#also also!!! the whole before crisis-crisis core period of time is one of my favorites with some of my favorite characters so I’ve been- | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

redantsunderneath · 4 years

Text

DC COMICS: Incoherence as Not-a-Bug-but-a-Feature (Spoilers for Batman 89-100)

Due to the emergence of the new Batman villain character Punchline, I wound up buying the last 12 issues of Batman and reading them in a single sitting. I’ve had trouble following DC comics for a while, constantly feeling that they were in trouble since back in the mid 2000s (with a glimmer of hope here and there). The act of reading DC comics has been a frustrating experience, where individual good stories and runs were laying around in the context of a lot of things that didn’t make sense while the company’s thrust felt chaotic and ideas not well blended. Every status quo change seemed hard to figure out the rules of enough to parse the context. We’ll get into the background of this, but my reading today of this extended stretch of comics that keeps losing the plot in favor of a fever dream of what’s happening at the moment with specific characters that refuse to cohere, it became obvious that what I had been looking at as subtext or critique was actually the text. I could see the messed up trees but was missing the the forest the universe was trying to describe.

What happens in these issues (Batman current series 89-100, I missed the beginning of the first of 2 arcs) is rolling war between the major Batman villains and the heroes (plus Harley Quinn and Catwoman), which shifts into a Joker and Joker adjacent vs. all as the Joker double crosses everyone then manages to steal Bruce Wayne’s fortune. We meet 3 new baddies – Underbroker, whose schtick is putting ill-gotten gains beyond the reach of the legal system (with an explicit line to rich globalists drawn), the Designer, who back in the day offered the four A list Batman villains plans to achieve what they most wanted, and Punchline, who is your toxic ex’s new millennial GF who really has it in for you (there is also a new good guy Clownhunter, which is a whole different thing, and a new costumed detective that predates Batman). This doesn’t convey the chaotic nature of what is happening issue to issue, but there’s more than one Batman hallucinogenic spirit quest, dead characters ostensibly walking around, a plan revolving around the Bat’s origin story that tells some version of it several times, and a no-nonsense declaration that the Joker, as the Devil of the Batman spiritual system, cannot die. The whole thing has the effect of convincing you there is no definitive sequence of events, only versions.

Alan Moore’s Killing Joke is not a favorite of mine, for a number of reasons. But the ending holds up. The Joker has done terrible things there is no antecedent for, and Batman wonders aloud if this never-ending dance they do ends in anything but both of their deaths; can they uncouple from the unhealthy duality the cycle of which simply repeats. The Joker responds, well, with a joke about two lunatics trying to escape an asylum. One jumps the roof to the next building, while the other is too scared to try. The escapee offers to hold a light while the other crosses on a beam but he says no, no you’ll just cut the light while I’m half way across. This not very funny joke nonetheless has a bunch of resonances – BM and Joker as conspiring co inmates, BM wanting to break out, a commentary about their natures (almost a reversal of the frog and scorpion story where the scorpion won’t go because he knows how this ends), but mostly it implicates BM as the one who is enabling the cycle, the reason why it won’t end. They both laugh uproariously, and the ambiguous final panels can be read as the fundamental realization of his complicity causing BM to kill J. A lethal joke indeed… except, next month, we see the both of them again. In broader context, the ceaseless cycle of the diad is reaffirmed. This has been hellaciously sticky as an idea in the Batmen universe.

My realization of what DC has been doing is pretty banal in its pieces. Marvel has “ground level” heroes while DC has a mythos, a pantheon. Their archetypal makeup is strong, the seven JLA members lining up with the pantheon of Greek gods and the Chakras weirdly closely. DC has big characters that are somewhat flat which they can use tell big bold individual stories that are cool the way legends and fables are cool. But these stories require bold strokes that a bit incompatible with each other. People get attached to these iterations. Meanwhile, Marvel trucks in soap operas where the characters give you an empathetic stand in and are narratively flexible. Marvel events are usually about the writer vs. the company, asking you to sympathize or deconstruct the creative impulse amid efforts to impose control or order. DC’s events are about editorial vs. the audience, the shapers vs. the forces of the world. It may seem obvious, given this description, that DC’s focus is on an archetypal tableau though it may be less obvious that this tableau is under extreme pressure from expectations when trying to tell ongoing tales month in, month out (or semi-monthly in some cases). The stories are constantly compared against the big stories that have gone before, and the audience’s ideas of the characters exert pressure to push them in directions that capture “the” version they believe in. This circle is not possible to square.

DC and Marvel both have a multiverse of sorts. DC used to tell “Elseworlds” stories which were later tucked into pocket universes. DC invented crossing over between “realities.” DC’s continuity is heavy baggage and they began to have “Crises” to resolve the narrative incompatibilities. These only made things worse as you can’t get rid of the past people have a relationship with – it will come back. Now you have to explain that away too. Marvel just lets it lay – forget about the iffy stories, they count, sure, just no one is ever going to talk about them unless they have an angle. Marvel continuity is all angles and amnesia. This is just easier to do with dating and rent and your ancient aunt’s medical bills than with Gods. Marvel’s multiverse is about sandboxes that you can always dump into the mainframe if they work (and never really mention the sandbox again).

There is a shift that occurred in the industry in the 2004 to 2005 era that is less remarked upon than many upheavals in comic’s history. Marvel had gone through a period of incredible new idea generation in the early 2000s after a late 90s creative cratering but had just fired the pro wrestling inflected soul of that moment (Bill Jemas). DC was coming off of a period of trying to do moderately updated versions of what they basically been doing all along. The attitude was “yeah we’re under stress from the combined history of these characters, but we got to keep telling the stories.” Geoff Johns was one voice of DC over the 99-04 period that showed potential - he seemed to get how to find the core of characters and push them into a new in sync directions if they over the years have lost a clear identity. But mostly he had internalized a basic schism between something mean that the audience wanted, and something good and wholesome about the characters themselves, and figured out how to mess around with this in a equilibrating fashion.

Interestingly, the ignition point of the main forces that were going to blow DC over the next decade and a half was a comic that had virtually nothing to do with any of those main forces. Brad Meltzer, a novelist, was hired to do a comic called Infinity Crisis, which sold extremely well and was, justifiably or not, recognized as an event. At the same time, everyone also kind of hated it because the dark desires of some DC fans were pushed forward just a bit too much for comfort and for a comic with Crisis in the name it didn’t do a whole lot other than “darken” things. Nonetheless, this lit an “event” fire at both companies. Marvel chose a shake up the status quo for a year, then do it again, pattern and was off to the races (I have written about this, and more, here) while continuing its Randian framing of beleaguered do-gooders opposed by rule making freedom haters.

As this was playing out, Dan Didio quietly took power in DC Editorial. His outlook was more Bloomian – he seemed to spark off of writers who exhibited anxiety of influence. He recognized Johns was the one person they had could be promoted into something of a universe architect, starting work on two key projects from which the rest would evolve. The first, was bringing back Hal Jordan as Green Lantern and diffracting the GL universe into its own symbolic system, with parts frisson-ing other parts, and almost a Magic the Gathering color scheme of ideas. The other was to build up to Infinite Crisis, which would become the model for most of their universe changing events until the present day.

The basic frame is this: DC heroes want to be good (in a sense of their inherent nature) but forces outside form a context that makes them fall. It’s a very gnostic universe, DC. They examine reflections of the concepts, invent scapegoats for certain tendencies (see Superboy Prime as entitled fanboy, Dr. Manhattan as editors that try and fail to mend things, etc), make characters violate principles, rehabilitate them, then show that the world if anything is more broken than before. This is kind of Johns’ thing and it fits Didio’s narrative as historicval tension fetish. But then came Scott Snyder (not to be confused with Zack) who began to work on Batman in 2011. Since then, as much as Justice League is pushed as the central title and Lex Luthor has been pimped, Batman has been the core of the universe and the Joker the core villain.

Snyder had the same continuity conflict wavelength but was significantly more meta and able to contain multitudes than Johns. He was the first to make an explicit mystery of how there could be several Jokers around at one time (who are the same but not, he posited 3 – man, Christians!) that seems prescient given the near future coexistence of filmic Jokers that are not able to be resolved. I believe he was the first to begin to tease out an idea – that different versions of things in comics are not a diffraction or filter effect, a using the set of things that work best for that story and leaving the rest, but are a matter of the archetypal system of the audience coming apart. From an in story perspective what appears to happen is that multiple versions of incompatible things exist in the collective unconscious of the continuing narrative, and this is something that the characters may become conscious of.

The run I just read is written by James Tynion IV building on the above trends. The trick seems to be going all in on the Jungian aspect (at Jung’s most religiously epiphanic). The Designer was a progenitor and adversary to Batman’s predecessor and his intellectual approach eventually defeated the detective… broke him. At some point in early Batman history, the Designer brought the top four Bat-baddies together and offered each, in turn, a plan to achieve what they most desired: the Riddler, a way to achieve an empire of the mind; the Penguin, power; and Catwoman, money. They are all elated as they await the Joker to come out. The Joker emerges with a furious Designer on his heals and promptly shoots him dead. He explains that he didn’t like his joke in the form of a fable – the devil offered four people the path to their greatest desire: the three chose earthly things, but the Joker’s wish was to be him, to become the devil. The story proceeds to suggest that the Joker just exists, he is present as a necessary component in the system. You can kill him, yet he is alive.

DC has been using physics metaphors for the nature of their reality since Flash of Two Worlds in 1963. The multiverse as a continuity concept was their idea and the holographic universe of the hypertime was a thing. It seems like since Dan Didio took over, they’ve been heading towards a concept of broad superimposition, of measurement effect being weak, of the universe being like a quantum computer with all possibilities coexisting and the story instantiating not one reality but a path through all the possible ones. By making Batman trip balls through quite a few issues and relive his origin from different angles, the story is one of its own instability and the heroic task that confronts our hero is attempting to actualize the world. The Joker is the Devil in the sense of lack of fixed meaning, of relativistic chaos, of the world not making sense because it’s unmoored nature with ultimately no knowability. Batman, in this story, functions as a postmodern knight crusading against the impossibility of epistemological grounding.

There’s more going on, sure. One plot is, literally, defund Batman. There is rioting, people brainwashed by being exposed to toxic ether, people paid to go to theaters even though they will die as a result, and questions about neoliberalism similar to that one Joker movie. Punchline has no personality yet (Tynion’s not the best at that) but she serves well as a generational foil for Harley – a rudderless ideological vacuum susceptible to Joker-as-idea-virus rather than an unfulfilled MD who felt alienated due to the structures of her life and was seeking escape into structureless possibility. The Designer stuff is both continuity play (See why they changed from goofy villains to more “realistic” ones! Look how pulp heroes informed superheroes!), a comment on the nature of a longstanding narrative (strong intentions die out as Brownian motion overwhelms momentum), and a lawful evil/chaotic evil setup of the dualism of apocalypses (overdetermined authoritarian vs. center does not hold barbarism). But the thing that ties this to the past decade and a half of DC is the sense that the reality is fluid and susceptible to change or outright s’cool incompatibility.

This is different than other flavors of meta in superhero comics. Grant Morrison believes the archetypes are stronger than the forces that seek to bend them. Alan Moore wants you to deconstruct your sacred cows and probably hates you personally. Marvel might play with self-awareness, but effortlessly resolves inconsistencies after it’s finished playing. DC, at this point, allows you to watch the waves solidfy into symbols and dissolve, and the constant confusion and lack of grounding is more of a choice then I thought this time yesterday. The conflict theory of DC reality has been in full swing but this looks to be turning towards a kind of Zen historicism, holding contradictory things in your mind at once. Warren Ellis’ JLA/Authority book is the nearest comparable text I can think of. I need to call this, but I didn’t even talk about Death Metal, DC character multiplicity as meta-psychosis event extraordinaire. Comics just keep getting weirder.

#DC comics #batman #joker #punchline

90 notes · View notes

bard-llama · 3 years

Text

WiP Wednesday: A Single Spark

I don’t think I’ve shared this whole scene before, but it’s one of my favorite scenes I’ve written, ‘cause there’s so much going on with everyone as they try to figure out where their political alignment is.

Premise: This is from a fic series called A Single Spark where Foltest orders the forest burned to destroy the Scoia’tael - only it does a lot more damage than just that (and the Scoia’tael survive, because they actually know how to care for forests and periodically burn the underbrush. Also, Roche and Fenn risked going into the forest to warn them, ‘cause Foltest has gone off his rocker.) With the help of Triss and Keira, the Blue Stripes manage to help the locals keep Ellander and Flotsam from burning down, and after the fire has burned out, everyone tries to figure out where things stand now that they’re technically all traitors in Foltest’s eyes.

Iorveth’s voice was entirely reasonable as he said, “all we want is the right to live freely. Is that truly too much to ask!?”

“He’s right, John,” Roche found himself saying and saw Iorveth turn to him in surprise. This was going to sound callous, but, “just look at the numbers. If we want a single chance to stop this from happening again? We need nonhumans. Is granting equality really that much to ask?”

The look on Iorveth’s eye made him feel strangely warm and he cleared his throat.

Natalis shook his head, expression openly uncertain. “We are fighting for a Temeria where our king won’t burn down forests. But I don’t have the authority to promise that kind of change. The nobles would never support it.”

“Hang the nobles!” Roche swore. “They’ve already made their stances clear! If they stand for the reckless destruction of Temeria, then who cares what they approve!?”

“I know you’ve never been fond of us,” Maria Louisa La Valette chided calmly as she walked into the room, “but not all the nobles have betrayed Temeria, thank you very much. And that is a good thing, because I believe I have exactly what you need.”

“Oh?” he scowled.

“You should know better than any,” Louisa sniffed, looking down her nose at him, “if we are to have a real chance of opposing Foltest and his loyalists, we’re going to need a viable option for someone to rule in Foltest’s stead.”

Roche opened his mouth to protest – and then his brain finally kicked into gear and reminded him exactly why Louisa La Valette would be the one to make this point.

“Foltest won’t claim them if they oppose him,” he reminded her softly. He didn’t particularly like Louisa La Valette all that much, but she was a proud woman and, unusual amongst her peers, she was actually invested in her children’s lives. And she knew Foltest, probably as well as he did. She had to know how this action would cause Foltest to respond.

Her throat moved in a quick swallow before she nodded sharply. “I know. I’ve discussed this with my family, and we’ve made the decision.”

John Natalis coughed light. “Pardon me for interrupting, my lady, but what–?”

Louisa cleared her throat, sweeping her eyes over the assembled group – not that there were many of them. She was the highest ranked noble present, and he had no doubt that she saw that as meaning command should automatically fall to her.

Unfortunately for her, neither Roche nor Natalis were the type to turn over command in the middle of a crisis. Which meant they had 3 commanders, a Scoia’tael elf who probably wouldn’t listen to any of them, a mage who rarely did anything she didn’t want to do anyway, and another noble. Great. No way that was going to be a problem.

“My children, Natalis,” Louisa said, gesturing towards the door as a young man with dark hair opened it and guided two small children with lighter hair inside. All of them were Louisa’s children, but considering the old Baron (may he rest in peace) had had black hair, and Louisa herself had dark hair, it was clear to anyone who looked that the young twins had a different father than the older boy.

Roche knew that people often did not look, but even so, there had been more than a few rumors about Louisa’s affair with Foltest. They were discreet – Roche knew this because often times he would be the one providing the discretion – but they were both nobles to their core. Nobles never noticed the servants, never thought about the fact that servants could gossip just as readily as other courtiers did.

Natalis had obviously heard said rumors, because he stared for a long moment at Ari, the oldest child, then assessed the twins in silence for another long minute. Then he cleared his throat. “My lady, what precisely are you proposing?”

“I am proposing that Foltest’s children be his heirs to the throne,” Louisa was calm as she delivered the news, and in any other circumstance, her declaration would be cause for Roche to panic. A dispute over the line of succession could destroy a reign if rulers weren’t careful. But Foltest had been planning to claim the children as his own, once the right politically expedient moment had arrived. They were bastards, so there would still have been some dispute over the rightfulness of their claim to the throne – but Foltest had only one other child, and if their claim was viewed more strongly than hers...

Shit, Roche really should’ve invited her. He hadn’t even thought of it, and–

The door opened again and this time, Triss Merigold entered with a white-robed priestess of Melitele who was technically the Crown Princess of Temeria. Technically, because while the reality was that Foltest was her father, no one knew that. To the world, Princess Adda the White was Foltest’s niece, daughter of the late Princess Adda of Temeria.

To a noble, a sister’s daughter was less respected than the primary family line – aka Boussy and Anais, Foltest’s direct children – but she was at least considered legitimate. Sort of. The cover story Roche had concocted when Adda had appeared – and he did mean appeared, as in, out of thin air in many ways – was that the late Princess had secretly married a nobleman, who had then hidden their child from the King after the Princess died. He’d had to specify that the nobleman had hidden Adda from Foltest, because none of them had known about Adda’s existence until a witcher lifted the curse from a striga. Eight years after the late Princess’s death.

The public had accepted the story, fortunately, but the fact was that until the curse had been lifted, Adda hadn’t known anything but the life of a monster that hungered for human flesh. She was cured of that, but its effects remained even as the Sisters of Melitele taught her how to be a person. Roche was proud to say that he’d played some small part in that, in raising the young woman standing in the doorway.

He also had a recurring nightmare where Foltest decided that his former-striga daughter was too nonhuman to be tolerated. She wasn’t, of course. Adda was human. The witcher had cured her.

Sure, maybe Roche had noticed little ways in which she was still a little… effected, shall we say? Like the way that her growl made all the hairs on the back of his neck stand straight up. Or the way that she could hear people moving two rooms over when Roche certainly couldn’t. Or the way that she preferred her meat rare enough to still be bleeding.

Little things. Not enough to make her not a human, though. It wasn’t as if she was an elf or a dwarf or a halfling or something. She was human. And just a little superhuman as well.

Triss Merigold cleared her throat and addressed everyone assembled in the room. “May I present Priestess Adda the White, Crown Princess of Temeria.”

Natalis, Keira Metz, Duke Hereward, and Louisa all bowed courteously, some noticeably lower than others. Belatedly, Roche remembered that he was supposed to bow too, which got him some odd looks from the others, but Adda just smiled at him. Iorveth didn’t move a muscle, looking at them all balefully.

“Gentlemen,” Adda’s voice was soft, yet it easily commanded the room, “ladies, I understand this is a strategy meeting to determine what to do next about Foltest.”

Natalis cleared his throat, “yes, my lady.”

“Wonderful. If you wouldn’t mind filling me in?”

“Of course,” every single one of them said, automatically assuming that she was addressing them as the leader. He’d known that was going to come back to be a problem.

Triss rolled her eyes and called on her fellow sorceress. “Keira? Would you mind?”

“Of course, your highness,” Keira nodded. “We haven’t exactly accomplished much.” The mage’s voice was scathing as she flicked a glance at Iorveth. “Roche brought Temeria’s Most Wanted Terrorist to the meeting, which understandably bothered some people.”

Roche rolled his eyes. “And Iorveth made the surprisingly rational argument that if we want to change Temeria, why not give nonhumans equal rights and protections, too?”

“The people would never accept it,” Louisa dismissed easily.

“I rather think the nonhumans would,” Adda said, soft words ringing in the silence that followed. “I am not sure that working with the Scoia’tael is the right answer, but why not make this change as well? I assume you’re already intending to ask for Foltest to step down.”

“And his children,” Louisa emphasized, squeezing each of the twins’ shoulders. Anais and Boussy mostly just looked uncomfortable. “Will take their rightful place as his heirs.”

Triss arched an eyebrow. “Rightful place? You do recall that you are speaking to the Crown Princess, don’t you?”

“Who is Foltest’s niece. Not his direct descendant.”

Roche rolled his lips together, determined to take the particular secret that meant she was wrong to the grave.

“Niece?” Anais spoke suddenly, eyes fixed on Adda. “You’re Papa’s niece?”

Adda blinked down at Anais for a long moment and then knelt down and smiled. “I am. It’s nice to meet you. I didn’t know I had other family.”

And there was a rebuke in that that had Roche wincing, but nonetheless, there was something incredible about watching this meeting of Foltest’s three children. It was only right that they should know each other.

Louisa’s hand tightened around Anais’s shoulder. “I’m sure they’d be delighted to get to know you,” the noblewoman said, eyes sharp and hard, “provided you do not contest their claim to the throne.”

“My lady,” Triss interrupted, “with all due respect, they’re children. Adda is of age.”

Louisa was not moved, but Adda cleared her throat, smiling at Anais and Boussy as she rose. “I’m sure something can be worked out. More importantly, I would like to know where everyone stands on the nonhuman issue.”

“More important?” Louisa muttered, but obligingly shuffled her children to be seated around the table. Natalis, Keira and Hereward were all already sitting at the table, and Triss and Adda joined them.

But Iorveth didn’t move, and Roche twisted back to cock an eyebrow at him.

“That ‘nonhuman issue’,” Iorveth grit out, “happens to be my life, my people’s lives, and the survival of our entire species in the face of those who seek our eradication.”

Roche blinked, taken off guard by the venom in Iorveth’s words. But then, he supposed he’d never really thought about it like that before. To him, hunting elves was just – well, just following orders. He’d honestly never thought much about the experiences of nonhumans from their perspective. Foltest had never been interested in hearing that intel and Roche had never even thought to gather it.

Swallowing down the turmoil of emotions that thought caused, Roche looked at Iorveth and forced himself to see. To see beyond the enemy commander and the wily opponent and the talented warrior, down to the elf underneath all of that. To Roche, that Iorveth was an elf had never really mattered. Well, obviously it did, because those were Roche’s orders, but he’d just… never really thought about it. Iorveth was a terrorist, a criminal. Who cared that he was an elf?

Except… except Iorveth was a terrorist because he was an elf, wasn’t he? Because he wanted freedom and equality for his people. His elven people.

Weird how Roche had never thought about that before. It made him feel… something. Something uncomfortable and sour and a little too close to guilt for comfort.

“You’re right,” Adda said, and the whole room stared at her. She simply bowed her head to Iorveth. “I apologize for minimizing your fight. While I don’t personally agree with your tactics, I can understand what might lead you to taking such actions. That does not make them forgivable,” she was quick to say as Duke Hereward jumped to his feet, “but you are right to remind us that there are real people behind these issues, real lives affected by what we decide.”

Iorveth looked gobsmacked, but then, so did most of the room. Adda was certainly different to what they were all used to with Foltest.

The elf still didn’t join them at the table, but he did reluctantly ghost slightly closer, leaning against the wall behind Roche, which Roche was weirdly okay with, considering Iorveth could conceivably knife him in the back at any time.

But why would he? At the moment, Iorveth needed him, needed his acceptance to keep from getting slaughtered. Of everyone in this room, Roche would bet that only Anais and Boussy were unarmed. Iorveth wasn’t stupid enough to start a fight he couldn’t win, and seven against one, even this one, was a fight he could not win.

“Your highness,” Hereward said, shifting uncomfortably. “You almost sound as if you support the nonhumans.”

“That would be because I do, Duke Hereward,” Adda’s voice was firm and spoke of absolute faith in her words. “I believe that Temeria should be an equal Temeria for all Temerians, regardless of species. That is the Temeria I stand for.”

Roche tried not to gape. It probably should not have been as much of a shock as it was to hear Adda’s words. In retrospect, she’d always been very insistent that Melitele looked after all people, no matter what their ears looked like or how tall they were.

“That’s absurd,” Louisa scowled. “Temeria is a human land. If nonhumans want their own land, let them go somewhere else.”

“You are sitting on top of the ruins of the city I was born in, dh’oine. This was my land long before it belonged to you.”

Louisa and Ari bristled, and Roche could see Natalis frowning in thought even as Hereward closed himself off entirely, clearly uninterested in anything the elf had to say. Keira looked phenomenally unimpressed, and Triss mostly just looked concerned, but he kept his focus on Louisa. If any of them might try to stick a blade through Iorveth’s throat, it was her.

Without really thinking it through, he held his hands up placatingly, “there’s no need for this to get heated–”

“Heated!?” Louisa snarled. “What happened to the Blue Stripes commander who defended Temeria against the nonhuman threat? You stand there and let him tell lies, you bring him here and vouch for him – what has he promised you?”

Roche frowned. “My loyalty is to Temeria, and it isn’t for sale,” he said firmly. “This is a meeting to determine our next steps, as people who are all considered traitors to Foltest now.” And oh, that hurt something deep in his chest, made it ache with the memory of everything Foltest was to him. Had been. Now? Now, Foltest was clearly mad, and Roche had to think of what was best for Temeria. “We’re talking about standing against the King and all his armies. If you believe we few have the capability to stand up to those forces, then you’re deluded. Even the men in your own service aren’t enough, Lady La Valette, and to send them into battle without support would mean a slaughter. Hundreds of Temerians dead, for no other reason than because you could not sit and discuss what might be possible if we worked together. Is that really something you want on your conscience?”

Natalis cleared his throat authoritatively, “what is it you’re proposing, Commander Roche?”

“I’m not proposing anything. I’m saying that the leader of the Scoia’tael is literally here, in this room. And all he’s asking is equality for his people. That sounds like the beginning of a negotiation to me.”

Hereward scoffed, wrinkling his nose. “Negotiate with elves? When have you ever known an elf to keep their word!?”

“Have you ever known a human to keep theirs!?” Iorveth growled, low in his throat, and the sound reverberated around the room, setting more than a few people on edge.

Roche had to try hard not to smirk. These people didn’t understand Iorveth in the slightest. Maybe some elves were liars and oathbreakers. Hell, plenty of humans were liars and oathbreakers too. But Iorveth? Iorveth had his own sense of honor. It was warped by his morality, of course, but it was there. Why else would Iorveth save him in exchange for warning the Scoia’tael of the coming fire? Why else would Iorveth send his men out to look for Fenn?

“Enough,” Adda said, quiet voice somehow cutting through all protests.

The end result of this is gonna be 3 factions warring for control of Temeria.

The Loyalists

Foltest and his cronies, including a mage. They say a king can do whatever he damn well pleases and that’s the way it should be. Foltest fully intends to keep his position as king.

The Pragmatists

Louisa La Valette, John Natalis, Keira, and the others that stand with them that say kings shouldn’t be able to abuse their powers that way. They want Foltest to step down and his children to take the throne.

The United Temerians

Roche, Iorveth, Adda, Triss, and others who stand with nonhumans. They say that while Temeria is undergoing this change, why not include nonhuman rights as part of it. They want Foltest’s ‘niece’ to take the throne.

Of course, before this can happen, there’s all the build up with the forest fire which I still gotta write. But eventually, some of this ‘verse will actually be published and I am excited for that.

#rorveth #iorveth x roche #politics #a single spark #fic planning #my fics #adda the white #triss merigold #keira metz #louisa la valette #john natalis #king foltest #the witcher

13 notes · View notes

emsartwork · 4 years

Note

Sorry if you’ve already answered this but J was wondering if you could talk more the girls childhood/growing up? Love what you’re doing btw, absolutely adore how you’ve basically recreated the Winx world! 💗

Thank you!!! and sure thing! long post ahead

BLOOM: she never really had any problems family wise, Vanessa and Mike told her she was adopted at like…. Age 7 or so (in a positive affirming way obvi) and even if any kids teased her about it she never doubted her parent’s love for her. Even with Daphne’s spell helping her blend in with earth life, Bloom still had a nagging sense she didn’t “fit”, and got lost in fantasy books and art whenever possible. Growing up she deals with some body image issues that probably stem from the whole wrong fit feeling. Bloom grew up an artistic and quiet kid, Mitzi and Selina were her best friends from childhood, and because they both had really strong personalities, Bloom often repressed her own feelings in order to play peace maker. Up until high school, where Mitzi, who was always the leader, slowly started to turn into a bully in order to gain the approval/fear of her peers, targeting Selina specifically. Bloom was more of a follower at the time and just didn’t want to loose her friends so she didn’t stand up to Mitzi but tried to treat Selina as if nothing had changed, which was not cool with Selina and she not-so-subtly started to reject Bloom as a friend. Bloom, for her part, did get her shit together and stand up to Mitzi, loosing her only other friend right before her senior year of highschool (she was still technically friends with Andy but they had also just broken up and everything was awkward lmao). Bloom regrets not standing up to Mitzi sooner, and wants to rekindle her friendship with Selina (and Mitzi if she’s willing to tone down the bitchiness).

STELLA: So Stella’s childhood is a little more complicated. Stella is the first SoLuna heir in Solarian history, and a very loud minority protested her very existence. Stella also had to stay close to the Second Sun of Solaria as a child, so she had a very solitary and confined early childhood in a wing of the Solarian castle. When she did figure out how to sneak out she was only 10 or so, and spent most of the time just wandering around the capital city. She didn’t have any problems in the city, but an off duty guard recognized her and took her back to the palace. Stella was then sent to an elite boarding school under a false name (Sasha), she formed close friends with Nova and Varanda, but the trio was the target of the rest of the school’s bullies (for various reasons). Junior high was peak nerd Stella, but she “princess Diary-ed” herself when starting high school and started placing all of her value in her appearance and status as a sex object. Her parents’ marriage was also starting to crumble and Stella felt like she had lost their love. Because Stella craves validation and affection, this lead to a couple bad relationships because the only way she could get people to “love her” in her brain was through physical intimacy, even if it didn’t really fill the void she felt. Nova and Varanda were her rocks during this period and Stella was able to learn to love herself first with their help. Stella was insanely nervous to leave her friends and go to Alfea, and tried to force friendships with other people originally, (this mostly lead to people thinking she was annoying and getting multiple censures from Griselda), and her first genuine connection on Magix was with “Prince Sky” (Brandon). Nova and Varanda were VERY worried when Stella first told them about “Prince Sky”(Brandon) and how fast they had gotten into a relationship and they may have stalked/threatened him on a visit to Stella but they eventually came around and started to like him. Stella being expelled was only kind of an accident, Varanda texted Stella in the middle of a Chemancy class her application to Alfea for the next year had been accepted and Stella got SUPER excited and blew up the classroom. She probably could have stayed in school but her response to Fraragona and Griselda’s “now what do you have to say for yourself young lady” was *giddy laughter* and “ i only wish the explosion had been big enough to send me forward to next year!!!!!” and griselda was like “either she goes or I go” and Stella was like “ya gurl i gone” of course her time back on Solaria didn’t go exactly as planned as her parents were just fighting every time they tried to do something together making her people pleasing/self blaming tendencies worse.

FLORA: ahhh my baby So Flora does remember her father, not a lot and she feel guilty she doesn’t remember more, but she was only 7 when he died. Alyssa remarried when Flora was 13, and eventually she adjusted to having a younger sister who she loves very much now. Due to Rhodos’s nature preservation needing a lot of room for study Flora and Miele grew up pretty far away from any town and didn’t have a lot of friends. This is primarily why Flora and Miele are so close despite their age difference, and why Flora took her role as protector so intensely; she was the only one there (I mean besides the parents obviously). Flora did well in school though she was quiet and reserved, which made making friends even harder than living in the middle of nowhere. She figured out the best way to make people like her was to give them what they wanted, and this snowballed into Flora becoming kind of doormat not comfortable with voicing her true feelings and faking a lot what people expected from her. Flora has a lot of repressed…… everything (Bloom mostly just has a lot of repressed anger she’s good with other emotions lmao) she has trouble identifying what she’s feeling and for the most part is content to leave her feelings buried as long as the surface remains calm. The Winx do help her start to access her feeling more, and encourage her whenever she does voice an opinion. Helia is a perfect match for her in the sense that his quiet nature leaves Flora to express herself without trying to mold herself into whatever she thinks he wants (of course on the flip side this also means Flora and Helia have issues with communication and repression but that’s another topic).

AISHA: hoo boy another complicated one. Aisha was raised in a strict environment, this mostly stems from her parents and their more…. anxious natures, but royalty on Andros is not as free as some of the other planets. Aisha’s world consisted of lessons and adults and rules and she had very little control over her own life. Aisha met Anne in a rare moment of freedom in the tidal gardens where Anne’s father worked. Anne was biding her time waiting for her dad to get off work so they could grab some dinner and was dancing. Aisha just watched her for a while before Anne noticed her and asked her if she wanted to play. The two formed a fast friendship, and Aisha finally started to feel like she had some sort of influence in her own life as she snuck out of lessons to play with Anne every evening she could(obviously their favorite thing to do was dance lol) Unfortunately Anne and her father disappeared one night. Aisha lost her only friend, the only social outlet she had, her one source of freedom, and couldn’t even figure out what had happened. Feeling so out of control lead to a pretty bad anxiety disorder for most of her teens, primarily triggered by the dark or being trapped in some way. She also has issues trusting others and letting people help her. Aisha started to act out, trying to exert any kind of control and relieve some of her anxiety. Her risk taking behavior got pretty bad, but she had started to tone it down after she met and bonded with Piff(royal business trip to Magix she skipped out on). Of course when the pixies went missing she wasn’t going to let her friendship vanish again and tracked them down with a not so healthy single minded determination.

TECNA: born to higher class parents, Tecna had greatness thrust upon her from an early age. She received extra training and education basically from birth, which she was fine with for the most part. Tecna grew up being able to handle academic pressure very well and met all of her teacher’s and parent’s expectations. She and Riven had a brief collision as preteens in a school before Riven got expelled. Tecna’s one issue was that of her emotional intelligence, Zenith doesn’t really place an emphasis on that, so she was able to advance through high school very predictably until she attended a non-Zenith based workshop for magic. She found herself socially ostracized and very very confused. Of course Tecna had never met a subject she couldn’t master and emotions wouldn’t be an exception right??? Wrong. Zenith’s information about the brain and the chemicals produced was of no help, her teachers and parents didn’t understand why Tecna suddenly had this new interest in such an illogical subject, and worst of all, Tecna realized she didn’t understand her own brain chemicals. Tecna had a mini existential crisis, realized she had no idea what she even wanted to do with her life or why it mattered and applied to the Alfea Fairy program because “FAIRY MAGIC EMOTION MAGIC HELP” also it would offer her strong emotional experiences(transformations basically require it), the opportunity to work closely in groups, and personally obverse her dorm-mates emotional states. She got way more than she bargained for but doesn’t regret it a bit.

MUSA: my angst child T-T so basically, the first half of her childhood is p good, her parents work really hard and don’t always have enough money but the family unit is pretty stable. At around 12, Musa’s mom gets sick. Nobody is too worried at first, but she never seems to get better and she takes a big turn for the worse when Musa is about 16, Matlin is finally diagnosed with Core Failure Syndrome. CFS is similar to Core Fatigue, but while Core Fatigue can be remedied fairly easily with rest and magic, CFS is virtually incurable unless it’s caught really early. The causes are still unknown, and the symptoms (fatigue, nausea, cognition issues, and muscle weakness) can be prolonged but mild until it’s too late. In the later stages (extreme fatigue, numbness in the extremities, chest pain, joint pain, memory/focus issues, inability to keep food down) all you can do is try to make the afflicted comfortable. Ho-boe is understandably distraught, and tries to freelance write for music but goes into a pretty bad depressive state. Musa has a few odd jobs here and there, and thats mostly what’s keeping them afloat among heavy medical debt. Musa latches on to her mother for emotional support as Ho-boe is super dissociated. When Matlin does pass as Musa turns 18, Ho-boe finally breaks, and violently destroys every last reminder of Matlin because he can’t deal with the pain. Musa, who has suddenly had her one emotional anchor cut off, is super freaked out and scared by this and it really damages their relationship going forward. Musa becomes incredibly anxious, and can’t really process her mother's death because her father won’t talk about it with her and is still shut off emotionally. Moving to Magix only worsened it as Musa rebelled and went after music with a desperate passion. Applying to Alfea was a way for Musa to get out of the house, and she and her father weren’t on speaking terms when she did leave for the college. Musa had planned on learning more magic to further her career as a musician, special effects infusing magic into a song rubbing shoulders with rich and well connected people who could possibly get her connected to the big shots in music….. The winx situations had her change some of her long term plans a little, but her connection with the group + her separation anxiety and fierce loyalty didn’t really leave any other choice lol

93 notes · View notes

clumsyclifford · 3 years

Note

bella I would love a directors cut on literally any of the rilex you’ve written, but specifically it’s always her, and you, and me, or for these days you’ve been stuck in my brain 💙

OHHHHHH those are some CHOICESSSSSS lucy. fuck yeah. let’s get into it. ill link them both here but we’ll take em one at a time

it’s always her, and me, you

these days you’ve been stuck in my brain

here’s a cut for convenience cos i KNOW i’m gonna go long here.

okay! let’s start with the rilisex fic.

it’s always her, and me, and you

so like it says in the ao3 notes, this fic came from realizing just how frequently rian and alex kiss each other like, all the time? just? casually? for funsies? this was another one of those situations like i mentioned where the hook aka first line (“Rian's no expert, but he doesn't think normal friends kiss this much.”) just appeared in my head and i was like heyyy that’s a GOOD first line. i have to build from that line. that’s the hook, that’s the summary, that’s the core.

something i discovered upon searching through the editing history of the doc: i had originally sort of intended to go a direction with this where in some other circumstance, rian would see alex giving jack a super casual friendly kiss and he’d get all sad/jealous and be like sure why SHOULDNT alex kiss jack after all its just a thing he does with his FRIENDS. but the fic ended up going a different way and honestly? im glad. i like this way better.

the role of singin in the rain in this fic actually has a HILARIOUS backstory because the night i originally wrote that conversation in the tour bus kitchen, i went into the club and said the following

and then. the next day. rian streamed with ricky, and i asked if he’d ever seen singin in the rain, and he ANSWERED ME and said he hadn’t. so first of all i had already written the scene and i then had to rewrite it to make it so rian wouldn’t have seen it but also!!! i literally asked rian fucking dawson if he’d seen a movie for the sole reason of using that information for fanfiction!!!! and he provided me with the information i needed!!!! whole thing is just fucking hysterical to me. ANYWAY.

ANYWAY, the other reason why sitr has such a big role in the fic is because megs and i watched the movie together while i was in the middle of working on the fic, so it was extremely fresh in my mind. in fact i can probably show you this: i had this comment left for myself when i was kind of trying to figure out if i could make a real metaphor of sorts with the sitr ot3 and the Big Three of this fic. some of this ended up in rian’s wild musings in the hotel scene but i did conclude that it wouldn’t really have worked and that was definitely true but anyway. fuck it, director’s cut, here’s the kind of shit i leave for myself to refer to

so that’s part of the reason why it became such a puzzle piece of this fic, but real talk, it’s also just because i love singin in the rain it’s one of my favorite movies lmao

briefly gonna also touch on lisa and why she’s in this fic because i realize that rian/alex/lisa is an interesting approach to rilex! first of all, i love lisa. i love alex and lisa. and it occurred to me that there was really no reason to split lisex up just to make rilex happen. plus there’s this tweet that really just pushed me over the edge of being like yeah, rilisex is extremely plausible. so that’s that on that.

as for the scene in the hotel room while they’re watching sitr, there is a small piece of that scene - from when alex starts kissing rian’s shoulders etc to “it would defy the laws of nature not to” - that i actually wrote before anything else in that scene. that small piece got stretched out and edited quite a bit from how it started but it did function as a sort of foundation around which i built the rest of the scene, because that small section sort of ~came to me~ absolutely out of nowhere, and i really liked the Vibe it had and i wanted to include it. i THINK that was the only piece of this fic that i wrote Out Of Order - for the most part this was written chronologically.

ALSO!!! omg this is exciting, this fic actually has a deleted scene!!!!!! i hate cutting scenes but i also hate having scenes that are less than 1k and this one didn’t really contribute much to the fic. i can probably share it here right? sure why not ! hopefully you can read this. it originally took place after the scene where alex and rian call lisa for the first time. the question of “what gets left into interview videos and what gets cut” is also just interesting to me as a (fic) concept in general so...eyes emoji, but here’s my mini-exploration that i cut from the original fic. enjoy lol it’s silly <3

oh! also one more thing!! the very final scene was included for two reasons. the first reason being that when i write getting-together fics, i really prefer to add on a scene After they Get Together because i love to write domestic established relationship stuff and i think that’s a satisfying reward for a reader who’s just slogged through all the mutual pining and bullshit to get the characters together. but the OTHER reason is that i got an anon (here it is!) and i read that ask and was immediately like well shit. now i have to fucking include this. for the anon and for myself. so you can thank that anon for that last scene. (also i wanted to include merrikat especially since i had to cut their little moment in the interview scene above.)

so....................whew. i think i’ve bled that fic dry. holy shit that’s a lot of Stuff. OKAY! let’s move on.

these days you’ve been stuck in my brain

so!!! THIS fic was the breakthrough after (what felt like) a long bout of writer’s block. long for me was maybe two weeks, but i am the kind of person who is always writing, and two weeks was a long time to go with little to no inspiration/motivation to write anything. i had also been in a weird narrative headspace because i’d been binge-watching disney shows (jessie > austin and ally > girl meets world) and i don’t know how well i can explain this but the way those shows are written is a lot snappier and cares way less for realistic and consistent character development or plots or relationships, and so i was stuck between caring a lot about including those things in my fics but also being unable to conceptualize them in writing because my brain was in Disney Writing Mode. does that make sense? this is rhetorical so let’s go with yes. so anyway. i was in a slump

actually what i ended up doing was basically googling something like “au prompts tumblr” or something and just scrolling through posts. i saw something about soulmate telepathy and i actually tried to write something totally different before i wrote this one, but the first attempt was a different concept and then the direction i took it was like......it wasn’t quite right and i realized that i was kind of writing dark disney style? there is really no way for me to explain what i mean by that because it seems really obvious to me but that’s just because i’m inside my own head so just take my word.

anyway. attempt #1 of soulmate telepathy rilex went poorly, and this fic was attempt #2. i kinda took the soulmate telepathy thing and changed it as i saw fit and i also went back to skim helen’s telepathy fic because obviously she’s the pro and then i tried not to steal her ideas. and as i was writing it i kinda realized i was doing the whole quirky funny best friend character with jack and also doing the whole “somehow this not-very-dramatic situation with teenagers is treated as The Most Dramatic Thing Ever and that’s totally normal and nobody finds it strange” disney trope with rian and alex being soulmates and i was like (deep sigh) i have to accept that no matter how much i try to fight this, this fic is going to be tainted with disney. and that’s life

on top of that i will add that the real-life rilex were extremely inspiring during the two-day period during which i wrote this fic, because that was when the once in a lifetime video came out and in the brief pre-video livestream rilex were Beyond Married and that definitely helped in the writing of fic rilex!

hmmmm what can i tell you about this fic itself.................honestly, i don’t think there’s much to tell! rian is a band kid because in real life rian was a band kid and he’s staff manager at rita’s just like he was in real life. there is truthfully not a lot to unpack here that i can think of!

oh here’s something i guess: rian and alex go on a date in this fic! that is because watching So Much Disney made me realize that i often forget the fact that people just. go on dates. sometimes. look i clearly do not have an active romantic life but i also really liked the idea of alex and rian going on a date despite not knowing if they’d be soulmates or not and liking each other organically just by getting to know each other, rather than being victim to the whole soulmate thing. like i wanted them to build a connection so that they would want to be soulmates. and then the audience would want that for them too. stakes!! very important.

i can tell you i had a mild crisis over the title of the fic because i am not a fan of the word brain and i didnt wanna use that sticky lyric for the title when it had a word i hated but it was objectively a much better title option than the other one i had, which was “sticky just like the song in my head” but i obviously decided on the former and it has not upset me nearly as much as i expected it to so that was the right decision imo

so! i think that’s all on that! sorry (?) that it got so long although then again i don’t know what’s to be expected in a director’s cut for two long fics but thank you for asking me about these, i love them both so very much rilex is so supremely underrated but so very important

#cashtonasfuck #ask #answered #this is a whole ass multimedia fucking presentation #you asked for the director's cut but like i sure as hell didnt hold back dflkhggj #in fairness you picked two longer fics #though most of my rilex fics are longer ones which is strange #but like good for them #director's cut #this was really fun #thank you lucyyy <3 #these were the good right choices for rilex fics to dissect because the other ones are either shorter or rilex is a background pairing #or like . just aint that deep #i stole the plot of something unpredictable from that other fic by that other person #so ya know #the fact that this response contains an entire deleted scene in a screenshot #this is a lot lmfao

3 notes · View notes

beyondthetemples-ooc · 4 years

Text

“Why” tags are going here because Tumblr’s a baby who can’t handle all these words at once. :P

Why:

#but i spent my whole life absolutely CONVINCED that wings belonged on my body. it just... tok me a good long while to figure out Why.

#Oh THAT'S why everyone's freaking out over that post.

#at first I was like ''Wow this is Srentha to the core!'' And then I read ''why this unreasonable answer at the sight

#honestly this is why i'm basically addicted to empty-mind meditation?

#??? why do people do these awful things to Good People though

#i don't know how or why and i don't remember ever having Learned about That Letter? but my mind automatically knew it was 'hath' somehow

#Of course that DOES beg the question of why a LORd of CHAOS doesn't... you know. CHANGE it? ??

#first of all: REM WHY ARE YOU COMING to OHIO of all places???

#okay but. randy how did they MEET what's the STORY why are they HATING on TEXAS

#or like. a Sarcastic Joke because cyborg was once like ''why aren't you miss mary sunshine''?

#''What are you DOING. You RUN. ALWAYS RUN.'' and i was like. ''why bother getting into adventures if you're gonna RUN though..''

#I don't know why but I always score better on Customer Service Questionaires when I choose responses like ''I'm sorry

#i've never seen that still before and I CAN;T FATHOM WHY because that is FANTASTIC!

#I don't know why but ''novice suddenly ends up with super incredibly powerful abilities'' is one of my FAVORITE TROPES!

#I have no idea how/why but these just gave me Massive Leyla and Srentha Feels.

#my usual turnaround time for Dreams to Real Life is about two weeks. not sure why but it happens to like 7 people in my immediate family

#Especially with the bells. I don't know why but bells always remind me of that place. ~<3

#Nobody intrinsically knows how to solve problems that hurt another person. That's why COMMUNICATION is so important!

#also: Good Post re: Why Danny is So Actually-Great

#why does everyone spell ''bear with me' like that?

#i know right? Why did I never think of that??

#why do i love this so much

#that's basically why Evanescence became my favorite band. it's not all romo-/sexually-centric

#i've always read it the same way and didn't notice Why Everyone Stopped Liking Her but that also brought that particular Change to light...

#groans eternally in Tumblr's direction. why even bother with all these updates.

#Oh THAT'S why Eda could do glyphs! /joke

#thaaaat's probably why Fancie Word Choice has always been a strength in my writing.... {lD;;;;;

#velvet and sheer... why have I never seen that combination before? It's GLORIOUS

#That's probably why he's so good at spontaneous Travelling too. Lots of practice when trying to find her... /owo

#This is why House and Senate votes count though! The President may have a lot of control over the military but a strong H+S

#I know MC Escher was a master of this (whatever This is) and that's why he's one of my favorite artists.

#okay but I'm intensely curious why he didn't have a plan to take HIMSELF out and thought he'd have to rely on THEM dsfndsgmfhdgj

#I wonder why he'd need to attack/defend while shifted? Can he also use such magic when he's not shifted?

#but I think that variety is why her every new album is so refreshingly Different. Her singing ALONE improves so MUCH with every album!

#the only difference is that I imagined the fire came with smoke and that's why her gasp was so strangled and she grabbed her throa

#honestly this is why i'm basically addicted to empty-mind meditation?

#i'm cleaning my room and i misplaced it. badfnmkngjf;lk this is why i hate cleaning

#but scenes like this are why i love DC's latest gen of animated movies

#that Friends As Family theme was super important to why i love the 80's comics too..........

#this is why i read fanfic

#i think she feels slighted in some way but i can't pinpoint Exactly Why let alone HOW.

#and it's like.. Halfo f why lapis's characterization is so Shaky for me? Because the girl barely talks??? And she has like 7 Speech Modes

#^^^^ GUYS THIS WAS ALERINA. This is the environment Dove was raised in! This is why losing her mother tore her apart! ^^^^^

#This is so so SO important and delves deeply into why language is so important for learners and general humanity alike. ~<333

#that's why my tag for Old People Stories isn't specific to any generation. it's just Shitty Adults Being Shitty

#I write primarily about OCs and I know that's why my readership is so low. I write stories for a Dead Fandom that has declined sharply.

#you know? so that's why my Affirmations Tag is like 60% Steven UniversE Content at this point. 8F It's Helping Me Learn!

#It's a CIRCADIAN THING not an INSOMNIA THING. I don't know why my doctors don't believe it's NOT the same as INSOMNIA

#oh is THAT why my love language is ''all of them''?

#and i hardcore headcanon ry ouwearing glasses when he gets older. so why not?

#i Suck at the aCTUAL DRAWING art but i'm i na bit of a fallow period with the org and personal life. so why not?

#i'm already planning an aviary for the doves. so why not? (they'd be Very Separate from teh raven though. for obvious reasons)

#let's add to the Emotional Whiplash of Today pile. sure! why not!!

#but i got the dvd and i have vlc so why not use them i guess? i already had it in the drive for the extras and this way there's .....

#She can hop dimensions so why on Earth-- ALL the Earths-- hasn't she Been Relevant to ANY multi-timeline crisis yet???

#yes of fucking COURSE Dove and the rest are in Team Transition too!! Why on Earth-- on ANY earth! wouldn't I transition them too?!

#so why on earth did danny chase get shafted so hard?????

#about WHY or if she's GONNA be OKAY or HOW or--

#So gentle and soft and concerned and really quite quiet and subtle... which might be why others didn't pick up on the Love Vibe

#but the last one I reblogged didn't have that specified! 8O i don't know why one of my special interests is Unusual Instruments

#why WOULDN'T you snog a snitch if it could bring your dead loved ones back though? Why on Earth WOULDN'T you???

#but it's about ''they're very different. but they're friends!'' It just never talks about why or how that's important.

#(i think that's her full name for some reason but i don't know why or when i heard/saw it. somebody please correct me if i'm wrong!)

#I must be an Asker. I've never understood why people are so convinced they Can't Say No if someone asks?

#i also think PTSD makes you react to fear Differently from Pure Adrenaline Responses... but i can't unravel Why right now

#And also at the time I couldn't fathom why someone would think she was autistic. because i didn't know myself

#god this foreshadowing was just. so sincere and heart-rending and when this episode came out I *DID* wonder why she'd say that...

#I'm STILL trying to figure out why Srentha thought Dove was confessing that she has heartworm. (i know she Does Not in fact

#at first I was like ''Wow this is Srentha to the core!'' And then I read ''why this unreasonable answer at the sight

#i can't figure out why though

#If my Harmony Core theory is correct: it would explain why they're playing their music So Hard.

#the fact that my first reaction was ''why though'' is..... concerning?

#raven's like How? Why The HELL. and dove doesn't have a good answer besides ''it felt like i needed it.''

#fun fact: i misread this as ''zatana zatara / MICHIGAN '' and i was like... ''why the fUCK--''

#i don't know why there's all this fanart of

#and also sugar skulls are delightful but you should really know what they MEAN and REPRESENT and WHY they're sweet and flamboyant

#if someone is passionate; angry; or distressed over a topic: She doesn't always understand WHY until they EXPLAIN it. If they do at all.)

#oh hey why was THAT line never a meme

#this is why we need

#but that doesn't make it any less FRUSTRATING because I've been wORKING THROUGH the pptsd and why won't it STOP?

#(because that's why we have to pay for everything from movies to individual channels now. let's be real)

#i've never understood why winter and fall were the only ~fashionable~ seasons for wearing black.

#I mean to be FAIR some of the government DID mobilize and that's why we got the Stimulus Bill.

#But DC... this bullshit is why we can't have nice things

#and as soon as I looked it up: y first thought was ''Oh is that why we call them Abner?'' My second was ''Is that what *I* am?''

#also if you're as powerful as zee it probably comes second-nature so why WOULDN'T you throw it around to stop an argument?

#okay but if SPINEL doesn't know then how/why would BLUE know

#what? no i didn't just stare at this for a solid two minutes and read it over five times. no.. why would I do that?

#that's because it's not ''cool'' to hate on it so why would it be ''cool'' to like it ironically?

#why WOULDN'T you snog a snitch if it could bring your dead loved ones back though? Why on Earth WOULDN'T you???

#but it's not like a ragey angry thing. it's like........ war of attrition? why yes i think i WILL sign the 47th petition for the same thing

#over and over again and rewound and replayed until i got the whole spell written down. why YES I'm a little hyperfixated! why do you ask!!!

#tag game #rhs blog

1 note · View note

jewishaxelwalker · 5 years

Note

Hi. I've been trying to read all issues with Owen in them recently, and I was wanting to know if you have any sibling headcanons for Owen, Bart, and Thad (or just Owen and Thad). I loved Johns's GL run but FUCK if he didn't just butcher everything Impulse-related. Anyways, I feel as though the "oh shit you're my brother" meetings that never happened would've been glorious, and I wanna write shit but I have no idea how they would act around each other.

Please trust me when I say that you don’t want to get me started on talking about GJ and non-sucking-Hal-Jordan’s-dick comics, I’ve got enough venom within me to fuel a 300-episode podcast. But to be fair to poor Owen, I don’t think anyone really knew what to do with him, which is why he was able to bounce between being a villain, hero, and anti-hero, while remaining best friends with Supergirl and somehow only running into any Flash like…once. Owen Mercer’s wasted potential is both one of the things I’m saddest about in regards to mid-2000s comics, and one of the rejected names for my hypothetical band.

Breaking down Owen’s personality to the core basics, he’s a dork with a chip on his shoulder and a strong desire to Belong. He (like both Bart and Thad) wasn’t raised by his biological parents and (unlike Bart and Thad) we don’t actually know what his pre-Identity Crisis family situation was like. The desire to Belong could come from an unfulfilling relationship with his adoptive parents, or it could come from growing up feeling just a bit off. Because of this, he’d probably get along really well with Thad, whose own parent situation was…awful, until he got to experience life as Bart, which is to say, life with Max and Helen. They could also bond over how hard it is to do good, when a lifetime of instinct and literal programming say no, bad is easier. Bad gets results. Circumvent the law, bend the rules to suit your own needs.

Their dual relationship with Bart would be both casual and strained. Owen is used to putting up with Axel and Kara namely, he’s used to putting up with someone who has absolutely no goddamn filter, and someone who is wildly more powerful than him and also like…really good at this whole superheroing thing. Owen’s dorkiness would be a good bonding point for him and Bart (it’s canon that Owen likes movies, both old and new, and even worked in a movie theater before he met Digger and dove headfirst into a life of crime, and it’s also canon that Bart’s other best friend, Preston, is a movie buff and so he knows how to speak the lingo), might even act as the only bonding point at first, until they discover their mutual affinity for Super-people. Keep in mind, Bart only looks 16, while Owen actually lived all 19 of the years he’s been alive, even if the time periods he lived them in are questionable at best.

The relationship between the three brothers would be strained, at first. Owen and Thad would definitely get along better, but once Owen found more things in common with Bart, Thad would most likely distance himself. Bart’s taking away someone important to him yet again, why even bother fighting it? But what he didn’t count on was how perceptive Owen is. He’s not an animal or a superhero identity, he doesn’t pick favorites, and he can be shared.

“That’s the thing about big brothers, squirt, we’re this weird middle ground between parent and pet.”

“I am several hundred years older than you!”

“You’re also several hundred millimeters shorter than me, so cork it and go hug our brother before I pick you up and hang you on the back of a door.”

They’re agreed that, even though Bart is the genetic original, he’s their youngest brother. They’ve also agreed to never tell him this.

“Ah, playing the ol’ Slytherin and their Hufflepuff gambit, I see.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“Ask Craydl, I gave him the first four Harry Potter books on tape last time.”

“Please stop poisoning my AI.”

My favorite way to write the speed bros, personally, is in non-power AUs where Owen grew up with them. I’ve written Owen as both the older brother and the younger brother, but I kinda lean harder towards the former. I’m literally counting the days until I finally get the time and inspiration to finish this one AU I started back in 2017. It involves Pokemon Go, and Axel is there. Someday.

#Owen Mercer #Bart Allen #Thad Thawne #long post

101 notes · View notes

violentnonretirement · 5 years

Text

About Bastet: Jack

I’m doing multiple posts to kind of separate out things. This one will be about Jack, there will be one about Ana, and then one about the general Lore.

So keep in mind this is just about Jack, since the short story was equally about both and I literally have way too much to talk about with Ana to fit them both here while still being at all readable.

I’m just going to go through chronologically. Also under the cut because it’s... It’s a lot. Ana’s might end up longer, though.

“ As she took a closer look, she could see that the jacket and his flesh had been ripped apart by a shotgun blast. From that range, it should have killed him, but Jack had certain advantages. His wounds could heal themselves—a legacy of his past as a test subject and an enhanced soldier...“

First of all, we can finally do away with the ‘Gabe wasn’t trying to kill Jack’ theories because he absolutely was. Also, referring to Jack (and by extension Gabe) as test subjects says a lot about the nature of the SEP. Not an exact process, not a 100% smoothed out deal. Jack and Gabe were test subjects.

Jack’s got a crazy good healing factor. Like. We learn later the bullets from Reaper have a necrotic agent of some sort that’s trying to keep him from healing and his body is still pushing through to heal the wound literally minutes after the attack, also aided by Ana’s dart.

“ His genetic enhancements should have helped him acclimatize to different conditions, the same way they should have stopped the blood that was seeping through the shirt he’d tied across his midsection as a bandage. “

First of all, “genetic enhancements”. Second, Jack is able to acclimate to different weather very easily.

ALSO

How many times has Ana bailed his dumbass out of danger???

“ ...He made a face at the bitterness. “Any sugar?” “ “ ....“You’re a kitten, Jack,” Ana laughed. “

THIS IS FUCKING CUTE COME AT ME. I got that hc wrong Jack apparently likes sweet things if tea is too bitter for him. Fucking adorable you big punkass funky boy.

Tangent here to talk about their banter? Like it’s so... honest? Like it’s just “these are two extremely close people who still have the fun sarcasm and are easily filling back into the role of close friends despite everything that’s happened”. It’s genuinely entertaining and I had a lot of fun reading the back and forth because it’s just fun and snarky and both have so much life to their replies. And it shows they know each other to the point that Ana knows Jack well enough that she literally drugs him because she knows he’s about to be a dumbass the minute he wakes up.

Also, proof that no one but the three of them and by extension Talon know Jack and Ana and Gabe are alive.

Jack took a trip to New York with his mother and loved the Egyptian museum as ‘his favorite part’, so that’s rly cute.

“ “We tried to find you,” Jack said somberly. “I used every resource at my disposal. Gabe even put McCree on it personally. Not a trace. Everyone else tried to convince me you were gone and that I was being irrational. But deep down I knew that you couldn’t be dead.” “

“...It turns out we couldn’t do it without you,”

“.... Don’t let this go. Don’t be like the others. They dismantled everything we spent our lives building, and then they made us into villains.”

“ “... You never were good at letting go,” Ana chided him. “Too stubborn for your own good.” “

Fucking. One of my big headcanons confirmed. That Jack and Gabe did everything in in their power to find Ana, and that Jack did not give up. If there’s something to be learned about his character from this it’s that Jack is a deeply emotional and very unforgiving character. He remembers, and he holds grudges like a motherfucker.

Even after the years, Jack was in Cairo because he believed Ana was alive and he wanted to find her.

Jack says he’s moving on and his quest is moving on but I don’t think Jack can let things go. Period. He couldn’t let go of Ana, Overwatch- his in-game lines “I’ve got a long memory”. Jack does not forget, and again, he holds grudges like a motherfucker.

She was thought to be dead for years and yet Jack held out hope the entire time, all the way up to chasing her down in Egypt after hearing there was a vigilante there and hoping it was her. If we’re looking at canon Jack, canon Jack loves Ana deeply. She is an important person to him. Just like he loved Gabriel.

Which brings me to a big point. Jack is an angry, frustrated figure but he feels deeply. He feels so deeply for the people he’s with. Ana, Gabe, those people are so fucking important to him that the issue of Ana’s unknown fate, plus the (still only theorized) ‘betrayal’ from Gabriel, two people who were so important to him, turning to anger and vengeance would feel like the only option for him.

“ Ana read the desperation on Jack’s face. “Getting revenge for what happened won’t accomplish anything other than getting you killed.” “Maybe, but I still have to fight. Everyone else gave up, but not me.” “

This is the core of my style of characterization. If Jack lets this fight go- against Talon and Hakim and Los Muertos- he has nothing left. Jack was a soldier for the majority of his life. We know he enlisted around 18 and fought in the crisis, and led Overwatch, all adding up to about 30 years of “fighting the good fight” and something like 6 of fighting it from the shadows. At this point, giving up that fight would force him into an identity crisis, and I don’t think Jack wants to face that, so he just puts up walls against forming new bonds, and considers that, yes, he may die, but he wants to do what’s right. (it’s not healthy. There are so many times when Jack is wrong, etc, and he’ll fight you tooth and nail because he’s a stubborn jackass but he’s not a mentally healthy person)

This also supports my hc that Jack kind of blamed everyone. In that anger, Jack considered everyone at fault, and then sat on that anger and pain for years as he tried to find out what happened. He saw people either get to return to normal life, be forced into mercenary situations, or worse, and he couldn’t do anything to stop it- just try to find out what caused it and expose the people who ruined his life.

“ “Cairo and the world will suffer until we bring them all down! You have to see the bigger picture,” Jack said heatedly. “Are you even hearing yourself? You would never have made this argument before,” Ana said disapprovingly. “The way we do things matters.” “

Jack was the man who believed in saving everyone and Gabe was the bigger picture person, I think. I think Gabe did the dirty work no one else wanted because he saw what needed to be done and got it done for the greater good, even if that meant sometimes morally wrong choices in the moment. Now, Jack sees Hakim and Cairo, he sees the wrongness there and he doesn’t want to get involved because he knows Talon is Hakim’s benefactor and taking out Talon is the only true way to get rid of Hakim.

And we see that as much as he loves Ana, he is still angry and lashes out. He sees the world through a selfish view. He sees it as ‘this needs to get done and I don’t know why you don’t see it my way’ but Ana sees Cairo as she has for the time she’s been gone. Egypt is her home, she can’t see it rot under Hakim. This is her mission.

It was the sort of problem that was never Jack’s strong suit. He preferred two sides, concrete facts, and one clear, unequivocal decision.

In messy situations, Jack finds an answer, and he goes with it. And in a time when almost all his decisions are ‘messy’, Jack often has the moments between Los Muertos escaping and the grenade at Alejandra’s feet. There is what’s important now, and what’s important for the future. Deciding that Alejandra was the most important then, and then agreeing to help with Hakim, Jack is being forced to do what’s right again, and it causes him to fight against the personas of Soldier: 76 and of Strike-Commander. We hear SO much that Jack is stubborn, stubborn, stubborn, but he relents to Ana. He comes back after storming off and helps Ana take down Hakim. Hakim is the grenade at Alejandra’s feet- he cannot ignore his conscience, and here, he also knows he cannot do this without Ana.

“ He had gotten one good night’s sleep since he arrived in Cairo, and it was the first in as long as he could remember “ ...He was uneasy now. Staying in one place for too long was risky, especially now that Gabe would be looking for him. He had to move on.

Also going along with the “Jack just doesn’t stop” vein of characterization. Jack can’t stop. Especially now that Talon is very aware of his presence and that he’s coming after them.

“That’s why it’s a great photo!” laughed Jack.

cute.

So let’s get into Vincent.

Jack is gay, as confirmed by Chu. I have my issues with this reveal like I did with the Christmas comic and Tracer’s reveal. The romantic partner characters are not really, full characters. They’re stand-ins, and they’re not given a whole lot before they’re buried in the story again, but they do their job. Lena is a lesbian, and Jack is gay. This in itself makes me so happy. Because here, in this whole update, we are given a Manly Man’s Man in Jack- except that we learn he’s a deeply emotional man, struggling with trauma and mental health issues, and is so far from the picture so many people might have of a gay man. Like Lena, he isn’t defined by his sexuality, it’s just a part of him. Which is what we want. Yes, again, I have my issues with the reveal, but in the end, and if I’m deeply honest with myself, I’m happy that two mainstay characters in this game are irreversibly, wholly, completely confirmed inside and out as SAGA, and I’m happy that Jack is given that identity as someone who was open about it. Ana apparently knew Vincent well enough that she recognizes him from an old photo.

But in that vein, we get the fact that they’re separated, and that once upon a time Jack “I’ll never stop fighting” Morrison wanted to settle down in the quiet life with his then-boyfriend, and openly talked about that, at least with Ana if not others. Again, we’re given the image that Jack as a younger man was a very openly emotional, connected, and caring figure. Someone who loved the people he was close to dearly and showed that.

“At least you and Gabe managed to have families.”

Another one of those hcs I’m ding-ding at, Jack did not really engage in relationships as Strike-Commander. Whether or not he tried we don’t know, but he didn’t ‘manage’ to have a family, or connections beyond platonic love for people like Ana, and Gabe, and likely others. But it also ties into that resentment and anger he’s been nursing for so long. It’s not a kind remark. Not mean or hateful, just, kind of unnecessary.

“I just thought my mask was scary.” Jack smiled.

What a fucking dork.

In all. I’m happy. I’m so happy to see Jack confirmed as gay, I’d love to know more about Vincent, I’d love to see where this all goes, and I love that we have a continuation, more lore for Ana, and more personality for both of them- seeing these softer sides of the ghosts.

That being said, I’m happy with the s76 lore we have. I love him, he’s my dude, but we need lore on literally anyone else. I would be happy if their story was either on pause for the next however long or working in the background while other characters got their stories and their time in the spotlight. I want to see Zen, Lucio, Zarya, the Junkers. They need to be fleshed out. They need to be fully realized.

#god fuck this took forever #headcanon;#using that just because I'm making speculations etc #anyways

8 notes · View notes

sage-nebula · 5 years

Note

Would you reccomend Final Fantasy 12? How do you find the story and gameplay? I already know I probably won't super like Vaan lol but how have you found everything?

You have pretty good timing, anon; I’m actually playing Final Fantasy XII as we speak, haha.

Anyway, I would recommend it! I can’t speak from the standpoint of someone who has long been a fan of the Final Fantasy series, because I have not. Outside of very brief times spent with Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy IX, in which I did not come even close to finishing either of them, this has been the only main series Final Fantasy games I’ve played. All of the others that I’ve played (and completed)—Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core—have all been side games and spinoffs. So I can’t say whether you’d like XII if you’re a long-time fan of the Final Fantasy series, because I myself am not and, from what I’ve heard, it changes the formula quite a bit. (ETA: I forgot that I also played and enjoyed Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, although I couldn’t beat the final boss. I did play it up until that point, though, so it was basically completed even if I couldn’t go all the way with it.)

That said, I personally am enjoying it quite a bit, although I don’t think I’m too far into it yet. My Switch history says that I’ve put twenty hours into it so far (well, twenty or more), and I know that a chunk of those have been spent just exploring and doing some sidequests (which is actually what I’m doing right now, heh). I have all of the party members, though, and I’ve gotten into the plot a bit, at least enough to see that the plot itself is less focused on one specific character, and more focused on the politics in the world of Ivalice as they are the moment, which I actually really like.

I’ve mentioned it a few times on my blog before, but when it comes to Final Fantasy I am all about Ivalice. The only Ivalice game I started by didn’t finish was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: Grimoire of the Rift, and to be honest I’m not sure why I didn’t finish that one. I can’t remember disliking it, so it might have just been that I got caught up in other things. Either way, most of the Final Fantasy titles I’ve played have been Ivalice games, and I’ve loved them. Tactics Advance was my favorite game for a long while in childhood (and was the first Ivalice game I ever played), and Tactics: War of the Lions remains one of the best games I’ve ever played, period, and if it gets a Switch port I will die of happiness. (Hopefully said port comes with a way to issue birth control to your chocobos, though, because honestly … you go into battle with two chocobos, and you come out of battle with thirty of them, they bred that fast.) Final Fantasy XII feels like a mix of the two games. We have various races present, such as the viera and the bangaa, like we saw in Tactics Advance, but the plot is heavily based in political conflict and warfare, like we saw in War of the Lions. To that end, while we do have characters that have personality, backstory, et cetera, the story isn’t about them so much as it is about this war as a whole and what effect it has on them, which is again similar to War of the Lions, where although there were characters in that game who were important, what was more important than them and their individual conflicts was the role they had to play in this ongoing war and these historical events as they would be remembered years later. It’s a different track than a lot of JRPGs take, since JRPGs tend to be more focused on the individual characters, but it’s one I like because the world of Ivalice (and all its countries and historical events and so on) is interesting to me, and I like to see how it all connects and fits together.

The gameplay is fine as well, though there are some things that take getting used to. I’m playing on Switch, so I can’t say how it is on other consoles, but one thing that trips me up is you have to use the buttons on the left Joy-Con to navigate menus rather than the analog stick, and nothing tells you this. You also open your menu with X rather than the Plus button, which similarly trips me up, haha. The battle mechanic is a mechanic that pretends to be real-time action when it’s really still turn-based. You really just have to get within proximity of an enemy for your character’s attack bar to start up, and then they’ll automatically attack once it’s full, rather than engaging in real-time combat a la a Tales Series game. That said, you can choose whether to have your party members act autonomously or not through Gambits, and you still have to keep an eye on things like status changes and whatnot, so it’s not like all the challenge is gone from it, but quite a bit is. That said, though, it is nice not to have to deal with random encounters, since you can see enemies right there on the map with you.

As far as the characters are concerned, yeah, the game would be much better without Vaan (and by extension Penelo) in it, haha. Vaan’s pretty much the designated protagonist only in that he’s the first character you control and the one you use to run around cities and such, but (at least where I am in the game at the moment) he has no bearing whatsoever on the plot, and neither does Penelo (who is literally only there because Vaan is there). The story isn’t about any one character in specific, but the rest of the party members all have a reason to be there, all have ties to the plot in some way, and all have an idea of what’s going on and can therefore contribute. Vaan … doesn’t. And neither does Penelo. And it’s kind of annoying that they’re there when I literally could not care less about either of them, haha. But I don’t dislike them enough that it drags the whole game down, especially since the other characters get to do their fair share of speaking up and acting since they actually have an idea of what’s going on. (Balthier calls himself the leading man, and honestly? At this point in the game? It really feels like he is. Of course, he’ll always be the leading man in my heart regardless—he is My Mans™—but still, since he has more of an active role and idea of what’s going on, it honestly feels like he’s more important story-wise than Vaan, haha.)

I feel like I’ve rambled a lot in this response and I’m not sure if what I’ve said is helpful, but tl;dr I do recommend it. The gameplay is fine, even if it encourages the player to be passive; the story is good so far, though highly political and focused more on the world than the characters; and while Vaan and Penelo are annoying, they’re mostly easily ignored since the remaining party members all have a bigger role in the plot / more of an idea of what’s going on. I can’t say how it stacks up as a main series Final Fantasy game in specific, because this is the first one I’ve really sank my teeth into, but as a game on its own I’m enjoying it so far and am glad I got it.

#final fantasy xii #for those who have played - I'm on my way to the Garif Village south of Giza Plains for the first time #(at least I am once I stop faffing around and get back to it)#so no spoilers past that point please and thanks!#Anonymous

1 note · View note

patriotsnet · 3 years

Text

Will The Republicans Win Back The House

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/will-the-republicans-win-back-the-house/

Will The Republicans Win Back The House

Effect Of Republican Retirements

Donald Trump pledges to help Republicans win back the House

Indeed, 2020 was actually a Democratic-leaning year, with Biden winning the national popular vote by 4.5 percentage points. So theres a good chance that states will be at least a bit redder in 2022 than they were in 2020.

That could make these retirements less of a blow to Republicans than they first appear. Whats more, by announcing their retirements so early, Burr, Toomey and Portman are giving the GOP as much time as possible to recruit potential candidates, shape the field of candidates in a strategic way in the invisible primary and raise more money for the open-seat campaign. And in Ohio specifically, Republicans still look like heavy favorites. Even in the Democratic-leaning environment of 2020, Trump won Ohio by 8 percentage points, implying that its true partisan lean is probably even more Republican-leaning. Ohio is simply not the quintessential swing state it once was; dating back to the 2014 election cycle, Democrats have won just one out of 14 statewide contests in Ohio and that was a popular incumbent running in a blue-wave election year .

Nathaniel Rakich and Geoffrey Skelley, FiveThirtyEight

Read Also: When Did The Republicans And Democrats Switch Platforms

The Squad Coasts To Reelection

Three high-profile Democratic members of the squad in the House of Representatives held their seats in a comfortable fashion.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will continue to represent New Yorks 14th District, defeating the Republican John Cummings by a wide margin, while Rep. Ilhan Omar also ran well ahead of the Republican Lacy Johnson in the race to represent Minnesotas 5th District.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib also defeated her Republican challenger, David Dudenhoefer, and will continue to represent Michigans 13th Congressional District.

You May Like: What Do Republicans And Democrats Believe In

A Zombie Republican Party Will Overwhelm Joe Biden In The 2022 Midterms

President Biden promised he will restore the soul of America. Hes already running out of time. The commander-in-chief is 78 and unlikely to see out more than one term in office. By the time the pandemic crisis passes mid-2021, inshallah Biden could find his administration has run out of gas before it ever really got started. A week is a long time in politics. Two years can whizz by.

For now, Biden appears to hold the aces. He has a Democratic majority in the House Of Representatives and his vice president, Kamala Harris, can cast the deciding vote in a split Senate. The economy, stimulated to its guts, is expected to roar as this year goes on. His opposition, the Republican Party, looks prone wrecked by its calamitous marriage to Donald Trump. The Republican base still hates the Republican establishment and vice versa. The infamous storming of the Capitol on 6 January, we are told, has tarnished the American right for a generation or more.

The Republican Party, for all its problems, remains the strong favourite to win the House in the 2022 midterms, possibly by a large margin, and they may even take back the Senate

Trump or no Trump, the Grand Old Party marches on. The mistake pundits make is to confuse Republicanism with a normal democratic movement. It is more like the political equivalent of the undead a zombie army that horrifies every sane voter but somehow always wins because people hate the Democrats more.

Don’t Miss: Why Are Republicans Wearing Blue Ties

How Many Senators Are Chosen

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.

Also Check: Republican Secret Meeting To Stop Obama

An Incoming Class Of History

Several of the newly elected state representatives are making history.;

The Republican Madison Cawthorn, 25, who beat the Democrat Moe Davis to represent North Carolinas 11th Congressional District, will become the youngest member of Congress in modern history.

The Democrat Cori Bush is set to become the first Black congresswoman from Missouri after winning in the states 1st Congressional District.

The Democrats Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres will also be the first openly gay Black men to serve in Congress, after winning in New Yorks 17th and 15th districts respectively.

And nine out of the eleven Republicans who have so far unseated incumbent Democrats are women wins that will drastically expand the representation of women and especially of women of color in the House Republican caucus.

Currently, there are just 13 voting female Republican representatives in the House and 11 female Republican incumbents who ran for reelection in 2020.

Don’t Miss: How Many Democrats And Republicans Are In The House

Gop Lawmakers Threaten To Punish Democrats If They Win Back Control Of Congress

‘When we take the majority back in 2022, I’ll make sure consequences are doled out,’ said Rep. Madison Cawthorn.

Republicans are outraged that Democrats are governing by majority rule in the House. In retaliation, they are vowing to do the same things they now decry as unprecedented and wrong.

“Never in the history of our country has a Speaker acted like such an authoritarian,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted on Thursday.

He was upset that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had rejected his request to appoint Republican Reps. Jim Banks and Jim Jordan to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Both men voted to overturn the 2020 election results and pushed the lie that President Joe Biden only won because the election was stolen.

“Never in the history of Congress and the select committee I checked with the historian has this ever taken place, where the one party decides who’s all on the committee,” McCarthy told Fox News in a video he with his tweet. McCarthy in fact voted to give Republican then-Speaker John Boehner the exact same unilateral appointment power in 2014 for the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi.

But while House Republicans claim they are being mistreated because the majority won’t let them have their way, they are also promising to retaliate by turning the same actions they criticize now against Democrats in 2023.

Recommended Reading: Senate Democrats

What Is The New Balance Of Power In The House

House Democrats held onto their majority but lost seats to Republican challengers.

More than a dozen incumbent Democrats lost re-election bids, despite earlier projections they could gain up to 15 seats.

Democrats took the chamber after they netted 41 seats in the 2018 midterm elections, their largest single-year pickup since the post-Watergate midterms of 1974. But some of those new Democrats were among the partys losers in 2020.

Rep Emmer On Why He Thinks Republicans Will Win The House

Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee and is leading the GOPs efforts to win control of the House in November. Emmer joins Judy Woodruff from Minneapolis to discuss his reaction to the Republican National Convention so far and why he thinks his party will win a majority in the House this fall.

Read Also: Leader Of The Radical Republicans

What Was The Outlook Prior To The Election

Republicans needed to get to 218 seats to win back the majority they lost in 2018. The National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans, in early 2019 identified dozens of Democratic-held districts to target. They included;30 Democrats;who were elected or re-elected in 2018 in districts that voted for President Donald Trump in 2016. All but one Dave Loebsack of Iowa sought re-election. Most were first-term members who defeated or succeeded Republicans in the 2018 election. Republicans won some of these Trump Democrat districts but needed to unseat most to win back control of the House.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of House Democrats, identified more than 40 Frontline Democrats it expected to have very competitive re-election campaigns. Many of these members represented;suburban districts;that have diversified their populations in recent years. In most of these districts, Democrats were running for re-election for the first time. The Frontline Democrats amassed large campaign funds.

Democrats also identified more than three dozen Republican-held districts they intended to target, including seven in Texas.

Democrats also made a play for the suburban Texas districts of retiring Republican Reps.;Pete Olson;of the 22nd District and Kenny Marchant of the 24th District. They lost the 22nd District, but the 24th is currently too close to call, with Republican Beth Van Duyne leading.

Gop Control Of State Governments Gives It The Edge In Contest To Redraw Congressional Maps To Its Advantage

House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, hopes to become speaker of the House after the November 2022 elections.

Print icon

Resize icon

The Census Bureau released the preliminary findings of its 2020 U.S. population count on Monday, setting the stage for a once-in-a-decade congressional redistricting process that could in itself be enough to give the Republican Party the five additional House seats needed to recapture the majority following the 2022 midterm elections.

Under the new count, California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia will each lose a congressional seat. Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon and Florida will gain one seat, while Texas will add two.

Read more: New York, California set to lose House seats; Florida and Texas to gain after Census Bureau reveals 2020 counts

New census data and reapportionment add challenges for the Democrats in the midterm elections, wrote Sarah Bianchi, political analyst at Evercore ISI, in a Tuesday note to clients, pointing out that states that President Joe Biden won in the 2020 election lost a net three congressional seats.

New York could be where Democrats decide to abandon a principled stand against gerrymandering and use their supermajorities to overrule the independent redistricting commission to create a map that nets Democrats four more seats.

Also Check: Who Was The Leader Of The Radical Republicans

Nbc News Polls Predicts Republicans Will Win House Back In Massive Landslide

August 18, 2021, 7:40 am310 Views

According to a new poll, Republicans are on track to retake the House in a historic landslide in 2022.; And this isnt according to Fox News or another right-wing source, this is coming from NBC.

Based on all factors, youd have to consider Republicans the early favorites for the House majority in 2022, poll tracker David Wasserman told NBC.

Democrats best hope is that Bidens approval rating stays above 50 percent and that Republicans have a tougher time turning out their voters without Trump on the ballot.

Bigleaguepolitics.com reports: The NBC report cites the all-too-predictable trend of the presidents party losing House seats in midterm elections, Democrats choosing not to run for reelection in some cases, and Republicans reaping the benefits of increased online donations, which are now on par with those of Democrats.

As for the Senate, its anyones guess as to what will happen. The chamber is currently deadlocked at 50-50, and at least five GOP senators have announced that they will retire after next years midterms.

2022 will be an interesting and impactful year. Keep checking back with;Big League Politics;for midterm election coverage.

House Passes $35t Budget Framework After 10 Dem Moderates Cave To Pelosi

Trump has ‘no plans’ for third party but will help Republicans win back House and Senate in 2022

The House Democrat in charge of making;sure the party retains control of the chamber after next years midterm elections is warning that a course correction is needed or they could find themselves the minority again with current polling showing the Democrats would lose the majority if elections were held now.

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told a closed-door lunch last week that if the midterms were held now, Republicans would win control of the House, Politico reported Tuesday.

Maloney advised the gathering that Democrats have to embrace and promote President Bidens agenda because it registers with swing voters.

We are not afraid of this data Were not trying to hide this, Tim Persico, executive director of the Maloney-chaired DCC,;told Politico;in an interview.

If use it, were going to hold the House. Thats what this data tells us, but we gotta get in action,;Persico said.

Maloney, in an interview with NPR, said issues like climate change, infrastructure, the expanded child tax credits, immigration policies and election reforms will;attract voters next fall.

Were making a bet on substance, Maloney said. Whats the old saying any jackass can kick down a barn, it takes a carpenter to build one. Its harder to build it than to kick it down. And so were the party thats going to build the future.

Maloneys dire warning failed to surprise some Democrats who have been sounding similar alarms.;

Read Also: Did Trump Say Republicans Are The Dumbest

0 notes

writing-alright · 3 years

Note

hey hey!!! how about 1993 (When did you first hear about Daft Punk?),1999 (Has your opinion of the band changed over time?), 2007 (What do you think about Alive 2007?), and 2018 (How does Daft Punk fit into your taste in music?)

Heyo!! <3 Loved your answers, and thank you for the questions friend, these go really well together!

1993: When did you first hear about Daft Punk?

I’m thinking it couldn’t have been earlier than 2006 or so, because my pops gave me one of those circa 2005/2006 iPod nanos and listening to Discovery on that is my earliest Daft Punk memory. Once I realized that they probably had more music, I looked in my dad’s never-ending music library and found Human After All, Homework, and the Daft Club album. Then I looked in his collection of music magazines for Daft Punk stuff, and always looked for news in the magazines that came in the mail. I’d say it took a couple years of listening before I really called myself a Daft Punk fan.

1999: Has your opinion of the band changed over time?

Around 2008 or so, I officially designated them as my favorite band. By then I understood how unique what they were doing as musicians was. I’d also been branching out from my pops’ taste in music to build my own, and Daft Punk was the core of it. They’ve been number one ever since, even through extended periods when I hardly ever listened to them. Nowadays I’m world-weary enough to appreciate how they didn’t let the music industry and the “star system” ever get in the way of their music. On so many levels they just didn’t (and still don’t) give a funk, and that’s pretty punk!

You know what’s funny? One of the biggest changes of my opinion was when, probably around 2010, I had a crisis of faith moment where I realized Daft Punk couldn’t actually be two robots. It was like Santa all over again...

2007: What do you think about Alive 2007?

Alive 2007 redefined what concerts could be, I think. It’s not just a superlative DJ mix, it’s not just a live visual show, it’s not just a technological marvel, and it’s not just an unforgettable moment preserved via the best live album known to humankind. It’s all of the above. I think it’s the band at an apex, to call upon triangle imagery.

The Daft Punk triangle has three points: creativity, resilience, and love for the craft. What creativity, to envision a stunning concert performance that puts them up front yet never distracts from the music--only adds to it! What resilience, to perform for extended periods of time in full costume! What love for the craft, to carefully blend three albums together and keep intact the soul of each piece!

Experiencing the concert vicariously through the album will be enough for me, and not just because it has to be. I think the whole point is that it could only happen that one magical time. You only live once, and if you could repeat a good thing over and over again it would lose nearly all of the meaning. Why mourn the passing-by of events and time when you can be fully alive now?

2018: How does Daft Punk fit into your taste in music?

To go more in-depth on what I mentioned in the 1993 answer, they were the foundation. One defines their taste in music by saying “I like X, Y, Z” and in the beginning my X, Y, and Z was “Daft Punk, good music, and video game songs.” Once I actually knew a bit about music and genres, I knew I was big into dance music. Later I narrowed it down to French Touch and blog house.

Everything that they loved and found inspiration in, I began to love: disco, classical, house, etc. But again, I like any random stuff I think is good. Daft Punk is very, very good.

#Bloggle #Replies #fltwoodsmonster #Daft Punk!#Epilogue!#Long Post

0 notes

victoriousscarf · 7 years

Note

For the impression meme : Dick Grayson; Damian Wayne

(I tried to insert this picture later in the post but honestly it makes such a good header for me babbling about Dick so I’m leaving it where it is even tho this was an ACCIDENT)

Dick Grayson:

First impressionLike, I know I watched the old animated Bats show and watched the movies etc so probably the first real time I went “Dick Grayson is a character” was the Val Kilmer movie which like, kill me.

But honestly the first time reading comics I remember sitting up and going oh this is a character, this is a person and I’m SO INTERESTED was reading Hush (again, good/terrible comic to read early) which means Jim Lee’s beautiful art (I may disagree with 90% of anything that man says or does and would like him to retire from DC as editor but man I can admit he draws so PRETTY)

Yeah like that panel. And his snark about maybe this time the Joker won’t break out from Arkham for at least a month this time.

And I was like yeah okay. This is good. Let me go add Nightwing comics to my massive library request list (All the librarians knew my name pretty fast okay)

Impression now

My FAVORITE. Like no I’m serious, he’s right up there with Luke Skywalker as all time favorite characters. And also this is why I’m so damned picky with him as a character because at his core, I think he’s an inherently optimistic character, not because he’s naive or stupid or sheltered, because he’s not. But despite the terrible things that have happened to him, and in fact despite his own nature (his temper, his distrust, his workaholic tendencies) and despite the terrible things that have happened to him over and over and over again, he still makes the conscious CHOICE to believe in goodness, in kindness and compassion, in the world being a better place. (And honestly he’s a lot like Luke “I am a Jedi like my Father Before me” Skywalker in this way). He’s still flawed, as I said he has such a temper, and is about as distrustful of people as Bruce is. But he can BUILD trust with people (unlike Bruce for like the majority of people) and everyone loves him for it. The superhero community trusts him in ways they don’t trust Bruce Wayne (which is fair considering how often Bruce like causes destruction simply due to his own massive trust issues, like the Tower of Babylon and Brother Eye). And yeah okay he’s my favorite, but there’s also this view of Dick in fandom and even the more recent writers that strips a lot of this complexity and shrewdness and leadership from him. And so like in current pre-Rebirth (I’ve been waiting for rebirth to settle a lot more than venturing in there) my impression is not great. And i dread what’s coming both there and in larger media. Favorite momentAh damn like where would I even start.

Like it’s sad that in some ways my favorite moment dealing with him ever actually doesn’t even feature him in it, and it’s Bruce talked with Earth 2 Superman and Supes saying that their world was so corrupt, so dark, so tainted compared to his and he couldn’t understand why this world survived when his own had been destroyed when it was much gooder and Bruce looks at him and you can tell he’s wondering that too and then he goes okay but what about Dick Grayson and Supes sorta goes eh? and Bruce is like if everything is so much worse here, is Dick Grayson tainted and corrupted compared to yours? And Earth 2 Superman says no, no he’s still good, and Bats goes great and fights him. You get the implication that if that hadn’t been the answer, Bruce might have been as willing to give up on this world as that Supes but no, Dick still was the same shining bright light, still such goodness in a dark world and that made the whole world worth fighting for. LIKE KILL ME. Kill me.

And honestly I still love Dick being so good that even when all the other teen titans were down and Slade Wilson charges into his apartment even out of costume and with no warning Dick manages to jump out his window and escape where the element of surprise pretty much took down the rest of the team. That’s a classic.

Idea for a story

I’m a sucker for aus, especially aus where the DCU is more or less the same expect Bruce didn’t raise Dick. There was one scan I found where an alternate Dick was raised by Zucco and honestly that haunts me to this day. Or a novel length exposition of the time he was a vampire hunter and Batman was a vampire who killed his parents and it ends with them being together in the night… forever. LIKE THESE ARE CANON AUS give me more of that weirdness. (A lot of Batman elseworld stories that are canon sorta downplay Dick and what I’m saying is don’t. Upplay him like crazy and how he effects Bruce at ever turn, in every world, how all the Robins exist with him through time)Unpopular opinionI hate him and Barbara. I mean, with caveats but I can’t ship it. Partly because I really got into comics around the time of Infinite Crisis, so when Barbara was blaming him for being sexually assaulted, (And there’s a lot of baggage in there because the author at the time was refusing to acknowledge it was rape so like there’s no way to deal with the aftermath of that if you’re not even saying it happened) he cheated on her (what) and I’m pretty sure they were engaged just in time for shit to totally blow up. And then we fast forwarded to one year later and like this stuff didn’t really come up or get worked through? But yeah it was just a period where i found them really messed up and unhappy with how it was written and all the new 52 stuff makes me want to scream and possibly tear my hair out.

Like okay the one time I really liked them was like in the 70s during Batman Family where like she has a phd and was at a congressional hearing and Dick came along as her assistant? Like, that was fun and cute and I really liked their dynamic. Modern comics? Not so much. Favorite relationship…. Yeah Dick and Bruce man. I’m reading this not as a romantic relationship but in GENERAL of any relationships ever nothing has driven my love for DC quite like Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson and their clusterfuck of emotions about each other, the fact that no matter how or in what manner, they are fucked up in love with each other and it is incredibly destructive to both of them. They can’t like settle down and just care, because of who they are they’re constantly butting into and hurting each other and yet at the end of the day they are still the most important to each other. Favorite headcanonDick is demi sexual fight me.

Damian Wayne

First impression

Okay I read Batman and Son like when it first came out in trade, having NO CLUE who Damian was gonna be, or how his arc was gonna play out so like my first memory is him kicking Tim through the fucking cases and going WHAT IS THIS. Like, I was pretty peeved when he showed up. I was like ugh, of course Bruce having a biological son had to happen sometime and yeah Talia, because Son of the Demon but uuuugh. That was to change. Impression nowHe is precious and must be protected, 11/10Favorite momentI mean, there’s a lot. But one panel that always sorta stood out to me was the time that Hush got plastic surgery to look like Bruce Wayne and confronted Dick and Damian like that. And there’s just this panel of Damian, barely coming up halfway Dick’s chest, putting himself between Dick and Hush like hell yes I will take you on, how dare you. And how protective of Dick it was, even though Dick was Batman and he was Robin, that didn’t even matter.

So yeah that one panel stands out because it encompasses so much but I also love every time he loves an animal more than most humans. Idea for a storyIdk, I really like future Batman Damian again, as Morrison introduced him a couple times, including in Multiversity. I’d really be interested in the downright apocalyptic future he becomes Batman in and how the batfam backs him up, and how he creates his own because as much as his father, he cannot really work totally alone.

Alternatively he and Billy Baston go on a series of misadventures and it’s as terrible as that sounds like it should be but also GREAT

Unpopular opinion… It’s really funny I can instantly pin down things I disagree with fandom on with Dick Grayson but so rarely with other characters. Idk? I love him?

I guess a thing I’ve seen a lot is people not really exploring how he will change as he gets older and just sorta transpose how he is currently on his future self and obviously he’s going to grow up a lot and change and I don’t see that coming up a lot whereas I’m like super excited to see him grow up/explore him grown up in fics. Favorite relationship*Sigh* Well obviously Dick and Damian. I mean, again, this doesn’t even have to run romantically, I just loved their dynamic under Morrison. I loved the switch of Batman and Robin where Dick, who was the brightest Robin became the dark knight, with a little nugget of rage as his Robin. I still love that comics cares about them together but I feel like a lot of their later interactions misses the edge Morrison gave them. Favorite headcanon

Him and Connor Hawke hang out a lot and go to vegetarian restaurants and bookstores together and have very philosophical conversations about religion and art and literature and faith and how they view being heroes (and Damian coping with his past vs Connor growing up in a monastery) and what their fathers mean to them.

Damian is very protective of Connor is what I’m saying, he’s the only intelligent conversation he gets sometimes. (Sometimes, way down the road, Jason joins them for bookstore excursions, looking for first editions to send Alfred and Damian is sorta pissy but he’s grown, he can handle this)

#VS does a meme #VS does a text post #VS does an ask #this is a dcu town

10 notes · View notes

ablogthatsathing-blog · 7 years

Text

Surprise, I’m transgender! While this may be a shock to some, to others this might have been expected. I owe everyone reading this an explanation, and that will be conveyed through this long-ass story. I am sorry that this took so long to say, and I hope that regardless of how you may know me, that this does not change anything. (sorry I curse a lot in this… I wanted to stay as true to myself and this is most alike to how I talk and how I would say it. A lot of this is un-edited raw thought so with that said, have at it) Before we dive into the story, I would like to preface this by saying that I never wanted to be trans. I would also like to reinforce the fact that being transgender sucks and I almost wish that this was a choice, because I would love to wake up one day and just decide not to be trans. That day isn’t going to happen though, and I can personally vouge for the “it’s not a choice” argument. Trust me, being transgender has stopped me from doing quite a few things. If I could magically switch to being cisgender so I could live a normal life, I would. So, without further or due, here’s my story, in a terrible chronological order almost as bad as that in the movie, Citizen Kane. Let’s start from when I actually found out I was transgender. Any doctor’s favorite question is, “How did you know you were trans?”. The “transgender” term came to me by accident, as I was being the introvert I still kind of am, watching YouTube videos up in my room at my grandma’s house. I was 12 at the time, and while scrolling through the “recommended” section, a video titled something along the lines of, “How I knew I was transgender” popped up. By clicking on that video, I unknowingly opened up my Pandora’s box of shit. Listening to this trans man talk about his experience, as well as with his struggles with gender dysphoria as a teenager felt something freakishly close to what I was feeling about my own body at the time. The term “transgender” though, was just something too big for me. Having already dealt with Lyme disease the year prior to that, I really didn’t want any more problems in my life… so I pretended like I never even heard the word, or related to that dysphoria that the man talked about, and went on living my life suppressing every ounce of pain I felt. I figured I would only deal with it when I had to. Girls were getting boobs and hourglass bodies, and guys were getting squared jaws and broad shoulders, as well as facial hair. When it was my turn to step up to the puberty plate, I tried to do everything I could to mask the changes that were happening to me. Which is quite strange, because at the time I was also denying any possibility of being transgender. Periods were a nightmare (and still are), causing deep depression that was a mix between dysphoria and self-rejection, as well as many crying episodes. Luckily small boobs run in the family, and I was able to get through middle school and into high school wearing double sports bras to hide those “almost A’s”. To deal with the hair situation, I cut that shit short at the end of 8th grade, and braced myself for the reputation that it would bring me… *Cough* *Cough* Lesbian. All of the things that I was doing to hide my gender and my body really didn’t throw many people off. That’s not to say that they didn’t think it was weird, but it wasn’t unlike me to dress “construction casual” like the other boys. I was always the tomboy, often seen rocking some lacrosse shorts and some sort of athletic T-shirt all throughout elementary school. My best friend and I also only played with the boys during recess. That was until I was too much of a weirdo (was it the pony tail mixed with the basketball shoes and all male wardrobe?). I was ousted from that crowd and bullied pretty heavily. Even though it was terrible at the time, Im grateful for the experience, as it really did build character as well as a little confidence when I finally was on the other side of it. Anyways, flash forward to about 8th grade during the Emo ultra butch phase…At that point people kind of expected things like short hair and guys clothing from me. They just figured I was some uber lesbian that was finding myself. Little did they know that yes, while I did like girls, I didn’t like the fact that I was technically a girl, but in all fairness I wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time either. I think I did have an idea, because the term transgender lingered on my shoulder ever since I watched the video. I tried so hard to forget about it, but while on the inside I was working hard to convince myself I wanted to be a girl, on the outside I was already beginning my transition process. Remember that whole “Ill deal with it when I have to” plan? Yeah, well that “time to deal with it” bell rang right before my 15th birthday. It was right about that time when I slipped into a constant state of terrible depression. For the most part I should have been happy at the time, as I had a girlfriend who supported me in everything I did, and never batted an eye or questioned any of my “gender hiding” habits. While we did not end up working out, I am forever grateful to her for being the first person I was able to come out to, as well as for always accepting me for who I was, not as the gender I identified by, or the clothing choices I made. Anyways… September/ early October of 2015 was when it occurred to me that it was time to either deal with the situation at hand, or to commit suicide. I hated every part of myself… I didn’t fit in right on either side of the gender spectrum, and I had to accept the hard fact that I was transgender and that there was no changing it. For my 15th birthday, I bought some of my friends presents instead of accepting anything, as I figured I wouldn’t make it to my 16th birthday and I wanted to show my love and appreciation for them. So, in between that October to March of 2016, my depression was getting so bad that even the slightest things would result in the thought of “I guess I’ll just die… that’ll make things better”. My depression was playing a nasty game of Cuban missile crisis with my mind. Brinksmanship was the only thing that brought me to actually say the words “I am not comfortable in my own body, I am transgender.” It was either that or Depression was going to launch its nukes. I thought I opened Pandora’s box when I watched that YouTube video when I was 13, but boy was I a fool for not realizing that Pandora seems to have an unlimited number of shit filled boxes. See, the issue with telling your parents your trans is like, “Wow! I feel so relieved that the thing that almost caused me to kill myself is finally off my chest… oh wait, now I actually have to really deal with it.” The best metaphor I can think of to describe the situation is that it’s like peeling an onion. Each layer, while gradually getting closer and closer to the core, makes you cry and stinks up your kitchen. If only being transgender came with a pair of onion goggles that would keep the tears away. Unfortunately, the elves didn’t stop by to drop off my pair the night that I came out to my mom. Instead, I woke up many days to, “now what” conversations, and a lot, and I mean a lot, more crying. Here’s another thing that the Fairy (no pun intended) god mother doesn’t tell you about being trans. As far as I can tell from the experience I have, it actually gets way harder when you actively begin to transition, up until you’re on hormones for a couple months! If being trans was a plot structure graph, English teachers would have one hell of a time trying to explain all the rising actions, climaxes, and falling actions to their students. You know when you’re on a school break or summer vacation and your parents still have to go to work, so you stumble out of bed at like 10:30 only to find a giant list of chores you have to complete before your allowed to go out? I experienced something similar to that after I came out to my parents, except instead of the list being signed “XOXO -Mom” mine had something like, “Have fun bitch! -Your Superego”. The mental list that I had come up with for myself looked something like this: · Come out to close friends · Come out to my sister, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents. · Come out to the school administration · Come out to school · See a psychologist that can get me a testosterone letter · See an endocrinologist to get testosterone · Get both parents on board with testosterone I wanted to come out to my close friends first for two reasons… One was that my girlfriend already knew, so what would the difference be if the friend-group we were both in knew as well? Two was that I wanted to practice actually saying the words, “I am transgender” to my friends before I started playing tranny hot potato with my family. Telling my family kind of stood in the way of telling the school administration, as well as my classmates, because my sister, along with two of my cousins and I, all went to the same school together. “Hey Katie, I just heard someone say Kieran’s a boy now?” Needless to say, that would be a little awkward. The list got totally re-made many times, and as the list continues to increase in size, I’m sure it will also continue to change its order of priorities. The ever-changing list is like a fucking hydra… cut off one problem and two more shall appear. Over the course of a year I came out to many of my close friends, along with other acquaintances. Originally, this was a feat that seemed insurmountable, but with each conversation came more and more confidence. While I had yet to fully accept, and love myself, coming out to my friends allowed me to get in touch with a lot of feelings I was pushing away. Many of them wanted to hear my story, and wanted to understand what it was that caused me to feel this way. I began to recall all the situations that raised many gender crisis flags, some of which I had never felt comfortable to talk about until then. I told them my communion story… The one where I was so upset about having to wear a dress, that I ran off the church lawn after a couple pictures, and stripped out of my dress in the parking lot. It didn’t even phase me that I was completely nude in front of most of the town, I was just focused on getting that dress off. There are many stories very similar to the communion nightmare, and if you look back into family photo albums, you rarely find me wearing dresses or girly clothing. When I was 7 my second cousin was getting married in Washington D.C. and my entire family drove down for the wedding. In all the pictures, we have from the wedding, I can be seen wearing a pony-tail, blue polo shirt, a pair of khaki Capri’s and some super sexy blue crocks. I was that cousin… and no it was not because of the crocs. Sorry to jump out of chronological order here, but let’s jump to June of 2016, when it had been 3 months since I had told my parents and a couple of friends that I was transgender. I started seeing a new therapist in hopes of getting a letter for testosterone. Depending on where you live, or which doctor you see, the process for getting testosterone usually goes along the lines of seeing a therapist for x amount of time, seeing an endocrinologist, and then getting your testosterone recommendation letters and giving them to the endocrinologist who will, fingers crossed, write you a prescription for those goodie- good hormones. That’s the over simplified order because, let me tell you, that is never how easy it is going to be. So, I start seeing this new therapist, right? I’ll just make it clear that I personally hate therapy. That’s not to say that I have anything against the people who find therapists or therapy helpful, it’s just that the whole system doesn’t really work for me. As a passionate overthinker, as well as a person who has spent the last 6 years seeing therapists, I love to also psycho-analyze the shit out of myself. It’s such an awful habit, because I end up making myself more depressed than I was and then I’m stuck feeling like shit for the rest of the day. Going to therapy for me just sucks because when the therapist asks, “So maybe it’s the fact that you have X going on, its causing a lot of sad feelings?” and it’s like “Um no actually X was a small problem that made me feel let down as well as furthered my trust issues with people. Problem Y and Z are the things that are causing me to feel sad but there’s nothing I can do to change them so here’s a shit ton of my parent’s money, let’s sit here for another 45 minutes and bullshit the rest of this session.” It’s kind of sad when you get to the point that your therapist sucks so much, you have to psycho- analyze them to try and figure out what led them to their psychology major, and love of leather recliners and notepads. My favorite type of therapists are the therapists that haven’t spent any time in the chair themselves. They’re your stereotypical “so how does that make you feel?” therapists, the ones that always have their pen going. They stand out like a sore thumb to anyone that has seen their deal of therapists, as they struggle to remember small facts, and the DSMR is their only solution to your problems. Their psych evals start off with “ummmm… would you consider yourself to be a worrier?” and when they ask, “do you have any questions for me” they’re really saying, “please don’t ask me anything I have exactly 26.2 seconds until this appointment is over and I do not have the time nor the experience to answer anything, don’t let the door hit you on the way out kiddo.” Usually the only question I have for inexperienced therapists like this is, “where the fuck did you get you psychology degree?”. The 10 weeks of summer was a rushed mess between crippling depression and therapy appointments, and it was late August when my parents finally agreed it was time to go see an endocrinologist. Long story short, it is now February 23rd, and tomorrow I see a doctor that will most likely be writing my prescription for hormones (which according to predictions, should start in March). It has been an incredibly long journey, full of plenty of tears and new understandings. I know it will continue to be a long and tough road, but there is no way to properly express how grateful I am to be at this point. So now that you’ve heard my story, I’m going to switch gears to part 2 of this mini project. “Why?” Is a question I ask myself often. “Why am I transgender?” “Why am I like this?” “Why couldn’t I have been born normally” “Why can’t I just stop being trans?” “Why do I have to live my life like this”. To many cisgender people, being transgender seems like a conscious decision made by those who identify as a gender separate from that of the one they were given at birth. As a transgender person currently seeking medical treatment to help me cope with the life I am forced to live, I can assure you that this is not something people chose. It is not fun. It is not cool. It’s not exciting getting to live with a foot in both worlds. Do you have any idea how fucked up my ribs are from years of wearing sports bras and duct tape or ace bandages that were too tight? Try running in two, way-too-tight sports bras and tell me how you feel after about a mile. Those bruises that I’ve had since 8th grade? That sit right along my bra line? They don’t seem to be going away any time soon. My back hurts all the time from the binder I have to wear. When I forget to air dry it in time for school the next day, and I’m forced to wear the double sports bras again, I can’t get a full breath without being in terrible pain until 2:55 when I finally get home. Bathrooms are so much fun! There’s nothing being out with a friend and having to travel all around town to find a place with a single bathroom instead of having to deal with your traditional men’s and women’s rooms. Sure, I look enough like a guy to use the men’s room, but what happens when you see one of your schoolmates or maybe a family friend that knows you as female? Using the bathroom in school is super lit too. I usually have two options, one is to go during second period when nobody is down in the bathroom by the field entrance (oh and then not go to the bathroom for the rest of the day), or two is to go to the nurses and awkwardly ask to use their bathroom. While I have made an extreme effort to become close with the nurses, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s pretty weird to go there to use the bathroom. To avoid bathrooms overall, I usually just don’t drink anything starting from 9pm at night, until 3pm during the next day. That usually never works out though. I take medication for ADHD that makes me extremely thirsty and dries the fuck out of my throat, so what ends up happening is I’ll go to bed at around 8 on a dose of Nyquil (or else I’m never able to sleep), and then proceed to wake up every hour usually around the exact same time, drink a crap ton of water, and then go back to bed. That’s usually fine if it’s a weekend, because I won’t go out until later in the day, but on schooldays this is terrible because it means that I’ll have to use the bathroom all day but I can’t. Another great thing about being trans? Trying to look as masculine as possible, following the “whatever it takes!” notion. Nothing like picking up some awesome eating disorders. Last year, anorexia/ binge eating, lead to orthorexia, and then finally led to a forever fucked up view of food. Oh, and you know what eating disorders do to an already fucked up stomach like mine? Fuck it up even more, so kiss and Dairy/ Grains goodbye. I hate eating outside of my house because I’m still scared of calories, and when I eat at home I have to eat worrying about every single thing I put in my mouth. If I get fat, I won’t look as masculine. If I get too skinny, the doctors won’t give me hormones because they’ll know I have an eating disorder. If only they understood that the eating disorders were caused by being trans, and hormones would rid of my eating problems because I would look masculine without having to starve myself (oh or work out every day and ruin plans because I need to go to the gym or else I feel like I can’t see my friends because I look too feminine) Of course clothes help, but they usually don’t look right on my disproportionate body. I also don’t gain muscle half as fast as regular ol cis guys do, so even when I bust my ass in the gym every day (looking like a scrawny fool to all the other guys there) I don’t see like any results which throw me into a terrible depression because what’s the point of going to the gym then? Oh, that’s right… if I don’t go to the gym, I won’t look like a guy, and I can’t eat then because I’ll look to feminine. Ruining things is also a really fun hobby! Whether it be relationships, friendships, ties with relatives, social outings, or maybe even just a car ride or just sitting around in your living room, you can always count on being trans to ruin shit. Who knows how your crush will take it when they find out your trans? Disgusted? Maybe, “That’s a shame, I would have dated you if you were cis”? It’s always a gamble, you can never tell how people will react. Close friends usually take it well, sometimes they just want to understand the whole thing. That’s totally okay with me, as it is my job to help people understand what being trans is, and it also helps me understand and come to terms with myself. Family is super tough. They’re the ones that mean the most to you, and even if you’re out to them, there’s always potential to ruin shit. You really can’t beat ruining dinner with your mom, like how I did the other night. We hadn’t had the chance to sit down and talk in a while, and after 15 minutes of me talking about trans stuff (cause you know the question “how are you” automatically segways into the trans shit) she slams her fists down on the table, starts crying, and says “please can we just talk about something happy in your life?” and then you start crying because you just ruined dinner and oh yeah, there’s nothing happy about living a life where you constantly want to kill yourself, because of how much you hate yourself. So, even when you dry your eyes and ask “how’s work going?” and your mom puts down her food and says she’s not hungry anymore, you realize not only did you just kill the dinner vibes, but you literally ruined dinner. My sister really loves to deal with trans stuff too! The second I try and correct her on pronouns, she rolls her eyes. That usually starts a fight. Monday night, it ended with me fighting back tears, saying “You know sometimes when you hate yourself so much, one of the few things that keeps you going is a pronoun.” She rolled her eyes again and laughed, and I started sobbing. If anyone wonders why my sister and I have a bad relationship, that’s why. I can’t imagine how hard it is for my immediate family. I wish I didn’t have to put anyone through this. I wish I could change so they didn’t have to deal with my mess, and so many tears didn’t have to be shed. I wish I was never trans. I wish I didn’t have to bind in order to feel a little bit better about myself. I wish I didn’t have to plan out every single thing about my day in school, like using the bathroom and avoiding locker rooms. I wish I actually could envision myself going to college, or living to see my next birthday. I wish my first reaction to things wasn’t “I’ll kill myself then I won’t have to deal with it”. I wish I could run cross country or track again. I wish I could use the bathroom without having to worry about seeing someone, or being afraid of being questioned or worse. I wish I didn’t worry about the pitch of my voice when talking to strangers. I wish I fit in with guys. I wish I didn’t ruin things. I wish I could drink water. I wish I didn’t have problems with food. I wish I could not worry about talking to girls because of the fact that I’m trans. I wish I didn’t have to work out in order to be able to leave the house. I wish I could be okay with myself. Now that you’ve gotten through all the shitty stuff, here’s some positivity. I know I say plenty of times that I hate myself, and that I think about suicide as an option for everything. Rest assured, while yes, some days are worse than others in regards to depression and suicidal thoughts, I still have hope. There are so many amazing things in this world and I acknowledge that killing myself, won’t allow me to see. I love making films and writing. I love making other people laugh, and laughing at my own jokes. I love to make people happy. Personally speaking, one of the greatest things about being in a relationship is waking up every day and thinking, “how can I make this person’s day awesome?”. I love seeing my friends succeed (and helping them out when they mess up). I love to meet people. I love talking to people, even strangers. I love hearing other people’s stories, and learning about people. I love hearing why your favorite animal is a flamingo, and I want to know the story behind what made you hate striped shirts. I love music, both making it and listening to it. I love to learn (although I hate learning in a classroom setting). I love to read books, read opinions, read the news, read different perspectives, read about religions, read about philosophies on life and our existence. I love bike riding, skateboarding, and running. I love exploring, and the trouble that it sometimes gets me into. I love adventure, as well as change. Even though I love adventure, I also love staying home and watching movies. I love hugs. I love to chill and watch Netflix. I love to sleep and I also love waking up early to work out. I love to suck at piano and guitar. I love to dance terribly. I love animals. I love being upstate and out in nature. I love San Francisco (but I hate planes so idk when ill visit again). I love (and really miss) good food. I love to bake. I love to cook. I love photography. I love my friends, I love my teammates and I love my family. I love so many things, I couldn’t possibly trade my life for all of the above. Look at the things I wish were different and compare them to the list of things that I love. The love list far outweighs the wish list. Seeing black or whatever the hell happens after you die, can never compare to the opportunities I have been given. My family and I might have our struggles, but whose family doesn’t. I’ve been gifted with a great education, an ADHD brain that allows for extremely creativity, a great family, amazing friends, and a world is filled with so many stories that need to be told, so many ideas that need to be here, and so many opportunities that are ready to be taken. To all of you who have made it through this entire thing, I want to say thank you. From the bottom of my heart, I genuinely appreciate the fact that you took the time to read this. I would really like to express that I do not want any sympathy from this, and that the whole point of writing this was to help people gain some perspective and understanding, as well as to come out to those that didn’t know I was trans. Just because we all may experience different struggles in life, it’s impossible to say that we all don’t have a list of things we love. Regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, social class, or disability, there will always be room for love. Once again, thank you for reading this, it really means a lot to me.

8 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 4 years

Text

Best DC Comics to Binge Read on DC Universe

https://ift.tt/2LjeV6J

With an enormous swath of the world involved in varying degrees of social distancing, many of us suddenly find ourselves with a lot of time on our hands. Never fear! There are more options for streaming comics than ever before, and that means we have access to more of comics history, more hidden gems and epochal runs than ever before. But the variety of options to read can be daunting. That’s why we’ve put together a recommendation list of some of our favorite comics binge reads to help you through quarantine.

DC Universe rolled out in 2017 as the first full-service entertainment streaming platform – old shows, old movies, new shows, new movies, and a huge library of comics. And while a lot of the excitement over the platform has been about that original or new shows (justifiably! Harley Quinn and Doom Patrol are amazing!), it also gave us access to a staggering catalog of old comic books.

If you’re coming to a comic streaming service like DC Universe, chances are you don’t need us to recommend the hits. Nobody who watches the CW shows needs to be told that Crisis on Infinite Earths is worth reading. Likewise Batman: Year One, or All-Star Superman or The Great Darkness Saga. We’re going to skip over some of the obvious ones and point you towards hidden gems, stories you might have otherwise skipped over but for a trusted recommendation. We are also looking for monster runs that will keep you occupied – you can read six issues in one sitting. Some of these might take you an entire round of social distancing to finish.

A quick note about the reading guides: Many of them may have their own separate entry under DC Universe’s reading lists – those are helpful, but these are definitive. We will occasionally link to non-Den sources, but if you like what you hear, you should be encouraged to find your own best path. A lot of these stories wend through crossovers that are of varying degrees of relevance to the main books. It’s your call if you want to read the whole thing.

The Death and Return of Superman

The Death of Superman Reading Order

I know I said we wouldn’t talk about obvious must reads, but I feel like The Death of Superman (and it’s aftermath, World Without a Superman, Reign of the Supermen, and Kal-El’s inevitable return) should be on here. They can’t really be recommended enough.

“The ‘90s” are often maligned as a wave of gimmicks and stunts, and killing the most important comic character in the history of superhero books definitely qualifies as a stunt. But what made The Death of Superman stand out (and several other ‘90s DC events, to be honest) is that it was actually very good. This era of Superman comics is actually a hidden gem – Clark is a joy, and all the weirdness and fun of the Superman universe is in full swing, like Cadmus, Mxyzptlk, and a truly bizarre (but surprisingly good) Justice League roster.

Movies

Men of Steel: 11 Actors Who Have Played Superman

By Mike Cecchini

How Brandon Routh Returned as Superman for Crisis on Infinite Earths

By Mike Cecchini

The four writers – Jerry Ordway, Louise Simonson, Roger Stern, and Dan Jurgens – move pretty seamlessly between them on the main Superman books, and the art teams (Jon Bogdanove, Jurgens, Butch Guice, and Tom Grummett especially in the Death story) do amazing jobs of telling the story. Don’t be fooled by how gimmicky this feels, The Death and Return of Superman actually lives up to the hype.

Batman & Robin

Batman & Robin #1-17, Annual #1, Batman #17, Batman & Robin #18-32, Robin Rises: Omega, Batman & Robin #33-37, Robin Rises: Alpha #1, Batman & Robin #38-40, Annual #3

The Pete Tomasi/Patrick Gleason run on Batman and Robin never got the love it should have, because it ran parallel to two of the most high-profile Bat-comics of all time in Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman, and the back half of Grant Morrison’s story in Batman Incorporated. But in ten years, people are going to be looking back at this as a classic.

Comics

True Detective Creator Outlines What His Version of Batman Would Be Like

By John Saavedra

Movies

The Batman: Release Date, Cast, Villains, and More Details About the DCEU Movie

By Rosie Fletcher and 2 others

This is a controversial claim, but if you read this run, I think it holds up: Pete Tomasi writes the best Damian Wayne. He’s the right mix of arrogant little shit and not-actually-as-competent-as-Batman, and he actually learns lessons in this run that feel earned. He also dies during these stories, and Tomasi gets the chance to explore Bruce’s way of grieving, as well as drop in a series of guest stars that includes the best Two Face story I’ve ever read. Gleason and inker Mick Gray are utterly incredible, and do as much with one sixth-page panels with heavy inks and silhouettes as many art teams do with full page splashes. It’s a great, underrated run that I think you’ll love.

Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman (2006) #14-44, one story in #600

Oh my goodness Gail Simone’s Wonder Woman is exactly, precisely what I want out of a Wonder Woman comic. To me, Diana’s comics are an exception in that they should be as focused on how to avoid fighting as they are on the action. This run does that perfectly: she isn’t a belligerent meathead looking to stab everything in sight (but she does spend a little time with a neat Conan analogue, while we’re on the subject). She’s truly an agent of peace who then periodically has to kick some ass.

Movies

Wonder Woman Wasn’t Always Set During World War I

By Kayti Burt

Movies

Wonder Woman 1984: Who Is Maxwell Lord?

By Jim Dandy

The art is really good – Aaron Lopresti and Bernard Chang handle the bulk of it, and the storytelling and pacing are really well handled, but the panel borders stand out as especially interesting and visually entertaining. The guest stars are great – Black Canary brings Diana to Roulette’s fight club for a couple of issues, and there’s a big Power Girl punchup later in the run. This is just excellent, excellent Wonder Woman storytelling.

Suicide Squad

Suicide Squad on Comic Book Herald (end at issue #66)

John Ostrander, Kim Yale, and (mostly) Luke McDonough’s original Suicide Squad is a revelation. The concept is almost overdone at this point, and is a little bit ruined by putting big names like Harley Quinn on the team, but taking a batch of nobody villains and putting them on suicide missions to earn their freedom actually sets serious stakes, and this book does everything it should with those stakes. This is politics and espionage and force projection all wrapped into a story that makes the DC Universe feel more complete.

Movies

Suicide Squad 2 Cast, Release Date, News, Story, and More Details

By Mike Cecchini

Movies

The Many Deaths of The Suicide Squad

By Marc Buxton

Beyond the plotting, though, there are so many great characters that come out of these books. Amanda Waller is one of the single best characters in all of DC Comics, and this is the run that made her the badass who can face down Batman in the shower without flinching. Punch and Jewlee are hilarious running gags. Deadshot gets some incredible work. Hell, even Captain Boomerang gets multiple dimensions added to him (without ever losing his core concept: he’s a giant asshole). I promise you, I’m underselling how good this era of Suicide Squad is.

Legion of Super-Heroes

Legion of Super-Heroes Secret Files & Origins #2; Legion of Super-Heroes (1989) #122-125 alternating issues with Legionnaires (1993) #79-81; Legion Lost (2000) #1-12; Legion Worlds (2001) #1-5, The Legion (2001) #1-26, Legion Secret Files & Origins 3003; The Legion #27-33

If you loved Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning’s Marvel space work, when you read their Legion of Super-Heroes, you’ll be baffled at how Guardians of the Galaxy ended up on the big screen and not this.

The Legion of Super-Heroes is generally regarded as…not the most newbie-friendly superhero team in the world. Fair or not, this run of Legion comics is incredibly accessible and does as good a job integrating them into the larger DC Universe as any I’ve read. It’s also exactly like DnA’s Marvel cosmic work, in that it is wonderful space opera that happens to have superheroes. The first batch of stories deals with a wave of catastrophes hitting the galaxy in quick succession. Legion Lost has a group of Legionnaires get thrown outside of the galaxy as they’re trying to fix one of the first catastrophes. Legion Worlds serves as a series of check-ins with popular Legionnaires left behind in the United Planets and is a really effective way to hook you into the 31st century of the DC Universe.

And finally, The Legion is an outstanding team book following all of those. Legion Lost is an unquestionable highlight; Olivier Coipel’s art is incredible, and the story will make you launch your tablet/phone/computer across the room at a couple of twists. This run is incredible comics.

Justice League International

…you don’t have to read all of this, but if you feel like going for it, do it. You can stop at the red dots, though.

The Bwa-Ha-Ha era is half-superhero comic, half-workplace comedy, the template for greatness to come in Legends of Tomorrow, but a great superhero work in its own right. It’s an era of Justice League that takes itself (and its villains, and its stakes) much less seriously than just about any other era of the last 40 years. If you were raised on the post-Morrison “New Olympus” era of the League, the tone shift might be a little jarring. But that tone shift is part of what makes Keith Giffen, J. M DeMatteis, and Kevin Maguire’s run on Justice League special.

There are so many really good characters in this book, but one of the best parts is how much it does for both the League staples like Martian Manhunter and Batman, alongside the…less substantial…characters. Blue and Gold (Beetle and Booster, respectively) got their start here, and that one panel where Batman knocks out Guy Gardner that gets shared around the internet once a year is from this era.

Comics

Justice League Keeps Building the Wider DC Universe

By Mike Cecchini

Comics

New DC Universe Timeline Revealed

By Mike Cecchini

And besides being great comics, this run is also the favorite Justice League of a disproportionate amount of current comics writers, giving it an outsized influence on not just current books, but the rest of pop culture that superheroes have taken over – Wonder Woman 1984 is probably going to owe a HUGE debt to the Max Lord created by Giffen, DeMatteis, and Maguire.

Deathstroke

Deathstroke: Rebirth #1; Deathstroke (2016) #1-18; Titans (2016) #11; Teen Titans (2016) #8, Deathstroke #19-20, Teen Titans Annual #1, Deathstroke #21-42 (and when they go up, read The Lazarus Contract crossover and through issue #50 of the main series)

Priest’s Deathstroke is the best book that came out of DC Rebirth. Under normal circumstances, Slade Wilson sucks. He too often falls into a murder daddy archetype, a super cool anti-hero who goes big on the violence and the dysfunction as background statuses, and not as relevant parts of his story. Priest turned all that on its head and turned in a 50 issue run (plus a couple of specials, annuals and crossovers) that was about a father who loved his kids and didn’t know how to tell them, who also happened to be a top shelf mercenary and supervillain.

Movies

Deathstroke Solo Movie Details Revealed by Gareth Evans

By Kirsten Howard

Deathstroke: The Most Versatile Villain in the DC Universe

By Marc Buxton

That’s not to say there isn’t some super cool ass-whipping in it. Batman and Damian Wayne are recurring characters, as Priest sets up a mystery that might undo Damian as a character and gives more depth to Deathstroke’s issues with the Teen Titans. There’s an entire arc dedicated to him fighting various aspects of his own personality, personified in other villains from the rest of the DCU.

And it’s all so clearly and aggressively Priest – it has all the same style as his iconic Black Panther run, but with different storytelling to fit Slade’s tale. This is one of my favorite comics from recent years.

Starman

Starman Reading Order on ComicsBackIssues

For about three quarters of my entire life, DC had an absolute stranglehold on legacy in superhero comics. The entire DC Universe was littered with stories about someone new picking up an old cowl and an old title and having to grow into that role, whether it’s Jason Todd as Robin, Wally West as Flash, Dick Grayson as Batman, Kyle Rayner, Connor Hawke, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown. The list is nearly endless. The thing is, it’s a really good story archetype and an excellent use of shared universe superhero trappings to give heft and depth to stories that are otherwise not really allowed growth.

DC’s Stargirl Reveals Justice Society of America and Villains

By Mike Cecchini

Comics

Inside the Return of the Justice Society of America to the DC Universe

By Mike Cecchini

No comics did it better than James Robinson and Tony Harris’ Starman. It tells us the story of Jack Knight, the extremely Gen X son of golden age Starman Ted Knight. Ted is retired and passed his cosmic rod onto his son David, who gets murdered at the end of the first issue. It’s a hit on Ted’s whole family by one of his old villains, and Jack has to take up the rod to survive. Then he gets thrown into the mythology of the DC universe explained through the Starman legacy. It’s beautiful, fun, sad, meaningful, and heartfelt, and I bet you $1 that you cry at least once.

The Question

The Question (1986) #1-15, Detective Comics Annual 1988 , Green Arrow Annual 1988 , The Question Annual #1, The Question #16-24, Annual #2, #25-36

Comics

The Question Bounces Through Time In New DC Series

By Jim Dandy

Everyone jokes about how much of scenic Gotham City is abandoned amusement parks and chemical plants, but Gotham City is a family-friendly resort compared to the Hub City of Dennis O’Neill and Denys Cowan’s The Question. “Atmospheric” doesn’t even begin to describe this run.

It takes The Question, a character created by Steve Ditko, co-opted and pastiched as Rorschach by Alan More and Dave Gibbons in Watchmen, and introduced him to the DC Universe proper by putting Vic Sage through a spiritual ringer. Everything about this book is incredible – Vic is a terrific character; his supporting cast is thoroughly real; the book ties into the greater DC Universe really well (via Richard Dragon, Lady Shiva, and the annual crossover in the middle with Batman and Green Arrow).

But the real star here is Hub City, a love letter that’s also hate mail to mid-80s urban blight as scenery. And Cowan and inker Malcolm Jones III’s art – it’s tremendous.

Orion

Orion (2000) #1-25

I’ve been a fan of Walt Simonson’s Thor since I first read it, because it’s obviously incredible. But I didn’t realize until Thor: Ragnarok and DC Universe came out that Simonson might be the best comic creator to follow up on Jack Kirby’s ideas of all time, and it was Orion that really did it for me.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Simonson puts Orion, son of Darkseid raised on New Genesis by Highfather as part of the peace treaty between the two factions of New Gods, on his prophesied track to kill Darkseid, and finishes it pretty early on. The fifth issue is just Simonson drawing a huge blowout fight between the two, and it’s predictably gorgeous. But he sticks with the story past that battle and digs deep into Orion’s character, the mythology of the New Gods, and some of Kirby’s best creations (the Newsboy Legion has a running subplot and it’s awesome). It also has backups from some of the biggest superstars in comics (Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons, among others). This is a hefty run of comics, but you won’t be able to put it down.

The post Best DC Comics to Binge Read on DC Universe appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Comics – Den of Geek https://ift.tt/35DlxWB

#aion-rsa #Comics – Den of Geek

0 notes

waynekelton · 4 years

Text

Seven Scrolls Review

You see the word 'roguelike' thrown around so much these days. It can be difficult to discern what it actually means. Broadly, we use it to describe games that are run-based, with an element of procedural generation. They are hard, but fair. They reward a learning of a set of systems, as opposed to memorizing preplaced, hand-designed stages. It’s learning a language as opposed to just memorizing a book. But from there, anything goes. Action games like Dead Cells and card battlers like Slay the Spire all take this general formula and use it as a base for something way more extravagant and experimental. We like to call these 'rogue-lites'.

More narrowly, 'roguelikes' are games that share the same design constants as Rogue, the ASCII-based dungeon crawler from the 80’s. Rogue included tile based movement, where each step taken was a 'turn'. Enemies moved in reaction, and this dance occured as you attempted to navigate your way to the end of a floor of a dungeon. Various weapons and abilities can modify how you dispatch your foes, but should you die in your journey, the game is over. You’ll have to start from the beginning.

Put another way, 'rogue-lites' are like mezcal, made from basically the same ingredients as a 'roguelike', but because they aren’t made a very specific way, they aren’t tequila.

All that to say that Seven Scrolls, the new game by Jesse Venbrux, is maybe the best attempt out of making modern tequila on mobile since Imbroglio. It’s mechanical simplicity makes it easy to pick up and play, but the tiny wrinkles it throws into the formula are innovative.

As a purple skinned monk, your goal is to travel to the end of this dungeon, one little, grid-based room at a time. Each floor is small - only 5 x 5 - with Pac-Man style doorways on the outside borders, and little walls within the board to obstruct movement. Monsters periodically spawn in to give you grief and impede your mission. One of them, always the chicken, must be killed to get a key to move on to the next floor. The rest can be avoided and dispatched at your discretion.

These floors feel less like action games and more like puzzles. Moving around in ways that minimize your risk can require you to think several moves ahead. Once you get a few rounds in, never feels unfair when you get cornered by a pair of monsters. That said, it can take several deaths and restarts before you begin to really “get” Seven Scrolls.

This is largely because of its titular 'scrolls' system. Picking one up will add a passive effect that reads like an if-then statement. For example, if the Monk (you) kills an enemy, the Monk is healed. There are tons of different triggers and effects that can make some pretty potent spells. There’s absolutely no guarantee that these scrolls will work in your favor or not, though. Effects like shielding and healing can target monsters too. Triggers can pile up, causing a cascade of effects when something as benign (or necessary) as walking into a new floor occurs.

You can also use scrolls actively, so long as a target is applicable. Activating your scroll prematurely ignores the trigger, and just plays the effect out on the target. Maybe you need healing now, or want to make room in your limited inventory for a potentially better scroll. Just tap and burn it immediately. I find this adds a necessary element of crisis mitigation, as I often use it to get bad effects over with quickly. I’d rather the cthulhu beast that's aggressively chasing me get a shield now then some other, way worse time. This is my favorite feature of the game, because it provides some much needed agency in a set of systems that are seemingly going mad without your input.

This messiness is part of Seven Scrolls’ ultimate charm though. On top of the puzzle of navigating the floors, the chaos that the scrolls can add really unlocks a tactical layer that is a rare gem shining complexity and fun. Once you pass your first round by getting through all 7 floors and starting over again, new game plus style, you're hooked.

The scroll system has a charm reminiscent of Damian Sommer’s Chesh or Michael Brough’s Corrypt. Both are games that embrace mechanics that feel like bugs, and turn them into core gameplay. Jesse Venbrux’s project can stand shoulder to shoulder with some of these highly experimental successes.

Seven Scrolls has a strong, almost Holy Roman Empire visual style. Many of the icons have that twisted look to them - monk’s limbs crooked like paper dolls, one creature looks like a head coming out of the mouth of some other beast. I wouldn’t say that any individual piece of art is excellent, but as a whole, they come together to create a distinct “feel.”

All in all, if quick, turn-based puzzle/tactics are your thing, there's something in Seven Scrolls for you. It's the most “roguelike” game you’ll play so far this year, and is a great look at how sometimes just slight innovations can move a genre into new territory much faster than overdressing it with tons of other features.

Seven Scrolls Review published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

0 notes

illthinkofausernamelater12-blog · 6 years

Text

Before we dive into the story, I would like to preface this by saying that I never wanted to be trans. I would also like to reinforce the fact that being transgender sucks and I almost wish that this was a choice, because I would love to wake up one day and just decide not to be trans. That day isn’t going to happen though, and I can personally vouge for the “it’s not a choice” argument. Trust me, being transgender has stopped me from doing quite a few things. If I could magically switch to being cisgender so I could live a normal life, I would. So, without further or due, here’s my story, in terrible chronological order that is almost as bad as that in the movie, Citizen Kane.

Let’s start from when I actually found out I was transgender. Any doctor’s favorite question is, “How did you know you were trans?”. The “transgender” term came to me by accident, as I was being the introvert I still kind of am, watching YouTube videos up in my room at my grandma’s house. I was 12 at the time, and while scrolling through the “recommended” section, a video titled something along the lines of, “How I knew I was transgender” popped up. By clicking on that video, I unknowingly opened up my Pandora’s box of shit. Listening to this trans man talk about his experience, as well as with his struggles with gender dysphoria as a teenager felt something freakishly close to what I was feeling about my own body at the time. The term “transgender” though, was just something too big for me. Having already dealt with Lyme disease the year prior to that, I really didn’t want any more problems in my life… so I pretended like I never even heard the word, or related to that dysphoria that the man talked about, and went on living my life suppressing every ounce of pain I felt. I figured I would only deal with it when I had to. Girls were getting boobs and hourglass bodies, and guys were getting squared jaws and broad shoulders, as well as facial hair. When it was my turn to step up to the puberty plate, I tried to do everything I could to mask the changes that were happening to me. Which is quite strange, because at the time I was also denying any possibility of being transgender. Periods were a nightmare (and still are), causing deep depression that was a mix between dysphoria and self-rejection, as well as many crying episodes. Luckily small boobs run in the family, and I was able to get through middle school and into high school wearing double sports bras to hide those “almost A’s”. To deal with the hair situation, I cut that shit short at the end of 8th grade, and braced myself for the reputation that it would bring me… *Cough* *Cough* Lesbian.

All of the things that I was doing to hide my gender and my body really didn’t throw many people off. That’s not to say that they didn’t think it was weird, but it wasn’t unlike me to dress “construction casual” like the other boys. I was always the tomboy, often seen rocking some lacrosse shorts and some sort of athletic T-shirt all throughout elementary school. My best friend and I also only played with the boys during recess. That was until I was too much of a weirdo (was it the pony tail mixed with the basketball shoes and all male wardrobe?). I was ousted from that crowd and bullied pretty heavily. Even though it was terrible at the time, Im grateful for the experience, as it really did build character as well as a little confidence when I finally was on the other side of it. Anyways, flash forward to about 8th grade during the Emo ultra butch phase…At that point people kind of expected things like short hair and guys clothing from me. They just figured I was some uber lesbian that was finding myself. Little did they know that yes, while I did like girls, I didn’t like the fact that I was technically a girl, but in all fairness I wasn’t consciously aware of it either at the time. I think I did have an idea, because the term transgender lingered on my shoulder ever since I watched the video. I tried so hard to forget about it, but while on the inside I was working hard to convince myself I wanted to be a girl, on the outside I was already beginning my transition process.

Remember that whole “Ill deal with it when I have to” plan? Yeah, well that “time to deal with it” bell rang right before my 15th birthday. It was right about that time when I slipped into a constant state of terrible depression. For the most part I should have been happy at the time, as I had a girlfriend who supported me in everything I did, and never batted an eye or questioned any of my “gender hiding” habits. While we did not end up working out, I am forever grateful to her for being the first person I was able to come out to, as well as for always accepting me for who I was, not as the gender I identified by, or the clothing choices I made. Anyways… September/ early October of 2015 was when it occurred to me that it was time to either deal with the situation at hand, or to commit suicide. I hated every part of myself… I didn’t fit in right on either side of the gender spectrum, and I had to accept the hard fact that I was transgender and that there was no changing it. For my 15th birthday, I bought some of my friends presents instead of accepting anything, as I figured I wouldn’t make it to my 16th birthday and I wanted to show my love and appreciation for them. So, in between that October to March of 2016, my depression was getting so bad that even the slightest things would result in the thought of “I guess I’ll just die… that’ll make things better”. My depression was playing a nasty game of Cuban missile crisis with my mind. Brinksmanship was the only thing that brought me to actually say the words “I am not comfortable in my own body, I am transgender.” It was either that or Depression was going to launch its nukes.

I thought I opened Pandora’s box when I watched that YouTube video when I was 13, but boy was I a fool for not realizing that Pandora seems to have an unlimited number of shit filled boxes. See, the issue with telling your parents your trans is like, “Wow! I feel so relieved that the thing that almost caused me to kill myself is finally off my chest… oh wait, now I actually have to really deal with it.” The best metaphor I can think of to describe the situation is that it’s like peeling an onion. Each layer, while gradually getting closer and closer to the core, makes you cry and stinks up your kitchen. If only being transgender came with a pair of onion goggles that would keep the tears away. Unfortunately, the elves didn’t stop by to drop off my pair the night that I came out to my mom. Instead, I woke up many days to, “now what” conversations, and a lot, and I mean a lot, more crying. Here’s another thing that the Fairy (no pun intended) god mother doesn’t tell you about being trans. As far as I can tell from the experience I had, it actually gets way harder when you actively begin to transition, up until you’re on hormones for a couple months! If being trans was a plot structure graph, English teachers would have one hell of a time trying to explain all the rising actions, climaxes, and falling actions to their students.

You know when you’re on a school break or summer vacation and your parents still have to go to work, so you stumble out of bed at like 10:30 only to find a giant list of chores you have to complete before your allowed to go out? I experienced something similar to that after I came out to my parents, except instead of the list being signed “XOXO -Mom” mine had something like, “Have fun bitch! -Your Superego”. The mental list that I had come up with for myself looked something like this:

· Come out to close friends

· Come out to my sister, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents.

· Come out to the school administration

· Come out to school

· See a psychologist that can get me a testosterone letter

· See an endocrinologist to get testosterone

· Get both parents on board with testosterone

I wanted to come out to my close friends first for two reasons… One was that my girlfriend already knew, so what would the difference be if the friend-group we were both in knew as well? Two was that I wanted to practice actually saying the words, “I am transgender” to my friends before I started playing tranny hot potato with my family. Telling my family kind of stood in the way of telling the school administration, as well as my classmates, because my sister, along with two of my cousins and I, all went to the same school together. “Hey Katie, I just heard someone say Kieran’s a boy now?” Needless to say, that would be a little awkward.

The list got totally re-made many times, and as the list continues to increase in size, I’m sure it will also continue to change its order of priorities. The ever-changing list is like a fucking hydra… cut off one problem and two more shall appear.

Over the course of a year I came out to many of my close friends, along with other acquaintances. Originally, this was a feat that seemed insurmountable, but with each conversation came more and more confidence. While I had yet to fully accept, and love myself, coming out to my friends allowed me to get in touch with a lot of feelings I was pushing away. Many of them wanted to hear my story, and wanted to understand what it was that caused me to feel this way. I began to recall all the situations that raised many gender crisis flags, some of which I had never felt comfortable to talk about until then. I told them my communion story… The one where I was so upset about having to wear a dress, that I ran off the church lawn after a couple pictures, and stripped out of my dress in the parking lot. It didn’t even phase me that I was completely nude in front of most of the town, I was just focused on getting that dress off. There are many stories very similar to the communion nightmare, and if you look back into family photo albums, you rarely find me wearing dresses or girly clothing. When I was 7 my second cousin was getting married in Washington D.C. and my entire family drove down for the wedding. In all the pictures we have from the wedding, I can be seen wearing a pony-tail, blue polo shirt, a pair of khaki Capri’s and some super sexy blue crocks. I was that cousin… and no it was not because of the crocs.

Sorry to jump out of chronological order here, but let’s jump to June of 2016, when it had been 3 months since I had told my parents and a couple of friends that I was transgender. I started seeing a new therapist in hopes of getting a letter for testosterone. Depending on where you live, or which doctor you see, the process for getting testosterone usually goes along the lines of seeing a therapist for x amount of time, seeing an endocrinologist, and then getting your testosterone recommendation letters and giving them to the endocrinologist who will, fingers crossed, write you a prescription for those goodie- good hormones. That’s the over simplified order because, let me tell you, that is never how easy it is going to be. So, I start seeing this new therapist, right? I’ll just make it clear that I personally hate therapy. That’s not to say that I have anything against the people who find therapists or therapy helpful, it’s just that the whole system doesn’t really work for me. As a passionate overthinker, as well as a person who has spent the last 6 years seeing therapists, I love to also psycho-analyze the shit out of myself. It’s such an awful habit, because I end up making myself more depressed than I was and then I’m stuck feeling like shit for the rest of the day. Going to therapy for me just sucks because when the therapist asks, “So maybe it’s the fact that you have X going on, its causing a lot of sad feelings?” and it’s like “Um no actually X was a small problem that made me feel let down as well as furthered my trust issues with people. Problem Y and Z are the things that are causing me to feel sad but there’s nothing I can do to change them so here’s a shit ton of my parent’s money, let’s sit here for another 45 minutes and bullshit the rest of this session.” It’s kind of sad when you get to the point that your therapist sucks so much, you have to psycho- analyze them to try and figure out what led them to their psychology major, and love of leather recliners and notepads. My favorite type of therapists are the therapists that haven’t spent any time in the chair themselves. They’re your stereotypical “so how does that make you feel?” therapists, the ones that always have their pen going. They stand out like a sore thumb to anyone that has seen their deal of therapists, as they struggle to remember small facts, and the DSMR is their only solution to your problems. Their psych evals start off with “ummmm… would you consider yourself to be a worrier?” and when they ask, “do you have any questions for me” they’re really saying, “please don’t ask me anything I have exactly 26.2 seconds until this appointment is over and I do not have the time nor the experience to answer anything, don’t let the door hit you on the way out kiddo.” Usually the only question I have for inexperienced therapists like this is, “where the fuck did you get you psychology degree?”. The 10 weeks of summer were a rushed mess between crippling depression and therapy appointments, and it was late August when my parents finally agreed it was time to go see an endocrinologist.

Long story short, it is now February 23rd, and tomorrow I see a doctor that will most likely be writing my prescription for hormones (which according to predictions, should start in March). It has been an incredibly long journey, full of plenty of tears and new understandings. I know it will continue to be a long and tough road, but there is no way to properly express how grateful I am to be at this point.

So now that you’ve heard my story, I’m going to switch gears to part 2 of this mini project.

“Why?” Is a question I ask myself often. “Why am I transgender?” “Why am I like this?” “Why couldn’t I have been born normally” “Why can’t I just stop being trans?” “Why do I have to live my life like this”. To many cisgender people, being transgender seems like a conscious decision made by those who identify as a gender separate from that of the one they were given at birth. As a transgender person currently seeking medical treatment to help me cope with the life I am forced to live, I can assure you that this is not something people chose. It is not fun. It is not cool. It’s not exciting getting to live with a foot in both worlds.

Do you have any idea how fucked up my ribs are from years of wearing sports bras and duct tape or ace bandages that were too tight? Try running in two, way-too-tight sports bras and tell me how you feel after about a mile. Those bruises that I’ve had since 8th grade? That sit right along my bra line? They don’t seem to be going away any time soon. My back hurts all the time from the binder I have to wear. When I forget to air dry it in time for school the next day, and I’m forced to wear the double sports bras again, I can’t get a full breath without being in terrible pain until 2:55 when I finally get home.

Bathrooms are so much fun! There’s nothing being out with a friend and having to travel all around town to find a place with a single bathroom instead of having to deal with your traditional men’s and women’s rooms. Sure, I look enough like a guy to use the men’s room, but what happens when you see one of your schoolmates or maybe a family friend that knows you as female? Using the bathroom in school is super lit too. I usually have two options, one is to go during second period when nobody is down in the bathroom by the field entrance (oh and then not go to the bathroom for the rest of the day), or two is to go to the nurses and awkwardly ask to use their bathroom. While I have made an extreme effort to become close with the nurses, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s pretty weird to go there to use the bathroom. To avoid bathrooms overall, I usually just don’t drink anything starting from 9pm at night, until 3pm during the next day. That usually never works out though. I take medication for ADHD that makes me extremely thirsty and dries the fuck out of my throat, so what ends up happening is I’ll go to bed at around 8 on a dose of Nyquil (or else I’m never able to sleep), and then proceed to wake up every hour usually around the exact same time, drink a crap ton of water, and then go back to bed. That’s usually fine if it’s a weekend, because I won’t go out until later in the day, but on schooldays this is terrible because it means that I’ll have to use the bathroom all day but I can’t.

Another great thing about being trans? Trying to look as masculine as possible, following the “whatever it takes!” notion. Nothing like picking up some awesome eating disorders. Last year, anorexia/ binge eating, lead to orthorexia, and then finally led to a forever fucked up view of food. Oh, and you know what eating disorders do to an already fucked up stomach like mine? Fuck it up even more, so kiss and Dairy/ Grains goodbye. I hate eating outside of my house because I’m still scared of calories, and when I eat at home I have to eat worrying about every single thing I put in my mouth. If I get fat, I won’t look as masculine. If I get too skinny, the doctors won’t give me hormones because they’ll know I have an eating disorder. If only they understood that the eating disorders were caused by being trans, and hormones would rid of my eating problems because I would look masculine without having to starve myself (oh or work out every day and ruin plans because I need to go to the gym or else I feel like I can’t see my friends because I look too feminine) Of course clothes help, but they usually don’t look right on my disproportionate body. I also don’t gain muscle half as fast as regular ol cis guys do, so even when I bust my ass in the gym every day (looking like a scrawny fool to all the other guys there) I don’t see like any results which throw me into a terrible depression because what’s the point of going to the gym then? Oh, that’s right… if I don’t go to the gym, I won’t look like a guy, and I can’t eat then because I’ll look to feminine.

Ruining things is also a really fun hobby! Whether it be relationships, friendships, ties with relatives, social outings, or maybe even just a car ride or just sitting around in your living room, you can always count on being trans to ruin shit. Who knows how your crush will take it when they find out your trans? Disgusted? Maybe, “That’s a shame, I would have dated you if you were cis”? It’s always a gamble, you can never tell how people will react. Close friends usually take it well, sometimes they just want to understand the whole thing. That’s totally okay with me, as it is my job to help people understand what being trans is, and it also helps me understand and come to terms with myself. Family is super tough. They’re the ones that mean the most to you, and even if you’re out to them, there’s always potential to ruin shit. You really can’t beat ruining dinner with your mom, like how I did the other night. We hadn’t had the chance to sit down and talk in a while, and after 15 minutes of me talking about trans stuff (cause you know the question “how are you” automatically segways into the trans shit) she slams her fists down on the table, starts crying, and says “please can we just talk about something happy in your life?” and then you start crying because you just ruined dinner and oh yeah, there’s nothing happy about living a life where you constantly want to kill yourself, because of how much you hate yourself. So, even when you dry your eyes and ask “how’s work going?” and your mom puts down her food and says she’s not hungry anymore, you realize not only did you just kill the dinner vibes, but you literally ruined dinner. My sister really loves to deal with trans stuff too! The second I try and correct her on pronouns, she rolls her eyes. That usually starts a fight. Monday night, it ended with me fighting back tears, saying “You know sometimes when you hate yourself so much, one of the few things that keeps you going is a pronoun.” She rolled her eyes again and laughed, and I started sobbing. If anyone wonders why my sister and I have a bad relationship, that’s why. I can’t imagine how hard it is for my immediate family. I wish I didn’t have to put anyone through this. I wish I could change so they didn’t have to deal with my mess, and so many tears didn’t have to be shed.

I wish I was never trans. I wish I didn’t have to bind in order to feel a little bit better about myself. I wish I didn’t have to plan out every single thing about my day in school, like using the bathroom and avoiding locker rooms. I wish I actually could envision myself going to college, or living to see my next birthday. I wish my first reaction to things wasn’t “I’ll kill myself then I won’t have to deal with it”. I wish I could run cross country or track again. I wish I could use the bathroom without having to worry about seeing someone, or being afraid of being questioned or worse. I wish I didn’t worry about the pitch of my voice when talking to strangers. I wish I fit in with guys. I wish I didn’t ruin things. I wish I could drink water. I wish I didn’t have problems with food. I wish I could not worry about talking to girls because of the fact that I’m trans. I wish I didn’t have to work out in order to be able to leave the house. I wish I could be okay with myself.

Now that you’ve gotten through all the shitty stuff, here’s some positivity. I know I say plenty of times that I hate myself, and that I think about suicide as an option for everything. Rest assured, while yes, some days are worse than others in regards to depression and suicidal thoughts, I still have hope. There are so many amazing things in this world and I acknowledge that killing myself, won’t allow me to see. I love making films and writing. I love making other people laugh, and laughing at my own jokes. I love to make people happy. Personally speaking, one of the greatest things about being in a relationship is waking up every day and thinking, “how can I make this person’s day awesome?”. I love seeing my friends succeed (and helping them out when they mess up). I love to meet people. I love talking to people, even strangers. I love hearing other people’s stories, and learning about people. I love hearing why your favorite animal is a flamingo, and I want to know the story behind what made you hate striped shirts. I love music, both making it and listening to it. I love to learn (although I hate learning in a classroom setting). I love to read books, read opinions, read the news, read different perspectives, read about religions, read about philosophies on life and our existence. I love bike riding, skateboarding, and running. I love exploring, and the trouble that it sometimes gets me into. I love adventure, as well as change. Even though I love adventure, I also love staying home and watching movies. I love hugs. I love to chill and watch Netflix. I love to sleep and I also love waking up early to work out. I love to suck at piano and guitar. I love to dance terribly. I love animals. I love being upstate and out in nature. I love San Francisco (but I hate planes so idk when ill visit again). I love (and really miss) good food. I love to bake. I love to cook. I love photography. I love my friends, I love my teammates and I love my family. I love so many things, I couldn’t possibly trade my life for all of the above. Look at the things I wish were different and compare them to the list of things that I love. The love list far outweighs the wish list. Seeing black or whatever the hell happens after you die, can never compare to the opportunities I have been given. My family and I might have our struggles, but whose family doesn’t? I’ve been gifted with a great education, an ADHD brain that allows for extremely creativity, a great family, amazing friends, and a world is filled with so many stories that need to be told, so many ideas that need to be here, and so many opportunities that are ready to be taken.

To all of you who have made it through this entire thing, I want to say thank you. From the bottom of my heart, I genuinely appreciate the fact that you took the time to read this. I would really like to express that I do not want any sympathy from this, and that the whole point of writing this was to help people gain some perspective and understanding, as well as to come out to those that didn’t know I was trans. Just because we all may experience different struggles in life, it’s impossible to say that we all don’t have a list of things we love. Regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, social class, or disability, there will always be room for love. Once again, thank you for reading this, it really means a lot to me.

0 notes