#The Harken Institute

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

the elitism in magic education

HELLO 🤡 I have come to you today with an analysis of Fellow Honest's motives and what they imply about the mages and non-mages in the world of Twisted Wonderland, as well as the state of magic education as it relates to one's social status. It's a doozy, so let's get right into it! ***WARNING: Spoilers for Stage in Playful Land!!***

Fellow's resentment of the elite harkens back to something I've always suspected but also something that Twisted Wonderland has seldom gone out of its way to shine a harsh spotlight on. That "something" is the discrepancy between the "haves" and the "have-nots" in terms of magic. With the main setting of TWST being a private magic school, of course the lens through which we view many events will be from this perspective as well... and that limits what we see and hear. Most of the NPCs we encounter (even the annoying ones, such as the Magicam Monsters from the first Halloween event) endlessly praise the NRC students just for attending a famous magic school. If we look closely though, we’ll start to see cracks in the shiny rose-colored lenses (which, coincidentally, is how Fellow’s UM name is written).

To begin with, we are told that only 10% of the human population (for the sake of argument, let's assume that most other races also have low magic rates) is even capable of magic to begin with. Of this 10%, the majority of people with the aptitude for magic only have enough to barely be able to lift a cup. In order to qualify for a prestigious magic school like Night Raven College or Royal Sword Academy, you'd literally have to be the cream of the crop and get lucky in terms of genetics. Magic cannot be learned by someone that was not born with the innate ability for it, and not everyone who is the child of a mage will be capable of magic themselves. This is already one HUGE barrier for entry. We now have more to consider.

Night Raven College is notably a private boarding school. This potentially means that students may need to pay a tuition fee for classes, room, and board. Perhaps this tuition doesn't exist, since NRC doesn't take applications but rather hand-selects its students. Additionally, NRC is based on a British school, and most European schools cost little to nothing to attend. However, it's hard to believe a school as fancy as NRC is a private institution that runs solely on the charity and goodwill of donors (though we do see Crowley happily accepting donations as well, specifically from the local town and from Kalim’s family). Realistically speaking, Stuff Costs Money, and if you Want Stuff, you also Need Money. NRC is not raising these mages of the future out of the goodness of their hearts, NRC is raising these mages because there is profit and prestige to be gained from the endeavor. What if there are students who are picked to go but end up having to leave because they can’t afford it?? This point is just speculative though; I won’t count it as actual evidence since there is no in-game lore which confirms tuition. We do know, however, that students do at least have to pay for their dorm uniforms, as Ruggie has mentioned he could not afford one—hence why he wears a hand/me-down from Leona. We also know students are on their own when it comes to paying for their food, as both Ruggie and Deuce mention being low on cash in reference to buying meals/snacks. Buuuuut even if we discount that money is a factor that gatekeeps some selected students from attending or having the cash to just get by on a daily basis, what we cannot ignore is that money inherently puts some people ahead of others before magic schools even recruit them.

Because the majority of those in Twisted Wonderland are incapable of using magic, magic is not typically included in general education. This means that if your kid manifests magic and you want them to be "ahead of the curve", you'd need to seek out resources for magic training and education. Now, this could mean reading materials, private tutoring, or reaching out to mages you know of. The problem with all of these things is that they tend to require money and/or connections, which are things not everyone has access to. Idia even says in book 6 that Riddle has an “artificially large” pool of magic due to how young Riddle started his magic training, meaning that the wealthy has the resources to just produce “better” mages. The rich also have more money to throw into items to help with magical training, such as bigger and better magestones (which must sell for substantial amount in the first place since Ruggie tries to save some to pawn off later in Vargas Camp) to keep mages healthier for longer (since magestones help absorb blot). This keeps power concentrated in an already elevated class. (Note: research has shown that money opens up and expands one's connections, which still puts the rich in an advantageous position compared to the less fortunate. There are also studies that show impoverished people who happen to have rich friends have a better chance of raising their own social standing just because of the doors and connections that rich friend can open for them.) Look at who in the main cast remarks on having formal magic training: literal royalty like Leona and the upper middle class like Riddle. Again, one could say that because schools like NRC appear to hand-pick students regardless of how much formal magic training they had prior to enrollment. However, the fact remains that it simply looks better to potential recruiters (using this blanket term because we don't know how magic schools besides NRC gets its students) and better prepares the child for magic school curriculum to get an early start on it.

Looking back at the 22 boys that make up the main cast, close to three-quarters or ~75% of them come from at least upper middle-class backgrounds and quite a few could classify as wealthy:

Riddle's parents are both doctors, with Riddle's mom in particular being well-known and well-regarded in their home community.

Cater's dad is a banker; his position is high enough up that he needs to relocate every so often (presumably to service their largest or most important firms).

Leona is a literal prince. Even if he isn't destined to be king, he still has access to the resources and wealth avaliable to a royal.

Azul's mom owns the most popular restaurant in the entire Coral Sea (have you seen how large the Coral Sea is on the world map???), and his stepdad is a lawyer.

The twins' family is said to be well-off; they are able to afford luxuries like fancy clothes and Mr. Leech stresses the importance of manners and presentation. He is implied to have business associates who are also well-off and would like to get in his good graces. (Popular fan speculation is that the Leeches are a crime family.)

Kalim is the heir to a massive family fortune and trading business. He also has relatives who are royals.

Jamil, as Kalim's attendant, is also from a reasonably well-off family; they are compensated handsomely for handling the Asims.

Vil's father is an A-list celebrity, and Vil is also one himself.

We don't know the specifics of what Rook's family does, but it must be well-paying, as we learn in book 5 that the Hunts have villas all over Twisted Wonderland, as well as permissions for international travel via warp pads.

Idia and Ortho's family run a secret organization that researches blot. S.T.Y.X. is so secretive that basically only those in super high positions like Crowley and Leona would know about them. Let's also not forget that the Shrouds have ties to the Jupiter Conglomerate and the Olympus Corp, which is a tech giant in the world of TWST.

Malleus is prince AND the heir to his kingdom’s throne. He is also one of the top 5 most powerful mages in the entire WORLD.

Lilia is a renown war general and a close friend of royalty. He raised a young Malleus as well.

Silver is Lilia's adopted son and is actually a prince himself.

Sebek's parents are dentists. They must make mad money. His grandfather is also a respected knight that served alongside Lilia.

Notice how all the dorm leaders are upper middle class or higher; the vice dorm leaders have ONE normal person (Trey); in Playful Land, Trey confesses to living a comfortable life so we know he must be at least middle class.

We can try to argue all we like that NRC doesn't discriminate based on social status for their selections, but if that's the case then why are so few of the main cast from impoverished or low-income families? Only Ace, Trey, and Jack count as squarely middle class. Ruggie is the only example we have of someone from a very low socioeconomic status rising up to be among "elites". The other example is Deuce, who comes from a single parent household and has implied they don't have a lot of money (for example: how the VDC/SDC earnings will help out his family). (Epel is kind of a ??? case because depending on where in the story you are, his family could be in financial trouble or not; in book 5, they imply his entire village is having difficulties selling product until Vil promotes Harveston apples on his Magicam.) Maybe it's unfair to say that 22 students out of 800ish is representative of the makeup of the entire NRC student population (or represents the composition of all magic schools), but Ruggie confirms in his Birthday Boy vignettes that a majority of the students at NRC are decently well-off. This single digit representation of low-income students is also true of real-life elite schools. They are private schools for a reason; it naturally gatekeeps who is and isn't "allowed" to attend, leading to the majority of its students being members of the elite.

Another thing to consider is legacy students. This term refers to the increased likelihood of people being accepted into a school if they had a relative that also attended that school. We know of two instances of this happening: Ace's brother and Sebek's brother also went to and graduated from Night Raven College. Ace even makes a remark during his sorting ceremony that he ended up in the same dorm as his older brother "as expected". If magic aptitude is genetic, then perhaps it makes sense to recruit from the same families--but again, this is inherently restrictive, as you would continuously be culling from the same pools generation after generation.

Back on the topic of bloodlines and family, what about Kalim, who has an extensive family? There will be no shortage of Asim mages going to NRC just because of legacy (Jamil even alludes to the fact that the previous Scarabia dorm leader was an Asim relative, and his recommendation is what got Kalim the dorm leader seat). And speaking of Kalim, consider instances where rich families are able to bribe faculty (lookin' at YOU, Crowley) or donate a large sum to get their kid ahead or to be given priority over others that may be more qualified than them (RIP Jamil). To continue off that point, NRC itself is structured as a "dog eat dog" world. Those with inherently more magical ability have the right to trump over others. You can duel and lose your dorm seat to a more powerful mage, even if you trump them in terms of merit or leadership qualities. Students feel a sense of duty to obey those who have bested them in battle (ie Epel's servitude to Vil). Everyone fears Malleus. Your magical power is respected above all else.

Attitudes surrounding magic have notably shifted from fear of it several hundreds of years ago (around the human-fae war, back when “witch” and “wizard” were used in a derogatory sense) to recognizing it for its strengths and actively seeking it or granting some favoritism to those who have it. There is, in fact, now class discrimination in based on whether or not you can use magic. We got an early instance of this as early as book 1 of the main story, when Riddle insults Yuu for their upbringing, lack of education, and their inability to use magic. It’s something that clearly rubs Ace, who has a magicless father, the wrong way, and he stands up for Yuu. There are other subtle hints about this divide sprinkled throughout the lore. For example, Ruggie has a voice line which he indicates that the slums where he comes from doesn’t produce many magic users. Again, recall that magic runs in bloodlines. This could potentially allude to a past where those without magic were forced into lower income neighborhoods, which results in pockets like Ruggie’s hometown with a high population of magicless individuals living in poverty. This doesn’t appear to be a large scale issue (perhaps its only an isolated case?), but this is worth paying attention to.

This could all translate into the professional world too. Some jobs are entirely locked behind magic (ie you just cannot do them or pursue them if you don't have the magical ability for it). Some jobs DO require magic (ie medical mages like Riddle's parents, magic police force officers, technomantic inventors, etc) and probably additional training that goes with it. As a result, I'd imagine that these magic-intensive jobs pay quite a bit more. There may also be overall more job opportunities for those capable of magic, since magic is so much more efficient than doing things by hand. It means more retention of wealth and/or more upward mobility for the few impoverished that are able to enter magic schools. (This is, of course, not including the few and far between cases of regular people who get rich in select industries, such as Kalim’s father.) Recall too that NRC requires its students to take internships during their 4th years, many placements being with very prestigious groups and organizations such as pro-sports teams, labs, tech giants, etc. Being able to attend a prestigious school with connections grants those elite students even more opportunities than the average person.

Then think about what this means for people who fall short of these standards that these magic schools set. We actually have examples of them in book 5 of the main story: when Deuce and Epel are reconciling on the beach, a bunch of delinquents from another school come along and start checking out Deuce’s borrowed magical wheel. Through the NPCs’ exchange, we learn that one of them has enough magic to power a magical wheel, but not enough to do much else. This NPC also couldn’t keep up in class and dropped out of a magic school. He then becomes insulted when Deuce implies he is “a beginner”, so this is obviously a very sore spot for him. Riddle also has dialogue that implies students dropped out of NRC prior to his reign (and since then, no Heartslabyul students have left). Additionally, consider how magic can be used to oppress and lord power over others. Deuce himself is guilty for summoning cauldrons to crush rival delinquents in fights back in Clock Town—even if those delinquents lacked magic themselves. Similarly, Epel is implied to use magic to gain an upper hand against those that bullied him back home. This all implies a social divide between those with magic and those without, and begs of bigger questions.

What happens to the ones that don’t make it? The ones that get left behind? The ones without the magic to make it “big”? This is the root of Fellow’s anger; he’s mad at a system that cast people like him (someone with very little magic) and Gidel (a non-mage) aside. They don’t get the opportunity to make better futures for themselves. They’re looked down on by high-up institutions that basically tell them they’re not good enough.

Knowing all of this, the deck appears to be stacked against the poor and non-mages. It’s no wonder why Fellow is so mad.

THIS ACTUALLY RELATES BACK TO WHAT ROLLO SAID IN 5-2 OF GLORIOUS MASQUERADE… "When you have too little [magic], you're resentful. And when you have plenty [of magic], you're arrogant. You can never content yourselves." The NRC boys are arrogant (this is the side of the story we’ve always known due to seeing the world mainly from their perspective). They are the “haves”, and we see them constantly misusing their power by fighting each other over very petty things (even if it’s against the rules to do so). But everyone else??? They’re scrounging for the scraps. Fellow falls into that former category; he IS the guy that’s resentful because of his lack of magic and how something he cannot control has already determined where he and Gidel will stand in life no matter how hard they work. They can never hope to rise out of poverty, and there’s nothing they can do about it. That must be soul-crushing.

When Fellow praises the NRC boys in that overly exaggerated way, he’s obviously being shady and facetious—however, there is also a kernel of truth behind this behavior. Most other NPCs we’ve met have spoken about the NRC boys favorably just because of their affiliation with a prestigious school. It’s the same way people might be impressed if you walked around in an Ivy League branded hoodie or something. People automatically associate you with the school’s shiny and exclusive reputation, and thus assume you are also intelligent, talented, etc. Then, in the same way being constantly put on a pedestal like this might result in the students getting swelled heads, this only further feeds into the NRC kids’ egos. They so privileged they don’t even recognize it. And that makes Fellow fucking FUME.

Look back at Fellow's dialogue. He is constantly mentioning the prestige of the school the boys go to, or adding on extra compliments about their status and skills. He's ass-kissing to his boss, who is also wealthy or part of the upper class, then insults the boss once he hangs up. Fellow is always in a position where he HAS to be subservient to the upper class in order to make his money and get by, and he finds that entirely unfair. Imagine having to simper and placate people you absolutely despise and blame for your problems every day, people who are gorging themselves on luxuries, coasting by in life, taking everything they have for granted while you get by on pennies—that has to get frustrating.

I want to briefly mention here that, in addition to praising the NRC students to high heaven, Fellow also talks down his own skills. He cheerfully calls himself a loser and says that no matter how much he trains, he could never reach their caliber of magic. Yes, Fellow is exaggerating to get the kids to think they’ve won, but I also have to wonder if he’s parroting the same phrases he was told long ago, from people who doubted him and never thought he’d make it. If that’s the case, then I get the sense that Fellow is in a way “reclaiming” his autonomy and power by adopting those same cruel words and using them as a strength. He admits to being “weak” but is also proud of the fact that he can utilize his magic along with his natural charisma to get a leg up over others. It further fuels his new belief that going to an elite school doesn’t matter, it’s practical skills that will serve you well.

Okay, back to talking about his shitty work situation! Fellow’s employer clearly doesn’t treat him with decency. They berate him, make unreasonable demands, act impatient, etc. They are a typical depiction of a toxic workplace and boss. This can also be read as shorthand for the relation between the rich and the poor, and how that may have shaped (or worsened) Fellow’s views on others of the privileged class. He makes many assumptions about the NRC students without really getting to know them, calling them entitled brats. Why? Because these descriptors likely apply to the higher-ups Fellow has always slaved away for. This, in combination with his own experiences in being rejected from magic academia, has created a person who feels trodden on by society and by the upper echelons who run it and benefit off the system.

Fellow himself is the perfect example of someone who was failed by said system. He has dialogue stating that he was never given the chance to learn because his magic was not considered strong enough. Still, he tried to make an effort to earn that chance among to elites and to study among them. Fellow was rejected, ridiculed, and told he had “forgotten his place”, what he had been born into. There were expectations he couldn’t meet, and so Fellow was thrown away like a broken toy. He has failed not because he didn’t try, but because he was denied the opportunity to begin with. This is where is rage stems from. Fellow despises the students of those same kinds of institutions who kicked him down, students who don’t realize how fortunate they are for their educations and will likely continue to perpetuate the system.

What, then, does that means for his signature spell, which is closely tied to one’s identity? Let’s take a magnifying glass to it. As previously mentioned, the name for Fellow’s spell is written as “Rose-Tinted Dream”, but it is said out loud as “Life is Fun”. The chant for it is, “Come on to the theater” (notably said in English rather than in Japanese). Both the spell and the incantation are references to the song Honest John sings in Pinocchio, Hi- Diddle-Dee-Dee. And… well, the whole UM in of itself is one big cruel joke given his circumstances now.

I think this spell is representative of a young Fellow still full of hopes and dreams, looking forward to studying at a magic school. But then those dreams are shattered and he has to commit terrible crimes to survive day-to-day, and he seems to have given up on his dreams. He even goes so far as to protect Gidel from having the same hopes he once did, telling Yuu to not put silly ideas in his head when Gidel expressed curiosity about school. At the same time, he delights in crushing the hopes of those he deems his enemies (stating that he wanted to betray Kalim to “teach him a lesson” about how cruel the world is). Fellow knows the truth: that life isn’t fun, that it will disappoint you and will put you down. His actions are very cowardly as well—he uses tricks and deception, he runs away from his problems instead of properly addressing them, the NRC students remark on his lack of pride. Fellow has had to throw away so much to scrape by. Yet his UM symbolizes someone brimming with hope—so perhaps it’s a UM he manifested when Fellow still thought he had a chance?? And then people made fun of him for it being so weak?? Alternatively, maybe he didn’t get his UM until after his dreams were crushed so he’s looking back on those nostalgic days of blissful ignorance with rose-colored lenses (which is, again, maybe why his UM magic name is written as “Rose Tinted Dream”). A UM that is a reflection of one’s true self, yet that same identity is one that has been forced to be discarded. That’s the reason why, despite all the swindling and scamming, I don’t think Fellow’s enthusiasm for fun is a lie. That’s the one “real” part of him, but even that’s been repurposed to help him live on scraps, something innocent twisted 😭 and that’s really sad to think about…

But also??? You could argue that Fellow still has a little bit of that lost inner child and hope left in him. He tries to defend Gidel’s understanding of the world and has goals of starting his own school despite how poorly he originally spoke about these institutions. (So Fellow does appear to care about children and their futures.) He also has a childish streak despite being an adult, demonstrated by his use of cowardly tactics, taunting kids, and abruptly quitting his job to then destroy his workplace. Fellow himself states that he “just tries to live a free and fun life”, thus his pursuit of money and pleasure. This could all play into being what defines Fellow and thus his UM. It embodies a spirit of playfulness even when he has been crushed under the weight of an unglamorous life.

I’ve heard people saying that while Rollo is Idia’s dark mirror and Fellow is Ruggie’s. They have similar backstories but ultimately their fates are different and left the former two down far more sinister paths. Just as Rollo is an Idia that turned his anger outward instead of inward, Fellow is Ruggie had he not been given a chance to receive an education to elevate his social status and job prospects. Fellow and Ruggie both cling to rich, powerful benefactors/bosses and do their dirty work to get on by—a big difference is that Leona, while he does also work Ruggie to the bone, also has some conscience. Something else to consider is that while Ruggie prioritizes making a life for himself by studying and securing a stable, well-paying job, Fellow is focused moreso on the accumulation of wealth itself (as he suggests to Kalim he’ll take a bribe to let him go free and quits when there is no longer money to be gained from his boss). Both don’t really care how they get their money (even if it is by dirty means), but ultimately Ruggie’s way of making cash is more sustainable in the long run. Yet Fellow ultimately realizes the importance of school deep down despite constantly denying it when the NRC students tell him of it. Fellow is in denial because that’s the only way he can cope and justify his lifestyle. He’s confused when finally confronted with students who are his ideal of “happy and free”, even when they’re in an educational system that he views as shackling people into strict roles. The way he laments about not being able to go to school is also very reminiscent of an adult mourning a lost or unfulfilling childhood, which is quite a depressing scenario…

Fellow is the one that got the short end of the stick in life. Ruggie met Leona, and Leona technically uplifted him in his endeavors, tutored him into getting decent grades and giving him hand-me-downs and money in exchange for his services. Fellow never had that kind of support system, he was just insulted and bullied into giving up and had to find an alternative way to keep himself going 😔

Personally, I think Fellow could also be a dark mirror to Kalim, no?? They exist on opposite ends of a social spectrum. Kalim has everything and Fellow had nothing. What’s more, Kalim is still wide-eyed and trusting. He is the only one willing to try words instead of fighting him and instantly labeling him as the enemy. Meanwhile, Fellow has become bitter because of how the world has betrayed him. He wants to take that trust Kalim has and show him how cruel everything truly is. Why is he fixated on that? Why even offer in the first place if he never intended on going through with it? Why does he want to rub it in Kalim’s face in particular? Maybe it’s because Kalim seems rich and dumb, as Fellow claims, but maybe it’s because there is envy there. Sure, Fellow is upset about Kalim being a sheltered brat that faces no challenges in life, but I also feel like he’s jealous that Kalim can still afford to think this way. That he can still afford to be cheerful, that he can still be a dreamer. Fellow was alluded to be like that once—but he can’t be like that anymore, not when he has to look out for himself and Gidel.

Side note, another comparison! Recall that Kalim’s Oasis Maker is also a UM that uses a little bit of magic. However, Kalim does not know of many creative ways to use his spell, as there is no real reason to since his home country has lots of canals and irrigation. He therefore deems his UM as pretty useless. Fellow meanwhile has what most consider a weak UM but he fully utilizes it to his advantage and pairs it well with his natural charm to maximize its effects. He had to develop these skills because he was in pressing circumstances in which they would benefit him. This contributes to the “mirror” theme between the two.

Fellow and Kalim have a notable similarity as well, and this is where I feel they can connect. They are both older brothers to a child or children who are magicless. Fellow only has one, and Kalim has many—but the number here isn’t what is important. What is important is that Fellow and Kalim think the world of their siblings and want to support them. To that end, Fellow is willing to be cruel and step on others, and Kalim is all sunshine to keep their spirits up. Fellow has suffered through great poverty and insults and Kalim has survived so many attempts on his life, yet they’ve developed distinctly different approaches to the worlds that have embraced them. Kalim’s wealth could afford him protection and luxuries, so he’s able to live carefree with others tending to his needs. The same isn’t true for Fellow, and so he came out far more spiteful and resentful.

Thinking about it, it’s ultimately Kalim’s words that convince Fellow to turn on his employer. (The other boys certainly wore Fellow down and planted the seeds of doubt, but it’s Kalim that I believe fully resonates with Fellow.) He can so happily talk about why he loves school, even though he doesn’t do well at it (something I presume is also true of Fellow, since he is lacking in tons of magic). It’s not said in a particularly articulate manner, but it’s so candid in its presentation. Kalim is relating to him based on similar skillset (or lack thereof) and sharing fond memories of his time at school, reviving the hopeful “lost child” in Fellow. Kalim is probably the first wealthy person in a long time that was friendly, kind, and supportive to him. And here he is, reassuring Fellow his dreams are still possible, to not give up. That’s the final nail that allows Fellow to be “honest” with himself and his inner child. It’s what leads to that slew of irresponsible actions at the end of the event (letting people free, blasting the amusement park, driving a sinking ship, etc.).

At the end of Stage in Playful Land, we see that Fellow never really let that childlike side of him fully die. (It seems to have been concealed under a desire for money and appeasing his boss.) He shares his dream of creating his own great school to give educational opportunities to non-mages and mages with low magical reserves like Gidel and himself, a school that teaches practical life lessons. He wants to promote his own ideals and to change the system he hates from the inside out. This was never communicated to us before most likely because Fellow had renounced those ideas in favor of blind hatred and a lack of faith in the world and those that dominate it.

Fellow also acknowledges that life may be even more difficult for him and Gidel going forward, as now they lack the money for even food and no longer have jobs. Furthermore, they need to worry about their ex-employers coming after them for what they’ve done. Even so, Fellow faces it all with a smile and reassures everyone that they can transfer or visit to play… “on this shining stage called life”. He and Gidel are able to walk away with their whimsy preserved, and can still be that which they’ve always wanted to be: dreamers.

All of this is to say that Rollo was right all along about magic, he never misses—

#twst #twisted wonderland #Fellow Honest #twisted wonderland analysis #twisted wonderland character analysis #twst analysis #twst character analysis #Ferro Honest #Rollo Flamme #Gidel #Gidell #disney twisted wonderland #notes from the writing raven #spoilers #Dire Crowley #Heartslabyul #Savanaclaw #Octavinelle #Scarabia #Pomefiore #Ignihyde #Diasomnia #Yuu #Ruggie Bucchi #Kalim Al-Asim #Jamil Viper #Pinocchio #Honest John #Riddle Rosehearts #Ruggi Bucchi

[centrally-unplanned]

Richard Hanania is one of my poster child writers for the "he is an complete idiot and also very smart" genre. I disagree with him on virtually everything, particularly core beliefs, but he nonetheless is an actual critical thinker who will come up with and explore interesting ideas, and so he is valuable to follow for exposure to good discussion from a world you are otherwise not gonna touch (and for a good laugh the other half of the time).

This is definitely one of those posts - the US right (not that the left is immune to this by any stretch, this is just about the right) is so infused with an instinct towards perpetual victmization that it becomes easy to buy into their own framing that the Right has been losing front after front in the culture war. This is the foundational premise of The Cathedral, the Moldbug-coined New Right tenet that "Cthulhu Always Swims Left" aka the left's structural advantage in controlling ~institutions~ means that in status-quo modernity culture will shift left over and over, endlessly...and therefore you need to violently overthrow the state and purge the corrupt neoliberal bureaucratic order to realize the will of the silent volke embodied in a CEO-Monarch to turn back the tide. Anyway, Hanania does a good job of pointing out that its really kinda bullshit. Tons of our culture has turned right over the past decades; gun control, education, and economics are the big topics that he mentions, and of course more exist, and its been a result combinations of public opinion shifting and the power of the state implementing agendas, aka normal politics.

Some of this is a bit of an overstatement - victories on like abortion for example haven't shifted minds, but instead exploited the US's ludicrous legal system to back-door legislative reform through the courts, its not a replicable experience in many other contexts or any other country. But the point overall stands, which gestures at the real problem - the only topic where the New Right's analysis 'holds up' is onthe sexual revolution and queer rights, revealing a movement irrationality obsessed with the sex front of the culture war. Here Hanania stumbles into his stupidity on why the right hasn't been successful fighting this, not really grappling with the fact that for example gay marriage is just really popular, this is a bottom-down fundamental sea change in how people view sex and society's role in policing it.

The mistake The Cathedral devotees make in analyzing society is that they take a single sip from a branch of the river of History and assume they have drunk it dry; Society swam left from 1950 to 1980, and the New Right cannot help but obsess endlessly over that transition as The Future. Note how common this is - so many people harken to "the 1950's" as the steady-state idyll of American society, the American economy, identify as 'traditional' everything from holiday songs to food recipes that were all invented around this time and have no older origin than that. Its all myths, and The Cathedral is an extension of that trend - by identifying US society in 1950 as a centuries-old continuity of tradition, it sees the changes of the ensuing decades as a radical discontinuity, and therefore a terrifying new normal.

It is wrong the same way nostalgia-memes are wrong; history never had a steady state, and people's ideas of even the 1950's themselves are primarily myth. Turns out historical conceptions of queer relationships have varied widly across time and space - none have been as progressive as today, but societally sanctioned spaces for queer relationships are legion. There has never been a steady state on sex and society.

But! Modernity *is* different from the past, and certain things have changed irrevocably - there is a verison of The Cathedral that is true. Technology & economic development have radically changed how we lived, from a society of farmers and their rulers to a society of urban professional workers. Cultural norms around sex & society varied all over the place; but (to radically simplify, there are a bunch of other factors) marriage for children to work the farms was near-universal, it was a structural necessity culture was built upon. This was a harsh limiter on sexual norms - said marriage for children needed to undergird it. That limiter is gone, forever, today. To not dive into it because its not the focus, with the limiter gone I don't think the 'sexual revolution', feminism, and queer rights is going to revert in a major way in the future.

Which will permit the right, as long as it stays maniacally obsessed with the idea that people don't have 1950's sexual morality anymore, to claim that they Always Lose. This is why Hanania stumbles, making the opposite mistake - seeing the failure to fight the sexual revolution as just a failed southern offensive in comparison to a successful northern attack on the front of education. The real trap is to not understand that culture is not freely malleable, only some of it is 'up for grabs' from the perspective of activists. Within the new status qup equilibrium of modernity, shifts right and left are not only possible but inevitable - but the rules of game have to be understood. Hanania may have only gotten halfway there, but props to him for opening my eyes to the contradiction.

[haggishlyhagging]

“Obviously, the increasing importance of keeping private property within the family spurred the development of concubinage as an institution for the preservation of patriarchal property relations. A couple's childlessness, with its implications of loss of property in the male line, could be remedied by bringing a concubine into the household. A Babylonian sales contract reads as follows:

In the 12th year of Hammurabi, Bunene-abi and his wife Belessunu bought Shamash-nuri from her father for the price of five shekels of silver. . . . To Bunene-abi she is a wife and to Belessunu she is a slave.

What is of particular interest here is that the concubine serves a dual function: she performs sexual services for the master, with the knowledge and consent of the wife, and she is a servant to the wife. This differs greatly from the relations between first and succeeding wives in many polygamous societies, in which the status of second and third wives is co-equal with that of the first wife. Each wife and her children are entitled to certain rights, to a separate dwelling place, to economic and sexual obligations the husband must fulfill in such a way as not to violate the rights of any wife. Thus, the nexus between sexual servitude to the master and economic service to the wife seems to be a distinguishing feature of concubinage under patriarchy.

The Biblical narratives of Genesis, composed between 1200 and 500 B.C., reflect a social reality similar to that described in the Babylonian sales contract (ca. 1700 B.C.).

The childless, aging Sarai urges Abram to have intercourse with her maidservant Hagar:

And Sarai said unto Abram: ‘Behold now, the Lord hath restrained me from bearing; go in, I pray thee, unto my handmaid; it may be that I shall be builded up through her.’ And Abram harkened to the voice of Sarai.

Similarly, Rachel urges her husband Jacob:

Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; that she may bear upon my knees, and I also may be builded up through her.

There are several underlying assumptions implicit in these accounts: a slave woman owes sexual services to her mistress's husband, and the offspring of such intercourse counts as though it were the offspring of the mistress. All women owe sexual services to the men in whose household they live and are obliged, in exchange for ‘protection,’ to produce offspring. If they cannot do so, their female slave property may substitute for them, in the same way that a man may pay a debt by pledging the labor of his slave to the creditor. The dependent status of the ‘free’ wife is implicit in Sarai's pathetic statement ‘it may be that I shall be builded up through her.’ The barren woman is considered faulty and worthless; only the act of bearing children will redeem her. Rachel, before offering Jacob her handmaiden, exclaims, ‘give me children, or else I die.’ When at last ‘God harkened to her, and opened her womb,’ she said, ‘God hath taken away my reproach.’ No clearer statement of the reification of women and of the instrumental use of wives can be made.”

-Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy

#gerda lerner #patriarchy #concubinage #female oppression #female slavery #reproductive slavery

[jasminewalkerauthor]

Trope chats: Dark academia

Dark Academia, a cultural aesthetic and literary genre, has surged in popularity in recent years, captivating audiences with its blend of intellectualism, mystery, and darkness. This essay delves into the evolution, appeal, defining features, and potential pitfalls of Dark Academia in literature and media, exploring its cultural significance and enduring allure.

Dark Academia finds its roots in gothic literature and classical themes, drawing inspiration from works such as Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and Edgar Allan Poe's macabre tales. However, its modern incarnation began to take shape in the early 20th century with novels like "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt and "Brideshead Revisited" by Evelyn Waugh. These works introduced themes of intellectualism, elitism, and moral ambiguity set within academic institutions.

Dark Academia's appeal lies in its romanticization of academia, coupled with elements of mystery, rebellion, and existential angst. Its depiction of ivy-covered campuses, candlelit libraries, and passionate debates evokes a sense of nostalgia and longing for a bygone era. Moreover, its exploration of complex characters grappling with ethical dilemmas and existential questions resonates with audiences seeking depth and introspection in their media consumption.

Defining Features of Dark Academia:

Academic Setting: Dark Academia often unfolds within prestigious educational institutions such as universities, boarding schools, or libraries, emphasizing the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual discovery.

Aesthetic Sensibility: Characterized by vintage fashion, classical architecture, and atmospheric landscapes, Dark Academia embraces a nostalgic and timeless aesthetic that harkens back to eras past.

Themes of Morality and Mortality: Dark Academia delves into moral ambiguity, existential angst, and the inevitability of death, exploring the darker aspects of human nature and the human condition.

Intellectualism and Obsession: Protagonists in Dark Academia are often portrayed as intellectuals or artists consumed by their pursuit of knowledge, creativity, or a particular obsession, leading to ethical dilemmas and personal crises.

Rituals and Traditions: The genre frequently incorporates rituals, traditions, and secret societies, adding an element of mystery and intrigue to the narrative.

While Dark Academia offers a compelling exploration of intellectualism and existential themes, it is not without its pitfalls. Critics argue that it romanticizes elitism, perpetuates harmful stereotypes, and glorifies toxic behavior such as substance abuse, self-destructive tendencies, and elitist attitudes. Moreover, its emphasis on aestheticism and nostalgia may overshadow deeper social and political issues, leading to a superficial engagement with complex themes.

In recent years, Dark Academia has experienced a resurgence in literature, film, television, and social media, fueled by platforms like Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok. Contemporary works such as "If We Were Villains" by M.L. Rio and "Ninth House" by Leigh Bardugo have brought the genre to new audiences, blending elements of mystery, fantasy, and psychological suspense. Additionally, films like "Dead Poets Society" and "The Magicians" series have further popularized Dark Academia's themes and aesthetic sensibility, cementing its status as a cultural phenomenon.

Dark Academia stands as a multifaceted genre that explores the intersection of intellect, morality, and mortality within academic settings. Its evolution from gothic literature to a modern cultural aesthetic reflects a timeless fascination with the pursuit of knowledge and the darker aspects of human nature. While its appeal lies in its romanticization of academia and exploration of existential themes, Dark Academia also faces criticism for its potential to glorify elitism and toxic behavior. Nevertheless, its enduring allure continues to captivate audiences, ensuring its place in the literary and cultural landscape for generations to come.

#writeblr #writers of tumblr #writing #bookish #booklr #fantasy books #creative writing #book blog #ya fantasy books #ya books #fiction writing #how to write #writers #am writing #fantasy writer #female writers #story writing #teen writer #tumblr writers #tumblr writing community #writblr #writer problems #writer stuff #writerblr #writers community #writers life #writers corner #writers on tumblr #writerscommunity #writerscorner

[heich0e]

okokok but but consider this - suna as your brother's best friend/ best friend's brother

tags: f!reader, tw age difference, tw size difference (he's a big boy!!), one (1) use of nii-chan in a decidedly suggestive way, suna's a bit of a creep but in like a genuine weirdo way not the pervert way (or is it...)

Ever since high school when he was scouted by Inarizaki, Suna has made two trips back to Aichi prefecture each year to visit his maternal grandparents.

Your brother, his childhood best friend since kindergarten, has always looked forward to his visits home.

You? Not as much.

It's not that you necessarily dislike Suna Rintarou, he's just... your brother's weird friend. Always quiet. Maybe a little irritating when you think about the way he and your brother used to tease you--pulling faces and calling you a baby by virtue of the fact that they happened to be born six years ahead of you. But there was always enough of an age difference between you that the three of you were just never particularly close.

To you he's just some guy who used to make fun of the training wheels on your little pink bicycle.

And to him you're just his friend's kid sister.

"Did I tell you Suna went pro?" Your brother asks as the two of you sit at the low table that serves as the centre point of the living room in your family's home. The kotatsu's quilt has been packed away for the warmer months of the year, and the heater is left off. "He plays in the v-league now for EJP Raijin."

You're sharing a plate of fruit your mother has prepared for you to share in celebration of having both her adult children back under her roof for a few weeks: you, home from college for a portion of your summer break, and your brother home for 9 days on what is doubling as a business trip for his work--though he has no work obligations today if his baggy shorts and faded graphic t-shirt are any indication.

"Yeah, only about eighty times," you say with a roll of your eyes, popping a piece of sliced peach into your mouth. "Why would I care, anyway?"

"I just think it's kinda cool," your brother says excitedly. "Little Rin in the big leagues."

"He's been taller than you since you were nine," you mutter around the piece of fruit stuffed in your cheek.

Your brother curls his lip at you in petty offence, and you respond with a wide, blithe smile.

"He might even be scouted for the national team, y'know," your brother supplies uselessly as you reach for a ruby red strawberry, as though that might be the bit of trivia that sparks your interest. "He'd be going to the olympics."

"The olympics are a frivolous, antiquated spectacle riddled with corruption, that fosters needless overspending, and that continues to platform harmful autocracies as legitimate political powers. The entire institution should have been abolished years ago," you reply, punctuating the sentiment by shoving the entire berry held between your fingers into your mouth.

Your brother blinks at you blankly.

"What the hell are they teaching you at that school of yours?" he asks with an incredulous shake of his head as he pushes himself up from the kotatsu, shuffling off towards the kitchen as he grumbles something about socialism.

"It's called critical thinking, you should try it sometime!" you call after him, but your mouth is still full so you doubt he understands it.

You're left picking around the plate of fruit idly, the warm summer breeze blowing through the open patio doors at the back of your childhood home that lead out onto the covered porch.

The air is heavy with humidity, the kind of atmospheric pressure that harkens an impending storm. The sky has been grey and ominous for the better part of the morning, with the immediate forecast calling for rain. You lean forward with a sigh, resting your cheek against the cool tabletop, wondering when the first drops will fall and the insufferable humidity might finally break.

You let your heavy eyelids flutter shut.

A sharp pain between your eyes is what rouses you from your impromptu nap some time later, though you aren't sure you drifted anywhere past the periphery of consciousness.

You furrow your brow, but the pain is still present. Persistent.

You peel your eyes open, lashes fluttering as you will your bleary gaze to focus, only to see Suna Rintarou standing above you, poking you in the forehead with one long finger.

"You sleep like the dead," he says dryly.

"Oh my GOD!" you yelp, sitting up so abruptly that you actually end up falling back gracelessly onto your ass. You'd been kneeling at the kotatsu, and your legs have fallen asleep, pins and needles prickling through to your feet. "What the HELL, Suna-san!" you bark, cheeks flaring hot as you glower up at him.

"It's actually kind of concerning," he remarks, ignoring your indignation. "Took you like five whole minutes of poking to even crack an eye."

"God, you're so weird," you hiss, rubbing your legs to stimulate blood flow back to your extremities--possibly a little more vigorously than you need to.

"Nice to see you too," he says, expression neutral but eyes alight with a familiar mischief.

"What are you even doing here?" you ask, kneading your thumbs into the plush of your thighs. The hem of your sundress is rumpled from the strange position you'd been napping in, you can't help but notice as you stare down at your lap. You wonder how you'll be able to get the creases out.

"Here to see your brother," the boy above you replies simply, like it should be obvious.

"Well, where is he?" you ask, looking around the room. There's no sign of your brother anywhere, and the house is eerily quiet.

"Not sure, I just got here." Suna shrugs impassively.

"He didn't let you in?" you ask, confused.

"No, I came in through the back," Suna says, nodding towards the open patio doors. You'd forgotten for a moment that Suna hasn't used your family's front door since... well, ever.

"How long were you standing in here watching me sleep?" you ask him sullenly.

"Just long enough to snap this," Suna says, holding up his cellphone were a photo of you slumped against the tabletop lights up the screen.

"Delete that," you order him.

"Don't think I will," he says, clicking the button on the screen to lock the device, the screen going black.

"Suna-san, I swear to fucking god." You force yourself up onto your unsteady legs, taking a step towards him. "Delete it."

"Language," Suna chides you flatly with a click of his tongue, blinking down at you.

Christ, when did he get so.... so...

Big?

He's always been taller than you, but the sheer breadth of him now. The way he towers over you. Looms over you in a way that seems to take up your entire line of sight. It's unexpected and a little off-putting.

But size-difference aside, you're not ready to give up.

"Delete. It," you repeat yourself firmly, reaching for the device he's still holding up in his hand.

You stumble forward on your next step in his direction, your circulation still not quite what it should be, and it sends you toppling straight into the very man you were making every effort to intimidate.

But for all Suna's strength, he's not expecting it, and the two of you end up toppling back across the couch behind him--you resting on top of him and him sprawled on his back.

You pick yourself up slightly, jarred by the sudden fall, using your hands against his firm chest to lift yourself up and look at him.

He's peering down at you when your gazes meet, his dark hair ruffled from the ordeal, his eyes scanning your face.

"Sorry, Suna-san," you say, quiet and embarrassed. You move to push yourself up off his chest, only to notice that his hand is on the small of your back, keeping you there.

"What happened to Rin-nii?" he murmurs, so quietly you almost miss it.

You make a confused, flustered sound.

"Er, well,"--you shift away slightly and this time he lets you go, his hand falling onto the sofa without protest as you rest back on your knees between his parted legs--"we aren't kids anymore."

Suna peers at you, his tongue peeking out from between his lips to swipe across them. Your eyes follow the motion without thinking, flickering up to his when you realize what you've done. Your hands curl in your lap, fisting the material of your rumpled skirt.

"No," he says, and the implication of his words makes something skitter hot and fizzling down your spine, "we aren't, are we?"

Thunder rumbles in the distance, and you feel the way the sound shakes the earth. The sudden shift.

The skies outside the patio doors open, and it begins to pour.

#suna rintarou x reader #suna rintarou x you #suna rintarou #suna x you #suna x reader #hq drabble #hq writing #writing

[gwen-writes]

The Fool

i was tagged by @purdledooturt to do WIP wednesday and here i am! i had the idea for a postgame ascended astarion fanfic, but with my own little twist, lol. here is the first chapter!

Summary: With no other options left to expend, Tav implemented a temporary solution. If the Vampire Lord could not be killed or saved, they would have to dull his strength - severely. And unfortunately, there is a ranger in Faerûn who is naive enough, kind enough, to feel bad for him.

Word count: 2.2k

Pairing: Ascended Astarion x Ranger!Female OC, but he's cursed to be a bat, because it's funny

-

The woods communicate, the soil must feel. Eyes etched into the bark of oaks, ears tucked into leaves. A hidden pact between the forest and wolves, roaches, beasts. It all sang to her, the tune that had been ingrained in her blood since birth. Pyryeva ran over her memories of lycanthropes in her head: the followers of Urdlen she had come across and slain, the petulant werecats clawing at her ankles in the defense of Shar, the wereboar who rammed into her tent and could not be convinced to just talk it out.

In fact, she often preferred to just convince creatures to leave - to stop harassing villages, or trampling beloved buildings. Other people found her a bit odd, something foreign and drifting behind her eyes that must have uneased acquaintances. But animals… understood. Scaled, hairy, or vicious, they paused to listen all the same. 

And so this troop of lycanthropes, she prayed to Ilmater, would stop their ravaging and just listen. Her passing through the Wood of Sharp Teeth was meant to be swift, just a stop on her journey toward the Reaching Woods. The shreds of the High Moor Heroes’ Guild summoned her back home to Elturel, tearing her away from the outskirts of Candlekeep.

Candlekeep, she had once dreamed, would be the city where she finally became an academic, a scholar. Instead, she was promptly declined from every formal institution for her… well, there was a running list. Lack of foresight, short-term memory failure, lack of perception, lack of artistic strength. It took her around thirty minutes to realize that these tests were not actually a qualifier for entry through the Emerald Door, and instead the guards’ cruel way of mocking her.

Her exit from Candlekeep was bittersweet, but she knew that it would lead nowhere. As had many of her ventures - a poor attempt to be anything but a ranger with impressive aim. Politics slipped from her fingers before she even grasped it, an incomprehensible block of information that she could not register, let alone wield. Then there was fiction, song, welding. Fiction felt as though it was holding her mind and wringing it of all its joy, so she quit. Song tumbled from her mouth like a dreary scratching. She actually quite liked that hobby, but that time it was the protesting of her peers that willed her to leave it behind. Weapons were too heavy and domineering in her thin hands, fingers too fitted for a sleek bow to keep something formidable in her hold. 

Embroidery stuck, her quick fingers weaving through fabric easily. That was enjoyable, for a while - the outstretched hands of Ilmater twined through her leather armor. And then, once her God had been preserved on all of her belongings, she was out of ideas. Nature was the next obvious option, but the badger she wanted for her gloves muddled into splotches in practice. The lovely frog for her blanket resembled more of wretched Grung. 

Thus, Eltruel called to her, and she harkened back. Only the Wood of Sharp Teeth bisected her path home, and when the renowned storyteller Pallidor pleaded for her help against the plague of lycanthropes - was she meant to decline?

Werewolves, Pallidor had described them, cunning and volatile. They were still reeling from their loss alongside Grand Duke Valarken, though that man was long dead. She would have loved to live to see that battle. Pyryeva found humanity one of her greatest pleasures: their intense emotions, vulnerability, and courage lended themselves well to sex and gluttony, two of her favorite pastimes. However, she felt torn over the human lifespan. It was 1500 DR, the dawn of a new generation, and nothing exciting was happening. The monsters had been slain, most notably The Absolute. She loathed having not been a part of the “Heroes” troop. But she assured herself that she was meant to be alone, and meant to like it, and meant to give and give as Ilmater commanded.

As ridiculous as it may seem, she wished that new monsters would rise up in the coming years to give her a title of her own. Good things come to those who wait, as her scripture alleged. She smiled, padding along the damp forest floor, imagining beasts scurrying away under her command in exchange for heaps of gold. 

Lycanthropes came in many forms: beautiful elven women or menacing orcs, their transformations ranging from a delicate swan to a dreadful wereserpent. Her awareness stirred, the woods calling out to her.

 Deep musk, wiry fur tickling her fingers as if she was touching it freely.

The sight of her targets were just as she had pictured - goring, rabid werewolves. Like gnolls, but hopefully receptive to a little charisma. Curiously, though, their focus was completely rapt on the trees overhead, paws swiping at the air with no success. Had they taken it upon themselves to hunt a squirrel? Or a bird?

“Going after a squirrel? They’re defenseless,” Pyryeva watched them, like puppies chasing a toy. The pack of three whirled on her, snarling. The tallest one of the group ducked to all fours, lunging at her. The ranger’s nails dug into tree bark, crumbling under her force, as she leveraged herself atop the oak.

“I don’t want to shoot you, but I could,” The bow was already in position, an arrow tipped with silver aimed for his yellow, feral eyes. “I’m good at this. It’s kind of my job.”

He only responded with a grunt, before clawing his way up the base. Fine.

Blood squirted from his right eye socket, a dog yelp escaping his snout as he loosened his grip on the tree. 

“Had enough?” She muttered, another arrow taut, suspended by her bow, immediately. The two lackeys in his wake deliberated amongst themselves, weighing the benefit of their previous prey with the supple-fleshed human hanging in a nearby tree. Apparently, Pyryeva was a better target.

“No way!” A huff escapes her as she hones her focus on one of her most consumptive spells, Speak with Plants. A waste in a battle so easily winnable such as this - as mother would scold - but Pyryeva was hired for her ability to win, not her ability to devise. The roots of the wide birch beneath the two lycanthropes rose from the dirt, entangling their massive paws.

“Your friends are trapped, and you’re about to be blind!” She called down to the leader. “Come out of your wolf forms, and talk to me!”

Instead, the werebeast opted to shake the oak with all his might, interrupting her balance. As a teenager, she despised when her instructors would force her to stand on one leg, books piled atop her head, for hours on end. Balance this, balance that. As if she had been training to join the circus, to tiptoe across rope. But it was as if novels depicting fairytales and wizard battles were resting on her skull, pressuring her to still. 

“I don’t have to spare you, you know! I’ve just been hired to get your group to go away, and I’m trying to be kind!”

This wolf was relentless, yanking the arrow from his eye with a deep grunt. 

“Damn you,” She hissed, her silver arrow heading for his throat, rather than another eye. The yellow of his iris was consumed by black, staring her down as he collapsed onto the leaves and soil. With a flick of her wrist, a swarm of pixies gathered around her frame, swirling down to the ground with her as she plummeted off of the tree.

The two final opponents stood, ankles beginning to look raw from the friction of their incessant wriggling.

“Will someone please just listen to me,” She panted. “I am Pyryeva. You are free to leave these woods -  I will not harm you. All I ask for is peace.”

“And if you don’t give me peace, I will stick my pixies on you, and leave you for dead.”

The green fairies around her cheered with fanatic anticipation. No peace! No peace! No peace! Shrill giggles fell flat around the three of them, lost to the dank vines and stumps.

A burst of energy from the left side, dissipating to reveal a thin elven man with black curls. Pyryeva sighed with relief, ready to start speaking instead of threatening, but he offered her no such grace.

“We, the true lycanthropes of this realm, will not be outcast to other planes for any longer!” He bellowed. “Vehlarr will be restored in Faerûn! It must be done!”

Foam spilled from the corners of the right’s muzzle, teeth bared. Pyryeva gave them a long stare, waiting for the dam to break, waiting for them to see sense and reason with her. But when she studied the elf’s dark eyes, she found no such thing.

“Kill them,” She murmured softly, and the pixies whirled ahead. The ranger shut her eyes tightly, rushing away from the sight, leaving the desperate yelping of dogs behind.

That was, until, her neck was alight again; senses tingling and buzzing with… with nothing at all. Not nothing - it was all consuming, gnawing and starved. Blood sapped over hundreds of years, icy flesh, and then pure depravity. Women and men scattered across the floor, necks torn through. Whips, scars. And a heartbeat pounding, so loud it takes all of Pyryeva’s constitution not to keel over and sob. 

Something rotten, something unholy and corrupt, something undead. Her instincts forced her to sprint, she was sure, to make quick work of the earth beneath her and vanish between the wood. And yet, when her eyes opened, that was not her view at all. A white bat was crumpled on the forest floor beneath her, and it reeked of undeath. But it was so… small. Fluffy. She knew that her senses had never been wrong, honed so particularly by her instructors that an error would never occur.

But she wasn’t in the habit of persecuting small creatures, no matter how undead they may be. A vampire bat, to be sure, but not one she couldn’t befriend. Pyryeva crouched, searching for visible wounds.

“You okay, little guy?” She cooed, and the white lids snapped open to reveal ruby eyes. In moments, it was latched onto her neck, stabbing through her flesh.

“Wha- Ow!” Pyryeva wrapped a fist around the little beast, ripping it from the wound. “You fucker! You fucking… fucker! Ow!”

It strained against her grasp, clawing at her thumb fiendishly.

“Let me go, you wench!” A deep voice emanated from the creature, so ironically demanding from such a cute face. Involuntarily, Pyryeva giggled.

“At least someone is talking to me today,” She flipped him upside down wordlessly, studying his form. “You’re so cute!”

“I will fucking destroy you, tear your muscle from bone!” His best attempt at a threat. She brought him a bit closer to her face, sniffing the air between them.

“You aren’t a normal bat,” She asserted.

“Well, aren’t you a scholar?” He spat, still wiggling in her hand. 

“Vampire bat,” She ignored his slight toward her. “Are you here with the lycanthropes? The werewolves?”

“Those miscreants?” He hissed, offended. “Absolutely not.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Just flying by, of course,” The bat hummed.

“Well, I hope your travels are safe, little guy,” She smiled earnestly, lowering him to the ground and loosening her grasp.

“You are so trusting, little human,” He purred. “Who taught you to be so… docile? It’s fascinating.”

Somehow, he was animated when he spoke, one wing covering his chest as if scandalized.

“It’s just… how I am,” Pyryeva replied softly. She felt an inkling in the back of her skull - a warning that despite this bat being adorable and small, something devoid of soul hid inside. “I really should be going now. More werewolves to catch, and all.”

“Ah ah,” He corrected her. “You will be going nowhere at all.”

“What?” She stared down at him, now standing five and half feet taller than his tiny stature. His wings flapped, and he buzzed up to her face, meeting her gaze.

“My name is Astarion, and I have endured a terrible affliction, you see,” Astarion began, clearly preparing to delve into a story.

“Astarion? Like, "Hero of Baldur’s Gate Astarion?” Her voice was shrill. “Like, Vampire Lord Astarion?”

A killer. A shameless, overgrown child in the form of a handsome, elven man who had gone sick with power. Infamous for his parties and their gore, the feasting on innocents that he indulged in, day or night. The fearsome Vampire Lord who could not be stopped, no matter how many high ranking officials came knocking at his door. Their remains scattered through the streets - a demonstration - and a subsequent silence from the public.

He was corruption born from flesh, a demonic bastard who emerged from the fantastic defeat of the Absolute a vile, psychopathic monster.

“You are a scholar!” His red eyes beamed.

“I want nothing to do with you,” Malice twisted in her words, unlike her usual cadence.

“Oh, my dear, you want everything to do with me, because your sappy, frivolous God says so,” Astarion crooned, glaring at the symbol of Ilmater on her chest. “And if you don’t help me, I will transform and devour you.”

That was a bold-faced lie, of course. The reason he so desperately required her assistance is because he could not transform at all, not since last Uktar. And poor Pyryeva, not studied in her Baldurian literature or news, completely unaware of that fact.

She stumbled back from him, “You wouldn’t.”

Astarion laughed in her face, “Oh, I would.”

“What do you want from me?” Pyryeva forced out the words.

“Walk with me, dearest, and I will tell you the whole sordid tale.”

-

i tag @tequilya and @syoish for next week! <3 :)

#fanfiction #ao3 author #astarion #ascended astarion #ascension #astarion fic #baldurs gate 3 #bg3 companions #bg3 #bg3 astarion #baldurs gate #fanfic #bg3 fanfiction #bg3 fanfic idea #wip wednesday

[concerningwolves]

i just keep thinking about how crime drama is seen as 'quintessentially British' and 'the bedrock of British TV', a trend which is often linked back to the wild popularity of Sherlock Holmes – and yet the actual Holmes canon is categorically and emphatically not at all what British crime drama currently is. I also keep thinking about the pervasiveness of copaganda in the crime drama genre, how "crime drama" has become synonymous with "police drama", and how Sherlock Holmes remains an excellent example of how to create mystery and crime drama plots without needing to have a police focus.

Like, I think it's fair to say that 99% of the time, "crime drama" on British television is actually police procedural drama (ahem, copaganda). Off the top of my head right now, thinking about popular British crime dramas, there's Line of Duty, London Kills, McDonald and Dobbs, Death in Paradise, Van der Valk, Broadchurch, Grace, Sherwood, The Responder, Shetland ... obviously, not all of these are the same in terms of the genre flavour they give. Some are dark and gritty, while some are just good fun, with a fair bit in between. But they're all about the police, and most of the time, they're about police/ police detectives who are "different" or "quirky" or "troubled and misunderstood". There are a lot of detectives who survive on coffee and spite, who feel like a weird hybrid of the Sherlock Holmes archetype and a hardboiled noir detective (and these are mostly men, I think it's important to note).

The shows that have the biggest Holmesian influences (that I've watched) are probably Death in Paradise and McDonald and Dobbs. The former is a long-running TV series that has followed a lineup of various unorthodixically brilliant detective inspectors who've ended up on the fictional Caribbean island of St Marie. (Paradise was also my insomnia binge go-to for a few months). It's a bog-standard crime drama, what I'd call a bit of fun rather than anything really engaging, which follows a formulaic structure that hardly varied across the six or so seasons that I watched. The detectives always have the observation-based intelligence that harkens back to Holmes, and because of the Caribbean setting, they do sometimes get away with taking the law into their own hands and letting criminals go as Holmes sometimes did. McDonald and Dobbs meanwhile is set in Bath in the UK, with the titular Dobbs as the awkward genius DS to McDonald's street smarts and investigative skills, and is still on the "bit of fun" side.

But you can never get away from the fact that they're still police. And this really irks me, because I've had a sneaking suspicion for a while that what makes Holmes so popular and enduring (at least in part) is that he gives people a hope that the police simply can't provide. Right now, Britain feels increasingly like it's devolving into a police state, but if global politics of the last decade have taught us anything, it's that the police service as an institution is not a friend to the joe public. This was very much true in the Victorian era, and it's still true now. It's probably one of the things that can be best carried into a modernised Holmes or Holmes-influenced show, but we never see it because British TV is so glutted with police drama and therefore copaganda.

When Sherlock Holmes breaks into a man's home to find his blackmail material, he does so as an individual seeking to do the right thing on behalf of a victim. Whether he's right to take that power into his own hands is contentious (and Conan Doyle doesn't shy away from the fact that Holmes is committing a crime, or from the fact that some of Holmes' methods in going undercover weren't right!), but ultimately he's one man. When a police officer breaks into a man's home to find evidence to build a case, that officer is committing gross violations of public trust that, in an ideal world, would see them sacked and probably arrested. But we're not in an ideal world. We're in a world where the police routinely get away with horrors because of systemic abuses of power and institutionalised bigotry. If you're not white, cis, abled and rich (or at least comfortably affluent), then the police are not your ally and they're certainly not a source of hope for justice or recompense.

In police dramas, however, these detectives do things that should see them thrown off the force, and it's framed as okay by the narrative because we're all meant to sympathise with this poor, tortured genius or whatever detective trope they've used. Even Line of Duty, a series that's meant to be about the anti-corruption unit who sniff out and quash police corruption, isn't free from this. It's what makes copaganda so pervasive and insidious. If the public consistently see their fictional and sympathetically-portrayed police do things that they absolutely shouldn't get away with, then the public will internalise the idea that this is normal. It's one of those cases where fiction very much does influence reality.

Surely crime dramas like Peaky Blinders and Father Brown show us the versatility that the genre could offer, too. You can have a gritty period crime drama that's literally about the criminals, or a silly series about a Roman Catholic priest solving crimes. The investigator/detective character doesn't have to be the (anti)hero of the narrative, either, which is something I feel gets too often forgotten. The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton is one of my favourite Holmes stories because although Holmes does all the investigative legwork and acts as a champion for victims who've been pushed down by someone rich and powerful, it's one of the victims who takes matters into her own hands and saves her own day. I'm also deeply fond of the Holmes stories where there isn't even a criminal element! The Adventure of the Yellow Face starts with a criminal investigative feel when Holmes suspects blackmail, but turns out to be a purely personal issue regarding a lady's past. The Adventure of the Creeping Man touches on criminal medical malpractice and/or fraud, I suppose, but it really just boils down to "man takes monkey drug" which is just plain weird.

So while I'm not saying that TV writers should do something with a "man takes monkey drug and acts like an ape" plot, I am a firm believer that crime drama could be so much more if it wasn't currently a massive slurry of copaganda and Holmes-influenced media that doesn't understand the material it's drawing from.

#crime drama #sherlock holmes #mystery #fragments of essays

[animehouse-moe]

Heavenly Delusion Episode 10 Part 2: The Walled City

Alright, part 2, we're back for more! There's just a world of stuff to talk about from the perspective of a manga reader here, and I really can't help myself with how much I love this series. So anyways, here we go, back into the second half of the episode!

⚠️Note: This is the second half of the post/review for episode 10, if you haven't seen the first half, click this link to get redirected to it.⚠️

Right away, we're treated to the use of reflections with it, as we see Kiruko reflected in the car. I just really love this as a creative decision. It allows viewers to see the people talking in some capacity, but doesn't force the convenience or "television nature" of placing characters side by side for discussion. Even better is their placement in the scene. Neither is given the full frame, as each is cut off at some point to avoid showing their facial expression to give viewers any further context or understanding.

Similarly to harkening back to earlier moments, the fluidity of characters really is just top notch. I can't get enough of all the different approaches and ideas that have been used on them through this episode. I think this scene in particular really stands out to that end, as both Kiruko and Juichi remain on model.

So everybody knows good things come in twos, but what about threes? Once more we get that slideshow approach, and because it's a flashback, it's got that massive padding around it. Such an interesting creative decision, but as I said earlier, it's such a great idea for separating it from the present day while still allowing it to occupy the same creative space.

Anyways, moving forward with the story, Juichi gets re-united with his son Jugo after him, Kiruko and Maru are happened upon by fellow "pigs". It's a relatively simple scene, but playing around with the shadows here was a really interesting decision. It's something that was established through the first half, as Juichi remains in the shadows (literally) while Kiruko and Maru explore the walled city. Because of that, him passing through this shadow and out into the sun to reunite with Jugo carries a really nice feel in him shedding his past and embracing his present/future.

Also, just a side note that I wasn't able to really expand on due to image limits in the first post: I really like the wideness of a lot of the shots in this episode. You see it with the gif above of Juichi, but we get a scene of Kiruko and Maru standing outside that has similar space to it. That distance just really helps sell Hirotaka's overall approach to the series, wherein they try to make sure wherever possible that the viewer feels divorced from the world, that they're looking on from the outside.

And then there's this cut of Kiruko running away. I love the anxiety it produces as her head figuratively spins. Such a great way to convey that anxiety as the silhouette of Kiruko rotates around the frame growing more and more distant.

Also, there's not really anything in particular with this moment, but I just found it a very picturesque and stylized frame. Though it's also another good example of the constant off model nature of the episode. However, it stays close to home as we've been shown, since it's a serious moment. You could say there's a scale to being off model in this episode. The more comedic the moment, the more off model you can be.

For a frame with more reason though, look no further than this one. I love the detail of her hands being the most frostbitten piece of herself from carrying Jugo. Such a simple addition, but it adds a great deal.

Soon after this though, we make a trip back to the institution. Where we start with Aoshima and Sawatari in a hallway. The direction of either piece is really solid to begin with thanks to the camera angles, but the pair of these frames together is even better. We start with the low angle that shows us Sawatari's arm, and then we directly follow it up with Aoshima reaching out and grabbing that arm. Just a stellar example of how to lead viewers.

Also, something you'll probably pick up on in this episode is that there's quite a few sequences where characters are missing their facial features. It's not so much a purposeful addition as it is a stylized one though, but I do enjoy it as a change of pace.

We flip flop between the institution and the outside world quite a bit as the episode starts to make it into the back third though, so bear with me a bit here as I cover/explain stuff in the order it appears.

Anyways, we had just seen that Kiruko's hands were frostbitten from carrying Jugo for so long, and in this scene here we see that they've been bandaged up. Really great detail, and I love that it exists solely as that. It's not something the anime has a need to call attention to, but rather is just another facet of it.

And then there's this amazing off model Kiruko. I love the style and how expressive it is.

Following this scene, we enter overlapping scenes between Jugo playing with bloody toys, and new kids being introduced to the institution. What a bone chilling pairing, and I love it. They use the blood stained blocks and the noises of Jugo playing with them to create a comparison and unsettling feel to the addition of new children at the facility. It elicits thoughts of violence, and that the children are playthings in the hands of some higher existence.

I also love how Aoshima acts through her speech, as her gaze lowers and lifts based on what she's saying. When looking up, she's speaking to the children as herself, but when that gaze is lowered, it's the words of someone else that spill from her lips. It's incredible effective at providing the sense that something's wrong, that Aoshima can't face the children with some of the words that she's been given.

Following her speech, we begin to hear those bloodied toy blocks of Jugo's again, right as we're shown the new 5th years. It really does a lot for adding to that uncomfortable atmosphere alongside the skewed camera angle.

Though before anything happens, we cut to little Jugo toppling his tower of blood-stained blocks, and reunite with Juichi while in the midst of a despicable act. More than the act though, the memory is outstanding. I love how in the flashback, the scene itself flashes to the rhythm of Juichi's breathing as he flees the walled city.

Plus, the art style and approach through this flashback? Incredible. I love how they keep the grayscale to Juichi's memories, but the more that he remembers, the more red appears within them, which can create things like this haunting still. If it wasn't clear, that red color was foreshadowing to the violence that Juichi incurred upon the man that ratted him out.

Following this flashback, we get this little scene to boot, showing Juichi effectively embrace that crimson so that Jugo may remain clean. Also, it's another really great example of the first person perspective use through the episode. Though it may be a child's eyes, the importance still remains. Juichi sees his son as pure and ultimately clean, while Jugo is forced to see his father as stained and tainted. While ultimately for the sake of his son, Juichi himself is unable to see what he's become, so that view from Jugo's perspective is incredibly important.

And for our final scene of Juichi we have this one. An incredible end to his character. This is the first time that we see the back of Juichi during his flashback, as it follow his perspective of retracing his steps once more, but as he flees rather than returns. And I think that's a hugely important difference. Juichi is no longer returning to face his demons and his past, but is now actively running from it once more. And because of that, and the act that he's committed, his entire body is bathed in a red hue in this last moment.

So with that, we finally reach the end of this episode. Incredible, amazing, astonishing, beautiful, breathtaking, stellar. There's so many words out there, but so few that feel like they can truly do this episode justice. What an experience, what a time as a manga reader seeing the material get elevated and improved upon to this degree. Such incredible work from start to finish, from the smallest of pieces to the biggest. I can't get enough, and I'm so incredibly excited (but equally sad) to see where we go to finish off this season.

#heavenly delusion #tengoku daimakyou #天国大魔境 #production i.g #mori hirotaka #kiruko #maru #anime recommendation #anime review #horror anime #anime and manga #anime

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Joseph Esposito: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant scientist and “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” was born on this day in 1904. Oppie, as he was known to his friends, was a complex man: he was arrogant, charismatic, and personally and politically naïve. He lost his security clearance in 1954 as he was embroiled in the McCarthyism of the period.

While conservative Republican leaders saw Oppenheimer as a questionable character, if not worse, American intellectuals supported him and saw the security hearing that investigated his security worthiness as a witch hunt and whitewash

Columnists Joe and Stewart Alsop, for example, wrote an indictment of the proceedings, "We Accuse!"--harkening back to to Emile Zola's ringing defense of Alfred Dreyfus in 1898--for Harper's. They concluded by saying of the removal of the scientist's clearance: "This act did not disgrace Robert Oppenheimer: it dishonored and disgraced the high traditions of American freedom."

Oppenheimer was a guest at the Nobel dinner at the White House in 1962. Although he was worthy to be in the same gathering as these Nobel laureates, some of whom also worked with him on the Manhattan Project, he was clearly the most controversial. President Kennedy’s invitation to the dinner was part of an effort to publicly rehabilitate the scientist. He would later select him for the prestigious Fermi Award. Oppenheimer died in 1967.

A year before Oppenheimer died, Arthur Schlesinger wrote to him: "You have faced more terrible things than most men in this terrible age, and you have provided all of us with an example of moral courage, purpose and discipline--you probably are not aware of the meaning your life has had for my generation." It was a great pleasure to talk about Oppenheimer and President Kennedy at the Historical Society of Princeton a few years ago. Oppenheimer had been director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton and a resident of the town.

I am looking forward to the "Oppenheimer" movie (directed by Christopher Nolan), which will be released in July.

The photo here is of Oppenheimer with his famous slouch hat and Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, the overall head of the Manhattan Project. It was taken at the Trinity atomic site in 1945 and it is in the public domain.

[Scott Horton]

#history #Oppenheimer #the Manhattan Project #Scott Horton

[inserviceto]

ivy :   what are your muse’s views on marriage ?   do they believe it is something strictly for love ,   or an institution rooted in business   &   social benefits ?   do they desire or have they desired to be married ?

Shitty meme aside, marriage is...sort of a nebulous thing to Harken.

His parents' marriage, while content and generally happy, was not one of love first; there was definitely love there, but it was learnt over years together as opposed to being the reason for getting married. His father, like many in his bloodline, was a favored knight to Marquess Tuscana (at the time). Seeing as it was his duty to uphold the line, Harken's father married mostly out of the obligation to have a wife and children.

While not proper nobility, Redmond had inherited land passed down through the bloodline that had originally been gifted to his family generations ago for their loyalty and service to the Marquess. It wasn't large, but it was enough to keep a decent chunk of their people together and safe in one area. He had no real need or desire to try and court a noblewoman, and so he looked no further than the women that worked the land of the estate; Doireann came from old blood in their little community, and they got on well enough.

It was a simple trade off; Redmond gained a wife to provide him with sons to further his line, and Doireann gained more status and comfort through her husband.

For the roughly seven years Harken lived with his parents, he viewed their marriage as warm and understanding. But, considering Harken came around when his parents were entering their older years, their relationship had upwards of thirty years to sort itself out into something familiar and comfortable.

So, with the short time Harken got to observe his mother and father, he viewed it as marriage being for love. But, when he was sent away to Tuscana Castle to begin his training as a knight, he had much more time to be exposed to more political/arranged marriages.

Getting married never actually crossed his mind until he came to serve in Pherae. Even then, it took him...years to really warm up to everyone and everything and actually consider that -- yes, he could be a human being and attain a happiness that wasn't entirely rooted in his service to his lord.

He just...also wasn't entirely ready for it, which is why it becomes such an issue later on.

Harken's engagement to Isadora is one I think purely done for love. He has nothing to offer her but himself, as he has since been stripped of any land or wealth prior to being taken in by Lord Elbert. He is nothing but his sword and shield, myriad issues, and genuine love and adoration of Isadora. He also desires nothing from her but herself. He has no want to be anything other than what he can be for her, and if he makes her happy by doing so, he is fulfilled.

#[ answered ask ]

[venusstadt]

Introduction

Hi, and welcome to Venusstadt. I’m Jiana, and this is the final part of a two-part series on globalism and its aesthetics throughout the 90s. Today, I’m discussing 90s globalist conceptions of the future, the most popular of which is definitely Y2K.

In the first part—which I HIGHLY recommend watching—I explained what globalism is and how the interconnectedness from new tech AND the sense of being at the ‘end of history’ led to the emergence of various aesthetics as people looked back at the history of humanity and looked forward to a new age.

During my analysis of these aesthetics I also spoke about cultural appropriation and exchange, as well as how white supremacists appropriated neoclassical aesthetics to be racist towards everyone else and establish themselves as “superior,” “civilized,” or “modern,” which is the perfect segue for this adjacent context I’m about to give.

Minimalism: A Brief Interlude

So, 90s minimalism!

Minimalism was not influenced by globalism by any discernible means, save for those minimalisms that were imported predominantly from Japanese culture and based on Buddhism as a part of the New Age movement and how it trickled into general 90s design philosophies.

Elly Parson of Refinery29 mentions that in the 90s, minimalism was more prominent in high-design spaces like rich people’s homes, hotels, storefronts, and luxury fashion rather than the interiors and wardrobes of the average person (Parson). Still, it’s significant, because when we think of minimalism, we harken back to the 90s since it was a response to maximalism in the 80s as I mentioned at the beginning of the last part.

Minimalism has come back around in fashion and design more recently, which has prompted a look at its origins. So I’m sure a lot of you by now know about Adolf Loos, a prominent modernist architect who is also associated with minimalism, who saw excess ornamentation as “savagery” and saw European modernism as “the ultimate answer to all aesthetic problems” (Chayka). Naturally, because of this, any time people give a cultural or sociological critique of minimalism, his name is involved.

Now, associating any ornamentation with the Other is racist, as are the loaded terms “savage” and “degenerate,” which he uses in his infamous essay Ornamentation and Crime (Loos 20).

In his essay, he also distinguishes art like rugs from things like buildings and furniture, which he views as needing to be firmly utilitarian (Loos 24). To him, any decoration of utilitarian things was a sign of cultural devolution and savagery (20). He advocated for more minimal aesthetics in order to reach a timeless look that could survive as civilization marched on (22).

Much of the language used is eugenics-speak, and goes back to the notion of social degradation that was VERY popular in the early 20th century. This was the idea that non-white people and poor white people could spread their “defectiveness” and therefore needed to be kept from mixing their genes with middle- and upper-class Western white folks for the good of civilization (Eugenics Archive Canada, “Degeneracy”).

From this we also get the concept of cultural degradation, which is basically the same thing, except that it hyper focused on the idea that non-Western and lower-class culture could lead to “lowered standards of education and failures of taste-inculcating institutions,” and, again, the demise of Western culture (Wampole).

So, to further summarize, there was a fear among Western white society that the art, music, and aesthetics of people of color and the poor, aka the cultures of the “Other,” could lead to societal and cultural regression, and thus annihilate Western civilization. And these fears were used to create laws and initiatives to both murder the said “Other” and eradicate their cultures—think, for instance, forced sterilization, the American Indian boarding schools, Henry Ford’s anti-Jazz initiatives, Tom Buchanan’s speech in the Great Gatsby, the Nazis entire existence, every US culture war spat since like, the 60s—you get the picture. 

Now, none of this is to say that people are weird eugenicists for liking modernist or minimalist aesthetics. I’m just using this to highlight rhetorics of modernity. As we saw prior, anything ornate or “other” is of the past, while what is “Western” is viewed as progressive, timeless, and more utilitarian.

“Progressive” and “timeless” are the keywords as I move into explaining the next set of aesthetics, which I’m calling the aesthetics of eternity, because that sounds really cool.

Eternity & Anxiety

So in the 90s, the rapidly approaching year 2000 was a big deal, for obvious reasons. A new millennium was on the horizon, which only happens like, once every a thousand years.

Plus it was the end of a technologically accelerated century. The mid-1900s started with inventions like the radio, the car, and the airplane; and by the early- to mid-1990s, people had gotten used to personal computers a la Apple and Microsoft, home video systems, and video game consoles like Atari and Gameboy, on top of previous inventions like photography and film, space rockets, and much, much more (Woollaston).

With all that in mind, people were looking forward to the future, while also being slightly afraid of it, as we see with the Y2K crisis (Wade). This excitement and fear appeared in the future-inspired aesthetics.

Like the global village aesthetics, this section is also split up in two: minimalist eternities and global anxieties.

I use the term minimalist “eternities” for this first portion to bring back the prevalent idea that the less ornamentation or cultural markers there were in design, the more “timeless” it would be.

This is observable in the industrial and sartorial design of a lot of Y2K or the Y2K-esque, like Cyber Corporate or Gen-X Soft Club. These designs are “clean.” They cannot be tied to a specific culture or time-period; it’s like they exist in this vacuous, liminal space. With Cyber Corporate specifically, CARI co-founder Evan Collins notes that it “seemed to be the go-to style to appear contemporary, especially with companies in industries associated with booming fields of the era” (Collins, “Cyber/Gen-X Corporate). And what’s most striking about these images is that they were contemporary and futuristic back then and STILL feel exciting and futuristic now, because of that minimalism.

As you can see, this is intentionally antithetical to the globalist aesthetics, which, because of their multicultural influence, were considered to be of the past.

But obviously the multicultural influence did not disappear altogether. In fact, it in some ways meshed with the futuristic aesthetics. This is especially true when it comes to East Asian cultures, specifically that of Japan.

So, like I said in part one, Western upper- and upper-middle folks were living large in the 1980s (White).

But Japan was also experiencing an economic upswing thanks to their export of tech and cars (White). And, of course, any time a non-Western country starts to have a bit of success, the West gets a bit uneasy. In 1985, Thomas White wrote in the New York Times:

“40 years after the end of World War II, the Japanese are on the move again in one of history’s most brilliant commercial offensives, as they go about dismantling American industry” (White).

Basically, White feared that American economic dominance would be thwarted by Japan due to how much America was importing as opposed to exporting, as well as the rise of companies like Toyota, Sony, Hitachi, Honda, and others (White). These imports especially spelled trouble for the American car industry, which was utterly gutted as people stopped preferring American cars (White).

There was also a fear that Japan’s steady rise would uplift other Asian markets (White). As White states: “Behind Japan (‘the big dragon’ some call it) march the ‘four little dragons’ (Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore) following in its path. And behind loom China and India, desperate as they are to raise their standards of living—at the expense of American standards, if necessary” (White).

The invocation of the dragon is unmistakably Orientalist of course, which brings us to techno-orientalism. With the rise of globalization and interconnectedness that came from it and the aforementioned “need for a new ideology to justify America’s hegemonic status at the end of the Cold War” (Harris) came this new breed of orientalism that was being leveled against Japan and other countries.

The term “techno-orientalism” was first coined by David Morley and Kevin Robins, a portmanteau of technology and Orientalism, which denotes the stereotypical lens by which the West often views the East (Harris). Unlike traditional (Said’s) Orientalism, which relies on stereotypes of the past, techno-orientalism relies on constructions of a future in which the East accomplishes supremacy through technological might (Harris) despite being non-Western and thus “of the past” and “degenerate”. As explained further:

“The techno- of techno-orientalism, then, comes to signal Orientalism’s relationship to economic globalization and to a form of temporal asymmetry: an Asian-ness characterized by the juxtaposition of cultural retrograde with technical hyper-advancement” (Harris).

Now any sort of perceived cultural dominance from a place that is non-Western, as we saw previously in the section about social and cultural degradation, always gives Western countries anxiety. For techno-orientalism, the level of this anxiety honestly depends on where you look, and sometimes it can’t really be described as anxiety but more of your run-of-the-mill cultural appropriation to seem hip or on-trend.

On the actual anxiety side, techno-orientalism is most associated with the cyberpunk genre, which features both technological advancement but is often set in a dystopian world. Now this genre obv. originated in the 80s and not the 90s like some of these other aesthetics, but it remained a prominent mainstay of the 90s and continued into the early 2000s.

For more specific film and storytelling examples of this, see the Japan Takes Over the World page on TV Tropes because I’d really be here all day if I went through all of them. Harris mentions multiple visual hallmarks of the genre, but in this case, these visuals are all unified by being a mix of Asian aesthetics and high-tech milieus. And I don’t believe this was incorporated into general industrial or architectural design, but it was a present in marketing and, to a certain degree, music.

2001: The Global Bubble Bursts

So, what happened to these aesthetics?

Well, like any trend, they faded away thanks to a change in the outside factors that brought them into the spotlight.

For one, in March 2000, the Dot-com bubble burst (Salvucci). This leads to large online companies (like Amazon) losing some of their values and causes smaller online companies to shut down, as well as a slight recession in the early 2000s (Salvucci). I don’t want to go into business and economic jargon so I won’t go too far into this, but think of the Dot-com bubble popping as the 2000s equivalent of the cryptocurrency crash we just had with the collapse of Terra-Luna and FTX. This puts a damper on the whole tech innovation schtick that people had going in the 1990s.

Then the attack on the World Trade Center occurs, which, on top of mounting criticism against globalism in the 90s thanks to the loss of industrial jobs in the U.S., absolutely killed the utopian globalist dream (Schwartz).

These events burst the 90s “cultural bubble” (Williams), and lead many to look back on the decade as frivolous and void of American cultural values.

Writing for the New York Times in November 2001, John Schwartz declared that:

“… the country is experiencing a shift away from the libertarian, individualistic values that were expressed in the celebration of the New Economy and toward more old-fashioned values in the wake of the terrorist attacks” (Schwartz).

This was a direct dig at Gen X, since the 1990s was powered by Gen X’s progressive, entrepreneurial spirits (Gross). We know these individualist values didn’t disappear with 9/11—after all, America was founded on such individualist values, and they would power the rampant Islamophobic sentiment in the wake of the attacks. The ‘libertarian, individualist values’ in question were that, as we know from the original 1990s article that defined them, Gen X were less loyal to specific corporations than they were to the idea that they could job hop and earn more money to support themselves.

Also, not that I’m some tech warrior or anything, but there’s a lot of reference in Schwartz’ article to the leaders of the Dot-com boom being ‘geeks’ and ‘whiz kids.’ Immature high school imagery, of course, but it also alludes to the idea that instead of these geeks winning at capitalism it should be the well-rounded, all-American kids—which, like everything in this video, is a coded concept.

Throughout the 90s, there was a growing nationalist movement in response to globalism, and the people involved were blaming immigration and undocumented immigrants for lost factory jobs that were being outsourced to other countries (Chatzky, McBride, and Sergie). This, along with things like people of color and gay people having rights, was a major factor in the 90s culture wars, the rise in paleo-conservatism, and a desire to “reclaim the United States” that would lead to events like Ruby Ridge and Waco, and then Oklahoma City, and then Columbine, and all the issues we still have today.

After Sept. 11, this nationalist sentiment became more mainstream thanks to the War on Terror. Accordingly, the multicultural and techno-futurist aesthetics of the 90s faded away.

There’s a return of preppy style, which had not been popular since the 1980s—again, a conservative period. This time around the prep style is embodied by stores like Aeropostale and Abercrombie and Fitch, the latter of which relied on images of thin, conventionally attractive models, and all-American (read: white) marketing for its desirability factor (Klayman).

We do see more traditional Orientalist imagery peak in the mid-2000s and fade by the 2010s (Collins, “Millennium Orientalism – Eastern Exoticism”). I don’t know what to make of this: judging by my previous multicultural aesthetic analysis I would call it either some appropriative attempt at peace and anti-war sentiment or at worst super insensitive given that Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Southeast Asian people were being conflated with one another, hate crimed, and labeled terrorists while their cultural aesthetics were being used for funsies. We’d also see some techno-futurist themes in Frutiger Aero (though the techno part was more played down) in line with tech innovations like social media and the launch of the 1st generation iPhone in 2007, but this seems like a nostalgic late Gen-X/Millennial grasp at Y2K.

2020: A Global Re-emergence?

So obviously Y2K is back and has been back for years, though in its current iteration that term refers to a mix of original Y2K, McBling, and some late 2000s stuff we don’t even have a name for yet. The most obvious guess for why these came back is because of the ubiquity of social media websites since they’ve taken over the internet (and because they’ve allowed for such archiving that re-introduced everyone to such aesthetics), especially because of the pandemic.

Evan Collins says that for Global Village Coffeehouse at least, it never came back and never was remembered as part of the general 90s aesthetic. I too thought these global aesthetics would be dead and gone forever since we’re more aware of cultural appropriation nowadays, but someone on TikTok pointed out that now that the U.S. is looking a little not global superpower-ish and other countries and fashion capitals are emerging, there’s a rush of multiculturalism again, at least in the luxury space. So, that could be exciting.

With both aesthetics, I feel like we’re far more skeptical and more culturally aware. There’s not an utter faith in tech or a blithe willingness to borrow from other cultures like there was in the 90s. And though people criticize Gen Z for biting from past aesthetics (as they did with Gen X), I think this is just a side effect of all these cultural materials from the past being available thanks to the Internet and things like the Wayback Machine. As with Gen X, our generation’s main cultural marker is that the interconnectivity and speed we have at our fingertips enables us to run through past aesthetics almost as quickly as we find out about them—but that’s a topic for a future video!

Conclusion 

And that’s all I have for this video. I realized towards the end that this was just a big excuse to talk about globalism, but, again understanding culture is important to understanding design aesthetics, so I hope you all learned something from this video that could help you in that respect.

As always, if you enjoyed this video, give it a like and maybe even click the subscribe button below for more. My channel is still new and I’m testing things out, so any feedback would be appreciated. I can also be found on Twitter and Tumblr. Thanks for watching!

Sources

Chatzky, Andrew, James McBride, and Mohammed Aly Sergie. “NAFTA and the USMCA: Weighing the Impact of North American Trade.” Council on Foreign Relations, 1 July 2020, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/naftas-economic-impact. Accessed 7 April 2023.    

Chayka, Kyle. “The North American Maximalism of Gigi Hadid’s and Drake’s Home Design.” The New Yorker, 5 Aug. 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/dept-of-design/the-north-american-maximalism-of-gigi-hadid-and-drakes-home-design. Accessed 6 April 2023. 

Collins, Evan. “Cyber/Gen-X Corporate.” Are.na, https://www.are.na/evan-collins-1522646491/cyber-gen-x-corporate. Accessed 7 April 2023.

Collins, Evan. “Millennium Orientalism – Eastern Exoticism.” Are.na, https://www.are.na/evan-collins-1522646491/millennium-orientalism-eastern-exoticism. Accessed 7 April 2023.  

Eugenics Archive Canada – Their website seems to be broken now, but here’s a link. http://eugenicsarchive.ca/

Gross, David M, and Sophronia Scott. “Proceeding With Caution.” Time, 16 July 1990, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,970634-9,00.html. Accessed 7 April 2023. 

Harris, Elif. “Orientalism & Technology: A Primer on the Techno-Orientalism Debate.” Elif Notes, 15 March 2023, https://elifnotes.com/techno-orientalism/. Accessed 14 April 2023.

Klayman, Alison, creator. White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch. Second Nature, Aliklay Productions, Cinetic Media, and All3Media America, 2022. 

Loos, Adolf. “Adolf Loos: Ornamentation and Crime.” George Washington University, https://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf. Accessd 6 April 2023. 

Parsons, Elly. “‘90s Interiors Were Eclectic, Fun, & Free. Now They’re Back.” Refinery29, 23 Sept. 2021, https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/90s-interiors-homeware-trend. Accessed 6 April 2023.

Salvucci, Jeremy. “What was the Dot-Com Bubble and Why Did It Burst?” The Street, 12 Jan. 2023, https://www.thestreet.com/dictionary/d/dot-com-bubble-and-burst. Accessed 7 April 2023. 

Wade, Grace. “The Y2K Movement: Its History and Resurgence.” Stitch Fashion, 19 June 2018, https://www.stitchfashion.com/home//the-y2k-movement-its-history-and-resurgence. Accessed 7 April 2023. 

Wampole, Christy. “Can Culture Degenerate?” Aeon, 5 Aug. 2021, https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-cultural-degeneration-has-an-unsavoury-pedigree. Accessed 6 April 2023.

White, Thomas. “The Danger from Japan.” The New York Times Magazine, 28 July 1985, https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/28/magazine/the-danger-from-japan.html. Accessed 14 April 2023. 

Williams, Alex. “2001: When the Internet Was, Um, Over?” New York Times, 8 Oct. 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/style/dot-com-crash-of-2000.html. Accessed 7 April 2023. 

Woollaston, Victoria. “The Best 1980s Gadgets that Defined a Decade.” Pocket-Lint, 20 Feb. 2023, https://www.pocket-lint.com/gadgets/news/147958-12-best-1980s-gadgets-that-defined-a-decade/. Accessed 9 May 2023. 

#Youtube #y2k #y2k aesthetic #minimalism #modernism #y2k nostalgia

[mariacallous]

The next test of whether top U.S. adversaries can erode its role as the leading global superpower will come in the form of a major diplomatic confab in South Africa. 

Next week, leaders of the so-called BRICS group—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—will convene in Johannesburg for a major summit, where Moscow and Beijing aim to solidify a counterbalance to the Western-led international system. Both Russia and China are keen to breathe new life into the BRICS bloc to show the world that there are alternatives to the patchwork U.S.-led alliances and institutions that have dominated global affairs for decades. 

There’s clearly a growing appetite among other countries for an alternative to the U.S.-led system: Some 40 countries, from Argentina to Saudi Arabia to Kazakhstan, have voiced interest in joining BRICS, while more than 67 world leaders and dignitaries were invited to next week’s summit. 

“The global south will be watching next week’s BRICS summit closely in the hopes that the rising grouping of global and middle powers makes some progress in filling the considerable gaps left by America’s shoddy global governance,” said Sarang Shidore, director of the global south program at the Quincy Institute think tank. Even as emerging-market economies reel from the shocks of the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine, Washington has offered little support, instead pursuing an aggressive campaign of interest rate hikes that has exacerbated economic turmoil around the world.

Next week’s summit harkens back to the days of the Bandung Conference, where 29 governments from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East assembled during the Cold War and laid the groundwork for the nonaligned movement. Like then, BRICS serves as an alternative, if inchoate, effort to push back against the hegemon of the day—albeit one that has been complicated by China’s and Russia’s membership.

“BRICS has tapped into a demand that wasn’t being met elsewhere,” said Rebecca Ray, a senior researcher at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, who noted that countries that aren’t even applying for membership are attending the summit in Johannesburg. “The question is: What do they want their role to be in responding to that?”

There’s no clear answer yet. And experts don’t expect one to emerge from the upcoming summit, with few details yet released on the agenda or real deliverables. Complicating the matter is the fact that BRICS countries have vastly disparate national interests, and vague proposals to expand the bloc’s membership and economic influence seem poised to stumble out of the gate. 

India and China are at loggerheads; South Africa is caught between a diplomatic rock and a hard place over its ties to Russia amid the war in Ukraine; and Brazil has done little to stick its neck out for Russia, despite its historically nonaligned foreign policy. All BRICS countries, even China, face economic headwinds that make any future plans to challenge the U.S.-led Group of 7’s spot at the top of the global economy more pipe dream than reality.

The grouping is currently in a “sweet spot, where it’s fulfilling its role, it helps members constrain the United States to some extent, [and] it strengthens ties between the BRICS,” said Oliver Stuenkel, a professor at the School of International Relations at Brazil’s Fundação Getulio Vargas. “But I think if there’s more ambitious projects, then it will inevitably strain this grouping and expose the divergences.”

For Russia, the BRICS summit is an opportunity to demonstrate that it no longer needs the West following Western efforts to isolate Moscow on the world stage in the wake of its bloody war in Ukraine. But that opportunity comes with an awkward footnote: Russian President Vladimir Putin is no longer attending in person as he has a warrant out for his arrest over war crimes in Ukraine from the International Criminal Court (ICC). South Africa, as a member of the ICC, would have been legally obligated to honor the arrest warrant. 

China, meanwhile, is keen to position itself as the de facto leader of the global south and the friend of choice to countries worldwide that feel they have been undervalued or left behind by Washington and its most powerful and wealthy allies in Europe and Asia. Beijing has long pushed for the grouping’s enlargement, even though its ambitions have sparked pushback from other BRICS members.

“China is the only country that is not concerned at all about diluting the prestige of BRICS” by expanding it to more countries, Stuenkel said. “For China, I think it really makes sense to expand so that the BRICS can become an element in a more China-centric order—a Chinese-led system of different structures like the One Belt, One Road; the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank; [and the] BRICS bank,” he said, referring to China’s leading global infrastructure investment program, the Chinese-backed multilateral lender, and the nascent New Development Bank established by BRICS countries just under a decade ago.

Yet Beijing has had a harder time getting the other BRICS members on board, further underscoring their competing visions of the group’s future. The idea of expansion has worried India and Brazil in particular, both of which have taken pride in the group’s exclusivity and fear that an open door will diminish its prestige. 

“Brazil is very proud of its BRICS membership,” Stuenkel said. “If you’re part of a very exclusive club, it makes sense that you don’t want to see the club becoming open to everyone.” 

One major proposal some leaders have floated ahead of the summit is developing a BRICS common currency to hedge against the U.S. dollar, although it is not on the summit’s agenda and experts are highly skeptical of the plan. Economist Jim O’Neill, who first coined the BRICS term in 2001, blasted the idea of a BRICS currency as “ridiculous” and “absurd” earlier this week.

“The idea that five countries with very divergent interests and trajectories can somehow form a coherent enough union to expand its membership and stand up this hare-brained idea of a BRICS currency seems really far-fetched to me,” said J. Peter Pham, a former U.S. diplomatic envoy to African regions during the Trump administration. “I don’t expect anything of substance to come out of this summit, unless you consider the lack of substance as itself politically substantive.”

Still, even without a common currency, Beijing has capitalized on the BRICS grouping to boost its long-standing bid to internationalize the renminbi and slash its dependence on the dollar. In the run-up to the BRICS summit, a growing number of countries, including Brazil and Argentina, have used the renminbi in trade to cope with a shortage of dollars and curry favor with Beijing. These efforts are set to continue long after Johannesburg, with BRICS countries expected to deliberate how to ramp up the use of local currencies in trade at the summit. They are also set to discuss a potential common payments system and committee focused on a joint currency—although experts don’t expect any challenges to the existing global financial architecture. 

Talk of a BRICS common currency is “really a reflection of a desire among some segments of the world to have some counterweight to the U.S., the U.S. economy, the dollar,” said Daniel McDowell, an expert in international political economy at Syracuse University. But “I think most of this is just in fantasy land, because I don’t see any world in which it is really going to emerge in the way some people might hope.”

[essaysonbanality]

Leather

A man on Grindr once told me that “leather was like drag.” I pressed him on the point multiple times, but he couldn’t say much more than that. He typed it out with such finality that it seemed to him perfectly self-explanatory. I guess I understood what he was getting at, but I hate pronouncements. Pronouncements are for people who somehow have lived in this world as I have and still have the balls to think that they can be right. Maybe it is my millennial hemming and hawing that is the real problem.

Though I hated how he said it, I got the gist of what that man on Grindr meant. Gay men wear leather to become someone else. Just like in drag, there are entire leather productions and competitions where various men wearing leather go up on stage and perform for an audience. I have caught glimpses of these shows sometimes while I have hung around the Eagle or Bullet. The newly announced winner demonstrates the appropriate shock and surprise and receives a leather sash with big bolded letters pronouncing him as “Mr. Bullet Leather 2023.”

There are layers here; some stretching back to rituals and observances only known by the daddies and the boys who love them. Some reason that this system of competition exists and exalts certain characteristics. I am not intending to suggest that we are performing on the bones of old ritual that has lost all meaning. Quite the opposite actually. I think the entire production is imbued with more ritual significance now more than ever.

Leather serves as a stark contrast to drag in a lot of ways. While drag is meant to accentuate femininity and challenge gender conventions, leather attempts to solidify roles and to reinvigorate an image of masculinity. But it is an image of men refracted and warped across time from an era immediately prior to AIDS that gay men seem to yearn for. The idea of men who wear leather jackets and Levi jeans that draw all eyes to their bulge, sport an aggressively prominent mustache, and struts with a cigar in mouth. Except this man existed in the 1960s and 1970s, and now he does not.

Oh sure, that man probably never truly existed. He was always fantasy. An amalgamation of characteristics that a gay man wanted both to emulate and be dominated by. But somewhere between then and now that man went from living to extinct. Now at every leather bar in America you can watch locals attempt to recreate that now extinct man for an audience who never met him. Like a game of telephone across generations and time until you are left with men who are being worn by leather — not wearing leather.

The reason this ritual is so much more important now is because the oft-revered leather daddy symbol harkens back to a time when gay men had purpose. Cruising, bathhouses, gay bars, leather events, and many other subversive acts were radical before the 1990’s because they either directly challenged the status quo or were the only means by which gay men could subvert it. Without the radical or subversive element which imbued these spaces and acts with meaning, many have lost their appeal and edge.

This degradation over time is a topic that modern queer authors have been grappling with for the past few years. Books like Cruising; Gay Bar; or Times Square Red, Times Square Blue have raised the alarm bells on the disappearance of gay public encounters. These books all typically have the same premise: a famed gay institution is dying and that is a bad thing because of X. While all these authors acknowledge that these institutions were human and therefore contained problematic elements, they all speak to a common loss. The loss of equitable sexual relations between men, cross-class commingling inherent in public encounters, and a subversive edge that keeps the whole thing interesting.

Radical sexual acts are now all about bespoke and customized experiences meant to appeal exactly to your sexual desires. No longer do you need to traipse through some bushes in your local public park before weariness has you settling for the older, out-of-shape man you saw milling around. Just open the app and find the exact model you are looking for and they will be at your doorstep before you know it. Even the glory holes in bathhouses have expanded in size so people no longer have to suffer the horror of enjoying a sexual experience without knowing the exact age, height, and BMI of the person they are blowing.

No doubt there are justifiable fears and reasons driving this reality. Young gay men raised by concerned straight parents who passed on their fear of that “gay disease” AIDS, a population raised on the “stranger danger” curriculum, and a culture which, despite preaching equity, has yet to apply that to lust. But one can’t help feel that something went awry here.

What is left then? Groups of men putting on custom leather gear all bought from shops now offering express global shipping on orders over $40. Elaborate themed nights at leather bars catering to an increasingly bored community that has resorted to newer kinks in the name of subversion. Picky cruisers who would rather walk three hours in a dark park than touch someone they don’t immediately find attractive. Attractive men who claim that their commodified sexual acts broadcast on Twitter and OnlyFans are really in the name of liberation for all.

Leather men and the spaces they inhabit have taken on a new desperate edge. The ceremonies and pageantry becoming an increasingly tenuous link to a time and place that no longer exists, but that young gay men wished they were alive to experience. Vests, chaps, and mustaches all seeming to say “Remember? This used to have a purpose!”

Come to think of it maybe that guy on Grindr was right all along. Leather is sort of like drag.

#leather #essay #gay #LGBTQIA #drag #leather man #gay leather #tom of finland

[kirliao]

evermore: short series

fandom: top gun maverick

character(s): various members of the dagger squad

a/n: wrote the initial draft after watching an episode of quantum leap. yall raymond is so good in it?? and if i could get myself back to giffing again, i could make logan aus. anyway happy top gun fall! let’s get our hearts broken :)

track two: champagne problems ( aka “i broke my own heart writing this” )

his callsign harkens back to a blissful, serene afternoon back at your shared alma mater. well, it was a blissful, serene afternoon before you had foolishly tripped over something and in a swift second, worksheets and notes flew around you like giant confetti for an incoming pity party. you felt that it disturbed the peaceful scenery you had been enjoying. that, and the glass face of your watch had cracked upon impacting the ground after you’d tripped. great.

you felt that you had disturbed it and you felt a heavy weight in your heart for being such an embarrassment and why were you so clumsy and -- well, your thoughts never did finish when a young man came out of nowhere and offered to help you with your notes. so.. coordinated and orderly and he'd returned most of the papers to you before you could even think about asking for his name.

"i'm logan. logan lee. we have sociology together." he introduced himself anyway. he had a great smile, you thought.

you ended up seeing more of his smile as the two of you became friends, later study buddies, then eventually, lovers.

logan had told you of his dreams to fly. how he thinks that mankind was meant to touch the heavens. you thought it was the most romantic thing in the world. you thought he was the most romantic man in the world.

he’d shown it consistently, not just with his words but his actions. lavish dinners both in his apartment and when you both go out to restaurants. nights spent at his place cuddled together on a plush sofa. he looked after you and made you feel special. in turn, you helped him wherever possible. loved him with what you had.

truth is, there was a part of you that felt like it had to end at some point. logan was nearly perfect in so many ways. the problem was that you didn't think you were.

always feeling like you were two steps behind, lagging in what should be a path that you could be walking in side-by-side with him.

you'd found yourselves perusing through the school archives one day. one of you had some project due for a humanities class when you came across some history about the dorm you had  stayed in during your first year at yale.

"huh. turns out it was a mental institution back in the day." logan noted, causing you to give a wry smile and to utter out a reply before you could stop yourself. "well, looks like it's made for me then."

you could feel his eyes boring into you, a suspended smile before he cleared his throat and carried onto other information about other things. the silence from that moment never did leave your mind.

failing a class or two led to you graduating later than him. then the dinners with his family when you finally let him introduce you made you feel out of place. not awful, per se, just....inadequate.

the lee family were nice enough, but they all had that air to them; or maybe it was just amplified insecurity stemming from years of hearing (and listening) to the voices in your head.

that they were better than you, this whole family of overachievers. legacy graduates from well-repute universities and their accomplishments displayed alongside the goofy childhood pictures of logan that both his mom and sister were all too eager to share after dinner. the exchanges were warm, but it stopped there. it was as if you couldn’t quite reach out or connect.

you never did tell logan after that maybe spending more time with his family was in the cards for you. you couldn’t. not after they had been so welcoming and nice. how could you even explain that it might not have been enough?

however, about a month or two before the holidays, logan had planned for the two of you to spend some time somewhere in the mountains. he had rented this gorgeous cabin; something out of a magazine that you'd read at the doctor's office before your sessions.

upon seeing the rest of his family's cars parked outside when you both arrived, you could already tell something was off.

logan's family was fancy. however, they were not throw-a-party-whenever-they-like kind of fancy. strike one.

the bottle of dom perignon on the foyer table meant business and you weren't sure it was the kind of business you liked. you and logan would never splurge for something like that, for whatever reason. strike two.

and while the two of you liked to dance, you usually did it in the privacy of your apartments. this slow tune guiding the two of you into a familiar, yet nervous, dance could almost bring tears to your eyes. and not the happy kind. strike three.

"you had made me the happiest man for all these years we've been together..." was how it started. the rest of it seemed to blur together. his warm smile, his romantic words..

it didn't hit you that the look in his eyes turned from strikingly loving to concerningly desparate until he was on both knees, your hand in one of his and his other one holding a box containing the most beautiful ring you've ever seen laid neatly inside.

"please..i want you to marry me."

you let out a breath you didn't realize you were holding and you pulled your hand back.

your lips quivered, "i'm sorry. i'm..i'm so sorry, logan. i .."

it didn’t register that the heels that clicked against the floor was yours until you realized that you were slowly stepping away from him, his pained expression slowly blurring as tears took over before you turned and all but ran away. "i.. i'm sorry. i’m so, so sorry..."

cinderella was one of your favorite fairy tales as a child. the part where she ran when the clock struck midnight gave you a thrill when you first read it. inwardly cheering her on to get home before the world could find out that she really wasn’t the princess they thought she was. hoping for her to be safe, away from the glaring judgment of the world she lived in. this felt like your cinderella moment, but you were grown enough to know that it wouldn’t have a happy ending.

upon returning to your shared room, you had packed your things and left almost immediately. out the backdoor through the kitchen and you walked. through the winds and the dropping temperatures, you walked until you had reached a convenience store in order to gain your bearings and call a cab to the nearest airport. buy the last ticket for a flight back to your apartment. 

no more words needed to be said.

you just weren't ready.

years later, you'd hear about logan again from mutual friends. they said he'd found someone new. admittedly, some of them think that the new one looked like you.

they said he also managed to get into this prestigious program called ‘top gun’. high chance that he had finally flown like he’s always wanted, like he’s always told you he would.

there was a time he promised to fly you; promised he’d make you see the world differently. that the world was so much more beautiful once you’ve seen it from up high. there was a time you would’ve agreed.

sitting on your desk was the watch that had a crack on it, back from the day you two first met. he had offered to get it fixed, but you couldn’t bring yourself to have it done. call it practicality or some weird sense of sentimentality, but the damn thing still functioned. and now, after all these years, it did the double duty of reminding you of him.

you made circles on the fogged up windows of your apartment; light snow in the northern states reminded you of that night. and while it was painful to remember just how much you've hurt and how much he's hurt, you preferred all of this over the what if.

because the what if wasn’t a happy ending. you knew that yourself. it would just be a bandaid to a much bigger problem.

and you knew that you'd rather have him be happy, even if wasn't with you. 

#logan yale lee #top gun maverick #logan yale lee x reader #top gun x reader #top gun fanfiction #top gun x y/n #top gun x you #logan yale lee x you #top gun yale #writes.

[queer-geordie-nerd]

Using 'woke' as an insult pretty much guarantees you've lost any argument with me you were attempting to make. If being awake to societal injustice, being aware of the systemic and subtle ways discrimination and prejudice prop up the institutions of society, and making an effort to unlearn my own unconscious biases and educate myself is an insult, I'd rather be that than some dusty bigot harkening for the "good old days" when what they actually mean is they want to be able to be as racist, misogynistic and queerphobic as they like without consequences.

[phucshuhari]

Sonic Drive-In: The Classic American Drive-In Experience

If you're craving a nostalgic dining experience with a modern twist, look no further than Sonic happy hour time. This iconic restaurant chain has been serving up delicious food and drinks to customers in their cars since 1953.

At Sonic, you'll find a unique drive-in setup where you park your car, press a button, and a friendly carhop arrives to take your order. It's a retro concept that harkens back to the golden age of drive-ins, but with a contemporary menu and service.

One of the standout items at Sonic is their extensive drink selection. From classic milkshakes and malts to innovative beverages like the Cherry Limeade and Ocean Water, there's something to quench every thirst. And let's not forget their famous slushes, available in a variety of flavors.

But Sonic isn't just about drinks – their food menu is equally impressive. Indulge in classic American fare like burgers, hot dogs, and chili cheese fries, or try one of their unique items like the Bacon Cheeseburger Toaster Sandwich or the Philly Cheesesteak Footlong.

With over 3,500 locations across the United States, Sonic Drive In Happy Hour is a beloved institution that keeps customers coming back for its unique dining experience, tasty food, and refreshing drinks. So next time you're in the mood for a nostalgic treat, cruise on over to your nearest Sonic and enjoy a slice of Americana.

#sonic drive in happy hour #sonic drive in #sonic drive in menu #sonic happy hour times #sonic happy hour menu