#Not Reconciled Or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules

[shihlun]

Jean-Marie Straub

- Not Reconciled, Or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules

1965

#jean marie straub #daniele huillet #danièle huillet #not reconciled or only violence helps where violence rules #not reconciled #german film #nicht versöhnt oder es hilft nur gewalt wo gewalt herrscht #heinrich boll #heinrich böll #billiards at half past nine #Nicht versohnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht

[atopvisenyashill]

there's a really sad parallel theme running through arya and cat's stories and it's that both of them are considered to be Doing Womanhood Improperly and struggling at how to reconcile their own feelings with the expectations of the people around them...

cat spends her whole life with arguably more power than most women would have due to her atypical life; first, as heir presumptive of riverrun, then, as acting lady of riverrun, and finally, as ned's beloved wife. all of this gives her the freedom to do wild stuff like travel to KL in secret, take tyrion hostage (and outwit him at nearly every turn!), get involved in conspiracies and politics and help raise banners, to use her shrewd mind and her intellect in a way that challenges and excites her....but when ned dies, every single iota of power is stripped from her and handed to robb by law and there's nothing she can do to reign in her fifteen year old son who makes mistake after mistake and drowns out her voice because it conflicts with his....

and as she struggles through her complete loss of power, unable to decide for herself where her path will go, unable to give commands, unable to argue for the safety of her daughters, helplessly watching her father die, arya goes on her own journey that involves a complete loss of power. arya's womanhood is a constant threat looming over her head so she leans into her non conformity to save her own life and fears that her newfound strength and harshness will make her mother turn from her for Being A Lady Incorrectly, never knowing that her mother is so desperate to get her back that catelyn has decided she's through being a proper lady and starts arguing back, starts acting without asking, starts showing her resentment on her face and gets herself banished by her own son...

both of them spend all of the first two books struggling with their womanhood only to have a flashpoint of realizing they can simply stop following the rules because the rules are unfair - from arya's " I am a direwolf, and done with wooden teeth" to catelyn freeing jaime from the dungeons, they realize the Rules of Men will never help them, will never save them, and turn to their own intellect, their own grief, their own cunning and despair and violence, to do what the Rules of Men have never been able to do and that is to keep them as women safe.

And its with each other, I think, that they will only be able to lay down their despair and grief and find both peace and comfort in this new definition of womanhood that they've both carved out for themselves!

#valyrianscrolls #catelyn stark defense squad #been trying to make this post for like 8 months and could never figure out how to compare the two #catelyn stark #arya stark #mothers and daughters #getting on my soap box #i'm saying arya and lady stoneheart are going to meet that's what i'm saying #i know everyone says this but if i had to bet money on one (1) thing happening in twow it's arya and lsh being lsh's final scene #clearing out my drafts a bit here #well not everyone says this there's some absolutely stupid takes that jaime will kill lsh and i cannot even begin to explain why THAT #is not fucking happening

[queer-starwars-bracket]

Queer Star Wars Characters (Round 2): General Bracket Match 28

Sky Graf | Identity: non-binary | Media: The High Republic Quest for Planet X

Sky Graf was a young member of the wealthy Graf family. A year before the Night of Sorrow, their father went missing looking for Planet X. To prove themselves to their family and possibly find their father, they stole their older brother’s ship the Brightbird and deemed up with Dass Leffbruk (who had previously made it to Planet X) and the Jedi padawan Rooper Nitani to use a Force artifact to try to find Planet X during the great hyperspace race. The Force artifact brought them backwards through the planets Dass had recently visited, where they face challenges while also trying to outrun Sky’s brother. During their journey, they also had to take the Path of the Open Hand member Fel Ix as a hostage. Fel Ix began to break through his cult programming, and when the news of a possible battle between the Path and the Republic reached the crew of the Brightbird, he convinced Sky to give up the search for Planet X to travel to Dalna. Fel Ix succeeded by appealing to Sky’s connection with their father by pointing out how he was a father himself. Working with Fel Ix, Sky helped defeat the Graf code that was corrupting the communication buoys in the Dalna sector, preventing more violence during the Night of Sorrow. Their brother, Helis, eventually caught up with them. But the siblings were able to talk about their feelings and reconcile. The two of them would fly the Brightbird together and continue to prospect. But Sky would no longer chase their father’s ghost.

Sky’s lifestyle was a combination of the hard and technical life of a pilot and hyperspace prospector combined with the luxury of their family’s level of wealth. They are very intelligent when it comes to science. They are confident, with a prickly exterior. They didn’t connect with Fel Ix the way Dass or Rooper did until the end, not wanting to try to understand the perspective of someone who tried to kill them. When things got serious, they showed a surprising capacity of violence and a willingness to do anything to achieve their goals. They only felt like they had unconditional love from their father, his disappearance driving them even further in conflict with their family. At the end of the book, they are more at peace, but still eager to make their own name separate from the Graf dynasty. Unusually for transgender characters in Star Wars, there is explicit discussion in their internal monolog about how they felt gender dysphoria when they started to go through puberty and how their father got them a binder.

Amara Kel/Howlrunner | Identity: wlw couple | Media: “Amara Kel’s Rules for TIE Pilot Survival (Probably)”

Amara Kel is the narrator of the short story “Amara Kel’s Rules for TIE PIlot Survival (Probably)” which is her internal thoughts about how to survive as a line TIE Pilot. This military satire story also details her relationship with another pilot, nicknamed Howlrunner. Amara Kel is snarky and cynical, dissoluted with the Imperial Navy but without the kind of spark that would lead her to defecting. She is happy to stay in the background, staying alive without promotion and glory. However, Howl’s skilled flying inspires in her a sense of love and respect for the TIE fighter and the wire thin finesse in its flying.

Amara and Howl’s Theta Squadron was one of the squadrons dispatched to hunt the Millenium Falcon through the asteroid field around Hoth. In spite of rule number one “Don’t Get Attached”, Howl pulls off some crazy flying maneuvers and saves Amara from being eaten by the exogorth. Miraculously, they both survive that deployment.

#star wars #sw #facpov esb #sky graf #the high republic #sw thr #sw thr phase ii

[vestigial0rgans]

thinking of using a quote from only violence helps where violence rules/not reconciled by straub-huillet as the epigraph to my paper because I am not exactly feeling too keen on truth and reconciliation or committees

[princesssarcastia]

one of the many things that people have said to me that will live in my head rent free forever, is something SainTalia said when we were going back and forth in the comments of one of their fics, once.

i don’t remember it verbatim, but the general idea is that in fiction, when it comes to morality, there are some fundamental things that either a character is okay with, or a character is  not okay with.  this is not an end-all-be-all rule by any means, infinite diversity in infinite combinations etc. etc.

but i do still think about that a lot.  I find a lack of conviction in a character, or a kind of wishy washy plasticity, to be jarring if it isn’t handled with enough weight or in the right way.

the scene saintalia and i were talking about in a fic, pertained to one main character committing an act of incredible violence and espionage in defense of the other main character.  and the thing saintalia said was, either she’s going to be okay with that, or she isn’t.  actually i went and dug up the comment directly:

That kind of violence isn't something one just "comes around" on. Or at least...I think it's a deep character weakness in writing to have a character freak out and be negative, only to come around later on something that SHOULDN'T BE come around on. Either they have morals, or weird morals, or no morals. But trying to bend around on something like that is basically sacrificing characterization for drama. And that isn't something I've ever approved of in any story I've read.

THAT’S what sticks with me.  some things are a yes, or a no.  and if you have a character start on one answer and switch to the other...unless the story is about how that changes, how the character is changing from one person to become that other person, it really rings false to me.

an example:  the scene in the dark knight (nolan!verse batman movies) where bruce wayne uses waynetech to take control of every cellphone in the city to find the joker.

FOX Like the phone I gave you in Hong Kong. You took my sonar concept and applied it to everybody's phone in the City. With half the city feeding you sonar you can image all of Gotham.

(turns to Batman)

This is wrong.

BATMAN I've got to find this man, Lucius.

FOX But at what cost?

...

FOX I'll help you this one time...

Lucius sits at the console. Batman moves off-

FOX But consider this my resignation.

Batman turns. Fox looks at him, serious.

FOX As long as this machine is at Wayne Industries, I won't be

Lucius Fox has his line in the sand, he is fundamentally not okay with this, and the only way bruce gets him to stay is by destroying the machine in the end.  this is not a thing where bruce can wear lucius down—and to have him change his mind would have been the equivalent of gutting his character.  you can’t really respect him if he finds something deeply wrong but does nothing about it, or does something he thinks is deeply wrong.

what it is, at its core, when people switch sides on important core issues to the plot or their character or the characters around them, is laziness, and oftentimes imo, a fundamental inability to let irreconcilable differences sit. 

it is uncomfortable when two people with diametrically opposed views interact.  it’s heartbreaking when two people who mean the world to each other find themselves completely unable to reconcile their different approaches or beliefs.  and I think more writers should lean into that.  

there’s a reason charles xavier and erik lehnsherr’s relationship has a weight and a gravitas to it that few others ever have: it’s their understanding that they cannot agree on something so fundamental that, despite their genuine affection for each other, they can’t bear to be together.  they have a line in the sand and they will not cross it, not for anything, not for anyone. 

that’s what im looking for, sometimes.  that’s what I wish more people did. 

#characterization #obviously there are exceptions #only sith deal in absolutes etc etc #batman #lucius fox #charles xavier #erik lehnsherr #opposing views #persuasion #writing #food for thought i guess #got im chatty tonight lol

[facesofone]

As an alter recently diagnosed osdd1b system I'm starting to dig deeper into what my gender might be because I've never quite been sure and I was wondering if Kyra could share some of her experiences with being a different gender than the body? If not thats ok, I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable, thanks for reading this ask anyway.

Hey! Sorry it took me so long to get back to you on this, been in the process of moving so things have been a little hectic. But yeah I can share some things.

*Just a warning there's a dark part, I mark with a trigger warning before and after the passage.

Well I would have to say my gender identity formed in first grade, my parents were pretty lax on gender rules and just let me be myself, but in elementary school I was met with more rigid standards. I saw girls playing and I wanted to join them, no thought to "I am a girl and that's where girls play" just that that was where I felt I belonged. When I got over there though, since the body was male, I was met with disgust as that was the age when boys had cooties. Ian was confused but I was hurt. I was basically told I didn't belong because of how I looked. When Ian went to go play with the boys they also treated me with disdain because I didn't understand their rules either. Elementary school was a rough time for us.

In highschool I was mostly pushed to the back by Jak, though he couldn't rid me entirely. I was able to produce enough feminine energy to have several close friends who were girls (even my best friend) which made me happy because for brief moments out of the day I could feel like something was mine. He enjoyed this because it meant he could talk to more girls, but he hated the way his thoughts went during it. He had a lot of gender confusion as he was very secure in his own identity, except for the series of contradictory thoughts that I produced.

When I finally got my turn to take full control of the body, I was able to explore my own identity and thusly identified as trans. It was hard to reconcile the fact that Jak was an alter so instead I chose to view him as the side of me that was holding me back from being myself. It was probably pretty obvious that wasn't the case considering he stuck around and complained the whole time, but I just wasn't in the right headspace to realize that yet.

[TRIGGER WARNING: Trans violence]

Fast forward a few years and we are mostly aware of ourselves as a system, and still presenting female. I was very cautious and aware of myself while in the city, and felt very proud to be myself. However I got attacked because of it, twice (the second time worse than the first, but in both I was lucky enough to be able to get away) and no longer felt safe.

[END TRIGGER WARNING]

So I decided to stop presenting myself in female attire and go back to the drab male clothes that let me blend back in. During this time I had a lot of turmoil, I felt that I was somehow betraying or abandoning my identity, but I realized I was only gatekeeping myself. My clothes didn't define my identity, and no matter what I was wearing I know who I am. We dress in jeans and a t-shirt, and have a beard so most people on the street will automatically assume male. This used to sadden me, but the people who are close to me, and really know me, recognize me when I am fronting and treat me as I want to be treated; so in the end I found a place to be happy with my gender.

Gender identity is confusing and can be twice as confusing as a system. I used to identify as a transwoman solely because of the AMAB/female identity dynamic, but I have come to realize I actually identify more as a cis woman (because that's what I am in the system) who just happens to be an alter in an AMAB body.

But that's just my own understanding of my own gender, and is just one of many ways people can interpret their own. I definitely encourage you to do your own self-discovery and see what fits you best. Hope this helped!

-Kyra

#tw #trigger warning #tw trans violence #trans violence #gender #gender identity #system #alter

[grelitia-fam]

…But honey is thicker still

(Part 2)

Gotham was different. That was the first thing the Grelitias learned. Gotham had almost no rules. Anybody could be anybody. There were no forced marriages or pressures to have kids as young as possible. It was a relief to them.. it’s where they learned the second part of the phrase they had always been told. “Blood is thicker then water..”

“But Honey is thicker still”

Carol had never been treated right. Her family and town had shunned her and her ex husband was a prince of shit. Carol had never known sweetness until she came to Gotham. Untill she met Christel.

Christel treated her like a human. She didn’t see her skin color or her beliefs as inhumane. She was just Auntie. It didn’t matter to her. Carol was a good person to her and she was given love in return. It slowly made Carol realize that maybe people outside of their family could be trusted.

“But honey is thicker still”

Carol was the sweetest guardian Hecate could’ve asked for. She was the opposite of Hecates parents, instead of cold and hard she was warm and soft. Hecate thought for the longest time that only Carol would be capable of giving them the love and care they needed. But then there was Christel.

Their adoptive mother. Their best friend. The aunt and godmother of their children. They never thought they’d be able to say those words to anyone, but Christel earned her place in the family. She treated them with kindness no matter who they were and what they did. She was a Grelitia at heart.

“But honey is thicker still”

Daxter hadn’t ever known love outside of what his ‘family’ had shown him. He thought that violence and words that broke his heart were love. He thought that pain was love. He thought his wife’s actions were out of love. He knows better now.

Love was Christel taking over cooking on the nights that Daxters job had taken so much energy out of him. Love was Christel calling him Baby Panda all the time. Love was Christel taking away his cigarettes and drugs because she was worried about his health. That was truly what love was.

“But honey is thicker still”

Kindness was a foreign language to Kam. It was a weakness and a fatal mistake. It was something to be taken out and beaten to death. Kam always thought that is he felt love for anyone, or if someone loved him, they would both be doomed to fail.

It wasn’t that way. Kindness made him stronger. Christels kindness saved his life. Her forgiveness helped him reconcile with his sister. Her love gave him the strength to be who he truly was. He would be forever thankful to her for that.

“But honey is thicker still”

Through Christel, the Grelitias had learned that kindness and love was what was missing from their lives. They had learned to open their heart, to trust, to learn to love and be kind again. All thanks to the loving soul that was Christel, they could finally say that all of them were loved. The phrase that rang in their head for years was gone now and replace with what they truly need to hear.

“But honey is thicker still”

[shadowmaat]

picking up the crumbs

Spoilers for the Mandalorian S3 finale ahoy:

I haven't watched the third season of the show because I could tell it was heading in a direction I didn't want to follow. And I'm not here to shame anyone who loved the season, I just want to play around with some of the elements.

The Force-sensitive clone "army." Experiments with cloning Force-sensitives or trying to induce Force sensitivity have, historically, not amounted to much. Still, if you're gonna introduce the idea you might as well use it.

However, just because you manage to grow a Force sensitive doesn't mean you'll be able to make them obey. Have someone who hides their ability or masks how strong they are. They bide their time, going along with things while they try and figure out what the hell is going on, but the vibes here are rancid and eventually they make their escape or- better yet- stage a breakout in order to rescue all their sibs, whether they're Force-sensitive or not. That'll give you a nice little faction that plays by their own rules and has an agenda that doesn't always line up with what the "good" guys want. If you're bored, you could even have Snoke be one of the rescues, except he decides he LIKES all that evil shit and heads off on his own to plot the sequels.

The remaining faction could stay secluded and remain an unknown factor. Or maybe they decide to join Grogu on Mandalore; that'd give you an interesting dynamic and also provide a basis for more Force-sensitive Mandos in the future. Which could be a nice way to finally move past Mandalore's bloody violent history of conquest or it could spell trouble somewhere down the line. Personally I'm in favor of the former just because I'm tired of the collective brain cell of Mandalorians being cued to "violence."

I still think Bo-Katan is a terrible choice as Mand'alor, especially since her story thus far has done nothing to reconcile her past and future. Good writers would acknowledge the abhorrent shit she was involved with in Death Watch and would have her proving that she's changed. We didn't get that, though, so perhaps a little ambiguity about her motives would keep it interesting. She says she wants to unite Mandalore and bring "her" people home, but is it as altruistic as that? Does she have hidden motives? Is she planning to make Mandalore a planet of conquerors again?

Din being sent out on bounty hunting missions again makes sense in a "we're struggling to rebuild and need all the money we can get" kind of way. It's a nice callback to S1, but far more expansive; it isn't just one small covert he's trying to support, it's a whole planet. And he isn't in it alone. Other Mandos are out there in the universe; some are also bounty hunters while others are traders, crafters, or just hardworking at whatever job they have. He can also call upon this support network if he needs help or resources. He may be working on his own but it doesn't mean he's alone, y'know?

Plus, if you go with the idea of Bo-Katan having Ulterior Motives then her sending Din out as much as possible makes sense in a "he's the most likely to figure out what she's doing" kind of way. All jokes of his obliviousness aside, he can still have a sharp mind and if he thought the Mando'ade were in danger, you can be damn sure he'd act on it.

As for the Darksaber, I'd say this would be a good place to inject a little Weird Shit. Don't have the Darksaber get destroyed, have it disappear. In a blink. One minute it's there, the next it's gone. WAS it destroyed? Did someone somehow steal it? Where is it now?

The story potential of it just disappearing could be fun. You have the whole question of if the Darksaber was the only reason people followed Bo-Katan or if the symbol of ages past is no longer as important as survival. And DID she really lose it or did the Darksaber decide she was unworthy and remove itself from the picture? (If she WAS planning dastardly things that would certainly be another interesting point.) Where did it go? If it wasn't destroyed it could potentially turn up again anywhere at any time. Past or future. Maybe it went back to Tarre. Maybe Finn's gonna find it at some point. Or maybe it's stuffed in the back of Din's junk drawer, waiting for Grogu to get old enough to use it.

I do understand that the Darksaber is, in a way, the Mandalorian equivalent of the "Sacred Texts" and that sometimes it's necessary to move beyond a symbol, I just think there are more interesting ways to move on.

Anyway, yeah. Mando is a fun sandbox and canon doesn't matter. lol

#Mandalorian spoilers #worldbuilding #shitposting

[chandiegeist]

Here's the next installment of the pokemon transformation list for my Get Along AU:

As I said in that post, dividing and limiting the settlements really helps with getting my inspiration flowing and keeping things consistent. This post we'll go over Diamond Clan, Pearl Clan, Ancient Retreat basically anyone outside of Jubilife Village (including Volo gonna bring him up again cause he belongs here)

Most of the clan members are unremarkable NPCs so they can be whatever pokemon found in their region. Personally I don't remember any of their names or personalities so I'm not picking distinct ones like last list. The Wardens aren't included under these rules obviously. The only really important characters are the leaders. I decided as an added challenge that I really wanted to make the leaders Hisuian specific pokemon. It puts a spotlight on their duty to the region and plays into what they can learn as pokemon.

The Diamond Clan are turned into pokemon found in the Crimson Mirelands. Adaman is a (Hisuian) Goomy. Turning into a Goomy is a bit of a nightmare for Adaman. He's slow and a bit slimy and falls asleep if he dries out. He's used to being the strong, confident, and overly punctual leader of Diamond Clan. As a Goomy, he has to learn to rely on his partner pokemon and clan if he wants to get anywhere at a decent pace. He struggles with how the transformation has ruined his reverence of Almighty Dialga's time, but he'll learn to adapt a different way to honor it.

The Pearl Clan are turned into pokemon found in the Alabaster Icelands. Irida is a Hisuian Zorua. I'm debating if the clan runs her out thinking she's causing a mass hallucination, but I think Glaceon, Espeon, and Flareon will stand up for her and eventually the Wardens will visit and back up the story as well. (As I'm sure everyone knows,) Zorua were created by human cruelty, and came back to inflict their own cruelty on humans. It's a vicious cycle Irida will learn and eventually work toward mending. As a Zorua, Irida is welcomed into the Zoroark packs as they see a lone baby Zorua. Even after they learn about the transformation, they still watch her because they've developed such a strong pack dynamic to survive in the wild. She has to fight her own biases against the Zoroark and Zorua, and grow to recognize the Zoroark line are sentient creatures with feelings and not just monsters. She will grow to understand that by previously ordering the clan to hunt down Zoroark and fostering the cycle of violence that they are more alike than they think, and it's her duty as leader to bring peace between these pokemon and humans.

Ancient Retreat is a bit of an odd case because it doesn't really have any wild pokemon (I don't count Enamorus). But! I did decide on which pokemon the two (kinda fitting Volo in here though he doesn't exactly fit) and coincidentally they both can be found in the Cobalt Coastlands.

Cogita is a Glameow. Something about her tired eyes, fancy clothes, regal demeanor (okay that's probably just me but), and the giant white flowers on her hat remind me of Glameow. (Debated making her a Hisuian Qwilfish but it didn't vibe.) She doesn't have much of her own story besides Enamorus hanging out with her as a baby pokemon, but I really want Volo and her to reconcile. She's willing to forgive Volo once he has his whole character arc and comes back begging for forgiveness from the one (idk religious? cultural?) personal connection he has. She's pretty cold to him in-game but I think they matter more to each other than they show. Kind of like cats.

speaking of cats because volo is a pathetic wet cat lmao

Volo is a Togepi as I said in the last post. He's out in the wilderness after failing his master plan and running off in disgrace. (I like to think he's hiding away on one of the tiny islands where Togepi can spawn as a joke.) His big character arc is about - you guessed it - redemption. He isn't out for everyone's forgiveness or even the MC's (considering they're gone lol), but he is pulled into growing into a better person. I don't have all the plans laid out but I like the idea of Melli and Ingo finding Volo out in the wild while his team of pokemon take care of him. Personally a fan of Melli and Ingo friendship so I think they'd work well in befriending Volo against his will and helping him grow to care about the current world and work through his complicated feelings about god rejecting/ignoring him. I do think his team of friendship based evolution pokemon actually being able to talk to him helps a lot in this regard.

#get along pla au #chandie posts #it's a lot of info #again #pokemon legends arceus #pla

[shihlun]

“Instead of wanting to create the impression that he is improvising, the actor should rather show what the truth is: he is quoting.”  -- Bertolt Brecht

Cologne - The Mourning Woman by Gerhard Marcks: monument in memory of the 2nd World War dead of Cologne

Jean-Marie Straub

- Not Reconciled, Or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules

1965

#bertolt brecht #brecht #jean marie straub #danièle huillet #Not Reconciled Or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules #not reconciled #es hilft nur gewalt wo gewalt herrscht #1965 #german film #gerhard marcks

[bisonteinvencible]

Nicht versöhnt oder es hilft nur gewalt, wo gewalt herrscht, Jean-Marie Straub, 1965

#Nicht versöhnt oder es hilft nur gewalt wo gewalt herrscht #Not reconciled or only violence helps where violence rules #Not reconciled #Nicht versöhnt #Jean-Marie Straub

[linkspooky]

THE TOP THREE HEROES ARE ALL FAILURES

In the sense that Enjdeavor, Hawks, and Jeanist all embody the failures of the hero system. The first clear sign that all three people who were set to inherit All Might’s Legacy would fail in doing so, is that none of them really understood what kind of hero was in the first place. 

Endeavor only ever saw All Might’s Strength, and thought All Might’s genuine desire to save people was just him playing to the crowd. Hawks thought Endeavor’s desire to surpass All Might was heroic, and what made him a better hero because he didn’t give up when everybody else said it was hopeless, but we the audience know Endeavor gave up early and took it out on his family instead. Best Jeanist thinks what’s most important of all isn’t saving people but rather “The Image” of Heroes to the public. Except, the only reason All Might was a hero obsessed with image is because he wanted even those he could not reach to be able to live in peace and save themselves. 

The top three heroes are all lacking in what All Might had, in that none of them actually believe that Heroes should save people. Enji believes in strength above all else, Hawks in sacrificing one’s self for the faceless masses, and Best Jeanist in the image of heroes to the public. 

It’s really showing that the option of “Saving Dabi” did not even occur to them once, despite the fact that they are completely willing to give a helping hand to the man who made Dabi.

The current number one, two and three heroes are all obsessed with All Might’s Legacy, however all of them are failures to All Might’s Legacy as well because they don’t understand the underlying ideal of heroes saving people. All three of them represent the failures of hero society, which is why they aren’t shown being overly concerned at hero society’s victims. Even when it’s revealed that one of hero society’s greatest villains Dabi, was actually one of hero society’s greatest victims too, created by one of their own, their beliefs barely change.

1. Enji Todoroki 

Enji was never concerned with saving others being the job of a hero. His one and only focus was just to be the strongest. He even has a shallow view of All Might’s ideals and goals because of this. He thinks the reason that All Might won number one was because 1) his all powerful strength and 2) his popularity with people. 

Enji never once mentions that All Might became the hero he was, because his number one priority in every situation was to save as many people as he could. Because, Enji doesn’t view it as the job of heroes to save others. 

Toshinori worked so hard because he genuinely wanted to be the shining light for others. He didn’t become the number one hero because it was his own personal dream, but rather because it was others needed of him. All Might isn’t a perfect hero either, but there’s still a difference between someone who wanted the number one spot because he genuinely thought it would save the most people, and someone who wanted the number one spot because he wanted to be the strongest.

Even after Endeavor’s supposed revelation where he saw Shoto being gentle with flames, rather than forceful and violence, Enji became the exact same kind of hero he was before. 

Think of the way Enji fought Shigaraki, burning him alive. He made several attempts to kill him during their fight, even though the rule is heroes absolutely must not kill, that’s what makes them different from villains. Heroes prioritize the safety of people, and saving civilians, except for Endeavor apparently. Endeavor as a hero is the exact same kind of hero he was before, and the flaw with that is if he had fought Dabi the same way he had fought Shigaraki.

He would have burned his own son alive. Enji isn’t even concerned in the least with saving people, even when the person most in need of saving is his own son. He sees villains as an absolute evil for him to punch and beat up in order to prove his own strength. The only way Enji knows how to be a hero is violently taking down crime and no one has ever challenged this, even though it’s the exact attitude that led Toya to his death.

Enji, only ever taught Dabi how to turn up the heat, because Enji wasn’t actually that concerned with his son’s well being. Toya was only worth something to him when he was strong, so Enji only ever taught Toya how to be the strongest hero and nothing else that a father should teach his son. Even now, Enji doesn’t let go of this idea of his that he has to be the number one hero, and being the strongest hero will solve all of his problems. 

Endeavor has used playing hero again and again as an excuse to run away. Now that Hawks is giving him another chance to be hero, he’s enabling him to run away again. 

It’s incredible how still even after the reveal, it’s always Toya who has to pay for the consequences of Endeavor’s mistakes. Toya is left alone to burn to death and spends the rest of his life covered in burns forgotten by his father, and it’s Endeavor who gets the unconditional support and love Toya needed as a child offered to him, just because he happened to be a hero. If he was a villain he would have just been locked up.

Endeavor is framed as the hero who does not give up, and yet, he very easily runs away and lets Toya take the blame for the majority of his actions. If Toya had been able to carry his dream he would not have abused Shoto. If Toya had not died that day he would not have doubled down even harder on Shoto. Toya’s the reason they could not come together as a family. It’s never Endeavor’s actions, it’s always, somehow, Toya who is blamed, and Toya who is burned as the consequence of Endeavor’s actions. Now, Toya is the one who needs to be stopped when Enji is just as guilty. 

I’m not saying that Enji should not be given a chance to get better, but why is the good side of Enji’s actions expressed over and over again and not Toya’s? Toya is trying to reform all of society. Toya is trying to hold his dad accountable for abusing him and neglecting him to the point that he died. That’s murder. Someone who lets their children die because they couldn’t be bothered to supervise them can be charged with involuntary manslaughter in a court of law. Enji has killed too, but rather than admit to his own flaws it’s must easier to cast Toya s the villain that needs to be stopped and himself as the hero that needs everyone’s support. 

Toya deserves the same chance that Enji got. 

2. Hawks

Hawks only saw self sacrifice in All Might’s actions. He saw someone harming himself over and over again for the sake of others, and that’s probably why he admired Enji’s pursuit of strength more because it was the opposite of him. 

If Enji is the extreme result of the attitude that villains can’t be saved, only stopped by putting themselves down with violence, then Hawks is the extreme result of self sacrifice. Hawks seems like the ideal hero on paper, he would do anything, and give up any part of himself to save a faceless stranger just like All Might. However, Hawks also has decided that he has the right to sacrifice others as well.

Hawks is self-destructive. That’s the extreme end of self sacrifice. However, unlike All Might who took the burden entirely on himself, Hawks will choose others to sacrifice as well. If Hawks sees himself as a tool for the greater good he will extend that to others as well. If Hawks sees himself as a bad victim who turned his back on their parents, he extends that to others as well. 

So basically, Hawks’ number one problem is with himself. He can’t reconcile his past. He feels guilty for being abused by his parents. He feels guilty for not forgiving the same abusive parents. He puts everything he has into being a hero, and yet, he doesn’t feel like he himself is a hero. Hawks’ only way he knows to feel good about himself is to continuously sacrifice himself for the sake of others. 

Because he learned when he was young the only way to be good was by sacrificing himself to protect others. He only received the help he needs because he showed he was “one of the good victims” but deep down internally he feels like he’s the bad one, for not being able to do anything for his mother, for not reaching out to her. 

Hawks can’t see himself as a victim and it messes with the way he sees other victims as well. He divides them into good and bad, and then tells himself that he’ll offer to help the good ones, the ones willing to improve. Hawks’ represents Hero Society’s own willingness to throw the bad victims to the dogs. 

It’s specifically Hawks who Twice calls this out on. So we have a number one hero who thinks the only way to deal with villains is to violently suppress them, and the number two hero that thinks the only people who deserve to be saved is the ones he deems as “Good” or “Trying to be better.” 

It’s all because Hawks has this really self destructive idea of what kindness is. That kindness is somehow destroying yourself for the sake of others, that it’s being overly forgiving and not holding any resentment at all. 

It’s like how Deku acts like forgiving his father is a kind act. However, at the same time implying that holding onto resentment would be an unkind one.

Even though the reason Natsuo won’t forgive is because Toya is dead, and Enji never showed any apparent remorse for it, and didn’t try to fix anything. Even though one son died because of Enji’s training, and then Enji just decided to train the one remaining son he had left a thousand times harder. Natsuo is attempting to hold his father accountable for his actions, but Deku acts like blanket forgiveness would be the kind thing to do.

Even though Deku himself is willing to overlook all of Enji’s past abuse of Shoto, and his murder of Toya, but at the same time stresses how unforgivable Toya and Shigaraki are. 

Deku just saves people in a self destructive way. He breaks his bones to save others, thus mirroring Hawks who just saves people without genuinely thinking through who needs to be saved. They save people, because that’s the way they hurt themselves to prove how useful they are. However, neither of them actually goes through the trouble of thinking who genuinely needs saving, and that’s why they’re able to carry such a false double standard. Enji needs help because he’s trying to be better, whereas Toya’s not trying to be better. Ignoring the fact that you know, Enji tries to be better by just, forgetting everything he did in the past and sweeping his past actions under the rug, whereas Toya is still suffering from the scars of Enji’s abuse, permanently on his body. 

However, between Twice a person willing to die to protect his friends and act of complete selflessness, and Enji who can’t even bring himself to think that maybe he should try to save the son he let burn to death on a mountain peak which one do you think was trying to be better? Enji who spent ten years, even after Toya had already died to his training, training up Shoto instead even harsher. Enji who referred to Toya as “a failure” and “almost perfect” when talking to Shoto about his death. 

“I’m going to help anyone trying to be better” is just an arbitrary line that Hawks draws.

That’s even the critique that Twice levelled at Hawks. Hawks doesn’t care because he never actually tried to see the good sides of the other people, but Toga was someone who comfotred Twice and understood him. Toga was someone who made the league feel like home. Hawks labels Twice as the only good one, because he just didn’t bother to see what was good about the other villains. Yet, at the same time he strains himself to see the good in Endeavor, to the point where he constantly apologizes for Endeavor’s actions and sweeps them under the rug. Endeavor is a good man who is just misunderstood in Hawks’ eyes, who just went wrong somewhere, but Hawks can’t ever offer up the same sympathy to the worst victims of society. Who lash out and hurt other people in the same way that Endeavor did, except Endeavor’s is excusable and there’s isn’t because...??? 

 Hawks is in denial, because he refuses to look at the good sides of the villains. Twice didn’t choose to accept his offer of help, so obviously he didn’t want to be better, therefore Hawks is perfectly justified in putting him down. Notice though how Hawks mentioned prison time for Jin, but not for Enji (neglecting a child to the point where they burn to death is... still a crime). 

Hawks is still in denial about himself. He thinks he’s offering people a helping hand. However, from Jin’s perspective we see how manipulative he is. Hawks didn’t offer Jin a hand, he held him at gunpoint and told him to surrender and betray his friends. Hawks is just lying to himself, because he didn’t go out of his way to save Jin, he ruthlessly manipulated him, and then betrayed him. He’s not framed as a hero trying desperately to save a villain, but rather a friend betraying another friend who trusted him. Because, Hawks does not just sacrifice himself. He’s the extreme result of self sacrifice. Self sacrifice turns into self destruction. Self denial. Hawks sacrifices other people. He forces himself to dirty his hands, because he believes this is the only way he can be a hero. He’s too weak individually, so he has to manipulate, pull strings, and even kill in order to achieve the results he thinks will save the most people. However, by doing that he ignores the suffering of the victims right in front of them.

Not only that, but he ignores what contradicts his simple black and white narrative. Enji was trying to be better so he deserves help and support, Twice didn’t want to be better so Hawks revoked his offer of support away. 

He’s willing to give support to a man who abused his family for no good reason, and who continues to evade any consequences or legal punishment for his actions, but then insists that Jin who was pushed to his actions by poverty and not wanting to starve to death just did not want to be better. He’s like, so unaware of what the problem actually is with society, he can’t possibly think why Enji leaving his own son to burn to death might have left his son a bit miffed. Enji is just a person who made a few missteps along the way but genuinely wants to be good, Dabi is just a selfish person who doesn’t want to be better, so says Hawks. 

Nevermind how hard Toya tried to be a hero, and how he never gave up on earning his father’s love. Nevermind how hard Twice tried to be helpful to other, and how much he loved the people around him he was willing to sacrifice his life. Twice’s last action was to save his two closest friends. Enji’s actions are always just to beat up villains to prove how strong he is. Enji is never concerned with anyone. Hawks does want to save people, but he never thinks about the people who need to be saved.

Therefore, heroes are always good. Even when heroes do bad things, Hawks contrives some way to not hold them responsible for it ever. Well, Enji isn’t like that now. Well, we don’t need to announce that Enji was an abuser, because that will just upset the public. 

The actions of Enji are apologized for over and over again. Because rather than holding him accountable for his actions. Instead of pushing him to actually fix his mistakes, it’s better to keep sweeping the problem under the rug. Because, as is repeated again and again heroes don’t save people. When a hero fails to save someone, rather than trying to fix that mistake it’s easier to blame the person who didn’t get saved. 

Even if it was your own son that you left to burn to death. That is somehow miraculously alive.  That has given you a second chance to save the person you should have saved that day by just, showing up, and actually acting like a father for once. 

Enji will just choose his job over and over again. Because heroes don’t actually have a responsibility to save people. Being hero is just a job. Enji, Hawks, Jeanist they consider it a profession, not a responsibility. Which is why all three of them are willing to blame Dabi for his own actions, but not Endeavor for his. Which, just proves Dabi right. 

Heroes aren’t actually concerned with saving people. Heroes don’t think about who is most in need of saving, and who the real victims are. Heroes just protect their own. 

Enji, Hawks and Dabi are all murderers. They have all killed someone in pursuit of their goal. Not only did Enji murder a child by neglect, he also tried to kill Shigaraki several times over, and even tried to murder Pop Step in vigilantes. Hawks killed Twice in pursuit of a goal. 

However, Hawks and Enji need to be supported, whereas Toya needs to be stopped. Because they are heroes, and Dabi is a villain. But sure, watch Dabi continually burn his own body over and over again and push himself to the very limit so he can achieve a society where another hero will never get away with abusing his family like Enji did his, and say that he doesn’t want to be good. Watch Toya burn himself over and over again as a child just trying to be a hero because he thinks it’s the only way to earn his father’s love, because he genuinely looked up to his father and wanted to be just like him, and insist that Toya just stopped trying to be better, that he was just a jealous child, that he was never good. 

Jeanist isn’t a fully developed character so I’m not going to talk about him as much, but he represents the attitude that heroes “only pretend to save people” because they fuss ove image, rather than doing the actual work of helping victims.

The thing is someone who is genuinely trying to be better would listen to Dabi’s words, to Shigaraki’s words. However, Jeanist, Hawks, Enji all think of themselves as the hero, therefore they assume they are good and that their actions are good. 

Whenever someone contradicts this, they just flat out ignore any criticism. Heroes don’t save people. Heroes just protect their own image as heroes, because they assume that’s what is necessary for peace. Even now, Hawks and Jeanist aren’t focused on the innocent people suffering from the victim break outs, but rather taking down the man out to ruin their reputations. 

They pretend to see those they haven’t protected. Even when that person is Endeavor’s own son, his pain gets swept under the rug, because the image of Endeavor as a shining hero is far more important than the responsibility he has to help his own son, that’s in pain and need to saving. 

#mha 303 #mha 303 spoilers #bnha 303 #bnha 303 spoilers #mha meta #hawks #takami keigo #endeavor #todoroki enji #best jeanist #dabi #todoroki toya

[lokilickedme]

The Way

I’m writing horror again.  I guess it’s that time, you know, that time that has nothing to do with Halloween or the seasons or whatever, that time when it just hits me for some reason.  And just like I always do, I’ll say I don’t know why.

Even though I know why, and you know I know why.

Because the truth is always so much weirder and worse and more disquieting than any excuse I could make up for it, and sometimes I just feel the need.

Today I felt the need, and I couldn’t make it go away.

And so I sat down, and words I didn’t want to write were written.

.

8592 words I would rate this Mature 18+ if it was a fic, strictly because of the subject matter.

Warnings: Death, mostly.  Religious trauma, brief descriptions of abuse, mentions of mental illness, domestic violence, grief, familial dysfunction, religious abuse, emotional abuse, medical conditions, brief mentions of drug use/abuse, mild gore in reference to corpse decomposition, psychological unease and mild terror, child abuse (mental/emotional/psychological), brief allusion to physical child abuse, cult references, loss of faith, attempted murder, possible actual murder.

A Note:  I love you guys, you’re always so quick and willing to be helpful and offer advice and suggestions and such, and I adore that about you.  But on this piece of work I ask that nobody offer any theories about what happened to my brother - medical, criminal, or otherwise - and please no suggestions on things we could do to pursue investigation, that ship has long sailed.  It’s been 23 years and he’s a cold case.  We spent years trying to sort it out but in the end it’s just something that happened, and we moved on because we had to.  There are a lot of open ends, a lot of question marks, a lot of suspicious details that never connected to anything - and we tried, we truly did.  If anyone out there knows the truth, they’ve never shown themselves to us.  We do have our theories, but my brother was a secretive person living a life none of us knew about, and the people he knew weren’t people we knew.  Everyone involved is either dead or moved on or got away with whatever it was they did, and there are only three of us who still care.  It’s over.

Until today, I’ve never put these events into words.

It was something I needed to do, finally.

This is PART ONE.  There may not be a part two, unless doing this ends up making me feel better.

Please feel free to comment if you wish.  As you can see, pretty much nothing triggers me.  I just ask that you please refrain from the type of comments noted above.

And thank you.

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This is, regrettably, a true story.  Nothing has been changed but the names, because the dead don’t like being talked about, and James was just enough of a shit to haunt me for it.

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They made up their minds And they started packing They left before the sun came up that day An exit to eternal summer slacking But where were they going without ever knowing the way

They drank up the wine And they got to talking They now had more important things to say And when the car broke down They started walking Where were they going without ever knowing the way

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

Their children woke up And they couldn't find them They left before the sun came up that day They just drove off and left it all behind them But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

- The Way, Fastball, 1998

.

That was the year James died in his sleep.

Or that’s what they say, anyway.  Asthma, the likely cause based on his medical history, our first and least disturbing assumption.  Undetermined, the official determination based on the hastily scraped-together autopsy, the best that could be done under the circumstances.  We tell people he had breathing problems, and they nod their heads and agree because they knew he did, and now he’s been gone so long that nobody asks.  Most of the people who ever met him have long moved on or disappeared or died themselves, or just remember him as the enigmatic middle son from the Keithley family that nobody really knew very well.  You know, the odd one, the one that showed up at meetings maybe once a year and smiled nervously but didn’t really talk to anyone and always seemed anxious to leave?  The one who died under mysterious circumstances?  That one.

He left the way he always came in.  Quietly, unexpected, without anyone being aware of either his entrance or his exit.

But me and mom know some things, and she’s not talking.  She probably never will.

So maybe it’s time I did.

December 1998.  I’d gotten married two years previous and moved back to the family land with my new husband.  He hated it there, but we had an affordable place to live.  It wasn’t bad.  He’d tell you otherwise.  The land never sat right with him, but I’d lived there too many years to see it.  I’d been fifteen when my father uprooted his large family from the city and hauled us out to the great back door to nowhere, and even though I’d left several times to wander elsewhere, I always came back.

I didn’t realize why at the time, at any of the multiple times.  But now I know.  That place gets you, and it holds you, and unless you’re goddamned devoted to staying gone you will always be pulled back.  It took me till I was 49 to funnel the necessary amount of devotion away from the religious dedication I’d had jackbooted into me and turn it toward getting out, but against a great number of overwhelming odds I finally did it.

But this isn’t about that, not yet anyway.  This is about my brother James, and how he went to sleep one night and found his own way out.

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It was snowing, had been for days, a bit unusual but not unheard of.  The part of the state we lived in was notorious for extended ice storms and we knew a bad one was coming, but until it hit we played in the snow like it was a gift and we were deprived children who knew it was all going to be taken away soon.  My brothers and I were adults but you wouldn’t know it, watching us sneak around in the woods staging elaborate commando attacks on each other.  James was the best of us, a stealth king who could stand in the middle of a room for an hour without a single soul seeing him.  Perception bias, he said.  Your brain ignores me because I obviously don’t belong, like those puzzles where you circle what’s wrong but it takes you forever to find them.

He crept around in the forest scaring the shit out of people, dropping his long tall self out of trees, appearing from nowhere to administer a well aimed snowball to the face of whoever happened to cross his path and then disappearing just as quickly.  We called him a wraith and it wasn’t a good natured jibe.  We meant it.  He made people nervous.  He was the stealthy kind of quiet you associate with danger, and he knew how to do things an average person doesn’t ever have any need to know.  It was a quiet cool that we admired him for, because none of the rest of us had it.

The religion we were raised in kept a tight lid on us, but me and James, we never really let it get into our bones.  We were the smart ones, in retrospect.  I went through the motions by force of habit and a sense of self preservation, doing what was expected and demanded of me, following the rules and making myself a perfect example of a young member of the church so I wouldn’t bring shame on the congregation and my family.  But mostly the congregation.  It was always more important than anything else.  And I had behaving down to an art form, but mostly when people were looking.  Usually also when they weren’t.

But sometimes, not quite.

And then I prayed for forgiveness about it later because God was supposed to forgive you if you asked him to, right?  The tenet of willful sin being unforgivable never took root with me even though that was what the church conditioned into us through fear and constant repetition.  They said it from the stage two nights a week and again on Sunday to hammer it home.  Two nights a week and again on Sunday my head silently disagreed.  God’s not like that.  And then I did the praying for forgiveness thing even though I knew I was right, because I was disagreeing with the church, and the church was God’s channel here on Earth, wasn’t it?  I committed a mortal sin at least three times a week on that subject alone, and though the dread of divine punishment was hardwired into me, I never could reconcile the concept of a loving and forgiving God destroying me simply for knowing better.

I’m not sure the comprehension of an overwatching deity ever actually established itself in James’ brain.  A moral code, yes.  But isn’t that what God is, really?  Maybe he understood more about God and forgiveness than the rest of us.  But he was considered an unapproved fringe member of the church because he couldn’t suffer people and noise and being looked at and he refused to preach, and he was soft-shunned as a result.  Because if you weren’t all in to the point of being willing to die at any moment for your faith, you were as good as faithless.

And faithless meant condemned.  And the congregation couldn’t be bothered with condemned people, regardless of their reasons for not having both feet in the water.  The first and only option on their list was to put the person out and let them find their own way back once they realized they had nobody left in the world who cared about them.

James escaped that somehow.  He was supposed to be shunned whole scale, but he wasn’t trying to convince anyone to leave the faith and he presented no threat to anyone’s strength of belief, and so far as anyone knew he’d committed no grave sins other than disinterest.  So the rule that dictated we cast him out was bent enough to allow him to remain living on the family land, though at one point during a fit of overzealous righteousness my mother had tried to have a family meeting to vote on whether or not we were going to let him stay.  I refused to vote and when I walked out of the house the meeting fell apart.

I’ve never forgiven her for that.  Her son’s life being put to a vote with her presiding over the proceedings, vengeful and unfeeling and devoid of compassion on behalf of God himself.  It takes my breath away, the anger, still to this day.  The only thing I ever truly learned from my mother about parenting was a long and intensely detailed list of what not to do to my own children, and I suppose I should be grateful for that.  It’s a bitter thank-you to have to give, but it’s something.

We knew James as much as he would allow us to, and not an inch further.  Which meant the extent of our knowledge of him pretty much stretched to include the singular fact that he was different.  What that meant, I still don’t really know - but it was there from the day he was born, that slight off-ness, the oddly off center calibration that you can’t really see so much as sense in a person.  I know now he was likely on the autism spectrum and he walked through life seeing and reacting to everything differently than most of us, but that wasn’t a thing back then.  You were just weird, or you weren’t.  And I’m not convinced that was a bad thing for him, strictly speaking.  But in the confines of our religion and our family’s devout and sometimes violent dedication to it, it took its toll almost daily.

He stood out, and he was very much a person who didn’t want to.  He wanted to fade into the background, to not be seen, to not be known.  And our religion didn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense, because we were commanded to be bold bearers of The Word Of God, and no exceptions were made.

None.

I’m going to stop calling it a religion now.  I beg your indulgence as I shift to calling it what it is, because calling it a religion is an insult to actual religions that don’t destroy peoples’ lives with callous indifference and murderous glee.

We were raised in a doomsday death cult.  There’s no other name that fits.

And we were trapped in it and its ugly cycle of neverending mental and emotional manipulation and abuse until we were adults, and some of us are still bound to it.  My oldest brother worked his way up to the upper levels of oversight in the local congregation and was solidly entrenched in it until his death, which is a story for later.  My youngest brother, the last remaining living blood sibling I have, is still deeply in it to this day and will likely never leave it.

I took the hard way out, three years ago, by walking away.

James, though.  He took the easy way.  He simply closed his eyes, and he was free.

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December 22, 1998.  Three days before Christmas, though that meant nothing to us.  The cult told us Christmas was a filthy demonic pagan ritual that was condemned by God, so to us the season was just a nice chilly time of year with lots of time off from work.  We’d had an unusual amount of snow, the most we’d had in years.  The roads were impassable and everyone was home except my husband, who worked close enough that his boss at the glass shop came and picked him up that morning with chains on his tires.  Lots of windshields had shattered from the sudden violent cold that had struck the previous night and Scott had the only glass shop for sixty miles.

I think it must have been around noon, and likely my mother had sent my dad up the hill to see if James wanted to come down for the lunch she was making.  He and his wife had split up against the strict rules of the church after a few years of suffering through an ill advised marriage, an important detail to this story that will come into the tale later, and he was alone up there at the top of the hill a lot.  Sometimes he forgot to eat, or he got so busy that he just didn’t bother, so our mother always made something for him because even though he was in his 20′s he was still a kid who needed looking after and her zealous fervor against him had died down with time.  I think he let her believe he was helpless because it worked in his favor and there was always lunch waiting for him in her kitchen as a result.

He was different, he wasn’t dumb.

We all lived on the hill back then with the exception of our youngest brother.  He’d moved to the city with his new wife not long prior.  The locals jokingly called the place a commune, and I guess they weren’t completely wrong.  Thirty-eight acres of wooded land far beyond the city limits that we’d painstakingly spent years carving a livable space into, with five houses, all built from the ground up and inhabited by an extended family of well known culties from a well known cult.  It’s almost comical, looking back on it, knowing now how they kept an eye on us for years to make sure we weren’t doing anything weird up there.

They should have run us off with pitchforks and burning stakes at the very beginning.

Things might have ended differently for us if they had.

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My grandparents lived at one end of the property, an old couple as simple and solid as salted soup, devoutly religious and devoted to the cult and very much cut from the can survive anything and probably will cloth like so many old country folks of their generation.  They were waiting out the end of days up there in their little wooden house, expecting the final hour of this old system to come long before their own demise.  I liked my grandmother, she had a sweet smile and fell asleep every time granddad started talking about the Bible and she paid me five dollars every Wednesday to drive her into town to get groceries, and years later, when she was dying, she told me she’d had a dream where she met my unborn son.  I was four months pregnant and didn’t know yet that I was having a boy.  She died before he was born, but to this day, fifteen years later, he tells me he’s sure he met her, he just can’t remember when.

I was scared of my grandfather.  Not terrified, but there was nothing grandfatherly to him and I always suspected he never actually liked kids much.  He’d once told us a story about the great Fort Worth flood that wiped out most of the city when my mom was a baby, and how he had told my grandmother to let go of my 2-year-old mother while he was struggling to get them across a rushing flooded creek in water up to their shoulders.  My grandmother couldn’t swim.  We could make another Ruthie, he said.  But I couldn’t get another ‘Nita.

He said it proudly, like he was to be admired for his choice.  I was young when he told that story, but it settled into me that this was evil.

Even when he was old as dirt and dying of a brain tumor in hospice care, he made me uneasy.  I was never close to him.  But for some reason, in his final days, he forgot who everyone was except me.  I had been living in another state for years and he hadn’t seen me since before the tumor started taking his life.  But when I walked into the room he turned his head and looked at me, and he mouthed my name.

He couldn’t speak.  I don’t know what he was trying to say, struggling with words that nobody could hear.  And I felt bad.  I didn’t want to be the last person he recognized.  My cousins adored him and had spent the last few years constantly at his side, and they were angry, maybe justifiably, that I was the one he reached for.

I didn’t want that at all.

I don’t believe he was a bad man, but he never spoke of anything except the cult’s interpretation of the Bible, and it was as tiresome as it was terrifying.  Granddads are supposed to be fun.  Ours quoted doctrine at us in a deep loud commanding voice that you couldn’t interrupt and you couldn’t tune out, and once he got going you had to just settle in and wait for him to run out of zealous steam.  And then he would suddenly stop and command grandmother to turn on a John Wayne movie and bring him some ice cream, and it was over until the next time.

I know my mother resented him.  She knew grandmother was the one that had refused to let her go, the one that had held onto her even though she almost drowned by the simple act of holding on.  She knew her father had been willing to let her wash away and drown.  That he thought she was interchangeable with whatever baby they would have next.  How she could spend her entire life with that knowledge and not be deeply affected by it was something that never made sense to me, but now, when she’s in her 70′s and I’m in my 50′s, I finally understand.  It affected her.  She’ll just be damned if she’ll let anyone see it.  And she had stood there in that hospice room watching him mouth my name with resentment burning in her eyes, though she would have rather died than let anyone know what it was for.  He’d forgotten her weeks ago.

The house in the center of the hill was mom and dad.  The homestead.  The house we’d all lived in together, that we’d built with our own hands, the first thing that marked that wild overgrown hill as a place where people actually lived.  A long path through the woods connected it to the grandparents’ house, and it was the epicenter of everything in our lives.  James and I had lived in the upstairs rooms of that house until we both moved out and married our respective mates years later, a reprehensible act on our part that was never okay with my mother and that she never forgave either of us for.  She’d wanted us all to stay.  We can all live here together until the New System comes, she always said.  That’s how the Bible says it’s supposed to be.  We can all keep each other safe and on the right path until the end comes, and then we’ll all be here together forever.

A decade later when I sat up on the hill watching that house burn to the ground, there was as much relief as grief billowing into the sky with the black smoke.  It was the end of an era, and it was far beyond time for it.

Nobody saw it but me.  James was dead, had been for years.  Robbie was dead now too.  Dad was gone, so was granddad.  Me and my youngest brother David were the last two left of the kids, but he had moved to a neighboring city when he got married and he has never seen things the way I see them.  We were of different generations, we weren’t raised the same way, and he’d never experienced the abuse I lived with for the first half of my life.  And he had dedicated his own life to the cult with all the honesty and lack of guile that I didn’t have when I’d made my own dedication vows at the too-young age of sixteen.

It was the end of an era, but apparently only for me.

James’ house was up the hill, past a clearing where my dad used to keep old cars that he cannibalized for parts.  Our oldest brother Robbie, long married with kids of his own, lived at the bottom on the farthest corner of the land.  And my house was on the slope to the west, built on the spot where we’d cleared off an old half-fallen homestead from the late 1800′s, dutifully paying no mind to the fact that a grave was nestled into the slope, right where the yellow daffodils grew.  The cult told us superstition was tied up with the demons and false religion, so we didn’t have the built-in human instinct that tells most people to stay the hell away from certain things.

We just pretended it wasn’t there, and put no importance on it.  It was just an old grave.  The soil was good and the garden I planted next to it did well, though those strange daffodils always wound themselves through everything I put in the ground.  My husband said something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t pay any attention to him.  He hadn’t been raised as devout as me.

My dad knocked on my door around lunchtime and I opened it.  He backed up, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, the fancy leather coat the dealership had awarded him when he was designated a five-star Chrysler technician and given the state’s first and only license to work on the new Vipers that had recently rolled off the prototype line.  It was a cool jacket.  Made him look like the old pictures my other grandmother had shown me of him from the early 1960′s, when he was young and very much a product of a fancier era.  He’d never stopped greasing his hair back and was still so thin that he and I wore the same size jeans.

I’ve never understood the look on his face when I opened the door.  To this day I can’t sort it.  It wasn’t a blankness like so many people who’ve seen death wear without awareness.  It wasn’t grief.  It wasn’t even shock.

He was sorry.

Those were the first words out of his mouth.

I’m sorry.

I stood there, not knowing what he was sorry for.  It was cold.  I couldn’t push the screen door open very far because of the snow blocking it.  And my father was standing at the bottom of the steps James had helped my husband build, his hands shoved down far into his pockets like a penitent child about to get in trouble, telling me he was sorry.

James is dead, he finally said.  He’s in his house.  I went up there and he’s dead.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now - just now, this very moment in fact, I know that I was the first person he told.  He came straight from James’ house to mine and told me my brother was dead.

I don’t know what I said back to him, I just remember sitting down on the top step and feeling the cold bite of the snow through my pajama pants.  There’s a vague recollection of putting my face in my hands, and the embarrassing knowledge that I did that simply because I didn’t know what else to do.  And dad just stood there, nervously stepping from foot to foot in the snow, because he didn’t know what else to do either.

I think I asked How at some point.  He said he didn’t know.  He had something in his pocket but to this day I don’t know what it was.

I don’t know if it was important.  Something tells me it was.  Or maybe it was just the eternally present handkerchief he always kept on him.

I’m sorry, he said again.  He seemed to feel like it was his fault somehow.  I’m sorry.

What do we do?  I asked him.  I’ve never felt more blank.  What are we supposed to do?

I don’t remember what he said, other than he was going to get my older brother.  I remember thinking that was a good idea.  Robbie would know what to do.  He always did.  Brash and blustery and bigmouthed, he got things done while other people stood around debating how to do them.  He would get on it, whatever needed doing.  He would figure it out.

I went back in the house and dad walked away, headed down the path through the woods that connected my house to Robbie’s, hands still shoved deep in his pockets, the big retro vintage Chrysler emblem on the back of his jacket the last thing I saw before I pulled the screen door shut.  I stared down for a minute at the mound of snow it had scooped into my livingroom, still with no clue what I was supposed to do.

No clue at all.

I kicked the snow back outside and shut the door.

----------

It’s an odd thing, watching the coroner’s van drive away with someone you know inside it.  Someone you saw just yesterday.  Someone who was alive.  Someone who should still be alive but isn’t, somehow.  And since there’s really no way to earn a ride in a coroner’s van without dying, there’s an awful unsettling sensation to it that you can’t get away from.  The last time I saw James he was laughing that devious little laugh of his, his eyes red and bloodshot from the ever present asthma he’d suffered with his entire life.  I don’t count the sight of the coroner’s van leaving the hill via our long steep driveway with his cold corpse tucked into a black zippered bag, because I didn’t see him.  I never saw him.  I didn’t see him dead in his house and I didn’t see them carry him out, I didn’t see them put him in the van.  I didn’t see him later, when it was all over with.  And if I try hard enough I can imagine that van empty, with that long black bag tossed crumpled in the back without a body in it, and James somewhere else living his life however the hell he pleases.

I hold onto that.  Some days it helps.  And some days I think I see him, walking by the side of the road or getting out of a car in the post office parking lot, and it makes me happy thinking he escaped.  I see him in every hitchhiker, in every wandering traveler making his way down the interstate, in every tall thin man I glimpse from the corner of my eye as I go about my business in town.

He’s out there.

I hope he’s happy.

The ice storm hit the next day.

----------

For the next two weeks we were stuck on our hill.  Power out, no electricity, no heat, no lights, roads iced over and impassable.  We all piled up in mom and dad’s house, quietly grieving James, trying to stay warm.  Most of the state lost power for days, including the city 150 miles away where his body had been taken to the state coroner’s office.  There was no apparent cause of death, so the state ordered an autopsy.

His body had just been placed into cold storage to wait its turn when the power grid went down.  And then, by some unholy stroke of nightmarish luck, the facility’s generators failed.

Nobody could make it in to work because of the ice.  By the time someone finally got into the morgue the cold storage had been down for four days.

Six bodies melted, including James.

----------

No viable autopsy could be done, though they tried their best I suppose.  The end report was obtained two months later.  It was mostly inconclusive due to the long delay and resultant decomposition of tissue.  There was apparent scarring on James’ heart, but it was old scarring and had nothing to do with his death.  His lungs were scarred as well, but that was no surprise, he’d had severe asthma his entire life.  There was no determinable cause of death, no inflicted trauma, no presence of illicit drugs as far as they could tell from the limited toxicology report they managed with what they had to work with.

No reason.

He’d simply died.

It seemed fitting, to me at least, that the end of him be enshrouded in an unsolvable mystery.  He was a secretive person, intensely private.  He would have loved knowing nobody had a clue what happened to him.

And so we drew our own conclusion as a family.  He’d had an asthma attack in his sleep.  There had been an inhaler next to his bed, but it was new and still in the box.  He simply hadn’t woken up to use it.  Dad didn’t participate in the drawing of this conclusion, his input kept stoically to himself, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

We pretended not to see it.

He and mom braved the last of the ice a few days later to make the 150 mile drive to see James one last time.

They came back different.

You couldn’t tell it was him, my mother said.  He was melted, literally.  It was like one of those science fiction movies where they melt you with a laser beam and you turn to goo.

Dad had nothing to say.  He went to bed and stayed there until the next day.

You can go see him, mom told me.  I’ll go with you if you want to go.  But I don’t recommend it.

I decided not to go.

And so I never saw my brother dead.  I never saw any proof that he was gone.  He just wasn’t there anymore.  There was no funeral, he was cremated and his ashes were sent home weeks later, and I went on with my life with the image in my head of James, alive, somewhere else.

----------

Dad was different from that day on.  He’d always been stoic, terse, strict.  My childhood had been spent in fear of him, an eternal dread of making him mad and feeling his temper erupt keeping me from showing any hint of a personality during my formative years.  The cult had forced him to abide by the violent tenet of Spare the rod, spoil the child and there was never any risk of me being spoiled.

James being gone flipped a switch in him.  He was nicer suddenly.  Mellow.  Kind.  After the trauma wore off his humor discovered itself and he was funny.  The dour angry demeanor fell off and revealed a man that I was sad never to have known before.  He and I became friends.  I could sense in his new attitude toward me that he regretted how he’d raised me and respected the way I’d always stood up and been my own person despite it.  But my mother was falling off the deep end and for all the newfound easygoingness of my father, she counterbalanced it with an extremism born of the religious fervor of a mother determined to gain enough favor with God to see her dead child again.  And she was going to make sure the rest of us did too.

We all had to get good and straight on the path, get completely right and stay that way, or we’d never see James again.  He’d be in the New World and we wouldn’t, and how would she explain that to him?  She and I worked together in a law office at the time and as she became more unhinged and unpleasant, I reacted by becoming more outgoing and accomplished.  Our boss changed my work designation from receptionist to Executive Assistant and started teaching me how to do everything from filing papers at the courthouse to photographing accident scenes.  I no longer answered to my mother, the office manager.  I answered directly to the boss.

That didn’t go over well.  She was a control freak with heavy untreated trauma, and the one person in the world she felt the most obsessive need to control was suddenly no longer under her thumb in a workspace where she considered herself the supreme authority.  She countermanded every order the boss gave me and tried to load me up with general office chores that left me no time to do the important assignments he’d given me.  I had no choice but to tell her she wasn’t my superior anymore.

She chose that day to have her nervous breakdown over James, jumping out of my car at a red light on the way home and storming angrily through a shopping mall with me trailing frantically along behind her, yelling for security to arrest me while I tried to get her to calm down.  I ended up telling her she wasn’t the only person who lost James but that none of the rest of us were allowed to experience our own grief because we were too busy catering to hers.

She sat down on a bench outside the sporting goods store and glared at me with a cold hatred I’ve seen on very few other faces, ever.

I knew it would be you, she hissed at me.

That moment changed our relationship forever.  It changed me forever.  That was the day I decided my life was my own, that she not only didn’t have authority over me at work, she didn’t have authority over me anywhere else either.  She could no longer dictate my actions, my behavior, my thoughts and feelings.

For this she disowned me.  It was the first of several disownings over the next few years.  I got used to it.  We went to work the next day like nothing had happened, and I didn’t do a single thing on the task list she slapped down on my desk.  It was a metaphor for the rest of my life, but I didn’t know it yet.

My husband and I moved out of state a couple of months later, away from that hill, away from her increasingly controlling paranoia and bitterness, the first of many small steps toward freedom.

As we were driving away with our trailer full of personal belongings behind us, he said one thing that I tried to argue against, but that somewhere deep inside I knew was probably right.

That land is cursed, he said.

----------

A few weeks before we moved my youngest brother came to town and we went into James’ house together.  It was exactly like it had been the day my dad found him.  The only thing that stood out as different was the bare mattress on the bed - the men from the coroner had wrapped him up in the sheet he’d been laying on and took it with them, leaving just the naked springform mattress James had bought for Jessica right before her final breakdown and their subsequent separation.

It took me a while to go in the bedroom, but I knew from the moment I walked into the house that I was going to end up there.  I needed to see it, the place where James had closed his eyes and left us.

There was a small puddle of dried blood near the foot of the bed, brown and stained into the fabric.  James always slept backwards, with his head at the wrong end.  The blood had come from his nose.

I touched it.  I don’t know why.  It was dry.

He was gone.

----------

David and I laughed a lot that day.  James had been funny in a way that was distinctly him, quiet and of few words, but those words had always counted.  And as we sorted through his things and talked about him and moved some of his stuff into boxes to be stored away, I felt as much awed respect as befuddlement at what was around me.  He’d never been a conformist, which I knew was why the cult had never gotten a firm grasp on him.  He was unknowable and therefore unbindable.  But his house was proof that he didn’t conform to any human expectations either, and nothing in it made sense unless you’d spent time around him.

There was an engine in the bathtub.  I’m not sure what it went to.  Another engine, in the beginning stages of disassemblage, rested on a blue tarp in the center of the livingroom floor, obviously the last project he’d been working on.  There wasn’t much furniture - his wife had taken most of it when she left and it would have never entered his mind to replace any of it.  Jessica’s cookware was in the kitchen cabinets, unused, some of it still in the original boxes, some not even fully unwrapped from their wedding shower years before.  Jessica didn’t cook, she microwaved.  David asked me if I thought it would be okay for him to take a glass Pyrex measuring cup because he’d broken his.  I told him to take it.  It had never been used.

I didn’t want anything, but knew I needed to take something.  One of my husband’s solo CDs was sitting on the entertainment center and the cover, the cover I’d designed, caught my eye and brought me to the CD player to pop the tray open.

Inside was a CD single of The Way.

It was the only thing I took.

----------

My husband told me some time later that my dad and older brother had altered the scene before the police arrived.  After the phonecall from me his boss had rushed him home and he’d gone up to James’ house without my knowledge.  He’d thought it strange that he’d had to step around at least a dozen empty compressed air cans scattered haphazardly around the place as he entered, like they’d been used and tossed aside one after another.  There had been several more on the floor around the bed.  My father had told him to go back down and see how mom and I were doing, and when he returned to James’ house after the coroner’s departure, the cans were gone.  Other than that he said things seemed different, but he couldn’t say quite how.  Just not the same.

He told me my dad didn’t call the police until after he and Robbie had been in there at least an hour, alone with the body.

It’s not something we’ve talked about often, because there’s no satisfactory explanation for it that either of us can come up with.  My mother says they probably didn’t want the police to assume the cans meant he was huffing compression fluid and accidentally killed himself, because Look at the shame and reproach that would bring on the congregation if anyone thought such a thing!  We all knew he used the compressed air to clear the valves on the engines he was working on, all mechanics do, it’s common.  Wouldn’t the police have accepted that explanation?  Dad was the only one that spoke to them.  They wrote down whatever he said, and then they left, and then the coroner came and took James away and that was that.  My father, the most upright straight-and-narrow devoutly dedicated man I’ve ever known in my life, misled the police for a reason that he took with him to his own grave.

The only other person in the world who knew the truth about it took it to his grave too.

At the same time.

In the same car.

Four years later, on October 18, 2002.

----------

The big garbage bag of empty air cans and whatever else that was removed from James’ house that morning had been stashed in my dad’s garage and stayed there until a few weeks after he and Robbie’s joint funeral, when my mother asked my husband’s old boss to come and dispose of it.  Scott was a man who knew people who could do things.

The evidence, whatever it was evidence of, vanished.

----------

The mystery around James never dissolved and eventually no one talked about it anymore, I guess because there was no way we could ever truly find out what happened without him here to tell us.  There were a lot of details that we could never find a way to weave together into anything that made sense and a lot of it was probably inconsequential anyway.  There was a girlfriend that he’d tried to keep hidden from us, a woman that was quite a bit older than him who wasn’t a member of the cult and therefore needed to be kept a secret.  In the end she had convinced him to stop hiding their relationship and he’d bought her a ring.  We met her all of twice before he died, and within days of his passing she left town with her brother and never came back, taking whatever she might have known with her.

James’ ex Jessica had sneaked onto the hill and broken into his house to put a dead raccoon in his kitchen sink a few days prior to his death.  We were shocked when he told us she trespassed on the land often without anyone knowing, and my mother made my father fix the electric gate down at the road so that it wouldn’t open without one of three clickers in the possession of herself, my father, and me.  James would have to come to her house and get hers any time he needed to leave the hill, an arrangement he agreed to because Jessica stole things from his house all the time, she would absolutely take a gate opener if she saw it.

He told us the gate wouldn’t keep her out though, and that she didn’t come in that way anyway.  The only way to protect ourselves from her was to lock her up and he doubted even that would do it.

He died less than a week later, and twenty three years later we still don’t know how or why.

----------

We never felt safe on the hill again.  Jessica was deranged in the worst possible way, we’d known it for a while, and James was her obsession.  She’d threatened to kill him multiple times and had tried twice.  We hadn’t known this, because James, big strong stoic Clint Eastwood type that he was, wasn’t about to tell anyone he was violently abused for years by a skinny little woman that everyone believed was not much more than a meek dormouse with shyness issues and a case of painful awkwardness.  But we knew she was evil.  We just didn’t have any proof.

The first thing my mother said after the initial emotional breakdown of finding her son dead was Jessica did this, I don’t know how but I know she did it.

I believe she was probably right.  But if Jessica was anything she was wily and devious with a strong survival instinct and an uncanny ability to lie convincingly and draw sympathy onto herself.  She’d convinced us for years that she was the perfect combination of sweetly harmless and endearingly clueless, but that only lasted until the day she called 911 screaming that James was beating her and then threw herself face first into a tree in their front yard and sat, calmly singing and coloring in a coloring book on the porch with blood running down her forehead, waiting for the police to arrive.  The act she put on when they got there was one for the Academy, but the officers didn’t buy it.

James calmly rolled up his sleeves and showed them his scars where she’d burned him and slashed him with a kitchen knife.  He pulled up his shirt and pointed out the marks she’d left on him with her teeth and nails.  He hooked a finger into his mouth and showed them the empty hole where she’d knocked one of his teeth out with a baseball bat.  One of the officers asked him why he hadn’t killed her and buried her somewhere on the land already.

She left in the back of the squad car, and my mother took James to the courthouse to get divorce papers started two days later.

Jessica came to his memorial service when we finally had it, several weeks after his death.  She wasn’t invited but we couldn’t keep her from coming.  She wore black like a widow and created a dramatic disruption complete with loud wailing and declarations of undying love, and afterward she stood to one side of the room, smirking at us with the kind of icy malice that you only see on the dangerously deranged, and then usually only in the movies.  Several people commented in hushed voices, asking why she’d been allowed to come.  At one point she started wailing They killed him!!, but everyone with the exception of her mother ignored her.

Her mother, who was still in our congregation, flitted around the room chatting with everyone, sobbing her heart out like it was her own son we’d just memorialized.  She was an ER nurse and had been famously fired from her job at the hospital for taking locked-cabinet medications home by the purse load.  She claimed she put them in her pocket to use on her shift and forgot to return them to the cabinet before leaving.

Jessica had been staying with her for a while.

----------

We fed the crowd at mom’s later that afternoon with my husband and his boss guarding the gate, making sure she didn’t try to come into my mother’s house.  The police were called preemptively, and because this was a town of 300 with not much of anything else to do, a squad car was dispatched and stationed near the inlet to the main drive.

Jessica showed up not much later, like we knew she would.  She drove past the police and parked a few yards down from them in plain sight, just sitting there by the side of the road, far enough away from our property that we couldn’t legally do anything about it.  The officers got out and talked to her, warned her not to cause us any problems, and she fed them a woeful tale about being banned from her beloved husband’s memorial service and denied the right to say goodbye to him.

The officers knew there was no body at that service to say goodbye to.  They also knew her.

My husband came up the hill and told us she was down at the road and that Scott was blocking the driveway with his truck to keep her out.  I told my mother it was time to file a restraining order against her.  She was living in fear and Jessica was known to be trespassing on our property frequently.  No, she told me with tears in her eyes but not a sign of distress on her face.  It was a look I knew, because my mother rarely showed emotion unless she was angry and the rest of the time it was this cold detachment.  That would bring reproach on the congregation because everyone knows what we are.  I can’t do that.  I won’t let her win that way.  I won’t let her cause us to bring shame on God’s name.

God’s name.  I took it in vain that day.

More than once.

I was leaving in a few weeks, moving a thousand miles away.  My husband and I weren’t going to be there to help her keep an eye out, and thirty eight acres of heavily wooded land is impossible to protect and easy to sneak onto from a hundred different directions, James had shown us proof of that.

God will protect us as long as we do the right thing and leave it to him, she said.  He knows what she is.

I think it was just a coincidence that nothing terrible happened in the following weeks, because my faith was getting tenuous and a lot of prayers were going unanswered.  But Jessica quietly disappeared back to her own world after a couple of infuriating weeks of putting herself in our paths every chance she got, and not long after that my husband and I moved away, and as we left the driveway for what we thought would be the last time he sighed and shook his head with the exasperation of a man about to say I told you so.

“That land is cursed,” he said.

I tried to disagree, though I don’t know why.

----------

Less than a mile up the road we passed a man walking.  He was tall and thin and covered in the dust of a long journey with a ratty backpack strapped to his back, and as we passed him I caught his reflection in the side mirror.

It was James, I knew it in my heart every bit as strongly as I knew it couldn’t be.

He was walking away from the hill, toward the west.  The way we were going.  And I swear on whatever holy relic you wish to place under my hand that he raised his head and met eyes with me in the mirror, and he smiled.

.

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today

.

[bookoffixedstars]

Still from "Not Reconciled" or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules by Jean-Marie Straub, 1965, based on the novel "Billiards at Half Past Nine" by Heinrich Böll. Kölner Literaturnacht.

source

[paranaturalpop]

I rate your pnat ships by how well they work as foils

I’m Professor Pops, welcome to Literature 405: comparing and contrasting in pnat ships. Love is in the air but all that really matters is narrative symmetry!

Mina and Agent Day (submitted by @anxanhh)

two women on missions who need a confidante. 

Mina is a calculating woman of science with a tender, vulnerable heart deep down that she guards. Day is a fun, giggly love goddess but beneath the surface she is just as calculating.  

They are both focused on their prospective goals to the point of subterfuge. 

They have similar missions, to solve the many mysteries of Mayview, but they’re at odds instead of working together. Will these lone wolves learn to let their walls down and work towards a common goal? 

Their spectral energies are complementary colors!!!!!!!!!!!! 

9/10 so different yet so alike. They should kiss and also develop as people.

Spendcia

Where's that post about paranatural having what my hero academia wants?

These two had interacted in cannon only once before we found out they were dating, power move on Zack’s part

The cousinhood and the consortium seem to have bad blood…. Enemies to lovers????

As teachers, Garcia is tired and phoning it in while spender is energetic and committed. But when it comes to mystery solving Spender is burning himself out while Garcia keeps him grounded.

Garcia does things like pack spender lunches with little hearts drawn on the bag but was surprised to be called his boyfriend. He acts chill but inside he is deeply invested in spender but also knows about spender’s isolating tendencies. 

8/10 there's a reason these two have been off and on again for 6ish years, they’re walking a tightrope of vulnerability.

Imaax (submitted by Rubyya)

The Destiel of Paranatural. No I will not elaborate.

Here’s a pnat history lesson, the original ship name was Maxaac, but Zack weighed in on twitter with a much better alternative: Imaax. Also sometimes called Team Lightning Rod. 

Black and blue colors, just like the emotional bruises they leave on the people around them. 

Isaac wants to be seen as heroic and Max wants to be seen as aloof. It presents in different ways but deep down they both really care what other people think.

They both fear sincerity. Isaac protects himself with theatrics and Max with sarcasm. 

Isaac puts on a big show of having strong ethics but he’s a little mean on instinct. Max puts on a big show of cutting people down with his snark and devil-may-care attitude, but when push comes to shove he’s kind and cares how other people feel. 

Max immediately insults every person he meets and they still want to be best friends with him, while Issac tries so hard to be cool and nice but people just can’t stand him. 

The meta tension between Isaac, who wants so badly to be the protagonist, and Max “magnetic personally” Puckett who is exhausted with being the protagonist, is delicious. 

There’s a reason official art tends to portray them together. They bring out the best in each other. Isaac brakes through Max’s performative pessimism and Max brings Isaac down to earth. 

10/10 these two were written as a pair and it shows.

Suzabel (submitted by Rubyya)

One of my fav tropes is ‘enemies to friends’ where the enemy part is completely one-sided. Isabel probably thinks she and Suzy get along great. 

Both the heads of their respective clubs, but with very different leadership styles. 

Isabel only studies her grandfather's spectral style to please him and is a near master of it, while Suzy is incredibly self-motivated even though her actual skills are lacking. 

Isabel is at a crucial time in her life where she’s learning to distance herself from adult authority figures in order to take on more personal responsibility. Suzy is already blazing with independence and could help her adjust. 

Inversely, Isabel could teach Suzy a thing or two about treating your club members with respect and doing the emotional labor necessary to prevent future conflict. 

Red and pink! Valentines colors! 

Isabel could kill you but would never, Suzy would actually try to kill you. 

Investigative reporter/person living mysterious double life is a great dynamic.

Back when Izzy had Eightfold they had the ship name ‘Paper Girls’ which is awesome

7/10 Don’t ask me how I know this but they would kill at karaoke together. And they’re ok foils.

Bullymagnet

Max ‘too cool for clubs’ vs a boy who defines himself by his tight knit group. 

Max is learning to be less passive aggressive and johnny is learning to be less aggressive aggressive. 

Max’s entry to spectral life was when he injured Johnny and saw a shade of a doctopi on him, and Johnny's first shade was Max's doctopi after the hit ball game. 

Johnny refuses to commit to not bullying max anymore even though he really likes him, and max is working on being nicer but he’s still gonna be snarky with people even though they’re his friends. Old habits die hard. 

If he hadn't seen that shade, Max might have joined Johnny's gang. He has the style, the stunts, the snark. 

8/10 Just two bros whose lives are changing forever.

Isaac and Dimitri (submitted by Rubyya)

Here’s my pitch for a ship name: Brainstorm

Orange and blue are complementary colors. 

Isaac hurt Dimitri accidentally somehow. Hurting others accidentally is the central theme of chapter 5. 

Idealist/pragmatist is a classic dynamic

They both have relationships with their spirit partners that are rooted in fear. 

Dimitri’s self concept is overly dependent on his sense of intellectual superiority, and Isaac’s on ethical superiority. 

7/10 have not directly interacted in the comic yet but the narrative symmetry is there

Johnny and Isabel (submitted by Rubyya)

Burnhound Vs Shockadile

These two are natural leaders who know how to treat their friends with respect.

These jocks are both lethal weapons, but while Isabel is a master martial artist, Johnny is a passionate but blunt instrument.

They’re both going through similar identity crises.

Isabel is struggling to reconcile her violent and disciplined upbringing with a good, gentle heart and Johnny is trying to reconcile his violent and self-centered lifestyle with a developing respect and empathy for other people.

Johnny dies his hair red, so he would think it’s cool how Izzy emits a fiery red aura when excited.

8/10 there's a reason these two were the team leaders in the hit ball arch.

Violet and Lisa (submitted by Rubyya)

People have been theorizing about what kind of cryptid Lisa is since day one meanwhile Violet gives off big normie energy.

Lisa is very plugged into all the Mayview weirdness as the queen of the school underground, while Violet was the only person who thought to go get a teacher during the hit ball arch. Lisa was also the only one who really spoke openly about how something was clearly very wrong with Jeff, everyone else talked around it and played by the so called ‘rules’. Lisa’s secret brokering Vs. Violet’s ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’ attitude presents two different approaches to trying to survive in a school run by a mysterious shadow organization within a town that contains several other mysterious shadow organizations.

“If you were, I’d have to be jealous too.” just two middle schoolers pinning over their crushes.

7/10 two girls against the world.

Isaac and Johnny

ship name: Firestorm?

Just 2 fiery redheaded mediums with anger management issues that command primal forces and wanna be best friends with max

Johnny chooses to have red spiky hair, Issac has had red spiky hair thrust upon him.

Both met Maxwell Pucket and decided they needed to change for the better.

I’ve said this before but Johnny and Issac have equal and opposite philosophies. Johnny doesn't care about the greater good, he just cares about a small group of people who he loves. Issac cares about the greater good, but can’t connect with individuals and ends up hurting them. Together they form one GoodTM boy.

Both their spirit partners want revenge on Spender. This spells trouble.

If there’s anyone to teach Isaac about unconditional friendship, it’s Johnny

Isaac has sworn off violence and Johnny worships at the altar of it.

9/10 they’ve only interacted in canon once so far but I’ve think we’ve got a big storm coming.

Suzy and Collin (submitted by Rubyya)

The Bakudeku of pnat. I will continue to not elaborate.

Suzy once stole Collin's phone which prompted Collin to try to cut her hair which prompted Suzy to stab Collin and at no point did either of them think to move to a different bus seat. As different as they are they are also very much the same.

Collin is the definition of mouth service (constantly disapproving of suzy’s antics but going along with it anyway.) while suzy is all action.

Despite their different attitudes they both seem genuinely passionate about the journalism club.

Fashion icons. Suzy’s sunglasses and legwarmers, Collins sweater vests and wrist bands, this duo could walk for Paris fashion week: middle school edition.

We’ve gotten an indication that Collin cares a lot about what Suzy thinks of him (taking off his wrist bands when she made fun of Max's) but we haven't gotten any sign yet that the feelings are mutual.

5/10 I think their story is yet to be told and we’ll get to know more about how they compare/contrast to each other in the future. Maybe brought on by Dimitri's betrayal?????

Cody and Isabel (Submitted by @a-bitchtm)

Cody is gay by WOG but that doesn't matter here since we are evaluating thematic compatibility, not romantic compatibility.

Red Vs. Blue

Izzy’s arch about stepping into her role as leader through communication and honesty contrasts Cody’s role as the secret class president. Izzy finally told Isaac the truth about the consortium, while Cody blatantly lied to max about being president.

Both seem to have generally good motivations and the skills/talent to back those motivations up.

Isabel is in the process of unlearning the ‘firm hand’ philosophy that she learned from her grandpa and Cody’s dad straight up tried to mind control him into murdering a toddler.

They were both taught to fall back on their capacity for violence and intimidation but those teachings conflict with the people they really want to be.

6/10 just two kids who are being led astray by authority figures trying to learn to be themselves.

Cody and Collin (Submitted by @gatortavern)

They both like vests.

Both beholden to blood thirsty predators

Collin is a journalist, Cody is a vampire/leader of the shadow government. It’s a huge power move on Cody’s part to hang out with Collin.

Cody’s support of his friends is enthusiastic while Collin would have you believe Suzy has kidnapped him.

4/10 they hang out for a reason but those reasons have yet to be fully developed

Isabel and Max (submitted by @Paranatural-goofiness)

They’re both people who have learned to put up walls to keep people out. Isabel through violence and intimidation, max through sarcasm and mockery. T

he other side of this is their mutual journey to let their walls down and connect with other people more genuinely, starting with each other.

Their search for acceptance and identity has led them both to become incredible athletes. Spectral fist martial arts = shred eagle stunts

As we saw in the hit ball game, Izzy faces things head on while Max is all about evasion. However we’ve seen how Izzy has actually learned to be evasive and guarded about her feelings while Max is a little more forthcoming.

8/10  Never has there been faster friends.

Isaac and Cody (submitted by Rubyya)

Drama kings

Isaac wants the likability Cody has.

Parallels of power: Isaac with power he didn't choose and cant control vs. Cody who also didn’t choose to have his power (elected), but wields it like an instrument.

Involuntary anime hair and involuntary glowing monster eyes

These two definitely both fall under the category of “lawful”.

I can see these two ending up on opposite sides of a conflict because they both have such rigid personal codes and an intense sense of duty.

I know I’ve been approaching almost all of these platonically but Isaac probably really wants a cool vampire boyfriend deep down

 7/10 Unstoppable force, meet immovable object. You two should watch anime together.

Hijack and PJ (submitted by @gatortavern)

They both wanna join the activity club so bad

Both have immature ideas about heroism and villainy. 

Both aspire to heroism while at the same time understanding that they aren't that yet and maybe never will be. 

They both, like many people in this comic, wanna be friends with max.  

5/10 Two supernatural babies who should play wii sports together

Stephen and Isaac (@Gatortavern)

Two boys who are easily overwhelmed

Lawful vs. chaotic

Isaac has enough secrets to give Stephen his conspiracy fix for a long time. 

In their own ways they both just want everything out in the open. 

Isaac is Stephen's dream, someone actually living a secret double life, and Stephen is Issac's dream, someone with a cool scar who would think he’s actually very interesting. 

5/10 these two are both very intense in their own way.

Johnny and Ed (Submitted by @theevilbrainman)

Two souls lost in the wind

Two people for whom friendship and loyalty is central to their character, and they’re both struggling with personal growth because of it. Johnny is afraid to change because his friends have always liked the person he already is, and Ed is struggling to even define himself outside of Isabel, the person he cares about the most. 

Both impulsive and uninhibited. 

They both live lives free from expectation. Johnny’s wild bully persona means no one is surprised by his antics or cruelty, while Grandpa Guerra doesn't really care if Ed takes up phantom fist like Isabel. He actually calls him a freeloader. Not having much expected of you can feel free but it’s also lonely and can warp your self-perception. 

6/10 these two crossed paths at exactly the right time.

I didn't cover every submission because even though only 9 people submitted you sent in 34 ships between you. Pnat’s fanbase is small but very dedicated. 

Honorable mentions: 

Johnny and clear sinuses, submitted by @gaul-the-unmitigated

Isaac and therapy, submitted by both @squidgeons and @somethingfishysgoingon

PJ and Johnny, submitted by @gatortavern, who seems to be under the impression that Johnny Would protect PJ and not destroy him just by breathing near him.

Day and Scabs, submitted by @gatortavern, because funny.

Special thanks to everyone who sent in ship between people who have never interacted in cannon, which was a lot of you. My eyes are opened now, so many possibilities.

#paranatural #pnat #q #ships #valentines #dr. zarei/agent day #imaax #spendcia #suzabel #bullymagnet #shipping #pnat spoilers

[seaquestions]

im sorry to the fetts, to anakin and obi-wan, but ive been thinking about quickswitch and sixshot’s story since before i got into star wars and ever since i saw the prequels i cant help it [copies homework but changes it as much as i can so its not similar] (long post ahoy)

anyway!! i started working on a lil comic script some time ago (which im not gonna finish anytime i bet but it still gave me Ideas). sixshot is taken prisoner by the autobots, and theyre gonna experiment on him to try and make their own six-changer. unfortunately sixshot wakes up, trashes the place and escapes before they could finish the full scope of the project but they did manage to create... a baby clone of sixshot (our boy, quickswitch). they get magnus/minimus to take care of the kid because a) not a lot of ppl have the clearance to know abt the project and he’s one of the few b) of the people who do know, he’s the only beastformer c) since he’s so dedicated to the cause, it would ensure that quickswitch grows up to be a loyal autobot, yes? so here. take care of this child.

things go wrong eventually. but for the time being minimus is an adequate dad to quickswitch, for someone who had zero prep or warning that he was going to care for sixshot’s baby clone. and they do love each other. minimus cares about the pup more than most things in life. maybe even more than properly filled paperwork. he has to be actually minimus way way more often too, and thats probably good for him and his identity issues. quickswitch‘s dad is minimus ambus, not ultra magnus. its a secret thats hard to keep, very hard now that he doesnt hide in the armour as often, but minimus follows the rules; not even his own pup can know.

and, naturally, quickswitch finds out. but not before he finds out the truth about his origins first. he’s a curious kid, yknow. and he’s different. people treat him different. nobody else is like him, he’s special. he’s going to grow up to become the hero of cybertron. (he’s going to grow up to become a weapon.) and it takes a little push from an anonymous message, telling him that he needs to know the truth. to know why he exists, and where he came from. and he sneaks around and finds out about the whole project, confronts his dad, and asks what other secrets have been kept from him and, well, the kid doesnt take well to being lied to his whole life. doesnt take well to the realisation that his whole purpose is to be used. he runs away, scratching the autobot insignia off his chest.

and as all this is happening, sixshot does his job, does his duty: committing acts of violence for the decepticon cause with indifference and existential loneliness. to someone like him, its a simple life. he’s been bored since he was born, really. he’s not had a challenge for a long time now. and unlike others he’s disinterested in fighting his fellow decepticons. whats the point, if they all end up in the same medbay? besides, he’d win anyway. he lets shockwave examine him, mess around and experiment, because what’s the point of saying no?

(shockwave found out about quickswitch very quickly, and decides to shelve the “cloning sixshot” project idea. if someone beat them to the punch, might as well not waste any resources. no, lets just take the already finished product, and make him think it was his idea too.)

quickswitch grows up, roams around the galaxy, unaffiliated. takes in a few bounties for cash, ends up making himself known against his will. well, its kinda hard to be inconspicuous when youre this big and you’ve got six altmodes, just like that very infamous decepticon, sixshot. quickswitch doesnt know if he wants to meet him. he’s afraid, a little bit. but he’s also so curious. think about it. thats his dad, right? well, his template at least. in his dreams, sixshot takes him under his wing and becomes his new mentor, maybe even recognises him as his son. in his nightmares, he is an autobot still, and he is pitted against the very person who he is made from, and he dies a brutal death. quickswitch still holds a grudge. he misses minimus but if he wants to stay, he’d have to rejoin the autobots, and he Does Not Want That. no telling how he’d be treated too.

minimus retreats into the armour. he’s ultra magnus nearly 24/7 now. he thinks about reaching out, of finding quickswitch and reconciling, but he’s afraid of being rejected. the magnus armour doesnt do anything against his son. its minimus who fucked up. he knows it, and he hates it. hates himself.

maybe they cross paths once in a while. but quickswitch just glares at ultra magnus’ face and walks away.

quickswitch gets swayed towards the decepticons. the idea of meeting sixshot is compelling, and as he grows into his own strength, he’s less and less scared, and more just curious, excited maybe. and he will meet him.

..... this is the part where im not quite sure how i want the story to go. the things that are definitely going to be a thing: quickswitch meets sixshot. sixshot is initially like “what the fuck” but slowly comes to like quickswitch. ultra magnus shows up at some point and all three have a confrontation. minimus and quickswitch reconcile, at some point. but idk what actually does happen??

either QS and 6S meet in a string of coincidences, or QS joins the decepticons? maybe?? i feel like either way QS is factionless by the end at least. thats just the vibe im getting. kinda wanna say “and then quickswitch gets two dads and they all live happily ever after” but ahh.... it just doesnt feel right for the tone of the story so far. but anyway thats what i got!!! the ending is!! not really there yet!! but ive been typing for like an hour so sksbjsjak im wrapping this up.

#incoherent turtle noises #long post #tf #sixshot #quickswitch #idk im tagging so i can come back to this easily