#but since the particular great ones noted to be sympathetic to humans are also the ones holding back the moon/perpetuating the dream etc

[adventures-of-the-creeping-bam]

NEVER SPLIT THE PARTY: THE ADVENTURES OF THE CREEPING BAM,  BOOK FOUR: THE HUNT - CHAPTER 8

If you’re new to the story, please go check out Book 1 first …

Boof 4 Chapter 1 is here …

IMPORTANT:  Please note this story includes content that may be considered mature, such as moderate battle violence, some strong language and occasional mild sexual scenes.

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CHAPTER EIGHT:  GAEL

The sound of the key turning in that lock is starting to become a trigger for me, I swear to Minerva.  The moment I hear the slightly sticky, scratchy ratcheting sound, followed by a shunting creak as the door sticks in the frame before finally popping loose, every inch of me goes cold, a deep chill riding up my spine.  If my mouth wasn’t already painfully dry it would go that way in an instant, and as it is I’m immediately working on sitting up the best I can with these ropes, huddling as tight into the corner as I can get with so little mobility.  Gods … I hate being so encumbered, it’s as humiliating as it is harrowing.

Still, at least whoever’s coming through doesn’t seem to be in a particular rush, which is enough to give me a chance to right prepare myself.  Next to me, da starts to stir too, a winded snort signalling his awakening as the sounds must shake him from what hard-won rest he’s managed to claw for himself, and I find myself starting to hate our captors a little more for it.  He’s already in such a bad way.

Finally the door pops open and a more battered, ratty older human man with a particularly unbecoming thin, patchy beard and a badly scarred left eye barely manages to catch himself as he stumbles through with it.  He rights himself with an angry grunt, rolling his wide, heavily muscled shoulders, and works on dragging the key from the lock again after swinging the door the rest of the way open to make room for more.

The fact that I was expecting Vandryss makes seeing the dragonhalf woman step through instead a genuine relief.  I start to relax almost immediately as I realise how quickly I’d just tensed up, slumping a little more into the wall I’m already leaning against, and I let a relieved breath out through my nose.  Not that she is, subjectively, really any better than our current number one enemy, but … I don’t know, given my previous experience with her, there just seemed to be something more … sympathetic about her, perhaps?  I can’t really be sure, but maybe it gives me a little hope.

She’s very striking, I have to admit.  She’s very tall, I mean still nowhere near as tall as Yeslee but I don’t doubt she’d make Shay look small, and while she seems built more for speed and agility it’s clear enough she’s got some great strength in her, and not just due to her blood.  There’s definitely something much akin to Kelsa about her, a powerful, disciplined warrior of profound experience but also a particularly cool, pragmatic cynicism too, but the more I see of her the clearer it is to me that she comes from a very different background.  It’s not just her far more expensive clothing and gear, but the way she speaks, her bearing.  This one clearly comes from money.  Which makes me wonder what in the world is she doing in this profession?

She seems somewhat softer than when I saw her last, which is interesting, but maybe it’s simply the fact that she’s clearly been at rest since last time she came in here, when Vandryss came back to question my father after … what she did to me.  She brought the rogue wizard too, Tavarrat, I suspect in case da decided to withhold after all, but he was pretty comprehensively broken after seeing me tortured and humiliated by that heinous bitch, so there was no need.  Mostly the dragonhalf stood by and observed, but she asked odd questions here and there, mostly about the Order’s involvement in all this, I noticed, and the answers seemed to trouble her deeply.  Mostly, though I got the impression she was mostly here to keep an eye on Vandryss, make sure she didn’t go too far with either of us.  Which was interesting.

She’s shed her armour now, instead simply wearing a pair of well-fitted, rich buckskin britches with very tall boots, a costly-looking linen shirt with really puffy sleeves, and a soft suede-and-silk waistcoat buttoned high to her neck.  Her dark hair is, comparatively, similarly relaxed, still tied back but this time in a much looser braid that falls over her shoulder, while several loose locks frame her face, more than one slipping over her eyes.  It’s a particularly fetching style that softens her fierce look, and definitely heightens her harsh beauty.

Stepping through, she takes a moment to look around the room even though there’s really been no real change since before, then steps aside as she immediately folds her arms tightly across her chest.  Still looking thoroughly disapproving about this whole business and clearly not caring who sees it.

Tavarrat follows, and the moment I see what she’s got in her hands I stiffen up again.  She’s carrying a bundled set of chains, attached to several heavy rings of dark metal, already glowing with etched runes and glyphs.  Damn it … she’s been busy since she left us alone yesterday.  That’s all for me, clearly.

When she enters her own gaze remains conspicuously locked on the floor in front of her, her face very closed-off and her brow tightly knitted.  I remember she seemed particularly quiet and withdrawn before, but I thought it was simply being in such close proximity to Vandryss.  I realise now that it’s more to do with very clear discomfort about having us here right now.  Despite her obvious betrayal of all she must once have believed in, I’m starting to think she really hates that she’s put da in this position, and now me too.  That’s interesting too.

The wizard takes a few steps closer, then falters, starting to take one more but then seeming to think twice and instead dithering for a beat before instead moving aside to approach the closest wall.  Then one more figure steps into the room and my blood goes cold.

Vandryss stalks straight towards me, her eyes already locked on me, and she doesn’t stop until she’s right on top of me.  I start to try and squirm away as she draws close, but instead of putting myself in a place of relative shelter I realise now I’ve simply trapped myself since I have nowhere to go when she reaches for me.  She doesn’t bother taking an arm or gripping me by the shoulders, instead she just curls her steely fingers into my hair and yanks, and I can’t help screaming through the gag as she drags me bodily across the floor.

“Hey …”  Da tries to croak a protestation but instead just descends into a little coughing fit as his horrendously dry throat must crack badly.  “Stop … stop it, leave them alone …”

“Shut up, Foxtail.  You have no say in any of this.”  Vandryss finally deposits me on my knees in the middle of the room, the tears that sprang unbidden in my eyes from the sudden pain already betraying me as they roll down my cheeks, and I angrily blink them away as I feel the shame flooding me.  I’m already distinctly self-conscious but this just polarises it.  “When you’re ready.”  she growls now, already turning to Tavarrat.

Who’s wrinkling her nose as she starts trying to sort through the slightly tangled assortment of iron fetters, taking a more halting step forward now.  “Yes I … gods, what’s that smell?”

“This little bitch pissed herself in the night, clearly.”  Vandryss is smiling now, sly and more than a little superior as she gives me a scathing look, intent on rubbing it in.  “Her father’s already managed to make quite a mess of himself, so I suppose it doesn’t matter now.”

As I feel my face grow even hotter I have to fight hard to stifle the unbidden urge to sob at this particularly cruel jibe, even if it is just a brutally honest observation.  I’ve been stuck here for two night now, trussed up tighter than a plucked bird from a butcher’s shop, I’ve not had a chance to attend to any of my personal needs.  I remember all too well waking up sometime late last night, it must have been, and my bladder felt like it was the size of a grapefruit, the urge to urinate growing distressingly strong.  I fought it for as long as I could, but after what might’ve been an hour I just couldn’t hold it in any more.  For a few moments it felt so good just to get it out of me, but then my britches were sopping wet and I could smell it too and the shame was horrible, I just wished the earth would swallow me up right there and that could be the end of it.  Da woke up a few minutes later because he must’ve heard me sobbing in the gloom, and he did is best to comfort me with words alone, but I felt so unbearably small and pathetically weak for hours after.  It’s been more uncomfortable since I woke up again, the urine itself having largely dried at least but my inner thighs are now itching and badly chafed in my slightly damp britches.

Now that bone-deep shame comes flooding back and I almost start weeping all over again, but with Vandryss in front of me, looking so horribly smug, mostly what takes over is just white hot fury.  If I could do anything right now I’d kill her on the spot …

Or at least try to …

“Just stop it …”  da mutters, barely managing to keep his head up enough to glare at her with one eye mostly still swollen shut.  “You cruel bitch …”

Simply turning to Tavarrat, Vandryss’ smile fades almost immediately, her expression becoming stony cold again.  “Enough of this shite.  Just get it done.  Then we can get down to business.”

Yeah, I really don’t like the sound of that, and my growing dread just tightens around my heart all the quicker as soon as the wizard lets a weary sigh go, giving up on the untangling now as she just takes hold of the banded metal collar and lets the rest fall noisily to the floor.  She looks up at me at last, and the way she looks so regretful scares me even more, I’m already starting to squirm again as she takes a more purposeful step towards me now.

“No!  Stop it!”  Da starts to struggle as she moves in on me, tugging at the chains binding him, but it’s as weak and ineffectual as before, while his voice continues to crack.  “Don’t you touch them!  You heinous witch … you traitor!  Have you no shame?!”

That halts her, for a moment at least, and it’s the first time I’ve seen her look at my father since we were reunited.  Her face grows so haunted, there’s true, horrified shock in it, and she pauses for a long beat, opening her mouth like she wants to respond … then her eyes seem to harden and her brow furrows again, her face growing stern as she sucks in a deep breath and starts approaching more earnestly.  And I have nowhere to go …

Damn it … I try to wriggle out of her path but I really don’t have anywhere to go, I can’t move much at all with the way that evil bitch tied me up.  In the end I essentially just start to topple, but she catches me long before I can really teeter over, taking hold of my shoulder with her free hand while she shakes out the collar with the other.  It swings open in her hand, already unlocked in clear anticipation, and as she pushes me upright again she digs her fingers hard into my shoulder, getting the firmest grip she can on me as she starts to work the band around my throat.

“Oh fuck … Gael, no … I’m sorry, I … oh you fucking bitch!”

Vandryss ignores my father’s weakened tirade and just steps in now as his words spur me to start struggling again myself.  She doesn’t bother with anything special, she simply grabs a handful of hair from my crown and gives my head a good shake for a few moments while Tavarrat steps back, seeming profoundly shocked and almost dropping everything in the process.  “Cut … that … shit … out, you stupid little cunt.”  Her hiss is close in my ear, low and breathy, but full of venom all the same, and it still smells so bad.  “Just keep still.  I won’t tell you again, I will simply hurt you.  Very badly.”

I can’t help whimpering at that, and what little fight there was left in me evaporates in an instant.  I’m entirely at her mercy, there’s nothing I can do, no way to fight.  Not like this.  Unfortunately, if I let them do what they clearly want to do to me, even if it does mean I gain a little more freedom, I still won’t be able to do anything.  They’ve thought this out too well.

For a long moment she watches me closely, looking sidelong into my eyes, and again they seem to blaze with that strange, unnerving baleful green fire that I can’t find any reasonable account for.  Then she lets go of me and steps away and if I could I’d collapse on the spot.

Tavarrat just stands there for another beat, clearly still rattled by her colleague’s clear overreaction, but finally she lets that deep breath go and takes up the collar again, and this time when she approaches me I just sit as I am.  Demure and placid as I lift my chin in anticipation, just wanting this over with now.  I have no further say in this, so I’d best not make it even worse on myself.

The collar is cold on my throat, uncannily so, in fact, when the metal makes contact with my skin it feels like it’s been left sitting in deep snow for an hour.  Not frozen enough to burn me, but it’s definitely uncomfortable.  I have to fight the urge not to flinch away after all feeling that, instead biting down on the gag and squinting my eyes into tight slits against the troubling discomfort.  Then she snaps it closed and the lock clicks all on its own and I mostly just see the flash of the markings in the metal reflected in her eyes as the invocation fetter seals itself.

What I feel is a good deal more intense, anyway.  I know that the air is only squeezed out of me for a moment, but it’s so uncomfortably like the other night, when Vandryss strangled me, that I instantly stiffen, unable to fight my arching back in sympathy to the memory.  There’s a much brighter flash inside my head, and I feel a strange blazing heat run through me in the same instant, my limbs alight from the inside as if every vein and artery was suddenly set aflame.  Like the breathlessness, the sensation passes in a moment, but it’s still profoundly disturbing, something I never want to feel again.

Once my lungs can work again I start sucking breath in through my nose, I can’t help it, and I double over as much as my bonds will allow, which isn’t much at all, certainly not without risking dislocation of my shoulders.  It takes me a long time to work up the strength to lift my head again, looking up towards Tavarrat as she steps back again, holding onto the rest of the bundle of chains as she starts to pay out the one attached to my unnervingly well-fitted collar.

“That should do it.”  she breathes, her voice as heavy with regret now as her face.  She looks down at the floor again.

“Oh my … Minerva …”  Da’s words are halfway between a growl and a sob.  “Gael, I’m … I’m so sorry …”

Vandryss steps back up now, and I don’t bother trying to move this time, mostly just in fear of what she might do to me now if I did.  She gives my head a hard shove from the back as it is, forcing my chin down, then I feel her steely fingers starting to work at the gag’s knot tangled into my hair at my nape.  As she starts to work it loose it just tugs and snags on the strands and locks that got trapped in it before, and I hear her hiss with clear irritation as she digs away at it, while it just hurts me all the more.  I bite down the best I can against the pain, but I can’t help a few little fresh whimpers all the same, and this just makes her growl and probe even more fiercely.

Finally it starts to loosen up and then, at last, she tugs it all free, and I almost moan as she drags the band of cloth out of my mouth at last, snapping it once before tossing it aside to slap onto the floor with a spit-wet splat.  Meanwhile I have to struggle for a few moments to work the wadded bundle of fabric left behind out of my mouth, almost choking after all in my efforts before I’m finally able to spit it out.  As it is I’m still uncomfortably close to gagging all the same, and I have to lean forward again to cough and hack before I’m finally able to start breathing properly again.

“Ah … oh … fuck …”  Finally I just spit once, twice, my mouth feeling dryer than ever now that the gag’s gone but it feels strangely like it’s still in.  I work my jaw for a moment more, then finally look up at Vandryss.

“You … you can … ah …”  I have to spit one more time, then cough again just to work on clearing my throat enough to speak, and even then my voice feels as painfully scratchy and dry as it sounds.  “Oh … you can do whatever you want to me, but I won’t tell you anything.  I swear to Minerva you won’t get a single crumb of information out of me.”

The way she smiles at that tells me she’s not convinced for a second, and I can’t blame her.  I didn’t feel very defiant saying it, my voice is too weak and quivery to be any more convincing than my face must be.  At least she doesn’t laugh at me, but her sneer is dripping with sarcasm as she crouches down in front of me now and leans close.  “Nice try.  Very convincing, I’m sure.  You could have had a brilliant career on the stage, why on earth did you ever choose to be a wizard?”

“Fuck you.”  I’ve spat the words out before I can stop myself, but they feel a bit more fiery than before.  There’s some real venom in that.

This just makes her grin even wider, and it’s a horrible sight like always.  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, darling.  Business first.”

Again I feel a deathly chill run up my spine, but she just steps back, turning away before I can respond.  Already looking to Tavarrat again.  “Finish it, I’m tired of waiting.”

Frowning deeper still, Tavarrat lets another heavy sigh go before holding the chain out to her.  Vandryss looks down at it for a charged beat before taking it with the sharpest, most disdainful look she can muster, I suspect, very much driving the point home, and cocks her head my way as punctuation.  The wizard simply glares back for another beat before stepping towards me again, reaching into her robs now.  After a moment’s searching she draws a small knife loose.

Seeing that naked blade, small but clearly still very sharp as all working wizards prefer to keep theirs, puts me right back on guard again, and I stiffen immediately.  As she approaches I consider trying to squirm away again, but check myself because of course it won’t go any better than before.  Besides, it’s pretty clear what she actually intends to do with that.

She steps past me now, moving around behind before crouching, and as I hold my breath I feel one hand take hold of the bonds at my wrist before I feel a subtle tug below, and then a snapping release.  My shoulders are still bound back tightly, but as she lets go of the rope at my wrist the strain on my back is relieved significantly now the line binding them to my ankles has been severed.  This time as I slump forward I’m actually able to properly bend at my waist, and I can’t help breathing a little deeper too as the strain eases a little.  Then she must lean forward herself because the next thing I feel is her gripping my shoulder again before tugging those particularly tight bonds just above my elbows.  I take a breath in anticipation for this one.

When these ropes are severed my elbows spring apart entirely of their own volition and this time I fold entirely double as my forehead is finally able to gently thump to the thinly carpeted floor.  I let a heavy sigh go, and it’s of the deepest, most profound relief, even as I feel my arms start to tingle mightily as my circulation is finally starts running freely again without such significant restriction.  At first it’s a cold, almost pleasant sensation, but then it starts to warm up considerably, turning hot and spiky as my wrists start to prickle, and then the real pain comes and I’m not so relieved any more.  By this point she’s already sawing away at the rope binding my wrists, and all I can do now is grit my teeth and groan as I ready myself for what’s to come.

The moment the bonds at my wrists are severed I slump onto my side, I can’t help it, my left arm is trapped behind me and under me but I bring the right up into my chest immediately, whimpering again as my hands and fingers start to burn as the numbness begins to recede.  Oh fuck … I’ve never felt anything like this, this is horrible.  I look at my hand and I expect it to be horribly mangled like my da’s, that’s certainly what it feels like, but while my fingers are red and bent into clutching claws that can do nothing but shake, they still seem whole and unbroken.  I can’t feel my hands yet, just the worst pins and needles I have ever experienced in my life, but at least I know they’re still there.

While this is all going on, it seems that Tavarrat has put her knife down and instead taken the chains back, and she’s unravelling the tangle with greater success now.  Finally she selects two of the small banded manacles, putting one aside while settling forward again on one knee with the other in hand while reaching for me.  I barely feel it when she takes hold of my right wrist, it’s just a deeper, more prominent tingling pressure through the prickling numbness, but at least this seems to deaden the effect somewhat when she snaps the manacle closed around it.  The glyphs flash again and this time mostly it’s just a subtle pulse through me, like taking a low charge of static.

She has to roll me over to get at my other wrist without tangling me up in the chains, but by this point the numbness has receded enough that I really do feel it this time when she seals the second manacle.  “Oh!  Minerva that … oh, that smarts …”

“I know …”  she barely whispers, again conspicuously avoiding my gaze now as she concentrates on the chains instead.  “I’m sorry.”

“Enough of that.”  Vandryss growls  “Just finish it.”  She plants a chair close by, facing away from me, and plants herself astride it with the back in front of her, an act that so incongruously reminds me of Kesla that it feels perverse to see her do it.  “Meanwhile we can have a little chat.”

Working on getting my breathing back under control as Tavarrat starts to saw at the ropes binding my left leg, I look up into that baleful green stare, and lick my lips in the vain hope I might be able to wet them.  It doesn’t feel like it does much, my mouth is still so uncomfortably dry my tongue feels like sandpaper.  “I just told you –”

“No, I told you, we’re going to talk.  Your colleagues are proving to be a particularly persistent thorn in our sides that I want removed before they cause more upset than my colleagues and I can realistically handle.  They’ve already made it necessary for us relocate our operation in order to pull it deeper underground, in order to hide it from …”  She works her mouth sourly for a moment, like she doesn’t like the way the idea tastes.  “Unwanted attention.  Now we’ve been forced to halt any further exports until we can safely resume open traffic northwards again.  We are losing time, and my colleagues’ employers are losing money because of it.  This is not stress I need.  So you will answer our questions, or I will make you profoundly regret it.”

“Yes, I’m sure you will.”  I growl back, not really even intending to, it’s mostly just a by-product of my throat being as parched as my mouth.  “But you’re just making me repeat myself.  I won’t tell you anything.  I won’t help you hurt my friends.  You’ve humiliated me already, you can hurt me all you want, you can even kill me, but I won’t answer a single one of your questions.  All you’ll get is a lot of screaming and finally a useless corpse.  I promise you.”

Tavarrat frees my left leg now and it springs out straight all on its own, and I can’t help groaning again at the momentary relief before sucking the breath right back in as I clench my teeth in anticipation of the coming pain.  Meanwhile she just starts working at the other leg, frowning deep as before as she continues to focus herself out of the conversation.

“That’s just it, though, isn’t it?  I could do all that, very easily.  I’ll get an immense amount of pleasure out of it, too.  I’m actually hoping you stick to your convictions, because the longer you hold out the more fun I can have with you.  But at the same time, that would also be an immense waste of our time, wouldn’t it?  I’ve already stressed that our time is finite, so I would be forced to take a different approach.  Like hurting your father instead.”

Again, my blood goes cold.  I manage to hold my tongue, just watching her now as I start to sit up, very wary of giving any sign that she’s getting to me with this talk.  My fear is that she can read everything that’s going through my head as clearly as an open book, because I’ve never been any good at bluffing.

“She can … do her worst to me …”  da chokes out behind me, the clanking of chains telling me he’s leaning forward as much as he can to make his point.  “I don’t care.  Just don’t give in to her … promise me, Gael.  Be true to yourself …”  His final words break up into coughing, and this time the metallic clinks tell me he’s collapsing back onto the floor again.

The closing of the first shackle around my ankle gives me another jolt, and I have to bite down against it, but in truth it doesn’t seems to hit me so hard as the previous.  I wonder if perhaps I’m simply getting used to it now, that my body’s adjusting to the sensation enough I’m starting to get over the discomfort.  I don’t like to think it might simply be down to the fact that it’s simply snuffing my power, and that what little there is left in me that’s not yet restrained has been further weakened.

Taking another deep breath as the sensation recedes again, I let it hiss out through my teeth and look up at Vandryss again.  I don’t want her to torture my father, he’s been through enough and honestly I don’t know if I really can hold my tongue watching her do it … but the thought of her using anything I say to kill just one my friends stokes a fire in me all the same.  I think about it for a long, drawn out time as she simply watches me, no more humour in her expression now, just cold, sharp observation.

Then Tavarrat finishes cutting away the last of the ropes and tosses the remnants aside with the rest she’s dragged off me, takes up the last of the banded manacles and locks it around my remaining ankle.  Again, I feel the kick, but I was right before, I really am seeming to get used to it now, it barely fazes me this time.  In the end I simply let a heavy breath go after and start working on sitting up again, giving my sore, rubbery limbs a few experimental twists and turns that go a long way telling me just how weak I am after being bound for so long.

So instead I just give up trying and stay where I am, lying on the floor looking up at the three women gathered around me, before finally letting my head loll back so I can just focus on the bare stone and wooden rafters of the ceiling.  “No, I won’t give you the satisfaction.  Da’s right, I couldn’t live with myself.  You might as well just cut my throat right now, otherwise you really will just be wasting your time.”

Honestly, the words feel like a massive bluff all the time as I’m saying them, and I’m not sure I really could maintain a brave face if she actually decides to act on my ultimatum, but my voice doesn’t quaver half as much as I thought it might.  My breathing is steady enough too, and with my hands as weak as my limbs I suppose I don’t have to worry about whitened knuckles giving me away either.  So I just stay as I am, staring at the ceiling, waiting to see what fate might have in store for me … or at least the whims of a clearly psychopathic bitch.

Then Vandryss rises into my field of vision again, and she looks so casual now I don’t actually realise what she’s about to do until she reaches behind her back and slips a knife free, and my heart leaps into my throat.  I couldn’t stop it if I tried.  As she takes a step towards me I make a renewed effort to try and at least get one of my elbows under me, enough to at least start to sit myself up, but I know I have no hope of actually defending myself, not yet.  I’m still too weak.  Right now it’s taking enough for me to simply remain stoic in the face of what looks like my approaching death.

“Wait … no, no you can’t!”  Da starts thrashing with renewed vigour, his voice cracking worse than ever as his struggles and pleas continue to prove entirely ineffectual.  “No!  Stop it you bitch!  You monstrous fucking PSYCHO!!!  DON’T YOU DARE!!!  DON’T TOUCH THEM!!!”

“He’s right, Vandryss.  That’ll do.”  The words surprise me, but more so hearing it come from the dragonhalf woman.  She hasn’t moved yet, but when I look I see she’s fixing her with a far sharper glare now.  “I mean it.  You should back down now.”

That finally gives her pause, and she stops a little short as she’s starting to lean towards me, knife now cocked and ready while her other hand starts to reach.  She slowly turns away from me, her still unsettlingly calm face unchanging as she looks up at the tall woman, and one of her eyebrows quirks just the tiniest bit while she cocks her chin a little in her regard.  “”Is that an order, Mallys?  After what we discussed last time?”

“Think of it more like simple advice.”  The dragonhalf takes a step back, but there’s no shying away in this move, no trace of backing down, she’s just adjusting her footing as I see her lay her right hand on her sword-hilt.  Her expression doesn’t change a jot the whole time, any more than Vandryss’.  “I wouldn’t want things to get complicated, so I thought perhaps it would be prudent to remind you of this one’s obvious value.”

The pale woman just stays there for a long beat, perfectly still the whole time but I’m sure I can feel the tension radiating from her all the same, she’s ready to leap at her without the slightest warning.  I can’t tell quite how tense she is looking at the knuckles of her knife-hand, the skin’s too pale for that, but … no, I just need to look at her to sense it.  Vandryss was already ready to kill, and I get the impression she really wouldn’t blink any more taking out someone on her side right now than me …

When she smiles, I start to think she might actually try it after all, or perhaps come for me instead, and I find myself tensing even though I know there’s no way I could realistically do anything … but then she simply steps back, straightening up as she slips her blade back into place, letting a heavy sigh go as she slowly shakes her head.  “No, I suppose you’re right.  Perhaps I should try a different approach.”

“No, I think I can do that on my own, actually.”  The fact that the tall warrior doesn’t remove her hand from her sword says far more than her surprisingly even tone.  “I don’t think your presence is helping things right now.  Besides, it’s not really required for this, is it?”

Vandryss’ smile thins, but doesn’t fade entirely.  Even so, her eyes narrow as she regards the dragonhalf for another beat, head tilting to a more notable angle now.  “Do I need to remind you what you’re actually here for, or can I simply –”

“Do I have to remind you that I don’t actually work for you?  Hontiresk may have put us together but he’s the one paying for our work, not you.  So I don’t actually take your orders.”

When Vandryss looks her over this time it’s a good deal colder, her smile gone entirely, and she’s working her fingers like she’s itching to draw again.  She’s wearing her sword, she could definitely respond in kind if the dragonhalf did decide to make a real fight of it, and given what I saw when she fought Kesla that first time, I’m well aware how skilled she is with it.  That being said, I don’t know how good the tall woman is …

“Fuck it.”  Vandryss steps over me almost before I realise she’s doing it, and doesn’t break stride as she just shoves right past her potential opponent while heading for the door.  “I really don’t have time for this.”  She turns at the door, and when she looks back glares with full venom again.  “Just do your job, Mallys.  You won’t earn the rest of your pay until they’re all dead, after all.”  She’s out and slamming the door before any response can be made.

There’s a long moment of silence as the tension leaks out of the rest of us, and even da slumps, letting a great, heavy breath out that shudders somewhat as if he’s on the verge of tears.  Then the tall woman finally takes her hand from her weapon as she steps forward at last, reaching up to brush her hair from her face with both hands while taking a deep breath.  “Oh … that’s better, isn’t it?”

I almost agree with her, but manage to stop myself in time.  Instead I just make a more concerted effort to sit up, and this time somehow manage to muster enough strength to manage it, drawing my legs up under my chin as I do so.  Finally I hug my arms round them and let my forehead settle against my knees, letting myself breath easier now I’m starting to feel a little safer.  I’m not sure how long this is going to last, but while it does …

“Luthan, could you fetch some water?” The dragonhalf takes the chair Vandryss abandoned and turns it around before digging in a pocket to retrieve a handkerchief.  Shaking it out with one hand, she uses it to dust the seat off, as if wary of making contact without cleaning it of that woman’s heinous touch first.  “Perhaps some food too?  I’m sure our young guest here could use both right now.  Their father too, I should imagine.”

That seems to bring the wizard up short as she continues to work on finishing unravelling the excess chains from my bonds, and she looks up at her now, blinking in surprise.  “But shouldn’t I … I really should finish with this first –”

“I’ll be here, I can keep an eye on them.  From what I understand, what you’ve done already essentially makes it impossible for them to use their magic, and it’s clear enough this young one can’t do much of anything else right now.”  She pockets her handkerchief after giving it a another heavy shake, likely to get rid of any unpleasantness now clinging to it, then finally plants herself the right way round on the chair.  “I’m sure I’ll be safe.”

“Are you sure?”

The dragonhalf lets a little sigh go, but the smile she offers up seems startlingly pleasant.  “Let the poor kid rest will you?  They’ve been trussed up like a Winterheart goose for the best part of two days, give them a chance to stretch a little before you hang them up there with their father.”

Oh shit … is that what they intend to do with me?  No, I can’t have that, if they tie me up again, especially like they’ve got my father … but there’s no way I could escape, not now.  I’m shackled with invocation fetters, there’s no way I could make the simplest spell work now.  And there’s no way I could remove them either, only another wizard whose powers are actually working could do that, and even then they need to actually know what they’re doing.

Now I realise the way Tavarrat is looking at me, she knows exactly what I’m thinking, and it makes me wonder if she might not leave after all, instead arguing to stay anyway just to make sure I don’t try anything … pointlessly stupid.  But maybe she picks up on how there’s just something a little … off with the other woman’s smile, and doesn’t feel up to arguing after all.  Instead she just nods and lets the rest of the chain drop after all.  “Fine, I won’t be long.  But be careful.  Just because she can’t use her magic doesn’t mean she isn’t still dangerous.  After all, she is Darion Foxtail’s daughter.”

Cocking a brow, the dragonhalf looks back at me as the rogue wizard heads for the door.  “They won’t be any trouble.  Not if they have any sense.”

I wait for the door to close before speaking again.  “Thank you.”

“Don’t worry about it.  Vandryss is … unpleasant.  Any time I can spend away from her I consider a significant bonus, so I imagined you felt the same.”

“No, I mean …”  I look down for a long moment.  “You didn’t call me she.  The rest of them, they don’t –”

“You seem like a smart kid, and I have the utmost respect for your father, so I’m willing to extend you the same courtesy.  So I’ll respect your choices, just as he does.”  She sits forward now, lacing her fingers together.  “Besides, it’s better if you’re comfortable around me.”

I’m not sure how to respond to that.  She’s got such a pleasant way about her, she’s calm and collected and so polite, she reminds me so much of Kesla, or at least how she might’ve turned out if she’d been highborn.  I could find myself liking her, very easily.  But I know full well I can’t, that I shouldn’t.  We’re not on the same side, she wants something from me, and I can’t give it to her, no matter how nice she is to me.

“We can’t … we’re not going to be friends.  You do realise that, don’t you?”

That certainly kills her smile, and she looks down at her hands, letting out another little sigh.  “Yes, I understand that.  I’m not an idiot.  But even enemies can have respect.”

“That’s very true, yes.  But that doesn’t mean that you being nice to me is going to earn you any special treatment.  I still won’t be any more forthcoming if you interrogate me with kindness.”

She chuckles a little at what I didn’t even realise was a joke until I’d made it.  She looks up again, and her face is soft, almost charming now.  “No, of course not.  But this won’t be an interrogation.  I promise I don’t expect you to tell me anything you don’t feel comfortable divulging.  I just want to have a polite, civil conversation, since I have you here.”

“About what?”  I can’t help frowning now.

“Your friends.  I’d like to know my enemy, because I know we’ll meet again, and I want to be able to greet her in kind.  So please, just enlighten me.  I want to know about Kesla Shoon.”

TO BE CONTINUED ...

#never split the party #the creeping bam #the adventures of the creeping bam #book 4 chapter 8 #original fiction #fantasy fiction #original fantasy fiction #to be continued

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Title: The Will to Battle

Author: Jefferson C. Anderson

Rating: 5/5 stars

This is a weird book, with the kind of weird that's hard to describe. On the one hand, it's just a standard historical novel, with the kind of standard historical elements that novels like this have. There are plenty of famous names (Hamilton, Lee, Napoleon, etc.), people get married and have children, there is a battle, and so on. I imagine there are many readers out there who've read and enjoyed these sorts of books about famous battles, and have a sort of vague sense that they've seen them all before. This is not at all a problem, since that would only mean that the book didn't have enough new things going on to be worth recommending.

On the other hand, that's not quite right -- it's hard to explain what makes this book a good novel, in the way that not every novel is, or at least not every novel of the standard sort. (See my review of "Lonesome Dove" for another example.) There's a very specific type of "goodness" that these sorts of stories exhibit, which is more or less invisible unless you know what to look for -- and even then, you have to have a pretty good sense of what those sorts of stories are like, in order to see them. The kind of good thing this book is is an intense blend of a certain number of kinds of good. The different kinds overlap, so sometimes you get a sense of one of the kinds, and sometimes you see another sort of quality that you hadn't thought to look for. It has the feel of a well-crafted symphony, in that way -- it gives you a feeling that every individual note was carefully chosen and contributes in its particular way to the larger whole.

What makes this book good is not the fact that it's all these different good kinds, but the weird way in which it combines them. Anderson combines standard war-related elements with standard modern elements as well. He gives us, among other characters, several professors, several journalists, etc., each with their own sort of contemporary-sounding names and mannerisms. The characters are drawn broadly, so that we can easily envision them as people like ourselves, although their personalities and idiosyncrasies will differ in ways that are easy to imagine (in the same way that, say, every historical figure can be imagined as at least kind of like someone you know). For instance, I am reminded of a certain novelist's writing, which has the advantage of being very "personal" in a specific, recognizable way, and which is also not the kind of novel I'm talking about. There are some characters who don't quite make the grade, but none of them are especially bad -- and in fact the badness (in some sense) of the book's "worst" characters are very much a product of their particular flaws.

The way that Jefferson C. Anderson writes the "human" characters (as opposed to historical figures) is extremely well done. You get a sense of the specific ways that the characters' idiosyncracies make them interesting and sympathetic. There's a great deal of detail about things that are minor, seemingly irrelevant, but in the context of the story it is the sort of thing that makes it feel like these characters really are characters. A typical example is the way in which the protagonists' various attempts at communication and socialization are portrayed as failures. The protagonists, like many people, constantly try to be friendly, and to avoid offending or alienating the other person, and yet somehow these actions will frequently just drive the other person away from them. The book explains this by showing how these characters have very different needs, and that they are responding to their social needs without ever realizing it.

Another example that comes to mind is how often they use the word "literally." I mentioned a character's description of herself as "literal" in my review of "Lonesome Dove," but there is a very different, much more explicit quality to this book than "Lonesome Dove." Sometimes it is meant as a kind of hyperbole, in the way that it is often meant with "literally" -- the character in question means to convey that she is "not just being literal-minded," i.e. that she is being open-minded. For instance, when one character gives another character an extended monologue about Napoleon and Napoleon's campaigns, the monologue can be viewed as either a sort of parody or as a genuine account of some of these campaigns. In the monologue, she describes a series of events with which you might not immediately have had much familiarity -- a certain battle, some people getting cut off, Napoleon's retreat. This sort of thing could be overdone, but there is something engaging about her being able to do so here.

There is a very particular sort of style (sometimes called "hardboiled") which is a product of the "standard" parts of a book, in the sense I've been describing, and which is distinct from the more "modern" (in a sense) elements -- you see it sometimes in older novelists, but these days it is a sort of style that is mostly associated with crime novels. The characters and setting in this book, and also certain events and descriptions that are supposed to be taken at "face value" (as opposed to being a parody or caricature or something), could easily be viewed as a part of this style -- after all, it has a kind of noir-ish feel to it. However, the narrator is an unreliable narrator and the events do not resemble this noir setting, so there is a sense that there is something of interest there that is deeper, that is hidden not in the specific facts, but rather in the way the author chooses to use and juxtapose those facts.

And it's not just that Anderson shows you these hidden things. His book, and the way that its narrator tells his story, has a certain sort of power that you wouldn't get from a piece of conventional writing. It's not just that his book is good, it's that there is something magical about it -- it gives you a certain sense of power, or perspective, that the text of the conventional story doesn't. It's a book that makes you feel a certain way, that draws you in and, in a way, changes you.

[collinajfr010]

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[wrenhavenriver]

And so the Hunt begins again. 

#bloodborne #bloodborneedit #soulsborneedit #gamingedit #plain doll #good hunter #the hunter #kgifs #kgifs: soulsborne #everyone calls this the bad ending but it's actually my favorite #slug baby ending is fun and all #but since the particular great ones noted to be sympathetic to humans are also the ones holding back the moon/perpetuating the dream etc #i'm not sure lifting humanity into its 'next childhood' will be any less horrifying than the dream was #and of the remaining two endings this one frees gehrman and gives the doll a host of the dream more likely to treat her kindly #it's funny because in dark souls i'm all for letting the fire fade/ending the futile cycle/letting the new age begin #but in bloodborne i'm like 'that futile cycle is just life in the face of cosmic horror'

[littleoddwriter]

Slashers x GN!Reader with BPD | Headcanons

This is purely for my own comfort, so, yeah - that obviously means that I have BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder). This only focuses on a few specific symptoms I struggle with, since I needed comfort for those in particular, at the moment.

notes; GenderNeutral!Reader; Intense Fear of Abandonment/Abandonment Issues; Splitting; Favourite Person (FP); Trauma; Self-Harm; Intense Mood Swings; Routines; Hurt/Comfort; Unintentionally Lashing Out on Others; Unstable Relationships (at times, but only on the Reader’s end); Impulsive and Self-Destructive Behaviour.

Characters: Asa Emory/The Collector; Charles Lee Ray/Chucky (Human); Chop Top Sawyer; Jesse Cromeans/Chromsekull; Lester Sinclair; William Easton (not a Slasher, but part of the SAW Franchise, so-).

Asa Emory/The Collector

He became your Favourite Person all too quickly – you couldn’t bear it when he wasn’t with you, when he wouldn’t reply to your texts, or return your calls, and when you didn’t know what he was up to

You split on him a lot in the beginning, and eventually you had reached your breaking point and told him how you felt and how scared you were and if he didn’t actually want you, he should just say so

Surprisingly, Asa ended up reaching a compromise with you, so that he would always text you once an hour, no matter what, to tell you that he was alright and what he was doing – He didn’t mind and was in fact the one to offer this strategy after you weren’t sure what to suggest, as you didn’t want to corner him

It works out well for you two, unless something comes up and he can’t text you – and as the hours stretch, you start spiralling again, having panic attacks, splitting on him, and/or harming yourself

When he comes home on such nights, he takes care of you, comforts you to the best of his abilities and apologises for not letting you know that something had happened earlier

At times that you already wake up in a mood, he would just take you with him to work, or his ‘hobby’ to keep an eye on you and assure you that he doesn’t mind, and that he’s here for you

He never judges you for hurting yourself either – he’ll just nurse your wounds and kiss them better

Charles Lee Ray/Chucky

At first he doesn’t take it all too seriously, although he does educate himself and lets you elaborate on your individual symptoms and struggles – he just has trouble being empathic and sympathetic about it

Still, whenever necessary, he’s here for you and he’ll hold you close as you cry, scream or go on about whatever set you off (he might even avenge you if someone was an asshole to you/triggered you/etc.)

He doesn’t mind your self-destructive and/or impulsive behaviours – he knows it’s not on purpose and he really isn’t one to talk after all in terms of impulsiveness at least

Being your FP might have caused some problems at first, since he doesn’t understand why you can’t just trust his word that he isn’t going to drop you one second to the other; but he eventually comes around and you two work on strategies to prevent you from spiralling too much when he’s not in reach

After a while, he starts being possessive of you anyway, and that’s when it really stops being a problem – he makes sure you know that he loves you and that you’re his

Chop Top Sawyer

No thanks to having been involved in Vietnam, he has his fair share of traumas and flashbacks as well, so that’s something he is better at comforting and helping you out with than anyone else – you both do

Since he doesn’t actually work anymore, he’s always at home with you when you’re there – he’s happy to not leave your side for long at times, and he’s even happier to have lengthy phone calls with you when you are apart

He may not be the best with words and displays of affection, but he does his best to assure you anyway, especially when you desperately need it

Self-harm is nothing shameful to him at all; and just like the others, he’ll only make sure you’re okay and your wounds will heal the way they’re supposed to

In a strange way, he actually enjoys being your FP – probably because he’s not used to this kind of attention and actually being needed by another person (apart from Nubbins, back when they were kids)

He even takes your intense mood swings in stride – mostly because he is sometimes a little oblivious to it anyway, but also because he knows you never mean it when you’re being distant or snippy

If you ever have an episode in his presence, he’ll comfort you as best as he can, if you let him close, and reassures you that it’s okay and that you’re safe with him (you’re special after all) – it usually works surprisingly well and it’s nice to be able to ride out your emotions and not be completely on your own in the process

Jesse Cromeans/Chromeskull

If you didn’t already have a therapist, he’d make sure you have one by the end of the week, after you’ve told him about your diagnosis and constant struggles because of it

Puts in a lot of effort into researching it in addition to what you’ve told him about your individual problems

When you tell him that he’s your FP, he takes it well enough – it doesn’t make him feel pressured, since he only sees it as a benefit to know it, because he can actively help to make it easier on you

So when he is out to work, he’ll text you regularly, send you photos, tells you what he’s doing, that he misses you, that he loves you, that he can’t wait to come back home to you, etc. and it soothes you a lot

He comforts you whenever needed and just showers you in kisses while you lie on top of him as he holds you close

If you hurt yourself and let him know, or he sees it, he never holds it against you and instead makes sure your wounds heal properly and that you know he is here for you if the urge comes back to help you resist it – he will also take good care of injuries that are worse

Whenever you are triggered by anything or suddenly started to feel bad or are having flashbacks, he is here for you – be that physically or not, depending on it, he’ll gladly puts everything on the back-burner to help you out, text back and forth with you until it’s passed/you feel a little better/more stable

Essentially you’re never alone with your struggles again; he takes such great care of you and accommodates you as well as he can to make life easier for you, and you couldn’t be more grateful

Lester Sinclair

When you tell him what’s going on with you, after he’s asked you about the very sudden mood swings you’ve displayed and he wanted to make sure you’re okay – he was confused and admittedly very uneducated on all the possible mental disorders that exist (you can’t blame him, though)

So you spend quite some time on telling him how BPD affects you personally and what he could do to help make it easier on you, especially since relationships are such a difficult thing for you

He grasps the basics very quickly and he rarely leaves you alone, unless you want to be by yourself or he can’t take you with him on some drives

Of course he’s concerned when you harm yourself, but he doesn’t make you feel bad about it – he understands that you can’t just turn it off and not do it – and he usually gets Vincent to take care of your wounds if they need better medical attention than your own, since he’s good and practised at it

Sometimes you might lash out at him – especially when you split on him, or you’re already irritated in general – and while he never blames you for it or holds it against you, it takes him aback a little every time (being used to such things from Bo helps him handle it better, though)

But it’s easy for you two to reassure each other of your love and make sure nobody’s feelings are ever seriously hurt – so despite all that, you share a good, fulfilling and healthy relationship

William Easton

Due to working with health insurances, he knows a lot about every possible illness – not just physical ones, so he was already familiar with the concept of BPD, which came as a relief when you told him

He takes it in stride every day – your mood swings are exhausting to yourself and while they can be tiring for him as well, he never lets on, since he is more determined to be here for you and help you through the worse ones

Since he’ll often stay in the office after hours to work some more, you two phone a lot whenever possible, or he sends you little texts to assure you of his presence and the fact that he is not going to suddenly bail on you

Still, no thanks to the stress his work puts on him, he unintentionally has an exasperated tone with you every now and again, which may cause you to spiral and split on him, but it usually turns out to be alright later – it’s just exhausting for you both

Whenever you engage in self harming behaviours, he comforts you and helps you out – he supports you throughout and keeps encouraging you; he can only guess how hard it must be to resist all these urges and try to ignore your intrusive thoughts

Whenever possible, he’ll buy you gifts to remind you of his love and presence – it’s always unexpected, which is the whole point, since he’s learned that those kinds of presents work far better to reassure you

#tw self harm #asa emory #asa emory x reader #the collector #the collector x reader #charles lee ray #charles lee ray x reader #chucky #chucky x reader #chop top sawyer #chop top x reader #jesse cromeans #jesse cromeans x reader #chromeskull #chromeskull x reader #lester sinclair #lester sinclair x reader #william easton #william easton x reader #slashers #slasher x reader #slasher character #slasher community #slasher fandom #slasher headcanons

[thepapergirlandthespiegelman]

Castlevania Season 4: I’m not mad, just disappointed

Season 4 is poorly written fanfiction, which is...better than a lot of things could be, I guess.

Spoilers below the cut.

Content warning: trauma, sexual assault, psychological manipulation

The Gods Have Had a Change of Heart

Or, “Season 3 Blocked and Ignored”

Season 3 felt like the fabric of the universe had been twisted just to inflict additional pain. Season 4 overcompensates in the other direction; trauma evaporates, and good things happen for no other reason than to make our favorite characters happy.

The Season 3 finale left two characters in particular totally devastated: Alucard and Hector. Alucard is violently betrayed in a horrifying sexual assault by the first two people he’s spoken to since Trevor and Sypha left. He ends up killing them in self-defense and puts their bodies on stakes outside the castle, alluding to his father’s habit of doing so and potentially hinting at a turn toward evil. Hector is seduced by Lenore and then enslaved using a magic ring.

Yet at the start of Season 4, it’s as if these things never happened. Alucard is troubled, but not totally devastated, certainly not evil. Taka and Sumi are referenced in exactly one conversation with new character, Greta, in which she says the rather tactless throwaway line, “I had a boyfriend and girlfriend at the same time once. But they never tried to kill me.” Hector is nominally imprisoned, but immediately seems highly agentic, perhaps even more so than before. He studies, lays traps, and makes secret plans with other people. Furthermore, his relationship with Lenore is completely transformed. From falling to his knees in abject horror and despair at being enslaved, he suddenly switches to light banter, in what is apparently a basically okay, mutually enjoyed romantic/sexual relationship. Manipulative, selfish Lenore is now a sympathetic character struggling to reconcile her own role and feelings with Carmilla’s plans.

The events of season 3 happened, remaining canon in the most basic, literal sense. But the emotional weight attached to them has disappeared into thin air.

Not gonna lie, I did breathe a sigh of relief when I saw that Alucard and Hector were okay. I’m soft-hearted! I don’t like seeing characters I like suffer! I mean, conflict is important, and I can deal with (or even enjoy in a certain sense) seeing characters suffer if it makes sense and serves a narrative purpose. But as far as I can tell, the season 3 finale was nothing more than lurid, meaningless violence. I probably wouldn’t have continued watching the show if it devolved into nothing more than finding novel ways to torture the characters.

Still, it doesn’t feel quite right to pretend like nothing happened either. Or, really, not that nothing happened, but that those things didn’t matter, didn’t hurt, didn’t leave lasting scars. That’s...almost kind of worse.

But, I thought, I can sort of forgive this sudden shift in the stars, given that there may have been some sort of change in creative direction relating to Ellis’ decreased involvement with the show.* Plus, season 3 was insanity. It’s not like it was full of great writing choices, so if we quietly ignore some of them, maybe that’s for the best.

*I only later learned that Netflix actually chose to continue with Ellis’ season 4 scripts. It is not lost on me that maybe Ellis doesn’t know how to write about the lasting effects of traumatic sexual experiences or how power dynamics can make a sexual relationship problematic because he doesn’t understand that those things exist.

Characters Being Nobody and Nothing Happening

Pretty Pictures, Not Much Else

Unfortunately, the disconnect between seasons 3 and 4 isn’t the only problem with this season. Although I felt that season 4 was a bit less boring than season 3 (I particularly enjoyed some of the earlier episodes of season 4), it suffers from the same basic problems of Characters Being Nobody and Nothing Happening.

None of the characters experience any significant development, let alone any sort of coherent arc. Sypha has changed slightly, becoming more rough and jaded. I did really like the scene where she talks about becoming the kind of person who says “shit.” I think it really speaks to how entering into a relationship with someone means taking on aspects of their lifestyle, and how that can change you in ways that you can’t predict and therefore can’t exactly “agree” to. Sometimes those changes are good, sometimes they’re bad, sometimes they’re neutral, and sometimes it’s difficult to know. But you have to accept that you’re sacrificing some aspects of the person that you could have been if you chose to live completely independently, or with someone else.

Trevor really hasn’t changed since season 1 when he first decided to take up the mantle of hero again. Likewise with Alucard. Hector and Lenore change, as previously noted, but that change is sudden, jarring, and occurs completely off screen in between seasons 3 and 4. Carmilla dies as exactly as she lived: bitter, angry, and violent. Saint Germain just kind of...gets fucked over in a nonsensical subplot, which is its own whole can of worms.

We also get several new characters in season 4, none of whom have developed personalities or motives, nor do they develop any of those things over the course of the season: Greta, Zamfir, Varney, Ratko.

And nobody. Does. Anything.

Trevor and Sypha spend the entire season trying to explore and aid Targoviste, which comes to absolutely nothing. They’re unable to help anyone, Zamfir dies, and they end up just jumping through a magic portal to the actually relevant subplot in the finale. Carmilla literally does little more than draw maps until she’s ultimately killed. Hector plays a minor role in Saint Germain’s extraction of Dracula from Hell; otherwise, he and Lenore basically just exchange banter. Saint Germain does sort of do some stuff? But it’s often unclear how he’s made his connections, who the people who are helping him are, or what exactly he’s doing in terms of his magic beyond “whatever it takes to get back to his lover.”

Sure, there are fight scenes, but they feel meaningless. There’s no context, no stakes. There’s also a LOT of dialogue, and it is. Not well written. Exposition is embarrassingly clumsy at times, and the philosophical musings are cliche at best, muddled and confusing at worst. There’s just not all that much going on.

That is, except for Isaac. But more on him in a second.

What Kind of Show Is This?

When the plot line adapted from Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse ended with season 2, the show struggled to establish a new identity.

Despite nominally dealing with themes like whether humanity is inherently good or evil and how to cope with wrongdoing and loss, seasons 1 and 2 ultimately boiled down to a pretty generic action-adventure/fantasy plot with found family/power of friendship elements. Main characters Trevor, Sypha, and Alucard don’t really wrestle with big philosophical questions or suffer any major defeats. They know that they have to take down Dracula for the good of the world, and they work together as a team to do it, with a little character development relating to their various backstories sprinkled in.

Then season 3 happened, and things got weird. The trio is broken up for what feels like a pretty trivial reason—Alucard has to protect the castle and Belmont hold, I guess? And the result of that decision is that the dynamics for the three main characters are completely unbalanced.

Ellis openly admits that he basically went feral with the writing of season 3, and it shows. The messaging in seasons 1 and 2 was cliche, but consistent. The message of season 3? Anyone’s guess.

Season 4 reversed the darkening of tone from season 3, but shares its inability to pick a story and tell it.

Isaac is the Main Character

Always has been.

While I can’t say that his character or arc are perfect, I can say that he actually has a character and an arc. He starts off motivated by his fierce loyalty to Dracula, then has to struggle to find his purpose once Dracula is gone. He goes from subservient to agentic. He goes from fully endorsing the genocide of humanity and not caring about his own life to seeing some worth in humans and genuinely wanting to live. He has an interesting moment that deepens our understanding of what night creatures are, while also serving as an exploration of the meaning of one’s fundamental nature. Most importantly, these changes happen naturally over the course of the show. They never feel forced or out of the blue, and while I feel like even more could have been done with Isaac’s character, there’s a lot to appreciate about what is there.

If there’s any thread holding Castlevania as a single, coherent work together, it’s Isaac. Not only is his character the best executed and the most coherent over the course of the show, his character explores themes that are larger than himself and relevant to the show as a whole, like those mentioned earlier: misanthropy versus a belief in the value of humanity; the ability to go beyond one’s “nature” or initial circumstances; and how to respond to being wronged or losing something important to you. Exploring the individual lives of characters is great, but really good writing usually requires going beyond that to reflect on broader questions and ideas. Isaac is the only character here that serves that larger purpose.

Sorry...I Just Don’t Buy It

The season 4 finale is crazy, although in a different way from season 3′s.

Varney being Death makes no sense on several different levels. I’m not going to spend a lot of time picking that particular plot twist apart, but I will talk about why I think it doesn’t work at the largest scale, and how I think season 4 might have been done better.

Last minute twists with zero foreshadowing are rarely a good idea, and this is no exception. Why introduce this “Death” entity at the last minute to be the most important battle of the season? The finale of the entire show, even? Besides the lack of logic or emotional buildup, this robs the show of the opportunity to make use of the antagonists that it already has. Since Dracula died, Carmilla has been the obvious choice for a new big bad. Why hasn’t she done more?

Season 4 feels crowded with characters and plot lines that amount to nothing. Why not bring some of these characters together? If Carmilla is the main antagonist, how come she never meets any of the protagonists (except Hector, who is a pretty minor player in this ecosystem) or even affects them in any way?

Season 4 feels like maybe it was trying to make something out of season 3 and the model that it presented, but it ultimately fails to do so. The writers throw the trio back together at the end anyway, so why not have them rejoin sooner and work together? Maybe Sypha and Trevor’s past experience with Saint Germain could have helped Alucard and Greta piece together what he was plotting sooner, rather than all four of them being completely blindsided by it in the penultimate episode. (Sypha and Trevor know that someone is trying to resurrect Dracula, but they fail to find out any actual detail about the plans, despite their supposed attempts.) Have characters actually do stuff, figure stuff out, advance the plot!

Likewise, maybe Carmilla becomes aware of Saint Germain’s scheming, sees it as a threat, and tries to take him down. Maybe she tries to get involved and somehow use alchemy or the Infinite Corridor to her own benefit. What does it look like when power-hungry Carmilla, who wants to rule the world, finds out there’s an entire multiverse out there? That could easily set her up to be a foil to Saint Germain, causing him to realize that what he’s doing is wrong.

What actually ended up happening in the show feels disjointed and often empty. In particular, most of the events that happen in the last two episodes just don’t really work for me. I didn’t like Trevor suddenly sacrificing himself to this random, new, super powerful enemy, or how the gems and dagger that he found just happened to be the perfect weapon to kill this new enemy, or how he inexplicably returns from the dead.

This kind of thing is what I mean when I say that this season feels like fanfiction. Trevor comes back from the dead for no discernible reason other than that it would really suck if he died. Greta as a character seems to literally only exist to be Alucard’s girlfriend and support him so that he doesn’t have to continue to be alone and potentially turn evil. Alucard’s trauma from Taka and Sumi and Hector’s trauma from Lenore are both conveniently erased. Even Dracula and Lisa are resurrected somehow and get their happy ending. And it’s like, I guess I prefer deus ex machina to the opposite (Does that have a name? When everything is going well but then something terrible happens for no reason other than to make things worse for the characters?), but they’re both bad writing.

God. This isn’t even getting into what happened with the Council of Sisters. And I don’t even really like those characters, but that doesn’t mean I want to see their characters handled poorly.

I’m not sorry that I watched until the end, but I can’t in good faith recommend the show as a whole. If you’ve yet to watch Castlevania, just stop at the end of season 2. While there are some shining moments in seasons 3 and 4 (4 more than 3), it’s just really not worth it.

#review #thoughts #television #animation #adult animation #video game adaptation #fantasy #Netflix #Netflix Original #Castlevania #storytelling #writing #characters #plot #character development #vampires #Isaac (Castlevania)

[inkweaver22-blr]

Four for four baby! This is perhaps the last of my daily updates as I’ll be busy the next few days. Here’s another little filler chapter but it’s a good one as it’s the first one where we directly see references to other creators’ Monkie Kid works! There’s three references here, two subtle and one explicit. I’ll make sure to have links to each work in the notes at the end of the chapter. Hope you enjoy!

AO3 Link

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Scattered Cicadas - Chapter Four: Childish Behavior

Tang often feels like the only adult surrounded by children. Literally sometimes.

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If there was one thing Tang had learned about these timelines he kept jumping between was that they were consistently inconsistent.

The minor details that changed randomly but never really affected the outcome of the events from his original time were still abundant and rarely phased him much anymore.

(Although that one time he had platinum blonde hair had been interesting.)

It was when entirely unique situations arose that the scholar was caught off guard.

New events sprung up every now and then and inserted themselves between the original ones. As with the smaller changes, these new scenarios were unpredictable and varied wildly in scope.

A surprisingly durable MK clone that somehow managed to escape being dispelled, gaining independence, and becoming Macaque’s apprentice.

An ocean demon sinking ships just outside the bay and Sandy getting to go on that water adventure he wanted.

MK’s birth parents trying to reinsert themselves back into his life after seeing his achievements on the news.

(Tang was so incredibly proud of his kid for standing up for himself and refusing their empty platitudes. The pranks that he, Mei, and the Monkey King had pulled on them in retaliation were great stress relievers.)

Since Tang could still do his best to help out in each new event without horrible consequences, it seemed the rule of “No Interference” did not apply to them. He supposed that made sense as he had no way to predict when or if they might occur and thus couldn’t change an outcome he didn’t know about.

He was grateful for that small mercy at least.

Still, with how these cycles seemed to be endless so far, a few of these events would happen over multiple timelines.

Getting de-aged by a mischievous trickster demon or spirit was a strangely common occurrence.

MK seemed to be the most popular target for this particular curse. The brightness of his personality seemed to shine even stronger whenever he was reverted into a child, which simply made Tang love the kid even more.

(He wished he could have helped the Monkey King tear Macaque apart for kidnapping their precious little one in that cycle.)

They all had their own turns of having their biological clocks reversed of course. Mei was a little trouble maker, Pigsy was a shy and timid toddler, and Sandy liked to have things he could break apart. Tang couldn’t clearly remember the times he had been de-aged but was pleased when an exhausted Mei and Mk had said he was the easiest of the adults-turned-kids to take care of.

Then there was the Monkey King.

Having to corral a rambunctious young monkey with the strength to crush boulders and the ability to duplicate or shapeshift was not easy.

(He still had no idea how MK had managed to do it alone once.)

With the amount of times they had all been subjected to this specific curse, Tang only really had himself to blame for not seeing it coming.

Tang poured over the scroll in front of him, trying to find the counter for this timeline’s version of the curse. Behind him, Mei distracted a de-aged Red Son, or Red Boy as that’s what the small fire demon was calling himself.

Getting kidnapped by a somewhat feral child with the ability to freely toss around the True Fire of Samadhi hadn’t been the most pleasant start to his day. While being mistaken as the monk Tang Sanzang was a little flattering, the threat of being roasted over the sacred blume flames and eaten had quickly dampened those feelings.

Luckily the young demon had fallen asleep, the fires dissipating as he lost consciousness. If only Tang knew how to cast the Monkey King’s fire ward...

“Ahem.”

Tang glanced up and paled at the sight of a displeased looking Demon Bull King.

“Little thief,” the demon addressed an equally freaked-out MK. “I believe you have something of mine.”

“Father! You’re here,” Red Boy called out as he jumped from Mei’s arms. “I have wonderful news! I’ve found a husband!” He quickly ran over to a petrified MK and leaned against him like he was presenting some great treasure. “Look! Look! Isn’t he pretty?”

Tang had almost forgotten about that particular detail. If they got out of this alive he was never going to let MK live this down for the rest of the cycle. Prerogative of being a dad and all.

“What do you think father,” Red Boy continued, ignoring MK’s desperate plea for him to stop. “I can marry him, right?”

DBK’s expression was frankly unimpressed as he stared down into the hopeful one Red Boy wore. Tang had a bad feeling about what was going to happen and slowly made his way around the room to hide behind MK and Mei who were also backing away.

“No.”

Tang winced a bit at the bluntness of the answer and braced himself for the explosion that was sure to follow.

“What? But… why? WHY NOT?!”

The genuine hurt and confusion in the young demon’s voice would have made Tang feel a bit sympathetic, if Red Boy hadn’t tried to eat him of course.

“Because I said so,” DBK growled as he knelt to be closer to his de-aged son. “Now, enough of this. Time to stop being a child.”

Tang frowned. That was... not how to calmly explain to one’s child about why you were refusing their request. Not if you wanted to avoid a full-on meltdown. He should know, having to take care of a young MK multiple times.

Looking into the Demon Bull King’s scowling visage, he wasn’t sure if the older demon simply didn’t know how, or just didn’t care.

“That’s… NOT FAIR!” Red Boy’s disbelief predictably turned into anger as his hair once again burst into blue flames.

“THAT’S NOT FAIR! I am not a child!” The True Fire of Samadhi burst out around the boy, seeming to startle DBK who took a step back. Tang was just thankful that it wasn’t aimed at him this time.

“I… I’m not-” Red Boy’s anger quickly melted away, as did the fire around him. The young demon sniffed a few times before dropping onto the ground and beginning to cry.

Loudly.

“You’re recording this, right?” MK whispered to Mei.

“Obviously.”

Tang sighed at their antics and looked over at DBK. The demon still looked angry but the scholar could see the uncertainty in his eyes. He seemed completely out of his depth and unsure on what to do.

Tang took a steadying breath before mustering his courage and stepping out from behind MK. If Demon Bull King didn’t know how to act like a good father then perhaps he could show him.

If he survived this he was going to need a vacation to fight back against the grey hairs this was going to give him.

The other adults all looked at him as if he had sprouted another head as he approached the sobbing child and knelt next to him.

“Red Boy?”

“H-huh?” The young demon looked up in confusion at being addressed.

“I know that right now everything seems pretty unfair and that can be upsetting,” Tang soothed, keeping his voice steady and reassuring. “But I promise you that your father has a good reason for not letting you marry MK. Would it help if he were to calmly explain that reason without getting angry at you?” He aimed that last sentence more at DBK than Red Boy, who’s sobs had slowed.

“M-maybe…” the young demon finally admitted.

Tang turned to stare expectantly at the Demon Bull King. The demon glared down at the scholar.

“Why are you treating him like a child?”

The harshness of his tone made Red Boy start to tear up again. Tang glared right back at DBK.

“Because right now, until we can reverse this, he is a child,” the scholar snapped, his fear replaced with righteous anger. “And like every child, he deserves to be treated with kindness and respect. He deserves to be comforted by a parent whom he obviously adores and be told that it’s okay to cry. He deserves to feel safe and loved.”

The room was silent save for the hiccups and sniffles from Red Boy as they all stared at Tang. DBK’s mouth hung open as he gazed incredulously down at the human, seemingly struck speechless.

“F-father?”

The small and unsure voice of Red Boy snapped the Demon Bull King out of his thoughts, and something seemed to loosen within him.

Tang stood and retreated back to MK and Mei to give the demon some privacy as he knelt next to his son and began speaking in a hushed tone with him.

“What the hell Mr. Tang,” MK hissed into his ear as he stared wide eyed at the pair of demons on the ground.

“Language MK,” Tang hissed right back before leaning over to Mei. “I know you aren’t recording two incredibly powerful demons having a moment of vulnerability who would stop at nothing to destroy us if they discovered the existence of such a video, right?”

“Eep!” Mei nearly dropped her phone as she rushed to stop her recording and then delete the last few minutes of the resulting video.

There were a few minutes of tense silence as the three humans did their best to pretend that there weren’t two demons having an emotional moment together just a few feet away. They gave a sigh of relief when Red Boy launched himself at his father, wrapping his arms around his neck. DBK seemed panicked at first before slowly wrapping his own arms around the young demon.

Tang adjusted his glasses and gave a nervous smile to the Demon Bull King who was scrutinizing him like a particularly confusing puzzle.

At least he didn’t seem angry any more.

Perhaps they would escape this fiasco unscathed after all.

----------

I was not expecting this chapter to turn into another Dad Tang story. It just kind of happened that way. So onto the references!

First is Durability by TaintTheUnstoppable which is beginning to shape up into something really interesting.

Second is Little One by @its-kall-the-clown which is just a huge fluff fest capped off with some nice angst. Highly recommended.

Finally we have the Red Boy comic by @purble-turble! Now obviously the Tang in their comic probably won’t do what this one did, by this Tang is too much of a Dad to let a little kid cry for too long.

Next chapter won’t be up until sometime next week! See ya then!

#Ink Writes #Monkie Kid #Scattered Cicadas #Tang #Tang Monkie Kid #MK #Mei #Red Son #Red Boy #Demon Bull King #DBK #Lego Monkie Kid #Durability #TaintTheUnstoppable #Little One #KALL #purble-turble #its-kall-the-clown

[ask-whitepearl-and-steven]

Alright alright alright

You’ve all been asking for it, so here it is! 

This will be (edit: HELLA) long and obviously spoiler-y, so everything is under a cut. 

Are you ready?

Before we get to it, I want to mention that for the sake of keeping things organized, I will NOT be talking about my AU (@ask-whitepearl-and-steven​) in this post. I want to just analyze the show as a viewer and a fan first. I’ll make a seperate post for AU-thoughts a bit later.

Without further ado:

EP 1: LITTLE HOMESCHOOL

This is a great way to open up the episode and show the changes through the lens of someone who has been a bit out of it for a while (we are all Cherry Quartz, fresh from the hiatus, aren’t we?) but I’m sorry, this post still takes the cake:

Okay, okay, back to the program.

“That used to be a loaded question...“

Right off the bat, Steven is SO much more confident about saying that he’s... HIMSELF! What a good feeling. I’m very proud of our boy. 

I love the name “Gemglyph” for the gem language! I’ll need to know who wrote these, though. And who the heck drew the diamonds? Hopefully it was BP. 

And I’m not the first one to point this out, but MORE ANIME REFERENCES!

Which can be seen as either a reference to the Chill Low-Fi Hiphop Beats to Study To OR Whisper of the Heart. 

And absolutely no one cares but something that caught my eye is the fact that they have an EARTH FLAG at Little Homeschool! How cool is that!

Earth 4ever!!! 

Off-note - I love how INVESTED they are in this conversation Pearl is having with Holo-Pearl.

Peak entertainment. 

I love Professor Amethyst and I love the random human who snuck in to apparently take lessons on Not Giving A Single Shit About Anything, Ever. 

And here we FINALLY are in the FUTURE

Where we FINALLY get Jasper as a functioning character

And 

She’s

SO DRAMATIC, I LOVE HER.

This is literally SO funny like she... she was just... laying on top of her house... under a blanket..... FOr WHAT? To stand up dramatically and throw it off when Steven inevitably paid a visit? 

Is that just what she dOES? 

“It’s FINE I don’t need any HELP, I’m FUNCTIONING, I’m just having a SELF CARE DAY OK”

Also I’m sorry but

Jasper: “It took forever to yank those puny green earthlings out of the ground.”

Steven: “You mean grass...?“

THIS. RIGHT HERE. is peak Jasper. 

It’s also curious how INVESTED Steven is in this:

“I’m TRYING to give you [a purpose]!“

Why are you... trying to do that, though? Isn’t the whole idea for gems to surpass their ‘purpose’ and just kinda... do whatever? Isn’t Jasper just kinda... doing whatever? 

I mean, sure, it’s not useful to anyone, but she seems relatively happy. Aside from. You know. The whole laying on rocks under blankets until she’s disturbed thing and-- okay, you’re right, maybe an intervention would be healthy. 

I’m not gonna talk at length about the rest of the episode - although I think it’s really good, I don’t know what I can say about it that hasn’t already been said. Jasper is definitely poking Steven’s buttons and rephrasing a LOT of what WHITE has said to Pink: “You surround yourself with inferior gems because it makes you feel better.”

And Steven REACTS to this. The taunt WORKS.

And yes, he gains some extra powers for it, but something tells me this AIN’T the only thing he will get. It feels like a two-edged sword. Like it’ll be his own downfall somehow....... maybe at the end of the series. 

Ashes to ashes.... hole to hole.

And oh wow I thought they were gonna bond but LMAO

“Consider your fight back there your first and ONLY lesson.“

Basically:

I love you Jasper.

EP 2: GUIDANCE

I LOVE YOU AMETHYST.

sHE’S doing SO much and she’s SO good at it!! Look at her!! Organizing stuff!!!! 

RUBIES IN SUNGLASSES. IN SQUARE SUNGLASSES. 

I need 20. 

And I also need 20 of Larimar because holy shit that’s hilarious. 

Larimar: “I want to hear the human screams forever.”

Steven: “Okay that’s kinda troubling.”

I love the reference to Monsters Inc here and I love the callback at the end of the episode when Larimar switches to Human Laughter to get her fill of that particular erm... need. 

And honestly the ensuing chaos is equally predictable and entertaining. 

I’m SO glad to know that Rubies are just... Like That and that actually Navy is not a deviation from the norm but rather a different flavor of the chaotic energy all Rubies naturally seem to possess. 

Amethyst is also super relatable:

“Ah yes, the fool comes crawling back. Come to beg for forgiveness, have you?”

In fact, the episode’s WHOLe HUMOUR is just very much My Brand

“Sometimes you save all the people but the rollercoaster still crashes into the ocean...... and that’s okay.”

Including the Running Gag that is Onion. Who... does not appear to have aged. At all. And that’s okay.

EP 3: ROSE BUDS

Okay where do I even begin with this one. Um.

I have to openly admit that I spent the majority of this episode wheezing with laughter. Let’s start with the Zoomans:

Who are CLEARLY STILL SUPER SALTY AT GREG ABOUT REJECTING THEM??? Which is hilarious. 

And also this paradise is fascinating in and of itself. 

But the next scene is basically where I started losing my shit.

Okay, okay, alright so. Uh. I have... a few questions.

Like Why. WHY. Does she look. SO MUCH like Rose? 

Clearly Rose Quartz differ in coloring and etc. But She literally looks. Like THE Rose. VERY explicitly. 

So here’s several options here:

1) Pink made Rose Quartz way before any of the Rebellion happened and Pearl just basically pigeonholed her into THIS specific Rose Quartz appearance because she (???) had a crush? Or somehow saw this specific Rose, thought ‘hot, i can make my sympathetic Diamond wear this exact costume and that would be EXCELLENT fanservice for ME’

2) Pink didn’t have any Rose Quartz until the Rebellion, and thereafter quickly decided ‘I need these gems as an alibi, so we’re just gonna make them” and she and Pearl basically inclubated Rose Quartz like a pokemon trainer hatching for a Shiny until they got one that looked Exactly Like That. 

3) There was no Thinking involved because this is Pink we’re talking about, and it was all just a huge coincidence for the sake of this Very Hilariously Uncomfortable Episode. 

While we ruminate on that, let’s look at some Relatable Reactions.

And here we have the holy trinity of “I have just seen the clone of my deceased parent/parental figure/lover.”

Featuring: Bonus ‘I’m Almost Over It’ Pearl

Also, I need y’all to make this into a meme:

For example:

Anyway, alright, alright. 

That relatable feel when your (hot) dead lesbian lover’s clone asks you if you’re okay after another one of the (less hot?) clones offers you a whole ass stick of butter to eat. 

And then you and your friends all hide in the bathroom to talk about your feelings:

Okay, the rest of the episode gives me FEELINGS and I love how hard Steven is trying, so I’ll just close it off with:

I LOVE THEM. Unironically, they are EVERYTHING I had hoped Rose Quartz would be. They’re SO MUCH like Rose herself - did she model her personality after them? Or are they just like her because she WAS like that, and they’re made from her essence? WHO KNOWS?! They’re adorable!

And the conflict between them and Steven is honestly so gooD! I don’t know if it’s completely relatable but I’m glad they ended up talking it out.

I wonder if we’ll ever see Her again... you know who I’m talkin’ about. 

Her....

I’m madly in love with Rose, ok, I don’t need a callout post. Just leave me be.

EP 4:  VOLLEYBALL

Alright, alright, alright.

OKAy,.... It’s fine. It’s FINE. I’m fINE. 

Confirmed: 8000 years. That’s. UH. A LOT? That puts our timelines quite a ways back. We kind of estimated as much, but still, it’s so jarring to think about. And PP is VERY casual about it. 

She’s also VERY casual about the injury.

“This is all Pink Diamond!”

It doesn’t seem like it bothers her to talk about it at all. She’s not even trying to keep it a secret. So I’m almost wondering - was there a connection to her being taken by White and the injury at all or not? 

She came to Steven to get healed - she clearly wants it gone. At the time she was injured, did Pink not even attempt to heal the injury? 

Follow up question: If she DID care, why didn’t she try to heal it?

Follow up to the follow up: Was it because she didn’t know she could? Or did she simply not have the time to (White removed her before she could)? 

When Steven goes pink, she gasps - but makes no further comment. It’s presumably because she’s seen this happen before. She doesn’t try to move away, weirdly enough - she asks him if everything is alright. Perhaps the context is too different for it to be triggering for her. Perhaps there’s more layers to it? HMMM. 

What follows is, perhaps, the SALTIEST we’ve seen Pearl since Greg rolled around.

“Did you come to compete?”

This is doubly curious to me because Crewniverse has previously explicitly stated that Pearl was NOT in love with Pink Diamond. She was in love with Rose. So if this is true, why would Pearl care about her place as Pink’s Pearl? She is supposed to be past all that, isn’t she? 

And yet as time goes on, the salinity grows exponentially. Alright, you two, I know you’re Pearls but tone it down with the sass. 

(Also, I’m sorry but I will NEVER call her Volleyball. That’s all. Bye.)

Also it’s worth noting that... PP is clearly VERY much in love with Pink.

This is, perhaps, where the lack of a grudge plays into it. She’s completely enamoured.

Moreover, she’s VERY casual about how she talks here. This isn’t exactly how one talks of their Diamond. This is how people talk about their romantic partners. She calls Pink silly, calls her ‘funny’. That’s not exactly a term of respect - it’s way more intimate than that. 

Also, did anyone else notice how, although CG Pearl’s gem is usually shaded in teal, it’s in Pink in this episode? VEEEERY subtle, Crew.

Also, we can’t quite see Pink Pearl’s expression fully here because her working eye isn’t visible, which makes it hard to get a read on things like

“I’m older than you.“ Is she just saying it casually? Or is she fully aware that she’s poking fun at CG Pearl? 

HI SHELL. ISN’T IT FUNNY HOW YOUR VOICE AND YOUR NAME ARE A SUBTLE NOD TO PORTAL, WHICH IS FORESHADOWING HOW BADLY THIS IS GONNA END. 

Meanwhile, Pearl continues to be in character.

“No need to be overly... attached.”

And this has nothing to do with anything but

she cute

Aaaand now it’s creepy again.

The rest of this is super important so let’s get to it:

“Oh, no. Pink did this.”

“What did you say?”

“It’s a funny story, really. Once, Pink got tired of asking Yellow and Blue for her own colony, so she went straight to White. Of course, White told her she wasn’t fit to run one... and well! That set her off.”

“Set her off? What are you talking about?”

“You remember how she was! With her destructive powers, throwing tantrums left and right! She had a scream that could crack the walls. She didn’t mean to hurt me! (giggle) I just happened to be standing too close to her that time and--”

And then Steven interrupts. 

We get more CG Pearl arguing for how wrong this image of Pink is to her. What CG Pearl knew was a totally different (or, well, same, but VERY changed) Pink. 

But what we have to prove our point is Steven himself. He rolls into the EXACT same state as Pink presumably did - and begins to over-use his powers. 

(This isn’t the first time we have seen him use this attack.)

The reactions from the Pearls are telling - this is clearly not Pink Pearl’s first rodeo with this type of Mood. 

And it’s important to note that Steven clearly didn’t direct any attack AT them. He simply yelled - and the whole dang place literally started to crack. There’s weight to the argument that possibly, Pink really DIDN’T mean to hurt her Pearl - that she was just collateral damage. 

Which doesn’t make it any better, obviously. Even if Pink had no direct intention of hurting her Pearl (and there are theories that Pink purposefully hit or threw Pink Pearl or somehow physically acted directly to damage her, which I was skeptical of) the result of it is still the same.

If you raise your voice and yell, even if you’re just yelling because YOU are hurt/have feelings, you might still hurt the people around you. If you throw a tantrum, even if your direct goal was just to let off some steam without aiming to harm anyone, whoever gets in your way is still the victim. 

And this is all very much On Brand for Pink’s timeline as we know it. We already knew this about her - we KNEW she tended to throw tantrums (like in the flashback on Jungle Moon) and that she was childish. The fact that she accidentally hurt her Pearl in the process because she had no self-control at that period in her life comes as no surprise. 

(Although it’s important to mention that perhaps hurting her own Pearl WAS the breaking point during which she finally realized how her emotional outbursts could have negative consequences on those around her.)

And this is a very beautiful message - even if Pink Pearl still doesn’t want to blame Pink for what was done to her (”But... she didn’t mean to!”) Pearl brings the point of it back around to her (”But you were still hurt!”) The point isn’t the person who did the hurting - the focus is on the victim and how they were affected. 

And the rest, I daresay, is history. 

I like the fact that they managed to still bring it back around to the main message: 

It isn’t about just “Pink was bad”. It’s about how she did bad things. And there were multiple sides to her - multiple stages. And the Pearls who knew her knew different sides of her - the side that didn’t know how to be a good person, who was selfish and childish and unrestrained... and  the side that was, arguable, too restrained. Who hated her own past, her own character and her own mistakes so much that she would rather bury them and keep secrets from everyone. 

And neither of those things were good, and neither were healthy, but they are a GREAT contrast to a GREAT character arc that is, arguably, still being unearthed. And we have so much more context for it all now. 

I, for one, can’t wait to see and discover more of Pink through Pink Pearl - no matter how ugly that side of her might be. I think it gives great perspective to her later growth. 

And if you ship the Pearls.. .well, I get why. 

Personally I’m not interested in it that way. Call me unromantic - I don’t think their relationship NEEDS to be shippy in order to be satisfyingly deep. I love the idea of them having a deep bond over this - a shared past, a shared experience, and gaining confidence through one another. 

Cheers and thanks for listening!

#steven universe future #steven universe: future #steven universe future spoilers #su:f spoilers #suf spoilers #su spoilers #steven universe spoilers #spoiler warning #pink pearl #volleyball

[ladyloveandjustice]

Books I read in 2020 Bonus Review: I’m in Love with the Villainess

I’m in Love with the Villainess follows a 20-something Japanese office lady named Rei, who, presumably after dying (potentially of overwork since she mentions her company was exploitative and she was forced into way too much overtime) gets reincarnated as the heroine of her favorite otome game/dating sim.

The thing is, Rei doesn’t play otome games for dateable male characters- in fact, she finds them to be pretty boring. She prefers flawed characters, characters who seem human- and for her, that’s the villainess of the game, Claire. Claire, who she has quite the crush on, and is pretty much the main reason she enjoyed this game so much.

So, having been reincarnated as the heroine, Claire proceeds to ignore all the boys and instead responds to Claire’s bullying with “Oh! Miss Claire! Please step on me harder!” (this is word for word what she says).

What follows is mostly fun and frothiness- I wouldn’t put it among my favorite books of the year or anything- but there’s something so delightful about seeing a girl enjoy being bullied by the villainess character she stans that I gotta throw it a little love. It soothed me when I needed some soothing.

The little details- like the fact Rei knows a ton about the game's backstory because she's studied it in order to write a VERY detailed fanfic about Claire rising to power and becoming a REAL villainess post-game- are really what tickled me about this one.

 Some people might find the early parts of the book where Rei is just constantly proclaiming her love for Claire while Claire goes “shut up peasant! ” a bit repetitive (and too much like harassment on Rei’s part) but those aforementioned little details, as well as how Rei eventually makes it clear she’s fine with Claire not ever returning her feelings, and would even support any relationship she pursues because she just wants her to be happy, offset it for me.

The book also has a surprisingly frank and grounded conversation where Rei explains her sexuality and laments the depiction of queer people in media and how it’s not great in either of the worlds she’s lived in. Upon the girls acting briefly wary after she confirms she’s gay, she notes ”My previous world often portrayed gay people as aggressively targeting people of the same gender- this world was much the same.”

And when one of the girls assumes it’s not that Rei’s gay, it’s that ~gender doesn’t matter to her~, Rei not only clears that right up, she actually acknowledges bisexuality and how it just doesn’t apply to her!  She notes: "Bisexual people existed for one, and those who identified as gay or lesbian might not be attracted to a particular gender so much as a particular person (...) I personally, wasn't into men. Gender was definitely relevant to me".

I was definitely pleasantly surprised to see a nuanced discussion like this in a story about a lady wanting her favorite villainess to step on her! It shows that Rei’s openness about her feelings for Claire aren’t just because she enjoys seeing her flustered, but because she doesn’t want to hide in a world that would rather have her in the closet. It gives some weight to her zany love story. (And there are a LOT of hints Claire might be closeted herself).

There is one hiccup- a bit where a brother and sister are revealed to be in an incestuous relationship- they’re antagonistic but ultimately portrayed sympathetically. The story doesn’t go too much into detail about the incest beyond saying they’re in love, and this could be a reference to a common plot twist in otome games or something, but I still found it mildly distasteful and it’s worth warning about.

However, overall, I found this to be fun story and was pleasantly surprised at the parts that had some real weight to them. I’m looking forward to volume 2!

#I'm in love with the villainess #inori #book reviews #my book reviews #2020 books

[yellowmagicalgirl]

Merlin’s Unavailable (Please Leave a Message with his Apprentice)

So last August, @inhonoredglory​ mentioned that they had “wanted to see a future in which Douxie used up his powers to defeat Morgana after Merlin died and was the one laying in the tomb by the time present-day Jim and Co. find him to defeat Morgana at the end of Trollhunters.” This is more of an au that completely ignores the time travel aspects as well as the fact that Merlin needed two master wizards to make the amulet, and then extends the medieval events of Wizards out to about a year as opposed to just a week. Still, I hope you enjoy this.

AO3

FFN

“Great Gorgus,” Blinky said as they saw the corpse covered in cobwebs. “It’s him.”

“Is it... really?” Claire asked.

"Must be,” AAARRRGGHH!!! said.

“It’s gotta be him,” Toby said. “I mean, it’s Merlin’s tomb; who else would it be?”

Well, it was also now Draal’s tomb. However, this particular corpse seemed to almost be in a place of honor. The stone from Jim’s amulet glowed, and so Jim walked towards Merlin. As Jim got closer, he couldn’t help but notice just how young Merlin had been when he died. Jim had thought that Merlin would have been an old man, not a boy who could easily just have been an older classmate from school wearing a ren faire costume. Merlin’s head rested on a black pillow, and Jim almost thought that his hair was tied in a bun.

Jim frowned slightly. Merlin had been so young when he died; would Jim and his friends die even younger? They had already lost Draal; who else did they have to lose?

Jim wasn’t able to get lost in his fearful musings, because three points of blue light rose up from the amulet before descending onto Merlin’s eyes and mouth with smoky trails. Jim leaned in closer, trying to see why the amulet had worked that way.

And then Merlin woke up, gasping for air before coughing and choking on the spiderweb. Jim took a step back, unsure of what to do. He had had basic medical training for if a person was choking, but something about Merlin’s corpse felt very wrong.

The pillow revealed itself to be a cat, who stretched and yawned before patting Merlin’s back. The cat then put on a pair of silver glasses before patting Merlin’s back.

“Merlin?” Jim asked after Merlin stopped coughing. Merlin looked over at Jim, and his face went through a myriad of hopeful and then pained expressions before settling on a scowl.

“Sorry, no, Merlin’s not available right now, or ever again,” not-Merlin said as he crossed his arms over his chest. The cat put a paw on not-Merlin’s knee, giving him a sympathetic headbutt before turning to everyone else in the tomb.

“Forgive my familiar’s rudeness,” the cat said, “he’s grieving.”

“But, if you’re not Merlin, then why’re you in his tomb?” Toby asked.

“I could technically ask you the same,” not-Merlin grumbled before the cat gave him a withering look. “Yes, Archie. Sorry, Archie. Master Merlin was old, even for a wizard, so he had already began preparing for his death by making me help build him a tomb even though he figured that he wouldn’t need it for another decade or five. I bet he never made any of his other apprentices do anything so morbid... all because I started wearing a skull-shaped pendant.”

The scowl broke into a sad thing that was almost a smile.

“I thought Morgana was Merlin’s only apprentice,” Blinky said. With that, the scowl returned to Merlin’s apprentice’s face.

“She didn’t deserve to be his apprentice, not after she... after... after she...”

“Do you want me to tell them, Douxie?” Archie asked. Douxie shook his head.

“Morgana betrayed Merlin. Betrayed Camelot, and in one fight she lost her hand so Merlin took it, and I helped him to make the amulet. Ten months later, she killed Merlin. If I hadn’t been there, hiding while the battle took place... he turned to ash, and I couldn’t even gather that to bury.” Douxie turned his head away and blinked rapidly. “All I had left was his staff. Two months after Merlin died, Morgana planned on using the pieces of Killahead Bridge to spread darkness across the entire world. I don’t know, I think she said something about how it would bring balance? Or something? Thankfully, Archie and I were able to draw her away from the battle, so that we could use a spell that we had found in one of Merlin’s old spellbooks to trap her in a newborn Heartstone on the other side of the world. But, I think I messed it up, or something, because I was so tired that I couldn’t use my magic, so I Archie and I came back here. That was two days ago, for me. I thought I was dying... the amulet has... had some of my and Merlin’s magic stored in it, so I guess that brought me and Archie back to life.”

“Yes, we should’ve told that little secret to Deya, but hindsight’s always better,” Archie said. “But since we never told anyone, why are you five here?”

Everyone made an effort not to look directly at Claire. AAARRRGGHH!!! spoke up. “Gunmar take Staff of Avalon. We followed, tried to stop him. Friend die in process.”

“I’m sorry,” Douxie said before a look of alarm crossed his face. “Wait. Sod. Fuzzbuckets, did you say that he took Master Merlin’s staff? He’ll use it to release Morgana!”

“Yeah, we already knew that,” Claire said. “Did you and Merlin plan for the tomb to self destruct when it was removed? Please tell me you can use your magic to get us out because my shadow portals don’t work.”

Douxie cringed. “No; nearly all of it is being used to keep Morgana sealed. But, the amulet of daylight should still work, and we can use that to get out of here.”

“Uh, about that.” Jim pulled out the pieces of the amulet. “We had to destroy this to get here.”

“Please tell me you have all the pieces,” Douxie said. Jim nodded. “Okay, I can fix this. I hope. The rest of you, try to make sure the area doesn’t flood while I’m working.”

Douxie hummed while he worked before frowning and standing straight. “I thought you said you had all the pieces!”

“I did,” Jim said.

“Clearly you missed one, there’s supposed to be a small metal piece right here!”

Claire pulled out one of her hairclips. “Will this work?”

Douxie squinted at it. “Hopefully.”

The amulet fixed, Jim called out the incantation and parted the waters with his sword. “If you helped to make the amulet, why isn’t your name part of the incantation?”

Douxie kicked at the ground, looking away and absentmindedly petting Archie’s ears. “Because I was just his apprentice; there was no reason for history to remember me. Let’s go and see if we can find a way to keep Morgana from killing everyone.”

Author’s note: Now imagine everyone returning to the Lakes' house and the human parental figures + Strickler are all going "oh good my teenager and their friends are safe... why is there another one".

Also, given the way Morgana killed Merlin in this, it was too sudden for Merlin to ever be able to tell Douxie just how much he cared about his son 😈

#blinky #aaarrrgghh!!! #claire nuñez #jim lake jr #toby domzalski #hisirdoux casperan #toa archie #tales of arcadia #trollhunters #toawizards #death mention #my writing

[hamliet]

I think your blog is one of the best out there. Maybe becuase of this , maybe because of your awesome takes... I find it hard being in the fandom. And I wanted to share this very unpopular opinion. The more it goes on the more I wonder : how did Enji turned into this? Most of all in fandom tends to justify touya because he’s the result of Enji’s abuse. However Enji isn’t a natural born abuser. I’ve read and saw plenty: he has not manias of control. He accept easily his wife to leave him (he wanted to build an house for her and since Shoto’s accident he hadn’t forced himself on her). He wanted an heir, true and he was more neglecting (which is a form of abuse). But many time were found evidences in studies neglecting parents have issues of their own. Which can be found in their original family and / or society (if no mental illnesses are implied).

This made me wonder. I love Japanese culture , novels and society. And one of the most recurrent theme , especially some decades ago, is the high pressure people are exposed. It was and sometimes still is a nichilist model in which you die or fly and sometime you can’t hope to Rise once again when you fail. For example the concept of “you need to go at a go prek to get in a good university and find a good job” is often depict and put to extreme in many media. This inspire even books in which families are up for anything to push their children and they are under great pressure. Since Enji seems a not so bad man per se, has no mental illnesses , the only thing left is his immense obsession that must come from something. And the fact that in society a man must be successful... I think here it is.

The fact he can’t express his feeling correctly for the most of MHA , neither he can’t read them at the point of being perceived “with no compassion at all” comply the stereotype of the father with way too high standard , this can’t come from nothing. It’s not hard unreasonable thinking he was most likely pressured as much when younger , and that broke him at some point (which is a recursive theme in many others novels). This doesn’t justify him, but it might explain why he ended up like this.

But while everyone seems to be able to... forgive dabi , justifying his doings becuase of how he was raised while condamning 100% Enji. However the lingering theme of my hero’s villains is that they aren’t a monster , they’re turned into one; and society played a huge role. I don’t stand for Enji’s actions (who would) but ultimately? If all villains were broken by society at some point (being AFO the only exception for now) why can’t be him too? Broken by a society that demands from heroes to be perfect , to never be weak, even through total desperation? Society even made a joke of all might who gave his life entirely and part of his organs for Japan. Rather than only condemning Enji for his doings , much like is doing with Dabi, the spotlight should be society again.

He did wrong. Terribly wrong. and now everyone is ready to crucify him. But how society taught him better ? How society perceive heroes as humans , how far they can be weak and fails and not be blamed? Like father , like son. Touya is the result of his family , I think it should be considerated Enji was the product of a corrupted society. Which never correct itself , never tries to change... they just discard heroes and villains alike just for not being “perfect”.

Hi! Aw, thank you for your kind words <3

So, I’ll break this down a bit, because I think this discussion needs a lot of nuance. I agree society affected Enji, but I don’t quite think that a victim of society is remotely comparable to being a victim of parental abuse.

To start with, I fundamentally disagree with the notion that abusers are born, and hence don’t buy that Enji is somehow different (or better) because he wasn’t born that way.

To note, I talking specifically about physical/emotional/spiritual domestic abuse, not about sexual abuse (and I don’t wanna talk about that because it’s not relevant here, so no one send me asks about it, thanks).

Abuse is a description of an action and its affects. I’ll quote @linkspooky’s meta on Hawks last week: abuser is not a bad word, it’s not just something that bad people do. It’s an unhealthy relationship dynamic that even good people, even sympathetic people can participate in. It’d be great if we could just do a genetic test and determine if someone is an abuser (actually it wouldn’t be great; it’d be dystopian and terrifying), but that’s not how people work.

However, “abuser” is seen as a bad word, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing (nuance/abuse is horrific and takes such a toll on people that I’m glad it is given serious weight in some respects, although imo it’s overemphasized in fandom places and underemphasized in real life) and I’m not getting into good/bad/pluses/minuses of linguistic connotations here.

Hence, I would actually categorize what Rei did to Shouto as abuse, and I do think the story indicates she was neglectful towards her other children. However, I have never labeled her an “abuser” because of the negative connotation as is clear she is not a repeat offender and Shouto doesn’t even blame her--he blames Enji, and I don’t think that’s an incorrect assessment either. It’s complicated. Abuse victims can be abusers at the same time as they are victims (ask many a kid of an abusive dad what their mom was like; at best if they didn’t intervene it’s usually neglectful and often people go no contact with both parents). People we love and care for can participate in abuse.

Mental illness is also complex in its relationship to abuse. Mentally ill people are far more likely to be victims of abuse than perpetrators, and  mental illness doesn’t make someone predisposed to being a bad person. Mental illness does affect how I see Rei’s actions, because she was clearly out of her mind at the moment she burned Shouto’s face; at the same time, mental illness doesn’t erase harm done even if the person can’t be held super culpable. Enji on the other hand was not mentally ill in the same way; he was able to think logically and separate right from wrong even within society (because society clearly still views beating your kids as bad).

It’s actually not really accurate to say that Endeavor didn’t try to control Rei and just let her go--he put her in the institution to keep her away from Shouto, which may have been motivated of course by trying to protect Shouto, but was more likely “trying to protect his masterpiece.” Rei instantly regretted what she had done; Enji didn’t show regret until after Kamino. Also, Shouto himself views it as taking their mother away, not as protecting him. In fact, he sees it as removing his protector and leaving him with just the abusive dad. Plus, Rei’s doctors probably wouldn’t have let him see her. So I absolutely do think Enji is a control freak.

For Enjii, there’s no indication of prior trauma besides just not getting what he wanted. But, as you say, I do think Enji was absolutely a product of society--culturally, though I’m not qualified to comment on that, and within the manga’s own framing of that culture. However, while Enji is a product of society, he is not framed with the child framing that is present around Touya; hence, why he’s not a victim in the same sense. He was an adult when he started doing bad things, capable of reason, as far as we know and there’s no indication this isn’t the case. He was ~20 when Dabi was born, so that means he was looking for a quirk marriage at the very latest by 19. That’s like starting your career as an administrative assistant and being pissed you’re not CEO like, a year after starting! That implies that he had a sense of entitlement at a very young age, entitled to the point of believing kids were not full people but instead extensions of himself to ignore, beat up, and cast aside as he pleased. Every aspect of Enji’s personality screams of toxic masculinity as well.

Also, almost every person who has ever done something wrong (and those who haven’t!) is a product of their environment as well as of their genetics, but I wouldn’t classify everyone as a victim--even though technically I suppose they would be, but the connotations are just not particularly fitting--and I wouldn’t call Enji one. Enji might be a product of society, but his kids are victims of a deliberate choice he had to be a terrible parent. Society sucks, but we don’t choose it and it doesn’t choose us in the same sense a parent chooses to treat their kids a particular way.  So, rather than saying Enji’s a victim of society, I think it’s more of society reaping what they’ve sown in terms of their #1 being revealed as a mass abuser; it’s karmic.

So to return to his character and Enji is also a representation of toxic masculinity--that is why for me personally, his crying this chapter  actually resonated. Like, I think it was well-framed in that his victims didn’t feel sorry for him and he cried before he knew they were coming, and while I get that people think he has no right to cry (as Rei and Natsuo said!). I see why people interpret that as manipulative, and while I absolutely think it was self-pitying, I also personally see it as human and realistic, and perhaps as a slight chipping away of the toxic masculinity that he embodies. We’ll see. I’m still no fan but that was the first moment in his redemption arc that struck me as sincere.

#Anonymous #abuse tw #endeavor

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism

Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word longeur, and remarks in passing that though in England we happen not to have the word, we have the thing in considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word ‘nationalism’, but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation – that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly – and this is much more important – I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. 

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality. [...]

It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one’s own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.

It is also worth emphasizing once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the U.S.S.R. without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is  one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist – that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating – but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the up-grade and some hated rival is on the down-grade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also – since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself – unshakeably certain of being in the right.

Now that I have given this lengthy definition, I think it will be admitted that the habit of mind I am talking about is widespread among the English intelligentsia, and more widespread there than among the mass of the people. For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. [...] And there are whole strings of kindred questions to which you can only get an honest answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of all the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939. And when news of the Pact broke, the most wildly divergent explanations were of it were given, and predictions were made which were falsified almost immediately, being based in nearly every case not on a study of probabilities but on a desire to make the U.S.S.R. seem good or bad, strong or weak. 

Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties. And aesthetic judgements, especially literary judgements, are often corrupted in the same way as political ones. It would be difficult for an Indian nationalist to enjoy reading Kipling or for a Conservative to see merit in Mayakovsky, and there is always a temptation to claim that any book whose tendency one disagrees with must be a bad book from a literary point of view. People of strongly nationalistic outlook often perform this sleight of hand without being conscious of dishonesty. [...]

Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political Catholicism, as exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism. So there are between either of these and for instance Scottish nationalism, Zionism, Antisemitism or Trotskyism. It would be an oversimplification to say that all forms of nationalism are the same, even in their mental atmosphere, but there are certain rules that hold good in all cases. The following are the principal characteristics of nationalist thought:

Obsession. As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can only relieve by making some sharp retort. If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority for it not only in military power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different countries are named. Nomenclature plays a very important part in nationalist thought. Countries which have won their independence or gone through a nationalist revolution usually change their names, and any country or other unit round which strong feelings revolve is likely to have several names, each of them carrying a different implication. The two sides of the Spanish Civil War had between them nine or ten names expressing different degrees of love and hatred. Some of these names (e.g. ‘Patriots’ for Franco-supporters, or ‘Loyalists’ for Government-supporters) were frankly question-begging, and there was no single one of them which the two rival factions could have agreed to use. All nationalists consider it a duty to spread their own language to the detriment of rival languages. [...] Nationalist thought often gives the impression of being tinged by belief in sympathetic magic – a belief which probably comes out in the widespread custom of burning political enemies in effigy, or using pictures of them as targets in shooting galleries.

Instability. The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, as I have pointed out already, they can be and often are fastened upon some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincaré, Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred years, transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among literary intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was to Japan, with Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and in our own age it is usually to Russia. But the peculiarly interesting fact is that re-transference is also possible. A country or other unit which has been worshipped for years may suddenly become detestable, and some other object of affection may take its place with almost no interval. In the first version of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, and others of his writings about that time, one finds the United States praised almost as extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within a few years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility. The bigoted Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even of days, into an equally bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within the next few years. What remains constant in the nationalist is his own state of mind: the object of his feelings is changeable, and may be imaginary. But for an intellectual, transference has an important function which I have already mentioned shortly in connection with Chesterton. It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic – more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest – than he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realizes that this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion – that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware – will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack – all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognized for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one’s conduct.

Indifference to Reality. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians. It is the same with historical events. [...] If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world: and yet in not one single case were these atrocities – in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna – believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind.  Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should – in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 – and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which, it is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied. In 1927 Chiang Kai-Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn’t count’, or perhaps had not happened. The primary aim of propaganda is, of course, to influence contemporary opinion, but those who rewrite history do probably believe with part of their minds that they are actually thrusting facts into the past. When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly. Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported – battles, massacres, famines, revolutions – tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connexion with the physical world.

[...] If one harbours anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts: 

British Tory. Britain will come out of this war with reduced power and prestige.

Communist. If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would have been defeated by Germany.

Irish Nationalist. Eire can only remain independent because of British protection. 

Trotskyist. The Stalin régime is accepted by the Russian masses. 

Pacifist. Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.

All of these facts are grossly obvious if one’s emotions do not happen to be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case they are also intolerable, and so they have to be denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial. I come back to the astonishing failure of military prediction in the present war. It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. [...] The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified – still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.

The reason for the rise and spread of nationalism is far too big a question to be raised here. [...] It can be plausibly argued, for instance – it is even probably true – that patriotism is an inoculation against nationalism, that monarchy is a guard against dictatorship, and that organized religion is a guard against superstition. Or again, it can be argued that no unbiased outlook is possible, that all creeds and causes involve the same lies, follies, and barbarities; and this is often advanced as a reason for keeping out of politics altogether. I do not accept this argument, if only because in the modern world no one describable as an intellectual can keep out of politics in the sense of not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics – using the word in a wide sense – and that one must have preferences: that is, one must recognize that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one’s own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognize that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes. The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a moral effort, and contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us are prepared to make it.

#George Orwell #nationalism

[thegayhimbo]

True Blood Season 1 Review, Part 2 of 2 (Spoilers Ahead)

Apologies for this coming a few days later. It’s been a busy week, and I’m only starting to discover how time-consuming these reviews can be. I’m also currently in the middle of re-watching season 2 (and you can check out my ongoing thoughts about that season as I post about it). For later reviews of the True Blood seasons, I may just give general thoughts on what I liked and didn’t like. The only exceptions will be if I want to do a separate character/story analysis from a particular season.

In any case, let’s get cracking. 

To start off, I will be honest that, even as someone who identifies as gay and seeks out LGBT+ representation in media, the “vampires as a metaphor for oppressed minorities” message never worked for me (at least not in the way the show presents it). For one thing, I found the metaphor redundant and unnecessary when you already had minority characters like Lafayette and Tara (both of whom are black and part of the LGBT+ community) who could represent themselves without becoming vampires. There’s also the fact that both of them had to struggle with relatable real life issues (racism, sexism, homophobia, socioeconomic status, etc) than affected them on a daily basis. Scenes like Lafayette’s AIDS Burger speech for instance did more to convey the homophobic bullshit Lafayette constantly deals with, and I wish the show had expanded more on those moments.

The other part is I don’t think the metaphor was as clever or well-thought out as the writers wanted it to be because of the way they set up vampire society. If anything, the show accidentally undermines its message about tolerance based on how vampires act/behave on the show and what they do to humans. 

One thing that always irritated me (especially in season 1) is how the writers consistently downplayed when humans had valid reasons to be wary of vampires that wasn’t just rooted in bigotry: Over the course of the show (and even in the books) we find out many vampires have kidnapped, raped, tortured, drained, and killed humans in the past, or else turned them into vampires without their consent. We see this in season 1 with Malcom’s nest, Bill’s trial, and the murders/abductions vampires perpetrate against humans. Nan Flannigan (the spokesperson for the AVL) mentions at one point that vampires usually kill humans, and must consistently cover it up and lie about it on TV because she knows it makes vampires look unsympathetic. There’s also the entitled and bigoted attitude vampires have towards humans where they see them as either food, pets, slaves, or disposable commodities. What’s worse is vampires like Malcom, Diane, and The Magister (who’s a high ranking official in the vampire government) have comment on this:

From “Mine” (1x03):

Diane: Not everyone wants to dress up and play human.

Malcolm: Not everybody thinks it was such a great idea. And not everybody intends to tow the party line. Honey, if we can't kill people, what's the point of being a vampire?

From “I Don’t Wanna Know” (1x10):

Magister: Humans exist to serve us. That is their only value.

Some might say that you can’t judge the actions of a few vampires and equate that with all vampires. However, the problem is this isn’t just a case of a few vampires. Vampire culture and society in the books and the show are based solidly on seeing humans as either inferior beings, food, or subservient slaves who only exist to serve vampires. This attitude is deeply engrained, and has been for thousands of years. It constantly affects the way they relate to and interact with humans, and as I pointed out earlier, vampires have a history of kidnapping and killing humans that goes back centuries.

Humans have only known about vampires for 2 years as of season 1 (they came out of the coffin in 2006, and the show starts in 2009) whereas vampires have committed atrocities against humans for THOUSANDS of years, and have arguably acted as the oppressors in those situations. They have advantages that humans don’t (glamouring, superspeed, super strength, ability to drain, etc.) that make them dangerous, and they have chosen to keep some of those abilities from humans because it’s convenient for them to do so. And since many vampires can’t or won’t control themselves (or else make justifications for why it’s okay to treat humans the way they do), that is a BIG PROBLEM for humans who get caught in their crosshairs.

Likewise, as we find out in the later seasons, the vampire government is depicted as corrupt and self-serving (to say nothing of how humans are procured for the monarchs/chancellors, or the barbaric justice system they have), and their entire mainstreaming agenda is more interested in pretending to be civilized for humans (and encouraging vampires not to get caught feeding on humans) rather than actually trying to get vampires to change for the better. It’s also mentioned in season 4 (by Bill of all people) that vampires have a history of infiltrating human organizations (like the Catholic Church) to carry out their agendas. All of this was depicted over the course of the show.

Please note I am NOT saying that humans are guiltless in the way they’ve treated vampires. If anything, season 1 was pretty clear about showing how bigoted humans could be towards vampires. We had drainers like Amy Burley and the Rattarays who targeted vampires for their blood because of it’s magical abilities. Likewise, we were also shown hate crimes towards vampires (the rednecks who burn down Malcom’s nest) and organizations like The Fellowship of the Sun who were heavily anti-vampire. 

But the thing is the show clearly frames such bigotry in a negative light. The message that both the books and the show emphasize is that humans must learn to be tolerant of vampires. Characters like Jason, Tara, and Arlene are expected to grow and become more open-minded about vampires, no matter what kind of reprehensible crimes vampires commit. 

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing..............except that the show perpetrates a double-standard regarding how vampires treat humans vs how humans are expected to treat vampires.

It would be one thing if the books and the show took the position that vampire’s treatment of humans is bigotry that needs to change. Instead, the books and show frame it as "that's just the way they are, and it’s their nature, so deal with it." I cannot begin to describe how many times I’ve heard this excuse from fans whenever the vampires do something morally reprehensible. The problem is that completely undermines the message of tolerance that the books and the show constantly emphasize. You can't be tolerant of someone who sees you as food, who intends to harm you, and who views you as subservient to them. It also doesn't work to claim that humans must treat vampires as equals but it's okay for vampires to still indulge their bigoted attitude towards humans and treat them as inferiors, or that it’s okay for vampires to torture/rape/drain/kill/abduct humans because “that’s just who they are.” 

And please spare me the rape and abuse apologies, or the excuses of “you can’t apply human morality to vampires” or “there are different rules” or whatnot. I’ve heard them before, I don’t agree with them, and as stated, I think they undermine any message of tolerance and learning to co-exist peacefully with others who are different from you. There is a BIG DIFFERENCE in my eyes between a vampire who needs to feed on a human for survival, and a vampire who tortures/rapes/inflicts pain on a human out of sadistic pleasure or just because they can. There is nothing relatable or sympathetic about a character who perpetrates that kind of evil on someone else, and I’m done seeing people trying to make justifications for why it is. 

In any case, this is just my take on how the “vampires as a metaphor for oppressed minorities.” I don’t know if I’ll get blowback for this (I suspect that I will), but I wanted to clarify on the reasons I had problems with how the vampires are portrayed and how that contradicts the message of tolerance and peaceful co-existence that both the books and the show claim to endorse. 

#true blood #true blood spoilers #tgh opinions #vampires #the southern vampire mysteries #lgbt+ representation #true blood analysis #lafayette reynolds #tara thornton #true blood season 1 #jorge alonso de san diego #diane hardwicke #liam mcknight #malcom beaumarchais

[spooky-space-kook]

Goddammit. Okay. Things I am obsessed with from In The Flesh. (NOTE: I am a dumbass who knows jackall about anything I'm talking about. If I'm ever insensitive about a topic, please just tell me. I only do my best, ok?)

Amy is a gift and every moment she's on screen I fall in love that little bit more. This isn't a deep assessment I just fucking love Amy.

I could be completely off base, but each of our main "PDS Sufferers" feel as though they represent different ways mental illness is expressed. I know fuckall about most mental illnesses and so will leave it at that. I just think it's interesting.

I also like how they use characters to show the many different responses to oppression. Keiran's initial go-along-to-get-along becoming awareness and resentment. Freddy insisting he's not like the others. Simon finding purpose. Keiran's parent's blind ignorance and total faith in the system. Ken Burton becoming fervently anti-undead to hide the fact his wife is undead and returned home. Bill and Rick acting as though it isn't real, and crumbling the moment the thin veil is torn away. And Amy being the treasure she is and just leaning way the fuck in.

Everyone dressed in Amy's style at the end. Especially Sue and Shirley. Even more that Keiran's idea of "moregeous" is Old Man Hat.

The contrast between Rick and Simon's room. The former clearly hiding under so much masculine hooplah. Sexy half naked women, army crap. And at odds with the character we get glimpses of when in Keiren's presence. The latter's room is very much... well, gay. And young. Walls covered in boyband posters and race car drivers. I know the director said he left home as a teen, and honestly I'm surprised it wasn't earlier. The space is very much a pre-teen's. It says so much about Simon's character. That even if he left in his mid-teens, he must've started drifting away much earlier.

Simon's many, many layers and huge shirts. To me it ties strongly with what we learn in s2 ep5. It comes off as dressing to hide oneself.

The village's characters all interact like people who have known one another for years. Even the bad guys. When Keiran is in a very dire situation and being threatened by Gary in the last episode, he still talks to him like you would any schmuck you've known since elementary days. And all the interactions are this way. Personal and understanding in a way that's specific to a community where everyone has always known everyone. Fuck I love it so much.

I just appreciate the consistent characterization so much. It's so fucking good. Even when they started having to rush things along, they did it well. Characters grew without becoming totally different people.

S2 Ep5. Ignoring revoked consent. It was a very interesting moment to me. The whole episode made me re-evaluate a lot of aspects of the character, but this in particular stood out as impactful.

Even through it all, I sympathize with Jem and Gary and every other poor soul who lived through the Rising. I don't know if I'm supposed to, but I do. What they went through was awful. And traumatizing. They have every reason to be afraid. It is not an invalid fear. I love that they never showed us the human's experiences, because we've likely seen it enough times to understand and sympathize.

AND FURTHERMORE every PDS Sufferer is as much a victim! Because they really weren't in control, and had no way to be besides.

And along with that note, I love the moment when Jem makes The Big Mistake. Because I agreed with her. I thought she should go to the authorities. It was an accident, but the consequences were huge. And immediately after thinking this, I asked myself why I feel our PDS souls should get a pass due to trauma and lack of control, when Jem essentially had the same experience as a result of PTSD. I love that so much. The show constantly has me comparing and contrasting the experiences of the living and undead.

The very deliberate staging of Weston and Halperin. First working together, eventually split, and finally... no Weston at all. The moment where they are standing separate, Halperin with their benefactor on one side, Weston on the other, divided by a column, is very interesting. Halperin is friendly and welcoming to Weir, the representative of their funding source. Weston is clearly hostile. After that moment, we never see Weston again. So much said with so little! Ugh! So good! I want to know more about that divide. What it lead to. Why was Weston gone later?

I like Gary. There I said it. He's a horrible person but a damn good character. I simultaneously sympathize with him and want to slap the absolute shit out of him. We get glimpses into his total inability to cope (the story at lunch, coping with humor. Terrorizing people. Refusing to move on.) But it's interesting. When we see him with the living he seems like a fairlu nice, empathetic person. Were this the Walking Dead, Gary would be the Good Guy. He'd maybe even be our protagonist. And in a lot of ways the show treats him appropriately. We see many facets to his personality, both good and bad. We see him in a sympathetic light occassionally. He's never quite a 2 dimensional nut job or monster. It's great.

Every shot in Simon's former home. Every. Single. Shot where they are together? Empty chair. The emphasis on a missing figure is so lovely and clever. And sad.

This is the world's smallest thing but no two actors look more like mother and son than Sue and Keiran. Same big fuck-off doe eyes.

There'll be more, just you fuckin' wait. I've been rewatching the shit out of this show and need to get my thoughts out.

ADDITIONALLY. SPOILERS BTW.

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If Keiran is the first risen I will eat every left sock I fucking own. I went back to s1 ep2 and there were about a zillion other legs walking around when he crawled his lazy ass out of that coffin! Which is even more infuriatingly intriguing.

I'm also not surprised that literally zero fic can imagine our main pair being together outside of small moments near the show's timeline. Simon has an addictive personality and only just found purpose. I think domesticity wouldn't suit him. Meanwhile Keiran craves it. That and normalcy, simplicity... I wish there had been more time to see that conflict.

I wish we could've seen more of Gary. I want to know if they ever planned redemption for him. The way they treat him, it feels like they were going to. His portrayal felt too sympathetic, otherwise.

I wish we could have seen Jem grow. She was such a good character and I genuinely felt for her. Simultaneously called a badass and a coward. Maybe feeling that way too. She deserved the rest of the arc she never got.

ALSO. I NEED TO KNOW. WHO THE LEADER OF THE ULA IS. I NEED TO. My suspicions: John Weston. But we'll never know now T_T

#in the flesh #in the flesh spoilers

[wizardysseus]

@veliseraptor replied to your post “if you think i’m an insufferable odysseus liker now, imagine if homer…”

tell me how people talk about book 5 wrongly please

there two things in particular i want to hit on.

(1) calypso’s speech to hermes

when hermes comes to tell calypso to let odysseus sail back to ithaca, she rails at the double standard of male gods separating goddesses from their human lovers. and readers love it. twitter loves it, emily wilson seems to love it, freshman english majors in my classic lit class loved it.

“You cruel, jealous gods! You bear a grudge whenever any goddess takes a man to sleep with as a lover in her bed... So now, you male gods are upset with me for living with a man. A man I saved! ... I cared for him and loved him, and I vowed to set him free from time and death forever.” (5.118-20,129-130,135-7, tr. wilson)

i’m going to bounce translations a bit, because i have, uh (checks notes) three on hand; wilson emphasizes the gendered double standard most. and... yeah, i get why everybody wants to talk about it. the odyssey is chock full not only of those double standards, but of female characters speaking for themselves (especially relative to, say, the iliad). but it drives me up the wall when people talk about how persuasive or sympathetic calypso’s speech is and refuse to acknowledge one sort of incredibly crucial detail --- that the thing calypso is arguing for is her right to own a human man.

by the time we meet odysseus, he’s been on ogygia for seven years and wants very much to go home. here’s wilson again:

She found him on the shore. His eyes were always tearful; he wept sweet life away, in longing to go back home, since she no longer pleased him. He had no choice. He spent nights with her inside her hollow cave, not wanting her though she still wanted him. By day he sat out on the rocky beach, in tears and grief, staring in heartbreak at the fruitless sea. (149-158)

and my other translations, just for fun!

fitzgerald:

[She] went to find Odysseus in his stone seat to seaward---tear on tear brimming his eyes. The sweet days of his life time were running out in anguish over his exile, for long ago the nymph had ceased to please. Though he fought shy of her and her desire, he lay with her each night, for she compelled him. But when day came he sat on the rocky shore and broke his own heart groaning, with eyes wet scanning the bare horizon of the sea. (158-66)

fagles:

[She] found him there on the headland, sitting, still, weeping, his eyes never dry, his sweet life flowing away with the tears he wept for his foiled journey home, since the nymph no longer pleased. In the nights, true, he’d sleep with her in the arching cave---he had no choice--- unwilling lover alongside lover all too willing... But all his days he’d sit on the rocks and beaches, wrenching his heart with sobs and groans of anguish, gazing out over the barren sea through blinding tears. (165-175)

this isn’t odysseus retelling his story --- it’s the narrator, who is at least arguably more reliable. (spark notes, which i occasionally consult because i forget what chapters things happen in, says that odysseus is “sulking,” which, wow.) 

when calypso says he can leave, his response is wary at best. in each of these translations, he meets her news with a shudder, accuses her of plotting against him, and exacts an oath from her not to harm him. “Goddess, you have some other scheme in mind, / not my safe passage” in wilson (172-3), “Surely you’re plotting / something else, goddess” in fagles (192-3), and in fitzgerald:

“After these years, a helping hand? O goddess, what guile is hidden here? … I take no raft you grudge me out to sea. Or yield me first a great oath, if I do, to work no more enchantment to my harm.” (183-4,188-90)

it massively weirds me out that i regularly find people online who characterize odysseus as swanning around the mediterranean having sexy fun times. (there’s also circe, and it’s interesting that odysseus refuses to sleep with her until she swears a similar oath not to harm him. but i’m talking about book 5, when odysseus is several years older and much more desperate.) this is not a happy guy!

your mileage may vary as to how sympathetic you find odysseus in all of this. i like odysseus because i like Terrible Con Men Who Are Very Sad And Cry A Lot. but of course, we meet a lot of other characters in the poem who are in just as bad a way, if not worse. most of them get neither the freedom odysseus does, nor the same compassion from the narrator, the gods, and odysseus himself --- most notably, the twelve slave women he and telemachus hang at the end of book 22. if we’re going to talk about double standards, surely that deserves attention.

and yet! and yet. none of that changes the fact that odysseus wants to go home (his most, if not only, sympathetic trait), and calypso won’t let him. 

calypso is interesting! her speech has ramifications for the rest of the epic, for sure! i just wish more people could talk about it without sounding like calypso effectively utilized girl power by keeping odysseus as a sex slave for seven years.

(2) odysseus’ response when calypso offers him immortality

calypso gives odysseus permission to build a raft. but before he begins work on it, she tries to change his mind, even offering him immortality... and odysseus wants nothing to do with it. 

So Odysseus, with tact, said, “Do not be enraged at me, great goddess. You are quite right. I know my modest wife Penelope could never match your beauty. She is a human; you are deathless, ageless. But even so, I want to go back home, and every day I hope that day will come. If some god strikes me on the wine-dark sea, I will endure it. By now I am used to suffering---I have gone through so much, at sea and in the war. Let this come too.” (215-24, wilson)

wilson calls him tactful, fagles “worldly,” and fitzgerald “the strategist”; in each of these translations, he couches the rejection with a plea not to be angry with him. and yet... people want to pretend like what he says is how he actually feels about penelope? give me a break.

(granted, i see this take less often than the one above. but it still irks me! i’m irked!)

he finally has the chance to go home, and a goddess who has held him captive makes a last-ditch effort to insult his wife to convince him to stay, and you think that’s the moment odysseus is going to choose to be sincere?

like, this is what wilson has to say about it in her introduction: 

Why exactly does Odysseus make this surprising choice? The poem never gives us an explicit answer---an omission that makes the hero’s yearning for home all the more resonant and moving.

YEAH, WHAT A MYSTERY.

odysseus’ entire Thing is that he isn’t straightforward. you don’t have to like him and you certainly don’t have to feel sorry for him. but --- of all the flaws and questionable-at-best decisions you could choose to pick apart! --- i strongly object to this idea that odysseus’ motives and actions in book 5 don’t make sense. just because, what, you think he should have stayed with calypso? you don’t buy that he loves penelope? come the fuck on. i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again: if you don’t read odysseus’ identity as absolutely rooted with his home and wife and son, no wonder the poem falls apart.

#veliseraptor #replies #homer is where the heart is #thoughts #long post #rape tw #... my other rants are not this involved

[aliarlies]

When Disaster Strikes

Here's my take on March 29th's Modern AU prompt for @rwbyrosegardenweek

It was nine minutes before disaster, and Ruby and Oscar were eight minutes away from their first kiss.

A series of unexpected events started to unfold that morning for this disaster to occur. Headmaster Ozma Pine, Oscar’s father, received a call that preparations for the upcoming school festival were met with questions regarding city regulations that he needed to confirm. Because of this inquiry, Ozpin needed to contact the mayor whom he later called after breakfast. Unfortunately, that same mayor was none other than the headmaster’s ex-wife, Salem, and neither had an amicable relationship post-divorce. This call ruined the good mood she had that morning that lasted well into the afternoon. When her daughter came into her office around lunch to ask to borrow one of her mother’s rare classic cars, Salem met the request with an angry stare, a chiding of her daughter’s poor behavior recently, and a grounding. More annoyed than upset, her daughter ignored her and decided to go over to her father’s house in the evening to borrow what she needed.

Oscar, however, wasn’t privy to any of these events. That morning when his father told him that he would be gone this evening for work, he took it as a chance to invite his longtime crush, Ruby, over to his house to spend time with him. Perhaps he could even muster up the courage to ask her out on a date or confess his feelings for her. This line of thinking was quite common for sixteen-year-old boys.

Ruby, also, wasn’t aware of any of these events. That morning when she met Oscar in their folkloristic class, she offhandedly mentioned that she hadn’t done their latest homework yet and how it would be a great idea if she could do it with someone so she could make sure she get a decent grade. She received what she asked for when Oscar invited her to study after school. Now all she had to do was muster up the courage to ask him out on a date or confess her feelings for him. This line of thinking was also quite common for eighteen-year-old girls.

It was now 5:37 PM. At 5:41 PM, Ruby and Oscar would share their first kiss. A minute after, disaster.

“I’m glad I took up your offer to study together, Oscar,” Ruby said, stretching her arms after jotting her final notes and leaning closer to the boy.

Her closer proximity made the boy flush, but he managed to smile. His confidence was rising. “You don’t have to mention it. I mean… Folkloristics is more my dad’s thing and, well, I never thought I would enjoy it. You, uh, you certainly make the class fun.”

Both of their hearts pounded as they stared at one another. Whatever words they wanted to say were caught tangled at their tongues. Blood rushed to their heads as each admired the other. Fortunately, with their minds too flummoxed, they just allowed instinct to take over. The two would move as one towards each other. Their breathing grew shallow; their eyes closed half-lidded. Their lips crashed into one another like gentle waves at the beach.

For a blissful minute, there was no one else in the world but Ruby and Oscar.

“Wow. You’ve surprised me, Oscar. I never thought you would bring a girl over,” said a sarcastic feminine voice.

Ruby and Oscar pushed each other apart. Standing above the two of them spinning a key ring around her finger was Cinder Fall, smirking down at the two of them with mirth in her eyes.

“CINDER,” Ruby shouted, nearly gasping.

Cinder chuckled. “Ruby Rose. Did you enjoy kissing my little brother?”

“Ruby, we came as soon as we heard about you having an emergency,” Weiss shouted as she barged into Ruby’s room with Blake in tow and nodding along.

Yang greeted them from her lax position on Ruby’s couch. “You’re just in time. Just wait until you get a load of what Ruby just went through.”

Weiss and Blake glanced at one another, then to Yang, and finally on Ruby who looked dead on her bed with a pillow firmly hugged against her. Her eyes seemingly spiraled with despair and confusion.

“Well? What’s the emergency?” Weiss asked, taking a seat at Ruby’s desk. “You know I had to cancel my club activities.”

“I had to leave Ilia in charge for the protest we had planned at city hall,” Blake said, sitting on the couch beside Yang.

“Oh, dope. What for, Blake?” Yang asked.

“Nothing big, but they recently passed a regulation where—”

Weiss loudly coughed into her fist. “Girls, no time for that. Ruby. Emergency. What happened?”

Yang grinned and let out a loud giggle. “Well, I’ll go ahead and tell since Ruby is being all sulky. What happened was—” A pillow struck her face.

“Shut up, Yang. I’ll tell everyone,” Ruby said morosely, rising from her bed with dull eyes of torment.

What followed was a summary of events that codified the beginnings of a romantic comedy. She retold everyone how she made a mortal foe with Cinder Fall, her upperclassman in the Archery Club. Their rivalry was the stuff of legends that involved defeating their good friend, Pyrrha, in her last competition before she transferred schools, thus totally bumming their friend circle out. And how she totally ruined the farewell party with Penny who was going home for her foreign exchange program with her gang of ne’er-do-wells who cheated their win against Penny in Dance Dance Revolution. Ruby also told her friends of how she met a wonderful boy named Oscar Pine who got into school early like her at the start of the new semester after her two good friends left and how he was so cute. She told them how she was falling completely head over heels for him because of how sweet and caring and thoughtful he was. This particular segment lasted for thirty minutes and thoroughly annoyed her sister and two friends.

Finally, she revealed how during a study session at Oscar’s house earlier that afternoon, it was revealed that his older sister was none other than Cinder!

“Wait, wait, wait, hold on.” Weiss stood up, crossing her arms. “Are you telling me I had to skip out on my extracurricular because it turns out your boyfriend is related to your rival?”

“He’s not my boyfriend… yet,” Ruby protested.

Blake groaned as she allowed the couch to consume her. “Ruby, I know it’s your first boyfriend and all, but you shouldn’t freak out just because your boyfriend has relatives you don’t like. Or vice versa, even.”

“Oh right, I remember you telling me how Adam’s parents were, like, the sweetest couple ever,” Yang said. “How’d the two of them get such a jackass of a son…”

Frustrated, Ruby groaned. “None of that is the point! I don’t mind if Oscar is related to Cinder! What I mind is that I totally smack talked about her all the time in our previous conversations! I outright completely hated her and said super mean things behind her back to her little brother!”

Weiss, Blake, and Yang paused.

“Shit. You got a point there, sis,” Yang admitted.

“Ruby totally hates me now!” Oscar shouted, panicked hands grabbing at his horror-stricken face. 

Cinder, meanwhile, helped herself to the snacks left on the table. There were many words that could describe Cinder. Beautiful. Conniving. Gorgeous. Terrifying. Ambitious. Unfortunately, sympathetic wasn’t one of them. If you were able to crack open her mind, you would see mostly images of her ruthlessly showing up Neo and those ugly twins later tonight at Junior’s club with her new dress and car.

“You’re being overly dramatic, Oscar,” she said breezily.

Oscar turned and faced her, looking exasperated. Their relationship was complicated, but they didn’t hate each other like their parents did. “Cinder, Ruby absolutely despises you after what you did to her and all her friends. I’m your brother. She’s going to hate me.”

Cinder would have snorted, but wouldn’t do well for her image. Instead she opted to just roll her eyes. “Look. What she and I have doesn’t have any bearing on what you do with her. Not to mention, I saw the way she looks at you. The girl is smitten.”

“…she is?”

“Focus, boy.” Cinder snapped her fingers. “Besides, if she does end up hating you just because of me, she wasn’t worth your time anyway. Besides, Neo likes you. Maybe? In a dom sort of way, I guess? I could introduce you to her if things with Ruby don’t work out.”

“But you hate Neo.”

She rolled her eyes again. “Of course I do. That mute thinks she’s better than me. I will admit she’s gorgeous though, and you deserve at least that.”

Oscar sighed and shook his head. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll… I don’t know, call Ruby and ask her if she hates me or something.”

Cinder sighed and grabbed Oscar by the wrist, pulling him as she made her way towards the garage. Little known fact about Cinder Fall was that despite her appearances and her ruthlessness, she did have a few weaknesses. When Oscar resigned himself to an awkward phone call, he inadvertently made his lips pout and his eyes went downturn looking up. Deep within the cold, unfeeling heart of his older sister, Oscar somehow managed to unfreeze a little bit of actual human kindness with a simple, unintentional puppy dog look.

“I’m taking you to Rose’s house, and you’re going to talk it over with her. Then you’ll clear things up by making out,” Cinder declared as she forced Oscar into their father’s muscle car.

“Um, Cinder. Why are you being so nice to me?”

Cinder stared dead ahead as the garage door slowly rose, letting the glare of the sunset burn her eyes and clear her mind with pain. “Because I need you to help me with dad once he figures out I took his car.”

Cinder lied as easily as she breathed.

Ping!

[It’s Cinder.]

Ping!

[Rose. I’m coming over to your house.]

Ping!

[Don’t bother asking how I know where you live. Of course I do.]

Yang whistled appreciatively as she read the latest text messages that sprung up on Ruby’s phone. She had relinquished her phone to her older sister in a vain attempt to stop herself from texting Oscar and further worsening the situation. In another timeline in which Ruby kept her phone on her and did text Oscar, things were a lot better and the misunderstanding would’ve resolved a mere thirty minutes after Ruby ran off in panic from his house. Unfortunately, this was not that timeline.

“Is it Oscar, Yang?” Blake asked curiously as she watched Ruby continued to rant and rave about her misfortune as Weiss patted her on the back in comfort while bored out of her wits.

“Nah, it’s Cinder,” Yang answered, chuckling. “Classic big sister move she’s doing. I think she’s going to come over and beat Ruby up for laying her lewd hands all over her little brother. It’s what I would do.”

Blake grinned. “Oh? Why aren’t you doing the same then?”

“You’ve met Oscar, Blake! The kid is a total sweetheart. I’m more afraid of Ruby hurting him.”

“Hey! I heard that,” Ruby shouted, her cheeks puffed up by the insult. “I definitely would not hurt Oscar.”

“You punched him in the schnoz when the two of you trained with Qrow.”

“Yeah, well—”

CRASH!

The girls yelped as a rock came crashing through the window.

“Cinder, are you crazy?! You didn’t have to throw a rock!”

That was Oscar.

“Rose! Come on out. I brought Oscar with me.”

That was Cinder.

Ruby turned to her sister and two friends, unsure what to do. Weiss looked panicked as she stared at the broken shards of glass now on the floor. Blake looked equally as shocked, but not that shocked, that Cinder literally threw a rock through Ruby’s window. Meanwhile, Yang gave Ruby a thumbs up and motioned for her to go downstairs.

“I got your back, Ruby. If Oscar’s here, you probably are just going to talk! I’ll watch your back if Cinder tries anything while Weiss and Blake cleans up the mess,” Yang said as a matter of fact.

“We will?” asked the two volunteered for clean-up duty.

“Do Ruby a solid, you two. This is her first romance! What’s a broken window or two?”

“Adam literally jumped through a window to chase after me when I dumped him, Yang.”

“See! It’s completely normal!”

“Fine, I’ll clean it up. But only because it is so unsafe to leave broken glass here,” Weiss groused.

Despite her nerves and the erratic pounding of her heart in her chest, Ruby nodded bravely and started her descent downstairs. When she opened her front door, she found Cinder leaning against a car parked by the sidewalk and Oscar nervously gazing at her. With a roll of her eyes and a kick, Cinder pushed Oscar forward. The two slowly closed the distance.

“Hey Oscar,” she said nervously, her fingers steepling together.

“Um… hey Ruby,” he replied, scratching the back of his neck.

Neither two knew what to say. It was to be expected, after all. The two were completely inexperienced when it came to romance. For Ruby, she didn’t quite know romance very well. Her family was a confusing chart of relations that involved too much melodrama. For Oscar, he only read books about romance. There was also his parents, but their enmity towards each other was legendary. However, at least they knew one thing. The person right in front of them was someone they really, really liked.

“I’m sorry!” “Sorry!”

Ruby and Oscar paused and stared at each other as they both apologized at the same time. Oscar smiled sheepishly and gestured for Ruby to go first.

“Oscar, I’m so sorry when I ranted to you in the past of how much I didn’t like your sister. You must have been so hurt that someone was saying horrible things about your family.” Ruby sighed and stared longingly at Oscar. ‘Goodbye my first love story.’

However, the boy blinked owlishly at the apology and asked, “Wait. You don’t hate me?”

“How could I ever hate you, Oscar? You’re so kind and thoughtful. You’ve helped me out so much even when starting college was all new to you. Meanwhile, all I ever did for you was just vent my worries.”

“Ruby, don’t ever apologize for having feelings. I told you before that I’m there for you, and I mean it. I was afraid you now hated me for being related to Cinder. It’s not the first time I’ve been treated differently just because of someone I was related to.”

It was if death no longer hung over the two. They then relaxed into one another’s embrace, hugging each other as relief filled them to the brim.

“So… that kiss we had? Does that mean we’re together now?” Oscar asked into her soft, red hair.

Ruby laughed into his shoulder. “Of course, silly.”

One hour and thirty-seven minutes after disaster, Ruby and Oscar found their happy ending.

“Um… Oscar. Cinder just drove off.”

“She does that.”

“Then would you like to stay for dinner?”

“I would love to.”

Twenty-three minutes after Ruby and Oscar found their happy ending, a tired Taiyang and Qrow would come home. One minute after that, after the two entered the living room where Ruby and Oscar explored their relationship in newfound romantic territory, disaster struck once more.

#Rosegarden #Rosegarden Week #Rosegarden Ship Week #Ruby Rose x Oscar Pine #Ruby Rose #Oscar Pine #Writing #Fan Fiction