#fictional!george is such an enabler

[allylikethecat]

Chapters: 5/6 Fandom: The 1975 (Band) Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: George Daniel/Matthew Healy Characters: George Daniel, Matthew Healy, Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s), Original Child Character(s) Additional Tags: Christmas, Meeting the Parents, Angst and Hurt/Comfort Series: Part 4 of The Infection 'Verse Summary:

“Yeah,” said Matty, pulling his hand away from George’s to run it through his hair. If there was one thing he was good at, it was doubling down, even if usually that just made it worse.

“Christmas, what are your plans for Christmas?” Matty swallowed hard, feeling very small all of a sudden and like he was baring a piece of his soul, “because I would very much like to spend it together.”

“Oh,” said George and Matty wanted to die right then and there.

.

AKA The Christmas Fic™️

#allylikethecat #Happy Tuesday! #the Christmas fic #It's Christmas #The Infection Fic Verse #The infection verse fic #the infection verse #infection verse fic #infection fic verse #infection verse #its finally almost done!! #thank you so much for all of the patience and support as we worked through this one #wow has it taken much longer and also ended up much longer than initially planned #also fun fact this part five is totally different from the one i had outlined #fictional!Matty went em no and then went rogue and just decided he was gonna do his own thing #so here is his and fictional!george's own thing #fictional!george is such an enabler #can you imagine if after all that the last few days this wasnt the fic i updated lol #also i really hope i dont let anyone down #im worried i got too excited and over hyped this #please let me know your thoughts #and thank you for being so kind and patient and supportive #i appreciate it more than you know!

[morerawerbreath]

Fictional Men Ranked Least to Most Likely to Eat Pussy

When I’m bored my powers turn to evil. Happy to announce that @earlymodernlesbian is not only is an enabler but wrote a gay companion piece which you can and should read here!!!! 

10. Mr. Rochester — Jane Eyre

No chance of oral here. Sorry, I don’t think he puts Jane first once in this book. She’s too busy being a ministering angel to ever consider anything above and beyond her wifely duty and I don’t think Rochester ever really stops being a narcissist long enough to consider her desires or even, you know, her life. I bet his french mistress asked him to do it once and he was like “ew, no”

9. Rhett Butler — Gone With the Wind

Rhett says shit like “you ought to be kissed and by someone who knows how,” and then I bet would go down on you one time just to show you what you were missing out on, and then he’d tease you about how much you liked it for months afterwards and refuse to do it again. Imagine how much more normal Scarlett might have been if she was getting regular oral.

8. Konstantin Levin — Anna Karenina

Definitely knows about eating pussy and can’t stop thinking about it. I think he might even shamefully obsess about it in conjunction with his dirty peasant laborer fantasies. However, he also has the ascetic monk thing going on so I bet he hardcore represses his desires to actually do it. That being said, I think if he ever got over himself he’d be way into it.

7. Mr Darcy — Pride and Prejudice

I’m not convinced Mr. Darcy even knows going down on girls is a thing, but once Bingley had filled him in I bet he would try it. Elizabeth I’m sure would not object but I can’t see this happening more than once or twice.

6. Oliver Mellors — Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Mellors has the distinct advantage and disadvantage of being the only character from a book that actually describes sex acts. If it was based solely on what he said (being turned on by getting women off, not shutting up about Connie’s ass, talking about how much he wants a “real” woman with a “real” body), I’d say absolutely he wants to get down there and would use the cringiest words possible to describe it. However, they textually do almost everything else so I feel like if he ate her out DH Lawrence would have told us 😔

EDIT: he goes down on her in the most recent movie!!! vindicated

5. Jonathan Harker — Dracula

Jonathan is obsessed with Mina (rightfully) and loves her to the end of the earth, so of course he’d do anything for her, including eat her out. However, there’s so much putting women on goddess pedestals in Dracula that he might just like, repeatedly kiss her between her legs and and be like, “am I doing this right?” and Mina would be like “I love you so much Jonathan” but she wouldn’t actually get off, you know? 

4. Heathcliff — Wuthering Heights

Someone who is willing to dig up your grave would definitely be down to lick your pussy. Cathy and Heathcliff are so rabid about each other I bet oral is like, one of the least weird things they would have done to each others bodies if they had the chance

3. Gabriel Oak — Far from the Madding Crowd

Not intimidated by Bathsheba’s independence and position of power. Could take care of her and spoil her if she ever let him and they both know it. Plus, not afraid to get down and dirty and do farm work for her. If a man cures your sheep and saves your hay before a storm, what else will he do for you? 👀

2. Mr. Knightley — Emma

Mr. Knightly is the definition of a service top. 100% confident in his masculinity and completely comfortable putting Emma’s needs and wants first, but not gonna let her get away with being high and mighty. Excellent combination of obsessed with her but still in charge. ;) She would get neurotic about it and he would tell her to chill out and he’d be right.

1. George Emerson — A Room with a View

George chugs his respect women juice and is so turned on by the idea of women as individuals with unique desires he can’t stand to see Lucy betray herself by marrying a robot. “I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms” ?!? “The desire to govern a woman lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together before they shall enter the Garden” !! What’s not to love about a pro-Eve humanist who enjoys swimming naked and is constantly telling everyone to be less embarrassed about desire and the body? No question George is going to be eating Lucy out every day of their lives and getting off on it himself.

Bonus: 

Marius Pontmercy — Les Misérables

Shy, but also French. Not sure which one wins out here. 

#pride and prejudice #emma #wuthering heights #a room with a view #far from the madding crowd #gone with the wind #anna karenina #lady chatterley's lover #dracula #jonathan harker #mr darcy #heathcliff #rhett butler #jane eyre #mr rochester #marius #les mis

[captainfantasticalright]

Today on this scene inspired this other scene in Good Omens:

We have The Time Machine (1960) and The Book (episode 2 of season 1).

General plot of the film:

Time Machine is a 1960 American period post-apocalyptic science fiction film based on the 1895 novella of the same name by H. G. Wells. It was produced and directed by George Pal, and stars Rod Taylor, Yvette Mimieux, and Alan Young. The story is set in Victorian England and follows an inventor who constructs a machine that enables him to travel into the distant future. Once there, he discovers that mankind's descendants have divided into two species, the passive, childlike, and vegetarian Eloi and the underground-dwelling Morlocks, who feed on the Eloi.

Sadly I cannot link the original tweet anymore because Douglas’ account is no longer there. But I did screenshot it beforehand.

Here is a side by side comparison of the scene in the film that inspired that scene of Aziraphale reading the book and “the cocoa doth [grew]cold”.

Pay special attention to how things move outside of the windows! That is the most important bit. And of course the relation to time and how the person doing the action is almost static, whereas all around is rapidly changing.

Film trivia:

When George's guests leave for their New Years activities, it is clearly daylight. The clocks in the room said 6:05 pm. Sunset in London on December 31, 1899 was at 4:01 pm. It would have been dark outside. (This is when he is first trying his machine).

Luckily in Good Omens when Aziraphale dashes back into the bookshop, it is dark outside and thus finishes reading when it is light again.

For another this scene inspired this scene: about The Bishop’s wife.

#good omens #crowley #aziraphale #ineffable husbands #neil gaiman #terry pratchett #good omens fun facts #easter eggs #the time machine #cocoa #season 1 episode 2 #that’s a dress #film references

[tsunflowers]

I would love to take a class where the textbook is "the future is female: 25 classic science fiction stories by women, from pulp pioneers to ursula k le guin" edited by lisa yaszek, and you just read a story every week and discuss it. they're arranged in chronological order from 1928 to 1969 and are obviously picked not only to demonstrate each author's style but to reflect social attitudes of the era. there would really be a lot to talk about in an academic setting. but even if I can't teach that class I recommend giving it a read if you're interested in old scifi. these were the standout stories to me but you may have different faves when you read it

"the black god's kiss" cl moore, 1934. a female knight travels through a portal to a land she considers to be hell in order to find a weapon capable of defeating the man who conquered her. this is the one I posted saying "it's just like the alien from alien." the imagery is so vivid and engrossing that i can't believe it was written 90 years ago

"all the colors of the rainbow" leigh brackett, 1957. an alien husband and wife on a diplomatic mission to earth find that sundown towns don't appreciate aliens much either. liberal use of the n word in this one bc the characters are extremely racist but I found it to be a very unique example of sf/fantasy discrimination metaphors. I'd love to discuss this one in a class bc I kind of feel like it's not a white woman's story to write but I also don't think a black woman would have gotten it published in 1957? definitely an interesting one

"pelt" carol emshwiller, 1958. a hunting dog brought by her master to an alien planet to hunt exotic furs finds that the native species can communicate with her but not her master and becomes torn. since you're in the dog's point of view you never get the full picture of what happens but it's very melancholy

"car pool" rosel george brown, 1959. it's truly just like an episode of a sitcom where a group of women who run a hovercarpool for their kids let a three armed alien kid in and things go awry. the standout is the relationship between the protagonist and a rival mom who she envies bc the rival mom can pull off wearing a real boudoir slip

"another rib" john jay wells & marion zimmer bradley, 1963. stranded male exocolonists accept an experimental procedure from an alien friend that will allow them to give birth and further the human race despite their captain's intense homophobia and transphobia. interesting in its portrayal of gender and srs bc the alien brings up the fact that humans have already accomplished gender-affirming surgeries but there's also never any implication that the men will become women. they just become men capable of giving birth. however I learned from this anthology that ms bradley enabled child sexual abuse so fuck her

"when I was miss dow" sonya dorman, 1966. a shapeshifting alien from a masculine mono-gender race is made to take the form of a human woman to learn more about human settlers and resents it at first but is fundamentally changed by the experience. made me want to cry a little

"nine lives" ursula k le guin, 1969. two guys who are getting sick and tired of each other after a long mining expedition on a faraway planet are joined by ten sexy and beautiful 20somethings who are all clones of the same guy. the clones can act in unison but also keep each other company. this could be the future of the human race... or not

#my book review corner

[beardedmrbean]

Hey you know that color hat with a fan on it boys wear like in cartoons? Does anyone knows where that trope came from and why? Is it from the 50’s or something?

The name “propeller-head” is used nowadays for a technophile, sometimes disparagingly, for an enthusiast of technology and (according to the Mirriam-Webster Dictionary) especially of computers. In images, the modern geek may be satirized with a cap having one or two toy propellers mounted to spin horizontally above the top of the hat.

So, was this flamboyant hat originated in the flower-powered hippie era of the 1960s? Well, no - decades earlier, in fact. It is generally accepted to have been first improvised in Cadillac, Michigan, using a beanie (a visorless cap) in 1947, made by Ray Faraday Nelson. It quickly became an icon for science fiction fans to identify themselves, and a national fad.

In a published interview1, Nelson described how “In the summer of 1947, I was holding a regional science fiction convention in my front room and it culminated with myself and some Michigan fans dressing up in some improvised costumes to take joke photographs, simulating the covers of science fiction magazines. The headgear which I designed for the space hero was the first propeller beanie. It was made out of pieces of plastic, bit of coat-hanger wire, some beads, a propeller from a model airplane, and staples to hold it together.” Shortly thereafter, it was worn by George Young of Detroit at a world convention, where it was an enormous hit.

Nelson thereafter frequently drew cartoons for fanzines portraying science fiction fans wearing propeller beanies. In 1948, Artist Guy Pène du Bois (1884-1958) painted a “Boy with a propeller beanie” hovering some feet up in the air above what looks like perhaps a sandy beach.

Shortly, it was further popularized by a television program, Time For Beany (video). The show was hugely popular with children, and even adults. The title character was a propeller beanie-wearing puppet named Beany whose sock-puppet friend called Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent was voiced and controlled by an unknown Stan Freeberg!) Starting in 1949, it ran five times a week for five years. It was hugely popular with children, and even some adults (including Albert Einstein, according to a Stan Freeberg reminiscence) (video). That idea of Bruce Sedley on KTLA in Los Angeles, California, was produced by Disney animator, Bob Clampett, who soon followed up with a syndicated, animated cartoon series of Beany and Cecil, in which Beany's propeller enabled him to fly (video).

Nelson went on to become a professional writer of novels and short stories. He made no profit from the fad of sales of beanie hats that followed from his idea.

In the summer of 1947, while still in high school, science fiction fanzine artist Ray Nelson, per his claim, invented the propeller beanie as part of a "space man" costume on a lark with some friends. He later drew it in his cartoons as emblematic shorthand for science fiction fandom. The hat became a fad, seen in media such as "Time for Beanie", and was sold widely by many manufacturers over the next decade.[11]

The propeller beanie increased in popular use through comics and eventually made its way onto the character of Beany Boy of Beany and Cecil. Today, computer savvy and other technically proficient people are sometimes pejoratively called propellerheads because of the one-time popularity of the propeller beanie.

In 1996, student hackers placed a giant propeller beanie on the Great Dome at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The scaled-up propeller rotated as the wind drove it like a windmill.

Propeller beanie drew laughs from Belgian workmen as they unpacked display shipments to show “How America Lives” for the U.S. exhibit at the Brussels Fair, as shown in Life magazine (31 Mar 1958). (source)

______________________________ there's a good amount of this I didn't know, the article at the top goes on further and further too if you're interested I just hit the opening point of who's claimed to have originated it and why, which the wiki article has too.

#anonymous

[shukakumoodboard]

6, 8, & 11 for the fanfic asks :3

oho. anonymous georg enables me again. i love u

6. Which yet-to-be-started fic is first on your list?

my gawd. the hardest fuckign question tbh. part of me wants to say the enemies-to-lovers kamakura period japan longfic i've tentatively titled bushidō, but that still requires a lot of plotting and like. kelbrain, before i can even begin writing it sdklghdlkf. i want to give it my full creative power and, considering my fanfic capacities pre- and during- my current degree, i think i might actually try to turn my attention to my two collab fics! shan't say the authors rn, but i don't think they'll be a surprise to those who know me when they're finally done and posted lol

8. Is there a story idea in your mental vault that you’ve never been brave enough to try writing? Is this the year? Can you tell us about it?

i mean i could also say bushidō but that's a sellout because i just discussed that in the last question so i shall also say i should like to try my hand at my sole gaaleesbians wip, thread of deepest scarlet, heart of shining pearl, which is, as you may guess from the title references, is a salem witch trial puritans au. behold:

Gaara’s crimson red lips sang poisonous, blasphemous hymns, and she wanted nothing else. “I can,” she breathed. “I would show you, in all your loveliness, such wonders, if you wish it.” For if Gaara was the serpent in the Garden, she was Eve, and in that parable, it was she doomed to succumb to temptation; her weakness preordained, this was her Apple and the ways of wickedness were already within her, and so. “Please.” And so, she let Gaara consume her.

#cant write smut ive got catholic guilt anyway, i've never written Da Lebbiesiasnsns, and i've never written historical fiction, so we shall see if i am All Powerful or not

11. Would you like to try any new fanfic genres or tropes this year?

help all of these questions are related. i want to try historical fiction as seen in the previous answers! most of the other things i have on the brain are things i've at least dipped my toes in.

thank you so much for asking <3

quite literally offering u free snippets for the right questions yall

#fictalk #gaalee #writing gronp hours #text #thank you sm i get such a kick from answering questions it makes my day

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

6 and 15 for the author asks!!

6. Favorite title you used

Arsonist of Paradise, an original novella based on a true anecdote that my mom told me during the COVID lockdowns. It follows an elderly woman as she enables her husband's prescription drug abuse, until finally the state puts him in a nursing home that he promptly dies in as the virus rips through it. The title is from a passage in Attar of Nishapur's Memorial of the Friends of God where Rabia of Basra runs through the streets of her city with a bucket and a torch, saying that she wants to douse the fires of hell and burn the gardens of paradise so that reward and punishment will not distract people from God. Similarly Carol Proctor, my protagonist, ends up destroying everything in her life, good or bad, and throws herself, like George Bailey, on the mercy of a God she only sort of believes exists. I'm still in the very early stages of actually writing it, still setting up Carol's relationships with her family.

15. What WIP are you taking into next year with you?

Lots! Arsonist of Paradise, extensive edits to another (very very long) original fiction project, and "The Land of Midian" (my Lottielee and Shaunjackie-focused experimental Yellowjackets AU) will probably stretch into early January as well.

ao3 wrapped [writers edition]

#feel free to ask about my original writing! #personal #writing #give me love give me memes #staghunters

[merry-melody]

Outing Stephen King and the Queering of American History by Tony Magistrale

The American Gothic routinely unsettles established boundaries of human sexuality. "Gothic resolutions repeatedly insist on order restored and (often) on reassertion of heteronormative prerogative," George Haggerty observes. At the same time, "Gothic fiction is about reaching some undefinable world beyond fiction; reality, and that 'beyond' can never be pulled back int narrative control. That is why Gothic fiction remains queer as it is" (Haggerty so). In other words, reader discover in Gothic works—including, prominently, wort, penned by Stephen King or adapted from his words to celluloid—a conservative assertion of heteronormative prerogative as well as the transgressive potential to violate this suffocating order. Due in no small part to its Gothic character, King's multiverse oscillates between homophobia and its rejection, between the monster as homosexual and homophobia as monster. This oscillation enables us to explore the sexuality of his corpus from two different positions. When we read his monsters as homosexual, a correspondence takes shape: "queer" History is monstrous because it refuses to reproduce itself in a "healthy" way. When we interpret King's considerable output as homophobic, a perverted sense of History appears in parallel, one that can be (at least partially) blamed upon impediments to the "normal" propagation of the species. At the same time, when we analyze these tales with homophobia as the monster, we walk away with a distinctive impression that History is stuck in an entropic loop precisely because of its so-called normal propagation. History with a capital "H"—a dominant, heteronormative construct—rubs up against histories with a lower-case "h"—accounts made "queer" due to their rejection of any singular Historical (or sexual) consciousness. As Andrew Smith and William Hughes write, "The very presence of the queer makes the assigning of absolutes ... a futile act" (Smith and Hughes 5). That is to say, by reclaiming the "queerness" at work in King's vision of American history, we might be able—at last—to imagine a future beyond our limited horizons. With this duality in mind for the chapter as a whole, let us consider first the nexus King often offers between homosexuality and monstrosity.

"Queerness" as Confinement

To begin, let us not equivocate: King's treatment of homosexuality throughout his literary career has been less than enlightened. There exist no gay male or lesbian relationships that are portrayed as mature, morally responsible, or loving. There exist, on the other hand, plenty of examples of King employing homosexuality as a metaphor for oppression and otherness, a point that is acutely apparent in his treatment of adult male homoeroticism that crosses into the worst stereotype of male homosexuality: predatory pedophilia. Many of King's most perverted adult male figures (and their supernatural avatars) underscore their mental instability and social pathology through an out-of-control compulsion to rape boys and sexually naive heterosexual men. Their dictatorial violence expresses itself most essentially through homoerotic coercion. More specifically still, the monster throughout King's canon is frequently coded "queer" even when its sexuality remains indeterminate: Pennywise (IT), Barlow ('Salem's Lot), Bogs and the sisters (Shawshank), Sunlight Gardener (The Talisman), Gasher and Tick Tock Man (Dark Tower III: Waste Lands), Horace Derwent and many of the other ghosts at the Overlook (Shining), Percy Wetmore and Billy the Kid (Green Mile), The Kid and Trashcan Man (The Stand), and Todd Bowden and Kurt Dussander (Apt Pupil). As earlier chapters have already demonstrated, King perceives American History to be stuck in a self-defeating loop, and this loop appears to be propelled along by a corrosive "queer" undercurrent. 

To examine the "queer" side of American History in King's texts that feature the monster as homosexual, let us begin with Apt Pupil (1982), the story of a young man named Todd Bowden who forces a former Nazi soldier, Kurt Dussander, to tell him all about the atrocities that he committed in World War II. Apt Pupil is, first and foremost, the story of an aspiring Historian (reminiscent of our discussion of Jack Torrance in his role as a writer).1 While Torrance is pulled into the role of sympathetic reader as he uncovers the Overlook's documented History, Todd's involvement is far less passive, eventually birthing an Americanized version of a "Hitler Youth." Todd's drive to master all of the secrets of Dussander's History quickly proves to be transgressive, if not downright perverse. "Things would come into focus," he assures himself. "Things always did." The boy's effort to uncover, document, and organize unsavory events into a neat-and-tidy History proves similar to Dussander's "German efficiency," which is to say, in both cases the compulsion to arrange things systematically proves to be utterly dehumanizing (116, 112). Apt Pupil intersects Todd's misguided codification of World War II with King's codification of a certain view of human sexuality—a connection that remains highly problematic. Put simply, King's text sexualizes Todd's drive to expose the inner-workings of History. —I really groove on all that concentration camp stuff," Todd remarks. —I get off on it." He's not alone, of course—as King's story notes, "a lot of people" today seem to "get off" on images of the Holocaust, feeling an odd combination of repulsion and sadomasochistic titillation. Todd's obsession with exposing all of the secrets of WWII appears as a pathology, faulty wiring, or—more likely still—the result of bad parenting. Practicing relaxed parenting methods associated with the 196os, Todd's father shrugs off the possibility of his son reading Penthouse magazines, claiming that the boy should be encouraged to "poke around." Because of the state's reputation for liberal politics and a sunny American disposition, it appears to be no accident that both novella and film choose California as their locale. In related ways, Apt Pupil lays a good deal of the blame on secular American culture, with its embrace of "easy sex". According to the logic of Apt Pupil, to understand our obsession with World War II requires that we interrogate America's half-baked high school History as well as sex education curricula. In the end, Todd's problem seems to stem from dual over-exposures: to sex and to History. He suffers from a desire to uncover forbidden knowledge, as he consumes images of the Holocaust as though they were pornography, as though his over-heated appetites should never be repressed but always indulged. Perhaps when it comes to knowledge of History and sex, the novel suggests, we should avoid consuming too much of a good thing (in our Introduction to this book, we discuss this proposed moderation as an effect of King's tacit alignment with New Historicism). Historians, in King's estimation, possess an unhealthy libido. Dussander's instant recall of the war strikes readers as "perversely clear," and so the drive to leave no stone unturned, to pry into every taboo, reveals itself to be transgressive on multiple levels. As Todd transforms into his childhood fantasy (a detective), he plunges into puberty, a shift that pushes him to blur the line between "all-American boy" and grown man with carnal impulses. Due to his free-thinking parents and his liberal culture, he is never chastened; in fact, he is rewarded for his curiosity with good grades and academic accolades, such as becoming the Valedictorian of his graduating class. There is nothing foreign to his imagination, super-charged as it is by raging hormones and a prurient fascination with the darkest propensities of the Nazi regime. That these elements overlap into a perverse sexuality remains one of the more compulsive aspects of the novel and film. Apt Pupil declares the violence of American History to be, at its root, kinky. Todd cannot neatly separate his jingoism from his poisoned Historical consciousness or his abject sex drive. The film highlights this admixture in its frequent associations between Todd and baseball and basketball, Todd and the "Dare to be a leader" slogan linked to the presidential figures on Mt. Rushmore in his high school hallway, Todd and the American flag in his driveway at the end of the movie. In the novel, after he dreams of having sex—while Dussander drones out statistics in the background—he mistakes his ejaculate for blood, misreading his personal climax as the climax of History, "the end of the world thundering" (193). Apt Pupil therefore presents the border between sexual lust and blood lust as a confused hinterland, diagnosing (in the process) a psychosis that characterizes King's over-zealous Historian (we might gesture here at the "inappropriate" arousals experienced by Jack in The Shining or Louis in Pet Sematary as the two men pursue mastery of History).2 In the novella's final scene, Todd seizes a (phallic) gun and begins a killing spree—an "ecstatic" moment that resembles the young men that gleefully run into deadly conflict throughout American History, proclaiming themselves to be "king(s) of the world." King's pubescent protagonist mounts an orgasmic charge into certain death and, after he murders for the first time, promptly masturbates. In addition to the homoerotic bond that is cemented between Dussander and Bowden in the evolution of their "History course," King and director Bryan Singer likewise associate the isolated and isolating act of masturbation with the arousal of pathological impulses. There is a scene [52:00] in the film version that could be easily overlooked: Dussander has donned again for a second time his Nazi uniform and cap and stands erect in front of a bedroom mirror. On this occasion, he is alone in his house and has chosen to wear the uniform voluntarily. The camera opens the scene with a slow pan right beginning with a view inside Dussander's open closet; it stops on the old man securing his cap and taking in his mirrored reflection. In a film where various "doors" serve throughout as metaphors for a forbidden knowledge of History as well as violent indulgence, Dussander's open closet door proves no less significant.3 The symbolism is clear: Dussander has released his closeted (Nazi) self, discarding his old man (American) pants in exchange for the German uniform, and, like Jekyll's transformations into Hyde in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he desires a mirror to bear witness to the emergence of his doppelganger. Underneath the open window, Archie roots in Dussander's garbage cans for empty liquor redemption bottles. As he confronts his reflected image in the mirror, Dussander's left hand begins a slow descent down the front of the uniform until hovers over his crotch. Just as he appears about to touch himself, he interrupted suddenly by the sound of Archie's clanging bottles. There are several conflicting aspects associate with this scene, the most glaring being the sexual arous; Dussander experiences while wearing the Nazi uniform'') especially because he is further stimulated by the pseudo uniform that has conferred a higher military rank—"I see I've been promoted," he tells Todd—than the one he had during the war. At the same time as the image he views arouses him, he is also shamed by it. When he realizes someone is lurking below his window, Dussander's immediate reaction is to hide himself in the room beyond the scope of the window. Just as Stevenson's Jekyll rushes away rudely from the window in the chapter "Incident at the Window" when he feels himself unwittingly transforming into Mr. Hyde in front of his friends, Utterson and Enfield, Dussander fears his own exposure as Nazi and masturbator.

Both novel and film go to great lengths to trace the steady process of character inversion taking place between the teenager and old man: Todd finds himself encumbered with adult burdens—lying, murdering, sexual impotence, restive sleep—as his affiliation with Dussander and a shared Nazi past deepens; conversely, the "stories" from this past (stories that he is at first coerced into telling, but then gradually revels in exposing) reactivate the repressed Nazi underneath the "tax paying" American citizen. Dussander's return to his dark past fills him with a degree of shame, as when Archie catches him wearing the uniform, but more so it reinvigorates him: regaining his pride as a Nazi officer, he surges with the life and death power he once wielded as the Kommandant at various concentration camps; in King's novel he goes on a killing spree of "undesirable" homeless men (while murdering only Archie in the film adaptation). It is therefore in keeping with these inverted transformations that Singer visualizes the reawakening of Dussander's sexuality at the same time that Todd's is adversely affected when Becky attempts to fellate him in the front seat of her car. Both Dussander and Bowden manifest warped sexual responses because of their "secret bond," which includes a pronounced homoerotic component.4 Singer's film adaptation explores how Todd desperately attempts to achieve mastery through what we might call an eroticism of vision (a connection that stresses the dual meaning of "pupil" as a student in pursuit of mastery as well as a core component of the eye).5 As the movie's opening credits appear on screen, we watch Todd combing through photographs from World War II, eagerly absorbing grotesque images, moving smoothly from English to German language texts. Through the magic of film, on several occasions during this montage the viewer watches Todd literally page through History—his boyish American face aligned with head shots of the most infamous German officers from the Wehrmacht and figures from a book entitled Hitler's Henchmen. Todd's eyes are frequently juxtaposed with Nazi eyes that appear through the transparent pages of the History that he peruses. On at least two separate moments, the viewer finds it difficult to distinguish Todd's eyes from those that are staring out of the past from young faces of Nazis not much older than Todd. As early as this opening montage in Apt Pupil, the past merges with the present and overwhelms it visually. In Freudian terms that the film appears eager to recycle, the eye possesses phallic attributes because it serves as an individual's most potent sensory organ: "What has been called the expansion of our `exosomatic organs' has meant above all extending the range of our vision, compensating for its imperfections, or finding substitutes for its limited powers." Subsequently, a number of feminist critics, including Luce Irigaray and Laura Mulvey, address a pervasive correlation between ocularcentrism and phallocentrism (Jay 3, 526). From this standpoint, Todd's (impossible) quest to know all of the secrets from Dussander's historical mnemonic takes on a uniquely cinematic quality. The film longs to see what remains barely visible, what is tantalizingly revealed only in glimpses—Dussander, partly obscured by a filthy screen door; Dussander, partly obscured by a lace curtain that divides rooms; Dussander, partly obscured in the shadows of Todd's dreams. Singer's Apt Pupil remains singularly obsessed with a boy's frustrated desire to see everything, a perverse scopophilia that the audience shares: when a shade is drawn, the film cuts in a similar fashion, forcing spectators to endure Todd's experience of (highly sexualized) frustration. At the climax of the film, the teenager encounters a pigeon with a broken wing, a stunning shot framed by the otherworldly light coming through an open gym door. As he smashes the pigeon with his basketball, everything glows. An ecstasy of total vision accompanies Todd's decisive entrance into the field of violence—an intimate exposure, blinding the spectator with its dramatically heightened radiance. In the novel, Todd's climatic End of History raises important questions about the intersection of sex andHistorical consciousness. If Todd's perverse desires lead him to a (grim) totality, that is, to a sense of absolute mastery over the past that marks the final "thundering" days of the species, what are readers to make of the treatise on sexuality that Apt Pupil grafts onto a treatise on the (sadomasochistic) discipline of History? King's novel—unlike the film adaptation—reaches a dead-end, as the all-American boy dies before he can become a man and the corrosive elements of American society march forward, more or less unchanged. The text thus perpetuates a thesis that our book has been tracking: American History remains stuck in a violent cycle, hyper-sexualized and—as a result—unable to "move forward." As Dussander forecasts in his dire warning to Todd about possessing secret knowledge of the past: "It never goes away. Not for you." Figuratively speaking, we can read Todd's nocturnal emissions as blank bullets, fired aimlessly in the isolation of his bed, lacking any future-oriented purpose. Because the future is always already mired in the past, Todd's future is a crypt that should have been "left shut" (Apt 201). When Apt Pupil likens a failing model of understanding History to intercourse without germination, we glimpse the homophobic and anti-gay underpinnings of King's story (and we also begin to understand how these underpinnings influence King's understanding of American History as a noxious construct). After all, King's narrative renders Todd's notions of History visibly "queer." His relationship to Dussander is infused with homoeroticism (e.g., he loves when Dussander begs). The two males come to possess one another's secrets, intimate details that they use to playfully tease one another as if engaged in a kind of foreplay. In the scene where Todd "gifts" Dussander with the Nazi costume uniform, Todd forces him to put it on for the boy's visual pleasure. While Dussander prepares himself upstairs out of sight, Todd is shown eagerly anticipating his return in the kitchen. It is a sequence suggestive of a lover awaiting the emergence of his beloved, adorned in s/m fetish clothing out of The Night Porter, purchased for the purpose of sexual arousal. Indeed, the fact that the old man is initially repulsed when he sees it and reluctant to wear it allows Todd the opportunity to exercise control over Dussander, further enflaming the boy's homoeroticism. Singer's camera actively invites such a reading as it tracks Dussander's black-booted ankles descending the staircase in a slow rhythm. The Nazi assumes the position of the feminine object of the male gaze, appropriating the role of the female whose legs would be typically adorned in sheer stockings and high heels, as is the case in countless heteronormative iterations of similar scenes. As feminized object of the gaze, Dussander is side-lit in blue lighting, while Todd is back-lit with the natural light source entering behind him through Dussander's window and the kitchen's yellow paint (see Picart and Frank 112-3). Todd's response to this fetishist indulgence is clearly meant to contrast his interaction with Becky in her car: when Dussander arrives in front of him, Todd abruptly rises phallic-like from the chair he is sitting in and engages the Nazi directly, first telling him to "shut up" when he complains that the uniform makes him itch, and then dominating him further under orders to "perform" a variety of military signatures. When Becky seeks to arouse him sexually in her car, on the other hand, Todd remains passively disengaged, asking her to blow marijuana smoke away from him, slumped into the corner of the girl's passenger's seat, and more interested in seeking clarity to his moral confusion—"Do you ever wonder why people do the things they do?" —than focusing on the orgasm Becky wants to provide him. Todd is at least subconsciously aroused by the uniformed Dussander because the boy is in control—he has constructed the entire scenario; with Becky, his libidinous urge is diminished accordingly because she is female ("Maybe you just don't like girls," she mockingly snorts) and because she seeks to establish herself in control of their sexual agenda. If Todd's encounter with Becky suggests history with a lower-case "h"—a reminder of the individual's impotence before forces that he cannot hope to grasp—Todd's connection to Dussander presents History with a capital "H"—an invitation to impose one's personal preferences as if they are universal; a call to sustain (the delusion of) control over invisible forces that surge through the frame. In the novella, Todd almost immediately recognizes his relationship with Dussander in these sexualized terms: "'He was holding my balls ... I was holding his." To which Dussander adds: "'He and the boy were ... feeding off of each other ... eating each other." Importantly, readers cannot interpret this relationship as romantic in any traditional sense; even beyond the pedophilic elements, their depraved bond lacks any redeeming qualities. It is a tale of domination, pure and simple—a tale of self-flagellation as well as abject humiliation. In novel and film alike, Dussander eventually cries out: "'We are fucking each other—didn't you know that?" (178, 150, 197). Consequently, there is neither a future for this relationship nor for either one of them. The experience ruins Todd completely, violating all of the salutary boundaries that would have kept his libido alive. He has seen and felt it all now, and so he must perish, as he does in King's novel. But in the film, Todd's survival bodes badly for the future, pointing the way to what Dennis Mahoney envisions as Todd's graduation into an American "bogeyboy" (39). In its literary and cinematic iterations, Apt Pupil culminates with a dismal foreclosure common to both horror literature and film: monstrous homoeroticism, "properly articulated and fully identified, can only mean the end of (H)istory" (Haggerty 128). It is nearly impossible to interpret Apt Pupil as in any way friendly to the cause of the LGBTQ community because the story incessantly portrays its homosexual undercurrent as deviant, evil, and violent—like AIDs, a manipulation of a contagion that threatens to contaminate "our children." We cannot ignore how the overt homosexual subtext that courses throughout Singer's film led to a real-life lawsuit (eventually dismissed) where attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that the teenage actors who played Todd's classmates were victims of pedophilic exploitation and that Singer (and the film's production company) deliberately reworked King's tale into a homosexual story line. As we have seen, King's novella can be read as complicit in inspiring similar charges. As Todd and Dussander purportedly take pleasure in "unhealthy" expressions of sexuality (expressions directly linked to the boy's reprobate understanding of History), King's reader could reasonably walk away from the story associating homosexual desire with Nazi criminality. Simply put, King's novel demonizes homoeroticism by virtue of its association with Nazism. Joan Picart and David Frank argue convincingly that "the historical malevolence of Nazi atrocity as a social and ethical problem is conveyed and constructed as a sexual problem" (102). Todd's final words in the film—"You have no idea what I can do"—complete the demonic trajectory of the text as a dark Buldungsroman: Todd inherits the Nazi mantle from the dying Dussander, signifying his "graduation" to a higher level of evil. At the same time, his intimidation of the guidance counselor Mr. French, reminding a historical-conscious viewership of how easily the Nazis first dominated France militarily and then subjected the country to the humiliation of the Vichy puppet regime, succeeds because Todd pushes the film's homophobic subtext to a more overt level, employing the threat of false homosexual accusations as a means for securing French's silence.' Though the novel details explicit homoerotic dream sequences to underscore the corruption of the Bowden-Dussander union, the film offers a broader array of implications—and almost all of them are negative. The brutal murder of Archie, the homeless man with clear homosexual (or at least bisexual) inclinations, is reduced to a rite of passage for Todd: Dussander queries him "How did it feel?"—a final test of Todd's Nazi education and the completion of the extermination pie chart that includes a category for homosexuals in the opening of the film. Archie's murder takes place in Dussander's basement, a dark cellar illuminated with a glowing red furnace meant to suggest concentration camp ovens. Archie's last words—"Why are you doing this?"— indicts not only Todd himself, but likewise the boy's unholy relationship with Dussander and the entire Nazi regime. After the murder, Todd's face is streaked with Archie's blood, raising the unconscious specter of AIDs asthe homosexual again bleeds into both victim and murderer, the monster that creates and perpetuates the disease. Beyond the sheer profligacy of male-male desire, Apt Pupil enlarges to address the "queerness" of an American History that fails to reproduce itself. In other words, American History lacks the "proper" orientation required for advancement, for either successful development or expansion. In the versions told by King and Singer, this "queerness" stops the supposedly natural trajectory of History in its tracks. When Todd engages in "real sex" in King's text—defined as heterosexual congress—he finds it distasteful and devoid of any meaning: "Her breasts were bags of meat. No more" (255). In this exact moment, Apt Pupil solidifies what theorist Lee Edelman calls "reproductive futurism": through its absence, the text gestures at the interdependence of a "natural" Historical imagination and a "natural" sexuality. King's reader witnesses how heteronormative assumptions inform dominant constructs of human (in particular, Nazi as well as American) History. Pointing at Todd's "wasted" seed, in tandem with his apparently warped proclivities, the reader is asked to draw a concrete conclusion: "If [...1 there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization" (Edelman 13; author's emphasis). If Todd could only have engaged in a "normal" mating ritual with a female, his masculine urge for mastery might have been tempered, and his ejaculate would have been put to better use: namely, to fertilize an egg and form a child. In turn, the self-enclosed (and self-indulgent) loop of American History could have been broken and the species would have flourished once more—moving its focus from the crypt to the crib. Due to its unsavory "queerness," then, Apt Pupil can be read as a representative example of the homophobia in King's multiverse, and, subsequently, as an affirmation of the implicit "reproductive futurism" that informs so much of America's heteronormative culture. 

When placed in conversation with Apt Pupil, the novel IT further confirms the homophobia attendant to many of King's works. Once again, the writer invokes queerness to deepen a character's connection to monstrosity. Like Apt Pupil, IT tracks History stuck in a loop—a town doomed to replay its prior traumas, over and over again; adults who must return to their old stomping grounds and confront an evil that, like clockwork, re-emerges. Echoing the obsessive chain forged between Todd and World War II, Derry cannot engage in a forward trajectory as the city remains mired in the past. This paralysis again has clear sexual undertones: the arrested development of the town parallels the infertility of the Losers' Club, none of whom can bear children, leaving them to serve as sacrifices to be made to Pennywise. Disguised in his most terrifying avatar as a clown, Pennywise's link to a lethal orality that is coded gay is emphasized in an expanding mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth and its particular desire to consume male children, such as Georgie. Importantly, Pennywise's emergence in the novel, signaling the commencement of another cycle of terror against Derry's children, coincides with the torture and eventual murder of a gay man, Adrian Mellon (a scene erased entirely from the 1990 miniseries based upon the novel). While none of the perpetrators ofthis crime remember the event with absolute clarity, and Mellon's lover, Don Hagarty, was preoccupied with his own terror and searching for rescue, several of them see Pennywise lurking in the brush under the bridge from which Mellon was thrown. In the various descriptions of the clown offered to the police, Pennywise is pictured as an active participant in completing the job of killing Mellon. In the process of claiming Adrian's body for itself, the observers all emphasize the clown's mouth filled with "bared teeth—great big teeth." But several of the boys also recall the attentive body language that Pennywise applied towards his wounded gay prey, "shoving one of Adrian Mellon's arms back so it lay over his head." Pennywise offers his victim an intimate embrace, signaling a mixture of vicious cruelty and homoerotic arousal: "The clown, [Hagarty] said, was standing near the far bank with Adrian's dripping body clutched in its arms. Ade's right arm was stuck stiffly out behind the clown's head, and the clown's face was indeed in Ade's right armpit, but it was not biting: it was smiling." The clown places Mellon in a position that resembles a feminizing swoon as much as a death throe. And of course, Pennywise's involvement remains the only secret left undisclosed: "At the major trial —that of Garton and Dubay—no one mentioned a clown" (35-7). Pennywise's lair is located in the brush of the Barrens, and underground, specifically the sewers of Derry. It's affiliation with the literal "bowels" of the city links the clown with a secreted homosexuality—the anus of the city —a place where the heterosexual adults of Derry are never pictured, but perhaps the only public place in the town where gay men dare to express themselves sexually. Pennywise's fierce orality again finds another parallel in the disturbing homosexual interlude that takes place down in the Barrens between Henry Bowers and Patrick Hockstetter later in King's novel. Both of these young adults are aligned with It and exist, like the clown itself, in opposition to the Losers' Club. Although fully aroused by Patrick's hand, "Henry's [penis] had grown amazingly. It stood up stiff and hard, almost poking his bellybutton," Bowers' reaction, as it is for everything in his life, is to view his sexual response with a combination of denial and fury: —I don't go for that queer stuff ... And if you tell anyone I did, I'll kill you, you fucking little pansy!'" (821-2). The ferocity of Bowers' homosexual panic explains his relentless antagonism towards Mellon earlier in the novel. But even more relevant, it highlights his and Patrick's link to Pennywise: their mutual duplicity, fear, random anger, and mental instability. Once more King aligns homosexuality with pathology; in fact, one appears to feed into the other: "[Hockstetter] was a sociopath, and perhaps, by that hot July in 1958, he had become a full-fledged psychopath" (825). Throughout the King canon we find a repetitive triad of mental illness, homosexual desire, and a loss of moral compass in the writer's constructions of monstrosity. A significant number of King's monsters—be they human or supernatural—bear disturbing similarities that conform to this description. Perhaps King relies on such stereotypes to establish clear-cut portraits of malfeasance for a popular audience in order to forge a sympathetic bond between reader and the monster's victims. Just as It is a compendium of monsters from popular culture and the personal nightmares of the Losers' Club, the writer'sappropriation of homophobic stereotyping may be an effort to incorporate monstrous figures such as John Wayne Gacy, a homosexual serial killer readily identifiable to King's readership who, like Pennywise, also employed a Pogo the Clown avatar. As a horror writer seeking to provide an essentially heteronormative readership with associations designed to inspire fear and loathing, King's reliance upon a nexus between homosexual terror and monstrosity is especially effective. His readership can repress and deny identification with the "queered" outsider. Consequently, when such figures appear in King's plotlines, gay desire, as it does in the "torture porn" genre, conflates with a love of torture, violence, and murder. The love that cannot be spoken destroys binary oppositions, linking itself to Julia Kristeva's definition of the abject, and thereby threatening the constructed idea of normative heterosexuality. King's "queer" monsters exploit the audience's own homophobic prejudices in order to associate them with beings made ever creepier. Whatever King's reasoning, he is creating monsters, such as Bowers and Hockstetter, that are neither nuanced nor multidimensional; having fallen off a moral continuum, they exist solely to foment cruel violence and crude destruction. They are unburdened by any self-doubt that might complicate their warped visions of reality. The fact that evil in the King universe frequently forms a bridge with undiagnosed mental illness may be mysterious (and thus appropriately terrifying), but its link to a sadistic homosexuality remains exploitative. The joining of mental illness with perverse sexuality—a violent brand of homosexuality, specifically—equates the two in a reader's mind, ultimately defining monstrosity in King's fiction asboth "queer" and insane. IT's resolution is once more inseparable from "reproductive futurism." The future stems from heterosexual copulation, the novel suggests—a relationship that the text solidifies with the infamous encounter between the male youths and their lone female friend, Bev. Each boy must have sex with Bev (but not with each other) to pass from their stunted development—away from the fixed eddy of American History, with its constant return to violence and perversion—to a survivalist tomorrow. It is as if by confirming their heterosexuality via intercourse with Bev that the boys become insulated from Pennywise's homoerotic drive at the same time that any hint of homosexuality (among the boys themselves) is displaced through the presence of Bev as female. Similarly, in King's The Shawshank Redemption, the same-sex bond between Red and Andy is diffused and normalized by the "poster girls" that Red shares with Andy to put on the wall of his cell. Like Rita Hayworth's erotic presence, Bev serves as a "sexual conduit" for legitimizing expressions of male homosocial bonding and love. Her active presence eliminates the homosexual threat that, as we have traced, signals corruption in King's world. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes this process in Between Men, that "we are in the presence ... of a desire to consolidate partnership with authoritative males in and through the bodies of females" (38) Given the heightened degree to which King treats sexual expression in his fiction, some of the strongest and most life-affirming bonds that occur in his books take place (ironically) between men in strictly homosocial relationships. The numerous male-bonding permutationsfound in work as diverse as The Stand, IT, Sh.awshank, The Green Mile, Stand by Me, and Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass are intensely intimate, but never sexual.? King habitually appreciates the value of same-sex bonds; they represent some of his most compelling fictionalized portraits. Yet he steers clear of investing any of them with a homoerotic charge—at least overtly. When characters in his texts do cross the line from homosocial to homosexual, they risk an opprobrium apparently summoned from King's own inherited past. The severity of King's judgment might be tied to his career-long affiliation with the Gothic, wherein transgressions against the status quo—particularly sexual transgressions—result in horrific consequences (at least, within the framework that we have been tracking of homosexuality as monstrous); or perhaps it is the lingering influence of the writer's strong Methodist upbringing, his long heterosexual monogamous marriage, or the regional ambiance of New England Puritanism with which King has lived his entire life. In a Playboy interview published in 1983, early in his career, King was remarkably candid on the subject of sex, acknowledging his own personal conservatism which, in turn, has likely filtered into his treatment of the subject in his fiction as well: "I think I have pretty normal sexual appetites, whatever the word normal means in these swinging times ... There's a range of sexual variations that turn me on, but I'm afraid they're all boringly unkinky" (Underwood 45). This comment, particularly the last half of it, goes a long way towards explaining why any expression of "kinky" sexuality that breaks against "normal"—masturbation, bondage, cross-dressing, fetish wear, adultery, pornography, oral sex (recall the disastrous consequences of car sex in Thinner), and particularly homosexuality—is viewed as deviant in the King universe. More often than not, when human sexuality makes an appearance in a King text it signals at the least unresolvable complications for the characters involved, and more often than not, their fall into corruption. At the close of IT, the reader realizes that its protagonist, Bill, has chartered a successful escape route because, as he peddles his catatonic wife down the hill (and away from his past), he achieves an unexpected erection. King's narratives in this way conceptualize American History as "queer" in a homophobic sense and appear to prescribe heterosexual coupling as a sort of panacea. His works reveal the extent to which America's dominant Historical consciousness remains caught up in a certain paradigm of sexuality, anchored (unconsciously) to a set of assumptions about the value of procreation, including the ideal of child-bearing, that offers a "libidinally subtended fantasy ... to screen out the emptiness" (Edelman 7). Doctor Sleep likewise correlates the claustrophobia of History with what it posits as perverted expressions of sexuality. A sequel to The Shining, this novel begins by remembering how the Overlook once demanded that Jack forfeit his offspring in exchange for intimations of glory, a transaction that also occurs in Derry and fuels the hotel and town's inability to "move on." The Shining, we will remember, also advocates reproductive futurism when the owner of the Overlook, Horace Derwent, reveals his terrifying homosexual proclivities through his dalliances with a violent dog-suited man named Roger, who (not unlike Dussander) threatens to "eat" Jack's son Danny, starting with his "plump little cock" (Shining 494). Now an adult, Danny goes to battle inDoctor Sleep against a group of marauding vampires that calls itself the True Knot. Rather than make its own future, the True Knot takes the future away from its victims by consuming them within an incestuous loop. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the text identifies this inward-looking consortium with a homosexual meeting between two stereotypical "men-haters" (lesbians, it is worth noting, that appear to have chosen their sexuality due to the bad behavior of men). The True Knot perpetually indulges itself, recalling the decadence of Apt Pupil, in "meaningless" foreplay that leads to nothing but pleasure: "Life was ... their only reason for living" (Doctor 154). Put a bit differently, these vampires simply vamp, without advancing anything, including biological life itself. Their personal enjoyment cannot be linked to the perpetuation of the species, and so they "queer" what the novel implicitly understands to be a "normal" Historical consciousness. From Apt Pupil to Doctor Sleep, then, King's story worlds demonize homosexuality by evincing that the growing impotence of American History will only be "corrected" through even more heterosexual coitus. One of the only scholars to address the issue of homosexuality in King's fiction, Douglas Keesey, attempting to rescue IT from charges of homophobia, argues that "[I]f society is disturbed by homophobic violence in [King's] fiction, it should recognize and criticize its own homophobia rather than blame the writer for it" (189). This position completely lets King off the hook. As John DeLamar counters, "Keesey spends more time arguing a defense of King, the author, than he does examining the novel's embedded homophobia [by] claiming the text is a satire of homophobia" (DeLamar 4). As we haveshown, King's literary and cinematic narratives regularly equate homosexuality with monstrosity (a harmful caricature with real-world consequences that must not be overlooked, especially when perpetrated by a writer with King's cultural clout). They codify American History as sexually perverted, deviant, and corrosive, suggesting—at times, quite directly—that the failings of History and its chroniclers can only be "corrected" through a return to heteronormative prerogatives. At his most restrictive, King associates a deviant sexuality, as he does especially in The Stand, IT, Gerald's Game, and Apt Pupil, with the moral degradation of the individual. In The Talisman, for example, King and Straub create a dual universe that is imperiled by men such as Sunlight Gardener, an evangelical preacher who is also a homosexual pedophile. Like Pennywise, Gardener emerges as a homophobic portrayal of viciousness whose lust for male children is made even more odious in the delight he obtains in traumatizing them further through acts of fear and sadistic torture. King and Darabont's highly popular and powerful prison narratives, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, eventually locate criminality and evil not in Andy Dufresne and John Coffey, who, respectively, are falsely convicted and incarcerated for murder, but in each text's representative homosexual men: the sisters, Percy Wetmore, and Wild Bill. While Percy Wetmore may not technically be gay, he is certainly coded as "queer"; highly effeminate, he is the only guard on the cellblock excessively attentive to his physical appearance (e.g., meticulously combing his hair or adjusting his tight uniform). His name, Wetmore, underscores his propensity for hysterical panic during crisis situations resulting inwetting his pants. Percy's outsider status and lack of competence at his job is glaringly obvious when contrasted with the albeit unrealistic hyperbolized kindness and commitment to justice (e.g., Brutal's fierce assertion that Bitterbuck's execution leaves him "square with the House") associated with the other guards on the cellblock. In contrast to Wetmore's outwardly effeminate traits is his baseline sadistic personality—while he freezes in terror during active moments of Wild Bill's random acts of violence and sexual harassment, Percy luxuriates in the power he imposes over the other prisoners, especially savoring Delacroix's protracted misery. Thus, Wetmore is an exemplar of King's gay monsters: coded homosexual—even effeminate—but expressive of a vicious cruelty rather than tenderness towards other males. King's portraits of homosexual men always contain a profound element of sadism. The sisters in Shawshank ("Go ahead and struggle; it's better that way") and Wild Bill in Green Mile are "bull queers" who force their sexuality onto others. While their intrusive violence leads Red to acknowledge that they "have to be human first" to qualify as homosexuals, the fact that both the novel and film define Bogs and the sisters solely in terms of their sexuality works as an implicit indictment of their homosexuality. In Green Mile, Wild Bill is an omnivorous rapist: he may prefer little girls, but is also highly attracted to Percy's prissy presence on the cellblock. Notably, Bill is unattracted to the heterosexual guards he finds working there; he recognizes the "queerness" of Wetmore, whom Bill demeans as if he were female, stroking his crotch and whispering in his ear that he is soft like a girl, that he wants to fuck his asshole, and later invites Percy to "suck my dick." Wild Bill'sfelonious crimes are murder and pedophilic rape, but he is actually a compendium of psychosexual perversions, and King and Darabont make it clear that homosexuality is among them. In the Playboy interview, King goes on to opine that "I'm not into the sadomasochistic trip either, on which your competitor Penthouse has built an entire empire ... despite all the artistic gloss, it's still sleaze; it still reeks corruptingly of concentration-camp porn" (Underwood 45). King proves to be a chaste taskmaster when it comes to expressions of sexuality. This translates into a somewhat contradictory stance from such a politically progressive thinker, as one might expect such stringent sexual conservatism from a religious zealot or an ultraconservative ideologue. The writer's attitude towards sexuality may in part explain the deep-seated antipathy he has consistently shown Donald Trump in Twitter posts, as the president is a good example of King's propensity to view a person's (especially a male's) sexual proclivities as a barometer for his morality.

"Queerness" as Liberation

It is through a reinterpretation of The Stand that we might start to complicate the analysis of King's depiction of the homosexual as monster. Upon an initial reading, The Stand upholds many of the problematic aspects addressed above: in particular, its villainous forces are branded as "queer" by practicing sadomasochistic sex (as when The Kid anally rapes Trashcan Man with his gun as the latter orally pleasures the former) as well as by admiring the novel's central antagonist, Randall Flagg, with "something like love," something that blurs the line between the ecstasy of worship and the ecstasy of orgasm (587, 358). However, a careful reading of The Stand cannot bypass the text's core conundrum: how is it that "normal" American society keeps recreating its own destruction? Of even greater interest to us, is it possible that a "queering" of History with a capital "H," which results in more expansive as well as inclusive histories with a lower-case "h," may not lead to society's ruin, but to something else entirely—a kind of renewal? After all, Flagg's vulnerability is initially exposed by a bisexual woman, Dayna Jurgens, whose suicide thwarts the Dark Man's apparent omnipotence and his desperate efforts to extract information from her. "She had gone, perhaps in triumph" (965). Although a minor figure among the novel's cast of hundreds, Dayna does stand out as the first to disrupt Flagg's plan for dominion over the Boulder Free State. Instead of focusing exclusively upon the novel's virulent association of corruption with homosexuality, then, it may prove fruitful (or—indispensably—fruitless) to dwell upon the invaluable role of "queerness" in disrupting the delusional march of History. Sam Miller proposes just such a reading while examining the horror film genre as a celebratory alternative to hegemonic sexual and social order: "The queer monster not only provides [the LGBTQ community] an opportunity to identify with someone on-screen, it also allows us to vicariously live out our rage against a social order that oppresses us" (Miller 221). As we invert the core argument of this chapter so far, we must not dismiss out of hand the various ways in which King's works present heterosexual "norms" as poisonous. Interestingly, instances of homosexual rape and heterosexual marital sex are often disturbingly similar inKing's world. King's gay men are typically aligned with a fascist agenda, preying on the young and vulnerable. The husbands that populate this writer's "domestic fiction," beginning with Cujo in 1981 and culminating with the 199os novels of patriarchal abuse: Dolores Claiborne, Gerald's Game, Rose Madder, and A Good Marriage, underscore similar horrors in marriage and heterosexuality. Susie Bright recognizes that King's "men, exemplified by Daddy and Husband, are pretentious brutes who are impossible to identify with" (Bright 54). And King's women are often only "liberated" once they extricate themselves from sexual relationships with these husbands and fathers, instead embracing lonely, sexless lives. The few successful marriages and sexual unions that occur in King's world are so traditional that they harken back to the 195os (King's own childhood reference point). His fictionalized sex is either cloyingly romanticized—locked in the domain of rarified white, bourgeois marriages, such as those found in Bag of Bones and Lisey's Story (where, coincidentally, a spouse has died, leaving the remaining partner to indulge a Poe-like romantic cliché of a lost perfect union deathlessly immolated at the altar of memory)—or it sinks to the level of vulgar appetite, in the form of brutal rape assaults, both heterosexual and especially homosexual. While partially attuned to negative abuses that can stem from sexual compulsion of all stripes, King seems closed off to the idea of liberated constructions of either homosexual or heterosexual unions. It therefore falls upon inventive readers to reclaim the "queerness" in King's works for productive, even redemptive, ends.° Although The Stand does end with the much-ballyhooed birth of a Child, this particular child hardly resolves thingsfor the novel's central community; in fact, the child's life teeters on the edge, and the reader cannot be certain that it survives at all. Michael Collings comments that, in King's fiction, "only rarely does the [Mild become instrumental in restoring order" (Collings 17). On this front, The Stand subverts a common expectation of post-apocalyptic art, such as in the film Children of Men (2006): the tendency to hinge hope habitually upon a miraculous birth. At his worst, Flagg treats the continuation of the species in a shockingly clinical fashion, declaring Nadine Cross, his female slave, to be nothing more than an "incubator" (Stand 976). The Stand fears—perhaps above all else—the reproduction of the status quo, a fear that it links directly to the (mistaken) belief that the arrival of a Child will fulfil the society's fallacy of instant renewal. A very different picture of Randall Flagg emerges in this reading: his inherent "queerness"—as a rabble rouser, he lives to overthrow the accepted way of doing things—may prove to be an essential component of King's multiverse. 9 He does return incessantly to undo stale social orders. Could it be that the King reader errs in the urge to reject all of what Flagg represents? While The Stand's "crew of light" seem intent on recreating the ancient regime (through committee assignments, the return of law, and democratic processes, etc.), and retaining faith in the coming Child, it may be Flagg alone that recognizes a need for radical social change (even as he seeks to recreate a fascist regime that employs all the deadly hardware of the past under his personal dominion). As the Gay Liberation Front states in its 1971 manifesto, the "complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished. It's not a question of getting our piece of the pie. The pie is rotten" (Serinus). When read in this fashion, Flagg's recognition to rebel against the pre-plague status quo alerts King's reader to the cycle of doom aligned with American History. At the end of the novel, Flagg is emblematic of a self-destructive urge—the Freudian death drive—inimitable to American society. He embodies a compulsion to undo dominant cultural narratives that survive in many of King's works produced in the wake of The Stand. Before returning to texts discussed earlier with this alternative framework for analysis in mind, let us briefly pause to unpack how "queerness" might function as a requisite part of historical consciousness rather than an abject aberration. The fantasy that the arrival of a Child will fulfil all of the desires of an ailing society—underwritten by a deep-seated belief in the supposedly divine mandate of heterosexuality itself—is a dangerous one, Edelman warns. Such a belief equates the child with "Imaginary Wholeness" and promulgates "[H]istory as the continuous staging of our dream of eventual self-realization" (Edelman in). This perspective provides a secular theology of sorts by supporting two delusions: first, that society could be perfected, and second, that humans could consciously plan this perfection. As a Gothic author, King's works are antithetical to a utopian vision—from the anti-heroes of his pseudonym Richard Bachman, to the misguided transcendentalism of IT and Dreamcatcher, to the innate corruption of the American suburbs, punctuated by Todd's gunfire (Apt Pupil) and Blind Willie's doubling (Hearts of Atlantis), King argues time and again that an ideal society can never exist. The flaws of human nature stand in the way of such social amelioration. The purposeof King's spokesperson Glen Bateman in The Stand is to remind us that the individual can maintain his or her moral freedom and dignity only as long as he or she remains an individual. Once a social relationship advances beyond a small group, the dangers attendant to conformity and institutionalization grow progressively stronger, transforming a social microcosm into a macrocosm. King deflates delusions of perfection in a variety of manners, including (one could argue) with his "queering" of History as a heteronormative absolute. "The queer must insist on disturbing, on queering, social organization as such." Said another way, the image of the "queer" reminds us of our "inescapable failure" in breeding an all-American boy like Todd in the first place (Edelman 17, 26). The "queer" ruptures the dream of bureaucratic Nazis everywhere, offering in its stead a death drive to undermine fantasies of total fulfillment, or imaginary wholeness. In King's story worlds, the best way to dismantle a "reproductive futurism" is to privilege "queerness" as a negativity that marks the short-sightedness of any imagined path to the End of History. In Doctor Sleep, Danny's faith in the determinism of genetics, which is to say, his mistaken investment in the internal logic of human breeding as a form of self-realization, proves to be deeply corrosive: "In human affairs, the only real king is genetics," he laments. "There's nothing but family history ... blood calling to blood." But, in the end, Danny proclaims: "I am not my father," a sentiment that undermines his previous statement (189, 523, 499). What ultimately drives historical imagination, Danny begins to realize, is not the venerated birth of a child, but death. At the close, his contribution to society is not through heterosexual partnership, not through "getting regular with somebody," but in his willingness to work in a hospice lending assistance to individuals in their last moments of life (178). The final reversal of Doctor Sleep —from birth to death—exemplifies the "queerness" of King's alternative American history (with a lower-case "h"), a model that rejects patriarchal inheritance in favor of ceaseless transgression. IT can be read through a similar "queer" lens because we might interpret Bill's "sexual awakening" at the novel's terminus as just another one of the text's many delusions. Indeed, the cosmic cycle in Derry can never truly end. The city crumbles to pieces in order to be rebuilt (ad nauseam)— such is the death drive of the place as well as its people. The story necessitates a lack of heterosexual libido to gather the adults together and guide them to save the day; if the adult members of the Losers' Club are not impotent (or unhappy in their partnerships), they would have had no reason to return to Derry. To interpret IT in this fashion, we shift from Freud's pleasure principle—in which heteronormativity is the presumed means and ends of a healthy society—to his death drive—in which the figure of "the queer" plays a pivotal part in prolonging desire by maintaining dissatisfaction, thwarting the allure of The Stand's first Child, and insisting that a perpetuation of the status quo never delivers what it promises. Although IT can be interpreted as a shining example of reproductive futurism, the novel can also be read as debunking the notion that procreation and the forward movement of History, together, form a meaningful mythos. When Adrian —the gay man murdered in the opening of the text—demonstrates his civic pride by wearing a Derry hat, IT suggests a different historical understanding, one in which the city might achieve a pluralistic sense of continuity without the repugnant aspects of American History that are at the center of much criticism throughout King's fiction (i.e., violent, imperialistic, and exclusively heterosexual). Adrian's legacy endures in the novel's penultimate scene: when Bill grabs his friend Richie's hand and feels that he is wearing his wife's wedding ring, it amplifies their fraternal bond and empowers them to enter into battle with Pennywise (IT 769, low). Decoupling the urge to be an actor on the stage of History from the institution of marriage as existing exclusively between a man and a woman, IT charts a different course in which homoeroticism is not the End of History but its moment of rejuvenation. The film adaptation directed by Andy Muschietti, IT Chapter Two (2019) picks up on this theme and suggests that Richie (Bill Hader) is a closeted homosexual. In one scene, Pennywise torments Richie by threatening to expose his secret to the rest of the town. Ultimately, Richie finds some kind of peace in his sexuality, as he is empowered to finish carving the name of his love interest at a visible town site. (Nevertheless, we must ask why Muschietti's film seems to have little compunction in portraying grotesque homophobic violence, but it remains unwilling to declare Richie's homosexuality in any kind of overt way.)'° With this pivot, we may inquire into what the "queering" of American History in Apt Pupil can tell us about the complex imbrication of sexuality and historicity in King's multiverse. In a sense, the crypt actually turns out to be better than the crib (as a compelling rejoinder to heteronormativity, the pathological mastery embodied by straight white males). The death drive of American History does reveal itself to be "queer," but not in a fashion that needs to be dismissed as homophobic; rather, the death drive of Apt Pupil might be read as instrumental in preserving King's fictional universe against the threat of annihilation. Apt Pupil choreographs the death drive in several specific instances. When Todd invites Dussander for supper with his parents, it disappoints him that everything goes off without a hitch. After he extends the invitation, he (unconsciously) longs to "let the cat out of bag," for his visitor to blow a hole in the naïve iconography of his all-American image of his family and himself. Meanwhile, Todd's father (unconsciously) wants his son to cease being "perfect" and violate the clean-cut, obedient ideal. He gleefully imagines Todd's secret urges in a way that undermines his son's stagnant "normalcy," thrusting him into a manhood defined by its dysfunctionality. Neither Todd nor his father, then, truly want to maintain their efficient, well-manicured façade. Instead, they are driven to "queerness" in order to escape from the oppressive hold of their sanitized and sanctimonious lives. Unaware, Todd is also driven to failure at school, a failure that threatens to expose his charade with Dussander and, mercifully, eviscerate his storybook paralysis: "A part of you wants it to end. Needs for it to end" (Apt 183, 145; author's emphasis). Faced with the nightmare of complete exposure—a totality that would end his desire because no secrets would remain, and there would be no unfulfilled fantasies left to pursue—Todd the Historian needs to fail. The "queerness" of his experience with Dussander may have been his sole opportunity to decamp from the self-perpetuating, oppressive narrative called AmericanHistory. Because King's long-standing account of American History is built upon the promise of greater acquisition and absolute mastery, Todd can escape from this loop only with the (re)introduction of blind spots, forgetting, as well as the inability to expand, germinate, and bear oneself forth, over and over again. A "queer" American history (with a lower-case "h"), shorn of the "evil" connotations foisted upon it, would remain always-already transgressive. A "queer" American history would not reproduce itself; it would forever negate its own delusions, undermining its own "libidinally subtended fantasies" and "disturbing ... social organization as such" (Edelman 7, 17). Rather than look to the future Child (a static ideal, unable to grow or change), we might consider what life might look like beyond the enclosures of reproductive futurism. From this alternative vantage point, Todd's downfall stems less from an excess of "queerness" than from the shortness of its supply. To accentuate this alternative, Singer's adaptation contemplates a "queer" mode of seeing. The film repeatedly lingers upon obscured windows through which the audience must strain to comprehend what lies beyond. These opaque apertures challenge the film's spectators to reflect upon their own narrow, heteronormative viewpoints as well as to consider the pleasures to be found in a different erotic visuality. At one point, Dussander watches Mr. Magoo, the famous cartoon character who is visually challenged. One "queer" mode of seeing proposed by the film is blindness: the inability for the eye to penetrate the world, to master it, to bring forth knowledge. The eye finds new delights in distinctive forms ofengagement. When the authorities apprehend Dussander and they are pictured standing at his hospital bedside, the camera looks up through a blurry lens at the assembled faces as Dussander rushes to put on his glasses; at last, he is genuinely seen by others, and the power dynamic has been fundamentally reversed. If American self-confidence is bloated, as Dussander claims to Bowden, the unexpected inability to thrust his penetrating eye outward evokes an alternative ethical vision (alongside an unexpected kind of eroticism). The second "queer" mode of seeing in Singer's film—arguably the more enduring mode of the two—is achieved through the extensive use of superimposition, in which one scene overlays another (a palimpsest that refuses to freeze events and arrange them into a chronological sequence). Martin Jay writes, "Ocular-eccentricity... is the antidote to privileging any one visual order or scopic regime" (591; author's emphasis). Unlike the sense of mastery that accompanies classical Hollywood editing, Singer's Apt Pupil recalls the ocular-eccentric juxtapositions of Soviet montage: a mode of seeing designed to make meaning in the poetic spaces between images (not through their seamless accumulation). The film's "queering" of vision challenges an assumption that cinema must operate in a linear fashion by steadily exposing everything until the engorged spectator is at last sated. In the clashing cacophony of Singer's text, pleasure comes from the disintegration of coherence, from a rejection of absolute vision accompanied by the elevation of the blind spot. This "queer" mode of seeing opens the future to radical discovery by departing from cinematic norms. Apt Pupil closes with a close-up of the crystal blue eyes of Dussander's corpse as they stare blankly out at the audience. Uncannily, these dead eyes still seem to see outward, uncomfortably penetrating the spectator—but they do so in a "queer" sort of way; that is, their familiarity (as eyes that can see) rubs up against their unfamiliarity (they should not be seeing anything at all, at least not in any neurobiological sense). The final shot of the film captures a genuinely "queer" mode of seeing as sight becomes blindness and blindness becomes sight, all at once. In our book's final chapter, we further unpack this sort of divergence as a critique of American History, given by King its fullest articulation in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. King's reader might opt to reclaim the "queerness" of his texts as a force for social uplift—a death drive to alert us when our naïve hope for utopia has become genocidal, and to signal the strong presence of Nazism inherent in our own reproductive futurism. A "queer" American history (with a lower-case "h") subverts our blind march into tomorrow by exposing the emptiness of our declared destination as well as the barbarity of History's established cadence. "Queerness" thus fractures the imaginary wholeness associated with procreation and, in turn, alters our attenuated Historical consciousness, which can no longer function like a gilded roadway. King's readers might also reconsider the innate "queerness" of his texts in order to challenge noxious heteronormativity. By so doing, readers of Stephen King might work to open a future with greater possibilities for a plurality of the American populace.

Notes

1 Dennis Mahoney connects the opening History book photographs of the film version of Apt Pupil with the "infamous scrapbook" from The Shining, a connection that underscores the commentary we associate with both films (29). 

2 For instance, see Jack's kinky encounter with the beautiful, rotting corpse in Room 217 (King's novel) and 237 (Kubrick's film) or Louis's complicated arousal/impotence in relation to the burial ground: the pull and push of the eerie woods into which he sojourns to "neck" with a young woman, only to be rebuffed by the acidic undertones of the place; his ability to become "hard and erect" after visiting the forbidden area set against an icy rejoinder—"the winterwhine" of Death that serves as a constant murmur under the sounds of his love-making (King Pet 158, 278). 

3 In an attempt to provide Todd with an explanation for Nazi excursions into perversity, Dussander remarks in the film adaptation that "a door was opened that could not be shut." The boy and the old man first meet with an amber-colored screen door separating them. And when the Nazi proves physically unable to complete the murder of Archie, he tricks Todd into going down into the basement to finish the job, "Now we'll see what you are made of," and locks the door behind him. In this scene the boy and the Nazi are separated only by the door between them, which functions again symbolically as a mirror as much as a door. 

4 In keeping with a fascist aesthetic, which overemphasizes physical beauty and militarism associated with the male body, fascist art worships masculine form. It would appear that fascists are confronted with a core paradox: the fetishization of masculinity at the same time that overt homosexuality must be repressed to avoid undermining the masculine ideal and to permit heterosexuality. Ironically, then, the Nazis were obsessed with rooting out homosexuality within their ranks and punishing it in the camps, forcing gay Jewish male prisoners to wear pink Stars of David. The Gestapo was infamous for blackmailing Army officers who had become disposable with the charge of homosexuality. And yet Hitler had known all along, from the earliest days of the National Socialist Party, that many of his closest and most important followers were gay. As William Shirer documents in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, "It was common talk, for instance, that Heines [one of the leaders of the Brown Shirts] used to send S.A. men scouring all over Germany to find him suitable male lovers. These things Hitler had not only tolerated but defended; more than once he had warned his party comrades against being too squeamish about a man's personal morals if he were a fanatical fighter for the movement" (Shirer 225). Apt Pupil maintains the tension in this conundrum throughout as Todd swings back and forth between Dussander and Becky Trask, secret fetish idol and high school girlfriend. 

5 The film's singular focus on vision works both overtly and covertly. It returns, obsessively, to images that resemble the eye (including a clouded window in the wooden door of a concentration camp that Todd configures in one of his dreams). At one point, we see Todd sporting a Vuarnet t-shirt —a French brand of eyewear developed by opticians. The interrogation of sight is everywhere in Apt Pupil. 

6 Picart and Frank delve into the bond shared between French and Bowden and conclude that there is a strong homoerotic tension between the two that exists even before Todd's concluding efforts to manipulate French's silence. Citing a missing scene in Boyce's script that was excised from the movie, Picart and Frank argue that "French's fondness for Todd may extend beyond mere professionalism" (123). J.M. Clark likewise detects that "Singer plants doubts in us as to whether French is gay and whether his concern carries with it a hidden agenda" (18). 

7 The majority evidence for positive homosocial bonds in King's canon are male-to-male centered. But there are some interesting exceptions found in Gerald's Game and especially Dolores Claiborne, where female-to-female bonding forms an important alternative to abusive heterosexual marriages. Nonetheless, King's opprobrium against homosexuality holds firm here as well, as Dolores' relationship with Vera is similar to the homosocial bonds we find among the male heroes populating King's canon. The two women live in the same house and take care of each other for decades, yet despite being alone and friendless all this time, there is no hint of a sexual component to their relationship. Selena is right in the film adaptation when she claims they "love each other," but as friends and co-conspirators only, never as sexual partners. Although Jessie's connection back to Ruth, the latter a radical feminist lesbian in Gerald's Game, helps the former to confront and overcome her situation handcuffed to the past, their bond is strictly maintained as a consciousness-raising friendship, even as Jessie departs the novel, like Dolores and Vera, an asexual woman no longer interested in men. 

8 When King does consciously attempt to uplift the LGBTQ community, his efforts lead to problematic results. For instance, in Elevation (2019), a straight white male literally sacrifices himself to save his lesbian neighbors, affirming a white (heterosexual) savior complex. One of the grateful lesbians fawns over her hero: "'What you did ... made it possible for us to stay in Castle Rock ... without you, part of my beloved would have always remained closed off to the world" (Elevation 134). Even use of the word "beloved" seems out of place and time, diction that sounds artificial and stilted. 

9 For instance, Flagg's propensity for disruption is on display in King's The Eyes of the Dragon (1984), a fantasy novel in which Flagg foments insurrection against the "good king" and seeks the destruction of the latter's kingdom. 

10 In his interview with Hader about the film, Marc Malkin writes, "While Richie doesn't discuss his sexuality in the film, Hader said of Richie, 'Hopefully, he has an understanding of, an acceptance of who he is" (Malkin). We might wonder why his self-knowledge must remain a "hopeful" undercurrent, rather than made manifest.

#meta #stephen king #tony magistrale #it #apt pupil #the stand

[bookapism]

The Power of Fiction: Exploring the Impact of Storytelling

In a world brimming with facts and figures, it's easy to overlook the profound influence that fiction wields. Yet, nestled within the pages of novels, short stories, and epic sagas lies a potent force that shapes our perceptions, stirs our emotions, and illuminates the human experience. The power of fiction is not merely to entertain, but to enlighten, empathize, and ultimately, transform.

At its core, fiction is a mirror that reflects the kaleidoscope of human existence. Through the lens of storytelling, we encounter characters grappling with universal themes of love, loss, hope, and redemption. We walk in their shoes, share their triumphs and tribulations, and glean insights into the complexities of the human psyche. In doing so, fiction fosters empathy—a bridge that connects us to the lives and struggles of others, regardless of time, place, or circumstance.

Consider the timeless classics of literature, from the intricate tapestries of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" to the haunting prose of Toni Morrison's "Beloved." These masterpieces not only transport us to distant lands and bygone eras but also offer profound reflections on the human condition. They challenge our perceptions, confront our biases, and compel us to confront uncomfortable truths about ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Moreover, fiction has the remarkable ability to transcend barriers of language, culture, and ideology. In the hands of skilled storytellers, words become a universal language—a testament to our shared humanity. Whether penned by a Nobel laureate or a budding novelist, stories have the power to ignite imaginations, kindle passions, and inspire change.

Indeed, the impact of fiction extends far beyond the realm of entertainment. Studies have shown that reading fiction enhances cognitive function, stimulates creativity, and fosters emotional intelligence. As we immerse ourselves in the lives of fictional characters, our brains undergo a process of neural mirroring, enabling us to experience their joys and sorrows as if they were our own. This cognitive empathy, in turn, fuels our capacity for understanding, tolerance, and compassion.

Moreover, fiction serves as a catalyst for social change—a megaphone for voices silenced by oppression, prejudice, and injustice. From Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to George Orwell's "1984," literature has played a pivotal role in challenging prevailing norms, sparking revolutions, and shaping the course of history. Through the power of storytelling, authors have galvanized movements, amplified marginalized voices, and laid bare the inequalities that pervade society.

In today's fast-paced world, where attention spans wane and screens vie for our gaze, the allure of fiction remains undiminished. Despite the allure of instant gratification, readers continue to seek solace in the pages of books, hungry for narratives that stir their souls and expand their horizons. In an age of information overload, fiction offers a sanctuary—a refuge where hearts are nourished, minds are enriched, and spirits are rejuvenated.

As we navigate the labyrinth of life, fiction serves as a guiding light—a beacon of hope amidst the darkness, a compass that points us towards understanding, connection, and transformation. It reminds us of our shared humanity, our capacity for resilience, and our innate longing for meaning and belonging.

In the end, the power of fiction lies not in its ability to escape reality, but to confront it—to grapple with the complexities of existence, to wrestle with the shadows of our collective past, and to envision a brighter, more compassionate future. Through the alchemy of storytelling, visit my website to discover that within the pages of fiction, lies the power to change the world—one story at a time.

#books & libraries #novels #book to read #fiction #bookworm

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 1.2 (before 1960)

69 – The Roman legions in Germania Superior refuse to swear loyalty to Galba. They rebel and proclaim Vitellius as emperor. 366 – The Alemanni cross the frozen Rhine in large numbers, invading the Roman Empire. 533 – Mercurius becomes Pope John II, the first pope to adopt a new name upon elevation to the papacy. 1492 – Reconquista: The Emirate of Granada, the last Moorish stronghold in Spain, surrenders. 1680 – Trunajaya rebellion: Amangkurat II of Mataram and his bodyguards execute the rebel leader Trunajaya. 1777 – American Revolutionary War: American forces under the command of George Washington repulsed a British attack at the Battle of the Assunpink Creek near Trenton, New Jersey. 1788 – Georgia becomes the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution. 1791 – Big Bottom massacre in the Ohio Country, North America, marking the beginning of the Northwest Indian War. 1818 – The British Institution of Civil Engineers is founded by a group of six engineers; Thomas Telford would later become its first president. 1865 – Uruguayan War: The Siege of Paysandú ends as the Brazilians and Coloradans capture Paysandú, Uruguay. 1900 – American statesman and diplomat John Hay announces the Open Door Policy to promote trade with China. 1900 – Chicago Canal opens. 1920 – The second Palmer Raid, ordered by the US Department of Justice, results in 6,000 suspected communists and anarchists being arrested and held without trial.[13] 1921 – World premiere of the science fiction play R.U.R. by the Czech writer Karel Čapek in a theater in Hradec Králové. 1941 – World War II: The Cardiff Blitz severely damages the cathedral in Cardiff, Wales. 1942 – The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) obtains the conviction of 33 members of a German spy ring headed by Fritz Joubert Duquesne in the largest espionage case in United States history; Also known as the Duquesne Spy Ring. 1942 – World War II: Manila is captured by Japanese forces, enabling them to control the Philippines. 1949 – Luis Muñoz Marín is inaugurated as the first democratically elected Governor of Puerto Rico. 1954 – India establishes its highest civilian awards, the Bharat Ratna and the Padma Vibhushan. 1955 – Following the assassination of the Panamanian president José Antonio Remón Cantera, his deputy, José Ramón Guizado, takes power, but is quickly deposed after his involvement in Cantera's death is discovered. 1959 – Luna 1, the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon and to orbit the Sun, is launched by the Soviet Union.

#Events

[marqeting]

The Rise of AI Influencers: Here's How Brands Can Work With Them!

Up until now, you understood what value Influencer marketing holds for both brands and content creators. However, the talk was about influencers who are humans, not man-made. As the time has evolved, the industry has witnessed a rise in the number of influencers, including the digital influencers.

Another new trend has taken over this industry pushing the boundaries of creativity and challenging traditional notions of celebrity endorsements—the computer-generated influencer. These virtual personalities, created through advanced technology and artificial intelligence, are gaining popularity recently. As brands discover this trend, understanding the dynamics and advantages of working with computer-generated influencers becomes crucial.

The Origin of Computer-Generated Influencers Computer-generated (CG) influencers, also known as virtual influencers or avatars, are digital characters brought to life through a combination of computer graphics, animation, and AI. These lifelike personas are created with meticulous attention to detail, from facial expressions to fashion sense, making them indistinguishable from their human counterparts on social media platforms.

Computer- Generated Influencers are appealing Brands Brands are increasingly turning to CG influencers to amplify their influencer marketing strategies. These virtual personalities offer a unique blend of creativity, relatability, and endless potential for customization. With complete control over the virtual influencer's content creation,, brands can strategically personalize content to engage specific target audiences.

Moreover, CG influencers present an opportunity for cost-effective and efficient campaigns. Traditional human influencers may demand high charges for their services and may not be available 24/7. CG influencers, on the other hand, can be active at all times, promoting products and engaging with followers without the limitations of physical constraints.

What Brands Should Know 1. Authenticity and Transparency Despite their digital origins, CG influencers need to convey authenticity to relate with audiences. Brands should ensure that these influencers match with their values and maintain transparency about the CGI nature of the influencer. Audiences appreciate honesty, and transparency can build trust, enabling a genuine connection with the brand.

2. Legal and Ethical Considerations Legal and ethical considerations become paramount even when partnering with AI Influencers. Brands should be vigilant in ensuring that their CG influencers adhere to ethical guidelines and comply with advertising regulations. Disclosures about the virtual nature of the influencer must be clear, preventing any potential backlash from consumers.

3. Continuous Innovation Quick advancements in recent AI technologies is no wonder. To stay relevant, brands must adapt to this dynamic nature of technology. The field of AI and CGI is continually evolving, and brands should be prepared to adapt and innovate. Keeping pace with emerging technologies ensures that CG influencers remain competitive and capable of delivering unique and memorable content.

Kyra or Kyraonig represents an Indian fictional character introduced by FUTR STUDIOS, co-founded by George Tharian and Himanshu Goel. Launched in January 2022 through an Instagram profile, she holds the distinction of being India's first Virtual Influencer. Like Kyra, there are many other AI influencers taking effective control in this industry by reshaping the way human influencers create content on social media.

4. Measure and Analyze As with any marketing strategy, brands must measure the success of their campaigns. Utilize analytics tools to assess the impact of CG influencers on key performance indicators. Analyzing data will provide insights into audience engagement, conversion rates, and overall campaign effectiveness, enabling brands to refine their strategies to achieve advance results.

Conclusion- The emergence of computer-generated influencers presents a distinctive avenue for brands to explore unparalleled marketing opportunities. As these CGI influencers continue to hook audiences and gain prominence, the prospect of brand partnerships with them becomes increasingly enticing. Now, the question is: Will your brand seize this innovative opportunity? Before planning to start off right away, you should conduct thorough research on the concept, and equip yourself with the knowledge shared in this blog to identify potential influencers.

To know more, visit us at- https://www.marqeting.in/

#conversion #digital marketing #influencer marketing platform #return on investment #sales #social media #top trends #top strategies #business goals #success #marketing tips #online presence #trends in entrepreneurship

[allylikethecat]

That update omggg, when matty speaks about how his addiction made him a liar I'd never considered it to the extent that it is in the a&e fic and it's just!!!! so much angst!!! Can't wait for the next chapter for all the feels

Thank you so much for reading and for sending in this ask! I’m so happy to hear that you enjoyed the new chapter! I got really in my head about it and am just so grateful for messages like these!

I thought it was really interesting that IRL!Matty talked a lot about how his addiction turned him into a liar, and really wanted to build off that inspiration in the fic - obviously I have no idea about the extent of what IRL!Matty went through, and only know about my fictional version which has became his own independent character, but Fictional!Matty is for sure going through it, and is going to try and lie, cheat and steal his way out of the situation in which he has found himself. I also really like the ideal that Fictional!George just loves him *so much* and they have been together for *so long* that Fictional!George found himself covering for him, and enabling him without even realizing it because taking care of Fictional!Matty is just what he does. 

Hopefully I won’t frantically decide to rewrite chapter 7 on Monday night like I did chapter 6 and then over think it to the point where it was actually impacting my real life 😂 because hopefully, from what I have outlined and written so far it’s going to hopefully hurt! Thank you for reading and for your message! 

❤️Ally

#allylikethecat #ask ally #anon ask #fanfiction #matty fic #gatty #rid me of the blues #the a&e fic #a&e fic #the infection verse fic #the infection verse #the infection fic verse #infection verse fic #infection fic verse #infection verse #thank you so much for reading #keep it kind #we like fictional!Matty more than irl matty in this household #i hope you continue to enjoy this fic though #because in my mind they have become their own characters

[extremely-moderate]

Revolutionary Moderation: Embracing Gateleg Without Upsetting the Balance

"🎩💼 The Founding Father's guide to staying politically moderate on the controversial topic of gateleg: Embrace open dialogue, weigh pros & cons, seek common ground! Let's fold together without folding apart! 🤝🔀 #FoundingFatherWisdom #GatelegEtiquette" In a world of polarizing politics, where opinions clash like waves against the rocks, it can be a challenge to find common ground. Yet, I, as a Founding Father of the United States, stand before you today to shed light on the art of being extremely politically moderate about gateleg. Now, you might be wondering 'What in the name of King George is gateleg?' Well, dear reader, it refers to that delicate balance between supporting and opposing certain policies or beliefs. Much like the gateleg table that can be folded or extended, political moderation requires us to navigate these issues with finesse and equilibrium. As a discerning Founding Father, I have witnessed firsthand the perils of extreme ideologies. It was clear to us that moderation was the key to maintaining harmony and fostering compromise. So, let's dive into the depths of this art, shall we? Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, keep an open mind. Being moderate means being receptive to different viewpoints and, at times, challenging your own preconceived notions. Engage in thoughtful conversations, listen attentively, and consider various perspectives before forming a conclusion. Secondly, embrace empathy. Understanding others' experiences and motivations enables us to bridge divides and find commonalities. Remember, my fellow citizens, we are all bound by the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Let empathy be our guiding light towards moderation. Next, cultivate critical thinking. Don't accept ideas blindly, but question and scrutinize them. Moderation requires intellectual independence and the ability to discern facts from fiction. Arm yourself with knowledge, for it is the sword that cuts through extremism. Furthermore, resist the allure of tribalism. It is tempting to fall into partisan camps, but true moderation lies outside the confines of rigid labels. Seek collaboration, seek unity - for the greatest achievements in our nation's history were born from compromise. Lastly, always remember the power of civil discourse. A respectful exchange of ideas paves the way for progress, while insults and hostility only breed division. Let your words be guided by reason and respect, for a moderate voice carries weight beyond measure. So, my fellow citizens of the present day, let us embrace gateleg with the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Let us strive for moderation, for it is the path towards unity and progress. May our nation find strength in its diversity, and may the spirit of compromise guide us towards a brighter future.

#gateleg #Politics #Moderation

[ahgastayverse]

BRAVE NEW WORLD NOVEL

STRAY KIDS UNIVERSE THEORY

Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. This novel is often compared to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY

Reproductive technology encompasses all current and anticipated uses of technology in human and animal reproduction, including assisted reproductive technology, contraception and others. It is also termed Assisted Reproductive Technology, where it entails an array of appliances and procedures that enable the realization of safe, improved and healthier reproduction. While this is not true of all people, for an array of married couples, the ability to have children is vital. But through the technology, infertile couples have been provided with options that would allow them to conceive children.

SLEEP-LEARNING

Sleep-learning (also known as hypnopædia or hypnopedia) is an attempt to convey information to a sleeping person, typically by playing a sound recording to them while they sleep. Although sleep is considered an important period for memory consolidation, scientific research has concluded that sleep-learning is not possible. It appears frequently in fiction.

PSYCHOLOGICAL MANIPULATION

In psychology, manipulation is defined as subterfuge designed to influence or control another, usually in a manner which facilitates one's personal aims. The methods used distort or orient the interlocutor's perception of reality, in particular through seduction, suggestion, persuasion and non-voluntary or consensual submission. Definitions for the term vary in which behavior is specifically included, influenced by both culture and whether referring to the general population or used in clinical contexts. Manipulation is generally considered a dishonest form of social influence as it is used at the expense of others.

CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

Classical conditioning (also respondent conditioning and Pavlovian conditioning) is a behavioral procedure in which a biologically potent physiological stimulus (e.g. food) is paired with a neutral stimulus (e.g. the sound of a musical triangle). The term classical conditioning refers to the process of an automatic, conditioned response that is paired with a specific stimulus.

SUMMARY

The novel opens in the World State city of London in AF (After Ford) 632 (AD 2540 in the Gregorian calendar), where citizens are engineered through artificial wombs and childhood indoctrination programmes into predetermined classes (or castes) based on intelligence and labour. Lenina Crowne, a hatchery worker, is popular and sexually desirable, but Bernard Marx, a psychologist, is not. He is shorter in stature than the average member of his high caste, which gives him an inferiority complex. His work with sleep-learning allows him to understand, and disapprove of, his society's methods of keeping its citizens peaceful, which includes their constant consumption of a soothing, happiness-producing drug called “SOMA”. Courting disaster, Bernard is vocal and arrogant about his criticisms, and his boss contemplates exiling him to Iceland because of his nonconformity. His only friend is Helmholtz Watson, a gifted writer who finds it difficult to use his talents creatively in their pain-free society.

Bernard takes a holiday with Lenina outside the World State to a Savage Reservation in New Mexico, in which the two observe natural-born people, disease, the ageing process, other languages, and religious lifestyles for the first time. The culture of the village folk resembles the contemporary Native American groups of the region, descendants of the Anasazi, including the Puebloan peoples of Hopi and Zuni. Bernard and Lenina witness a violent public ritual and then encounter Linda, a woman originally from the World State who is living on the reservation with her son John, now a young man. She, too, visited the reservation on a holiday many years ago, but became separated from her group and was left behind. She had meanwhile become pregnant by a fellow holidaymaker (who is revealed to be Bernard's boss, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning). She did not try to return to the World State, because of her shame at her pregnancy. Despite spending his whole life in the reservation, John has never been accepted by the villagers, and his and Linda's lives have been hard and unpleasant. Linda has taught John to read, although from the only book in her possession—a scientific manual—and another book John found: the complete works of Shakespeare. Ostracised by the villagers, John is able to articulate his feelings only in terms of Shakespearean drama, quoting often from The Tempest, King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. Linda now wants to return to London, and John too, wants to return to see this “brave new world”. Bernard sees an opportunity to thwart plans to exile him, and gets permission to take Linda and John back. On their return to London, John meets the Director and calls him his “father”, a vulgarity which causes a roar of laughter. The humiliated Director resigns in shame before he can follow through with exiling Bernard.

Bernard, as “custodian” of the “savage” John who is now treated as a celebrity, is fawned on by the highest members of society and revels in attention he once scorned. Bernard's popularity is fleeting, though, and he becomes envious that John only really bonds with the literary-minded Helmholtz. Considered hideous and friendless, Linda spends all her time using soma, while John refuses to attend social events organised by Bernard, appalled by what he perceives to be an empty society. Lenina and John are physically attracted to each other, but John's view of courtship and romance, based on Shakespeare's writings, is utterly incompatible with Lenina's freewheeling attitude to sex. She tries to seduce him, but he attacks her, before suddenly being informed that his mother is on her deathbed. He rushes to Linda's bedside, causing a scandal, as this is not the “correct” attitude to d*eath. Some children who enter the ward for “death-conditioning” come across as disrespectful to John, and he attacks one physically. He then tries to break up a distribution of soma to a lower-caste group, telling them that he is freeing them. Helmholtz and Bernard rush in to stop the ensuing riot, which the police quell by spraying soma vapor into the crowd.

Bernard, Helmholtz, and John are all brought before Mustapha Mond, the “Resident World Controller for Western Europe”, who tells Bernard and Helmholtz that they are to be exiled to islands for antisocial activity. Bernard pleads for a second chance, but Helmholtz welcomes the opportunity to be a true individual, and chooses the Falkland Islands as his destination, believing that their bad weather will inspire his writing. Mond tells Helmholtz that exile is actually a reward. The islands are full of the most interesting people in the world, individuals who did not fit into the social model of the World State. Mond outlines for John the events that led to the present society and his arguments for a caste system and social control. John rejects Mond's arguments, and Mond sums up John's views by claiming that John demands “the right to be unhappy”. John asks if he may go to the islands as well, but Mond refuses, saying he wishes to see what happens to John next.

Jaded with his new life, John moves to an abandoned hilltop lighthouse, near the village of Puttenham, where he intends to adopt a solitary ascetic lifestyle in order to purify himself of civilization, practising self-flagellation. This draws reporters and eventually hundreds of amazed sightseers, hoping to witness his bizarre behaviour.

For a while it seems that John might be left alone, after the public's attention is drawn to other diversions, but a documentary maker has secretly filmed John's self-flagellation from a distance, and when released the documentary causes an international sensation. Helicopters arrive with more journalists. Crowds of people descend on John's retreat, demanding that he perform his whipping ritual for them. From one helicopter a young woman emerges who is implied to be Lenina. John, at the sight of a woman he both adores and loathes, whips at her in a fury and then turns the whip on himself, exciting the crowd, whose wild behaviour transforms into a soma-fuelled orgy. The next morning John awakes on the ground and is consumed by remorse over his participation in the night's events.

That evening, a swarm of helicopters appears on the horizon, the story of last night's orgy having been in all the papers. The first onlookers and reporters to arrive find that John is dead, having hanged himself.

From: Wikipedia

#stray kids lore #stray kids theory #stray kids

[maacwanowrie]

Exploring the Evolution of Visual Effects in Cinema

 The evolution of visual effects in cinema has been a remarkable journey that has transformed the way stories are told on the big screen. From the early days of practical effects to the cutting-edge technologies of today, visual effects have played a pivotal role in pushing the boundaries of imagination and bringing fantastical worlds to life. If you are an artist seeking to showcase your work on the big screen, pursuing a career in VFX courses in Pune can be a great choice for you. It offers opportunities to work on high-profile projects, collaborate with renowned studios, and advance in your career to become a leader, managing teams of skilled VFX artists.

 In the early years of cinema, visual effects relied heavily on practical techniques such as miniatures, matte paintings, and stop-motion animation. Filmmakers like Georges Méliès, known for his groundbreaking work in the early 1900s, employed innovative techniques to create magical and otherworldly effects. As technology advanced, techniques like rear projection and optical printing became popular, enabling filmmakers to create more seamless visual effects.

 The introduction of computers in the 1970s paved the way for a new era in visual effects. With the advent of computer-generated imagery (CGI), filmmakers gained unprecedented control and creative freedom. Films like "Tron" (1982) and "The Abyss" (1989) demonstrated the potential of CGI, though its full potential was yet to be realized.

 The 1990s witnessed a significant leap forward in visual effects with the release of films like "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" (1991) and "Jurassic Park" (1993). These films showcased the power of CGI in creating realistic and believable creatures and environments. The success of these movies sparked a surge in the use of CGI in subsequent films, opening up new possibilities for filmmakers and audiences alike.

 As technology advanced, CGI became more sophisticated and seamlessly integrated into live-action footage. Films like "The Matrix" trilogy (1999-2003) and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy (2001-2003) raised the bar for visual effects, showcasing groundbreaking techniques and stunning visual spectacles.

 The 21st century has witnessed a rapid evolution of visual effects, with advancements in CGI, motion capture, and virtual production. Films like "Avatar" (2009) and "Gravity" (2013) pushed the boundaries of what was possible, immersing audiences in breathtaking and realistic digital worlds.

 Today, visual effects have become an integral part of filmmaking across genres, from fantasy and science fiction to dramas and even comedies. The line between what is real and what is digitally created has blurred, as filmmakers strive to create seamless and immersive visual experiences.

 The future of visual effects looks promising, with emerging technologies like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and real-time rendering revolutionizing the industry. Filmmakers now have the tools to create interactive and immersive experiences that transport audiences into the heart of the story.

 In conclusion, the evolution of visual effects in cinema has been a fascinating journey, driven by technological advancements and creative innovation. From the early days of practical effects to the digital wizardry of today, visual effects have transformed storytelling, transporting audiences to fantastical worlds and pushing the boundaries of imagination. As technology continues to advance, the future of visual effects holds even more exciting possibilities, promising to take audiences on extraordinary visual journeys.

[deliciousphilosopherpanda]

https://canikusa.org/

Details, Fiction And Tp9 sfx

My copy shoots straight and legitimate. Together with the TP9SFx, the good people at Canik have accomplished a simply outstanding occupation of optimizing their now outstanding TP9 series pistol. The morphology from the gun excises each of the discomfort outside of Georg Luger’s snappy 9mm rounds, and working the piece is excellent fun all around. Nils has long gone head-to-head in opposition to competition with guns costing triple and often up to six times in excess of his Canik, and he nonetheless trounces them. Every person that is anyone will make concealment holsters for this gun likewise. In spite of all that interesting stuff, the TP9SF service pistol charges perhaps two-thirds of what a equivalent name-model handgun might. I've run a zillion rounds by way of mine. The initial aspect that makes the Canik TP9SFX so aggressive is The one-action bring about pull with a short reset. When capturing any kind of Competitiveness, this specific bring about can shave valuable break day the clock when taking pictures doubles or an array of steel. ALERT - It's got come to our interest that a fraudulent World-wide-web web page is misusing the Canik identify, trademarks, illustrations or photos and items in what we suppose is actually a plan to defraud unsuspecting firearm and accent purchasers. The websites canikgun.com, canikpistols. I operate a purple fiber optic when not applying purple dot sights, but I see a lot of greens as well as other aftermarket sights at the array. Together with the TP9, you’ll have that alternative appropriate out of your box. A rubber retention strap can also be provided if you propose on maintaining the gun holstered for some time. The full shebang will come packed in the hearty plastic, lockable storage scenario. The TP9SFx incorporates 4 various mounting plates to accommodate almost all of the environment’s preferred micro red dots. The identical very little toolbox incorporates the mounting components for the plates. Every little thing you'll want to mount the sight is bundled. Looks like you are employing new Reddit on an outdated browser. The internet site may well not work correctly if you don't update your browser ! If you do not update your browser, we suggest you pay a visit to previous reddit . In addition it enables the gun to get billed in opposition to one thing business should everyday living actually go sideways and you find yourself working the gun just one-handed. This appendage can be set up or not based on operator desire. The gun operates just fantastic either way. Tp9 sfx The slide launch is extended in addition. The Canik TP9 SFx is made for Opposition, fundamentally on steel plates and poppers. I began out shooting it at compact rocks at twenty five yards. When I received it sighted in I loaded the magazine to capacity with twenty rounds of FMJ and proceeded to run it as quickly as I could, shooting in a four-inch rubber dice at 20 yards. Visible assessment of a gun’s chamber accompanied by tactile affirmation will make sure no matter if a firearm is Secure to manage. Information, Suggestions In case you’ve checked out spending plan shotguns in the final twenty years, you’ll discover that a massive host of them are created in Turkey.

Tp9 Sfx Options

While this may well feel an odd decision, we can see this staying well-known with people that carried possibly a Beretta m9 or even a Sig P226 up to now. Our provide incorporates 118 types of     Canik TP9 SFX Leather-based holsters with vital features like rapid and simple attract and re-holstering. Wide selection of carry positions and carry designs assist you to browse via a lot of holster styles with great retention along with a included trigger guard, either open best holsters or holsters by using a thumb crack. Mag release is usually switched out to generally be still left-pleasant…but there’s no way with the slide halt. Prepare for many very good ole slingshot reloading then. The standard Canik TP9 SFX leather holster is manufactured from cowhide that's been processed, molded and tanned to perfection. Leather-based holsters has better warm feeling, for a longer time life time and greater healthy, as opposed with other elements. In step with the race gun mantra, There's also a removable charging take care of that may be included to possibly side of your slide. This enables the operator unparalleled control of the slide when racking. The front on the triggerguard is squared off and serrated, and there's a 3-notch Picatinny rail in front of the triggerguard for mounting a weaponlight or laser. The TP9’s journal drops conveniently and positively when the mag release button is pushed. The magazines are numbered about the back to indicate the amount of rounds in position. This is a superb, professional, supportive, and Energetic Canik Group. The declaring 'If you don't have nearly anything wonderful to say, Really don't say it' applies. Rude & crass instigators won't be tolerated You will also find prolonged Journals readily available, which can be loaded with twenty bullets. The canik TP9 SFX relies on the usage of the 9mm Luger cartridge. Among several of the features of the handgun are the following: an optics All set skeletonized slide, front slide serrations, extended journal catch and extended slide halt, accent rail, 18-spherical or prolonged 20-round journal. Most of these options and The truth that the pistol is optics-All set make the Canik TP9 SFX a really reliable tactical pistol. The pistol is most often used for Levels of competition taking pictures and it’s also a viable company handgun. Gun Details The front sight is considered the most vital visual on any pistol, as that is Anything you’ll center on when capturing. The Canik TP9 designs include conventional dovetail sight cuts for adjustability and both equally a pink and inexperienced fiber optic front sight to make sure you can choose the most effective shade to your Visible choice. Check out all our favorites…however, if we needed to pick one at this moment it’d be the Holosun 507c X2 ACSS. Resulting from The present scenario involving COVID-19, prospects may well expertise longer than normal ship instances. Be sure to be certain we've been carrying out every thing within our energy to Get the deals for you in a secure and timely way.   The METE collection may be the fruits of a long time of tireless tests and engineering leading to a truly amazing final result! The SC model features a shorter barrel, which makes it less difficult to conceal and use for personal protection, though a little bit less exact. It’s truly worth mentioning that a lot of the Elite styles feature threaded barrels, generating them viable suppressor hosts. Canik nicely stippled the body for simple purchase when rushed or sweaty. In the meantime, the dust protect includes a rail for accessories. The frame on my duplicate is black though the backstrap and magazine baseplates can be a metallic metal coloration to match the tungsten slide. Frankly, the TP9SFx seems magnificent.

The Basic Principles Of Tp9 Sfx

The journal release is reversible on the user stage and in addition sports activities the niftiest screw-in extensions. The gun comes along with a little plastic toolbox that features two spacers that, jointly, supply a few diverse profiles for your journal release. Canik created a lanyard attachment position into your butt. We in no way use these retention products on this facet from the pond, but nearly every armed Israeli I saw even though in that extraordinary nation utilised a person. It is actually my impression that any reward obtained from getting a comp on a regular pistol is basically psychosomatic given that most OTS pistol rounds(+p provided) lack the amounts of powder required to run the comp competently, if at all. Thanks to the way your new holster is built, your handgun will not likely slide out in the holster even if you decide to have your rig the wrong way up (Despite the fact that we advise you not to hold in this manner). Even so, in order to get as much retention as is possible, Be at liberty to pick from our variety of Canik TP9 SFX Leather Hybrid holsters equipped that has a thumb-split strap. As mentioned earlier, aftermarket accessories really are a necessity for a pistol to become competitive towards Other people. ALERT - It's arrive at our awareness that a fraudulent World wide web website is misusing the Canik identify, emblems, pictures and products and solutions in what we think is often a scheme to defraud unsuspecting firearm and accent purchasers. The web sites canikgun.com, canikpistols. With its simple dealing with traits and twenty-spherical ability, it would definitely provide effectively as being a home or truck gun. For day-to-day carrying and/or hid use, I would favor a journal which inserts flush While using the grip frame. At 27 ounces, I do not find the gun objectionable weight-wise for packing and the polymer holster which is included locks the pistol securely set up and releases it when desired. Cocking serrations are at both equally the front and rear in the slide. There's also four pounds-decreasing cutouts found on all sides with the slide driving the front sight and two extra at The underside front of your slide. TP9 SFx is formulated to serve as the Top quality Model of TP Collection Pistols with its 5.twenty-inch barrel. SFx comes along with numerous new capabilities as modular for the shooter to get pleasure from extra in target capturing. Outfitted with entrance serrations, extended magazine catch, and extended slide halt, the shooter’s Charge of the pistol is Increased and sighting is improved because of the fiber-optic front sight. Side reversible magazine catch with more sizes of release buttons and alternate backstraps for just a customized in shape MSRP Find your supplier When you are a accredited firearms vendor, make sure you go to our supplier internet site to purchase. This might be by far the most extras you have in a regular pistol package deal for anything less than $one,000. For pure worth, this is punching way outside the house its fat class. Even the facet manufacturing unit stippling doesn’t enable just as much in case you’re sweating. I’d grab some Talon grip tape.

#Tp9 sfx