#it's my attempt and failure at escaping from my anime roots and trying new more cartoony styles

[lynaferns]

Do you also have specific brushes for different vibes or just use the same brush(es) for everything you draw?

I normally use a thick custom brush for all of my art pieces or that black pen brush I used for my latest OC drawings but sometimes I like using my old basic brushes and sketch whatever I feel like drawing at the time.

#idk #I don't always stick to just one brush for every drawing #it's my attempt and failure at escaping from my anime roots and trying new more cartoony styles #I want something more like when Disney used to experiment with 2D styles or the 2D era of DreamWorks #the villains were always the ones with more shape and body variety #I have to squeeze my brain to draw new faces and bodies that I haven't drawn before #in occasions like that a thin brush helps me define more... whatever I'm trying to do #thin brush also means more room for details #it's been so long since I've used my basic brush...

[shesey]

Wintering by Katherine May

“Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition, and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful. Yet it is also inevitable. We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer, and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves.” “Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible. Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season when the world takes on a sparse beauty, and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.” “That’s what humans do: we make and remake our stories, abandoning the ones that no longer fit and trying on new ones for size.” “In the changing room later, I experience a different kind of warmth: the nakedness of a dozen women, all unashamed. These aren’t the posing bodies you find on the beach, dieted beyond al joy to be bikini-ready, and tanned as an act of disguise. These are northern bodies, slack-bottomed and dimpling, with unruly pubic hair and the scars of hysterectomies, chattering companionably in a language I don’t understand. They are a glimpse of life yet to come: a message of survival, passed on through the generations. It’s a message I rarely find in my buttoned-up home country, and I think about the times I’ve suffered silent furies at the treacheries of my own body, imagining them to be unique.” “Ghost stories may be a part of the terror of Halloween, but our love of ghost stories betrays a far more fragile desire: that we do not fade so easily from this life.” “Winter has decorated ordinary life. Some days, everything sparkles.” “You realize that no one is what they look like, on the surface. Everybody has their dose of suffering; it’s just more hidden in some than in others.” “I think about this a lot, she says, the needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it. You can’t have one without the other.” “In the absence of sunlight, it would be too costly to maintain the machinery of growth.” “I’m fairly certain that my decision not to have a second child rests squarely on my worship of sleep.” “I have nothing to show for my forty-odd years on this earth, except for a pile of dusty books.” “4am. The ego flares like a struck match: bright, blue, fleeting. I am thankful to be alone when this happens, to let it burn out in private. We should sometimes be grateful for the solitudes of night, of a winter. They save us from displaying our worse selves to the waking world.” “Certainty is a dead space in which there’s no more room to grow. Wavering is painful. I’m glad to be travelling between the two.” “Sometimes writing is a race against your own mind, as your hand labours to keep up with the flood tide of your thoughts, and I feel that most acutely at night, when there are no competing demands on my attention. That slightly sleepy, dazed state erods the barriers of my waking brain.” “I can confess all my sins to a piece of paper, with no one to censor it.” “Our personal winters are so often accompanies by insomnia, but perhaps we are still drawn towards that unique space of intimacy and contemplation, darkness, and silence, without really knowing what we’re seeking. Perhaps, after all, we are being urged towards our own comfort.” “Lucy is a symbol of absolute faith and utter purity, but the sins for which she suffers are not her own. Instead, she shoulders the weight of the male gaze, and is destroyed by it.” “Some winters creep up on us so slowly that they have infiltrated every part of our lives before we truly feel them.” “We felt broken into pieces, but at the same time, never so loved.” “We changed our focus away from pushing through with normal life, and towards making a new one. When everything is broken, everything is also up for grabs. That’s the gift of winter: it’s irresistible. Change will happen in its wake, whether we like it or not. We can come out of it wearing a different coat.” “I could have stood there and cried on the spot, just knowing that I wasn’t alone.” “I felt accepted in a way that I hand’t for months.” “This isn’t just an unkind attitude, it does us harm, because it stops us from learning that disaster happens, and how to adapt when it does. It stops us from reaching out to people who are suffering. And, when our own disaster comes, it forces us into a humiliated retreat, as we try to hunt down mistakes that we never made in the first place.” “I simply had no defence against the changes that were happening in my life.” “Life never does quite offer us those simply happy endings. I often that that it’s all part of my own craving: the moral clarity of cause and effect, reward and punishment for my actions. A map for living that renders everything explicable.” “All her desires were for elemental things: love, a little comfort, the society of interesting people. Everyday life is so often isolated, dreary, and lonely. A little craving is understandable. A little craving might actually be the rallying cry for survival.” “I love the inconvenience [of snow] the same way that I can sneakingly love a bad cold: the irresistible disruption to mundane life, forcing you to stop for a while and step outside of your normal habits.” “In autumn, the male drones are sacrificed because they’re no longer of any use, and would otherwise just be hungry mounts to feed.”  “Our lives take different shapes: we do not work in a linear progression through fixed roles like the honeybee. We are not consistently useful to the world at large. We talk about the complexity of the hive, but human societies are infinitely more complex, full of choices and mistakes, periods of glory and seasons of utter despair. Some of us make highly visible, elaborate contributions to the whole; some of us are just part of the ticking mechanics of the world, the incremental wealth of small gestures. All of it matters. All of it weaves the wider fabric that binds us.” “We may sometimes drift through years in which we feel like a negative presence in the world, but we come back again, not only restored, but bringing more than we brought before: more wisdom, more compassion, a greater capacity to reach deep into our roots and know that we will find water.” “Usefulness, in itself, is a useless concept when it comes to humans. I don’t think we were ever meant to think about others in terms of their use to us.” “We flourish on caring, on doling out love.” “Winter is a time for the quiet arts of making: for knitting and sewing, baking and simmering, repairing and restoring our homes.” “We sing because it fills our lungs with nourishing air, and lets our heart soar with the notes we let out. We sing because it allows us to speak of love and loss, delight and desire, all encoded in lyrics that let us pretend that those feelings are not quite ours.” “As I walk, I remind myself ot the words of Alan Watts: ‘To hold your breath is to lose your breath.’ In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts makes a case that always convinces me, but which I always seem to forget: that life is, by nature, uncontrollable. That we should stop trying to finalize our comfort and security somehow, and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life. Our suffering, he says, comes from the fight we put up against this fundamental truth: ‘Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is in pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.” “The future, to which we devote so much of our brainpower, is an unstable element, entirely unknowable.” “When we endlessly ruminate in these distant times, we miss extraordinary things in the present moment. They are, in actual fact, all we have: the here and now; the direct perception of our senses.” “I’m beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savoured. I would never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery, or shrink from doing everything we can to alleviate it; but I do think it’s instructive. After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us that something is going wrong. If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt. We seem to be living in an age when we’re bombarded with entreaties to be happy, but we’re suffering from an avalanche of depression; we’re urged to stop sweating the small stuff, and yet we’re chronically anxious. I often wonder if these are just normal feelings that become monstrous when they’re denied. A great deal of life will always suck. There will be moments when we’re riding high, and moments when we can’t bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both, in fact, require a little perspective.” “We need friends who wince along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while when we’re finding our feet again. We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on in there; that sometimes, everything breaks.” “I recognized winter. I saw it coming (a mile off, since you ask), and I looked it in the eye,. I greeted it, and let it in. I had some tricks up my sleeve, you see. I’ve learned them the hard way. When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favoured child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable, and that my feelings were signals of something important.” “We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, or course, seek to deny that we grow gradually older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint.”

#winter #books #quotes #katherine may

[ibtk]

Book Review: THE ECHO WIFE Sarah Gailey (2021)

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through NetGalley. Trigger warning for emotional, physical, and sexual violence, including child abuse.)

One hundred days from sample to sentience, and every building block is based on the DNA of the original.

In hindsight, I don’t know why I ever thought he wouldn’t choose her. She was perfect—everything he wanted. He made her that way.

“No,” she interrupted. “You were right. I was made for something, and I’ve never even wondered about it. I was never asked if I wanted this.”

Dr. Evelyn Caldwell is at the top of her game - in spite of the many obstacles her ex-husband Nathan has thrown up in her way over the years. At the beginning, they were a team: scrappy upstart research scientists valiantly trying to create a perfect carbon copy of a human being. An identical clone, from DNA to behavioral quirks and everything in between. And then came an accidental pregnancy - which Nathan fully expected Evelyn to carry to term, despite all evidence to the contrary - followed by Nathan's escape into academia and apathy, or so Evelyn thought.

A chance discovery points Evelyn to a much more sinister truth: rather than giving up, Evelyn's ne'er-do-well husband hijacked her research to build a new, "better" version of her. Martine is submissive, compliant, and unquestioning, with the quiet, unassuming domesticity of June Cleaver (and yet she's still got the curiosity and intelligence of her source material, much to Nathan's misfortune). Most importantly, she desires the family that Evelyn does not. Of course she does: Nathan programmed her that way.

Evelyn is unwillingly sucked into Martine's orbit when "fucking Nathan" winds up dead. The two women - or the woman and her specimen, depending on your POV - are forced to collaborate on the cover-up, since discovery could mean ruination for them both.

The story gets super-twisty after this, so I won't say more because spoilers! Several times I thought I knew where the plot was headed, but Gailey has created one twisty-turny, mind-boggling roller coaster of a ride in THE ECHO WIFE. The further in you venture, the more the twists (and bodies!) pile up. As far as suspense goes, this book has got it in surplus.

I also enjoyed the deeper, more complex psychological and ethical issues that undergird the story: themes of self-identity, free will, nature vs. nurture, and bioethics are woven into the fabric of the plot and characters. Martine's attempts - some failed, some not - to "buck" her programming are fascinating, as is Evelyn's conflicted feelings about it, at once frustrated and excited. She wants to root for Martine on a feminist level, but can't, because that will spell her own personal scientific failure.

As an ethical vegan, I'm especially drawn to science fiction that explores our obligations to sentient, nonhuman creatures, from clones to cyborgs. (Team Cylon all the way!) Through Evelyn's relationship with Martine, THE ECHO WIFE probes Dr. Cadlwell's attitudes towards her research, including the many psychological tricks she employs to keep a clinical, "objective" distance from her subjects:

Clones aren’t people, legally speaking. They don’t have rights. They’re specimens. They’re body doubles, or organ farms, or research subjects. They’re temporary, and when they stop being useful, they become biomedical waste. They are disposable.

While many readers (myself included) will no doubt see this as self-serving and reprehensible, it's no different from how we dehumanize and objectify non-human animals - who are unfeeling masses of "meat" to be consumed, "natural resources" to be harvested, "guinea pigs" to be vivisected, etc. - in order to justify their exploitation.

Whereas Nathan and Martine occupy entirely different ends of the ethical spectrum, Evelyn is a really slippery character to pin down; she's both a villain and a hero, a victim and a victimizer. Her inner monologues, then, can be pretty damn frustrating...which isn't necessarily a bad thing, though I do wish we had a more honest look at her ethical compass. We get a taste from Martine -

“I don’t think you’re different from him,” she said. “I think you make people and you dispose of them when it suits you, just like he did. I think that if this had all taken place inside a lab, and if his victims didn’t look just like you? You wouldn’t be conflicted about it at all. You wouldn’t think he’d done anything wrong.”

but the conversations about clone ethics are mostly dominated by Evelyn, self-reported and skewed by her own (arguably dysfunctional) world view. Because of this, I felt like THE ECHO WIFE only started to scratch my longstanding itch in this regard.

The ending is not at all what I expected, and left me with a weirdly conflicted feeling. Like, it's dissatisfying on its face - I really wanted a certain someone to die! - yet also kind of perfect, in its own way.

I need an epilogue, though! What's going to happen a few years down the road, when a certain other someone starts asking questions!?         https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3788743794

#Sarah Gailey #books #reviews #science fiction #the echo wife #cloning #thriller #suspense

[raindrenchedstories]

Forever home CH 19

YES. It’s happening. No I didn’t abandon it. I’ll make a second post.

Richter sat miserably on Bear’s shoulder. Holding onto a thick chain necklace, and using the giant’s shoulder straps as a seat belt. The past few days he didn’t speak much. It took a little over a week to coordinate the meet up. In that time, Bear had been trying to pull the little fellow out of his funk.

It wasn’t really much use. Instead the nightly visits were converted into time to console his small friend. Richter had been reunited with his family prior, so there wasn’t much in the way of paperwork afterwards. Nor the more invasive, but much quicker memory probings.

Instead, he was just left to feel like a failure. Neil had been luckier, and managed to find the whereabouts of his father. The two managed to meet with one another and promptly decided the memories were too painful. Apparently they offered to stay in touch.

Bear’s relationship with Archibald took a small break in light of the events. Both men felt too guilty enjoying themselves while their friends were in such misery. Though, they did still spend plenty of time together. It was less focused on them, and more on... Richter.

Despite being surrounded by friends and family, there seamed to be a lot on the mans mind. As he stared glumly from his vantage point. Bear swallowed. Drawing the small mans eyes onto him. “Not far now. Um... There’s a warp.”

“That’s fine.” Richter nodded, before settling into his little ball again. As it turned out, it was fine. Not even Richter’s extreme discomfort with the gates was enough to shake him. Bear crossed the new surroundings. Having to pull a map from his overall pocket. He hoped this visit was enough to shake the human.

Crossing his way to Lev’s home he heard a tiny gasp from Richter. Finally some excitement from the man. And Bear could see why. Levas home was much like the woman herself. Flourishing with life. Many stone guardians, animals long since dead and reanimated through magic, surrounded her home. Protecting it. Her garden grew high above any small one’s head. A few even towered over Bear himself.

All vegetables and fruits. Quite the contrast to his flower garden. But nestled at the roots of every great tree, was a tiny little patch of small foods. Strawberries, peas, parsnips and the like. All of it culminated into a massive hill, with a door. Not quite Archibalds mountain. But it was large enough for a giant to live snugly.

“Gotta give her props for decorating.” Richter commented. Bear could only hum in agreement. He’d never really seen Leva’s house until now. Though, it clearly spoke of her. Bear’s knuckles gently wrapped on the door frame. He got a stony hollow barking in return. There was an argument before she shoved her way through the door.

“Quickly. And get a good hold on Richter. I don’t want Arrie playing with him.” Bear slunk inside, a firm hold on his human passenger. The large dog guardian bounding behind his knee caps. Excitedly attempting to greet the new guests.

“er. Hello miss Leva.” Richter inclined his head. Poking just above Bear’s index finger. Tiny hands resting just on the middle digit for support. Probably cover, as well. Richter was never a fan of new anything for the first three days.

The fiery giantess grinned in kind. “Good day Richter! Avery is waiting for you in his shelter. He’s anxious about your visit.” She gave the human a brilliant smile afterwards. Bear thought he saw his small pal blush. Soon enough Richter was set beside Avery’s shelter, and Bear was dragged into the living room. Just out of ear shot.

“How’s he holding up?” Leva hissed. Bear could only grimace.

“He’s... Well he’s holding. It’s just going to take some time. Maybe more time than I imagined. I’m getting worried.” He admitted.

*

Avery opened the door for him, leading Richter in. Once the giants were gone, and Arrie was sufficiently shooed into the other room. Avery leaned in conspiratorially. “Okay so I’m guessing it didn’t go well.” He threw an arm over Richters shoulders, guiding the human to his living room.

Which was apparently turned into a room sized pillow fort. Richter stared in bewilderment. “Not... Really. No.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, mouth agape.

“What? It’s effective. I don’t get a lot of privacy around here.” Avery dragged him into the fort. “I should thank you for giving me the idea. Here. Back towards the book cases.” He began crawling back to the indicated end. Resting on the bookcase were two small make shift bags. Supplies and clothing squirrelled away. A rough cut in the plastic and wood of the back wall of the book case making the plans clear.

“You’re escaping?” Richter gave him a curious glance. Though, he wasn’t about to pass judgment. He wouldn’t blame anyone for choosing an alternative to his own decisions. He was quite sure Neil would be doing the same if it weren’t for the ability to learn magic through Archibald.

Avery just laughed in return. He placed a warm hand on the humans shoulder. “No Richter. WE’RE escaping. Today. I had to pull some strings to get ‘em to wait. But I have a few friends waiting outside. I’ve already cut a hole in the wall across the counter. We just have to be quiet. Arrie is like a personal alarm system.”

Richter glanced at him. Eyes wide. “Oh... Avery I. I’m not sure about this.” He shrugged. “I know you don’t like Bear but-”

“Richter. Listen to me. It’s not about that. Hell if it doesn’t work out, I’ll lead you right back to Williams door step. But how long has it been since you last tasted freedom. Real freedom?” Avery squeezed his shoulder.

Richter grimaced. Then shook his head. “Look. I’m not going to judge. And it has been a while since-”

“Good let’s go!” Richter was dragged out by the arm. Hissing his disapproval of the situation.

“Avery just listen dammit.” He was already carrying both bags for the elf as he began prying the back wall open. Suddenly a noisy barking sounded beside them. Thunderous and alarming. Leva and Bear both entered the room in time to see Avery pry the wall open.

“AVERY!” Leva’s voice was stern. Disapproving.

Bear just stood. Crestfallen. “Richter?” Richter wanted to say so many things to clear this whole debacle up. Instead he felt something press against his throat. A firm arm gripping his shoulders. His hands still full with both bags.

Avery snarled behind him. “Don’t you fucking move! You freaks just keep your hands to yourselves. I don’t need magic to slit his damn throat.” Bear froze up. Leva clapped her hands over her mouth. Avery started backing them both through the hole.

“If I even see one shadow waiting for me outside. Hell if I even THINK there’s something out there to stop me. You’ll have to be ready to bury this bastard.” He continued, never taking his eyes off the giants. Even doing his best to hide his form behind Richters. Being tall and sturdy had it’s disadvantages, it seamed.

He stuck the knife in the wall opening, shutting it behind them. Avery turned Richter around. “There. Now you have an excuse if you choose to stay. But please. Just walk with me. I just want to talk this out. Okay?” Richter rubbed his neck, but followed through the surprisingly thick, expansive walls.

Avery’s gate was erratic and sloppy, his eyes stayed ahead. In the minimal light from some unknown source, he could see the elf’s ears constantly turning. “Have you been sleeping? Like. At all?” Richter stared out at the carved and chipped walls. His response was hysterical laughter. Which basically told him everything he needed to know.

“I can sleep when I’m out!” Avery grinned. Richter shoved his hands in his back pockets, losing himself in his thoughts a little. None of which involved flattery towards his elven friend.

He gave a sigh before shaking his head. “You’re wrong.”

“Huh?” Avery glanced at him, eyes sparkling and wide. Filled with dream like wonder. Richter almost felt like he was about to break the news about Santa-clause to the guy. He took a breath to steady himself, then continued.

“The moment you’re out, it’s a game of survival. Let me ask you. Can you hunt? How about your friends? Do you know how to build a fire? Or purify your water? What tools have you brought for yourself?” He started rummaging through his bag. Nothing but clothes. Mostly summer wear.

“Do you have anything to help you survive the cold?” His lips pressed into a hard line. He almost wished he’d called more. Given Avery more of an outlet. The guy had a life before the war. Of course he knew he’d needed some more than this. Right?

“I...Didn’t think of that. But that’s why I want to bring you. You’re clever and innovative. Something we elves just plain aren’t. If it doesn’t have to do with magic, we fail at it.” He grinned. “Where did you learn all that anyhow? What do humans do when giants aren’t scooping you up by the ankles?”

Richter sighed. Stopping halfway down the tunnel. Avery paused as well. “Honestly? I only lived because of my old man. He was always paranoid about the end of the world. He prepared himself, and his family along the way. It ended up saving our lives. But there were still things we needed to learn.”

“... This is your chance to pass that on, you know.” It all came to a head there. Richters eyes started to tear up. He just gave a bitter laugh and motioned for Avery to join him sitting.

“I just can’t Avery. I can’t.” He shook his head resting his chin between his knees. “Hell I honestly believe living with Bear is better for me. Anything is better than wondering if you’ll wake up tomorrow or not.” He was shaking. And for once, someone his size held him. Pulled him closer.

“What do you mean by that?” Avery’s voice was emotionless, but that was fine. He simply wanted to understand. Richter took a deep breath. Held it for a second. Then let it go. Along with it, he spilled his entire past.

Richter wasn’t that old when the world had ended. He’d fled. Pulled by the writs to the nearest shelter with his parents. He couldn’t find Neil, or his family, But they were assured he was safe. That was a good thing at least. They waited in the rescue centre for days with no word. Supplies were dwindling, and surrounding him were unfamiliar faces he wanted nothing more than to know.

Despite this, folks remained hopeful. Joking, laughing, and making the best of a bad situation. Richter remembered one particular old man, who had made a point to read stories to the younger children. The older ones had taken to acting out some of the fairy tale drama behind him. If for no other reason than to distract them from sad times. It was just until disaster relief could get in.

Then the word got out. There would be no rescue. There would be no better times. Or rebuilding. It was a real, honest to god, end of the world. Richter vaguely remembered lamenting the lack of television. Of all things. But his parents, they were more concerned with getting the hell out of dodge. And for good reason. The bad news turned everything into a riot.

Even the old man with his stories and wonder, made for the hills before things got out of hand. Taking a few good souls with him. Richter often wondered what became of them. But over time, they mattered about as much as the buildings he slept in each night.

They first took shelter in the basement of their former home for a while. Gathering supplies and preparing for a longer trip. What followed was a long series of small trips here and there. Quite often they’d run out of food, or water. And gaining these resources was less than easy.

People would gather in small collectives. Some were docile, even friendly towards his family. Some weren’t. But everyone was hungry, thirsty, or tired. It ground down to negotiating what was needed between peaceful parties. Or an outright brawl for life giving supplies.

Richter remembered being forced to yank a satchel of food free from an elderly woman at one point. While his father stood firm between the pair and a large young man. They traded blows for a long time. He remembered the look on that lady’s face, as his mother dragged her back from him. Shrieking and pulling hair. There was only desperation and contempt in those eyes. If ever Richter needed to remember terror. He revisited that moment.

On occasion, Richter would be sent to a different room in their shelters. Always near the door. To keep watch he’d been told. He was fairly certain it was for other reasons, however. A few months later, his mother ended up slow, sluggish sickly or off balance. It was about then his parents realized their mistake. Richter was soon left holding his baby brother. A little brother who did not last long in the new world.

Richter held his arm in front of Avery. In all it’s scarred glory. “This is the only thing I have left of him. From the night we lost him. My parents left me alone to look after him. A pack of feral dogs decided to roam by. I thought they’d leave me alone. I mean, I was bigger than them. But I’m only one man.” He shuddered. “I still remember his screams.”

“Wh-... How did you get out of that?” Avery sat with him. Staring Richters scars down like they’d offended him.

“Dad heard me. Us. He had both hands and a weapon. I had a stick and a baby. They never blamed me. But... I couldn’t sleep after that. I kept thinking those dogs would be back.” Richter shrugged.

“And that’s only one of the things I didn’t expect. It’s a mess out there. Honestly I’m not the only one with a story like that. There are things you can’t be ready for. I’m not saying this to discourage you or anything. I don’t actually know WHY I’m saying this.” Richter ran a nervous hand through his hair.

“Because you’ve had a bad run of luck, and you just need to talk it out.” Avery shrugged. Richter scrunched up closer to himself. When finally he heard something he didn’t even know he needed to hear.

“Well, I finally got my answer to my biggest question. Why you could deal with my... Condition so well.” Avery pulled his knees in, mimicking Richter. “You’ve been there.”

“No. That’s because my mother was a therapist.” Richter laughed. “Look. I’ll walk you out and give you a few pointers before you guys try to survive on your own. Besides, you still have your magic, to some extent. So it’s not going to be so bad.”

“Right. I hope you don’t get into too much trouble with Bear.” Avery stood, tugging Richter to his feet. Richter shrugged. Laughing it off. The worst Bear could do was lock him in a room for an hour or two. In comparison it was nothing. Just a bit boring. Maybe a little degrading.

They spent the last of the walk talking about survival tactics. Until something drew Richters attention. “Wait. Where did you get that knife? And how did you do all this?”

“Like you said. I still have some magic. And the knife.... It was given to me by my friends outside. The resistance.” Avery shrugged. “You can ask them where they got it when we meet up. We’re almost there.” Light pooled in through a small hole leading outside. Richter took a breath of fresh air. Before turning to Avery.

“I do appreciate the attempt, you know?” He smiled sheepishly. “It’s just...I can’t.” Avery just grinned back and nodded slowly.

“I wish I’d known earlier how things were. I guess we find freedom in our own ways. Right?” They stepped into the warms sunlight, and the knife was reapplied to Richters throat. Lightly. Avery glanced about warily. It turned out to be well within his right.

Richter could just make out a few tell tale signs of Bear, but he couldn’t see much else. The brute could be stealthy when he wanted to be. No clearer had it shown than that moment. The only reason Richter knew he was there was having lived as the mans pet for so long.

There was just that looming sense. It was far away, almost invisible. But Richter could just feel it. He half expected to look up, and see the giant with a casual cup of coffee and a smirk for the ages. Waiting for the inevitable scream and fall. Such things still happened. Though now it was more a game between them.

Not this time. Richter knew damn well he was being watched. Bear was waiting to spring from his hiding place. Waiting to rescue him. Or scold him. Though Richter really wondered if it was really worth either. Of course, Bear had no idea what was going on.

Avery gave a short whistle. Three elves emerged from the garden. One gave Richter a harsh look. He folded his arms. Speaking quickly. Avery shook his head, responding in kind. Neither of them wanted to talk to him, it seamed. So Richter was left in the dark. Eventually it turned into an argument.

Richters eyes shifted over the group. They were all lean men. One bore a few scars from battles passed. Another had bright blue streaks across his skin. Another kind of scar, Richter had been told, from magic. The third was better off, clean of injuries.

The conversation finally translated. “So you’re just going to turn him lose? Avery just slaughter him now.” The blue streaked one commented. Avery shook his head.

“You just said he was a valuable asset! It’s not like he’s going to rat you out. He’ll have no idea where we ARE.” He argued. Poking his own palm to accentuate the point. “We just need a way to contact him without being noticed and-”

“And what Avery? You met this human what. Once? Twice? You’re really willing to put your life in his hands? OUR lives? Look at him. Pampered little pet. Give me one reason he won’t turn right around and give his master our location, and status.” The clean one barked. His eyes flicked over Richter. A sneer pulled his features.

Richter just shrugged. Waiting patiently for something a little more substantial to happen. “Besides, when have we elves needed any other species’ help?” The streaked one snarled. Their hands were twitchy. In an all too familiar way. Resolutely, Richter took two steps back. One to the left, finding himself safely behind Avery.

The friendly elf’s ear turned towards him a moment, before returning to his companions. “Listen, I had to kidnap this damn human just to get him out. Bringing him along would be a liability. His master would hunt his ass down, and by extension ours.”

“You said he’d come willingly!” The scarred one piped up.

“Everyone is willing with a blade to their throat.” Avery countered. Things were starting to go south. Richter could feel it. But Bear was there, right? He’d be protected if things went wrong. Relaxing his stance, Richter turned his head towards the three aggressors.

“Are you an idiot?” The streaked one spat out. His eyes started darting in every direction, ears swivelling nervously. “Is his master at least a soft heart like yours?”

Avery cleared his throat. He shook his head quickly. “No but-”

“Who is it then? Do we know them?” The scarred one kept his full attention on Richter. Eyes widening. The human, in turn, shrugged in an ‘I don’t know man’ fashion. There wasn’t much he could say in this situation. Or do. He couldn’t deny the fact that he had an owner. Or that they would be protective of him. Bear was nothing if not vigilant when it came to Richter.

It occurred to him. Would Avery be left alone to enjoy his stolen freedom? These elves fell under the responsibility act as much as he did. If a human were to try the same thing. Would they be hunted down? He was starting to understand the paranoia.

“We do, he’s-” It happened in a blur. Avery was wretched aside. The unmarred elf snagged the humans arm before something cold, and painful stung into his ribs. Richters eyes blew wide. He managed to stare up at his attacker. Before he heard Avery scream.

“He’s WILLIAM THE WARHEADS!” A look of horror struck the trio. The two marred ones glanced at the one with the knife in Richters breast. Then at Richter himself. Neither of them had to ask what would happen next. The clean one just released the blade. His hands trembled.

Avery shot for him, shoving the attacker aside and supporting the humans weight. “Richter. Oh gods above. Richter I’m so sorry this-” A mighty roar of anger crashed from some unknown hiding place. Richter had only enough time to see a massive palm snag his attacker into the air. The other two jolted away.

He clutched Avery’s shoulder, struggling to breath. “Av- A-a-a-Avery. How bad?” He winced watching the scene behind his elven friend. The blue streaked one dropped to his knees, hands up. There was a gasp as he was plucked from his position on the ground. The scarred one tried to flee, and was quickly snagged.

A looming shadow fell over the both of them.

*

It didn’t look good, he couldn’t understand either mans ramblings. Richter was spluttering out names at random. Both his, and Avery’s. As for the elf. He kept repeating apologies in his native tongue. He would occasionally check over his shoulder, wince, and look back to Richter.

It was clear the attack was unplanned. Based on Avery’s response. However, it happened, and now Richter was in critical condition. Where were Archibalds spells now? Of course protection against stabbings were tricky, there was no spell for true invincibility.

“Avery. I can’t see how bad it is. Hold up your hand if there’s a chance.” He tried to keep his voice from shaking. He would not repeat his past mistakes. Minutes passed. Avery remained still, fretting over Richter’s injuries. Bear licked his lips nervously.

When it was too long with no response, Bear reached forward. Avery’s voice cracked into a scream, but the giant paid it no mind. Instead, he scooped the small human into his hand. There was too much blood. Richter was struggling for air. He took a shaky breath.

“Ricky?” The humans eyes snapped to his, he seamed to force a laugh, leaning back.

“Hey big guy.” He winced. “Not exactly the ‘goodbye’ I was expecting when all this started.” There it was, that ever present smile Bear thought was extinguished. Only, it was far from a happy occasion.

“Don’t send yourself to the grave early bud.” The giant tried to smile, but getting Richter to any kind of medical facility would take an agonizingly long time. Avery was useless with the inhibitors, and Lev was no healer. Bear scrambled every memory he had searching for some kind of answer.

“Hey Bear?” Richter’s voice was merely a whisper. He was struggling to hold on, but the fight was draining him fast. The giant was sure his hands were causing the man a small earthquake.

“Yeah Richter?”

“It’s stupid I know. But was I... Fuck...” He paused, then cursed one more time. “Fuck it I’m dying anyways. Was I a good pet?” This shook Bear from his panicked stream of thoughts, turning to the man in his hands, he sat dumbfounded. Richter’s form was shaking with effort.

In the days after Richters translation Bear had stopped considering him a ‘pet’. He’d always just been a small housemate. A friend, and the only person he’d ever shared most of his concerns with. But there was a time before that. Bear gave a soft laugh. “Yeah. Yeah you were...”

“Hah. More than Archibald can say for Neil then. Beat him at something.” Neil... Oh how would Bear break the news to Richter’s long time friend? The two were thick as thieves. Sure at some point, he would have had to anyways. Neil was a familiar. Destined to live as long as Archibald did. Neil. Familiar. That was it!

Like a bolt of lightning a realization hit him. Bears eyes lit up with glee. “Richter! Ricky I think I can help you. But I need your answer on this. I need your permission.”

Richters eyes were starting to glass over. It had might have been just a bit too late. But he gave a short nod. Sputtering something that Bear hoped was ‘yes’. His palms lit in a feint green glow. Channelling magic between the humans limp form and his own. Every nerve sung for a moment, before the same glow echoed back from the humans form.

Richter pulled in a deep breath, then fell still. Eyes shut. The glow faded. The group sat in the garden waiting. But there was no response from the human. Bear took nervous pulls of air. Just waiting. “Richter?”

#Fictional drama #G/t #cliffhanger #Forever home

[aquaquadrant]

Exiled Au - Part 5

surprise! i finally finished the last one-shot for the exiled!varian au i started writing ages ago, inspired by art from @ghosta-r. all the previous chapters and the art that inspired them can be found on my blogged, tagged as exiled!varian au. i’m going to start working on getting all of the chapters uploaded to my A03 within the new few days! 

also, i’m going to consider this completed for the time being, but i left it open enough that if inspiration happens to strike me again in the future, i can continue with more one-shot type chapters. however, it won’t ever be a full out fic, so PLEASE don’t ask me to continue! hope you enjoy, please reblog/comment if you do! - Aqua

Rated T for: depiction of violence, mild injury

It was two days before Varian found another town.

Two days of following a road through thicker and thicker wilderness, of snarling branches catching on his clothes and stones in the ground underfoot and glowing eyes watching him from the forest and reminding him painfully of Ruddiger. Two days of eating nothing but the odd few berries he found growing on bushes, of drinking from streams and sleeping in trees.

He almost cried with relief when he saw the town, but he managed to hold it back. He was already dehydrated, after all.

Varian tucked his coat up all the way to his chin and pulled his hood tightly over his head. Taking a deep breath, he steeled himself before walking into the town.

The streets were populated but not overtly so. He got a couple glances but nothing more than that. It was a homely little town, with dirt streets instead of cobblestone, thatched houses instead of wood. A few carts were set up in a wide market square, a light chatter filling the air as people examined the wares. But Varian wasn’t interested in that as much as he was the building with a sign hanging over the door reading, food.

He hurried towards it, trying to walk casually but probably failing. Inside was a cozy sort of mess hall, warm from a large hearth against one wall and filled with long wooden tables and benches. His attention was caught by a woman standing behind a counter, taking a customer’s order.

Food. Varian quickly stepped into line, his stomach already growling at the scents drifting in the air. After a minute that seemed to stretch on forever, it was his turn to order.

The woman behind the counter looked him up and down, wrinkling her nose. “You some kind of wizard or something?” she asked, nodding at his staff.

“No, ma’am,” Varian murmured, scanning the wooden sign hanging up behind her. “Could I please get a bowl of porridge?”

The woman squinted at him, doubtful.

“I can pay for it,” Varian added quietly, reaching for the coin pouch in his bag. The coins he’d earned working for Jonathan, the ones he’d tried to refuse but Jonathan insisted-

“Hey, you there!”

Varian froze at the harsh, unfamiliar voice. Oh god, please, no-

“I’m talkin’ to you, boy!” A hand roughly grabbed Varian by the shoulder and turned him around.

Varian found himself facing a thoroughly unpleasant looking man. Angry, too. He gulped. “Yes, sir?”

The man scowled. “I knew it. You’re that criminal, aren’t you? The Alchemist?”

Varian’s heart sank. “Sir, please,” he whispered, “I’m not looking for any trouble. I just want to buy some food.”

“That so?” the man demanded, disbelieving. He caught sight of the coin pouch in Varian’s bag and grabbed it out, his features darkening. “You probably stole this, didn’t you?”

“Hey!” Varian cried, trying in vain to get the pouch back, the man holding it easily out of his reach. “I earned that! Please!”

“Yeah, right,” the man scoffed. “Come on, boys, let’s show this lowlife how we treat criminals around here.”

The next thing Varian knew, two pairs of hands wrapped around his arms, pulling him away from the counter and dragging him toward the door. He fought to get free to no avail, his legs kicking in the air. Someone opened the door, and with a great heave, the men threw Varian outside onto the street.

He landed badly on his foot, a sharp pain flooding up his leg and making him cry out. His staff landed on the ground next to him a moment later, one of the vials shattering in a spray of glass and pink liquid. A bit of it caught Varian across his face- fortunately, non-toxic. He blinked, rubbing the chemical off his face.

“And stay out!”

The door slammed shut.

Shakily, Varian rose to his feet, leaning on his staff. It hurt to put his full weight on his foot- probably a sprain. Hopefully just a sprain. He didn’t have time to check it properly, though. Wary and disapproving eyes watching him from all corners of the square, and he knew he’d worn out his welcome.

Taking a breath, Varian started to painfully make his way down the street, to the road leading out of the town.

Maybe he’d have better luck in the next town.

Varian backed against the wall of the alley, sneering men closing in all around him.

Fortunately, the next town had been nearby; not even a full day’s walk, which was especially good for his bad leg. Unfortunately, they’d been just as receptive as the last town- which was to say, not at all receptive. Varian hadn’t even made it into a building to attempt to buy food before a small mob had set after him, chasing him into an alley.

“Please, sirs,” he begged, clutching his staff to his chest protectively, “I’m just- I’m just passing through. I- I don’t want any trouble, I’ll go, I promise.”

“Aye.” One of the men cracked his knuckles. “We’ll send you on your way.”

The first punch was to the gut. Varian keeled over, gasping for breath, his staff clattering to the ground. The rest of them joined in, and Varian’s world exploded into pain as he crumpled. The alley wall was behind him, men on every side, no chance of escape. A kick to the head, a punch to the ribs, a foot stomping on his already bad leg.

Varian didn’t resist. He simply curled in on himself and waited for it to be over.

Finally, blessedly, the men seemed satisfied with the damage inflicted. They dispersed casually, with a few parting jeers directed at Varian. One of them lingered and delivered a final kick to Varian’s stomach.

“Let that be a warnin’. Don’t show your face ‘round these parts again, criminal,” he spat.

The man walked off, his footsteps echoed off the alley walls and fading. Varian laid there for a long time, breathing raggedly through his nose, trying to string thoughts together through the pain screaming in his mind.

He’d definitely heard something snap, but the pain was all over and impossible to distinguish. With careful, shaking hands, he went about checking himself, feeling for broken bones. He winced as he touched tender, forming bruises, but he wasn’t finding anything. At least, not until his hand patted against his coat pocket; he felt two distinct shapes where he knew only one to be. Swallowing, he reached inside his pocket and withdrew its contents.

The orange crayon had snapped into two.

Varian’s breathing hitched. He stared at the pieces for a moment, uncomprehending, before his hand curled around the broken halves of the crayon. A sob welled up in his throat.

It was a small thing. A simple thing. But it was one small, simple thing on top of a lot more and altogether it was too much. It was just too much. How much lower could they lay him? He’d already lost and suffered and hurt. When would it be enough? Why wasn’t it enough?

Varian sagged into the ground, his cheek pressed against cold, hard stone. If he just laid there, the temperature might drop enough overnight to kill him- no, get up, you’ve lasted this long. You don’t get to give up, you don’t have that right. His life wasn’t his to throw away; it’d been granted to him. To cast it away ungratefully would mean being a bigger failure than he could handle.

Bracing himself, Varian rolled onto his hands and knees. The pain from the movement made him gasp, a sharp intake of breath through gritted teeth. His bad leg was in agony, and he could already tell it wouldn’t take his weight. His staff was within reach, however, and none the worse for wear. He snatched it up and slowly rose to his feet, a few tears streaking down his face.

Leaning heavily on his staff, Varian glanced around. The streets were still abandoned, nothing to impede his leaving town. But as clearly as he could see the road leading away, he could see the forest it cut through. The wild, untamed, hidden path of the wilderness.

People… were no longer safe. He knew that now. Trying the same thing over and over again while expecting different results was the definition of insanity, and he knew he had to give this up while he was still sane. Following the road to the next town over would be pointless. He had to make his own way, at least until he was far enough away from Corona that no one would know of the criminal Alchemist.

Varian shoved the broken crayon back into his pocket, tightened his grip on his staff, and started walking.

It was harder, traveling off the road.

The forest was dense and unforgiving. Rolling, uneven ground, peppered with rocks and tree roots and all sorts of things to trip Varian up. Bushes and branches scratched at him, snagging on his clothes. Animals rustling through the trees and sending him on edge. And the rougher terrain was even more unkind on his bad leg, making his limp that more pronounced.

And yet, it was still better than the alternative. Still better than finally finding a town only to get thrown out.

Varian didn’t know to what end he was traveling. So he was avoiding human civilization; now what? What kind of life did he expect to make for himself out here? He was hardly an outdoorsman. All he had was his knowledge of the chemical foundations of nature and little snippets of wisdom imparted to him by Dad-

Varian shook his head violently, cutting the thought down before it could take root. He couldn’t get distracted. He’d figure something out. He couldn’t give up now, after everything he’d been through. He had to keep going.

It was hard to keep a sense of direction. Trees and boulders and hills blurred together into one endless landscape. He was starting to lose feeling in his fingers and toes- except for his bad leg, which was burning with infection.

Varian ignored it. He ignored the stiff ache all over his body, too. He ignored the gnawing hunger in his stomach, the dryness of his throat. Humans were far more resilient than most gave credit for. They could push themselves far beyond their normal limits when their life depended on it. And if he repeated that fact to himself over and over again, he might just make it to morning without-

Something caught on his foot, and Varian nearly faceplanted, a startled yelp cutting though the silence of the forest. He managed to brace himself with his staff, hissing painfully through clenched teeth as he examined what he’d tripped on.

Curiously, it was an old wagon wheel, rusted and mostly overgrown with weeds. Varian tilted his head at it, frowning, before looking around warily. There didn’t seem to be any roads nearby, but he spotted an opening in the tree line up ahead. Cautiously, he started to creep toward it. If there was a road, he’d want to go in a different direction, lest he accidentally wander into-

A log cabin sat in a small clearing. It was modest, not much bigger than his storage shed back home, with boarded up windows and moss growing in odd nooks and crannies.

Varian stared at it for a moment, waiting for his vision to stop going in and out, just to make sure it was really there. Bewildered, he looked around, wondering if he’d stumbled into yet another town. But the cabin was the only building visible, the rest of the area filled with dense trees.

Chewing his lip, Varian hesitated. The cabin looked completely abandoned- but what if it wasn’t?

But if it was, he might’ve just found a way to avoid freezing to death.

Making up his mind, Varian carefully approached the door, trying to stay as quiet as possible despite his limp. He came to a stop, swallowed, and tentatively knocked on the door.

“H- hello? Is there anyone in here?”

No response.

Taking a deep breath, Varian grabbed the handle and pushed the door open. It gave with no resistance, seeming to not have a lock, and it creaked as it went. The cabin’s interior was dark, illuminated only by the light Varian let in. And most importantly, it was empty.

It looked like it’d been empty for a long, long time. Dust coated the floor, cobwebs tucked into the corners. The only furniture was a rickety wooden bed with a ratty mattress, straw spilling out of rips in the fabric, and a small tabled pushed up against the wall, with a barrel for a seat. But most important was the stone fireplace on the far wall, coated in old soot.

Fireplace. Fire. Warmth. Not freezing to death.

Varian stumbled inside, pulling the door closed behind him. The light in the room immediately decreased to almost nothing, but luckily, he had the faintly glowing vials on his staff to light his way. His mind started racing as he examined the fireplace. He was in no condition to go foraging for firewood, but he had a wooden bedframe that looked about ready to fall over at a sneeze.

Painstakingly, Varian pulled the mattress off the frame and set about taking it apart. He was right in guessing it was structurally unsound; he didn’t have to pull hard at all to snap the wooden planks into smaller pieces. He carried them to the fireplace and dumped them inside, easing himself to the floor as he tried to light it with two thin strips of the wood.

Finally, there was a spark, and the wood caught fire. In a few minutes, the fireplace was roaring away, filling the cabin with a warm flickering glow and the soothing sound of crackling wood. Varian breathed a sigh of relief, sinking onto the straw mattress.

A safe, warm place to sleep. On a mattress, not up in a tree or on the ground. This was just what he needed; a good night’s sleep to rest and heal, and then tomorrow he’d be ready to move, go foraging for food. Once he was stronger, he could…

Well, where else could he go after this? Should he go anywhere else? The cabin would keep him protected from the elements and wild animals, but away from people. Maybe… this was exactly where he was supposed to be.

Alone.

Varian pulled the broken crayon out of his pocket, studying the two pieces. He’d tried moving on, starting over. People clearly didn’t want him around, despite his best efforts, despite how sorry he was, despite how much he wanted things to be different.

Only now did he understand that he was right; the king sparing his life might’ve been out of misguided mercy, but his true punishment was to live out the rest of his days alone. It was exile in the deepest sense of the word; not just from a single place, but from everywhere, everyone. An exile from the world.

Varian tossed the broken crayon into the fire.

#tangled the series #rapunzel's tangled adventure #exiled!varian au #my writing #rta #varian

[akiyama-san]

I've noticed your comments about Love Live Sunshine and don't get me wrong, we all have our own opinions and I'm not telling you stop posting your negative thoughts about it, but why do you hate Love Live Sunshine so much? And if you hate it that much, why are you even watching it?

I suppose it comes off as hate doesn’t it? Well despite how it appears, it’s not entirely hate, it’s mostly disappointment, and while that might not sound much better i’ll try to explain what I mean, hopefully to a degree that it can be understood. 

Spose I should start at the top shouldn’t I? 

I think it goes without saying that this point that I didn’t like the original show at all, it had its moments, and 2 or 3 good characters, which isn’t saying much I realize but these casts are fucking bloated of course only a handful will be likeable. The concept seemed really fucking stupid from the outset, and it is, but I’ve seen worst, and as a first attempt by SunRise for an Idol show, to my knowledge, the idea to give it an actual plot to follow was in theory a noble one. It failed completely, but the thought was there. More to the point, almost everyone was completely flat, incredibly stupid, and beyond insufferable. 

I’ll be honest, I can put up with a lot, and if I had chosen to watch it of my own volition I’d probably have been more forgiving of the writers dancing on active fault lines, but at the time some years back, I had several people breathing down my neck to watch the fucking show so I went in pissed off. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t change the fact that these characters say and do things that would make me want to hurt a small child, but I would still have been more kind to it in the long run. 

Then the movie happened, and well.... Lets just say the series needed the fucking soft reboot that was Sunshine after that abysmal travesty of a movie that completely deficated on a third of the casts character development. I’m still trying to work out the quantum fucking mechanics of how Honoka could receive her microphone from her future fucking self BTW. 

I openly admitted this at the time, and this is important because this is often overlooked by the crowd. I said that after the failure of the movie, and knowing that a new series was coming, if SunRise could learn from their mistakes, then I would gladly and open-mindedly go into Sunshine with a positive attitude and be kinder to it if the series was able to escape its charred charcoal burned roots. 

Needless to say I was absolutely blown away by how incredibly Sunshine could be at times, and how baffling disgusting and incompetent it could be as well. I stress that Sunshine is wholly the better property I was able to enjoy more than whole episodes and character arcs completely this time around, as opposed to the original where I enjoyed maybe 10 minutes of its total 700 minute run from episode 1 to movie credits. 

The series had incredible characters to start, those already good characters ACTUALLY GREW INTO EVEN BETTER CHARACTERS, THESE CHARACTERS ACTUALLY GROW AND MATURE AND THAT’S INCREDIBLE. I’ll say openly that the second years are some of the best characters I’ve seen in any anime in the past several years, and I would never hope to take away from that. Better was that we actually had rivals that we could see and understand, that weren’t placed on a pedestal for no discernable reason, one that stood on relatively even ground that could be combatted in real time, force growth and change upon both groups. 

At the same time, while the series had heights and feats that rivaled Everest, it also had lows that would put the Mariana Trench to shame. No, I don’t care what anyone says, I will never get over all the bullshit that happened between Mari and Kanan, and how absolutely disgusting Kanan is, even now, refusing to grow up or stop being a cunt or do anything of value to the group you so claim to love. I’ll be generous and say I was fucking disgusted by SunRise repeating what happened with Honoka and Kotori in the first season here with Mari and Kanan, almost beat for beat. It was terrible the first time, and suicidally bad the second time. 

To regain the focus, by then end of it while my opinions were of the mixed nuts variety with plenty of roasted salt, I still gave it a hearty recommendation because I thought it was genuinely pretty good, blue cuntveats notwithstanding. 

NOW

Where my problem overall with Season 2 lies. If it disappointment and wasted potential were a physical force this series could level mountains. 

From the beginning we’re told that we’re on an incredibly strict time crunch and that we need to focus all our efforts hardcore in the second round. 

Only for almost literally all of the first 6 or 7 episodes to be nothing but filler and padding to waste time, where no growth or progression of any kind took place at all, and such wonderful gems as 

Dia: Please call me Dia-Chan.

Chka: No!

and the omnipresent 

Chika: Teach how to do a backflip

Kanan: Not on your fucking life!

Kanan: Oh shit she learned how to do the backflip... 

Where it all came to a head however was with the reveal of just how many students the school actually had, because that was something that was never brought up. The total number of students is 68 when all are accounted for. And the is beyond miserable. 100 fucking students isn’t enough, to maintain the school you need at least 200, but closer to 300. With 68 students the school should’ve closed fucking years ago. The revelation of that number killed the entire fucking show, it made moot the efforts and development of every single fucking character, because no matter what, even if they had gotten 100 students, this same predicament would still inevitably rear its head once again next year or the year fuckin after. 

I want to make clear, more than anyone else on this site, I have authority to speak on this matter, and no one can refute this, hell I’d barely even listen to them if they did because I severely fucking doubt they ever dealt with this sort of thing, if they did they would totally agree with me.

I have come face to face with a school closure myself. 15 years ago the district announced that my Elementary school would be closing, this school with 700 students that churned out some of the best results in the city might I add. It was a hard and long fought battle, it lasted 3 years, but eventually the parents won that war, and it’s still open now. How did they do that? By actually getting involved, going to meetings, talking directly to superintendents and comptrollers, explaining things like how some of them go to work really early or work late, they can’t send their kids anywhere else because they’d never be able to make it to other schools in the morning on time or pick up on time because of how far away they are, how different schools offer different programs, and not all schools offer the same accommodations for special needs children as this one did, ETC. The point is, the parents got active in the fight, the people that might have been able to affect the outcome did, and while it was no easy task, they did it, they actually fucking one that battle. 

I don’t expect even a fraction of that to occur, but to at the same time tell me that the parents don’t know or care at all, much less any of the other fucking 59 students are powerless to help in any meaningful capacity is an absolute load of horse shit. 

Where it started to bring my blood to a boil, nay to a bursting point, was what happened in the last to episodes with Saint Snow. The best song the franchise ever gave us was Self Control, followed by Shocking Party. This is a fact. From a single interaction some of the most intriguing and likeable characters we got were also Saint Snow. For them to be all but ignored in season 2 until 8 fucking episodes in is ludicrous, but for their first appearance in over 10 episodes to be them failing a concert and us not even getting to hear any of the fucking song, is insulting, it’s infuriating, it’s domestic abuse. This isn’t a slap in the face, this is Studio SunRise forcefully shoving their cock in your mouth against your will and punching you in the eyes with brass knuckles for crying about the cock in your mouth. 

Honest to God, if I wasn’t committed to seeing this through, these last two episodes would be my first set my merchandise on fire moment, and that is saying a lot. It might sound like i’m being overdramatic, but honestly there are a lot of people that agree with me on this matter. 

I did a lot of thinking in writing this post and it took me the better part of an hour to write it. I still hold fast on my thoughts about the original, 2/10 garbage. 

I still hold to my opinions of season 1 Sunshine, 7/10 very good. 

But this season? Well let me put it this way, I score every episode and tally the scores at the end, if season one got a 70 percent

Season 2 probably wouldn’t even reach a combined 20/130 

I will still recommend newcomers to Sunshine season 1 absolutely, but I will also absolutely tell them to pretend season 2 never happened, do not watch it because it will make you commit homicide in the aftermath. 

Why do I hate Sunshine Season 2? 

Because SunRise finds new and exciting ways to fail at absolutely everything on every single level every week. I infamously gave the movie a 1/10, in the long run, I think I would sooner rewatch that movie on loop than ever rewatch this season of Sunshine ever again. 

#love live #love live sunshine #love live school idol project #Anonymous

[spaceoutcat-blog]

The Duck Among Swans

~A Dancetale Story~

“Frisk! Stop toddling about like a goose!” The young human in question stopped their practice and attempted to make themselves smaller, hunching their shoulders and lowering their head. Their hands folded together tightly as they looked down at the black-and-white tiles of the studio floor. Their eyes flicked over to the other students, who had also stopped in their practices to watch the spectacle that was their graceless failure.

Every girl seemed so lovely with their perfect blonde or black hair and thin figures and skin smooth like painted china. Their flawlessly fluffed practice tutus and brand new pointe shoes. Frisk was out of place, a duck among the fairies of Swan Lake with their muddy brown hair and freckled skin. Frisk’s gaze snapped back up to the teacher as she spoke up in an elegantly enunciated voice.

“Every movement of a ballerina is supposed to be strong and graceful, but you, Frisk, are not any of those things. How do you expect to be in the production if you cannot get a simple pirouette right?” Impatient, the teacher tried to explain. “Imagine yourself as a marionette in a music box, with strings at your wrists and a small rod that going through your center. During your pirouette, you must remain as the doll: perfectly straight on the rod. Do you understand?” The student nodded slowly. “Good. Now try again. I want to see you do it right this time.”

Frisk didn’t move at first, trembling. They were afraid. Afraid to try again and afraid to fail. Faint giggling from the other students caught their attention and made them flinch. They wanted to disappear. “Poor little duck,” the others mocked in whispers. “Why does she even try? She’ll never be a good dancer. Why doesn’t she just go home to her imaginary parents? Or better yet, just go get eaten by a monster on the mountain.”

“Frisk, I’ll not repeat myself,” the instructor said. “Do it again.” Not bothering to brush the hair out of their eyes, the brunette turned their head slightly and brought one foot forward in tondo. Shaky arms lifted into a stiff third position in preparation. They brought the forward foot to the side, feeling their muscles go tense before they sprang up onto pointe. They had overestimated however, and hit the back of their knee with the other foot, making it buckle and sending them to the floor. A chorus of giggles followed.

“Hopeless child… Get up,” the teacher snapped. “Try again.” Frisk’s hands curled into fists against the cold tile as the tittering laughter from the other girls echoed again. ‘She’ll never be a good dancer.’ Choking on a sob, they got up quickly and ran out of the studio room, down the hall, and outside. They hurried down the steps, the boxes of their shoes clopping on the cracked old stone. They ran away from the building, heading in the only direction they could go, for there was cliff and water on two sides. They ran towards the place the people said no one returned from.

Mount Ebott

They had heard stories and rumors about the forested mountain. The students claimed that strange creatures lived up there. The teachers said that accidents happened to those who went up on the mountain. Whatever the case, no one had ever returned from a journey to the peak. Even search parties sent for lost travelers disappeared, and none had gone up for many years. None dared venture up the mountain side for fear of whatever was causing the disappearances. Frisk nearly turned back at the foot of the mountain, but the taunting words of their peers spurred them onward.

The human cried out in surprise as they suddenly tripped and fell to the ground, scraping their knees and ripping their already torn-up tights. They whimpered, fingers digging into the dirt before they slowly pushed themselves up. Tears spilled from their eyes, smattering on their hands and the dirt below. They sniffled, harshly wiping the tears away with the back of one hand and sitting down properly. They settled for a few minutes to catch their breath before trying to move again. When they tried to stand, they stumbled, pain stabbing up from their feet.

In frustration, they sat back down and yanked the frayed old ribbons from the knots, roughly pulling the shoes off. A short sob escaped them as they noticed the fresh blotches of red staining the wool toe pads. Frisk covered their mouth with a hand and looked away, an attempt at blinking back fresh tears being in vain. They bit their bottom lip and took another breath, gently peeling off the cloth pads and setting them aside before looking at their toenails. They could have been in much better shape, with how jagged and ingrown the nails were, but Frisk seemed relieved that whatever bleeding had occurred was mostly stopped by now.

They didn’t bother looking for the discarded shoes now, looking down the rocky path they had ascended so far. Then they looked behind them. The only way was up now - they didn’t think their feet could handle the thorns they had missed noticing below without shoes. Sighing with a short sniffle, they twisted around and started crawling upwards on the steep path, using anything they could reach to help keep their balance. After a short while, the land evened out on the slightly overgrown path, allowing them to rest a little bit. Frisk paused, however, upon noticing something odd ahead. Against a stout tree was a large wooden box. Curious, Frisk stepped off the path and looked at the surprisingly well kept container. Who could have put it up here? The question was left unanswered, but they noticed a gold plate with some writing on it. The plate read:

TAKE A SHIRT, LEAVE A SHIRT

In small letters below that, it read: or whatever else you may need.

Frisk stared at the box for a long time before tentatively opening it. It was by no means full, but the box held a few articles of clothing. The human picked out a shirt, a pair of shorts, and a pair of socks, then glanced around, looking to see if anyone was nearby. Instead, they noticed moss hanging from a tree, almost like a curtain. They waded through the brush and pushed it slightly to get behind it. A blanket of clover grew on the ground between the roots. The human doubted it was natural, but let it slide, taking a few minutes to change out of the dance attire and into the borrowed clothes. They looked at the old ones while sitting on a raised root to put on their socks and wondered what to do with the tights and leotard.

They came back out feeling just a little better than before, patting the box gratefully as they wondered what to do with their old things. They frowned and looked at the box - surely they shouldn’t just leave them in the box? Frisk blinked, noticing something strange again. The words on the box had changed. It now read:

FEEL FREE TO LEAVE TORN GARMENTS HERE

That was so odd. Maybe this was a different box? They didn’t see another one, though… ‘Strange things happen on this mountain,’ they recalled silently. Nodding in understanding, they opened the box and set their old clothes inside. The latch snapped as they closed the container and turned away. They looked both ways on the path. If they went down, they would return to their normal life, the same routines, the same people, the same teasing and short-tempered teachers as every other day. A bleak existence without much of a purpose. But if they went up… That lead to something new, something unpredictable. Anything could happen. And who knows. Maybe they would end up with something worthwhile. Or get eaten by a monster. Either seemed better than their current situation, anyway.

They decided to chance it and continued their ascent.

Frisk wasn’t the most energetic of children, yet somehow they managed to make amazing progress over a short span of time. At least, it seemed short to them - the trees above blocked out a lot of the sunlight, making it impossible to tell how long they had been walking. It felt like it had been a while, but the human didn’t want to stop. The studio far behind them now, they were curious about the mountain. Why were so many people disappearing up here? Were there really monsters? Frisk was determined to find out.

The path seemed to go on and on forever, with so many offshoots from animals crossing the trail or perhaps even other people at some point. Frisk didn’t think about the other possibility on purpose. They kept walking. Over time, the terrain changed from moss and grass to a rockier type path. It was shortly after that the trail vanished, and Frisk looked around, a bit lost. Where were they to go now? No sooner had they thought that than they noticed a large opening in the mountain some paces away. Wondering about it, the stepped to the edge and knelt, looking down, down, down into the hole. There was no telling how deep it was. Frisk tossed a rock down, listening closely as it struck the sides once, twice, and then was silent. They never heard it hit the bottom. It was a long way down, they concluded.

Deciding that lingering by endless pits was a waste of time, Frisk got up, intending to look for a new trail to follow. Their plan was interrupted as they twisted on the ball of one foot, tangling themselves in a mess of roots around the pit’s edge. They lost their balance and fell backwards, descending into the darkness beneath the mountain.

So…DanceTale is amazing! I’ve seen a lot of art for it, and it’s really neat! I’ve been working on this for about two or three days now. It ended up much longer than I anticipated!

I’ve been a dancer myself for about five or six years total. Though I was supposed to learn all styles, my teacher had a very, very strict focus on ballet, which I was less eager to learn. Even now, I dislike that because I don’t know how to dance any style beyond ballet!

A lot of my own experiences in dance class inspired this. I’m thinking I may do more with this possibly - if people don’t mind it. I’m actually wondering who exactly came up with DanceTale so I can tag them properly - it’s an enigma for now. Thank you for reading!

#self repost #dancetale #undertale #for that one anon

[fictionadventurer]

Father Brown Reread: The Sins of Prince Saradine

When Flambeau took his month’s holiday from his office in Westminster he took it in a small sailing-boat, so small that it passed much of its time as a rowing-boat.

We haven’t started a story from Flambeau’s point of view in a while.

The detective business must be good if he can take an entire month off.

In “The Invisible Man”, Flambeau’s house and office are in Hampstead, a suburb of London. Apparently, Flambeau has moved to a new office in the center of London.

I adore the these opening pages, and I love the atmosphere of the story. I would rank it as one of my favorite Father Browns. Yet before this reread, I remembered absolutely nothing about the plot of the story. I’m not sure I’ll have much to say about this one, beyond ecstatic exclamations of “COLORS!” and “FAIRY TALES!”

The vessel was just comfortable for two people; there was room only for necessities, and Flambeau had stocked it with such things as his special philosophy considered necessary. They reduced themselves, apparently, to four essentials: tins of salmon, if he should want to eat; loaded revolvers, if he should want to fight; a bottle of brandy, presumably in case he should faint; and a priest, presumably in case he should die.

This is my favorite quote in all the Father Brown stories.

Such good characterization and such good humor. 

Like a true philosopher, Flambeau had no aim in his holiday; but, like a true philosopher, he had an excuse. He had a sort of half purpose, which he took just so seriously that its success would crown the holiday, but just so lightly that its failure would not spoil it. Years ago, when he had been a king of thieves and the most famous figure in Paris, he had often received wild communications of approval, denunciation, or even love; but one had, somehow, stuck in his memory. It consisted simply of a visiting-card, in an envelope with an English postmark. On the back of the card was written in French and in green ink: “If you ever retire and become respectable, come and see me. I want to meet you, for I have met all the other great men of my time. That trick of yours of getting one detective to arrest the other was the most splendid scene in French history.” On the front of the card was engraved in the formal fashion, “Prince Saradine, Reed House, Reed Island, Norfolk.”

This is a good vacation philosophy.

I’m kind of impressed that not only has Flambeau remembered the card, he also saved it.

(Flambeau, king of thieves and hoarder?)

But really, it’s a terrible idea to send an internationally-renowned thief your address.

I’m trying to imagine how Flambeau convinced Father Brown to go on this vacation. “Hey, Father, come help me find one of my fanboys.” “Okay.”

Also, how does an active priest get a full month of vacation? Priests get a few weeks of vacation time per year, but it seems strange that he’d be able to take it all at once. Maybe he was just there part of the time?

To speak more strictly, they awoke before it was daylight; for a large lemon moon was only just setting in the forest of high grass above their heads, and the sky was of a vivid violet-blue, nocturnal but bright. Both men had simultaneously a reminiscence of childhood, of the elfin and adventurous time when tall weeds close over us like woods. Standing up thus against the large low moon, the daisies really seemed to be giant daisies, the dandelions to be giant dandelions. Somehow it reminded them of the dado of a nursery wall-paper. The drop of the river-bed sufficed to sink them under the roots of all shrubs and flowers and make them gaze upwards at the grass. “By Jove!” said Flambeau, “it’s like being in fairyland.”

COLORS!!!

FAIRY TALES!!!

This is like the best parts of the Orthodoxy chapter about fairy tales. No one conjures a sense of wonder the way Chesterton does.

“All right,” said Father Brown. “I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous.”

Me: *nods furiously*

I love how this story doesn’t even attempt to ground itself in reality. We’re just straight-up in a portal fantasy, traveling to a place where the rules of literature, not of life, take precedence.

It was opened by a butler of the drearier type—long, lean, grey and listless—who murmured that Prince Saradine was from home at present, but was expected hourly; the house being kept ready for him and his guests. The exhibition of the card with the scrawl of green ink awoke a flicker of life in the parchment face of the depressed retainer, and it was with a certain shaky courtesy that he suggested that the strangers should remain.

Apparently he’s expecting the arrival of his two enemies, if he keeps up the butler masquerade. So why does Paul invite them to stay? Wouldn’t it be easier and safer to send them off?

“We have taken a wrong turning, and come to a wrong place,” said Father Brown, looking out of the window at the grey-green sedges and the silver flood. “Never mind; one can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.” 

Father Brown is heavily, heavily intuitive, and never more so than in this story. He was suspicious of the house before they even stepped inside. He has no evidence--he just knows that something’s wrong with the place.

Father Brown’s familiar with how fairyland works. He’s been a fairy tale trickster in previous stories, so this is his native ground, in a sense. Yet because fairyland is familiar, he doesn’t have the same sense of wonder that an ordinary mortal would have. There’s always that sense of foreboding and horror.

For all that, he’s not afraid. He knows that fairy tales can have good endings, as that last, wonderful sentence shows. Fairyland has many horrors, but like Pandora’s box, it also always has hope.

Father Brown, though commonly a silent, was an oddly sympathetic little man, and in those few but endless hours he unconsciously sank deeper into the secrets of Reed House than his professional friend. He had that knack of friendly silence which is so essential to gossip; and saying scarcely a word, he probably obtained from his new acquaintances all that in any case they would have told. 

I like this side of Father Brown’s character. He’s a quiet, steady presence in the background, not immediately impressive, but more effective for all that. Quiet people never get as much respect as they deserve in fiction.

“There isn’t a good one,” she hissed. “There was badness enough in the captain taking all that money, but I don’t think there was much goodness in the prince giving it. The captain’s not the only one with something against him.”

Poor Mrs. Anthony. Stuck in this house for so many years with people like that. Is she trying to escape?

The nameless interest lay in something else, in the very framework of the face; Brown was tormented with a half memory of having seen it somewhere before. The man looked like some old friend of his dressed up. Then he suddenly remembered the mirrors, and put his fancy down to some psychological effect of that multiplication of human masks.

I like that Father Brown was wrong, and that there was a good reason he was wrong. The mirrors add to the fairyland feel, yet also serve a practical story purpose.

His face was fastidious, but his eye was wild; he had little nervous tricks, like a man shaken by drink or drugs, and he neither had, nor professed to have, his hand on the helm of household affairs. All these were left to the two old servants, especially to the butler, who was plainly the central pillar of the house. Mr. Paul, indeed, was not so much a butler as a sort of steward or, even, chamberlain; he dined privately, but with almost as much pomp as his master; he was feared by all the servants; and he consulted with the prince decorously, but somewhat unbendingly—rather as if he were the prince’s solicitor.

Father Brown sure learns a lot in only a few hours.

It’s interesting that Paul retains such authority, when he’s the blackmail victim here.

The sombre housekeeper was a mere shadow in comparison; indeed, she seemed to efface herself and wait only on the butler, and Brown heard no more of those volcanic whispers which had half told him of the younger brother who blackmailed the elder.

She’s totally a domestic abuse victim, isn’t she?

The same singular sentiment of some sad and evil fairyland crossed the priest’s mind again like a little grey cloud. “I wish Flambeau were back,” he muttered.

Poor Father Brown. He’s really vulnerable here.

We’ve seen how Flambeau relies on Father Brown. Now we see how Father Brown relies on Flambeau, and it’s a little heartbreaking. 

The rest of the story would have played out differently if Flambeau had been with him.

“I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,” answered Father Brown. “The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.”

A nice bit of theology.

The prince made an inexplicable noise like an animal; in his shadowed face the eyes were shining queerly. A new and shrewd thought exploded silently in the other’s mind. Was there another meaning in Saradine’s blend of brilliancy and abruptness? Was the prince—Was he perfectly sane? He was repeating, “The wrong person—the wrong person,” many more times than was natural in a social exclamation.

I’m trying to figure out why Saradine reacts like this. He’s not mad. Has he figured out that Father Brown thinks he’s his elder brother? Has he figured out some part of his brother’s scheme? Does he think that Father Brown is hinting that maybe Paul didn’t kill the guy?

He took out of it two long Italian rapiers, with splendid steel hilts and blades, which he planted point downwards in the lawn. The strange young man standing facing the entrance with his yellow and vindictive face, the two swords standing up in the turf like two crosses in a cemetery, and the line of the ranked towers behind, gave it all an odd appearance of being some barbaric court of justice.

This is a splendid image. Shocking and romantic.

The fairy tale has collided with a Ruritanian romance. The swords are like a slap to the face, pulling us out of the dreamy fairyland and into a real world with real life-and-death stakes. Yet a duel to the death is also completely unrealistic and fits in with the fairyland atmosphere.

It’s a strange combination of reality and over-the-top fantasy, and from here, the story has a nightmarish quality.

“Prince Saradine,” said the man called Antonelli, “when I was an infant in the cradle you killed my father and stole my mother; my father was the more fortunate.

My name is Inigo Montoya...

Father Brown had also sprung forward, striving to compose the dispute; but he soon found his personal presence made matters worse. Saradine was a French freemason and a fierce atheist, and a priest moved him by the law of contraries. And for the other man neither priest nor layman moved him at all. This young man with the Bonaparte face and the brown eyes was something far sterner than a puritan—a pagan. He was a simple slayer from the morning of the earth; a man of the stone age—a man of stone.

Father Brown is in the wrong place at the wrong time. If he hadn’t been there, there’s a chance the truth of the matter may have come out. But since they’re both stubborn and contrary, Brown’s presence sparked a duel that needn’t have happened.

“Flambeau!” he cried, and shook his friend by both hands again and again, much to the astonishment of that sportsman, as he came on shore with his fishing tackle. “Flambeau,” he said, “so you’re not killed?”  “Killed!” repeated the angler in great astonishment. “And why should I be killed?” “Oh, because nearly everybody else is,” said his companion rather wildly. “Saradine got murdered, and Antonelli wants to be hanged, and his mother’s fainted, and I, for one, don’t know whether I’m in this world or the next. But, thank God, you’re in the same one.” And he took the bewildered Flambeau’s arm.

This shows how shaken up Father Brown is. He’s rarely this expressive. It’s especially jarring in this story, where he’s been in one of his more reserved moods.

They saw plainly the family likeness that had haunted them in the dead man. Then his old shoulders began to heave and shake a little, as if he were choking, but his face did not alter. “My God!” cried Flambeau after a pause, “he’s laughing!” “Come away,” said Father Brown, who was quite white. “Come away from this house of hell. Let us get into an honest boat again.”

There’s no reason for Paul Saradine to reveal the truth, but I totally believe this old monster would do it. Horrible person.

We’ve fallen fully into a horror story now.

Father Brown’s reaction was exactly the same as mine.

“But, however agitated, he was not hopeless. He knew the adventurer and he knew the fanatic. It was quite probable that Stephen, the adventurer, would hold his tongue, through his mere histrionic pleasure in playing a part, his lust for clinging to his new cosy quarters, his rascal’s trust in luck, and his fine fencing. It was certain that Antonelli, the fanatic, would hold his tongue, and be hanged without telling tales of his family.

That seems like a lot of assumptions to make. Especially about Antonelli. I get that he took the law into his own hands and doesn’t need to tell the story of the murder--but why wouldn’t he want to? Even if Antonelli’s going to hang for achieving vigilante justice, there’s no reason he would protect Saradine’s reputation.

But if Saradine was wrong and Antonelli said something, he could always go on the run again. He was already half-planning to do so.

“Laughing, God help us!” said Flambeau with a strong shudder. “Do they get such ideas from Satan?” “He got that idea from you,” answered the priest.

The horror I felt in this moment was visceral.

This is the final horrible touch to cap off the story and tie everything together. I’m a little in awe of how well it worked.

Poor Flambeau. You’ve built such a lovely little life, but you’ll never quite escape your past. It’s still wreaking havoc in the world, long after you’ve left it behind.

“Father,” said Flambeau suddenly, “do you think it was all a dream?” The priest shook his head, whether in dissent or agnosticism, but remained mute. A smell of hawthorn and of orchards came to them through the darkness, telling them that a wind was awake; the next moment it swayed their little boat and swelled their sail, and carried them onward down the winding river to happier places and the homes of harmless men.

It certainly felt like a dream. Chesterton did a fantastic job of creating that surreal atmosphere.

It feels good to leave the horror behind and sail away in peace.

Yet it also seems horrible that the prince and his entrapped wife will live undisturbed. Can’t Father Brown and Flambeau do something? They have no concrete evidence, but isn’t there some way to reach justice?

I suppose we have to trust that things will come out right on the other side of the tapestry.

#father brown reread #father brown #g.k. chesterton #the wrong shape #the innocence of father brown #flambeau

[theconservativebrief]

I’m what you’d call an agnostic. I don’t know if God exists, but the question is probably unanswerable, so I’m content to live in the uncertainty. That’s probably why I’ve always found the so-called “New Atheists” misguided in their critiques of religion.

New Atheism is a literary movement that sprung up in 2004, led by prominent authors like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. Although they were right about a lot of things, the New Atheists missed something essential about the role of religion. For them, religion was just a protoscience — our first attempt at biology and history and physics. But religion is so much more than a set of claims about the world, and you can’t fully understand if you don’t account for that.

John Gray is a British philosopher whose latest book, Seven Types of Atheism, explores the history of atheism. It’s both an affirmation and a critique of atheism, written by an atheist who is aware of all its contradictions.

Gray has been one of the most forceful critics of the New Atheists since they first emerged on the scene, and his new book continues in that vein. I called him up to talk more about his views on the movement, and about religion and science more generally.

Gray told me that the New Atheists are shaped by myths of their own, and that their failure to understand or acknowledge that is one of the biggest flaws of their movement. He also said that atheism is far more interesting when it seriously asks what it’s like to live in a “genuinely godless world.”

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

I see you as someone who enjoys exposing the hypocrisies of people who enjoy exposing the hypocrisies of others. Is that how you see yourself?

John Gray

Indeed. I’m a skeptic by nature, so I’m resistant to claims by anyone to have complete answers to intractable human problems. I’m particularly annoyed by what’s now called “New Atheism,” and I react strongly against those who debunk the beliefs of others in a way I find bullying and shallow.

The New Atheists — Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and others — attack religions in the sublime confidence that these religions are myths and that they themselves harbor no myths, but that’s not true.

In many cases, the New Atheists are animated by 19th-century myths of various kinds: myths of human advancement, myths of what science can and cannot do, and all kinds of other myths. So yeah, I’m compelled to attack anyone who is debunking others for their reliance on myths when the debunkers themselves can’t see how their own thinking is shaped by myths.

Something as ancient, as profound, as inexhaustibly rich as religion or religions can’t really be written off as an intellectual error by clever people. Most of these clever people are not that clever when compared with really clever people like Wittgenstein or Saint Augustine or Pascal — all philosophers of the past who seriously engaged the religious perspective.

These New Atheists are mostly ignorant of religion, and only really concerned with a particular kind of monotheism, which is a narrow segment of the broader religious world.

Sean Illing

My complaint with the New Atheists has always been their insistence on treating God as a purely epistemological question. I don’t think you can make sense of religion if you only see it as a system of beliefs. In the book, you make a similar point in a slightly different way, saying that the “human mind is programmed for survival, not for truth,” and I’m curious what you mean by that.

John Gray

The human mind is like every other animal mind. If Darwinism is right, and I think it’s the best approximation we have to the truth about how humans came into the world, then all aspects of the human animal are shaped by the imperatives of survival.

That includes the human mind, so there’s a deep-seated tendency in the human mind to see the world in ways which promote human survival. And the tendency to obsess over reason and rationality overlooks this fact.

Many of our most important ideas or conceptions aren’t really intellectual solutions to intellectual problems. I think that’s what you had in mind when you said earlier that the New Atheists irritated you because they treated the idea of God as a kind of theoretical or epistemological question.

There’s this silly idea that we have no need for religion anymore because we have science, but this is an incredibly foolish notion, since religion addresses different needs than science, needs that science can’t address.

“Even if everything in the world were suddenly explained by science, we would still be asking what it all means”

Sean Illing

I think that’s right, but you can unpack that a bit so it’s clear what you mean?

John Gray

For example, there are still people who treat the myths of religion, like the Genesis story, as some kind of literal truth, even though they were understood by Jewish thinkers and theologians of the time as parables.

Genesis is not a theory of the origins of the world. It’s not obsolete, primitive science. It’s not a solution to the problem of knowledge. Religion isn’t like that. Religion is a body of practices, of stories and images, whereby humans create or find meanings in their lives.

In other words, it’s not a search for explanation. Even if everything in the world were suddenly explained by science, we would still be asking what it all means.

That’s where religion steps in.

Sean Illing

Let me push back a little on behalf of the New Atheists. I think they’d respond to you by saying, “Look, specific religious ideas like the notion that life begins at the moment of conception or that homosexuality is sinful are causing real harm in the world, and so we’re morally obliged to attack those ideas.”

How do you respond to that?

John Gray

There’s no doubt that religions have contained many ideas that have caused humans harm. There’s not the slightest doubt about that. All human institutions cast a shadow which comes from the evil they carry within themselves.

To give you an example, I think the Christian idea of original sin has an important truth in it, which is that humans are divided animals. They’re different from any other animal on the planet in that they regret and sometimes even hate the impulses that guide them to act as they do. It’s a key feature of the human animal, captured by this myth of original sin.

But from the very start, the idea of original sin was caught up with a kind of obsessive interest in and hatred of human sexuality, which poisoned it to the core. At the same time, we should remember that many of the secular religions of the 20th century condemned gay people, for example.

Homosexuality was illegal for most of the time that the Soviet Union existed. Doctors who performed abortions in communist Romania could be sent to prison, and in some cases even subjected to capital punishment. Many of the worst features or the worst human harms inflicted by monotheism have been paralleled in the secular religions of modern times.

So ideas do have consequences. All we can do is try to embody these traditions as much as possible. There isn’t some form of life, not even an imaginary type of pure liberalism, that is free of these terrible consequences.

Sean Illing

I don’t think that all religions are the same, but I do believe that they’re equivalently untrue in the conventional sense of that term. But it’s obvious that religion contributes something essential to the human condition that we need, and whatever that is, we’ll still need it in a Godless world. This is the thing that atheists dismiss too easily.

John Gray

I think you’ve put it very closely to the way I put it in the book. Most forms of organized atheism are attempts to fashion God surrogates. In other words, one of the paradoxes of contemporary atheism is that it’s a flight from a genuinely godless world.

I’m most interested in the atheists who’ve seriously asked what it’s like to live in a godless world. Not to construct some alternative God, like reimagining humanity as some collective agent that manifests itself through history or science or some other redemptive force.

Too many forms of atheism have functioned like monotheisms by another method. In other words, they’ve tried to fill the gaps in their view of the world, a world in which God has been dethroned, and then they just leave the rest of it as it is.

But they’re still stuck with core assumptions that come from the monotheistic traditions. The idea, for instance, that humanity has a collective identity is fundamentally a religious notion — that’s how it came to us. We can make secular arguments in defense of this belief, but you can’t simply ignore its historical roots.

I think we should regard religions as great works of the human imagination rather than pictures of the world intended to capture what is empirically true. Any atheism that fails to do this will invariably miss what is most essential and enduring about religion, and probably make the mistake of smuggling religious assumptions into their secular alternative to religion.

“To think that you can escape the storytelling impulse that animates myths, to think you can escape that in politics is a deadly myth of its own”

Sean Illing

I often wonder if the Enlightenment skepticism that birthed atheism ultimately leads us to a moral abyss — and by that I don’t mean to imply that people can’t be moral without God, which is one of the stupidest claims I’ve ever heard. What I mean is that science cannot supply moral values, and I’m not sure this is a fact we can really own up to as a civilization, because it requires a conversation about human values that we seem incapable of having.

John Gray

I think we have to own up to it, because the danger of thinking that science can provide values has been demonstrated many times. What often happens is that science simply validates the ruling values of the time, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, those were racist values.

And we see this happening now: Many people believe science can validate our deepest values, and it just so happens that those values are conventionally prevalent in society — they’re fundamentally liberal democratic values.

If the prevailing values are good, then great. If they’re not, though — as was the case in Nazi Germany or communist Russia — then science becomes a handmaiden to the most awful crimes in human history; and almost always, those crimes are committed in defense of some grand project to improve human society.

So I think we just have to accept that science has limitations. All values come from the human animal, and that’s just the way it is. That doesn’t mean all values are equally good or bad or wise — I think that’s a mistake, too. We have natures, and there are certain constants in human life, and that’s a moral foundation we can build on.

Sean Illing

I suppose what I was getting at is that religions are stories in the same way that liberal democracy and justice and human rights are stories. These are products of the human imagination; they mean nothing and would not exist without human beings around to affirm them, and there is no ultimate foundation for any of them.

John Gray

We live by our fictions, and there is no supreme fiction. We fashion different fictions as we go along. There’s no part of our lives that is exempt from this kind of fictive world-making. As you say, even our highest ideals and creations are constructs that we’ve collectively built.

To think that you can escape the storytelling impulse that animates myths, to think you can do politics without relying on these same impulses is a deadly myth of its own, because it means you condemn all these other practitioners — except yourself, of course, because you’re the rationalist who stands above it all. But that is a terrible conceit, a fatal conceit. That’s what I’m really arguing against in my critiques of the New Atheists.

Original Source -> Why science can’t replace religion

via The Conservative Brief

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