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foreverlogical · 3 years

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Donald Trump’s descent into madness continues.

The latest manifestation of this is a report in The New York Times that the president is weighing appointing the conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who for a time worked on his legal team, to be special counsel to investigate imaginary claims of voter fraud.

As if that were not enough, we also learned that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was pardoned by the president after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, attended the Friday meeting. Earlier in the week, Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, floated the idea (which he had promoted before) that the president impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election in several closely contested states that voted against Trump. It appears that Flynn wants to turn them into literal battleground states.\

None of this should come as a surprise. Some of us said, even before he became president, that Donald Trump’s Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering him, was his psychology—his disordered personality, his emotional and mental instability, and his sociopathic tendencies. It was the main reason, though hardly the only reason, I refused to vote for him in 2016 or in 2020, despite having worked in the three previous Republican administrations. Nothing that Trump has done over the past four years has caused me to rethink my assessment, and a great deal has happened to confirm it.

Given Trump’s psychological profile, it was inevitable that when he felt the walls of reality close in on him—in 2020, it was the pandemic, the cratering economy, and his election defeat—he would detach himself even further from reality. It was predictable that the president would assert even more bizarre conspiracy theories. That he would become more enraged and embittered, more desperate and despondent, more consumed by his grievances. That he would go against past supplicants, like Attorney General Bill Barr and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and become more aggressive toward his perceived enemies. That his wits would begin to turn, in the words of King Lear. That he would begin to lose his mind.

So he has. And, as a result, President Trump has become even more destabilizing and dangerous.

“I’ve been covering Donald Trump for a while,” Jonathan Swan of Axios tweeted. “I can’t recall hearing more intense concern from senior officials who are actually Trump people. The Sidney Powell/Michael Flynn ideas are finding an enthusiastic audience at the top.”

Even amid the chaos, it’s worth taking a step back to think about where we are: An American president, unwilling to concede his defeat by 7 million popular votes and 74 Electoral College votes, is still trying to steal the election. It has become his obsession.

In the process, Trump has in too many cases turned his party into an instrument of illiberalism and nihilism. Here are just a couple of data points to underscore that claim: 18 attorneys generals and more than half the Republicans in the House supported a seditious abuse of the judicial process.

And it’s not only, or even mainly, elected officials. The Republican Party’s base has often followed Trump into the twilight zone, with a sizable majority of them affirming that Joe Biden won the election based on fraud and many of them turning against medical science in the face of a surging pandemic.

COVID-19 is now killing Americans at the rate of about one per minute, but the president is “just done with COVID,” a source identified as one of Trump’s closest advisers told The Washington Post. “I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with COVID ... It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”

This is where Trump’s crippling psychological condition—his complete inability to face unpleasant facts, his toxic narcissism, and his utter lack of empathy—became lethal. Trump’s negligence turned what would have been a difficult winter into a dark one. If any of his predecessors—Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, to go back just 40 years—had been president during this pandemic, tens of thousands of American lives would almost surely have been saved.

“My concern was, in the worst part of the battle, the general was missing in action,” said Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, one of the very few Republicans to speak truth in the Trump era.

In 30 days, Donald Trump will leave the presidency, with his efforts to mount a coup having failed. The encouraging news is that it never really had a chance of succeeding. Our institutions, especially the courts, will have passed a stress test, not the most difficult ever but difficult enough, and unlike any in our history. Some local officials exhibited profiles in courage, doing the right thing in the face of threats and pressure from their party. And a preponderance of the American public, having lived through the past four years, deserve credit for canceling this presidential freak show rather than renewing it. The “exhausted majority” wasn’t too exhausted to get out and vote, even in a pandemic.

But the Trump presidency will leave gaping wounds nearly everywhere, and ruination in some places. Truth as a concept has been battered from the highest office in the land on an almost hourly basis. The Republican Party has been radicalized, with countless Republican lawmakers and other prominent figures within the party having revealed themselves to be moral cowards, even, and in some ways especially, after Trump was defeated. During the Trump presidency, they were so afraid of getting crosswise with him and his supporters that they failed the Solzhenitsyn test: “The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me.

”During the past four years, the right-wing ecosystem became more and more rabid. Many prominent evangelical supporters of the president are either obsequious, like Franklin Graham, or delusional, like Eric Metaxas, and they now peddle their delusions as being written by God. QAnon and the Proud Boys, Newsmax and One America News, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson—all have been emboldened.

These worrisome trends began before Trump ran for office, and they won’t disappear after he leaves the presidency. Those who hope for a quick snapback will be disappointed. Still, having Trump out of office has to help. He’s going to find out that there’s no comparable bully pulpit. And the media, if they are wise, will cut off his oxygen, which is attention. They had no choice but to cover Trump’s provocations when he was president; when he’s an ex-president, that will change.

For the foreseeable future, journalists will rightly focus on the pandemic. But once that is contained and defeated, it will be time to go back to focusing more attention on things like the Paris Accords and the carbon tax; the earned-income tax credit and infrastructure; entitlement reform and monetary policy; charter schools and campus speech codes; legal immigration, asylum, assimilation, and social mobility. There is also an opportunity, with Trump a former president, for the Republican Party to once again become the home of sane conservatism. Whether that happens or not is an open question. But it’s something many of us are willing to work for, and that even progressives should hope for.Beyond that, and more fundamental than that, we have to remind ourselves that we are not powerless to shape the future; that much of what has been broken can be repaired; that though we are many, we can be one; and that fatalism and cynicism are unwarranted and corrosive.

There’s a lovely line in William Wordsworth’s poem “The Prelude”: “What we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how.

”There are still things worthy of our love. Honor, decency, courage, beauty, and truth. Tenderness, human empathy, and a sense of duty. A good society. And a commitment to human dignity. We need to teach others—in our individual relationships, in our classrooms and communities, in our book clubs and Bible studies, and in innumerable other settings—why those things are worthy of their attention, their loyalty, their love. One person doing it won’t make much of a difference; a lot of people doing it will create a culture.

Maybe we understand better than we did five years ago why these things are essential to our lives, and why when we neglect them or elect leaders who ridicule and subvert them, life becomes nasty, brutish, and generally unpleasant.

Just after noon on January 20, a new and necessary chapter will begin in the American story. Joe Biden will certainly play a role in shaping how that story turns out—but so will you and I. Ours is a good and estimable republic, if we can keep it.

PETER WEHNER is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.

#ideas

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hatboyproject · 3 years

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This is very long, but it might be of interest to someone, somewhere. I was asked recently about the direction I'm taking this romance in and whether or not I'll be addressing certain disability specific subjects within it. The answer, of course, is yes - I have always planned to do this in one form or another. Whilst no single piece of media can address everything I'd like to say on the subject, and I am working within the bounds of a larger story with its own pacing and focus to consider, there's still room to touch on some of these things.

I'm aware that my interpretations won't always be the same as others'. They are my interpretations, coloured by my experiences and feelings, and ultimately, this is my mod - I'm writing it for everybody who 'wears the ballcap,' so to speak! But, it's my interpretation of this character that I'm trying to share with everyone. Different people "took the helm" (laugh, I'm hilarious!) on writing Jeff across the trilogy, and as time has gone on I've been trying to convince myself that it's okay to have my turn at doing that, too - albeit in a non-professional capacity. So... Let's get into my interpretation of Jeff, where his stuff comes from on my view, and how things went to get him to where we are at the beginning of ME3, where the romance can occur.

A lot of how I interpret him comes from experiences in my own life with my own issues, and with those of my loved ones, some of whom are physically disabled in similar (but not identical) ways to Jeff. Some of this carries an element of catharsis for me.

Mechanically and narratively speaking, what draws me to writing this romance is the contrast between how these two characters are strong. It's this core idea that strength doesn't have only one manifestation in a person. That loving somebody doesn't have to be done only one way, that it can be beautiful and passionate and fulfilling - even if, when it gets physical, the headboard can't exactly be made to shatter with the force of it all. For me, it's also an exercise in insecurity and dealing with feelings of frustrated inadequacy - something that has plagued me my whole life.

Yes, yes, he's fictional - but the only way for me to really get into a character is to think about them as if they're a real being. When I look at Jeff as a person, I see many things... Some very positive, some pretty negative... I try to see him as a complete person with strengths and flaws.

On the surface he is often defensive, dismissive, sarcastic, and emotionally avoidant. But why is that? He is highly skilled, dedicated and capable, and knows it, but at the same time is a person who is constantly overlooked, underestimated, and asked to work thrice as hard to get the same considerations. Even then, his validity is questioned often by almost everyone around him. Over time, combined with the realities of living with his physical condition, this has given him some deep-seated insecurities. He feels the need to brag about his skills because they are, ultimately, the one thing about himself that he is absolutely certain has real worth. He overcompensates for this by abusing rules and technicalities wherever he can, because I think he knows that if he played life by the rules, he'd never have gotten anywhere. It's a stacked deck, so why not hide some aces up his sleeve? When you don't fit in the box provided, you question the value of every box you see.

When a person lives with this long enough, it can get hard to swim against the tide of society's expectations and still remain chipper about it, let alone not internalise some of it. It can cause a person to create a shell constructed out of distrust and untruth.

Living with a disability can really suck sometimes, and the suck is compounded when having to deal with your own frustrations plus those of others. In my personal experience, that happens a lot.

There is a certain sense of alienation that it can create, and it can become a kind of Sword of Damocles. It can be easier to anticipate rejection and others' assumptions, inabilities to understand or relate than to keep reaching out, only to have the same tired conversations about being different. I see a lot of this in him. I understand the chip he has on his shoulder.

I also see an extremely sensitive, empathetic, devoted and boundlessly loving person under all that. In fact, it's because of these things that I think he actively tries to distance himself. At the core of his being, I see Jeff as somebody who loves quickly and completely. I think he sees that as a vulnerability, incompatible with what he's learned he has to do to survive... and also with the machismo thing that comes with being a pilot. I think on some level he's terrified of that about himself, but he also can't help it. Jeff is ride or die. So, he tells himself he doesn't care and never lets anyone in. Any time anyone showed interest, he'd shut them down, alienate them, distance himself, and get in the seat of something that flies.

I think up until now, (ME3) he's seen intimacy both as a thing he longs for, but is also afraid of because of his fundamental knowledge that he is different. He thinks he can't "measure up" to what he sees all around him. He sees romance as something that will lead to his inevitable rejection and being crushed, emotionally - and if he's not careful, physically, too. I think he's embarrassed about that as well. He's very interested where it comes to all that, but the things he likes to watch, he knows he can't do like that. His only experience is second-hand as a voyeur, so some of his perceptions about that are unhealthy for him. I think any kind of attempt by the medical professionals in his life to broach the topic and offer support on, he's angrily changed the subject, or stopped listening to, because of the entire mess above. I think Jeff is kind of a lonely person, and some of it is self-imposed, though the reasons for him thinking it's the right thing to do aren't all within his control.

All this is difficult for him to reconcile with, because he has been desperately in love with his commanding officer since almost the moment s/he met him, but entirely unprepared to face it.

I think at first it was easy for him to dismiss it as a stupid crush. Everyone gets them when cramped up in close quarters in stressful situations and the Commander's magnetism was hard to ignore. But then it became clear that Shepard really hadn't read his file and really hadn't made any assumptions at all about him. S/he just wanted to know him, and as time progressed and that actually bore out, it got hard not to really feel something powerful, even though s/he was the Commander and it wasn't strictly appropriate to think that way. But, then there was that thing about not fitting in the box provided...

I think he agonised over coming to Shepard with it, but ultimately decided it would be selfish with everything they were going through. I think there was a part of him that decided s/he'd never be interested anyway, not when there were other, healthier people to choose from... People who didn't have these hangups or need special accommodations made for them. I think he decided to keep it to himself, for what he felt was both their sakes.

If/When the Commander quietly hooked up with someone else, I think he had a lot of feelings all at once. On the one hand, the person he cared for most was finding some peace in all the craziness. On the other, he wished that particular brand of peace was shared with him. Most of the time there were more important things to worry about, but during downtime, I think it was on his mind a lot.

I think he feels very sheepish about it, but occasionally his jealousy got the better of him and he interrupted Shepard at moments that got too hard to watch on the security cams. He watched the cams around the ship lot, and listened in on all the others a fair bit. I think because he saw himself as being at a remove from most people in a lot of ways, it was easy to justify that to himself. I think he saw it kind of like listening to a podcast or a soap opera or... Nature documentary, almost, or something. He got to know all of them in this way... Parasocially at first, but gradually, socially too. He felt better about trying, because he had this secret edge. Not the greatest stuff he's ever done, but... Complete person. Strengths and flaws.

And then, the unthinkable happened. He couldn't accept that the ship was dying. He was sure he could save it... But when Shepard's hand touched his shoulder, when s/he'd come back for him, he knew it was over. And then, it really was over. Shepard paid the price for his arrogance. The person he wanted to protect the most spun off out into space. The communicator between his mask and that helmet was still in range for long enough that he could hear the choking. For a long time afterward, even hearing people cough made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

The Alliance grounded him. I don't think he even had the capacity to be mad about it. I think that was a hard time for Jeff. I think between being burdened with the knowledge of the Reapers, the loss of Shepard, and the weight of his guilt, he was pretty close to the very, very edge when Cerberus knocked on his door and made him a bunch of promises. Pretty sure those promises had nothing to do with leather seats and everything to do with Project Lazarus. I'm very sure that the promise of Shepard coming back is the reason he even let Cerberus pay for the surgeries he agreed to undergo, because I don't think he valued himself much at all at that point. I'm pretty sure it was being ready to help Shepard that he was thinking about when he was learning to walk on his painful legs without crutches for the very first time. When Cerberus offered him a big shiny reset button I think he took it without hesitation because there wasn't anything else to hope for. I think seeing Shepard in the docking bay galvanised him and without ever telling them so, he pledged his life to them even harder than before. I think he told himself that he would support Shepard in every way he could. He would go wherever, do whatever, and when dealing with him, try to give them what he knew they needed; a goddamn break.

So, fast forward again, and now we are here. With all of this in mind... Shepard might have had a dalliance with someone else, or might've been too damaged by their previous love interest on Horizon, or whatever. Either way, I think Jeff saw it as not his business to even dream about that. I think the guilt tore him up every time he looked at Shepard. I think he felt like on some level, he deserved the pain of unrequited feelings which only ever got more intense. If he didn't think himself worthy of it back then, doubly so now. I think during the six months of house arrest, he tried to visit, but the Alliance denied his every attempt. Then the attack on Earth happened.

And so now we have Jeff, who, just like other humans is confused and groping about for a sense of what's up and what's down. Fortunately for him, Shepard is part of that sense of stability. He's just better at hiding it, because avoiding it and telling himself to focus elsewhere is second nature to him by this point. But things are a little different, now. Shepard seems looking around for a connection too. Future days seem short in number and the rulebook less and less important by the minute. Denying it to himself becomes impossible, and even EDI prods him about it. Shepard won't stop being so goddamn nice to him and even responds with things that if he didn't know better, he could interpret as... But then all the old insecurities come rushing back and he's walking on his own damn eggshells again. Fuck it. It's time to admit it. To come clean. S/he has to know.

So he asks. And s/he accepts. He's equal parts thrilled, stunned and terrified. He's even on some level, suspicious. Is s/he setting him up for a fall? Are they angry about his responsibility? What do they want out of this, actually? He hasn't explained what it'd be like. That what they're doubtlessly expecting of him is unrealistic. That he's completely inexperienced. I think at this point, he's a bit pissed off with himself and feeling a lot of dread because he's pretty sure how this is going to go. He realises he's got so caught up in it that he's done things in the wrong order. Damage control. He has to talk with Shepard and explain what s/he should expect from him, because it will be different. Manage expectations because he's had to manage his own. He goes in steeled.

But s/he knows it will be different, it turns out. As ever, Shepard has made no assumptions whatsoever. S/he only wants to get to know him. Wants him for everything he is, and accepts what he is not. It was never an issue for them beyond understanding how to work with it, because he is worthy just as he is, and has worked hard enough. He has to teach them about his limitations, about underestimating and overestimating... But where there's a will, there's a way. Time for a few shared moments of peace before the end of days, and through all the craziness, something feels right at last. He feels safe enough to let Shepard in properly. Thus begins his reassessment of himself and reckoning with letting go of the insecurities he has that aren't actually his own, but come from outside.

Also he totally gets to sext the Commander now when s/he's on missions. Nice.

So. There's a lot more I could say and expound upon but it's been hours and I have stuff to do. That's my direction. It's not going to suit everyone, and I doubt I can get everything across... But I'll try. I'm just one person, with just one perspective, with just one version of this story. But I hope people like what I come up with surrounding this framework, because I have lived a lot of it myself. Just a few less Reapers in my version. Not everyone's experiences and responses will be the same.

#shoker #shoker mod #hatboyproject #jeff joker moreau #character study #my approach

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asherlockstudy · 3 years

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Rhett and Link’s problems with the Enneagram

I have now watched both Enneagram EBs and the second one actually set my gears to work (So Anon here it comes! I promise it was spontaneous).

After listening to Link and mostly Rhett talk about the Enneagram again and again, I realised I have a problem but I can not place its exact root. There is either something fundamentally wrong with the Enneagram itself or maybe it’s Rhett and consequently Link who talk about it in a way that made me feel a little uncomfortable.

My problem and cause of concern was that everything that was said during the two podcasts had a clear negative tone to it. I will have to bring in myself to it to give you an example so bear with me for a paragraph. I did the test and I am a 5 (Investigator - Observer, something like that) which suits me rather well, especially since it agrees perfectly with my Myers-Briggs INTP type. The results said I was a 5w6 (essentially an emotionless analytical robot) which is definitely wrong as I am clearly a 5w4 (a sad mess who analyses the world and searches pointlessly for the true meanings in life and wants to come up with the ultimate all-encompassing philosophy). I mean, OK, they are not described exactly like that but trust me, that’s the point. But despite all the flaws associated with it, especially in the fields of socialising and tremendous procrastination due to an insane fear of failure, I am actually very much in touch with it. I revel in analysing, in trying to see the bigger picture, to make up my own theory about life and the world. It gives me fuel to go on, it fills me with excitement, it gives me a purpose.

Now, what I kept hearing from Rhett and Link are the things they would hope to run away from. I can’t seem to remember a single positive thing they said about their personalities. All traits they mentioned ( which were all pretty one-dimensional for both I dare say) were presented in the context of torturing them and having to confront them. With these insights in their personalities and the spiritual deconstructions earlier, their old (surprising back then) statement that they are “fundamentally sad people” makes more and more sense. Some of their traits, like Link’s care for perfection to the smallest detail and his moral concerns could have been neutral or positive but, no, they are almost all given as clear negatives or at least as things that have an emotional toll on them.

This gives me the impression that Link and especially Rhett have found comfort in studying the Enneagram and try to find an explanation for what they are like, to feel part of a group, represented in their misery. In short, they focus on the analysis of the flaws of their personalities as a part of who they are and avoid dealing with the root that caused said flaws. Link is more self aware while Rhett still struggles to reach the root of it, which is his childhood. Not that he doesn’t know it but he can’t just deal with the people and the situations that impacted him enough to make him a three. For instance, Rhett seems to believe that he is a natural three that his parents made manifest even more strongly. It could be the case or the threeness we observe in him is the direct product of his parents’ constant judgement. By keeping chanting he needs to “be” instead of “do”, I am not sure Rhett will achieve much. Honestly, the one impactful step he needs to take is to stop caring about what his father thinks and I am sorry to say he is still not near achieving this. Especially when I take into account how scared he was during his videocall with his dad in GMM and how relieved he looked after the call was over without drama. In short, my problem with their take in the Enneagram is that it seems that Three is Rhett’s pack of unresolved issues rather than his complete personality type.

Furthermore, Rhett speaks knowingly about all numbers / personality types which proves he consumes passionately all Enneagram information that is available. For a man of his level of active lifestyle, hectic schedule and impatience, this shows that he indeed seeks comfort in finding a detailed description and an explanation for his personality, for the way he feels and acts. What does this mean? Well, that he does not like the way he feels about himself a lot. Not only that, but he is actually in a search of self. At this point, he is no longer cryptic about it but it is more serious than he lets on. He tries to make sense of himself and he tries desperately to find something in himself to love. I hope there are people in his life who let him know that he is worthy of their love, friendship and appreciation even though he is so deep inside his head that even the affectionate feedback can only help so much. Rhett will start finding some peace only if he takes the one step I mentioned above.

And then it seems that Link’s personality type is also exclusively a byproduct of his childhood and is aggravated by his relationship with Rhett. Link’s perfectionism doesn’t cause him enthusiasm - he just dreads the disturbance of his supposedly perfectly stable world. In all honesty, Link doesn’t strike me as an ambitious person. Link would just love to have his dear routine and a loyal person to share it with. Link needs stability and companionship. He is fine with just one person as long as this person contributes to the stability of their bond. Who that one person is in Link’s life is another story…

Link doesn’t care that much about the creative process and, frankly, he doesn’t care all that much about the comedy. Link cares to keep the environment Rhett and he work stable and safe. For Link, judgement from the audience is not as alarming as Rhett’s frustration because of it. Link cares to ensure that Rhett’s idea will be successful enough to keep working and to keep working together. So Link’s entire self-identification as a one seems to stem from his fear of abandonment and worthlessness only. Link fears he has not much to contribute to Mythical and he tries to counteract that by becoming the ultimate source of management and control. Because if he didn’t even manage the company, then what would Rhett need him for? Hence, Link’s obsession for control is a consequence of his fear, he doesn’t necessarily love to be in control for the sake of it. This is proven by his plane example, which shows that he finally relaxes when he does NOT need to be in control.

Link has been working hard most of his life to ensure his position next to Rhett. This brings even more insight in his resentment for Rhett that explodes from time to time. Link resents Rhett because he tries so hard to be always by his side but due to Rhett’s opportunitism, he can’t tell whether Rhett wants his companionship or he simply needs it for their brand. Even worse, Link dreads that the reason Rhett is his friend is because Link feeds his ego with his loyalty and admiration, because he takes Link for granted and not because he loves Link for who he is.

“Do you care for me or do you revel in the fact that I care for you?”

Now, I can’t get inside Rhett’s head but I doubt he uses people. I believe his genuine care for Link can be found in the weirdest examples - those from which Rhett has nothing to gain i.e getting frustrated when Link doesn’t enjoy food as much. Yes, this is a sign of love. Rhett enjoys food so much that he wants to share that enjoyment with Link. He can’t realise Link’s tongue works differently - he thinks Link is missing out and it frustrates him. Another silly example is Rhett buying Apocalypse equipment for a clearly disinterested Link and probably never getting its money’s worth back. This is important to Rhett for some reason and he is concerned enough to protect careless Link as well despite having no personal gain from it.

The truth is that these two men feed off each other; Rhett keeps Link attached to him to always feel worthy and Link keeps Rhett attached to him to always feel safe. However, the fact that Rhett is almost his entire source of safety and that Link is Rhett’s biggest calibrator of worth is indicative of the levels of love and need. Nevertheless, Rhett and Link are not independent people. They were constantly in search of support from one another and they lost themselves in the process of satisfying others or being safe. This is something they are realising only now.

Link’s fear of abandonment is so big that it frequently leads him to an almost paranoid behaviour. It is crazy that he felt left out when Rhett communicated with the audience during a podcast whose key purpose is to… communicate with the audience. His fear here has two sides: 1) that Rhett didn’t consider him an equally important business partner so he preferred to speak directly to the audience and 2) that Rhett isn’t emotionally invested in him in order to open up to him. And by saying he can deceive people if he needs, Rhett doesn’t help Link overcome his huge insecurities. This is why Link begs Rhett to talk to him about his feelings more. He does not understand whether Rhett loves him or uses him. The notion that Rhett doesn’t truly love or appreciate him is one of his biggest fears in life.

As for Rhett, it is certainly huge growth that he starts opening up and being vulnerable to a few thousand strangers yet it all still derives from his need to be accepted by said strangers as I am afraid that the late disproportionate criticism he gets for silly stuff on Twitter and Tumblr surely don’t help him deal with his issues, no matter how hard he tries. Therefore, Rhett is trapped in a vicious circle. Besides, Rhett was overly sensitive to be hurt when Link stated the obvious; that he was being vulnerable in hopes to be understood and accepted, because that was clearly what Rhett was openly doing. However, having someone discussing openly his vulnerability immediately made Rhett retreat back to his shell because no matter how hard he tries, Rhett hasn’t managed to separate vulnerability from weakness in his mind yet.

Long story short, Rhett and Link might be Three and One respectively but I am not sure they have a good understanding of themselves anyway. They may have figured out their types correctly but they certainly narrow their entire sense of being to their unresolved issues and phobias. They entirely lack a sense of self-worth and they probably have not realised the extent of the traumas in their youth. In the Enneagram language, the nine personality types have nine levels of development. I believe Rhett and Link are either in the average levels or the mildest unhealthy level. They are certainly not in the healthy top three levels.

Their obsession with the Ennegram helps only superficially but they seem to have based an illogically huge part of their self exploration on it. The Enneagram might offer some insight but won’t offer the resolutions they long for and badly need in order to find some relief. The ones that come when you confront your environment instead of overanalysing yourself and beating yourself up because of it.

#Rhett and link #ear biscuits #Rhett McLaughlin #link Neal #Enneagram #randl #r&l #mythical

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stillness-in-green · 3 years

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Ahistorical, Absurd, and Unsustainable (Part Four and Conclusion)

An Examination of the Mass Arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front Introduction and Part One Part Two Part Three

PART FOUR: Thematic Problems

For all that portions of the Western fandom look at the MLA and see Evil Quirk Eugenicists and Hypocritical Ultra-Rich, they had legitimate complaints, and their goals, while overly radical if taken to their logical extremes—see Geten[51]—still offer a way to address a huge number of the problems this society faces. Locking them up and throwing away the key is shutting off one of the most prominent angles on addressing those issues. Consider:

The Problem of Heroics

Quirk-based prejudice is real, and a huge amount of it is based in the hero/villain dichotomy. This isn’t surprising; when you set up a group of people as “heroes,” it follows logically, linguistically, naturally that the people they fight must be villains. Villains are bad, are evil, are black-and-white figures with no motivation worth considering. Toss them in jail; who cares? They earned being in there with their Bad Actions. But that kind of thinking is insidious—it spreads.

If someone looks like a villain, if someone has a bad quirk, they may well be a Bad Seed. And if they aren’t, well, the responsibility is on them to rise above that prejudice, to become better than the people around them think they can be—but no one asks the people around them to maybe stop being so damn prejudicial all the time.

A horrifyingly stark example shows up in Chapter 310, in which a woman is being attacked by a group of three men for no reason save that they think she looks like a villain, so they assume she must be a villain. Her obvious villain trait? She’s a heteromorph—unusually tall, with a vulpine face. That’s it. She’s not dressed in a threatening or antisocial style; she’s not aggressive or angry. She’s just a heteromorph who didn’t go to a shelter right away because she thought things would calm down if she waited it out.

Love Midoriya following this up with, “I bet they were just scared too.” Way to chase an aggression with a micro-aggression there, hero. (Chapter 310)

Of course, tensions are running high right now, higher than would ever be the case under normal circumstances, but even in “normal circumstances,” this uncomfortable bias persists. Consider Class 1-A’s Shoji: Shoji wears a mask because he's a gentle soul who doesn’t want to scare small children, but maybe instead, people should be teaching their kids not to judge by appearances? Then maybe their kids wouldn’t grow up to be the kinds of people who attack others for looking a little scary and not going to sufficient pains to hide it?

As far as bad quirks go, meanwhile, Shinsou is the classic example on the hero side. He was told by classmates, laughingly, that he had a good quirk for a villain; he carries himself at all times like he’s got something to prove. I suspect the only reason he’s at U.A. and not running with the League of Villains is a supportive home life,[52] but either way, people are all too ready to apply a villain label to him based on an ability that was nothing but genetic lottery, and that’s because the existence of heroes defines itself by the existence of villains.

Of course, the otherization of villains and people-who-kind-of-seem-like-they-might-be-villains is only part of the problem. The other and frankly larger issue is the effect that limiting quirk use to heroes-only has on the cultural mindset—heroes, villains, and civilians alike.

Japan in real life fosters a sense of community support so profound that children as young as four can be sent on small errands[53] around the neighborhood, safe in the knowledge that if they need help, they will be able to get that help. It’s far more common for young children to walk or take public transit to school than it is in the U.S. Another example is the country’s enthusiastic embrace of publicly available AED machines, complete with easy-to-understand printed and audio instructions about how to use them on people suffering heart attacks, a movement that has saved the lives of many who might not have otherwise survived long enough for an ambulance to arrive.

In My Hero Academia’s Japan, though?

You wind up with people who don't even particularly want to become heroes enrolling in hero schools anyway because it's the only way they can imagine contributing to society. Uraraka and Gran Torino are obvious examples—Uraraka becoming a hero less because she felt a calling to and more because it seemed like the best way to ameliorate her family’s hardscrabble lot in life; Torino getting a hero license not because he cared about being a hero at all, but because he was in on the One For All situation and needed to be able to use his quirk freely to help fight that secret war.

An even more telling case is that of the main character himself. Midoriya desperately wanted to “save” people, and from all the evidence we have in the early manga, as far as he was concerned, the only way for him to do that was to become a hero. He never even considered e.g. signing up for any volunteer programs around his neighborhood or joining the police. It’s like he never even considered the possibility of helping people via other channels.

And this is a consistent issue! People who don't think that they can become heroes train themselves (and are trained by society) into believing that they are powerless, that it isn’t their responsibility to help when they see trouble, leading to things like Shimura Tenko's “long walk,” where countless people look at a child of five, bloody and alone, and then make the conscious decision to look away, because “a hero will help.”

Hell, it even spills over onto actual heroes, who in the first chapter stand around like chumps waiting for “someone with a better quirk” to come and do something about the sludge villain, because they don’t have the perfect quirk to solve the problem themselves, so they don’t even try.

Of course, even if they did try, it might not be welcomed. Consider cases where people wanted to do good, like Gentle Criminal or Vigilantes' Koichi, but had their road to heroism blocked—this led them to villainy or vigilantism, which in turn can lead to arrest and possible prison time, with all the attendant stigma.

Restricting quirk use to heroes-only has impacts beyond just how it distorts people’s desire to help, too. Evidence in the manga suggests that some people feel a stronger biological drive to use their quirks than others. What options do those people have, then, if their quirks—or their personalities—don’t seem naturally cut out for heroism?

In Tamaki Amajiki’s flashback in Chapter 140, a teacher tells his class, “People make fine use of their quirks at any number of jobs. Being a hero’s not the only option. How will you be useful to society in the future? That’s what we’re here to explore in quirk training.” This is the scene in the manga that most explicitly tells us that other avenues for quirk use exist, but we’re never once shown what those avenues might be. At best, this suggests that those avenues are drastically limited (e.g. only available to those whose quirks are deemed “useful to society”) and/or poorly explained to people in-universe—else why would Uraraka have chosen heroism despite her lack of interest in it if she could have just gotten some kind of job license for her quirk? At worst, it’s an example of Horikoshi throwing in a line that contradicts the surrounding canon. Either way, we’re left with people who feel a strong drive to use their quirks being pressured into heroism or straying into villainy for lack of other acceptable outlets.

All of these issues could be mitigated by less draconian restrictions on quirks—which Destro's followers are the only characters in the manga we've actively seen pushing for, rather than just heard about second-hand—and by not using an ideologically charged word like “heroes” to describe a glorified independent police force. Allowing people to freely use their quirks[54] means fewer people being pushed into a heroics job they're unsuited for, means fewer people being pushed into villainy, means a more rounded view on how quirks can be used, leading to less quirk-based prejudice and less—well, let’s talk some about false dichotomies.

All For Nothing, Nothing For All

Shigaraki stands as a fundamental accusation of the way the hero/civilian dynamic exacerbates the Bystander Effect, making people think of themselves as powerless, while at the same time putting untenable pressure on heroes to be perfect victory machines who don't experience pain or doubt or weakness. He further attests that this dynamic pushes out people who don't fit either category—victim or hero—making them villains. This is one of the fundamental thematic conflicts of the series—is one hero enough? Are heroes themselves enough? What are heroes, what do they fight, and what should they be fighting? Who deserves to be “saved” and what does it mean, anyway, to “save” someone? What happens to the people who aren’t saved? How will the world grapple with the consequences, the resentment, that stem from that failure?

In his work Underground, written to grapple with and criticize the way Japanese media covered the sarin gas attacks, author Murakami Haruki talked about the response to the incident being to call the members of Aum Shinrikyo evil, insane, diseased, other. They were spoken of as a monstrous fringe that could not have been predicted, about which nothing could have been done, rather than examined as bright, well-educated young people who by all accounts ought to have had good futures ahead of them but instead spiraled down into a doomsday cult. Murakami asserted that, because the Japanese public was unwilling to ask how and why that happened, was unwilling to self-examine, the country was locking itself into a repeating cycle. Memorably, he wrote, “Most Japanese seem ready to pack up the whole incident in a trunk labeled THINGS OVER AND DONE WITH,” to describe this resolute incuriosity, the strong aversion to looking into the face of evil and trying to find the humanity within it.

In this post and its follow-up, tumblr user @robotlesbianjavert discusses the problems that stem from that exact tendency as portrayed in My Hero Academia. She says, “Only making decisions that benefit the greater good is not the real solution that the narrative is rooting for. Not so long as it fails to recognize and address the needs of the victims that still come of it.” Hero Society will never stop creating its own villains so long as, every time it fails people, it does nothing but shrug and write off the victims as unavoidable, inevitable sacrifices for the greater good.

I would also like to highlight her point—which I hope she one day posts her own full essay on—about the way All For One and One For All serve as two extreme poles of equally unsustainable visions for society. This dynamic is all over the manga.

There are the characters of AFO and his younger brother themselves, each forever locked in battle to prove the correctness of his own way of thinking, and forever talking past the other even when they’re face to face.

There’s the contrast of heroes, giving their all to help strangers even when it hurts the people they love, with villains, giving their all to help the people they love even when it hurts strangers.

The flaws in the One For All model can be seen in the multilayered ravages it inflicted on All Might physically, emotionally, and socially. Thus, one for all is not always ideal.

The strengths of the All For One model can be seen in a team of heroes and police combining their efforts and will to help one single person—Eri. Nighteye even highlights this with his speech about everyone’s efforts coalescing into Midoriya and helping him to “twist fate.” Thus, all for one is not always about selfishness.

Once you start looking for it, this duality shows up everywhere, and I think—I hope—it’s an angle Horikoshi is conscious of. The obvious solution is that the extremes of this society are all undesirable—that total selflessness and total selfishness are equally unsustainable, and both are, ultimately, damaging. A more holistic approach is needed, yet if a holistic approach is what the manga ultimately proves to be seeking, it makes the mass arrest of the PLF particularly problematic, if it’s allowed to stand unchallenged. You cannot just choose not to see 115,000 dissatisfied people—some way or another, you have to reckon with them, and if you don’t do it in a way that actually helps them address whatever their core problem is, you’re just setting yourself up for more of the same further down the line.

The MLA believed that they were fighting for a just cause, for freedom, for the future. They absolutely had issues—Geten’s words indicate that much—but they were issues that would have been much better addressed by actually challenging them openly, rather than suppressing them. If they couldn’t get society to agree right away that the use of one’s quirk should be as unregulated as the use of one’s hands, maybe they would have accepted a tiered license approach to quirk use as a good starting compromise. If they wanted totally unhindered quirk use, such that people could murder with impunity? Well, that would never have gotten past the House of Representatives, but maybe a bill declaring that crimes committed by quirks should be treated no differently than crimes committed via any other means would have. A weeklong debate on the Diet floor would have stood a much greater chance of e.g. addressing the needs of the quirkless than the MLA alone would have bothered with.

The MLA didn’t get to have that kind of debate. Instead, they ran headfirst into Shigaraki Tomura, who made them far more dangerous. And yet… For all that Shigaraki twisted them, he didn’t change them so much that Re-Destro couldn’t still see the light of his ideals within them. Furthermore, even though the PLF didn’t win the battle we call the War Arc, it may be that they’re well on their way to winning the actual war.

“The Seeds Are Already Sown”

So what did the PLF actually want? Well, we have a few sources on that—Shigaraki’s desire to destroy “everything,” the cloned Re-Destro’s vision of liberation through “order without order,” and so forth. But a very instructive place to look is Hawks’ doomsaying in Chapter 258. While the PLF is a bit too scattered or imprisoned to appreciate it, a shocking number of the things Hawks laid out for the audience have actually come about, even if they didn’t happen exactly as the PLF planned. Consider:

Bring down the status quo by annihilating all heroes. Heroes—a number of whom died the day of the raid—are retiring in mass numbers. As the manga describes it, they are “being put through a sieve.” They certainly haven’t all been annihilated, but the ones remaining are having to do the work with little in the way of thanks or glory—the false heroes Stain spoke of have left the table.

They plan to attack all major cities at once throughout the nation. Gigantomachia stampeded over more than twenty cities in the space of less than an hour. A bunch of them were surely not major cities, but all the same, it was a rampage that caught the heroes almost completely off-guard (because they were all tied up arresting the PLF and didn’t think Machia would be an issue), leading to massive collateral damage and unspeakable loss of life.

With society brought to a lawless standstill… Thanks to AFO’s prison breaks, a bunch of villains are now out there raising hell to their hearts’ content, and there aren’t enough heroes around to always respond in a timely fashion. They’re having to open up schools as shelter zones, evacuating entire cities, which the common people respond to predictably poorly, leading to groups of people who were not previously villainous deciding to take the law into their own hands.

…Re-Destro and the Hearts & Minds Party will storm the political world. In Chapter 297, the less openly fascist guard worries that the remaining factions of the HMP[55] will still be stirring up trouble on the political front, especially given the enormous wave of brand-new complaints about human rights violations that he doubtlessly figured were incoming.

They will distribute weapons and extol the virtues of self-defense, calling it true freedom. Whether Detnerat picked up the pace of its black-market support goods sales, bankrolled Giran doing the same, or some other groups—yakuza, perhaps—stepped up, we already know that there are weapons and support goods circulating throughout society, and that people are using them for self-defense.

These people will throw the world into chaos and enthrone Shigaraki atop the rubble. The second coming of All For One. Far more so than anyone in the PLF would have wanted, this one has come horribly true with the AFO vestige’s possession of Shigaraki.[56]

While it is perhaps karmic that the PLF is in no position to enjoy the fruits of their villainous efforts, it’s striking how much of what they wanted has come about anyway. And how much of this can really be undone or wound back? Complete societal breakdown isn’t the kind of genie you can easily rebottle, and this, I think, is particularly illustrated by the civilians Yo and Tatami encounter in Chapter 307.

I’d like to wind this essay down by zooming in on that encounter somewhat.

The group of people the Ketsubutsu pair encounter in 307 are not nice, but neither are they violent. Having, like so many others, lost faith in heroes to protect them, they want only to protect their hometown and for heroes to leave them be. They’ve fended off a few small-time villain attacks and are bluntly uninterested in cooperating with condescending heroes (an impression Yo is not helping to mitigate) who have done nothing but disappoint them.

The spokesman in particular feels to me like someone who’s suffered a significant personal loss. The shadow over his eyes here is telling. (Chapter 307)

When Muscular shows up, they are 100% ready to put their lives where their mouths are. They are all in the process of charging outside, first to stop their town from suffering more damage, then to back up a hero kid they just got done telling to buzz off. And you know? It’s possible—probable, even!—that Muscular would have murdered every last one of them, and them charging in to fight him would have led to a horrific tragedy, one more to stack atop the pile.

And yet, while the narrative doesn’t allow them to actually assist,[57] neither does it entirely rebuke them, in the end. When all is said and done, the civilians agree to hear Tatami and Yo out, and they help Tatami get Yo inside for medical attention. The leader is a little abashed, but he doesn’t bow his head and admit to being wrong; his group doesn’t meekly submit to being herded to shelter. And that’s because the narrative is—wisely—unwilling to say that they’re wrong.

After all, how could it?

Midoriya Izuku and the jaded civilian's instincts. (Chapters 1 and 307)

For a last comparison, remember that in the first chapter, Midoriya Izuku—quirkless, untrained Midoriya Izuku—dove into a fight he had no way of winning, no way of even affecting. All he was doing was endangering himself and making the sludge villain even harder to target. Still, All Might and the narrative alike praised him for his action, because it was driven by a “desire to save.” In Chapter 307, a group of undertrained civilians witnesses a high school boy being attacked by the highest tier of villain their society knows, a Tartarus escapee, a gleeful and unrepentant serial killer with a devastatingly powerful quirk. Their response is to gather up their weapons and numbers and dive in to try and help. Regardless of the weakness of their quirks, regardless of their lack of training, regardless of the danger to their lives, their instinct is the same as Midoriya’s was back then—“the desire to save.”

How could the narrative possibly tell us that they're wrong?

And if they aren’t wrong, this group of people who are so very close to the vision the PLF had for the world after their revolution, the narrative simply cannot expect to retain the slightest hint of credibility if it tries to tell us that the PLF are worth nothing more than an authorial handwave and the slamming of a cell door.

Conclusion

What we are seeing in the manga now is a society that is fumbling towards a new way. It isn’t perfect; it has a lot of wrinkles to iron out. Yet in some ways, if this is a society that has gone back in time, it is also a society that has a chance to chart a different path forward than it did before, a more inclusive path, a more balanced one. Heroes can still exist in the same way that surgeons and emergency responders exist, but that doesn't mean people throw their first aid kits in the garbage.

People protest that untrained civilians using their quirks leads to collateral damage, and that's true. The same would be true, however, if a nation that relied solely on public transit suddenly faced the total breakdown of that system and found that, if they wanted to get anywhere farther than walking distance, they had to get behind the wheel of a car and drive there themselves with no previous experience handling a motor vehicle. With some basic training, or perhaps a test and associated license that is as ubiquitous as a driver's license, how much of the collateral damage caused by civilians fighting might be reduced? How might people feel more empowered to act when necessary?

I very much want to see that future in the manga. It will feel terribly bitter, however, if the people who always believed in that future the most don’t get to see it themselves.

Bit characters are bit characters, I know. Terrorists in fiction don’t typically get to walk away scot-free. But numbers aren’t just numbers, even in fiction, even when they’re villains. If all Horikoshi wanted was a sufficiently large, scary threat to throw his heroes up against, he should have stuck with mindless Noumu or maniacal robots. He didn’t. He chose to make that threat human. He cannot now choose to dehumanize the threat, just because those humans are no longer convenient to his story.

Or at least, he can’t make me look at his doing so as anything other than appalling—ahistorical, absurd, and unsustainable.

Come back next time for sources and further reading.

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[51] And yes, as always, I do think that Geten-whose-name-means-Apocrypha is a radical, not a reliable barometer for the MLA norm.

[52] Contrasting Toga, the standard-bearer for bad quirks on the villain side.

[53] We don’t know if that practice—so widespread it became the subject of a long-running TV program—survived the Advent and raised crime rate, but if it didn’t, that only further suggests that kids wandering the streets unattended are probably in need of assistance.

[54] Within the same bounds other freedoms exist, e.g. they’re not unduly burdening others.

[55] Small political parties in Japan merge and fragment all the time, particularly in times of crisis, so it’s not surprising that the HMP has some sub-groups. I am somewhat surprised that these factions themselves weren’t dissolved as well, given the heavy-handedness on display everywhere else. This is about the only thing that suggests that the arrests might not be as totally over-the-top as is otherwise implied, though really, if that’s the case, it just brings us back to the problem of all the people who probably slipped the net if the HPSC did opt to undercompensate.

[56] Another enormous thematic issue I have with tossing away the PLF like this is that it renders Shigaraki and the League’s hard-fought victories in My Villain Academia all but meaningless—worse than meaningless, since settling into the villa instead of staying on the run or bunking up with Ujiko wound up losing them Twice—but that’s more a problem with the writing of Shigaraki’s arc than the themes of the series as a whole. Certainly, fumbling Shigaraki’s arc will have a nigh-incomparable impact on the themes of the series as a whole, but there’s time to salvage his situation yet, so I’m crossing my fingers and reserving judgement on that for now.

[57] It should have.

#bnha analysis #bnha meta #paranormal liberation front #meta liberation army #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #bnha #bnha spoilers #my writing #plf arrests #stillness has salt

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foolgobi65 · 3 years

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i really wish the writers of lucifer hadn't turned chloe and maze's friendship into such an afterthought! like ok:

- when they start in season 2, both of them are in pretty isolated places socially. chloe, already a pretty introverted workaholic, is just newly divorced and has exactly one (1) friend: lucifer. maze has finally split off from lucifer and has two (2) friends: linda and trixie, but for the purposes of this comparison linda really is maze's one friend. maze has just accepted that she's not actually going back to hell, that this time on earth isn't really just a lunch break before they go back to the real world (hell) and so she now has to figure out how to build a real life in LA.

- basically, both maze and chloe are kind of in similar positions in terms of being isolated and really only having a singular overwhelming relationship with someone as opposed to having a network they can rely on so that all their eggs aren't in one basket. you can see where this backfires on both of them throughout the series when linda spends the week not talking to maze after seeing lucifer's face, and when lucifer runs off to vegas and suddenly chloe is stuck with all these feelings she can't express (and crucially can't talk about to him, her best friend.) ofc lucifer and maze's relationship transcends friendship just based on their immense history and is its own weird thing that i also kind of wish they had given more thought to, but w/e.

- enter: maze and chloe's friendship! i think for both maze and chloe, the other person is as "far" as you could get from themselves, but is fascinatingly still someone they can like, respect, love, and be loyal to. for a good while (and this is something i REALLY wish they had maintained) chloe, maze, and dan are basically raising trixie together which takes so much respect and trust that the other person is someone you want having a hand in influencing a kid you love! i think what's interesting is that, unlike lucifer who is trying to answer existential questions about his place/purpose in the universe, maze is really just focused on the people she cares about and having a good time (which is rooted in her doing meaningful work as a bounty hunter.) chloe is someone who pursues duty to the point of self-sacrifice, and obviously her friendship with lucifer helps her loosen up, but the pedestal he places her on/reverence he sometimes feels for her prevents him from really popping that bubble in the same way maze does. also chloe and lucifer's relationship gets SO much more complicated around the time maze enter's chloe's life so the role that lucifer once had to shock chloe out of her comfort zone kind of goes to maze once chloe has to draw some personal boundaries with lucifer.

- i think the key to maze and chloe's friendship is that they're both people who desperately need someone who embodies the other person's best trait. while this tendency isn't always healthy, maze is fundamentally someone very loyal to those she believes deserves it. obviously she's also betrayed people a billion times but at her core she's deeply committed to those she cares about which is something that i can see chloe find really appealing. at this point chloe has spent so much of her life in this weirdly precarious position where, since her dad's death she hasn't been able to fully trust anyone or open up to them. obviously she loves dan, but its clear that even when they're still "good" he doesn't trust her instincts or potential like he should, and when he spent those months gaslighting her the issue for her even beyond the fact that he shot malcom would have been that he didnt support or trust his wife. the appeal of lucifer is that from the beginning he identifies that she's smart and moral with good instincts. he trusts her, and strangely over the season she begins to trust him too! and then he runs off to vegas, etc etc lol. maze's primary loyalty probably isn't to chloe, but we see that to the best of her capacity she wants chloe to be happy -- she gets the prison warden killed, she "tries" and then really does listen to chloe venting about lucifer, attends the parent night chloe was stressed about, sets aside her grudge with lucifer to find chloe.

- in turn, chloe's best trait is her ability to accept people as they are and see their potential. of course she doesnt really have that many friends, but the people she is attracted to are all works in progress (dan is obvious, as are lucifer and maze lmao, but there's also ella who confesses something very personal and scary to chloe and gets a hug in return, and even charlotte who chloe's had clashes with both as charlotte and Mom for years but still gets the benefit of the doubt.) maze does have to change when she comes to live with chloe and trixie, but we see trixie grow up heavily influenced by maze in ways that makes it clear that chloe must genuinely like maze, or those influences like the handshake and the passion for gore and the knife training wouldnt have been allowed. we know that the reason maze is so loyal to lucifer is that he was the first person to ever accept her for who she was unconditionally, without shame or judgment. we see that for lucifer chloe is that person, especially because she sees his potential for growth just as she sees maze's. because she doesnt have preconcieved notions of what they're supposed to be she only sees them as people going through a difficult period of growth and supports them as best she can: reminding maze that they're friends, worrying about her in canada, trusting her with trixie who is the most important person in chloe's life.

- of course, chloe and maze have lucifer and linda but narratively lucifer and linda become so much MORE for chloe and maze. the show sunk linda/maze lmao but linda's clearly the adult maze cares most about just as lucifer is chloe's. and for both in s3 this person they each place so much of themselves into suddenly hurts them and they both spiral. i think there was real potential for chloe and maze to become each other's support and develop into a really steady, enduring friendship in contrast to the chaos of their individual romances (you will NEVER convince me that triangle was about amenadiel rather than linda lmao.) even post s3, they don't really address that maze really hurt chloe by pushing her towards pierce, and that chloe hurt maze by lying to her. i really think there could have been a lot of growth from maze going back to living with chloe and trixie after making full ammends and chloe realizing that actually, yes she can deal with this and it isn't that scary and then the tragedy of her maybe missing her shot with lucifer becomes more stark. we see chloe and maze teaming up in the first episode of 5A but then they blow that up too! i get that chloe needs space and its clear they're both using the other as placeholders for the people they really want, but there's no reason that they couldnt have come back together later and re-established their friendship on screen. obv they wouldnt work together after lucifer comes back, but to me this is where i believe they should go back to living together. without that, maze's connection to trixie in terms of what they can show on screen becomes tenuous and chloe's home life just becomes less interesting/worthwhile to see bc it'd just be her or maybe her with trixie. without that, it feels like we just see a lot of chloe either at work or in relation to lucifer (bc thats the best bang for your buck in terms of interaction!) we do get to see maze with linda, which is nice, but idk just feels like a step back from early s3 when maze felt more embedded in a community of people who liked, accepted, and cared about her wellbeing.

- i think one of the issues is that chloe and maze's friendship might have seemed like a knock off of their "main" relationships with lucifer and linda bc they have similar dynamics with them, but idk! there's a sense of fun that we get from their friendship that we dont really see from the main pairings because those are so serious and passionate and the main mechanisms by which the 4 grow so there isn't as much room for the lighter stuff. i know i said that chloe sees the potential for growth but she's not really pushing maze to talk about her feelings. she's doing the dishes maze won't, smiling at maze and trixie's handshake, shrugging off the fact that maze is throwing knives at their rented walls. maze and chloe create space for each other to be seen as themselves, good or bad, in ways that linda and lucifer can't for whatever reason. they don't really push each other, just let the other person be. it wouldnt be the ideal dynamic if they were the only person in each other's lives, but i think its vital to have someone in your life who can, in chloe's case, gently push you outside of your comfort zone and in maze's case offer acceptance, friendship, and trust.

idk this is just going in circles as i repeat the same points over and over and over but i really wish they had put more thought into sustaining the maze and chloe friendship throughout s4 and s5 because it would have brought out notes in both of them narratively that i think are lost otherwise. also its just sad for trixie that someone who was basically part of her family who she was living with is just...not there anymore and that's never addressed. : (

#lucifer #maze #chloe decker #lol im just writing this here to avoid doing school work rip #back to pretending to do a reading!!!

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skamamoroma · 4 years

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All done.

I’m going to struggle IMMENSELY to summarise the past few hours.

I just used many tissues to dry my ridiculous tears, hardly able to see the screen. If this is the end completely then I’m satisfied. My heart doesn’t know what to do with itself but I feel contented.

But, LUDOVICO FUCKING BESSEGATO. Dude. I don’t know what to say about the talent of that man. The original s4 was fraught with issues with the odd true magic and beauty in there. It broke my heart at the time. I cherish those moments that truly were special and done to perfection. But I thank Ludo so much for what he tried to do, for the many MANY changes he made that made so much sense, that changed the story to fit his world, that made more messes that were ultimately more meaningful and for the surprises I didn’t expect. He has done this since day 1 and I am genuinely stunned.

Sana was and is beautiful. She was breathtaking from start to finish. She was human and difficult and gentle and funny and weird and intelligent and sensitive and so so much. Her mistakes didn’t feel unusual, her reasoning was impassioned and never once was she treated by the writing with anything other than affection even when she behaved wrongly. She was surrounded by beauty and at every turn she was just truly truly wonderful to behold. I didn’t know what to expect from this season but this? This genuine and total adoration for her. Ludo, that has you written all over it.

I have so much to say about the individual characters and moments and issues and THAT LAST EPISODE but as ever, if Skam It can be held up for one thing alone it is the dynamics between the characters and how they’re written with warmth and humanity and total deep affection. There was no dynamic went untouched, no moment wasted even in the background. Everyone was given their time and I didn’t feel it took away at all from Sana’s story... it always added to it. Rami/Sana, Filo/Marti, Fede/Sana, Luchino/Silvia, Gio/Marti, Eva/Gio, Sana/Ele, Filo/Sana, Marti/Sana, Marti/Eva, Sana/Malik, Elia/Gio, Filo/Ele.... every single one.

Mess and emotion and mistakes and difficulties were written in such an honest, blunt way and felt so true, so real as if these characters were exceptionally genuine. Especially Sana’s voicemail and her talk with Marti.

Every single shot was just fucking beautiful. I mean there’s no other way to say it. It was all achingly gorgeous, tiny little moments like the sound of a storm of the glare of the light or the steam from those hot baths (WHERE DID HE FIND THOSE). GOOD GOD.

The music. Hands down my favourite soundtrack of any Skam season and there have been MANY I’ve adored but this took the bloody biscuit. A perfect mixture and fitted each scene so beautifully, often adding to it so seamlessly like when Nico was playing seeker in hide and seek or when Sana was praying or the street procession’s voices...

And religion. I am not religious and I don’t speak for anyone who shares Sana’s experiences. I want to hear from you so so much. What did you think? As someone from outside that beautiful community and religious experience, it felt utterly breathtaking. It felt casual and normal as a way of life (whereas religion can often be portrayed as a burden) and it also felt celebrated and lit up from the inside to show the truth of it and the beauty within, the values it holds... not to mention the difficulties. Sana being able to speak to Marti the way she did or explain in her voicemail. Her anger. I felt it and I learned from her words. She just wanted to be seen, to be considered as herself and watching Malik look at her like he did and Marti being upfront with her but all because he likes her and their personalities fit and seeing her with her Mamma navigating being a teenager alongside the idea of a future.

I can’t finish without a mention of my boys. They were, as always, heart and bloody soul. My Marti was so present and overwhelming for me. I will 100% want to write god damn essays about him and about Nico but I didn’t feel he was out of character for a moment despite the major tests they threw at him, mainly because they laid the groundwork before it kicked off. We saw him from an outside view and his brutal honesty, his lashing out through fear and his sarcasm and stubbornness was explored in such depth... but his love for Nico was everywhere. All over it. As two young, complex guys and Nico with a past and vulnerabilities... both felt so raw and desperate at all times without ever losing the foundation they have. The effort to allow Nico to have as much of a voice as possible while still keeping that solid POV on Sana... I’m grateful. We all want to see more but the way it played out didn’t leave me feeling TOO wanting (EXCEPT FOR THAT UNDER THE BED SCENE... oh the desperation to see that). Testing them in that way was a brave move by Ludo but I am so pleased he did because they weren’t reduced to background models. They were woven into Sana’s story and given respect and real moments of beauty and honesty. I will NEVER BE ABLE TO GET MARTI’S HEARTBROKEN RED PUFFY TEARY EYES OUT OF MY HEAD. And the fact Gio was the one to lock them away...! Also. Hands down one of the best Marti moments was that snuggly hug on the beach, the fact that Nico looks at home and they’re both a little fragile but comforted by each other and then Marti and his god damn mouth asking if they can throw the guy in the water... hahahahaha. And Nico smiles. Because he knows Marti and loves him exactly as he is. Also a moment for Luchi and Silvia because I have a LOT to say but to see him trusted and to see his heart alongside his Luchi side was so meaningful and they were this refreshing special surprise.

And Gio. Gioooooo. Yet again. No matter which season, he felt fundamental despite not being the main. He is warm and navigates between them all with this sense of solidity and support. He’s just LOVELY. He was never missing. None of them were. I loved seeing him settled with Sofia (who was never belittled - only by Eva and hahahahaha yes they included her rolling her eyes again) but also clearly still entirely in love with Eva. That moment he told Cannegallo to get in line I was a weepy mess. The ending. Oh the god darn ending. That voice and hearing Eva’s words spoken back to him, hearing how loved he is and also reflecting on life... seeing them get back together so naturally. I honestly couldn’t have asked for more.

Also a moment for Federica. STRIKING AS ALL HELL. Fierce and willing to learn. Honest and she dazzled me.

I am unable to summarise properly as I’d write all day and it’s 4am! I have so much to say. I was bowled over by emotion watching the entire thing. But I was absolutely reminded of what a gift this show is and how precious I consider it to be. This season has wildly surpassed every expectation I had and god damn soared into the distance. I am stunned and I want to live, as always, in those orangey glowy scenes of warmth. It’s like being wrapped in a big blanket with someone telling you - “life is going to be hard but you’re ok, you’re going to be ok”. That’s how Skam Italia feels. Written, performed, edited and delivered with affection and love and i genuinely couldn’t be more grateful for it as I am this morning (did I mention it’s 4am).

I will write tons more. You know me. I will be talking endless about this season and you won’t shut me up but, for now, I hope you all enjoyed it as much as me. I don’t think I’m quite prepared to hear anything but love at the moment so I shall see you all tomorrow.

And, I hadn’t a clue if season 5 is a thing or even a possibility of any magnitude. Whatever happens, I want Ludo Bessegato with his hands all over it, loving these characters and taking us with them as Eva said though messes. I hope they don’t leave each other either ❤️ AND GIVE ME 10 EPISODES OF GIOVANNI GARAU FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. The world wants it.

Aaaaanyway, WHOEVER DECIDED IT WOULD EVER BE A GOOD IDEA TO BINGE A SKAM SEASON. Too many emotions. This shit needs time to digest in between. I feel like I just pushed off an emotional cliff. And on that note. I sleep. I love you all and I’m not even sorry for my meltdown! I’m classing this as my Italian revision. Job well done 😘

#skam italia #skam italia spoilers #FUCK ME IM EMOTIONAL #thoughts etc

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marueonmain · 4 years

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WINDFLOWER

part six ~ to be more normal ~

(part one) (part two) (part three) (part four) (part five) (part six)

A/N: I want to thank each of you who have continued reading and supporting me through all these parts (that’s almost 12k words total!) and I hope you keep wanting to stick around until the end. Stay safe. Stay healthy.

Summary: Alex visits with James & Fraser in a bid to distract himself from thinking about his feelings toward Y/N. George is concerned.

Pairing: imallexx x reader

Warning: Implications of Disordered Eating Habits. References to a Real/Imagined Domestic. An Absurd Amount of Pining.

Word Count: 2.4k

Subdued shades of orange with the occasional single brushstrokes of pink projected through his bedroom window and painted him in light. A bird chirped, and another chirped back in a cycle of communication lost on other animals. Alex did not realize the change outside his window until the light gradient settled on a loud yellow and created glare on his monitor.

It was sunrise, and he had just finished editing for his most recent video. Where the hours of work went was unclear as it played back with the same level of effects as other videos on his channel. But the hours showed in his fringe, darkened with grease, and in his hands that shook from low blood sugar.

Sleep was for the strong – for those who executed enough psychological control to shush their thoughts. To untie their mental boat and let it drift into the oblivion sea. Alex was not one of those people. Quieting his internal monologue required medication that put him in a state not unlike how he imaged it felt to be roofied.

Or else he did not sleep.

And Alex did not sleep that night. Not because he needed to edit or because he was so busy he did not realize he was tired. No, none of that. He knew he was tired: exhausted even: his limbs felt heavier as, throughout the evening, his blood was spliced and diluted with concrete mix.

Why did he not take his medication? Why not sleep? He did not want to be trapped in ~the dream~ again.

Despite his fundamental understanding of the uncontrollable manner in which the unconscious forms dreams, Alex was consumed with guilt for dreaming about kissing his friend's girlfriend. So, he punished himself: not allowing his mind rest nor his stomach food as he threw himself into his editing.

He would not allow himself think about it long enough to come to the obvious conclusion – that the real issue was not the dream itself. Despite what imallexx edits might guide someone to believe (with their cutesy music over compilations of smiling pictures or clips of him laughing), Alex was a young man in his twenties. And young men (who enjoy kissing) think and fantasize and dream about kissing.

And far more than kissing but regardless... He had dreamed about kissing his friends' girlfriends before: or at least Mia that one time. Ok, two times. He had dreamed about kissing cute men he saw on the train. He had even once dreamed about kissing Princess Leia.

It was natural. But Alex's thoughts about Y/N felt damning, felt wrong. Perhaps because it was the first instance in which he thought he had a chance to get the girl. Not that he would do; he refused.

It hit him. If he were always doing something else, then he would simply not have time to think about it – about her. Alex grabbed a pencil off his desk and his JoJo Siwa notebook and wrote a schedule for the coming week.

His hand cramped from furiously trying to keep up with dictating the information as it spilled from his head. He finished writing, but there were still stretches of time to fill-up including that entire morning. Was he desperate enough to disconnect from himself that he would risk the Budweiser Bug to visit his other friends outside his apartment building? Yes.

While rummaging around his bedroom for fresh(er) clothing to wear, Alex swiped a hat off his desk and concealed his unwashed hair with it. Not his tiktok bucket hat nor his iconic pink one, it was a lilac snapback with an image of lavender embroidered on the side. He rang Fraser.

“Hello?” Fraser answered with a voice bogged down with exhaustion.

“How’re you doing?” Alex greeted.

“Um.” (a pause – a processing delay) “Fine. Good. Yeah, what about you?”

“Trying to keep busy.” He tucked his wallet and keys into the pocket of a pair of joggers he found hanging, oddly enough, over the towel rail in his bathroom. Changing into them required a series of short jumping motions as he used just one hand. “You have any videos to film that I could jump in on?”

“Well I’ve been brainstorming ideas for a new series called…”

At the bathroom sink: Alex did not wait for the water to warm before splashing it over his face. He did a quick once-over and washed his cheeks and forehead with hand soap. Picking up his toothbrush from its holder stirred an uneasiness in him, he could not explain; he brushed his teeth and spit without rinsing.

Returning into the conversation he caught the middle of what would sound like a rant or passionate tangent if he did not know that was just how Fraser talked, “…and I’ve been working on a script for something on social repose—”

“Another needs to be stopped?" asked Alex.

Fraser laughed, letting it linger before continuing, "You got me. It's not done, but I could definitely use you for some reaction bits."

"Great! I'll be setting off within the hour." Ambling around – as is the norm during phone calls – Alex found himself in the kitchen. Half-full liters of lemonade, grocers bags, and dirty dishes cluttered the counters. He worked around the rubbish to make himself scrambled eggs with ham.

Fraser asked, "And you're sure about leaving the apartment? With the Bug? We could do a discord-call."

"Might as well get in some time on the train before things shut down."

"Alright, mate," there was a smile behind Fraser's voice, "just don't get arrested."

With their call ended, Alex finished cooking. He ate his entire breakfast in the same amount of time it took him to pull on his shoes.

During the train ride, he turned his phone's volume to eighty percent and blasted his music through his earbuds. His playlist was a mixture of two to three alt-rock or indie pop bands with a sprinkling of mainstream hits: a calm and comfortable backbeat throughout. No outlier tracks that burst into hard-hitting or exceptionally fast beats – nothing that might pump-up his adrenaline or be useful to scream along with in a fit of anger. That was not the connection he made with music in his formative years. Music to him was something to drown out that pesky internal monologue when lying in bed for too long – doing nothing – but perhaps pondering on some heartbreaking or otherwise emotional line in a song.

He arrived at Fraser and James' apartment when it was still technically morning. Knocking on the door, he was greeted with frantic barking and his tired ~obviously hungover~ friend.

After fussing over Kenji, Alex spotted the camera set-up in the kitchen and took his seat. Fraser and him watched several of social repose's music videos: covers of emo electronic, synth-pop songs, and a lot more original EMD songs than either man guessed – and all were dreadful. Neither could sit through a single video for more than forty-five seconds, and most of the footage they shot was just of their mouths hanging open in a disturbed shock.

Nonetheless, it was a great distraction. Alex liked feeling like he was helping out smaller channels – even if it was just those who were his friends.

Only as Fraser was cleaning up his equipment and Alex was sitting on the couch playing with Kenji, did James clamber out of bed and stroll out of his bedroom.

"Ow. What was that?" Alex asked in an exaggerated voice when the shiba nipped at yet another one of his fingers. Turning his attention to James, he asked, "Has he been biting a lot recently?"

James answered in his softer and calmer 'tired' voice, "He only bites sometimes. His brain is probably just locked on the idea of food right now; this is around the time Fraser usually feeds him."

"I just wanted a picture for instagram." Alex tried to find a good angle to hold his phone. He pushed Kenji to sit on his lap for a nice picture (which was sure to get hundreds of comments and love heart emojis), but the shiba was far too hyper to sit still. The few useable photos he got were of Kenji biting at and tugging the strings of his hoodie. "Come on, Kenj."

"Reckon he knows what you're doing with your phone, just mugging you off on purpose."

Alex hung around the apartment for the rest of the afternoon: enjoying an ubereats lunch and having James crush him at mario kart...multiple times in a row. The three talked youtube and the continuing aftershocks and effects of the ad crisis, and Fraser asked for feedback on a few video ideas.

An hour or two from sunset, Alex said his goodbyes and caught the train home to his apartment. Upon unlocking the front door, he was met with an interrogation.

"And where have you been all day?" asked George standing with his feet planted shoulder-width apart, and his arms crossed over his chest – the spitting image of a disapproving parent to a reckless teenager.

Smiling his fang-displaying side smile, Alex challenged, "Why do you need to know?"

"Sammy came over to film the opening pokemon cards video, and you weren't here. Neither of us could get a hold of you. Do you even care about my upload schedule?" It was a half-humorous rant with an eerie sense of latent seriousness.

"Phone died." He shrugged, not looking his flatmate in the eye and certainly not wanting to admit the truth – he put his phone on do not disturb earlier that morning, muting most everyone, including George and Sammy.

There was not an ounce of belief in George's expression, "Fine. Where were you, though, for real? You never leave the flat, let alone disappear; almost called Will and got a search team going."

"I was just filming with Fraser." Alex bent over to take off his trainers. There was a click from his shoulder when he did – alarming for such young bones. "We should host something soon."

And he meant soon. As talk of a complete social shutdown, rather than just more public health advisements, dominated news outlets; the thought of non-essential businesses being made to close their doors was frightening. And what was worse than the eking paranoia seeping into every day, was the horrifying realization that the pubs were considered non-essential.

Uncrossing his arms, George's posture shifted to be more normal. His brow furrowed as he seemed to examine his flatmate heavily; even so, he nodded in agreement. "Sure, we could do that."

"Great," Alex chirped and started toward his bedroom.

George grabbed his arm as he tried to walk past him. His hand clasped tight enough that his fingers touched his thumb, and nails would have dug into the pale skin – if he had nails that is. Both men were silent amongst the awkwardness of the interaction.

Sidestepping out of the armlock, Alex waited for George to speak.

"You're doing ok. Right, Al?"

"Yeah. I'm ok."

"But, you'd tell me if you weren't."

"Of course." Alex left to his bedroom. It was in a bad state, but he did not bother himself with picking clothes off the floor or taking food wrappers from his side table to the kitchen bin. He pulled his phone from his pocket and checked for messages: sure enough, there were eleven messages from George: ranging from asking where he was to blaming his laziness for ruining their chance to film.

Alex flopped himself onto his bed and started to scroll through his photos with Kenji. There was not much choice, so he took the least blurry one and posted it to instagram – with a bright filter and a sarcastic caption that took him longer to come up with than he would have liked.

Fifty minutes he spent scrolling through instagram, occasionally checking back to watch the likes on his photo go up and to reply to some of the first commenters. It was mind-numbing in the good and proper sense.

Until he saw it – and it was not his fault, he just happened upon it – and it sent his thoughts into hyperdrive.

A post. A photo. Y/N sitting on her sofa in the dark with the one light source (presumably her television) from behind the camera casting a blue light across her face. One hand clutching the blanket in her lap as the other hand was held up. Jewel-like eyes peering through her fingers and connecting with the camera. A smile playing purposefully on her lips.

If Alex's thoughts at that moment were put into a blender, they might still have come out making more sense than they did in his head. Eyes. Lips. Blue. Watching? Angelic. Eyes. Fingers. Dancing. Blue. Lips. Taste. Lips. Soft. Photographer. Photographer.

Before he might ask for the app to load more photos, Alex's burst of energy and hectic but classic over-thinking was interrupted. From above him came the sound of muffled shouting. He held his breath, stilled as if a prey animal not wanting to be spotted, and focused an ear to the noise.

There were no words he could pick out, but from what he could tell – or from the details he filled in – it was not a light argument of few words but something that might supersede a genuine scrap. And it was coming from Sammy and Y/N's apartment.

As he listened, his imagination wandered. Alex visualized himself, rushing to Y/N's aid and wrapping his thin arms around her in more emotional comfort than physical protection. He saw her turn to him with wet eyes and a red nose before burying her face into his shirt. It would be uncomfortable – as it is to be around distressed people. Yet it would be comfortable – as she would fit against him so well.

Again, his imagination wandered. Alex visualized himself as the one shouting at Y/N and growing angrier as she refused his hard-hitting gaze. He saw her turn to him with wet eyes and a red nose before hiccupping out a sob and dashing from the room. No. That was not right. It was wrong. He would not— could not do that.

#imallexx #imallexx imagine #imallexx x reader #alex elmslie #alex elmslie imagine #alex elmslie x reader #internet sensation #eboys #commentary crew #inabber #james marriott #memeulous #kenji the shiba

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se-ono-waise-ilia · 4 years

Text

Training the Perranth City Guard

Summary: After about year of rebuilding, Perranth starts to recruit and train the City Guard. Lorcan and Elide are invited to attend their orientation, and Lorcan has some thoughts on the role of the City Guard in Perranth. (Takes places about a year after end of KoA)

Genre: Social Justice, Community, Family, some cute Elorcan fluff at the end.

This story was inspired by current events, which calls to make major change in police training, funding, and more. This is not a perfect story intended to capture all components of the movement. It’s more of a nod to some of its important values.

—-

Elide wasn’t impressed with the City Guard orientation meeting, nor was she disappointed. It all seemed standard procedure - the patrols, schedule, laws that the Guard had to follow, actions by citizens that warranted punitive measures, and such. Elide understood this organization was necessary to the city, but it left her feeling uncomfortable.

She grew up in a place where total control was enforced by guards. Obviously not like the guards in her up-and-coming Perranth, but with similar duties. The Valg guards in Morath had almost the same responsibilities as this City Guard, but Perranth was supposed to be the opposite of Morath: peaceful, free, inclusive, an all-around good place to live. So why did the duties of the Perranth City Guard remind her so much of the guards of Morath?

As she contemplated her unsettled feelings, she glanced at her husband. She immediately noticed the subtle tells that he was also in a state of contemplation. First of all, he was sitting beside her. Normally, he stood behind her or off to the right - more so a warrior than lord, which was a powerful statement to her colleagues in court. But sitting beside her, she could tell he was being intentional about his choice. There was a reason he didn’t want to come across as an intimidating warrior.

He was also hunched forward, forearms on his knees, and hands clasped together. As though he wanted to take action, but was intentionally holding back and strategizing.

But more than his position and body posture, the expression in his eyes struck Elide. It was the expression Lorcan used when he was contemplating one of his fundamental values. An expression he used to direct at her when he was trying to atone for past actions.

Elide no longer felt unnerved, but intrigued. She could sense Lorcan was about to do something significant, but she didn’t know what. She had a feeling she would agree with it and play along.

Lorcan sensed her thoughtful gaze, and made eye contact with her. He didn’t change his facial expression. Then his eye travelled to her slightly pregnant belly.

He continued to stare at her as the facilitator of the training continued on. His name was Captain Chase. He had a very text-book look and character for the leader of a City Guard: experienced, confident, strategic, no-nonsense, efficient above all else. Lorcan didn’t seem impressed with him either, as Elide could tell he was lost in thought and barely listening to the man.

Elide tuned back in to the training, “…These patrols will be directed to these parts of the city in particular, so we have a constant presence where crime is most likely to occur,” Both Elide and Lorcan looked at the map to see where Captain Chase was indicating, and it was the part of Perranth were the impoverished population of new immigrants were struggling to find secure housing. It was something the council of Perranth had been discussing, but no action had been taken as of yet.

Lorcan’s face shifted to disapproval at Captain Chase’s strategy, and he looked to Elide for permission. Elide didn’t know what her husband was thinking, but she trusted him to say and do what he felt needed to be done. She nodded.

“Stop.” Lorcan stated.

Captain Chases stopped mid-sentence, his body frozen. Although the attendees had been quietly listening and writing notes, Elide could feel the room stop moving and breathing altogether. The presence her husband had…she couldn’t help but sigh internally.

Lorcan slowly stood up, and walked to the front of the room. He turned to face the City Guard. Captain Chase went to stand to the side, understanding that his lord had everyone’s undivided attention.

Lorcan stood with his arms crossed, and he stared at no one in particular. Elide could sense he intended to be careful with his words to make a point. Lorcan did not have the charisma of Queen Aelin for inspiring speeches, but he understood how to make an effective counterargument.

Elide also held her breath, but at last her husband spoke, “You know who I am. You know my experiences. So you know I’ve been present in cities…at various stages of…existence.”

The attendees in the room gave a slight nod, while looking intently at her husband. It went without saying, the stories of when Lorcan was a key part in demolishing some cities.

Lorcan continued, “I’ve see many variations of a City Guard, most of which have similar roles to which Captain Chase was instructing.”

Captain Chase did not respond with words or body language. Elide could tell the Captain was uncertain of what Lorcan was about to say, as was she.

Lorcan paused for another moment, “The Captain said there should be a heavier patrol presence in the part of our city that is struggling the most. As if it is expected that there will be more crime in that neighborhood.”

The room, if possible, felt even more silent and still. Captain Chase tensed up slightly at the implied critique.

“I have a question for you all,” Lorcan nodded to himself, as if he approved of his strategy, “Why is it expected for crime to occur in this neighborhood?”

Nobody answered or raised their hand.

Elide shook her head and said, “They may not feel safe, and they may not have choices for survival that are law abiding.” Her answer came from her experience lying her way into a job, and breaking many other laws at a significant moment of her life. And Lorcan’s life.

Lorcan nodded at his wife, “Other thoughts?” He challenged the crowd.

Soon, participants began to call out:

“Insecure housing.”

“They are hungry.”

“The don’t have productive ways to spend time, like a job or school.”

There were some more answers, and then Captain Chase spoke, “They feel that their dignity has been taken away from them, due to circumstances out of their control.”

Lorcan stared at the Captain. The Captain stared back. Lorcan nodded in approval, and Elide swore she could see the Captain’s body relax ever so subtly.

Lorcan stared back into the crowd, “Do you think extra patrols are going to help these people feel safe and supported?”

There were shakes of heads and murmurings that gave the consensus: no.

“Although City Guard patrols are necessary to an extent, the City Guard should also spend their time supporting our community in a way that truly makes the people feel safe and supported.”

The room paused again, but with awe rather than uncertainty. Elide beamed at her husband and lord of Perranth.

“What exactly are you suggesting, lord Lochan?” Captain Chase prompted.

Lorcan looked to the table next to time, retrieved paper and a writing utensil, and handed the materials to a random attendee in the front row, “What’s your name?”

“Gal,” the attendee responded.

“Can you record the following?” Elide again beamed at her husband. He had been working on asking people to do tasks rather than barking at them. With lots of reminders from her, she might add.

The man nodded and readied the writing utensil.

Lorcan looked to the crowd, “I ask for you to call out a problem or crime, but then call out a preventative solution that would likely prevent that problem or crime. For example, if the problem is insecure housing, the preventative solution would be constructing residential buildings.” He nodded to Gal, who wrote it down.

After a moment, people called out:

“People are hungry even though we don’t have a food shortage. Provide more areas in the city to get food, perhaps at no little or no cost to specific populations.”

“People need a way to earn money and contribute. Perhaps there could be a resource to help people find jobs in Perranth.”

“Some are traumatized in a variety of ways from the war and even before then. There should be a place that helps them recover and hopefully heal.” There were additional sounds of agreement to this point. Elide would very much like for Perranth to have healers. Not just to help her figure out her newly healed ankle, but also someone therapeutic to talk to.

“People need may need new skills to find work. Apprenticeships from current businesses could help with that.”

“Some do not speak the same languages, which can escalate emotions. Offering translators with common services could decrease frustrating misunderstandings.”

Elide spoke again, “Some people may not have had educational opportunities to learn how to read and write,” her voice trembled in insecurity, and Lorcan looked upon her lovingly. This look gave her strength, “Perranth not only needs places to learn, but it should be the right for every person in this city to learn at no cost or sacrifice.”

She could feel loving gazes from others, in addition to that of her husband. Upon taking up the mantle as Lady of Perranth, she tried desperately to hide her illiteracy. But after a while, it felt like she was deceiving the council and lying to her people. Her guilt overruled her insecurity.

With no small amount of anxiety, she began to ask people other than Lorcan for help with reading and writing. She expected humiliation, but instead received unending kindness and support. Not only were the people of Perranth respectful of her illiteracy, but they were overly eager to take it upon themselves to teach her. Everywhere she went, and every conversation she had; her citizens would point out letters, numbers, and words to her and explain their meaning.

It became a bonding experience for her and her people. The love she had felt since being open about her insecurity was incompatible to anything she had every felt. It was such a different kind of love than the romance she shared with her husband, and she treasured the feeling. She still had a lot to learn, but she was now able to read very simple texts and write basic prose.

So when she felt the room’s eyes on her, she felt nothing but support and admiration. Then she winked at Lorcan, and he smiled at her.

She didn’t know if it was her earnest participation, Lorcan’s rare display of endearing facial expressions, or the momentum gained from the powerful conversation, but answers from many more attendees come flooding out into the conversation.

An attendee next to Gal got him more paper, and many others in the room were also processing the conversation by writing down thoughts. Elide’s eyes lined with silver at the thought of her City Guard being more than just enforcers of law and justice.

After about 15 minutes of whole group conversation and writing, Captain Chase interrupted, “Forgive me lord and lady,” the room shifted their attention on the Captain, “I recognize the value of the City Guard contributing the the welfare of the community, but these ideas seem more like philanthropic work. Isn’t this the work of others, not the City Guard?”

Lorcan stared at the Captain, and this time the Captain showed difficulty in staring back, and eventually averted his eyes. Elide could tell the Captain was experiencing internal conflict. He wasn’t opposed to the community work, but Elide could tell he was also set in his traditional mindset of the responsibilities of a City Guard.

Elide understood this was her moment to lead. She stood, and walked to stand beside her husband. She could feel the room straightening up, even Lorcan adjusted his posture. She first looked to the Captain, “Yes, this work is not the sole responsibility of the City Guard. And the traditional work of the City Guard will still be respected and done,” she paused, “but on a much smaller scale.”

She then looked to the attendees in the room, “Lord Lochan and I desire the City Guard to have a presence of community support, more than a presence of law and order.

This conversation is only the beginning. Gal, could you please recruit someone sitting near you to help write a copy of everything you just recorded?” Gal nodded, “I will bring this copy to the council. And we will get to work on organizing departments to focus on these issues and solutions if they don’t already exist. The expectation is that the City Guard will use their hours of work to contribute to these causes however appropriate: manual labor, administrative labor, community outreach, and such.”

The Captain boldly countered, “Forgive me my lady, but won’t that send a message to the people that the City Guard is…” he searched for the word, but Elide could tell he was trying not to say something controversial.

She understood his intention, and silenced him with a hand, “Yes, this City Guard will not be like those of other cities. It will not have the tone of intimidation and ultimate authority.”

An attendee stood up. He was almost the size of Lorcan, and almost matched his intimidating presence. Elide had not observed him participating in the conversation until this point, “But if people do not feel the intimidation and authority of those in charge, why would they obey the laws?” Elide noticed this question was directed at Lorcan, not her. She huffed internally.

She analyzed the man for a moment, and saw someone who had used fear as a tool of control. Elide looked to her husband.

For a moment, the man and Lorcan were having a stand off in eye contact, “What’s your name?”

“Key,” he responded. Key was looking to Lorcan for agreement, but it was clear Lorcan was using this moment as a time to think about how to spin the question.

At last, “Everyone stand up.” Everyone did right away.

Lorcan looked towards Elide, “My lady,” he offered his hand. She took it. He led to to one side of the room. Then he let go, and positioned himself on the other side of the room, near the Captain. Everyone remained standing.

“If you have chosen to be a peaceful and law-abiding citizen of Perranth because you know how dangerous I am, and you fear me; stand on this side of the room.” Nobody dared to move, not even Key.

“But…if you have chose to be a peaceful and law-abiding citizen of Perranth because you love and cherish your home and community, stand on the side of the room with lady Lochan.”

After a moment, the people began to move. Elide observed the vast majority, including all of the many women, move to stand near her. Key, and six other men who looked just as menacing and eager for a fight, moved to stand near Lorcan. Elide looked to the Captain, and the Captain was the final person to choose his place.

He crossed the room to stand next to Elide.

There was a moment of quiet as she felt the attendees of the room consider why they chose their place. Elide felt an incredible sense of purpose and pride at the fact that most attendees essentially agreed to the point that they were motivated by love, not fear.

She moved to the center of the room and said, “We want the citizens of Perranth to love and cherish the City Guard as you love and cherish them. But to do that, you need to earn their love through being of service by helping the city in the ways that matter most.”

Lorcan moved to stand next to her, “Your original squad assignments are now invalid. At our next meeting, we will have sign up sheets for all of the causes we listed here today, and maybe some more that we have yet to think of. Your new squad will be the people who sign up for the same cause as you.”

Before the Captain could speak up again, Lorcan continued, “We will still have a number of squads participate in traditional duties of the City Guard. They will alternate every week, such that every squad is mostly doing community work, and sometimes doing traditional work.”

The he stared at the Captain, “And this traditional City Guard work will not explicitly focus on specific populations. They will be fair and just in how they patrol and manage challenging situations. I will personally observe and hold our guards accountable.” Her husband looked more serious than usual at that statement, and the Captain nodded with agreement and respect.

Elide kept the conversation on track, “Captain Chase will be in charge of the functions of traditional City Guard duties under the supervision of lord Lochan. We will need someone in charge of City Guard community support project management, who will attend council meetings and be under my supervision.

Does anyone here have experience managing large groups of people and multiple projects?”

A woman came forward, “My name is Dominique. I used to be in charge of a school in Perranth before… I have significant experience connecting with children, leading teachers, and managing school logistics simultaneously.”

Elide nodded with approval at the woman, “Would anyone else like to submit their candidacy?” No one did, “Very well. Captain Dominique, you will be in charge of the document Gal has written, meet with me, and attend tomorrow’s council meeting with me.”

Elide and Dominique smiled at each other.

Dominique nodded and went to Gal. Elide looked to Lorcan. Her husband addressed the room, “That is all for today. You will be contacted when Captain Dominique announces the second orientation.”

He then turned to the group of men who stood on his side of the room, “I see you men, and I understand you. But if you’re looking for a fight, you are not to be a part of the City Guard,” the men looked outraged, and Lorcan continued, “instead, you will be the guards of our personal estate, and get to fight me on a regular basis as sparring partners.”

The outrage on their faces simmered down as they contemplated this new offer. Lorcan elaborated, “Your duties will include full time grounds patrol, and discretely guarding lady Lochan. When our child is born, you will extend your duties to support the well being of our heir.

I am offering you the job you want, but the only violence you will receive is training with me,” he smiled grimly at them, and Elide noticed them begin to grin back, “Otherwise, you will act essentially as peaceful shields to our home and family. What say you?”

The looked at each other, then took a knee. Key stated, “We serve our lord and lady.” The others repeated Key.

Elide wouldn’t have known what to do with such characters longing for violence in a time for peace. Lorcan apparently thought giving the offer the fight him was a solution…and perhaps Lorcan needed a violent outlet as much as these men did.

Lorcan looked satisfied, “Report to me at dawn tomorrow on the sparring field outside my estate.”

Elide could sense a hint of excitement from her husband. Lorcan couldn’t really be himself around anyone but Elide, as he didn’t want Perranth to fear him. Even though Lorcan clearly didn’t want these aggressive men patrolling a peaceful Perranth, she thought it was possible that Lorcan wanted some like-minded warriors to give him a sense of companionship. Lorcan could likely be his true warrior-self around Key and these men. Elide wondered what nickname Aelin would name this group…

He then looked to the City Guard, “If you notice others will an unquenchable thirst for violence, send them my way immediately. Otherwise, dismissed.”

Every attendee showed some sign of respect to them with a bow, nod of the head, wave, some even asked for a handshake. Including Captain Chase. Gal gave a copy of the records to Captain Dominique, and the other to Elide.

Lorcan pressed a gentle hand again Elide’s back, and she accepted his escort to their next meeting. As they walked, she spoke, “Well that was an unexpected but welcome turn of events.”

Lorcan gave her a proud look, “Our home has a unique opportunity to start fresh in times of peace and plenty.”

She stopped to look at him knowingly, “And your intention was purely for the good of society?”

He stopped with her, and let his gaze wander to her belly. With one hand, he caressed the place where their child grew, and he used his other hand to gently press his wife against him. He looked down into her eyes, and she saw the tiniest glimmer of guilt.

“I realize that in the past, prioritizing the one I love without thought for others had devastating consequences,” he took a breath, “and I regret the narrow focus I once had.”

She put her hands on his face and lovingly caressed his cheeks with her thumbs. He continued, “This is the time for me to love more than just you. To love our city, so it will thrive. And be a safe and happy place for our child to grow up, knowing that love.”

He leaned down as she pressed up, and they met in the middle for a chaste kiss.

When she pulled away, she chuckled with the thought of a silly but possibly wonderful idea.

“What is it?” Her husband questioned her as they once again began walking, his hand still on her back.

“Well, arts programming is a service that will provide jobs and entertainment, which will help sustain peace and community.”

He looked at her to continue.

She smiled up at him, “Perhaps you could train your new lackeys in flaming sword throwing, and your could start a Perranth circus,” she couldn’t help but burst out in giggles.

Lorcan’s eyes lit up and he chuckled. They rounded a corner and he pressed Elide into a wall as she continued to giggle, “And will there be a beautiful oracle with red lips oggling me in the crowd?”

Elide quelled her giggles, “Always.”

The kissing to follow was anything but chaste.

#elorcan #elide lochan #lorcan #elide x lorcan #lady elide #lord lorcan lochan #throne of glass #kingdom of ash #tog #kos #sarah j mass #perranth #lady of perranth #lorcan salvaterre #SJM #sjmaas #tog fanfic

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entrapdaknation · 4 years

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Season 5 of She-Ra: What I Disliked

In a previous post, I listed the many things I loved about the series finale of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. The ending was satisfying and deeply moving, leaving me euphoric. However, a few flaws stand out. In this post, I’d like to list a few things about the fifth season that confused or disappointed me.

(1) SO. MANY. LOOSE ENDS.

- What became of the Galactic Horde clones? The series ends before we see their fates. Horde Prime’s death would have sent an emotional shockwave through the clone army as each soldier’s connection to the hive mind was severed. How did the clones cope with this existential crisis? What did they do with themselves after losing their god-emperor? How did the Etherians and the other subjects of Horde Prime’s empire react to the clones’ crisis? Did anyone help them forge new lives?

- What became of all the former Etherian Horde soldiers, particularly those who were raised in the Horde? Did they successfully reintegrate into Etherian society? Are they living in marginal communities such as the Crimson Waste, as Kyle, Rogelio, and Lonnie are shown to be? We never learn their fates.

- What becomes of the former Etherian Horde leaders, Hordak and Catra? Do they atone in any way for their crimes? Do the Etherians accept them after years of warfare and their role in summoning Horde Prime? We’re led to assume that they get happy endings with the women they love, but the other Etherians won’t soon forget their actions.

- Does Imp ever reunite with Hordak? Imp is Hordak’s “son” and the only person he trusted before bonding with Entrapta, but Hordak seems strangely unconcerned about him. Does Hordak worry about where Imp could be? Does he ever go looking for the boy? I realize that the writers wanted to focus on Hordak’s relationship with Entrapta, but I thought this was a glaring loose end.

- What became of Angella? Did she truly die after being trapped between dimensions in “The Portal”, or is she still floating around in hyperspace? The series never resolves her situation.

(2) Insufficient use of minor characters.

Season 5 focuses heavily on Adora, Catra, Glimmer, Bow, and Entrapta, with the other princesses and sorcerers playing supportive roles. I realize that the writers needed to conclude the main story arcs -- Adora rediscovering her She-Ra powers, Catra’s redemption, and Catradora -- but several fascinating characters were woefully underutilized.

Double Trouble’s shapeshifting abilities and love of chaos could have caused Horde Prime (or the Rebellion) endless headaches. Imp’s spying abilities, history with Hordak, and genetic connection to the Galactic Horde never come into play. Despite her knowledge of the First Ones’ war, awareness of past and present times streams, and attunement to Etheria, Razz appears for all of five seconds in the finale. Hordak should have received a lot more screen time, and I’m not just saying that as a shameless Hordak fan. For example, his reintegration into the Galactic Horde could have been a great opportunity to show viewers more of clone life.

All of these unique characters could have been used creatively in the story to great effect, but they were neglected or forgotten outright by the writers.

(3) Insufficient world-building.

I love She-Ra and the Princesses of Power dearly, but the show has always been light on world-building, and season 5 was no exception. I was hoping that season 5 would have given viewers more background on the First Ones, Horde Prime’s empire, and Hordak’s early years on Etheria, but it did not.

How did Hordak get the Etherian Horde off the ground with only a broken spaceship, desperation, and the charisma of a briar patch? What was the role of Scorpion royals in the early Horde? Where are the descendants of the First Ones now, including Adora’s biological family, and how did Light Hope know where to look for them? Does Hordak’s ancestral race still exist, and if so, what is their culture like? What is Horde Prime, and how did he form the Galactic Horde? What does Galactic Horde oppression look like on other planets? Is the She-Ra mantle a magical power, a benevolent Etherian spirit who possesses hosts, or something else entirely? I came away from the show with more questions than answers.

(4) Shadow Weaver’s fate.

Shadow Weaver’s self-sacrifice came with little character development preceding it to make it plausible. It felt like a cheap way of getting rid of a character who no longer served a purpose in the narrative.

As series endings go, I was grateful for everything the writers gave fans: emotionally satisfying resolutions to character arcs, canon ships left and right (especially Entrapdak), positive messages about second chances and the power of love, a hard-hitting allegory for religious fundamentalism, and groundbreaking LGBTQ representation. Series finales are rarely this generous to fans, and everyone in the audience came away with something they wanted. I just saw some flaws that bugged me, and I needed to get these observations out of my system,

#shera #spop #season5 #season5finale #hordak #razz #catra #imp #angella #doubletrouble #hordeprime #hordeclones #adora #shadoweaver

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i-dreamed-i-had-a-son · 4 years

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Thoughts on that (formerly?) annoying episode

Star Trek Season 1 Episode 24, This Side of Paradise, is (was) a frustrating episode for me. Spock, who up until this point has never explicitly shown romantic interest in anyone, falls in love with a girl. Not naturally though--no, he is drugged, and begs, on the ground, in agony, for her to stop the effects of the drug. When he finally gives in, then he appears to be free, but we know that he is certainly not himself.

Bones and Jim notice this as well, while talking to Spock over communicator, and Bones is immediately concerned, thinking Spock might be in trouble. What is Spock up to? He's chilling out with his girl.

It had really really really bothered me, though, that when all is said and done, and Spock has gone back to normal, and he is asked about what he has to say about his experience, he says, "For the first time in my life, I was happy." This was super frustrating and hurtful for me, because I relate to Spock's lack of romantic interest very deeply. (I perceive him to be aroace, but other interpretations are, of course, valid.) Is he really saying that all the good times he's had on the Enterprise, all the moments he's shared with Jim and Bones--all the companionship he has found in them isn't enough? That he has never been happy? That he needed to find a girl before he could be? What does that say about someone like me, who is aroace?

It especially bothered me because Spock only explicitly expresses romantic feelings when he is fundamentally not himself, and he recognizes this as well. (This post is already long, so I'll skip the details, but if you're curious, let me know.) Something deep and intrinsic about him is changed, and then he expresses romantic feelings--which further convinces me that he is aromantic. So why was he repeatedly subjected to this invasive altering of his identity? Was he not sufficient as he was? It felt humiliating to watch him behave in ways I knew he would never behave when he was himself. And it definitely felt like the producers were pushing him into a relationship to "fix him" and show his "human side".

But then I looked at it deeper, and I realized that maybe that's not what was going on at all.

While it is likely that a heteronormative message was intended, part of art is its interpretation, and I am choosing to internalize the other narrative that I see. And before we get going, a warning (if you haven't gotten it already): this is a long post. I'm on mobile and can't figure out how to make a "read more".

Firstly, I will say that aside from the romantic element, the episode had very good moments. Especially when Kirk confronts Spock, and you can tell that Spock is holding himself back, and doesn't want to believe that Jim means what he's saying, and he's utterly shocked that Jim would ever say something like that--and particularly that he uses the word "half-breed". (Spock, in an earlier episode, had actually told Jim that it disturbs him to hear that word from someone so close to him...essentially, he admitted that it hurts him. Jim hadn't outright said that he wouldn't use the word again, but it was clear that he knew the damage it could cause and that he had only used it as a last resort.)

But it gets more interesting when we consider what Spock actually responds to, and what he avoids. Firstly, he responds to that word, which he even tries to make into a Spock-version of a joke ("While the term 'half-breed' may be partially accurate..."), using defensive humor instead of addressing his feelings about it. The other thing he responds to, which is the only thing he actually directly answers, is Jim's taunts about his parents. Equally notable is that he didn't respond to any taunts about his relationship with Leila (the girl) that had insinuated he was unable to truly love her. Jim makes several attacks on this front, calling Spock a "carcass," a "computer," a shell of someone "pretending to be a man". "Does she know what she's getting, Spock?!" Jim yells at him. Spock says nothing.

Here's the punch in the gut: Spock only responds to things he believes are wrong.

Spock fights back when Jim maligns his parents, he responds to anything that is factually incorrect. He responds to the word "half-breed" by calling it "partially accurate"--implying he believes it to not be fully apt, but equally, implying that it does have some truth in it...and when it comes to the other personal statements Jim makes, he is silent. He doesn't believe he has enough evidence to dispute Jim's outrageous claims--because a part of him believes it himself.

Not only does this offer insight into Spock's insecurities, it also supports my view of Spock as someone who doesn't have those romantic feelings. Spock hasn't lost his memory while under the influence of the spores, nor does he lose it after their effects are removed; he knows who he really is and how he really behaves. There is a part of him that is freed by being expressive, and that part mostly focuses on appreciating the beauty in things. He comments on how beautiful the clouds are, and rainbows--and yes, perhaps he finds Leila beautiful, but I think he does so from a purely aesthetic and (shall I say it?) scientific stance. He likes feeling free to admire and experience the beauty of things, her included. But deep down, he knows what he's feeling for Leila isn't really love.

He might even like the sensation of kissing her, but not because of any romantic feelings--rather, because it is so clearly and intimately linked with being known, being understood, being trusted; not just from a physical perspective, but (especially for the touch-telepathic Vulcans), an emotional one. That is what truly appeals to him.

Spock feels freed because his usual inhibitions are gone (forcibly battered down, but we'll say gone). So he swings around on a tree branch and does other equally wacky things, and he kisses someone and speaks causally and comments on the beauty of life. He wants to experience the things he's never let himself experience before, because he feels at home; he is accepted, and that frees him. But he knows, deep down, that the freed "Spock" is fundamentally different from the one we've come to know, the one Jim and Bones know, the one on the Enterprise.

That's why he doesn't disagree with Jim when he starts attacking Spock's ability to love. He knows he can't. He knows this freedom, really, is false--and he knows how it came about. Not by a choice of his own, but one forced on him. Nevertheless, he is desperately attached to one particular aspect of that freedom. Just look at what he says as soon as the effects are broken.

First, he says to Jim, "You did that to me on purpose." An interesting choice of words, that belies his now emotionless facade. "You did that to me" acknowledges there was something inflicted on you that you did not want...in a way, that statement alone is Spock's guarded way of saying, "That hurt me. And you knew it would hurt me. I could not believe you would do such a thing...but now, I begin to understand..." And honestly, his face says the same thing. He's shaken up, he looks a little dazed; he's trying to reframe what happened--Jim didn't suddenly hate him for being how he was, it was a calculated move, meant to help him. But, it was clear that Jim didn't want Spock to stay that way. There was a Spock Jim knew, and he wanted (and needed) him back. The "freed" part of Spock needed to be repressed again, or at least that's how Spock saw it.

Think I'm way off base? Listen to what he says next:

"I don't belong anymore."

The entire episode, there's been a repeated mentioning of "understanding", of "being one of us"--but Spock is the only one that calls being affected by the spores "belonging". (Even if he wasn't the only one, it wouldn't detract from the importance of that statement.) His entire life, he has desperately wanted to be loved, known, accepted, and to feel at home, and he never had been able to be fully himself. He was always keeping a part of himself under wraps--not a romantic part, but a sentimental, emotional, free-spirited one. On Omicron Ceti III, Spock was finally able to express that part of himself and find only acceptance for it. Even though he knew the truth of why he was able to do that, he loved being loved and accepted so much that he couldn't bear to give it up.

He even begged Jim to stay with him--and you know what he said the spores offered? "There is belonging...and love..." (The theme of belonging returns again.) And is that a surprise? Unconditional love and acceptance, a sense of belonging--of course Spock would treasure those things; he has been searching for them his whole life! And of course he would want to share them with Jim too; even aside from the spores influencing everyone to infect each other, he is clearly more able to express his fondness for Jim, since during the entire time Spock is affected by the spores, he never once calls him Captain--only "Jim". He has always wanted this closeness, this openness, and he finally found it. It's no wonder that he seemed so heartbroken when Jim broke the spell of the spores--that feeling of belonging, despite how much he treasures the people on the Enterprise, was gone. Not for any lack of care from Jim or Bones or anyone else, but because he had never been able to accept himself before. If the spores hadn't forced him to, he never would have; now that they were gone, he found that he could not do so again.

When he says to Leila, as she realizes that he does not love her and has gone back to being who he really is, "If there are self-made purgatories, we all must live in them. Mine can be no worse than any other," he is not saying "I can't love you because I'll be going away on this ship and that wouldn't be logical." He's saying, "I know a lot of how I am, my refusal to express certain things, stems from how I see myself." In a way, his purgatory is indeed self-made. I don't believe this applies to his romantic feelings, or lack of them--they are not a decision--but instead to the freedom that came with accepting who he is.

And that is why the final line of the episode no longer bothers me. Jim gently nudges him by saying, "We still haven't heard much from you about Omicron Ceti III," and Spock replies, "I haven't much to say about it," pauses, and says,

"Only that...for the first time in my life, I was happy."

I had originally thought that he was saying he was happy because he had "found love", but now I see what he was really saying.

For the briefest of instants, he felt what it was like to love himself.

#spock #star trek #star trek tos #jim kirk #meta #aromantic spock #asexual spock #my meta posts #quality meta seal of approval #kay can i just catch my breath for a second

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afsanaas · 5 years

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𝑰𝒏𝒕𝒓𝒐𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑺𝒂𝒏𝒂 𝑬𝒉𝒔𝒂𝒏...

Hello everyone, I’ve reached out to a lot of guys to plot so I figured it would be best to provide from background on Sana! Here is her very much extended bio (I had to force myself to condense things down for my application cause I realized just how long it was considering I’m adapting her from a previous character of mine). ALSO quick apology for the use of gif icons, there are not a lot of resources for Kriti available so I made a bunch of her gifs a while back and they are all icons so I’m a little stuck in that regard!

tw: emotional abuse, miscarriage, mention of death in the family

UPBRINGING

The daughter of two Muslim Indian immigrants, Sana was four years old when she came to the US. Chasing the American dream in hopes of building a better life her father had already been in Jersey when he married her mother, working on putting down roots, and gaining citizenship before he was able to have his wife and daughter move over with him. Though they made a home in the US, her parents never quite embraced America, or it’s culture. They kept themselves closed off from integration in the community they lived in, opting to only associate with other Indian muslims they either knew from back home or shared some kind of distant connection with.

The cultural barriers aside, they saw their religion as something that set them apart from others we well, never realizing that they have come to this country for the chance to gain acceptance, and to escape religious persecution. It wasn’t that they never experience bigotry, but the fact that they also experiences immense love and support from their neighbors but yet refused to embrace these positives that always bothered Sana.

It was because of this her life was always a struggle between who she was becoming, and who her parents wanted her to be. They failed to see that while they may not consider themselves to be American, she did. English was her first language, all her friends at school were people from different ethnic backgrounds, her diverse education meant she understood the fundamental need for acceptance.

As she grew older and really began to understand herself, she realized that she didn’t believe in their god, she simply didn’t believe in any god. She found the cultural norms her family followed to be oppressive, and at times suffocating yet there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Her family, and extended family, and family friends were so deeply entangled in her life that were she to say anything at all, just like that everyone she knew and cared for would distance themselves from her. She’d be ostracized, so really the only choice she has as a young adult was to keep on pretending.

No matter how much of herself she had to hide from those who were the closest to her, no matter how much doing so hurt her. She didn’t realize it at the time but she was spiraling into this endless pit of depression and anxiety.

EDUCATION

One thing her parents did value highly like most parents was the value of education. Her parents were not given the opportunities to be well educated and that’s why they brought their kids to America so that they would have those opportunities. So doing well was an expected, and school was after all her only reprieve so she put her all into it. She was a natural leader in school, involved in many extracurriculars, academic related as well as track and field, she was the first person to raise her hand in class if she knew something, and also if she required clarification not letting anyones opinion of her get in the way of her learning. As well as she did in high school it wasn’t a surprise she was able to get nearly a full ride to the college of her choice. However her choice did have to be within the approved radius of her parents choosing. Northwestern, up in Evanston was a stretch for them, but after weeks of pleading, and bargaining they agreed but only after getting her to agree to allow them to start looking for marriage prospects for her. This was something she knew was coming and had been dreading but at the time she figured it was just a matter of saying yes to get to go to the school of her dreams.

ARRANGED MARRIAGE

Never had she thought saying yes would mean they’d find someone for her in less than a year of her starting college. He was a friend of a friends son, a computer software engineer doing well for himself, living in Lincoln Park. For her parents it was perfect match, it was a family they knew well, and a guy who was financially stable, not more than a decade older than her even just twenty seven while she was barely twenty. He and his family seemed open minded, and were willing to allow her to continue to pursue her degree even after marriage, how could it be anymore perfect? And like every other thing she’s ever wanted in her life, the choice was out of her hands because it was a choice of choosing herself and her own happiness over her family. Not able to leave behind her family she reluctantly agreed after meeting the guy a couple of times. He seemed fine, there was no spark there but he seemed kind, and understanding she could definitely do worse she told herself.

Unfortunately what she failed to realized before agreeing to it all was a marriage among her community was not between a man and a woman but the two families, so very intimately involved in all their business. The plan had been to live with his parents for one year before finding their own place and building their own home, however a couple months in she could tell that was not happening. Slowly everything became harder, she felt suffocated in her relationship and under the burden of responsibilities that had fallen on her shoulders all while she was desperately trying to keep up with college, already having had to take a three quarter sabbatical. Everyday was a struggle, whether that be with her husband, her mother in law, or her bratty sister in law. She was emotionally and soon physically becoming so strained that it showed on her face, something her mother in law never failed to point out to her.

The worst thing to have happened at that point in her life was for her to become pregnant. And even worst for her husband under the instance of his mother to have tampered with her birth control (that his mother had never been happy she was taking). The pregnancy was they last straw for her however, she could not get an abortion or rather they would not let her. It was like she was trapped in a sick soap opera a cycle of abuse she had no way of escaping. It really shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone when she miscarried, from how stressed and unhealthy she’d become in this period, no joy in her at all from the child growing inside of her. Of course she was tormented endlessly for it, her MIL having succeeded in placing a permanent wedge in her marriage, and leaving her completely isolated in her own home.

DIVORCE

Slowly she mustered up the courage then to return to college after the two years that had been wasted, it was this act of reclaiming control of her life that eventually gave her courage to get out of that toxic marriage against the will of everyone in her life. They all wanted her to compromise, give it time, try harder, but she was done trying to suppress herself for the benefit of others. She not only got her divorce but also dragged his ass to court, something no woman in her community had ever done. She get penance for her emotional trauma she suffered while in the marriage, the court ruling in her favor and ordering him to pay for the rest of her college expenses. This gave her some peace to focus her energy in earning a livable wage to support herself, she was not going to be returning to her parents home, or depending on anyone else for that matter. Soon everything was back on track she was living by herself in the city completing her bachelors and then going on to law school.

PLANS DERAILED ONCE AGAIN

Finally living her life on her own terms deciding what kind of person she wanted to be, figuring out what she believed in. College was fairly easy without any distractions holding her back. What she didn’t expect two years into law school was that her father would get a heart attack caused by her little sister getting pregnant out of wedlock. Already a heart patient who’d suffered from two minor strokes prior to this incident his heart gave out when this happened. And she found herself picking up the pieces of a family that had caused her so much pain and set her on a path of misery. After fathers passing she not only assumed the responsibility of caring after her mother and two sisters, but also the financial burden he left behind in the form of the money he’d borrowed from a crime family.

ENTER RAFAL KOVALI

The stress of the thousands of dollars she’d inherited in debt was crippling for her, she was barely making ends meet and finishing school. It was a point in life when she was quite done with being in constant struggle to stay afloat, she wanted nothing more than a reprieve from it all. She wanted to get ahead of it, not someday, not in a few years, but now. It was then that she met Rafal Kovali, not a knight in shining armour by any stretch of the imagination but a king in his own right with midas’ touch, someone with more than enough means to lift her out of the toxic cycle of debt and despair she was trapped in.

Even despite her less than gracious introduction to him when she hadn’t a clue who he was by some miracle he seemed to be drawn to her, her beauty a factor but also her spirited nature. She was tough, she’d had to be growing up against the odds with no one in her corner, she’d done the whole demure dignified thing and it had gotten her nowhere, she was done letting life fuck her. She knew he was a powerful man, and once she learned to what extent she decided to make her bed and sleep in it, metaphorically speaking. Her association with the Kovali has provided her for the first time some sense of security and stability, and though she realizes what a fine line she’s walking for the time being she’s willing to gamble with the odds if it means staying afloat, and staying ahead one more day.

Sana does not love the man, sleeping with him is as transactional for her as it was sleeping with her ex-husband. She realizes what that might make her, but growing up with little to no ownership of her body or her own self worth, her current situation is almost empowering. She’s given up on notions of romance she might have had as a teenage girl, she’d put those sentiments to rest the moment she signed her marriage contract years ago. Nor does she feel entirely awful about sleeping with a married man, was it anyone else she most likely would have. As pragmatic as she is she did her research and she knows enough about him and his wife to know they are not good people, in some screwed up way she’s rationalized with herself that their morally reproachable deeds obsolve her from holding any guilt for what she’s doing.

PUTTING UP HIGH WALLS

Given her struggles with herself and nearly every close relationship she’s ever had, Sana has now put up some very high walls around herself. Not allowing anything or anyone to penetrate them and bring her back to the places she’s worked so hard to escape from. She refuses to feel that lost and helpless against another person ever again. While being guarded and protecting herself is something that’s keeping her safe, it’s also holding her back from truly enjoying the freedom she finally has to be herself unapologetically, and keeping her closed off from anyone that might want to get close to her for the right reasons.

ADDITIONAL PLOTS FOR EXPLORATION

No Stopping The Heart - Sana is very practical about most things, especially so after the end of emotionally trying marriage she’s given up on any notions of romance and a picture perfect life. While her relationship with Rafal is simply advantageous to her, she is not a disloyal person even in a relationship such as theirs. I would be interesting for her to fall for someone else. Currently she is gambling with her life something she is well aware and accepting of. Gambling with her heart however is going to be a much hard pill for her to swallow.

$470.000 Down - The precise amount of debt her father had collected, being uninsured and having a major surgery the first time around had been a huge burden and he’d had no choice but to borrow the money to pay for it when the debt collectors began to get particularly nasty, though it was trading one evil for another. And while Rafal may have settled that for her, she very much still sees herself indebted to him.

#❛ ━ .*･ﾟ( ᴅᴇᴠᴇʟᴏᴘᴍᴇɴᴛ )#( figured I'd post this until her bio is posted on the main )#( apologies for the length! )

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sanaxehsan · 5 years

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&&. word has it sana ehsan was just spotted around the city. she is a twenty nine year old with no direct affiliation. she has been said to be resolute & candid but also quite obdurate & irascible. she is currently serving as a personal assistant to marcus blackman.

tw: mentions of emotional abuse, miscarriage, and depression

UPBRINGING

Though they made a home in the US, her parents never quite embraced America, or it’s culture. They kept themselves closed off from integration in the community they lived in, opting to only associate with other Indian muslims they either knew from back home or shared some kind of distant connection with.

EDUCATION

One thing her parents did value highly like most parents was the value of education. Her parents were not given the opportunities to be well educated and that’s why they brought their kids to America so that they would have those opportunities. So doing well was an expected, and school was after all her only reprieve so she put her all into it. Not caring that she came off as being headstrong, overly opinionated and ‘a know it all’. She enjoyed doing well, she enjoyed learning about the things she found interesting, and she reveled in positive feedback (perhaps because she got it so rarely at home). She was a natural leader in school, involved in extra curricular, academic related as well as track and field, she was the first person to raise her hand in class if she knew something, and also if she required clarification not letting anyones opinion of her get in the way of her learning.

As well as she did in school it wasn’t a surprise she was able to get a full ride to the college of her choice. However her choice did have to be within the approved radius of her parents choosing. NYU was a stretch for them, but after weeks of pleading, and bargaining they agreed but only after getting her to agree to allow them to start looking for marriage prospects for her. This was something she knew was coming and had been dreading but at the time she figured it was just a matter of saying yes to get to go to the school of her dreams.

ARRANGED MARRIAGE

And like every other thing she’s ever wanted in her life, the choice was out of her hands because it was a choice of choosing herself and her own happiness over her family. Not able to leave behind her family she reluctantly agreed after meeting the guy a couple of times. He seemed fine, there was no spark there but he seemed kind, and understanding she could definitely do worse she told herself.

Slowly everything became harder, she felt suffocated in her relationship and under the burden of responsibilities that had fallen on her shoulders all while she was desperately trying to keep up with college, already having had to take a three quarter sabbatical. Everyday was a struggle, wether that be with her husband, her mother in law, or her bratty sister in law. She was emotionally and soon physically becoming so strained that it showed on her face, something her MIL never failed to point out to her.

It really shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone when she miscarried, from how stressed and unhealthy she’d become in this period, no joy in her at all from the child growing inside of her. Of course she was tormented endlessly for it, her MIL having succeeded in placing a permanent wedge in her marriage, and leaving her completely isolated in her own home.

DIVORCE

She not only got her divorce but also dragged his ass to court, something no woman in her community had ever done. She get penance for her emotional trauma she suffered while in the marriage, the court ruling in her favor and ordering him to pay for the rest of her college expenses. This gave her some peace to focus her energy in earning a livable wage to support herself, she was not going to be returning to her parents home, or depending on anyone else for that matter. Soon everything was back on track she was living by herself in the city completing her bachelors and then going on start law school.

PLANS DERAILED ONCE AGAIN

Thing were finally going as planned, she was living her life on her terms deciding what kind of person she wanted to be, figuring out what she believed in and who she wanted in her life. College was a breeze for her considering academics had always been her forte. What she didn’t expect two years into law school was that her father would get a heart attack caused by her little sister getting pregnant out of wedlock.

Already a heart patient who’d suffer from two minor strokes prior to this incident his heart gave out when this happened. And she found herself picking up the pieces of a family that had caused her so much pain and set her on a path of misery. After fathers passing she not only assumed the responsibility of caring after her mother and two sisters, but also the financial burden he left behind.

ENTER MARCUS BLACKMAN

With all the financial burden she’d found herself in she knew that school would have to wait, what she needed first and foremost was a well paying job. This was when she came across an opening with the Italian Mafia Underboss (which she did not know at the time). The job was seemingly perfect, and the pay better was than other positions of the same title. Desperate she didn’t give it too much thought applying for the position, with some experience working as an office assistant and a receptionist through school, it was a huge surprise to her when she got the call back.

That was two years ago, and things have been fine ever since. Her pay check is well budgeted, she is able to keep her distance from her family and live her own private live simply providing them with the bank transfer they need at the start of each month, working some odd end jobs when the need arises but overall she has fallen into a good pace with her boss.

As long as she overlooks the bad boy persona he seems to enjoy putting on, and minding her own business. Her impeccable work ethic proving true, she’s gotten very good at her job leaving Marcus no room for complain. She keeps to herself, and doesn’t ask too many questions though even she is slowly getting closer to the truth of her bosses true dealings.

PUTTING UP HIGH WALLS

Given her struggles with herself and nearly every close relationship she’s ever had, Sana has now put up some very high walls around herself. Not allowing anything or anyone to penetrate them and bring her back to the place she worked to hard to escape from. She refused to feel that lost and helpless against another person ever again. While being guarded and protecting herself is something that’s keeping her safe, it’s also holding her back from truly enjoying the freedom she finally has, and keeping her closed off from anyone that might want to get close to her for the right reasons.

WANTED CONNECTIONS

A new reluctant friend

Someone interested in dating her

Strange Mafia encounters that are leading her closer to finding out the truth about who she’s working for

Literally anything, bring me all the plots!

#tdrintro #✧.*･ﾟ( ᴅᴇᴠᴇʟᴏᴘᴍᴇɴᴛ )

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welllpthisishappening · 5 years

Text

Nights Were Mainly Made for Saying

It's possible. Emma is certain. She's going to fix this. She's going to save him. By time traveling. Which is totally, absolutely possible.

She's read about it. There's a theory.

So, no one has ever actually done it yet, but that doesn't mean she can't or they can't try and she just needs a little help. From Killian Jones. And his magic.

Rating: Like a very high T teetering on the edge of M AN: I wanted to write something spooky. So I wrote about witches and time travel and Hamilton references. Can we still make Hamilton references? Has the time passed for that? Who cares, this is a time travel fic. It’s also absurdly long. Just like...because. I have no excuse. You should probably listen to Arctic Monkeys’ entire discography because that’s totally the vibe I was going for. Also because Alex Turner may be a vampire. That joke will make sense later.

On Ao3 if that’s how you roll.

“Say that again.” “No.” “Swan.” “I know you heard me the first time,” Emma growls, trying to push her way through the half-open doorway. Killian, however, doesn’t move. If anything, he grows several feet, eyes widening and an expression on his face that appears torn between disbelief and incredulous.

And possibly furious.

Or worried.

Emma can’t really tell the difference.

This might have been a mistake.

She huffs, shoulders drooping with the force of her own frustration. “I don’t get why you’re being such a jerk about this,” she mumbles, kicking at his ankles like they’re friends or something.

They’re not... not friends. Not really. Killian’s been around for as long as Emma can remember because he’s been David’s partner for as long as Emma can remember and magical folk alway tend to flock towards each other.

It’s some kind of defense mechanism, she’s positive, a twist of their genetic makeup or something because magical folk are emotional and prone to immediate reaction and neither one of those things ever works out very well in the real world. So they’ve got to be around each other. To make sure no one else figures out they’re there.

Strength in numbers or whatever.

No one really knows how magic started or why it only appears in certain people, but they’re there and some sort of quasi-community and support system Emma never could have imagined when she was sitting in a foster home in Minnesota, certain the way lights always flickered around her was just a byproduct of an exceptionally difficult puberty.

Magic was in her blood. As they say. Or as Mary Margaret would say because Mary Margaret loved to say things like that and promise things like that and Emma had nearly collapsed when she felt the particular rush of her magic at freshman orientation.

It went from there. Mary Margaret never left Emma’s side, or vice versa, and David appeared sophomore year, a rush of power and positivity that was questionably good at brewing things and they found more magic in New York, of the literal and metaphorical variety, a family and a certainty and nothing bad was ever going to happen.

Except, of course, when one of your magical friends is murdered in cold blood, alone, without any suspects of any kind. Then, you know, the cliché loses a bit of its weight.

Emma kicks at Killian’s shin that time.

He scowls, lips twisted and head tilted at an angle that cannot possibly be good for his neck. And, for the first time since Emma marched to his front door fifteen minutes earlier, she takes a second to look at him. Really. Because he looks like shit. Really.

There are bags under his eyes and a hint of red in his gaze, like he’s gotten approximately forty-seven minutes of sleep in the last few days. His hair is longer than usual, curling behind his ears and the NYPD t-shirt he’s got on has a hole in the right sleeve.

“Swan, I swear to God,” Killian growls as soon as the toes of her boot collide with his ankle again. “If you don’t stop assaulting me, I’m going to--” “--What? What could you possibly threaten me with? Ignoring my requests again?”

“Oh, they’re requests now, are they?” “Obviously,” Emma sneers, and this is not going the way she thought it would at all. She, admittedly, did not think it was going to go great, but the whole thing has been a disaster from the get and she’s averaging less than forty-seven minutes of sleep a night.

“Strangely enough I’m not getting that at all.” “Because you’re being the most difficult person on the planet.” “I really don’t see how that’s true,” Killian argues, and, that time, Emma’s foot comes up against an invisible barricade. The pain ricochets up her thigh, lingering around her knee and there are not enough curses or spells for all the things she wants to do to Killian Jones.

And that, really, is her problem.

Because Emma doesn’t really like Killian, but she doesn’t really hate Killian and she knows he’s the only one who will even consider going along with this plan.

It’s a relatively crazy plan.

“That’s a cheap trick,” she accuses, but he just flashes her a grin and his eyes almost look normal. Emma has no idea what his eyes normally look like.

The lie tastes bitter on her tongue, even without saying it out loud.

“I hate to repeat myself, love, but, again, I really don’t see how that’s true.” “Magician.” “Ah, that’s rude.” “A fact,” Emma growls. He hasn’t taken the barrier down. He’s lifted his eyebrows instead, the smirk settling onto his face like it’s putting down roots. “Listen, I’m going to do this whether you want to help or not, so--”

She’s not entirely sure what happens after that.

It’s a rush of something, magic and feeling and a hint of emotion that may be concern or something fundamentally deeper and far more important than that, but it leaves Emma breathless anyway, mouth falling open as she tries to take it all in. Killian jerks forward, fingers wrapped around Emma’s wrist, like he’s nervous she’s going to start disappearing right then.

She’s fairly certain that’s not how the spell works.

His fingers are impossibly warm.

“I can’t keep doing nothing,” Emma says, voice dropping of its own accord. The words scratch their way out of her, fighting their way to the surface because they’ve been sitting in the pit of her stomach for weeks and Graham didn’t deserve that.

He didn’t deserve to be alone.

He didn’t deserve to die.

Emma is going to fix this. She’s a goddamn witch.

“There’s not anything for you to do, Swan.” “We both know that’s wrong.” Killian sighs, thumb tracing across the back of her wrist. “That’s all speculation. No one’s ever actually done it.” “That you know of.” “You are pulling at straws, love.” “If that’s what I have to do, then, yeah, fine, I’m pulling at straws.” Emma wishes her voice would pick a volume and stick with it. Instead, it cracks over every other syllable, tears welling in the corners of her eyes and stinging retinas that are in desperate need of a set sleep cycle. Killian doesn’t blink. “Graham was a good guy.” “I’m not questioning that. Good is a vast understatement.” “Don’t you want to know what happened?” Emma presses, and she’s starting to sound desperate to her own ears. “It’s...it’s driving me insane. There are too many coincidences for it to be the accident David thinks it is.” For half a second Emma thinks she imagined the next few words out of Killian’s mouth. For half a second she thinks she’s actually delved into complete and utter insanity. For half a second she’s terrified.

But Killian doesn’t blink and his thumb is still pressed flat against her skin and Emma’s lungs are incredibly grateful when she takes a deep breath.

“Say that again,” she whispers.

The smirk turns into a smile. “I feel like we’re going in circles, Swan.” “Killian, c’mon, I--” “--I think it was a witch.” Emma’s entire body sags when she exhales, head colliding with Killian’s chest and she barely considers the fact that he didn’t barricade that before she’s wrapping both her arms around him. She mumbles something into his shirt, nonsense that may just be thank you several dozen times and that doesn’t really make sense, but David wouldn’t listen and Mary Margaret couldn’t listen and Graham did not deserve to die.

Alone.

He died alone.

“Did you tell David that?” Emma mumbles, Killian’s head shake almost audible.

“He’s not interested in that. The department said it was cut and dry. Wrong place, wrong time, and a weak heart, but it was…”

He trails off, Emma’s heart thundering in her ears because she knows how that sentence is going to end. It’s impossible. The medical records don’t make any sense. It wasn’t a heart attack or a stroke or anything remotely human.

It was magical and wrong and Emma is going to fix it.

Before it happens.

“You don’t know this is going to work,” Killian continues, a warning there that Emma ignores.

“I’m more optimistic about it than I was, like, four days ago.” “Why is that?” “Because I tried four days ago and it didn’t work.”

“Emma!”

She jerks back at the sound of her own name, eyebrows furrowed because they’re not friends and he never calls her that, but there’s a desperation to his voice that gives her pause. She bites her lip. “It didn’t work,” Emma repeats. “So, you know...no harm, no foul. Or whatever.” “That’s not whatever. That is…” Killian exhales sharply, tongue flashing between his lips and Emma has to dig her heels into the floor to stop herself from moving. “You can’t do that again, love. Please.” Emma nods slowly, an agreement without considering what she’s agreeing to. She can see the muscles in Killian’s throat move when he swallows though, and he’s going to do damage to his jaw if he holds it any tighter. “I don’t think anyone can do it alone,” she says. “I...it’s not simple magic.” “Because going back in time should be impossible.”

“Not in theory.” “And what happens if it doesn’t work?” Emma shrugs, a flush of fear creeping up her spine and settling at the base of her skull and the magic seems to spark in her fingertips. Killian laces his hand through hers without a word. “That’s why you’re here,” she says, and those words have a weight to them as well, a certainty she didn’t expect, but kind of needs because she’s not entirely what will happen if this doesn’t work.

Killian’s lips twitch. “And you didn’t think to ask David or Mary Margaret?” “David won’t and Mary Margaret can’t. You know that. And…” “And?” “You also know you’re better at magic than both of them. Don’t laugh at me.” “Why would I laugh when you’re complimenting me so nicely, Swan?” Emma flicks his chest, another twist of his eyebrows and quirk of his lips and his fingers are back around her wrist as quickly as if he’d teleported them there. He might have. He’s very good at magic.

He’s very good at everything.

It’s frustrating.

“We can’t just go into this blind, you know,” Killian says. “There’s got to be a plan and an escape route and--” “--And I’ve got that. All of it. Well, most of it.” “Most of it?” “You’re going to be the worst time travel partner, I know it.” “That’s assuming this works.” “It’s really not helping my confidence or my magic that you keep pointing out the likelihood of failure,” Emma mutters, trying to pull her hand back to her side. Killian’s fingers tighten. “The books are clear. It’s all about getting the incantation right and, well, you know...having enough power. I don’t...it didn’t work on my own and you’re the strongest magic I know. So either you agree or you don’t and we just...we never know what happened and we don’t fix it.” Killian considers that for a moment, eyes tracing across Emma’s face like he’s looking for the lie or the inevitable jab at his character. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t say anything. She holds her breath.

He taps his thumb on the back of her wrist again.

“You want to fix it?”

Emma hisses. “Was that not obvious?” “It felt wrong to assume.” “He shouldn’t be dead.” “The world’s not all that interested in that, I’m afraid.” “Yeah, well, fuck the world,” Emma says, and Killian’s eyes widen. “Listen. I…” “Ok.”

She’s positive she imagined it again.

That’s a frustrating habit to have picked up in the last few moments.

Emma gasps, stumbling back at the certainty in those two letters and the force of the magic around them and she’s certain they’re setting off several metaphorical alarm bells to every other being in a hundred-block radius, but ok is echoing between her ears and she’s almost hopeful this will work.

“Ok?” Killian hums. “You’re right. He shouldn’t be dead and I don’t think he died the way we’ve been told. There’s something wrong here. So, if you want to figure it out, then...seems wrong not to help somehow.” “What a gentleman.” “Something like that.”

“Alright,” Emma says, drawing the word out cautiously like she’s nervous he’s going to change his mind. “So, um…” “I’m not particularly interested in time traveling with you immediately, love. And if we’re going to assume our success is based entirely on the strength of our magic, then I’d suggest we aim for a well-placed full moon on Halloween.” “There’s a full moon on Halloween?” “You’re a very observant witch.” Emma clicks her tongue, but he’s also got a point. Several of them. She hopes she doesn’t regret this. She hopes this works.

“Just like that?” Emma asks. “Full moon on Halloween and you’re ready to go back in time and prevent a murder?” “You came to me, Swan.” That’s another point.

Emma’s going to scream. Or curse him. Or something else. Something less aggressive, but possibly just as drastic as cursing.

“Yeah,” she mutters. “I did.” The floor creaks when he moves, stepping away from the doorframe and Emma shudders as soon as his arms wrap around her. It’s like...something or everything and the magic in her veins practically sings, a certainty and confidence and she buries her face against Killian’s chest without asking.

His fingers drift across her spine, tracing between her shoulder blades like he’s following a path he can see and Emma lets her eyes flutter shut. She’s exhausted and worried, but she’s also tired of both of those emotions, and even more tired of seeing Mary Margaret cry and David ignore the possibility that there’s magic in New York they’re not aware of. So Emma doesn’t move, just breathes in the scent of laundry detergent and something that smells a bit like salt and it’s as if time gives them both a second to be.

Just to be.

Emma assumes that means time is on their side.

She appreciates it.

“You can’t tell David or Mary Margaret,” Killian says, the words far too loud in a moment Emma didn’t particularly want to end.

“No, no, I won’t. They wouldn’t...they’d try to stop us and--” “--I know, love.” Emma doesn’t think he realizes he keeps switching between endearments – he’s got nicknames for everyone, sarcasm and smirks and a distinct lack of sincerity that always seems to fall by the wayside whenever he glances her direction. She’s not sure he realizes that either. And she’s got no idea when she did.

Probably before deciding to time travel with Killian Jones.

“If I say that we should meet at moonrise, are you going to actually make fun of me?” Emma asks, leaning back in just enough time to see his tongue find the corner of his mouth.

“Absolutely.”

“Ok. Good.” “Maybe a few minutes before moonrise. Just to be safe.” “That’s what we’re being? Safe?” Killian nods. “When playing with uncharted magic, yes, but ...you’re right. I think this could work.”

The magic around them grows, strong enough that Emma is surprised she can’t actually see it. She can feel it though, like it’s cracking through the air and weaving between them, connections and knots, all of them twining together and twisting and it’s not as terrifying as it probably should be. It’s comforting.

“Moonrise,” Emma repeats, taking a step back and Killian’s hand falls to his side. “Here?” “Less likely for David or Mary Margaret to appear unannounced, yeah?” There’s something on the edge of his voice, but Emma’s too preoccupied with her pulse and her magic to linger too long on it. She hopes that’s not a mistake. “Yeah,” she agrees. “Ok, so, uh, it’s a date?” Killian chuckles lightly, hair grazing his eyebrows when he nods. “It’s a date, Swan.”

She sends Mary Margaret and David an email.

In case this doesn’t work.

Or something.

It seems less hokey than taping a note to their apartment door – which is only a few doors away from Emma’s apartment door, but it also feels a little less emotional and a bit more detached and Emma doesn’t bring anything except her phone with her when she walks fifteen blocks to Killian’s building.

He answers on the third knock, a different NYPD shirt and sneakers that look new. There are candles everywhere, more than few stacks of paperwork littering the floor. Emma’s eyes dart around the room, not sure what to land on because she’s now only a little worried they’re going to burn to death before they can even start the spell.

“What the hell is this?” she asks. “And did you buy new shoes?” Killian doesn’t quite glare at her, but it’s an admirable effort. “Why is David already texting me?” “I asked you first.” “This is...not a big deal. Did you tell David and Mary Margaret what you were doing?” “No!” “Swan.” “Not...directly.” “Emma,” Killian groans, and she wishes he would stop doing that. It’s messing with her mind and her center and she needs both of those to be as perfect as possible. Her magic is vibrating, she’s positive.

“I’m not having this conversation with you right now. We are running out of time.” “We are literally trying to time travel. We have more time than we could possibly know what to do with.”

“So then ask me this question when we’re in the past,” Emma mutters. “Did you work on the pronunciation for the spell? That’s important.” “I’ve cast spells before, Swan.” They’re both dancing around each other, deflections and distractions and neither one of those seem entirely appropriate a few minutes ahead of what they’re trying to accomplish, but it’s also the basis for their entire relationship.

Emma wishes her mind would shut the hell up.

She can hear kids laughing on the street below them, trick-or-treaters and humans without any knowledge of the magic that exists around them and sometimes threatens them and if there’s a witch out there killing other beings, then they’ve got a moral obligation to stop it.

Together.

She sighs, a breath of air she probably needs, and it takes less than a full moment for Killian to move into her space. His fingers are still warm when they brush over hers, twisting her hand to place something in her palm.

It’s a moonstone.

“Where did you get this?” Emma asks in disbelief.

“I’ve had it.” “What?” “Hold onto it, ok?” Emma nods slowly, lips suddenly dry because at some point her mind decided to start breathing through her mouth and moonstones are supposed to protect travelers. She doesn’t ask if he has one for himself.

“Alright,” Killian continues, grabbing several candles and moving them around a photo on his coffee table. Emma nearly chokes. It’s the crime scene, police tape obvious and a body even clearer and her vision spins as soon as the realization slams into.

He must feel the shift in her magic because he spins as soon as Emma’s breath hitches, a mumbled hey, hey and something that sounds like it’s alright, love and she nods as soon as his thumb grazes her cheek.

“Fine,” Emma promises. “I’m fine. You seriously know how to say all the words, right? I don’t want to end up, like, in the prehistoric age.” “I highly doubt that’s how it would work, Swan. Plus, every theory I’ve read says if you want to travel, you need visual of where you’re going. We’ve got that.” “You’ve got that. Why do you have that?” The tips of Killian’s ears go red. It’s a tell. It’s been a tell for years. “I already told you. You weren’t the only one with suspicions.” “You’ve been researching this!” “That’s a very dirty-sounding word. I’ve been...looking into it. That’s all.” Emma hums, but that realization seems to crash into her with the force of several eighteen-wheelers and the stone in her hand feels as if it’s vibrating. “Sure,” she says, taking a step around him and it feels like a million miles. “Alright, so we focus on the picture and the moment and--” “--Cast the spell? Yeah, that’s usually how it works.” “I’m going to kill you and leave your body in the past.” “That is violent.” “Happy Halloween.”

Killian barks out a laugh, teeth finding his lower lip. “C’mon, Swan. We’re getting very close to the witching hour.” “That’s not how that phrase works at all.”

“C’mon.”

She doesn’t argue that time, sinking onto the far ground at the far edge of the coffee table. It isn’t easy to keep her eyes away from the photos, but she’s going to lose her nerve if she sees, and Killian is right – it’s time.

“You ready?” he asks, like this wasn’t her idea and Emma nods brusquely, taking his hand when he holds it out. Still warm. “Try to stay in rhythm when we talk. The world likes that, usually.” Emma laughs, but it’s not a joke and her whole body starts to tremble as soon as Killian waves his hand over the candles. The flames jump, a flash of blue light and energy and she knows she’s speaking, can hear her own voice echo around them, but it feels like she’s watching it as well, hovering above the scene like she’s totally detached.

“Buailín, bean an taistealaigh, féachaint ormsa,” Killian says, care on every letter. His fingers don’t leave Emma’s, growing tighter with every moment. Her palm is sweaty, she can feel the moisture, making it difficult to hold her grip, but he doesn’t let go.

She digs her nails into the back of his palm.

“Cibé an bhfuil mé ag taisteal san aer, ar thalamh nó ar muir,” Emma continues.

The flames shift again, a flash of red and anger – the emotion almost palpable in the air, as if the air is angry at them for trying. Emma squeezes her eyes closed, doing her best to fight off the wave of nausea in her stomach, but the smell only gets more potent.

It’s like burned rubber and ashes, disappointment and fury and none of it is right. She’s shaking now, quick jerks that send pain through all of her limbs and into the base of her spine, moisture pooling at the bottom of her neck.

The smell grows.

And Emma gasps when she hears it, a cry of despair that seems to rip across all of time. Her eyes snap open, if only to check that she’s not actually being ripped apart as well. It feels that way, agony and an emptiness that seems to stretch out as far as she can see.

Her eyes widen, trying to find an end, but it only looks more vast the longer she stares ahead, a never-ending wasteland of darkness and nothing.

Alone.

The word flashes in front of her gaze like a neon sign, taunting and Emma shakes her head. It doesn’t move. The feeling grows, blooming in the very center of her chest like there’s a black hole there, and Emma can’t breathe.

She tries to lick her lips or swallow back the cry in her throat, but she feels like she’s standing on the edge of something, any movement certain to leave her falling into the abyss in front of her.

“Swan!” She doesn’t hear it at first. It’s nothing more than a wisp and want, but he yells again and squeezes her hand and Emma grips the moonstone as tightly as she can.

“You’ve got to finish it, love,” Killian says, and, that time, Emma hears him perfectly. “You can do it. I know you can.”

Emma shakes her head. “I don’t…”

“I’m not going anywhere, Swan. You’ve got to say the words.”

“Cosúil le talisman--” she starts.

“--i mo phóca clochfaidh mé.”

His hand never leaves hers. And everything goes dark.

Emma wakes with a start, eyes scanning the room and there’s no one there.

She sits up slowly, wincing at the ache in her right palm and her fingers barely unclench. There’s a moonstone in her hand.

“Oh shit,” Emma breathes. “It worked.”

It takes her a frustratingly long amount of time to figure out where she is, her apartment looking almost foreign without the empty takeout containers and piles of half-finished laundry she’d accumulated in the weeks after Graham’s death.

She shouldn’t be in her apartment.

She should be in Killian’s apartment.

She should–– “Oh shit,” she hisses again, leaping out of bed and wobbling as soon as her feet hit the floor. “Killian! Killian, are you here?” Silence.

Painful, vaguely terrifying silence.

“Killian?” Emma hates how small her own voice sounds, but bits and pieces are starting to come back and she’s not sure this worked the way she thought it would. Something about this is wrong. There shouldn’t have been that noise or those feelings, a flash of magic Emma is certain wasn’t hers. Or Killian’s.

Killian.

She jumps at the knock on the door, a quick rap of knuckles that’s practically exuding impatience. Emma swallows, tapping her fingers against the pajama pants she’s inexplicably wearing. Oh. Oh.

They hadn’t gone back to the crime scene, but they’d gone back to the day. And Emma had woken up in her apartment wearing pajama pants with a snowflake pattern on them because Mary Margaret had bought them for her last Christmas. It was a very bad joke.

The knock is louder the second time.

Emma twists her wrist, magic crackling between her fingers as she jogs towards the door. He’s halfway to a third knock when she swings it open.

“Swan,” Killian mutters, a note of wonder in his voice and she belatedly realizes it might be the first time he’s seen inside her apartment. They’re not really friends.

“Hey.” It’s an absurd response, all things considered, but Emma’s brain is firing a mile a minute and her magic is moving even quicker and she’s not entirely prepared for the look on Killian’s face. His entire expression shifts down, lips falling and shoulders sagging.

She’s almost surprised there’s not some soft of blue aura around him, just to really drive the point home.

“Oh,” he nods. “Ok, I um--”

He moves to walk away, which really is almost more absurd than Emma’s hey, but then she waves her hand and he crashes into an invisible wall that wasn’t there two seconds before. Emma assumes that means she’s won.

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t...don’t go. Please.” Killian turns around slowly, the heel of his hand rubbing his jaw. “Did you just magic a wall for me to run into?” “I wasn’t really thinking.” “Yuh huh.” “Were you...were you thinking? When you came over here?” “You’re doing a rather abysmal job of beating around the bush here, Swan.”

Emma scoffs, waving her hand again so no one else is injured by her invisible wall. In the past. They’re in the past. “That’s because I’m not entirely sure of the rules.” “I think we’ve broken right by all of those, don’t you?” “Look who’s beating around the bush now,” Emma accuses, reaching forward to stab a finger into his chest before she can reconsider it. His fingers curl around her elbow, another expression that she’s possibly hoarding or recording for posterity, and she can’t think when his tongue drags across his lips. “What exactly do you remember?” “About time traveling with you?” “Oh my God.” “Enough that I realized where we were when I woke up this morning. I’m going to go ahead and assume you remember too?” Emma nods. “That was…” “Horrendous?” “Yeah, something like that.” “Did you hear the screaming?” Emma asks, but one glance at Killian’s face is enough of an answer. “I didn’t expect that.” “Neither did I. And I don’t think it was time.” That catches her by surprise. “What? What was it then?” “I think it was the person who killed Graham.” Emma’s eyes widen, and she’s glad Killian is in front of her so she can rest her palm flat against his chest. “But that noise. That wasn’t--” “--We didn’t think it was human, love.”

“That didn’t sound like a witch,” Emma argues. “That sounded like...I don’t even know what. Every horrible thing in the world. That can’t be right.” “If you’ve got another suggestion, I’m all ears.” Emma scowls. She doesn’t have another suggestion. She’s got negative suggestions. “You want some coffee?” And, really, she shouldn’t be keeping track, but Killian’s face keeps doing things and responding to her and he hasn’t tried to move her hand away from him. So, she adds that expression to the list she’s only maybe kind of keeping and tries to smile like any of this is normal and Killian’s step is almost steady when he crosses the threshold.

He puts four spoonfuls of sugar in his coffee.

And they try to come up with a plan.

It’s a garbage plan. It’s a garbage, shit, terrible plan and Emma can’t help the whimper that falls out of her as soon as Killian’s phone goes off, David’s frantic voice on the other end because Graham’s dead and they’ve done all this before.

David only looks a little stunned when they show up at the crime scene together.

“What the…” he mumbles, shaking his head like it’s all a dream and Emma wishes it was.

She and Killian had left her apartment hours earlier, patrolling the twenty blocks around where Graham was found. There wasn’t anything. No clues. No nothing. Everything exactly where it was supposed to be.

And Graham looked even more pale in person than in the photos.

Emma turned on the spot, head colliding with the jut of Killian’s shoulder as he tried to tug her closer to his side.

David’s eyes were going to fall out of his head.

“What the hell is happening right now?” he demands. “How the hell did you get here so fast? How did both of you get here?” Killian ignores all three questions. “What’s your gut reaction to this?” “What?” “Your gut reaction, Nolan. Now!” David flinches at the acid in Killian’s voice, gaze flitting from his partner to Emma and back again. It reminds her of a pinball machine. “The coroner thinks it’s a heart attack,” David mumbles. “No outward signs of struggle and no witnesses and--” “--That’s not what I asked.” “What the hell are you getting at? You’re making it sound like you’re looking for something nefarious here.”

Killian sighs, letting his cheek rest on the top of Emma’s head. They’re not friends. They’re not friends. They’re time-travel partners. Who failed. Completely. And immediately.

David appears to be choking.

“You’ve got to tell me what’s going on with you two.”

Both Killian and Emma ignore that as well.

“There wasn’t anything, David?” she asks instead. “Nothing suspicious?” “Should there be?” “I don’t know.” “Sure you don’t.” Emma rolls her eyes, falling back on tried and true when nothing feels like that. Killian’s arm tightens around her shoulders. “What was Graham doing here?” Emma presses. “We’re not anywhere near his apartment.” “It’s a city, Em. People go out. Right?” She’s positive he doesn’t mean for that last question to sound as unsure as it does, but the world appears to be playing one long trick-or-treat joke on her and Emma can feel the tears on her cheeks. “Yeah, I guess,” she mutters.

Her eyes dart back towards Graham, though, medics and the coroner and she can dimly make out the crinkle of a body bag unfolding. Killian's mumbling in her ear, quiet promises and assurances that don’t make any sense at all, particularly with David glowering at both of them.

“There wasn’t anything, Swan,” Killian says, not for the first time that day.

“That is impossible.” He chuckles against her hair. “Yeah, that seems to be the theme.”

“We didn’t do anything. We didn’t change a single thing.” “What?” David shouts, drawing the attention of several uniform officers. He waves them off, shifting on his feet and one of the streetlights above them flickers.

“Don’t do that,” Killian warns. His fingers are moving now, tiny semi circles on Emma’s shoulder that seem as natural as the breathing she desperately needs to do.

“I’m not doing anything. Why did you get here so fast?” “We were in the area.” “We?” Killian glares, turning Emma on the spot and resting both hands on her arms. She feels kind of dizzy. She assumes that’s a byproduct of time travel. It’s probably not.

It’s definitely not.

“Maybe we were wrong, love.” “You are lying to me,” Emma hisses. “Right to my face. You know this wasn’t a heart attack.” David curses again, stomping his foot for good measure. Emma doesn’t blink. Killian inhales sharply. “I don’t think we did it right, Swan,” he says, soft and cautious like speaking too loudly will make it real.

“Did what right?” “That noise. Whatever it was. It shouldn’t have been there. And I think it’s got something to do with us. And Graham.” Emma sighs, an agreement sitting on the tip of her tongue. She doesn’t say it. She’s far too busy crying.

Killian doesn’t flinch – again. Just lets her head crash into his chest and holds onto her, ignoring whatever sounds David is making as several different police officers try to get them to move. There’s a gurney working its way through the crime scene.

“C’mon, Swan,” Killian says. “I’ll make you some hot chocolate.”

She lets him direct her back towards her apartment, never asking how he knows about hot chocolate or the cinnamon she sprinkles on top. She sits in the corner of her couch, crying even after the tears stop falling.

And they don’t try to come up with another plan.

There’s not anything to say.

Something is wrong.

They just don’t know what.

Emma has no idea what time it is when her eyes start to flutter, but it must be close to midnight, Killian shifting slightly next to her. Her heart stutters. “Hey, hey,” she says sharply, grasping at the side of his jeans like he’s about to disappear. “Don’t...um, don’t go. Please.” He turns slowly, staring at her with an expression she’ll probably think about every time she wakes up and just before she goes to sleep.

He nods.

“Yeah, ok, Swan.”

She falls asleep easily, her head on Killian’s thigh and his fingers toying with the ends of her hair and it’s almost enough that Emma doesn’t hear the scream as soon as the clock in her kitchen ticks twelve.

Emma wakes with a start, eyes scanning the room and there’s no one there.

She blinks, the frustrating sense of familiarity tugging at the back of her brain. There shouldn’t be anyone there. She’s home. In her apartment. Where she lives. Alone.

It’s...she can’t remember what day it is.

The phone on her nightstand is already ringing, a flash of color and vibrations and Emma hates the little lurch her heart makes when she notices the name.

Killian Jones.

She nearly knocks the phone on the ground in an effort to pick it up, slamming it against her ear. “Hi,” she says, and it comes out like a sigh.

“Hi.” “What day is it?” “My phone claims it’s September 12th.” Emma drops her phone.

She yanks the blankets away from her legs, staring wide-eyed at the pajamas she’s wearing again. Or still. Or, maybe, again. Words get confusing when time travel is involved.

And Emma has never hated a joke Christmas gift more in her entire life.

“Fuck.”

He’s yelling her name into the phone, loud enough that it nearly makes Emma laugh because the whole thing is absurd and impossible and they probably should have discussed leaving the past more. Emma just assumed it would...happen.

Magically.

God.

“Swan?” “Yeah, yeah,” Emma mutters, nearly falling out of the bed as she gets her phone back to her ear. “Still here.” “So, uh, it appears we’ve done a few things wrong here, love.” “You can say that again.” “Was that a joke?” “Not an intentional one.” Killian hums, and Emma pinches the bridge of her nose, the threat of a headache pulsing behind her left eye. “Ok,” she continues. “So. What do we do? Are we sure it’s still September 12th?” “I really doubt my phone would lie to me. Or NY1.” “NY1 is incapable of lying. Did he read the newspapers?” “Same as they were yesterday.” “Holy shit.” “Those were my sentiments exactly.”

“What do we do?” Killian makes a noise, not quite words and something that sounds a hell of a lot like confusion. “Try to find something again? Maybe it’s a gift from the universe?” “That seems like an awfully chipper mindset.” “Ah, the power of positive thinking. Also I just watched the same news story about a school in Crown Heights that’s getting its first-ever playground for the second time in as many days and it’s done wonders to my mindset about the world.” Emma laughs, easy and normal. She imagines Killian smiles. “You want to come over and drink more of my coffee and come up with a plan that, this time, doesn’t suck?” “I thought you’d never ask, Swan.”

It takes a full week before Emma believes the plan is impossible.

The plan continues to suck. Or sucks even more and Emma is standing next to Killian at a crime scene she’s certain she can describe in minute detail at this point.

For the seventh straight day.

David stormed away from them in a huff five minutes before – as soon as Killian growled walk away, Detective when David spotted his fingers wrapped around Emma’s – and no one’s paid them a second glance since. They’re standing stock still, a few inches of space between them, but Killian hasn’t tried to move his hand and Emma is gripping it like several metaphorical anchors.

She wonders why Graham looks so pale if it was a heart attack.

It wasn’t a heart attack.

“At what point do we just throw in the white flag?” Emma asks, not taking her eyes away from the coroner. His name is Victor. They learned that on the third day.

Killian turns towards her slowly, eyes frustratingly blue and decidedly distracting. His expression is unreadable. “Why would we do that?”

“There’s nothing here, Killian. We’ve searched every corner within fifty blocks. Nothing has changed. We haven’t done anything.” Emma’s voice cracks on the last word, an anger she’d been doing her best to avoid. And neither one of them have acknowledged the very real possibility that they may be stuck on September 12th for the rest of their lives.

They’ve got no escape plan.

She should have prepared better. She thought her magic would react better. Her magic, however, seems to be at the crux of Emma’s problems. It’s as if it’s developed its own rhythm in the last few days, a tide that’s coursing through every inch of her, warming her from the inside out and keeping her slightly off-kilter. It boils under her skin, a determination to do something because they haven’t talked about that noise either.

The noise that pounds in Emma’s memory and lingers on the edge of her consciousness every single night. At midnight. Every single night.

“Maybe there isn’t anything to do,” Killian whispers, and Emma doesn’t miss the defeat there.

“Hence my white flag joke.” “You’ve got a habit of making very poorly timed jokes, love.” “It’s a very misplaced defense mechanism. I think it drives Mary Margaret insane.” “I sincerely doubt that.” She doesn’t need the rush of feeling shooting down her arm to know he means it, the honestly in his voice strong enough to permanent damage to the space-time continuum. He nearly smiles when she meets his gaze.

“That was nice,” Emma mutters.

“It happens from time to time.” She nods, pulse fluttering and Killian’s eyebrows shift when he feels the change in her magic. “I don’t know what we’re missing. There’s got to be something. What did we do wrong?” “I don’t know.” “I”ll be honest and tell you that’s not the answer I was hoping for.”

He laughs, more than a little sarcastic, and for one absolutely, insane moment Emma is certain he’s going to kiss her. He stares at her like he’s about to, eyes tracing over her face and lingering for a moment on her lips, but then he blinks and it’s over and they’re still stuck in some weird Groundhog Day situation with no new clues and a terrifying shriek to end every day.

She probably wouldn’t have argued the kiss.

The corner has to ask them to move out of the way of the gurney.

God.

“I think we’ve got some time to figure it out, Swan.” “Was that a joke?” “Probably worse than yours, right?” “Decidedly.” Killian grins, not quite as exhausted as it’s been while they’ve been chasing ghosts and possible magic and Emma chews on her lip to remind herself that they’re not really friends. She can’t figure out why he agreed to help her.

She can’t figure out how he’s not furious she’s inadvertently trapped them in the past.

“Hot chocolate?” he asks, and Emma nods out of habit and want. Killian’s smile widens. “Good. I’ve got some theories about marshmallow to chocolate ratio I want to test out.”

They eventually decide that the optimum number of marshmallows in a coffee mug is seven, which seems kind of arbitrary, but Killian is quick to point out that it’s magical, Swan and Emma is willing to be charmed. So she doesn’t argue.

And she doesn’t say anything when, this time, he slides down next to her on the couch, pulling her flush against his chest with an arm around her waist and her hair in his eyes.

It’s comforting, safe and warm and a slew of positive adjectives that are probably as impossible as getting out of whatever loop they’re in because Emma’s breath catches as soon as her eyes close and the sound echoes off the walls of her apartment.

He finds her hide-a-key the next morning, letting himself into her apartment with a smile and coffee in hand. Emma blinks sixteen times at the sight.

“You’ve got to move that, Swan,” Killian says, groaning when he almost hands her his over-sugared coffee. “It took me almost no time to find.” “You’re a cop. And magic. You are literally made to find secret things.” “Made?” “Ask me that question again after I’ve finished the coffee.” Killian chuckles, dropping onto the edge of Emma’s bed. She watches him over the top of her coffee cup, a forced energy and certainty that should probably grate on her nerves more. She finds it kind of endearing.

Mostly because she’s kind of hoping he’s doing it for her.

She’s, like, seventy-five percent positive he’s doing it for her.

“What’s your deal?” Emma asks, and Killian arches an eyebrow.

“I saw that Crown Heights story again today.” “And?” “And I think we should take a day off from crime-fighting.” “What?” “I think you heard me the first time, love,’ he drawls, letting his hand rest on her outstretched leg. “And if we’re going to be stuck here for awhile, then we’ve got some time to...do other things.” “That’s insane.”

“No,” Killian shakes his head. “That’s practical.” “How you figure?” “You hear the noise last night?”

Emma nearly chokes on her coffee, Killian’s expression turning serious. “Yeah, I did,” she says. “It sounded worse, didn’t it?” “Like it was getting ripped apart. So I think we’ve got to change our approach, Swan. We’ve exhausted this avenue of the search, it’s time to find something different.” “By ignoring the search completely.” “Yes, exactly that. You ever been to Veselka?”

“The pierogi place?” “I think they have other things besides pierogies,” Killian argues, but there’s a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth and it would be really nice to not spend an entire day thinking about death. “But the pierogies are supposed to be legendary. Or so the rumors say.” “You’ve never been there?”

The question lingers in the air around them, buoyed by mutual magic and possible hope and Emma burns her tongue when she all but gulps down the rest of her coffee. Killian shakes his head again.

“Not once. But I’ve got a deep appreciation of Polish food.”

Emma scoffs, still charmed. Consistently. For the past week. Despite the lingering scent of death. “I really like the idea of a mass quantity of potatoes stuffed into some kind of pasta thing.”

“It’s a date then.” “Is this you picking me up?” “Something like that.” Killian stands up, offering a hand and another smile, or possibly the same smile, and Emma’s going to let him move her hide-a-key. “Get showered and we’ll go. A whole day of doing things we’ve never done.” “You’re very optimistic.” He doesn’t answer, but Emma thinks she hears him say something like that again as she turns on the water and they order every single pierogi option Veselka offers. The waitress looks at them like they’re insane.

They honestly might be.

Oh hey, there’s a second chapter. It’s also on Ao3.

#cs ff #captain swan #captain swan ff #captain swan fic #cs #i am just a bitter old doctor who fan #who is constantly like I COULD WRITE TIME TRAVEL #so here is some time travel #with kissing

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flynnmcdonnellwriting · 3 years

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The Birth of the ‘Troubled Estate’: A photo essay into Tom Hunter – ‘Holly Street Voids’

Documenting the effects of regeneration, artist Tom Hunter moved into Holly Street Estate, Hackney two years before it was demolished. Featuring four nineteen storey towers and nineteen five-storey buildings interconnected by a long ‘sinister’ corridor, Hunter photographed the last remaining residents of the community. Capturing the peaceful interiors of the resident’s homes, Hunter emphasises the individual presence of each occupants as representative of an old age of social housing that would quite literally be torn down and rebuilt. Paralleled to the neglected exterior of the tower blocks and the difficult struggle of daily life that came with it. Hunter expresses the importance of the resident’s welfare through his insistence to challenge the stereotypes around estate (Figure 1). As he states, “It was rough and violent and there was graffiti and rubbish everywhere, but then you went into people’s homes and it was a warm experience – meeting these people who had put pride and effort into their homes and bringing up their kids”.

Figure 1: Tom Hunter, Holly Street (1997)

Before being demolished, Hunter hosted an exhibition on the 19th floor, covering the whole room with his photos. Following the resident’s evictions from the estate, Hunter returned to the empty apartments capturing the anguish of departure in his series ‘Holly Street Voids’. Emphasising the fundamental disruption, Hunter symbolises the empty tower blocks as a paradigm failure in Britain’s social housing policies in photographing the slowly decaying and vacant rooms. Almost dystopian the images take on even more poignancy, given the idealistic utopian vision the tower blocks once been created under (Figure 2).

In the 1960s British architects hoped to learn from the mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s with the invention of new architectural forms that sought to recreate the social fabric of working-class communities. Taking influence from Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier they favoured a more modernist vision of 20th century living; the ‘streets in the sky’ were born. Made up of endless footbridges that connected blocks of apartments, the intention was to recapture the convivial nature of the historic streets and neighbourhoods that had once sat below. For all their good intentions, their application proved disastrous. Built on an inhumane scale, the tower blocks were high-density ill-equipped homes with poorly designed communal areas that hindered any likelihoods of residents building any sense of social capital. It’s often cited, that London suffered more damage as a result of property development and misguided councils in the 1960s, than Hitler had managed to inflict during the whole of the war.

Figure 2: Tom Hunter, Holly Street Voids (1998)

In 2017, Hunters series was exhibited at V&A’s Museum of Childhood. Entitled ‘Searching for Ghosts’, Hunter collaborates with fellow artist James Mackinnon and photographer Mike Seabourne exploring social housing in East London. Working with local residents who had lived in the area for over ninety-years they present an intergenerational project that shared stories of East London communities. Today only one tower remains at Holly Street, as Hunter explains; “They wanted to knock down all four, but the old-age pensioners were very vocal and said: ‘We want to live in the tower blocks, we like the views’. They loved the fact they could get a lift and the community feel. They thought it was much safer, which was completely the opposite of what I thought they would say.”

Built between 1966 and 1971, the estate became a key target for Tony Blair’s regeneration programme; having lived nearby in Mapledene Road while growing up. On the 2nd June 1997, a month after his landslide victory, he made his first public speech at Southwark’s Aylesbury Estate; “I have chosen this housing estate for a very simple reason. For 18 years, the poorest people in our country have been forgotten by the government. They have been left out of Government except for the purpose of blaming them. I want that to change. There will be no forgotten people in the Britain I want to build. For a generation of young men, little has come to replace the third of all manufacturing jobs that have been lost. Behind the statistics lie households where three generations have never had a job. There are estates where the biggest employer is the drugs industry, where all that is left of the high hopes of the post-war planners is derelict concreate”.

In order to rescue its most marginalised communities and seize the ‘New Britain’ it proclaimed New Labour sought to create ‘a different kind of community’ that would integrate them into a new globalised economy. In the same way Thatcher used the field of housing as a vehicle to enact her roll back of the state, Blair seized upon it to carry out his vision of the future as he embraced the new globalised economy that had shut so many previous communities out. This social exclusion through a lack of access to employment and recourses, as well as the ability to compete resulted in the convergence of the ‘problem estate’. This short-hand analysis would define Britain’s neighbourhoods as areas of unskilled individuals where economic inactivity had resulted in collective cultural behaviours ill befitting of employability.

‘Derelict concrete’ estates such as Holly Street and Aylesbury became potent examples of the growing stigmatisation towards Britain’s left behind neighbourhoods. Portrayed as a crime hotspot, to many Aylesbury Estate is most recognisable from Channel Four’s 2004 ident. Embodying every trope of urban decay from graffiti-ridden walls and littered walkways, the ident presented a threatening dystopian vision of its ‘streets in the sky’. It’s important to note however, that Aylesbury was less a ‘problem estate’ but rather an estate – like many others – that had problems. A sentiment that was shared by its residents. Being one of the poorest inner-city areas of the capital it had come to house a proportion of mostly black and ethnic minority communities; as well as being used as reception area for refugees and asylum seekers. Rejecting the media portrayals, they produced a more positive representation of the estate, highlighting the diverse social fabric of the community. As many argued, the estates problems didn’t lie within its individuals but in the years of poor upkeep and neglect; “Our lived experience of crime on the Estate does not match the myth – and this is borne out by the statistics. We need to counter these pernicious negative stereotypes. We are not going to be bullied into giving up good sound insulation, light, views and space because of exterior neglect and delays in re-housing growing families due to current housing scarcity”.

Despite refuting their community’s portrayal, the ‘troubled estate’ myth was important as it gave justification for the social engineering – the idea of mixed communities - that lay the heart of New Labour’s vision. By proposing a mixture of housing tenures, which critically included private ownership, New Labour believed that the injection of affluent middle-class owner occupiers would ‘lift’ estates benefiting them as a whole. Controversially it resulted in the demolishment of council homes that were then only partially replaced; in fewer numbers and less secure as they were completely unaffordable to those who needed them most. Aylesbury’s tenants rejected the proposed scheme fearing as much that it would lead to a middle-class takeover resulting in the reduction of space standards and diminished rights under new landlords. Understandably, they did not trust the council. In 1999 Southwark councils Director of Regeneration Fred Manson sparked fierce controversy after claiming that ‘social housing generates people on low incomes coming in and that generates poor school performances, middle-class people stay away’. For many it was easy to see it for what it was, as back-door privatisation. For the time being Aylesbury’s residents battle on.

Just a mile up the road, the Heygate Estate has been less fortunate. Demolished in 2011, residents were promised new homes as part of the regeneration. However, these were never built by the time they were ‘decanted’ from the estate in 2007 and of the previous 1,200 council homes, zero remain. Of the estate’s 1,034 households formerly renting from the council, now only 216 remain. Of the 2,535 homes that are now owned by the Lend Lease Group, only seventy-nine are social rented. Heygate Estate’s regeneration programme reflects a social issue that has hung over inner London for decades. With councils desperate to generate income while being surrounded by high priced properties, it’s hard to dispute it as nothing more than social cleansing.

It’s important to note that this isn’t a modern problem in London. In an ever-modernising 1960s Britain, the juxtaposing realities of the growing affluence and the surviving slums was ever more convoluted. For a country that was re-establishing itself as a progressive island of collectivist thinking, how could it carry on justifying such an archaic form of living. With a broad consensus towards the welfare state still felt, the politics of housing was once again brought to the forefront of daily political rhetoric. The general view held by many politicians was that in order to rid the cities of its slums they therefore had to build new housing both rapidly and on an unprecedented scale. Faced with growing waiting lists and a reduction in inner-city building sites, this led to many Londoners being rehoused in suburban estates on the capital’s peripheries. Known as the ‘London overspill’, this choice was one that was often unwillingly imposed upon them as it led to the break-up of support networks through that of the extended family.

The irony of New Labour’s ‘mixed communities’ scheme is that council estates have always been mixed communities that are home to people from all walks of life. While they disproportionately house many of London’s poorest citizens they are far from the ‘ghettoised’ caricature that is promoted by the media. There is of course a case to be made for the ‘mixed communities’ initiative. After all it was Nye Bevan himself who preached of the importance of council estates not becoming ‘colonies of low-income people’. While well intentioned, as there was undoubtedly a need to implement beneficial reforms to the decaying estates, it’s clear that New Labour pursued a neo-liberal agenda. In deciding to favour the market over the many, they essentially left council housing defenceless to rising prejudice; both against the underlining values that sustained it and the very communities that lived within them. By failing to challenge these attacks they left council housing open to the greatest threat that was yet to come.

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