#he really is the embodiment of 'i prevented murder'/'how?'/'self-control'

[cryinginthebackseat]

initials t.c.

Fandom: Open Heart

Pairing: Tobias Carrick x MC

Words: 7.299 (I’M SO SORRY)

Summary: Tobias Carrick makes Claire an offer she can’t refuse.

Warnings: 50% plot, 50% smut, swear-a-thon, blasphemy

Author’s Note: when the book first introduced us to tobias carrick, the first thing that hit my mind was “okay, but that dude is like the carbon copy of jesse williams and that’s hot” but then, once it reveals who he is and what’s his role in the book i went “interestinggggggg” cause you know, i’m a sucker for morally grey characters and all, and i’m not even ashamed to admit it. also, carrick is shaping up to be such an interesting character with each chapter and maybe one day- okay, maybe this sounds like a pipe dream- but one day, i hope he can be a li (let a girl dream plz) lmao

also if anyone’s interested, i made a PLAYLIST to accompany reading the fic.

the title is inspired by serge gainsbourg’s initials bb

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Cast down off heaven Cast down on my knees I’ve lain with the devil Cursed god above Forsaken heaven

To Bring You My Love - PJ Harvey

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Whenever Claire thinks about Tobias Carrick, admittedly, unfortunately, tragically, she always thinks about his eyes first before remembering what a colossal pain in the ass he is.

It always comes in that order. Like the number 3 always comes before 4, like the seawater dragging back from the shoreline before a tsunami occurs, like pouring milk before the cereal (she honestly didn’t get what the fuss is about until one day Elijah cried ‘oh, hell no you don’t, satan!‘ one morning and proceeded to give her bullet points why pouring the milk before the cereal is considered a sin and more of an abomination than Nephilims’ existence and that there’s a higher probability that she’s a psycho for being a ‘milk first’ kind of person). So apparently, Claire’s a psycho now which explains so many aspects- but she digresses and the point is, the reaction is uncontrollable and she high-key hates how she can’t control her goddamn mind most of the time.

The point is, she needs to stop thinking about him to begin with. 

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Claire Castelnuovo was born in the summer, under the sign of Gemini. Marilyn Monroe once said that stands for intellect, being a Gemini, but she was too blissfully unaware of this guerdon that she devoted her adolescent years to being outdoors instead. Too many days she spent trampling along the cornfields with her cousins until the skies faded out with brilliant purple-tinged amber and she was carrying a piece of the sun in her skin and smelled like one, stuffing wildflowers inside her boots as she walked around the neighborhood with her dad’s old stethoscope, napping in a hammock with Oasis’ All Around the World on repeat. By the time she hit 15, her black strands had turned brown from repeated sun exposure. She loved it.

But it was a different time, a different place. Somewhere that only exists on the margins of her memories, lost and hidden.

Now, Claire prefers the night.

It’s 9:30 pm when she arrives at a hotel bar in downtown Boston. A newly christened establishment which has somehow become a regular spot for Hemingway’s enthusiasts once the Boston Globe wrote an article about their Hemingway Daiquiri and how, as they wrote it, ‘probably the only place that’s brave and crazy enough to adhere to the 1930s original recipe’ and bourgeois party birds at wee hours during the weekend.

Her eyes are gritty, dry and strange. Her mind’s much worse for the wear- she feels like shit, like in the middle of watching that scene from The Green Mile shit when all is hopeless and you feel like walking out of the theater, but you’ve spent your last savings just to buy the ticket, so you decide to stick through it.

Claire makes a beeline for the bar, tries to flag down the bartender. She orders an Old Fashioned, making sure to specify to double it because she’s not a regular here and he’s not Reggie and that’s how she’s been taking her drink for years.

She knows well deep in her bones that she should be somewhere else. Somewhere more familiar, somewhere where Tim Mcgraw often plays from the subpar speakers, and the rustic wooden bar countertop is gouging and discoloring from the cheap household cleaners and alcohol stains, and her friends are cramming together in the same booth in the back, reveling and laughing until they close the bar down and make a mess all over. Perhaps it’s a mistake coming here, where no one’s a familiar face and the drinks are a tad overpriced for her budget.

But then, perhaps this is exactly what she needs; the unfamiliarity, the visceral feeling knowing that she doesn’t belong here, where no one knows her name and the huge deal of weight she’s currently carrying on her shoulders. Perhaps, she can’t face her friends after what happened, after what Esme has done. Shit, how could any of this happen? Claire knows this all on Esme’s, but her guilt has grown hopelessly tangled with her anxiety. She’s her intern, for fuck’s sake, Claire’s supposed to prevent this from happening in the first place.

Man, where’s Declan Nash when she feels like punching someone in the face?

Claire makes the mistake of drinking her drink too quickly, because it hasn’t been ten minutes and she’s drained half of the content. Then she reaches for her phone in her bag, fiddles with it, absent-minded, equal parts bored before then settles on watching the band performing Art Pepper’s You Go To My Head and immediately thinks of that time she accidentally dropped her brother’s saxophone in a moment of her rather graceless, wine-soaked self with the whole family present.

Someone plops down on the empty stool next to her. Claire’s now scrolling through her phone- again, bored. Sienna commented on the post Elijah shared to the group chat with a few unnecessary-yet-totally-necessary emojis to the already convoluted series of texts and Claire only reads them in silence, not only because her friends’ texting behaviors are too chaotic for her to follow sometimes but she’s not really feeling like talking to anyone right now.

“Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in.”

Famous last words.

Claire freezes in her seat. Her phone’s still glowing in her hand, alighting her features. She recognizes that voice- too well, that is and it’s enough to set off her flight-or-fight response.

She glances up from her phone, preparing for the worst.

Well, what’s presented before her is literally the worst.

“Of all the gin joints…” she says once her eyes find Tobias Carrick sitting next to her, still in his work shirt, sleeves rolled-up, a few buttons undone, reeking of smoke, soap and antiseptic with a shit-eating grin plastered over his face.

She should have gone to Donahue’s instead.

“Evening to you too, Castelnuovo. Drinking your dinner tonight, I see?”

“What, this? No, this is breakfast. 100% daily value of alcohol and pretty much nothing else. I mean, it’s not the weekend without a bad case of hangover and an aspirin snowglobe in the morning, am I right? You know, like a glass of aspirin? Not a literal snowglobe?” she blabbers, realizing just so by the time she hears him snort. Claire chokes down another sip to shut her mouth up. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m about to commit first-degree murder and burn this whole place to the ground,” he drawls, the ever goddamn sarcastic. “What do you think? I’m trying to get dru-”

“No, I mean what are you doing here, of all places? Can’t you get drunk somewhere else?” she interrupts, her midwest accent does funny things to the vowels and consonants- something that only happens whenever she’s in distress, or at least according to Jackie.

“Last time I heard, this joint’s still owned by the Hilton, not a certain junior member of the Diagnostics Team at Edenbrook hospital.”

“Dude, what do you think of the H in Claire H. Castelnuovo stands for?” Deadpan, trying to keep up with the rolling sarcasm, she retorts. He smirks.

“Horatio?”

“Get the fuck out of here,” she mutters, mid-eye-roll, mid-snickering.

He chuckles, his voice rich and smoky amidst the late-night swing and distant chatters. Carrick doesn’t leave, of course, typically him- if those anecdotes Ethan told her has taught her anything about his character, that is- defying everything, scheming his way to the top, the embodiment of ‘those devilish boys with their heavenly eyes’ type your mother warns you about.

Not that the latter is relevant.

“Or what?” His mouth twitches but there’s a hard, challenging light in his eyes that she knows too well by now.

“Or I’m leaving.“ She shoots him a glare. He’s testing her patience- again, like it’s his finesse. Some things never change, it seems.

“Come on, Castelnuovo, don’t be a sourpuss. The night is young and I can promise you, the last thing I am is a horrible drinking buddy.”

With a touch of irony, she replies: “I’m sure. I bet you asked your friends to fill out a questionnaire every time you went out with them, did you?”

Carrick hums.

“You’re funny.” But he says it in the same tone that someone might say Jesus fuck, you’re probably one of the most frustrating creatures I’ve ever laid eyes on. Also, because the next thing he says is: “A little rough around the edges, but funny nonetheless.”

“That makes one of us then.”

Carrick frowns, which is kind of a surprise because she’s half expected him to flash her that signature cheeky grin of his.

“Listen, I’m just trying to make a friendly conversation here. I know we haven’t really seen eye-to-eye with each othe-”

Claire snorts and crosses her arms over her chest. “That, doctor, is an understatement of the fucking century.”

“Okay so, we’re like Tom and Jerry but sans the background music and a naive little duckling running around calling one of us his momma, but I feel like now’s the time to call out a temporary truce between us.” A beat, then: “I heard about what happened with the intern.”

Something flashes across her face- and Carrick must have noticed it, because his face does this odd thing- it softens, even for a moment. She hates it. He’s not supposed to be looking at her like that, not supposed to see her at her weakest state or saved her ass- And Jesus, why does she have to be indebted to Tobias Carrick, of all people- But god forbid, the last thing she’ll ever do is crying in front of him.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she mutters, barely audible, trying to temper her fluctuated emotions.

“Then don’t. We can talk about anything else or fall into some sort of endless, meaningless platitudes. Whichever will work.” As if sensing Claire’s lingering hesitation, he adds. “Tell you what, to sweeten the offer, your next drinks are on me.”

She assesses him for a long minute, eyes narrowing. She’s shaking her head, but her mouth, as if against her will, instead says: “Careful, Carrick, there’s a chance I’ll be abusing that offer and run you dry.”

"Hey, if you want to butcher your liver so bad, don’t stop on my account,” he says. “Don’t worry, though, I’ll make sure to save your ass again this time around. Pro bono.”

Claire looks as if she’s just swallowed a dead rat. “Thanks, but no thanks. Death seems more like an appealing choice.”

“Well, I stopped death from interfering then, I’ll stop it again.” Carrick winks, she pretends to gag again yet remains still in her seat, so Carrick waves at the bartender for their order- she orders for a refill and he, a martini and Claire is this close from asking 'shaken or stirred?’ but then remembers who he is and immediately washes the question down with her drink.

“You know, if anyone told me weeks ago that I’d be having a drink with you tonight, I probably would have socked them.“

Carrick is in the middle of lighting his cigarette, but laughs instead. “The Times They Are a-Changin’, as Bob Dylan said.” A puff of smoke escapes his mouth, curling around his fingers. Claire instinctively looks away. “Which reminds me of that one time your mentor sang Ballad of A Thin Man on the fucking subway when we were 20.”

She swivels her head to his direction, on the verge of choking on her drink. “Hold on, hold on, Ethan Jonah Ramsey sings?”

“Give him a dare he couldn’t refuse and a few shots of whiskey, and I promise you he’ll sing like Sinatra on crack.” He grins, his eyes are all crinkled and bright; she thinks that means he’s genuinely amused. “Ah, good times. We were like- wait, who was it he’d like to say we’re like again?”

A small smile pulls at her lips. “Bert and Ernie.”

“Jesus, he really fucking compares us to some Sesame Street characters, huh?” She laughs at that, loud and bright. He does the same. “Personally, I’d always say we were like Butch and Sundance back then- rebels with a cause, a band of misfits, trying to leave our marks on the world. You know those types. We were young, we wanted so much- I still do. I mean, let’s be real, whoever’s wanted to be defeated at their own game?”

A crease forms between her eyebrows, not quite a frown.

“Nobody,” Claire concurs, hating herself for it. “But was it worth it? Betraying the closest thing you had to a brother or a lover…” Carrick coughs on his smoke from the latter. “or whatever in the process just to get what you wanted?” Claire was obviously aiming for that brash, hard-hitting jab, but it lands gloriously too soft.

The bartender finally places their ordered drinks down on the bar. Carrick reaches for it, taking a careful swig, then sets his glass down. He takes a deep breath.

"It’s nothing personal. It never was. I never considered him as my rival.”

“Yeah, but by doing whatever you did, you’ve made an enemy out of him,” she counters. “Look, Carrick, I know we live in a dog-eat-dog world and I know being good sometimes doesn’t get the job done. Perhaps Machiavelli was right. Perhaps, when necessary, you have to be ruthless, dissembling and manoeuvring- what did he say again? ‘The end justifies the means’? But if any worthwhile end can justify the means to attain it, if everyone outright surrenders to their darker side, then what’s left of our humanity?”

For an interminable moment, there is only silence. He simply stares at her, as if she’s a walking, talking Rubik’s cube he can’t solve or a book that he has opened and now he’s got to know so much more and she feels pinned under those warm irises, uneasy.

Suddenly, his mouth begins to take shape; the corners hike up, stretch and then he does the unexpected.

The bastard fucking laughs.

“Excuse me?!” she spits, white-hot anger lacing each word. Carrick laughs harder- the audacity- despite Claire’s growing razor’s edge stare. “Did you just laugh at me? I was being fucking seriou-”

“Sorry, sorry.” Wiping an imaginary tear from his left eye. “I was just remembering Harper’s words. She’s right, you really are on the side of the angels, aren’t you?”

She points at him with her glass, snarling. “And you, mister, are the devil himself with a medical degree and an egg head- and I don’t mean the slang for a highly academic person.”

“Ouch,” Carrick says out loud, still kind of laughing, borderline frowning. “Okay, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”

“Damn straight. Though you have a lot to apologize for.”

He groans. “Don’t tell me you’re still pissed about that one patient I stole under your nose?”

“The North remembers, ser,” she says, mean-spirited.

“Then does the North remembers that I saved her life?”

“Oh, so you’re discrediting the efforts of the other doctors that helped you make the cure?”

“Alright, alright. You win.” Carrick holds up his hands, the universal gesture of defeat and takes one final drag of his cigarette. He stubs it out, all the while keeping his gaze on her.

“So, how exactly can I make it up to you?“

Claire blinks- once, twice, thrice, realizing his intent. His voice drops an octave and he’s leaning in, close enough for her to notice the constellations of freckles splaying across his face and the way his brown eyes glinted like two shots of whiskey under a stream of light, intense and all-consuming. She feels her mind races, her brains feel as if they underwent a short-circuit and get caught on fire, and the fact that her mind’s on the precipice of exploring the idea is not helping.

A burst of laughter erupts from her throat, not that it’s funny- there’s nothing funny about the situation, but someone ought to diffuse this shift of tension between them, or that was her aim, at least.

“What, you wanna pay me back?” she asks, trying to keep her voice from cracking but failing miserably. Fingers trembling against her glass as she chugs nearly a quarter of her drink in one go.

He notices that.

"A Lannister always pays his debts, does he? If you think that I owe you one, then I’ll gladly pay.” His eyes flick back to her face, searing into her. The air crackles between them. The band is playing a different song now, a sound that only exists on the margin of her attention. If they’re in, say a mid 2000s rom-com movie, someone would probably interrupt this moment and save her from this. But this isn’t a movie.

Claire licks her lips, a candid reaction which encourages him to inch closer- or is it her? She can’t tell anymore. Tracing odd patterns on the palm of her hand with his finger and oh god, this is Carrick, the bane of her fucking existence, she’d shoot him first before she kisses him. But something about the prospect of fucking this bastard twists her insides deliciously into a confused mess.

“How? By fucking me?” she inquires, feigning scandalized- all that Catholic guilt bullshit.

He grins, all-teeth and wolfish and shrugs as if they’re talking about his life insurance policy or shit. “Well, that’s the idea.”

“But you don’t even like me.” It should come out as I don’t even like you, but even she knows that’ll be just another lie she tells.

“On the contrary, I enjoy our rivalry far more than I should, Castelnuovo,” he purrs and places a hand on her knee. Her throat bobs. She’s wearing a skirt, it didn’t seem important then, but now his hand feels warm against her skin, dangling on the edge of impropriety. Like gravity, all it takes is a little push for him to cross that line.

“I should be disliking the way you talk to me, challenging me and putting me on the back foot every goddamn time. I should be focusing on taking you down a peg, but the more I see you, the more I realize you have an attractive kind of power. And I’m just one man. And if there’s anything I learned, the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”

But then his movement suddenly ceases. Claire almost asks why.

"However…”

“What?” she stares up at him, eyes wide, breath hitching.

“However if you only accept alcohol as the currency for transactions, then I’ll tell the bartender to get us another round instead,“ he tells her, offering her one last chance to back out from this, from making this mistake with him.

Claire stares into her drink, actually mulling this over. Her mind tells her no, but the other part- the alcohol-infused part of her mind- whispers otherwise. She imagines if Ethan or any of her friends are here, they would probably grab her shoulder and shake the living hell out of her for even reconsidering his offer.

But then again, intelligence, alcohol and desperation have always had a bad history of getting along together.

“What about June?” Claire asks against her better judgement, after a long, considerable pause. Carrick raises a confused brow.

“What about her?”

“I thought you guys…” she trails off, makes a face, feeling all-kind of flustered and aroused and wow, she’s really doing this, huh? “I mean, I don’t know- I don’t wanna get in between you guys.”

“Nah. It was only a three time thing, but there’s never been anything between us.” He chuckles at Claire’s askance look. “If you don’t believe me, you can fact-check it with the woman herself,” Carrick adds, looking at her dead-on with his eyes like he wants to get the message across.

She regards him silently for a long second, and maybe she’s a touch drunk now, maybe the bartender put something in her drink, or maybe she just needs to blow off some steam after what’s been happening in these past few weeks and Carrick happens to be a decent warm body for the occasion, but Claire finds herself shifting closer.

"Then I want you to pay me back.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah,” she answers, more sure this time, more determined.

Her nose bumps his, his breath fanning across her face all the while Carrick’s slightly pushing her skirt up, letting his fingertips travel higher. His eyes keep darting back and forth from her eyes and lips, checking for her reaction. There is no inhibition here, not anymore. People might be watching- heck, they could be already watching and it terrifies her that she doesn’t give a damn about it.

“But if you tell anyone about this, I swear to god… ” she warns and a shadow of mirth passes across his eyes, making her almost regretting this. Almost.

“Claire, darling.” It’s the first time he’s ever said her name and her stomach does a tango. “Your secret is safe with me.“ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 

He gets them a room in the hotel, it’s on the twentieth floor. Carrick handles the accommodation- he can afford it, apparently, which is not really surprising and the nuisating check-in procedure while Claire only waits in the lobby like a beautiful, agitated china doll amidst the turbulent sea the whole time until he comes back, flashes the room key at her and beckons her to follow.

She goes ahead of him, but he catches up. His body heat sends her anxiety rocketing sky-high through the roof as they walk next to each other, hands briefly brushing against one another but she ignores that (or at least she tries).

They are silent in the elevator, they are silent even once they reach the designated floor and walk down the hall to their room where the dim and shadowed lights follow their steps like vultures.

Carrick holds open the door for her and she enters, taking in the windows and the striking view of Boston skyline peeking behind the curtains, the TV and the queen-sized bed. The latter does nothing to assuage the anticipation that’s bubbling in the pit of her stomach, by the way.

Claire hears him shut the door, locking both bolts. She peers at him over her shoulder, half-turned, one eye on him. Their eyes meet, neither speaks. He’s taking off his black peacoat, back against the door, he’s looking at her as if wanting her is his full-time occupation and the realizations comes in like a mule kick, how that tiny voice inside her head, the one that tells her that this is a bad idea and she’s better off leaving never comes.

The room is not considerably huge (with $110 per night, you would have expected you’d get a bigger room), he could easily have her in six large steps, yet he stands there. Sizing her up, smirking rather devilishly, handsomely as if challenging her to make the first move. It’s another fucking game with him. A display of power, waiting who would fall first.

Claire finally turns around to face him. With a renowned determination, she removes her coat, letting it fall unceremoniously onto the carpeted floor. Her blouse follows next and her skirt, which she tugs it oh so slowly down her legs.

Carrick’s eyes widen, if she doesn’t know better, she thinks he’s speechless. He takes a deep breath, his gaze religiously following every movement as she twirls around once more to unhook her bra. His jaw clenches and unclenches. He’s having a hard time keeping himself in check which she takes an immense pleasure in. Claire just wants to see the man squirm for a change, even if she has to shed every article of clothing she wears.

By the time she slips off of her underwear, she is breathing raggedly. He hasn’t yet approached her so she crawls onto the bed, lying on her back with one elbow props her up, legs crossed. She kicks off her heels, rolls down her stockings with a bit of that noir come-hither, Lauren Bacall-esque heavy bedroom eyes.

Finally, Carrick steps closer until he’s only a hair’s breadth away, like a target, filling her line of sight. The tension in the room is hot enough to send the thermometer reaching its maximum limit and she’s burning, burning, burning right through the core.

Claire cranes her head up to meet his gaze, noticing the way he’s drinking in her body like a pirate ogling a bottle of rum. High-strung, tense, Carrick lowers his head to her, his fingers carding through her long hair. Dimness consumes him raw, his silhouette is starting to find its place amongst the shadows except for his eyes. Never does the fire in his eyes falter, merely alight.

They are already nose-to-nose when Claire suddenly raises her hand over his lips. He withdraws from her, looking confused and hot and bothered.

“Take a seat over there, will you?” She motions to the settee near the bed, her tone leaving no room for argument.

He smirks, but she can see his bravado if faltering. “Ordering me around in the bed now, are we?”

“Didn’t you say tonight is about you making it up to me?”

“Touche, touche.” Carrick straightens his posture and makes his way to the settee across from her, shifting uncomfortably in his seat given the growing issue in his pants.

With eyes still trained to his, Claire cups her own breast, fingers pinching her pebbled nipple before the same hand travels lower down her stomach, her thighs. Carrick leans forward in his seat, obviously liking where this is going before Claire slowly and teasingly part her legs for him to see.

A surprised groan escapes him.

“Jesus, Claire,” Carrick hisses. “Fuck, I didn’t know you’re a goddamn tease.”

She doesn’t bother replying to him, but a winning grin finds its way across her face as she lays on her back, her shame and modesty are distant, knees pulled up so he can have a clear view of her. With two fingers, she runs them along her folds, dragging them slowly up to her clit. Claire imagines they are his fingers- which once upon a time would have horrified her, but tonight, as she repeats the motion over and over, knowing that he’s sitting there, watching her without being able to get his hands on her, she decides to submit to this newfound fantasy.

A rustle pulls her back to reality. He’s undoing his own pants, palming his cock, runs his fingers over the leaking head.

A low moan catches in her throat at that, her gaze snapping up from his erection to his face where his irises have darkened and pupils dilated. He wants to show her, that’s he’s as depraved as her when it comes to wanting, that he fucking wants her and in spades and she fails to think like a normal human being anymore.

Claire uses that image to work on herself harder, faster, feeling the intense pressure beginning to build beneath her fingers. She’s so wet now, despite him being able to see that, she wants him to hear it as well as she uses her idle hand to tap against herself. Carrick growls, his pace matching the rhythm she’s setting.

She slips her fingers inside her, drops her head back against the mattress and bites a loud moan that threatens to escape her lips. Flushing scarlet all over her abdomen, her breasts and up to her neck. Her blood thumping louder than bombs in her ears, her breaths begin to come in gasps.

Another fast and hard thrust from fingers, and Claire finds herself sighing his name.

“Tobias…”

And every last bit of his self-restraint snaps.

In just a blink of an eye, Carrick is already on his feet, grabs her waist, harshly, and tugs her down onto the edge of the bed where he’s now kneeling before her. He doesn’t bother with the teasings or soft kisses or caresses, and even before Claire has the time to register what’s happening, he crushes his face between her parted legs and eats her out.

She gasps, high and fleeting, twisting the bed sheet between her fists while his tongue flicks over her, moving back up, back down, lapping along her folds in the same motions she showed him with her hand, how she likes it. Claire forgets how to breathe. It just occurs to her just how arousing the sight of him on his knees like this, sending her mind hitchhiking into outer space.

“Oh, fuck.” She breathes, back arching on the bed with a drawn-out moan. “Fuck, Tobias!” Her hips gyrate over his mouth and she presses her heels against his shoulder blades. She’s so close. All she needs is a little push to send her careening into oblivion and it seems that Carrick can sense it because he brings two digits to her entrance and slides easily inside her, setting a ruthless pace.

With her hands reaching out to the back of his head, Claire cries out his name and trembles violently. Encouraged, Carrick curves his fingers inside her, hitting that exact spot that finally undoes her as she comes, long and hard, around his mouth and fingers- the kind of orgasm that you can feel deep in your bones- and watches as fireworks dance behind her lids.

When she finally comes down from her high, everything is hazy. It’s like waking up from a deep slumber after a decadent soak in a scented bath and she loses all orientation, until she feels him nipping the inside of her thighs. She hisses, glances down, heavy-lidded eyes finding Carrick is leaving bruises after bruises all over her skin like some kind of a lewd memento of his work, like he wants her to remember this the next time she wakes up in her own bed and he’s not there.

"Are you trying to turn me into a Na'vi, doctor?” She asks, still kinda breathless, feeling surprisingly conversational despite having just experienced, if not, one of the best orgasms in her life. He smiles against her thigh and withdraws from her, only after her thighs are sufficiently bruised enough, licks his fingers clean and stands up at the end of the bed.

“Maybe. You’d make a cute blue extraterrestrial creature, though,” he replies cheekily, then undoes the button of his shirt, showcasing his naked torso.

Claire feels her cheeks heating up again, but forces herself to stare; eyes following his pectoral muscles, down to the toned lines of his abdomen while he slides off of his pants. The man is one fine specimen, alright, and he knows- smug bastard- and she thinks it’s such a shame that Carrick is… well, Carrick. If the man learns how to shut up for one minute or avoid trying to sabotage everyone’s career at Edenbrook altogether, maybe, just maybe, she’d consider him.

“But honestly, I just wanted to hear you say my name again,” Carrick continues, crawling his way up to her, pulling her out of her musings. He settles between her thighs. His lips finding her ear and nibbling at the lobe while his fingers pinching and pulling at her nipple. Claire shivers. Nails scraping along his skin, raising angry marks that would certainly be there tomorrow.

When they kiss, it’s so good that she can’t help but curl her toes. He kisses her like he’s trying to steal her breath or her name. She can taste herself in his mouth, which sparks so many feelings inside her. Her mind’s foggy, sweat pooling on her forehead. Carrick is but shoves his tongue into her mouth, lapping at her, biting, sucking and she leans hard into the kiss, retaliates by scraping her teeth against his bottom lip. It spurs him on. Making his cock twitch against her thigh and Claire decides she can’t wait anymore.

Claire rolls her hips at him. He takes the hint and rolls over to grab a condom from his pants. Then he’s back on top of her, his weight and heat crushing her most deliciously and brings her body further up the bed with him; she drapes her legs around his hips, hands gripping his arms. Her lust and anticipation collaborate to the point of near madness.

Carrick nips the taut line of her jaw and drives himself into her.

They both groan in unison.

“Oh, fuck.” Carrick mumbles between shaky breaths, his face pressed against her throat. “Fucking hell, Claire, you feel so warm.”

Claire, on the other hand, goes rigid under him. Her mouth hangs open and her world narrows down to the feeling of his cock inside her and the pleasure that builds up again in her abdomen.

This is happening, she thinks, he’s inside her and it feels so amazing. She might as well be crazy for agreeing to do this with him in the first place, but the promise of the thrill beats the doubts.

He starts slow, just the smallest fraction of hips, gently thrusting back and forth in shallow motions. She whines, frustrated and impatient, raising her own hips to meet his, but Carrick’s weight pins her onto the mattress and she can’t fucking move.

“F-faster,” Claire stammers, her molars grinding like toothache.

The bastard smirks, like he’s been anticipating the word coming out of her mouth.

“Beg for it.” His words are punctuated with every unhurried stroke he’s giving her, teasing her and if she’s not in the middle of being fucked right now, she would have kicked him in the balls.

Growling, she swallows her plea by pulling Carrick down for another kiss. This time, she’s the one who does the biting and the sucking, making sure he’s distracted enough and then just like with all the things she does in her life, she takes the matter into her own hands.

With all her strength, she scrambles up, pushes him off of her and knocks him onto his back flat on the bed. When she swings her legs to straddle him, his eyes pop.

“Holy shit, you are feisty.”

“Only cause I’m angry and horny,” she bites off. Angling herself above him and with one hand, guides his shaft back to her opening. “And you- you weren’t doing a proper job fucking me.”

He smirks. “I was trying to wind you up.”

“Fuck you.”

She lowers herself and sinks back onto his cock, relishing in his moans and growls.

“Baby, you’re doing it.” His hands curling around her waist, his head falls back onto the bed, exposing his throat and Claire is so hard-pressed not to bite him there.

Claire ignores his smartassness, naturally, and lifts herself, drops back down. Slamming her hips into his until she’s bouncing on him. Nails clawing at his chest. Finally be able to set a pace she desperately craves for, finally wiping that smirk off of his face.

Under her, Carrick is biting his lip in an effort to not to lose control. His hands are everywhere now; her stomach, her breasts, her neck, her cheeks. Leaving fire on its wake. She might still hate him after this is strange, little arrangement is over but at this juncture, he’s exactly the remedy she needs after everything.

Then Carrick wraps his arms around her and picks up the pace, thrusting into her hard and fast. Claire shakes. She can’t catch her breath, her forehead pressed on his shoulder, her teeth latching onto his skin. Breathing a string of 'fuckfuckfuck’ while he squeezes her ass and continues to fuck her with careless abandon.

"Tobias.” Her moans amplify. She’s close to climaxing again, her legs quivering. Eyes wide shut. “Please, please.” So much for not begging.

He pulls her to him so their foreheads meet. Their lips brush against each other, but they aren’t kissing, merely trading breaths. A hand touches her cheek and her lids flutter open, finding his eyes- those depthless, amber eyes that pretty much lead her to this point, are watching her, pulling her in.

“Say it again,” he encourages darkly, face twists in pleasure. “My name. Say it again.”

She does it again, it comes out as a groaned whisper, repeating it over and over again like a sacred mantra.

Her second orgasm sweeps through her, making her spine arches, it tears a winded moan from her throat and it’s more than enough to trigger Carrick’s own release; fingers digging into the soft flesh of her hips, groaning gutturally.

Panting, sore but sated, Claire collapses on top of his chest, his arm still drapes around her. The rise and fall of his breath lull her to sleep. Before she knows it, he gently rolls her to his side, pulling the covers for them and kisses her on the shoulder, which comes out as… odd for her.

The bed moves and she feels him leaving.

He’s leaving.

He’s leaving.

She doesn’t know why it stings, but it does. But also Claire opts not to pay no mind to it and forces her mind to surrender to sleep that once again tries to take hold.

Claire wishes she doesn’t dream of him that night, but she does.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It’s way past midnight when she wakes up. The room is dark. The curtains are closed. She’s still naked and sore under the covers, mind reeling in from what has just transpired.

One might ask in which universe does Claire Castelnuovo agree to sleep with Tobias Carrick? Well, apparently they did it in this one and oddly still, she doesn’t regret it. Though she’s still low-key sad that he left her straight after sex, but hey, what can she do about it? This arrangement itself is nothing but a means to an end, anyway, a perverse alternative for him to pay back what he allegedly owes her, she shouldn’t be surprised if he left after the ‘debt’ is paid.

Feeling her mood somehow takes an unexpected dip, she gets us from the bed and gathers her clothes on the floor.

She’s in the middle of zipping up her skirt when the bedside lamp flickers and comes on.

Claire turns around. Carrick, rousing from sleep, looks at her, rubbing his eyes and stifles a yawn. His lips still tinged from her kisses and bites.

“Leaving so soon?” he asks, voice still raspy from sleep and Claire thinks her mouth is hanging open, standing rooted to the spot like a spider on an icicle; frozen in time.

For a moment, she does nothing but stares at him, being rendered speechless. For many times, Tobias Carrick never fails to surprise her. Just when she thinks she has him all figured out, he comes sneaking in through her windows like a thief in the night and it just strikes her, how he really is an uncharted territory for her. Despite her having him pinned under her, exploring the hard planes of his body under the touches just a few hours ago.

The man is like a fucking myth, at this point. She knows him only from stories and her limited time around him, but who is exactly Tobias Carrick? Is he the competitive doctor at Mass Kenmore, the Machiavellian asshole that severed his friendship/relationship with Ethan for the sake of his greed and ambition? Or is he, Tobias Carrick, the man who saves her life, makes her laugh and kisses her shoulder in the afterglow?

She’ll probably never know.

“Yeah, my roommates will probably deploy a search party if I don’t come home tonight,” she replies, distracted, finally finding her own voice back. He nods, feigning disappointment- or is he not? She clears her throat and continues putting on her clothes. “I thought you left.”

He chuckles at the absurdity of her deduction. “And without saying goodbye?” Carrick rolls off of the bed and rises to his feet. He’s already wearing his pants- thank fuck for that- and approaches her. “I may be an asshole, Castelnuovo, but just so you know, my mother raised me better than that.”

So they’re back to their usual last name basis perimeter. That’s good, right? After all of this, she thinks a little familiarity would be nice for her sanity.

“Good to know, then.”

Silence encompasses the room. It’s awkward and overwhelming and it throws her a little off-balance. At the bar, they seemed to know exactly what to say to each other- especially him; but now, even she can sense the hesitation in his gait, at the way he’s looking at her and a faint alarm is trilling her head. Because if he’s making this awkward, she can do a whole lot of worse.

"Oh, before you ask, that makes up for pretty much everything, yeah. I mean, it’s alright.” You fucking dumbass, she thinks to herself, averting his gaze while a smile blooms on his face.

“Good to know, then.” He parrots her words and she huffs a laugh, freely and sweetly, like she’s currently not knee-deep in her problems or she’s just fucked the most incorrigible man that ever exists. He does too, but his gaze lands on her mouth before going back to her eyes.

Another silence passes. It’s time to go.

“I have to go now.”

He nods mutely and moves away so Claire can step past him.

She wears her coat. In the mirror, she still looks thoroughly fucked; her hair’s dishevelled, she smells like him now, but she really needs to go. She promises herself that this will be a one time thing because, Jesus fuck, she’s supposed to be smarter than this. She’s not fifteen anymore, and this is not the summer where she can watch the sunset from the cornfields with her cousins even though his eyes possess the same color.

Yet she walks toward the door in a daze, like she’s forgetting something but can’t pinpoint what it is.

“Can I-”

“Hey, do you-”

She stops, mid-turning, and closes her mouth. She doesn’t realize she’s interrupting him.

“Oh, sorry,” Claire says, embarrassed. “You go first, it’s alright.”

“Can I have your number?” he asks, uncharacteristically hesitant.

She thinks he’s joking or maybe he’s just feigning interest, but one look at his eyes and she can tell that this isn’t smoke and mirrors.

The eyes, chico. They never lie. It’s dumb, but that line from Scarface is the first thing that comes to her mind. That’s why when she hands him her phone, her hand is shaking slightly. She has to bite her lip to stop herself from grinning like a maniac.  

Claire takes a cursory glance at her phone once he returns it. He saved his number solely as t.c. with the water drop, the syringe, the ghost, the eggplant, the firework emoji and she chuckles endearingly, questioning the universe how he can easily get both a rise and a laugh out of her.

“I’ll text you?” Carrick asks again and she nods a little too enthusiastically at it, but what the hell?

“Sure.”

“Alright.” He takes one look at her, steps closer and for a moment, she thinks he might be going to kiss her.

“Goodnight, Claire,” Carrick says instead and she nods, admitting the fact that he’s not going to do it.

“Goodnight to you too, Tobias.” Then pauses at the doorway, feeling surprisingly bold. “I gotta give it to you, though, for someone who’s become the bane of my existence for months, you’re a damn good lay.”

He barks out a laugh, obviously, that Claire can hear all the way down the hall. And she thinks she can get used to the sound.

                                                         fin.

Tag list: @villain-fuckarooni @beckaroo @arfeiniel​ @this-person-is-busy @colossalpainintheass​ @drethanramslay @hatescapsicum @theeccentricbibliophile

#playchoices #open heart #tobias carrick #tobias carrick x mc #open heart mc #oh mc #pixelberry #choices stories you play

[sanjuno]

You're doing NaNo?! Can you tell us anything about what you'll be doing???

SPOILERS FOR SANJUNO’S NANO 2020 PROJECT

No Evil Abolishing Resentment System

Transmigrator!Madara meets Reincarnator!Tobirama (… 55 times in a row.)

For NaNoWriMo 2020 – How Many AUs Can I Fit In One Fic?

·      0 Tails Interlude

o   Meet Sanzan-han

o   Introduction to System driven Quick-Transmigration isekai plot

o   “The seeds of evil are as follows, to hear of evil and take no action against it, to see evil and take no action against it, to speak of evil and take no action against it.”

o   “To do nothing in the face of evil is not a neutral act.”

o   “The only thing required for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing.”

·      1st World:

o   Crystal Nuclei Zombie Apocalypse with Ability Users and levelling up AU

o   Politician!Madara ended up being shoved into a zombie tide by people who thought he was too strong/disliked him before the apocalypse

o   Scientist!Tobirama really regrets not preventing that when Zombie Emperor Madara breaks through the city walls and kills everyone in Konoha Base

o   Reborn!Tobirama is determined to complete the vaccine he was working on in his first life – also keep Madara alive so he can’t become a super zombie

§  Tobirama would like to say he is surprised by Madara’s competency in zombie annihilation but he remembers how terrifying Zombie King Madara was so he really isn’t shocked that Empowered Human Madara is just as much the living embodiment of Nightmare Fuel

o   Madara as evolved Zombie catnip with a mouthy pet fish

§  Madara is absolutely disgusted by the Z-poc Virus undead they are gross, rotting, and go squelchwhen he hits them.

§  Some zombie bits get stuck in Madara’s hair. He has a screaming tantrum and promptly sets the entire horde on fire.

§  Pro-tip: Career politicians should avoid indulging in a crying fit over getting their precious beautiful hair dirty during a fight if they want to be taken seriously by their military escort even if they areso hilariously OP they can indulge in whiny hysterics and not die horribly as a result

o   The Zombies are Zetsu

o   Oh look Madara’s blood has the key component to creating the zombie vaccine who would have thought

o   There is so much angry sex for stress relief, just… so much

o    

·      1 Tail Interlude

o   Madara is pissed off that he accidently ended up in a relationship with Tobirama

o   Madara wants a refund on this System

o   Sanzan-han explains the fine print of “No Evils Abolishing Resentment System” – the Target must have resentment both towards Madara and from Madara

o   Madara’s first world was intended to lock his target

o   Switching targets will result in a full reset of his karma to level 1 – no cheating by using his previous incarnations accumulated points to get a head start any more

o   Madara’s only other valid targets approaching Tobirama’s stats were Hashirama and Mito

o   Madara could target someone else but without the heavy accumulation of karma like the Senju-Uchiha bloodfeud situation it would take thousands of lifetimes to accrue 10 tails

o   Madara is so mad ^_^

·      2nd World

o   Japanese Classic Fable AU

o   Crane Wife!Madara being Tsundere with his husband

o   Madara is accused of theft and Scholar!Tobirama is convinced to spy on his wife’s weaving

o   Madara gets caught ripping out feathers to weave into silks that are sold to pay for Tobirama’s exams

o   Madara flies away and is shot down by hunters

o   Reborn!Tobirama who is more than a little obsessed with making sure his wife doesn’t have a reason to fly off again

o   Madara doesn’t really understand why Tobirama is trying to prevent him from doing anything productive this is weird

o   Zetsu is a corrupted monk trying to capture Madara for his feathers/demon core

·      3rd World

o   Galactic Empire Mecha Pilots with psychic powers and enhanced bodies versus the Zerg Horde

o   Arranged Marriages for the noble class occur based on genetic advantages rather than affection

o   Ace Pilot/Mecha Engineer!Tobirama pays less than zero attention to his nominal spouse and heir in favour of developing weapons to fight against the Zerg

o   SSS Ace Pilot!Madara resigned to being ignored by spouse, makes friends with in-laws for sheer spite

o   Madara framed for sabotage – dies holding off a Zerg swarm

o   Science child!Kagami killed by kidnappers

o   Reborn!Tobirama pays better attention to his spouse and child while fighting to end the Zerg threat

o   The Zerg are Zetsu

o   Madara rolls his eyes and sets the Zerg Queen (Kaguya) on fire – Tobirama confused and aroused by his spouse

·      2 Tails Interlude

o   Madara wants to know if he’s going to be required to save the world every single time he’s due to earn a new tail

o   Sanzan-han: Sources say “probably”

o   Madara would question the heavy-handed implication that Zetsu was just using him but he’s still super pissed off about being trapped in a cave for 50 years and then possessed by a demon goddess thing so he’s more than willing the blame Zetsu for all the horrible things that happened

·      4th World

o   Japanese Mythical Creature AU

o   Kitsune!Madara saves the life of War General/Prince!Tobirama from Yin poisoning

o   There’s a snowstorm and Madara has to warm Tobirama up

o   Madara is a Calamitous Beauty and killed by cultists who wanted his demon core

o   Reborn!Tobirama is doing his best to take responsibility

o   Zetsu is the cultists who poisoned Tobirama and killed Madara

o   Madara is super pissed off but the shrine and the garden Tobirama builds for him are really nice so maybe he won’t claw the pasty bastard’s face off

·      5th World

o   Super Heroes and Villains in a Megamind AU

o   Pyromaniacal Villain!Madara “Moon Eye” is obviously an alien and the arch nemesis of the city’s most beloved Hero, Treeman

o   Aquatic Hero “Flying Thunder”!Tobirama’s civilian-marine biologist ID keeps getting kidnapped

o   Reborn!Tobirama needs to keep Madara sane and honestly that’s easier than it sounds because Madara gets adorably flustered when given sincere compliments and is hilariously easy to distract with questions about his obviously-also-alien pet fish

o   #I accidently started dating my brother’s arch nemesis #what do I do? #waiting online for answers

o   Sanzan-han is Minion and really likes the exo-suit

o   Zetsu is an evil shadow organization trying to take control of the heroes for world domination reasons

o   Madara has an invisible Susanoo and as ridiculous as this world can be he’s having fun in it

o   “PRESENTATION!”

·      6th World

o   Immortal Cultivators AU

o   Borderline-demonic/Unorthodox Sect Leader!Madara is getting chased around by Righteous Sect Inner Disciple!Tobirama because Madara keeps nabbing all the good secret treasures that Tobirama needs to prevent the demon realm from breaking free and invading

o   Reborn!Tobirama realizes in hindsight that Original Goods!Madara was also trying to prevent the Demon Realm invasion because the Righteous Sects didn’t listen to his initial warnings

o   Tobirama eventually pins Madara down as his Dao companion to get access to the booty loot Madara has collected/protect Madara from being targeted by unscrupulous treasure hunters

o   The demons/demonic spirits are Zetsu

o   Madara is playing whack-a-Zetsu and doesn’t have time for Tobirama’s nonsense

·      3 Tails Interlude

o   Sanzan-han praises Madara for his top-notch seduction skillz

o   Madara is So Done with this stupid godsdamned fish

o   Sanzan-han mentions but doesn’t explain that the accumulation of “affection points” will start having a notable effect on Tobirama soon – so gambatte, Mada-sama!

o   Madara tries to ignore the constant hooking up in favour of plotting new ways to kill Zetsu – seeing as the creature is the only thing he can kill in the Other-Worlds without losing the “ExP” that will allow his return home

·      7th World

o   Geode Betting Modern AU

o   Carver!Madara is a picky spoiled artiste who got blamed for ruining Tobirama’s family

o   Reborn-with-Treasure-Senses Appraiser!Tobirama is determined to “get revenge in advance” on Madara only to realize what a dork Madara is

o   Tobirama frantically backs off on his face-slapping plot only to overcompensate his way into dating a crazy artist

o   #oops

o   Zetsu are the yakuza involved in rigging the Geode betting

o   Madara is confused by the lack of open warfare but thinks this is a nice vacation

·      8th World

o   Greek Monsters AU

o   Gorgon!Madara has the strongest stone-gaze in History

o   Heroic Demigod!Tobirama arrives to take off Madara’s head for prophecy reasons

o   Tobirama’s Quest ends in tragedy – turns out ghosts/guardians of the Underworld don’t turn to stone so Tobirama can’t bring his little brothers out using Madara’s decapitated head

o   Madara is hiding from Reborn!Tobirama because he wants to keep in head on his neck, fuckdammit and accidently interrupts the murder of Kawarama and Itama via even more accidental kidnapping

o   Tobirama just wants to apologize for overreacting to a very ambiguously worded prophecy that he self-fulfilled – Tobirama is really, really very sorry, really – also wtf give him back his baby brothers

o   Zetsu is the Oracle of Kaguya who killed Tobirama’s little brothers and wanted Tobirama/Madara cursed/dead

·      9th World

o   Sentinels and Guides are Known AU

o   SSS Guide!Madara is 100% going to cut a bitch if these special fucking snowflake godsdamned Sentinels don’t piss off and leave him alone

o   6-sense Alpha Sentinel Prime!Tobirama does not want a Guide who will only slow him down with their coddling nature

o   Tobirama rejects Madara/doesn’t acknowledge their nascent connection

o   Reborn!Tobirama wakes up out of a zone – wakes up after pulling the Guide he recognized far too late as his own out of the depths of the bay – and promptly terrifies his entire family by going hyper-focused and borderline feral as he takes off to hunt down his Guide

o   Tobirama’s Guide – his Guide who is still alive – still alive and not drowned

o   Reborn!Tobirama has some lingering trauma to work through btw

o   Madara terrifies so many people when he starts inducing hallucinations as a defense mechanism

o   Zetsu are dark Sentinel cult masquerading as a shady government organization

·      10th World

o   Classic D&D AU

o   Harpy Queen!Madara is being plotted against

o   Necromancer!Tobirama regrets killing Madara and keeping his soul in a jar when he finds out the truth

o   Tobirama let’s Izuna “mete justice” – protip: Uchiha Harpies are actually Furies

o   Reborn!Tobirama decides he quite enjoys being Madara’s concubine

o   Madara lays an egg

o   The Demon Gods trying to break loose and destroy all life get kicked back into the Underworld – insert Zetsu smiting here

o   Hashirama is traumatized by his little brother’s loincloth

·      4 Tails Interlude

o   Madara throws an epic tantrum over the egg-laying thing

o   Sanzan-han doesn’t understand his deal but obligingly flees screaming in terror anyway

·      11th World

o   Imperial Court AU

o   Fire Priest!Madara is given as a “bride” to Imperial Prince Tobirama to remove Tobirama from the line of succession

o   Tobirama considered a “holy child” by the Fire devotees due to his red eyes

o   Tobirama realizes too late that his opinion of his “wife” was manipulated so that he wouldn’t be able to gather his full strength to compete with his enemies

o   Reborn!Tobirama has goals to 1. Be gay, and; 2. Commit Treason

o   Zetsu as the scheming Minister who is actually the bastard child of Empress Dowager Kaguya

o   Madara turns the court upside down and shakes because he’s bored and vindictive

·      12th World

o   Beastmen in Space AU

o   The Tribes are even more stupidly competitive than shinobi Clans but have more space (lol) to spread out so they aren’t at full war with each other

o   Snow Leopard!Madara has a female beast form as most Uchiha males do – Uchiha females tend to have male Beast Forms

o   Uchiha Do Not switch forms in Public/on the Battlefield and also the Uchiha don’t gender the way the other Tribes do

o   White Tiger!Tobirama only discovers this after the Uchiha are destroyed by hostile invasion of Borg-type enemies

o   Zetsu are the Borg knockoffs

o   Reborn!Tobirama starts courting Madara because rowr and peace happens because kittens – yay!

o   Madara uses his carving skills to create power stones that allow High Level Beasts to control themselves

·      13th World

o   Castlevania-esque Vampire AU

o   Vampires and Humans share a world but live in different realities thanks to magic sub-dimensions

o   Vampire Prince!Madara is lazy and hedonistic

o   Vampire Prince!Tobirama is disdainful of Madara’s magpie brain

o   Zetsu is the Religious extremist Vampire cult that realizes that Madara is the key to tearing down the veil and bleeds him dry to shatter the barrier separating the worlds and free the first vampire Kaguya

o   Reborn!Tobirama absolutely refuses to allow the Veil to get torn down again so he gets stupidly “devoted and jealous” over his previously despised betrothed

o   Madara is rather offended that the blood drinking is sexy and also that Tobirama is a tasty snack

·      14th World

o   Merfolk AU

o   Devil Firefish Mer!Madara always knew that the merfolk from the deeper waters would only visit the Volcanic Reef to mate and leave, especially the sharks – but he had still wanted to hope for something more…

o   Great White Mer!Tobirama only ever left the Kelp Forest to guard his more hormone driven kin when the pod headed to shallower waters to spawn and let the fry gather strength in the protection of the cove before heading back home

o   Tangling with the pretty, poisonous leader of the Uchiha pod was a mistake that could be entirely blamed on his brother’s tendency to overindulge in urchin-spines and share his vices with every mer in the vicinity

o   Someone (see: Zetsu) fucks up and pisses off the Ocean

o   Seaquakes and the resulting tsunami’s drive all the mer to the deepest-water cities to wait out the disasters

o   Madara gets eaten by a giant kraken while defending the fry – Tobirama arrives just in time to see Madara and their son get torn in half

o   Reborn!Tobirama courts Madara properly and the Uchiha pod moves into the sea-caves because the coral as too fragile for Tobirama’s peace of mind

o   Zetsu are creepy seaweed/anglerfish things

·      15th World

o   Virtual Reality Game AU

o   Code-writer!Tobirama develops Kenjutsu Mania Online in an attempt to revive his comatose little brothers

o   Overworked Detective!Madara gets suckered into the VR game with his little brothers

o   Crazy Person (Kaguya) traps all the players in a death game – as you do

o   Tobirama gets exposed as a game designer and PK’d

o   Reborn!Tobirama parties with Madara and gets married for the ExP bonus

o   Zetsu are a computer virus AI like Agent Smith

o   Madara uses IRL weapon skills to break the game and his character build before he smashes the Crazy Person open like an overripe melon

o   All the little brothers wake up

·      5 Tails Interlude

o   Sanzan-han is very proud! Mada-sama is halfway there!

o   Madara is throwing a huge fit over giving birth in 2 out of 5 worlds

o   But Mada-sama, the massive amount of affection points!

o   Fuck your affection points!

o   That’s the spirit, Mada-sama!

·      16th World

o   Modern Wizards AU

o   Dragon Keeper!Madara trips over poachers/dark wizards who kidnapped Ancient Runes Master!Tobirama for evil-ritual-sacrifice purposes

o   They accidently end up in a Marriage Bond

o   Tobirama suspects Madara of being a Dark Wizard

o   Madara is framed and executed – only for the real culprit to be exposed a few months later

o   The real culprit is Kaguya and Zetsu natch

o   Tobirama explodes a Time Turner

o   Reborn!Tobirama drags his new spouse Dark Wizard hunting

o   Couple Therapy for dumb Wizards go

·      17th World

o   ID Porn in a Miraculous AU

o   Masked Hero Phoenix is consistently pursued and wooed by his partner in crime fighting, Dragon

o   PoliSci TA!Madara has a raging brain crush on Bio-Chem Doctorate Student!Tobirama

o   An ill-advised insult/rejection causes Phoenix to darken and self-destruct

o   A grief-stricken Dragon “teleports” his mind back in time

o   Madara is so confused by Tobirama and his new stalker tendencies

o   Kaguya is RabbitMoth and Zetsu are the Akuma

·      18th World

o   Really Cheap Silmarillion Knockoff AU

o   Spell-Singer!Madara is driven mad by an Oath that was forced on him by a Messenger done Dark

o   Kaguya as the evil god and Zetsu as her evil Messenger

o   Forger!Tobirama doesn’t pay attention to extenuating circumstances until it’s too late and the bodies are buried

o   The World goes to shit for 3 ages because Tobirama’s shinies are the shiniest

o   Reborn!Tobirama devotes himself to fucking over Zetsu’s evil schemes and making pretty baubles for Madara

o   The fact that Madara’s new hairpin can level a mountain range is incidental and has nothing to do with Tobirama’s paranoia

o   An ancient mystery re. parentage is solved when Madara sings Kagami into being right on schedule – Tobirama is delighted to assist this time

·      19th World

o   Steampunk AU a la FF flavour

o   Enemy Nation!Madara is the Prince/General who goes crazy due to infection from alien viral lifeform

o   HoL Companion!Tobirama as a Prince of the protag Nation who are prophesized to save the world from Calamity

o   World goes to shit

o   Zetsu is the Scourge and Kaguya is Jenova/the Accursed

o   Tobirama is too impatient to wait out the “time-skip”

o   Reborn!Tobirama sneaks into the enemy stronghold – finds pre-infection!Madara imprisoned with tiny clone-child Kagami and steals them both

o   Cue roadtrip shenanigans as both sides try to track them down

o   Madara gets to one-man-army the forces of evil – Tobirama is very impressed

·      20th World

o   Demon Hunter AU

o   Incubus!Madara has a “food allergy” and has been stuck at the physical age of 13 being fed energy by his family members for the last 200 years

o   Functionally Ace Demon Hunter!Tobirama pegs Madara for a sex demon on sight because the lust whammy is legit the most distracting thing to ever happen to him and that incubus looks like a child ew

o   Tobirama sets a trap for Madara and is mean about it because he doesn’t appreciate the second-hand bad-touch feelings – trigger warning: allusions to non-con gangbang

o   Madara kills the “bait” and Tobirama bursts into the room

o   Tobirama sees adult!Madara in the aftermath of the carnage and is horrified to recognize his soulmate

o   Madara proceeds to vomit blood and dies at Tobirama’s feet – the allergy is no joke

o   Tobirama learns about Madara’s “allergy” from revenge rampage Izuna – recognizes that Izuna is Touka’s soulmate and doesn’t fight back

o   Tobirama regrets so hard he magics his soul back in time to the day he first saw Madara

o   The most awkward dating adventure begins

o   Zetsu are the actually evil demons who eat people for real – and not in the fun way Uchiha do

·      21st World

o   Gods AU

o   Ocean Kami!Tobirama realizes too late that he loved Volcano!Kami Madara and was unable to rescue him from the Underworld – that trick never works

o   Reborn!Tobirama starts bringing Madara tributes, averts the Twilight of the Gods via shameless debauchery, and accidently builds a tropical island honeymoon palace to spoil Madara in

o   Zetsu are the evil servants of the “god-eating Titan” Kaguya

·      6 Tails Interlude

o   Lots of Madara screaming about how the Powers That Be are far too fucking obsessed with seeing Madara get railed

o   Sanzan-han goes no-duh, most lifeforms devote about 99% of their spare life energy towards reproductive efforts

o   Madara is very grumpy about being a SSS Class Ninja Nightmare reduced to pillow-book wish-fulfillment fantasy fodder

·      22nd World

o   Noodle Dragon AU

o   Dragon King of the Northern Ocean!Tobirama and Quetzalcoatl!Madara courting shenanigans

o   OTL!Tobirama fucked up and led Hunters (Zetsu) to OTL!Madara’s nest and they stole his heart for black magic doomsday ritual

o   Madara ended up a stone statue curled around the shattered remains of his first egg

o   Reborn!Tobirama is determined to be a properly attentive mate

o   Madara is resigned to laying eggs again

·      23rd World

o   GoT-knockoff Medieval AU

o   Madara gets burned at the stake as a witch, doesn’t die, and then gets torn apart by a terrified mob

o   Northern Lord!Tobirama realizes that he done fucked up and needs Madara to beat the evil ice zombies

o   Reborn!Tobirama starts wooing an extremely cranky pyro-prince while trying to give the Uchiha Crown Prince more positive PR with the peasantry to avoid another riot

o   Zetsu are the Others, Kaguya as the Night Queen

·      24th World

o   ‘Taur AU – Tribal Setting

o   Leopard-Taur!Madara lives high up in the Mountains

o   Tiger-Taur!Tobirama is poisoned and delirious during a fated encounter – he doesn’t learn what happened or who saved him until after both prides are mostly destroyed

o   Reborn!Tobirama manages to avoid delirium induced amnesia and starts stalking Madara with the intent to make love not war

o   Zetsu are corrupted from using radioactive/poisonous Power Stones to boost strength, Kaguya is actually parasite queen

·      25th World

o   Exorcists and Ghosts AU

o   Cursed Ghost!Madara lingers in the courtyard he called home while he was alive

o   Kagami wanders in during the ghost hour and Madara shoves him into a cabinet to protect him

o   Exorcist!Tobirama finds out that Madara was still protecting Kagami from the devil spirits – not haunting him – only after the devils grow stronger and get free after ghost!Madara is destroyed

o   Reborn!Tobirama needs to figure out a way to woo his past incarnation’s very justifiably angry murdered consort before Madara denies Tobirama visitation rights

o   Zetsu are devil spirits who cursed Madara to death, Kaguya wants to consume Kagami for power

·      26th World

o   Midsummer Night’s Dream AU

o   Fairy Prince!Tobirama gets dosed with love potion

o   Meets Dark Forest King!Madara

o   Falls in potion induced love – which gets Tobirama invested enough to forget his previous prejudices and fall in True Love

o   Then Madara dies

o   Reborn!Tobirama is now immune to Love Potions because he is in True Love with Madara – fuck you, cheating bastard traitors to the Fairy Crown

o   Tobirama runs off into the Dark Forest to snag himself a Goblin King (and break Hashirama out of Love Potion induced insanity, natch)

o   Zetsu as the dirtbag fiancée, Kaguya as the dark fairy trying to take over both kingdoms

·      27th World

o   Naga AU

o   Banded Sea Kriat!Tobirama tangles with in-heat Black Hooded Tiger Snake!Madara and doesn’t realize until later that the whole situation was a bloodmage trap

o   Zetsu are the bloodmages

o   Tobirama finds Madara’s still bleeding skinned body a few weeks after they tangle – manages to get Madara’s skin and their still-curing egg back from the hunting team

o   Tobirama tries to save their egg and fails – it was taken from Madara too soon

o   Tobirama hunts down the bloodmage and dies in killing them

o   Reborn!Tobirama gives Madara proper aftercare – notes the bloody wound from the unwanted heat inducing potion – and hauls Madara back to his den for proper nesting

·      28th World

o   Magical Knight AU

o   Storm Knight!Tobirama damages Evil General!Madara’s control seal during the battle of the week

o   Tobirama then runs into amnesiac in civilian ID Madara after the fight and goes on a date

o   Tobirama still end up killing Madara when the brainwashing is reapplied – prolonged death scene reveals that Madara was mind-controlled not committing betrayal

o   Reborn!Tobirama puts significantly more effort into ensuring that the control seal is completely removed from “General Indra”

o   Madara helps defeat the Ancient Evil while wearing leather booty shorts

o   Kaguya as Mettalia, Zetsu as the Youma

·      7 Tails Interlude

o   Forget about the indignity of being Tobirama’s go-to baby incubator – Madara is absolutely flipping his shit over the booty shorts

o   Sanzan-han thought they were quite flattering on you, Mada-sama!

·      29th World

o   Blood Magic AU

o   Demon Lord!Madara gets honeytrapped by Blood Mage!Tobirama and stabbed from behind by Hashirama

o   Tobirama turns Madara’s body into a scrying gem to steal his powers and secrets

o   Snooping through Madara’s memories of their courtship lets Tobirama discover that Madara’s “evil plot” was a baby Kagami now cold in his cradle

o   Reborn!Tobirama is doing everything in his power to keep his family from finding out about Madara because the Senju’s whole “thing” is demon hunting and stealing their magic

o   Kaguya as the creepy Ancestor of the Senju clan who started the demon killing habit, Zetsu as the twisted remains of Senju elders who cursed themselves due to magic addiction

·      30th World

o   Phantom Thief AU

o   Kaito!Tobirama has to watch as his dear Detective!Madara gets gunned down by the Black Organization

o   Reborn!Tobirama first tries to send Madara away for his own safety – has a control freak panic attack when he can’t see Madara

o   Tobirama proceeds to go full disclosure overcompensation trying to keep Madara safe

o   Madara is a Sigh and steals all nine bijuu tama while Tobirama is sorting himself out

o   … Tobirama would like to know when his dear Detective learned to pick locks but before that there is a very serious problem that has arisen in Tobirama’s pants that needs to be dealt with because that was the smoothest heist Tobirama has ever borne witness to holy shit

o   Zetsu as the Black Organization looking for the magic gem Kaguya

·      31st World

o   Transformers AU

o   Decepticon!Madara is Sunspot and Autobot!Tobirama is Whitespace

o   The Great War happens – Kaguya-as-Unicron wakes up and eats most of the planet and population

o   “That’s no moon.”

o   Whitespace yeets his spark back in time and attempts to if not stop then at least delay the start of the Great War

o   Reborn!Whitespace ends up pair-bonding with Sunspot to rob the Decepticons of their Air Commander

o   A 3rd faction forms separate from the High Council versus Violent Terrorist Extremists options

·      32nd World

o   Beauty and the Beast meets Hanahaki Tragedy AU

o   Imprisoned Guest!Tobirama heads home for The Visit and stays away too long – not longer than he promised, but Beast!Madara was days away from suffocation

o   Tobirama comes back to a silent castle and finds Madara on his bed surrounded by blood and the flowers that had burst out from under his skin

o   Reborn!Tobirama is determined to break the curse – Madara is just really tired and in pain

o   What kind of fucking sadist curses a kid with roses growing inside their body – Madara was 13 when this shit started and his body knows it

o   True Loves Kiss ensues (and also Itama and Kawarama beat the shit out of Zetsu for cursing their new brother in law)

·      33rd World

o   ABO ElfQuest-ish AU

o   Alpha!Tobirama thinks he was tricked into marriage hunting Omega!Madara as part of a plot against the Senju Kingdom – everyone knows that you can’t trust Dark Elves

o   Tobirama finds out too late that there are evil forces on the loose that only the Uchiha are aware of – that’s why the Dark Elves are called Dark Elves, because they hunt evil in the dark

o   Madara is caught and left mutilated for Tobirama to come across just as he made up his mind to treat his mate better

o   Reborn!Tobirama misses his cue from the original setup – but he still finds Madara hiding in a waterfall cave because fuck no, no more fucking fucking

o   Spoiler: Madara gets fucked good and hard

o   Tobirama and Madara go demon hunting together

o   Zetsu are the Madkin demons created by Kaguya’s twisted flesh-shaping

·      34th World

o   Wonderland AU

o   Evil Dictatorship ruling family Uchiha Clan are actually held captive by their Palace – it’s a seal keeping a demon asleep and powered by the Uchiha who live inside the castle – the Uchiha don’t actually do much ruling, the Council of Elders is where the majority of the corruption is

o   Revolutionary!Tobirama kidnaps Crown Prince of Hearts!Madara during the siege to “free” Wonderland which lets the demon loose so Tobirama is forced to marry Madara and have kids quick due to being responsible for the plan that killed off 99% of the Uchiha

o   Also people born with red eyes get married to the Uchiha in the Kingdom of Hearts – those with red eyes have hearts that cannot be fooled or controlled (meaning they’re able to see through the demon’s tricks)

o   Reborn!Tobirama has just enough time to alter his plan for the attack on the Palace of Hearts – then he walks in on the turncoat guards who gave the Revolution entry to the Palace making comments about sexually assaulting Madara

o   Tobirama bursts in before Madara can break their skulls and “saves” his future husband

o   Most of the Uchiha survive this time – only the Elders get killed

o   Tobirama marries Madara again and gets to work on revamping the bad laws

o   Zetsu is the Jabberwocky

·      35th World

o   Werewolf Fighting Ring AU

o   Alpha Werewolf!Tobirama was unwillingly mated to Alpha Werewolf!Madara when he was caught and held prisoner by slave traffickers

o   Tobirama rejects Madara once they’re free of the arena but makes sure to “payback” Madara for his “humiliation” first

o   Madara had been given heat drugs the entire time and didn’t remember what Tobirama resented him for

o   Madara ends up dying from mate-loss

o   Tobirama is focused on bringing down the slavery ring and doesn’t know Madara died – until Hashirama sends him a letter about how his mate “didn’t make it through the birth” and asking him to get back for the funeral

o   Tobirama finally slows down – reads the file on Madara he has been ignoring since he found it – and breaks

o   Reborn!Tobirama is focused on treating Madara as a proper mate while also getting revenge on the Slavers

o   Madara is going to rip out so many throats out over being pregnant again

o   Zetsu as the warlocks running the slave rings to feed Kaguya power

·      36th World

o   Star Wars AU

o   By-the-Code Jedi!Tobirama tends to bisect all the “darksiders” he runs into – kills Izuna during a mission

o   Madara does full dark-side rage and Empress Kaguya takes over

o   Zetsu as the Darkside clone army

o   Reborn!Tobirama is a lot less saber-happy and has learned that the Uchiha are not dark – more wild/grey

o   Ends up Force Bonded to Madara to bring Balance

·      8 Tails Interlude

o   Madara has a screaming breakdown to the tune of “why fucking Tobirama?!?!?!”

o   Sanzan-han is like “He resented you the most? Duh? No Evil Abolishing Resentment System?”

o   Madara tries his best to fry the stupid gods-be-damned-twice fish

·      37th World

o   Sex Slave Soulmate AU

o   War-Mage!Tobirama uses borderline-forbidden magic to make Kagami – shatters his soulmate link to do so, which is what makes the magic unpopular but not illegal as nobody is actually “harmed” by the spell

o   Note: Kagami is now the living embodiment of the link

o   Kagami finds Courtesan!Madara in a high-end brothel that is a front for nobles to buy magically bound sex-slaves – this is actually super forbidden magic, btw

o   Tobirama saves Madara and the other enslaved thralls while rescuing Kagami

o   Madara had enough magic to fight against the enchantment and managed to get Kagami out of the brothel – that’s how Tobirama knew where to attack

o   No follow through after the rescue – Madara and the others are left under the enslavement seals

o   Madara ends up assaulted/dead/silenced by the nobles who used to patronize the brothel and slave market

o   Reborn!Tobirama moves faster and has already figured out how to break the enslavement curse – gets to the brothel before Madara manages to get Kagami out again

o   Mexican standoff ensues – Tobirama rescues his soulmate and kid

o   Madara gets freed from the curse

o   Courting ensues when their soulmark repairs when they touch after the curse is broken

o   Kaguya as the evil mage who was using the brothels as a power source, Zetsu as her simulacrum servants

·      38th World

o   Mythos AU

o   Dragon!Tobirama is married to Phoenix!Madara and resents it

o   Madara has bad PR and Tobirama listens to rumours so he ignores Madara as much as he can

o   Civil War erupts – Madara hides Kagami when their Palace is attacked and is a distraction

o   Tobirama finds his spouse ritually violated to steal his “fire”

o   Reborn!Tobirama is a much more enthusiastic spouse and realizes that Madara is a fluffy sap

o   Zetsu as the invading horde of magic thieves

·      39th World

o   Angels AU

o   Angel!Tobirama is “tempted” by Fallen!Madara

o   Tobirama kills Madara and kicks off a new War In Heaven

o   Regret hits when Tobirama finds Kagami’s body after Danzo kills him… in an exact mirror of how Tobirama tricked Madara

o   Reborn!Tobirama decides to “prove” that Madara is “evil” before killing him this time to keep the War from happening again

o   Tobirama gets his nose rubbed in Madara’s ability to love his family

o   Zetsu as actual demons who are trying to kill off both Angels and Fallen

·      40th World

o   Fae Marriage Hunt AU

o   Winter Fae!Tobirama was a petty bastard and resisted his betrothal to the point a Marriage Hunt was the only option

o   Skinchanger!Madara wins the Hunt

o   The peace between the High Court and the Wild Hunt collapses after Madara is killed during a diplomatic meeting

o   Reborn!Tobirama decides to play along/use his “marriage” to make the peace permanent

o   Tobirama gets his misconceptions challenged when Madara rides his cooperative “willing” bride into the ground

o   Kaguya as an evil Fairy Queen with Zetsu as her Greymalkin

·      41st World

o   The Mummy AU

o   Archeologist!Tobirama accidently triggers mummy!Madara’s awakening and the crazy demon cultists take advantage

o   Madara lets Tobirama kill him rather than let the cultists sacrifice Tobirama

o   Tobirama gets an info dump on Madara’s trauma

o   Reborn!Tobirama uses the evil cult to resurrect Madara properly and woos the ancient shogun like a boss

o   Kaguya as even more ancient evil Mummy and Zetsu as obsessed cultists

·      42nd World

o   Labyrinth AU

o   Adventurer!Tobirama keeps meeting a mysterious “king” in his dreams – King of the Labyrinth!Madara keeps a veil over his head and his hands covered by extra-long fluttery sleeves

o   Tobirama has to beat the Labyrinth to rescue his little brothers

o   Paranoid Tobirama gets tricked into betraying Madara by goblin Zetsu – the Labyrinth collapses

o   Tobirama’s little brothers are killed along with all the other kidnapped children – the energy from their deaths and the destruction of the Labyrinth is used to fuel the resurrection of a Demon God Kaguya

o   Tobirama dies taking his revenge after learning the full story

o   Reborn!Tobirama is much more willing to “dance” with Madara now that he knows Madara is as much or more a prisoner than the stolen children

o   Madara was used as a lure – his fingers bound in wire and his eyes sewn shut – but they miscalculated because Madara was still the King and wouldn’t let anyone who can’t complete his Labyrinth reach the children

o   Tobirama completes the Labyrinth… after he frees Madara

o   Yay romantic dance sequences

·      43rd World

o   Four Kings AU

o   Byakko!Tobirama gets trapped in a blood-and-wine seal

o   Suzaku!Madara runs afoul of Tobirama’s enemies, kills them all in a rage, and trips into Tobirama’s trap with him

o   Violent coitus ensues

o   Madara breaks the seal once the trap’s power has been exhausted and runs away

o   Tobirama wakes up with a blank memory as a result of the seal

o   Madara lays an egg – Kagami hatches

o   Zetsu as Minions of the God-Eater Kaguya catch Madara while he’s weak and sacrifice him thinking he still contains the combined essence of Byakko and Suzaku

o   Hey but actually Madara’s power was at a low ebb because he spent it all on Kagami so no resurrections for you, stupid doomsday cult

o   Tobirama rescues Kagami – baby bird begs the tiger to save his mama – is too late

o   Reborn!Tobirama gets to watch his past!self deflower the avatar of Suzaku and oh shit that means Kagami is my son? Tobirama is a scream

o   Time to gather the Four Kings and destroy a Demon Cult! Mito is Seiryuu and Hashirama is Genbu.

·      44th World

o   Warprize Ger AU

o   Imperial Prince!Tobirama is given as a consort to Ger Emperor Madara as part of a Senju plot

o   Tobirama is unaware that his attendants are using him to poison Madara but is super pissed at his father for giving him away as a treaty gift

o   Madara dies birthing Kagami but reveals to Tobirama that he was glad to marry him – Kagami is worth it and Tobirama was the only man to ever give Madara flowers

o   Kagami learns that it was a Senju plot that killed his mother and hates Tobirama for his part in it

o   War erupts between the Uchiha Empire and the Senju Kingdom again and destroys both countries

o   Reborn!Tobirama decides to overturn all his father’s plan and dotes on his Imperial Spouse – so manyflowers are given

o   Madara is an amazing Emperor and newly crowned Emperor Hashirama is super thrilled to have such peaceful relations with his neighbour thanks to Tobirama’s beautiful love story

·      45th World

o   Buddy-cop StarTrek Federation AU

o   Senju-With-Tentacles, Psychic!Uchiha-With-Horns

o   PHEREMONE MARKERS~!!

o   Zetsu are the Borg

o   Kagami is a Tube Baby

·      9 Tails Interlude

o   Madara is freaking the fuck out the last set of worlds were uniquely traumatizing – especially the Labyrinth one

·      46th World

o   Loveless AU

o   Sacrifice!Madara has learned to fight on auto – the first Sacrifice to figure out how to do so, and he doesn’t stop fighting even when his Fighter shows up

o   Fighter!Tobirama never wanted a Sacrifice because he didn’t want them to get hurt and he sees Madara acting as a Fighter so he doesn’t believe that Madara is a Sacrifice

o   The name of their Bond is Devotion

o   Madara gets targeted by a swarm of Dr. Kaguya’s fake-bonded Zetsu

o   Tobirama finds Madara’s body in Kaguya’s lab and uncovers the Bond too late to save his Sacrifice

o   Reborn!Tobirama is hyper overprotective and Madara trounces his Fighter’s ass up and down the street until he feels better about living in a reality with a world-wide virginity fetish

·      47th World

o   Witch Madara and Magical Creature Tobirama

o   Tobirama is cursed into a human form

o   Tricked into thinking that he has to kill Madara/a Witch to get the curse broken?

o   It was all a lie

o   Tobirama twisting the curse to go back in time instead of dying

o   Madara is too gods-be-damned-again tired for this nonsense

o    

·      48th World

o   Stargate AU

o   Head Scientist of the Expedition Tobirama

o   Leader of the surviving “Ancients” Madara

·      49th World

o   Welcome to Nightvale AU

o   Tobirama, the Scientist

o   Madara, the Sherriff of the Secret Police

o    

·      50th World

o   BDSM AU

o   Tobirama IDS as a Switch but he’s service oriented non-dynamic instead

o   Madara thinks toys/scenes are silly – demi-romantic/grey-ace Madara rides again

o   Tobirama has cultural dissonance meeting a “Dom” who likes being the one fucked

·      51st World

o   TRON?

·      52nd World

o   Tyrant CEO/Entertainment Circle

·      53rd World

o   From another world AU

o   Tobirama drops into Fantasy Land from a Modern-ish Naruto World

o   Madara as the Villainous Noble who was “jealous” of Tobirama’s magic power

·      54th World

o   Last Unicorn AU

o   Madara is the Kirin

o   Tobirama as a Wizard who likes Science more

·      55th World

o   Dragon Raja AU

·      10 Tails Interlude

o   Sanzan-han reveals why they were helping Madara – and fade to black

·      Return to the Warring Clans Era

o   Canon is About to Be Diverted

o   Madara is back on the battlefield where Izuna died

o   Promptly summons Sanzan-han to stop this fucking bullshit – Sanzan-han has ascended and become a massive dragon so yeah the battle is definitely over now

o   Tobirama appears to be having a migraine – whoops looks like the arrival of Sanzan-han has started the data-dump of all Tobirama’s System-generated memories into canon!Tobirama

o   Peace and Konoha happen

·      Epilogue/Extras

o   Tobirama has Suspicions regarding his shiny new memories – especially because he remembers seeing that fish. Everywhere. All the time. Stupid fish.

o   Everyone is very confused by how fast Tobirama and Madara get over the war and hook up but yay peace? Also Madara and Tobirama somehow make a baby and everyone is too busy trying to figure out how that works to complain anymore.

o    

·      

#Sanjuno's ficwork #NEARS #No Evil Abolishing Resentment System #MadaTobi #TobiMada #Pray for me friends this is how I die #Transmigrator meets Reincarnator #In which Sanjuno gets to be pretentious about how her MC hooking up with the ML is required for plot larger purposes than mere romance #NaNoWriMo 2020

[murdereraisuha]

Classpecting TWST: Octavinelle

Time to assign Homestuck classpects to the fish mafia!

Spoilers for chapter 3 and some of the trio’s personal stories. No knowledge of Homestuck required to read.

[Image description: A banner containing a picture of Azul, the symbol for the space aspect, and the words “Azul Ashengrotto: Thief of Space”]

For Azul, I think it’s easier to narrow down what his class is first.

To get back at his childhood bullies, Azul developed his unique magic “It’s a Deal,” which lets him make contracts with others. 

He uses clever loopholes and tricks to shift his contracts in his favor, letting him reap the magic and abilities of his victims. 

However, despite his power and skills, he still has self-image issues. 

In chapter 3, he overblots during a desperate magic stealing spree to make a more perfect him who isn’t a “stupid, clumsy octopus who can’t do anything by himself.”

What I get from this is that he steals from others, he worked hard to shape himself into a successful person, and he perceives fault in himself. Based on this, I think his class is either thief, the active theft class, or knight, the active exploitation class.

With that in mind, what exactly does he steal/exploit, and what do his insecurities relate to? Rather than concepts like luck, freedom, or the soul, Azul seems centered on concrete objects. In his childhood, he was tormented due to his physical appearance. In the present, he carefully controls his diet to maintain a slender physique. He also hoards things like coins and his contracts. 

Based on these things as well as the creativity he exhibits in his elaborate schemes (exam notes, beans day, investigating Scarabia, etc.), I think that Azul’s aspect is space, the aspect of physical attributes, creation, and patience.

So, thief of space or knight of space? After research into both, I think that thief fits the best. First of all, though Azul has amazing abilities on his own, he relies a lot on maintaining a hoard of contracts. Rather than working with what he has, he constantly seeks out more: more power, more profits, more restaurant locations. Similarly to how Azul’s downfall in chapter 3 stemmed from trying to steal too much (Yuu’s house & the photo), the 2 thieves in Homestuck also get into trouble for being too overconfident. Finally, while a knight generally protects and shelters those around them, Azul isn’t afraid to do stuff such as wring Floyd out like a towel to use his eel slime for developing a beauty product. Therefore, Azul is most likely a thief of space.

[Image description: A banner containing a picture of Jade Leech, the symbol for the light aspect, and the words “Jade Leech: Rogue of Light”] 

To figure out Jade’s aspect, let’s consider some facts about him. 

His unique magic, “Shock the Heart,” forces a person who looks him in the eye to truthfully answer a question he asks them. 

He dislikes predictable things, which is a reason why he loves his chaotic brother and enjoys growing unknown plants. 

He prefers to stay in the shadows while Azul/Floyd takes the spotlight.

Based on these factors, Jade seems well suited to either the void aspect, the aspect of secrets, confusion, and irrelevance, or its opposite the light aspect, the aspect of truth, awareness, and importance. Now, how does he interact with his aspect?

Though Jade, Azul, and Floyd are equals, Jade still usually acts in a supportive role to them. For example, in his ceremony robes story, Jade gives the list of the new students’ private Magicam accounts to Azul for him to use instead of using the list himself. Therefore, I think that Jade probably has a passive class.

Jade does not have a deficit of light/void and he does not have a destructive relationship with light/void, ruling out page and bard. He doesn’t truly embody either aspect, ruling out heir, and he doesn’t seem to do much creating/healing of light/void, ruling out sylph. That narrows it down to seer of light, seer of void, rogue of void, and rogue of light. 

Though I originally thought he was probably void and just kept the light option open just in case, Jade might actually be a rogue of light. A rogue, the passive theft class, invites theft of their aspect and through their aspect. Jade reveals knowledge (ex. contract violations & the Magicam accounts) and then leaves Azul and Floyd to do with it as they please. Also, Shock the Heart is activated using his eyes, and eyes are a symbol of the light aspect in Homestuck. 

Furthermore, the rogues of Homestuck often have trouble coping with having their aspect, correlating with Jade being uncomfortable with having people’s attention on him. He also has problems with giving information/the truth about himself. For example, his exaggerated fake tears after Idia doubts his wish during the Wish Upon a Star event strengthens Idia’s belief that Jade's wish is insincere, even though Jade might have really wanted to use his wish for Azul and Floyd’s benefit. Though Jade is pretty different from the typical descriptions of rogues of light I have read, I think he probably is a rogue of light.

[Image description: A banner containing a picture of Floyd, the symbol for the blood aspect, and the words “Floyd Leech: Bard of Blood”]

For Floyd, I have an aspect already in mind.

Breath represents freedom and flexibility. From his general refusal to wear his uniform properly or take on responsibilities to specific events like trying to play dodgeball during basketball club, Floyd certainly exhibits freedom. His unique magic, “Bind the Heart,” references the concept of freedom/captivity in its name. By deflecting any magic aimed at him, it basically ensures his freedom from injury and other harmful effects like Riddle’s” Off with Your Head!”

Just so we’re not narrowing our focus too much though, I’d like to point out that the rage aspect is also a possibility. Rage represents negative emotions, defiance, and persistence. For Floyd, he rebels against conformity and also exhibits some stubbornness in his teasing of Riddle. Floyd’s aspect might also be the opposite of breath or rage, blood or hope, since each aspect and its opposite are just 2 sides of the same coin as we saw with Floyd’s brother.

Anyway, on to class. First off, thief and rogue are out since he doesn’t do much theft. He doesn’t hide behind any masks or act very pessimistic, so knight, page, and prince are out, and he doesn’t seem to struggle with knowledge of things, so mage and seer are out. Of the remaining classpect combos, I was thinking witch of rage, bard of rage, heir of breath, or maid of breath. However, as I just said, the aspects blood or hope might also apply. After looking into god tiers of those aspects, one stuck out at me: bard of blood.

Bard is the passive destruction class, which invites destruction of their aspect or through their aspect. Bards and princes, the active destruction class, are notable in how they exhibit traits of the opposite aspect since they destroy their own aspect in themselves. In Floyd’s case, his abundance of freedom & spontaneousness can also be seen as an absence of commitments & responsibilities.

However, a bard doesn’t destroy all traces of their aspect, which is how I can find evidence that Floyd’s aspect is actually blood rather than breath. In Homestuck, those of the breath aspect tend to be rather emotionally detached or passive. For example, John handles shocking revelations with ease and Tavros uses sleep to escape sadness. On the other hand, blood players tend to be emotionally explosive and assertive. Karkat and Kankri are well known for being rather... cranky. Now, for Floyd,

I don’t think an emotionally passive person would have a murder mode face like this. There’s also the fact that Floyd specifically hates shackles, while a breath player would probably take their freedom more for granted. Anyway, going to how being a bard would interact with Floyd’s aspect, as a bard his actions lead to destruction of bonds/responsibilities. However, a bard’s aspect is still a part of them/an inevitability even if they try to act like it isn’t.

Let’s take the one big example of anguish within Floyd that we have: his school uniform story. While Floyd is having a blast riling Riddle up and trying to bait him into a game of tag, Riddle remarks that Jade doesn’t bother with this sort of mischief and he’s completely different from Floyd even though they’re twins. This causes Floyd’s mood to take a 180 and he abruptly leaves. Even though Floyd does stuff like steal Jade’s clothes or shove work on him—things that might suggest Floyd doesn’t care about Jade—Floyd actually doesn’t want their bond with each other to break. This also holds true for Azul: though Floyd explicitly says in chapter 4 that he and Jade will leave Azul if he becomes boring, that seems like a half-truth: with Azul being the person he is, how likely is it that he would ever become boring?

Floyd is a genius, talented in everything from academic subjects to music to sports. However, as noted by some other characters, his mood swings and flippantness prevent him from being the even more terrifyingly powerful person he could become. His personal challenge may very well be to find a middle ground between running from and depending on his bonds/responsibilities. Therefore, based on Floyd’s values, attitude, and faults, I can say that he is very likely a bard of blood.

-- Final notes --

Firstly, If you actually read through all this and enjoyed it, I recommend checking out mia-pon289’s Octavinelle theories and Dahniwitchoflight’s classpect stuff since this post drew a lot of inspiration from those. 

Secondly, I am going to flip my shit if Ace’s aspect turns out to be blood too once I get to analyzing Heartslabyul. Is basketball club just gonna become blood club?

Thirdly,

[Image description: A venn diagram with 2 circles. One circle is labeled “Animal with 8 legs” and contains “Vriska” in it. The other circle is labeled “Aquatic” and contains “Meenah”. The intersection between the circles contains “Azul”. The whole diagram is inside of a rectangle labeled “Thief”]

#twst #twisted wonderland #classpect #octavinelle #azul ashengrotto #jade leech #floyd leech #homestuck #twst analysis

[mediaevalmusereads]

A Rogue By Any Other Name. By Sarah MacLean. New York: Avon, 2012.

Rating: 2/5 stars

Genre: historical romance

Part of a Series? Yes, The Rules of Scoundrels #1

Summary: A decade ago, the Marquess of Bourne was cast from society with nothing but his title. Now a partner in London’s most exclusive gaming hell, the cold, ruthless Bourne will do whatever it takes to regain his inheritance—including marrying perfect, proper Lady Penelope Marbury. A broken engagement and years of disappointing courtships have left Penelope with little interest in a quiet, comfortable marriage, and a longing for something more. How lucky that her new husband has access to such unexplored pleasures. Bourne may be a prince of London’s underworld, but he vows to keep Penelope untouched by its wickedness—a challenge indeed as the lady discovers her own desires, and her willingness to wager anything for them... even her heart.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content Warnings: explicit sexual content, gambling

Overview: I don’t know how to rate this book. On the one hand, MacLean has a knack for writing addictive romances, and I found the heroine to be fairly complex and the crux of the plot to be compelling; but on the other hand, there were a lot of tropes I personally do not care for in this book, so enjoying it fully was difficult. I ultimately settled on giving A Rogue by Any Other Name 2 stars because of my subjective experience, not necessarily because MacLean is bad at her craft.

Writing: I found MacLean’s prose to be fairly well-crafted; not only does it flow well, but it also balances showing and telling. Sentences and descriptions are lush and emotive when they need to be, and slow and sensual when appropriate. MacLean also paces her novel fairly well; on the whole, the story (and sentences) moves along at a quick pace that doesn’t feel rushed, and moments that were more emotionally weighty felt like they had room to breathe.

Perhaps the most interesting thing MacLean does with her book’s structure is insert small excerpts of letters in between scenes or between chapters. These letters are written primarily from the heroine’s point of view, showing her attempts to write to the hero from the time he goes away to Eton to almost the present day. In my opinion, these letters were a good way to show that the heroine had a long history of trying to reach the hero, and I think it worked better than MacLean simply telling the reader in some flashback or climatic scene.

Plot: The main plot of this book follows Michael (the Marquess of Bourne) as he seeks revenge on Viscount Langford, the man who took his entire inheritance in a game of cards. After nearly ten years, he finds that Langford has lost his lands to the Marquess of Needham and Dolby, who has added them to his eldest daughter’s dowry. Bourne thus traps the eldest daughter in a compromising situation which forces them to wed, and he must devise a way to get back at Langford while also dealing with the angst that his marriage stirs up. Not only is his wife, Penelope, one of his dearest childhood friends, but Langford’s son is the third part to their inseparable childhood trio. Bourne must thus figure out whether revenge or love for his childhood friends is more important.

On top of that, Bourne is notorious for not only losing his inheritance, but for building back his fortune by running one of London’s most dangerous gambling dens. His reputation, as well as the scandal should the circumstances of his marriage leak out, is sure to cause harm to Penelope’s family by making it impossible for her younger sisters to marry.

Honestly, I was pretty intrigued by this plot. The question of what matters more, revenge or love, was a really interesting promise with a lot of potential for angst and moral dilemma. I think in general, MacLean handled the plot well by making Penelope a formidable force and making the details of the drama feel real. The thing I really didn’t like, however, was how the initial “marriage trap” went down. Bourne puts Penelope in a compromising situation by having her spend the night alone with him. To her credit, she tries to escape, and Bourne was 100% a horrible person for making her stay with him. I honestly felt like that wasn’t the problem, since it created high stakes and a flaw that Bourne had to atone for. Where it went wrong for me was in Bourne’s character and his actions. I think if Bourne had just blocked the door and prevented Penelope from leaving their shared room, it would have been sufficiently bad, but Bourne also picks up Penelope and spanks her before ripping her dress so that even if she escapes, she’s well and truly ruined. To me, picking up a woman and spanking her feels infantilizing, and it’s a misogynistic flaw that I simply can’t get over. I also feel like ripping her dress and exposing her constitutes sexual assault, and I couldn’t get over that either.

Characters: Penelope, our heroine, is fairly likeable at the start. She’s the eldest in a line of daughters whose spinsterhood threatens to ruin her sisters’ chances at finding matches, and her dilemma between doing right by her family and doing something for her own happiness was a compelling one. I liked that she was sharp-tongued to the point where she would say or withhold things from Bourne to hurt him; it made her seem flawed without being overly petty, mainly because most of the things that hurt him were borne out of her frustration over her situation. The main thing I didn’t like about her was that she didn’t seem to have any female friends, and when she met another woman who was beautiful or who may have shown interest in Bourne, she got absurdly jealous. To MacLean’s credit, Penelope never acts in hostility towards other women and eventually develops a kind of friendship with Bourne’s gorgeous housekeeper, but I found this jealousy over a man who does nothing but hurt her disappointing.

Bourne, our hero, is an archetype that I really don’t like: self-hating, brooding, controlling, and violent. While I liked his revenge vs love dilemma, I hated that he was self-loathing to the point of destroying everything around him (when he could have easily just... not). I think more could have been done to make him a selfish, obsessive, manipulating character without making him so controlling of Penelope. His actions regarding their marriage are bad enough; I really didn’t need him to try to control Penelope’s life by giving her no control over the household, over where she goes, etc. and I really didn’t need him to be so violent and jealous that he thought about murdering anyone who so much looked at Penelope.

To be honest, I was hoping Penelope would run away from Bourne and end up with Tommy, a childhood friend who seems to treat her with genuine kindness and worries about her happiness. Tommy was interesting in that he loves Penelope as a brother would, not as a suitor, and respects her decisions even if they are obviously toxic or self-destructive.

Other characters were interesting for their potential to offer commentary. I liked Penelope’s sisters, who embody different personality types and have different views on marriage and scandal. Watching Penelope worry for them was honestly touching, and provided unique opportunities for reflecting on romantic expectations versus realities. Bourne’s colleagues at the gambling den were also pretty great in that they seemed to be more respectful of Penelope than Bourne was. I liked that they called Bourne out for his behavior and didn’t try to control Penelope on his behalf.

Langford, our primary antagonist, wasn’t present enough for me to have an opinion one way or the other. Honestly, I didn’t feel that much animosity towards him - he was an ass for taking the entire inheritance from a 21 year old, but I felt like the blame was more on Bourne. I only reveled in his eventual demise because he got pretty sexist in the final showdown.

Romance: I’m going to just say it: I wasn’t rooting for Penelope and Bourne to be together. Most of their “love story” involved a lot of manipulative, controlling behavior on Bourne’s part, which would have been something to atone for and could have been a good story had Penelope not forgotten about it the instant Bourne showed some basic human decency. A lot of their fights consisted of Bourne being manipulative, Penelope realizing that everything he does is for selfish reasons, then forgetting it because she finds him attractive or because he does something nice. There was no acknowledgment or atonement for him hurting her or using her, and Penelope decides she loves Bourne because he raised himself above his scandal by building back his fortune. For some reason, she finds that admirable, but because we see Bourne ruining people in the same way he was ruined at the beginning of the book, I couldn’t see him in the way Penelope did.

Bourne’s redemption also felt pretty empty. Throughout the whole book, there’s this constant lamentation that he’s not good enough for Penelope, that he will only cause her ruin, but he wants her anyway. He’s also so obsessed with revenge that everything he does hurts Penelope, whether it be ignoring her happiness or going after Langford by way of Tommy. Instead of a slow, steady process where he comes to value love over revenge and where he makes up for all the hurt he caused her, he seems to turn on a dime with maybe 25% left of the book. Honestly, I found their whole romance exhausting after the first hundred pages, and I wished there was more of a gradual ennobling of Bourne’s character, rather than the self-indulgent pity party he seems to exhibit.

TL;DR: Even though A Rogue By Any Other Name has quick, witty prose and an interesting crux at the heart of the plot, the self-loathing, controlling hero and exhausting romance ultimately prevented me from enjoying this book.

[targaryen-stronghold]

Dany deliberately targeting innocents in KL was horrible and OOC af, but I think what really irritated me was Tyrion's condemnation and shock. He's so shocked she didn't listen to his advice when the city surrendered. Like, DUDE, what counsel have you given her in the last 2 seasons that has ACTUALLY WORKED? Tyrion lost Dany her allies. He told her Cersei would keep her word. He told her the North would support her if she fought for them. (1/?)

(2/2) He told her to treat with Cersei, and Missandei was beheaded. Literally, Tyrion was one of the WORST things/people to happen to Daenerys (Besides Jon Snow and Sansa Snark). Literally what reason did Daenerys have to believe anything that came out of Tyrion's mouth? Everything he advised her to do ended badly for her. She was punished for listening to her advisors. And then harshly judged, side-eyed, gaslighted, and treated like she was crazy when she wasn't. Ugh.

You are absolutely right. Let’s start by saying that Dany killing innocents “because reasons” is total bullshit. This woman couldn’t even look at innocent people murdering each other for sport in the fighting pits of Meereen. It was tradition but she was 100% against it because innocent people died for so good reason at all. She accepted it because it was important to her people. She locked up her own dragons to prevent them from killing another child or harm anyone else. She used her dragons to fight her opponents because that’s what smart people do and dragons are her power, she doesn’t need to wield a sword. However, she only killed soldiers and people who opposed her because that’s what all monarchs do if they want to rule. 

There are shameless double-standards regarding Dany in this fandom because she’s a woman who commands the most powerful forces in the lore. She also embodies both female and male energy and traits - and this makes fragile men feel threatened and women with internalized misogyny feel uncomfortable. Other male characters did far worse than she in their quest for power and they aren’t treated as harshly as she is. Tywin literally slaughtered an entire House because they rebel against the Lannisters. Robb and his troops destroyed the Riverlands; the innocent people who lived there didn’t care about Ned Stark or the Northern Independence, they just want to live in peace - for them the Red Wedding was a blessing (actually by “avenging” the Red Wedding and killing every male Frey in GOT, Arya probably caused a fight among the other Houses to decide who would take control over the Riverlands. Of course this is glossed-over because the Starks are moral superior to every other character and can do no wrong). Jaime commanded the slaughter of everyone in Highgarden: including innocent men, women and children. Not only that but King Bran saw fit to name one of those murderers to take hold of Highgarden in the end: I bet the surviving farmers who were terrorized by Bronn and the Lannister soldiers feel really safe now. The Starks also fought to get back their home. It doesn’t matter if it was their ancestral home: it belonged to House Bolton by royal decree. They had to take it back by force and many Northern houses didn’t even support them. Afterwards, Sansa even wanted to strip Lord Umber (a child) and Lady Karstark (a teenager) of their ancestral homes because their parents fought against in Starks in the Battle of the Bastards. Fortunately for these kids, Jon opposed to this idea. 

When I saw “The Bells” I couldn’t believe my eyes. The stupidity of it. First, the ringing of bells doesn’t even mean surrender in the GOT/ASOIAF universe and that’s well established (ever since Season 2) but I guess Dumb and Dumber kind of forgot. Second, Dany had no reason whatsoever to target innocent people in the streets when Cersei was locked in the Red Keep. She only needed to fly to Red Keep and be done with it. She would eventually kill innocents in the process but at the very least it would have made sense. When I read the leaks, I thought it would go down like this. But instead, they made her burn down several streets before getting to Red Keep for no good reason at all.  Cersei doesn’t care about the people and Dany knows this. Some can justify it as revenge for Missandei’s death but that’s bollocks. Those people didn’t kill or cheer for Missandei’s death: they probably don’t even know about her. At its core, this was only a plot device to make Jon look heroic while murdering her in the next episode and for Tyrion not to look like a traitor.

And this, ladies and gents, is how you ruin a TV series.

As for Tyrion suddenly caring about the people of King’s Landing is yet another Dumb and Dumber bullshit. Tyrion doesn’t care about the people: he is selfish in both books and show and he craves power too, mostly because the wants his father’s approval. Tyrion even wanted all these people dead a few seasons ago and resented saving their lives when Stannis attacked the city. The same with Varys: he fed Aerys’ paranoia by constantly telling him about traitors and acting like a snitch but in the TV show they had him all remorseful about witnessing Aerys’ burning people he considered traitors.  He even sided with a King that commanded the sack of King’s Landing (leading to the murder and rape of innocents) and laughed at dead children (Elia’s children) as they were placed at his feet by Tywin. 

Was Tyrion really on Dany’s side? Because he clearly didn’t want his siblings hurt or killed. And he knew Cersei would never give up her power and Jaime would stay by her side. He persuaded Jon to do his dirty work (= killing Dany) to save his own skin because he knows he would probably be executed for treason, not because he cared about the people. 

What they made Dany do in GOT is wrong and off-character. But what House Stark, House Baratheon, House Arryn and House Lannister did in the sack of King’s Landing was far worse so people really should stop acting so self-righteous. Drogon turned those innocents into dust in a matter of seconds because dragonfire is hot as hell, but when those soldiers raped and murdered it wasn’t so quick and the women who were raped had to live with the trauma and probably with the offspring of that rape. Ned opposed to it and went to look for Lyanna, yes. But his soldiers and the other Northern houses didn’t follow him: they stayed in King’s Landing murdering and raping until they had enough. That’s fucking disgusting. It’s also fucking sickening painting Dany as the ultimate evil of the series when all of this happened.  

#daenerys targaryen #pro daenerys #pro dany #anti game of thrones season 8

[luna-almighty-god]

Comfort a Little Dream N°4 [This desire I have for you.]

This story is obviously not canonical, please do not refer to it if you are looking for canonical information.

Careful, there are explicit scenes in this story (violence) !

I hope you have a good read!

===

First Chapter

Previous Chapter

===

The darkness of unconsciousness was one of the most terrifying prisons he had ever known. Dream cowered, trembling, unable to raise his head to observe this desperately empty, desperately dark place. The place that had held him prisoner for so long... for hours? Days? He couldn't tell, his vision of time was cloudy, as cloudy as the feelings that assailed him.

He was scared, shaking, sobbing. And in this place devoid of life, he heard only his own groans, his own painful and pathetic groans.

He was scared. He wanted Ink. He wanted Cross. He wanted his brother.

[Someone, anyone...]

Was he dead? Was it hell? Was it his fate after his miserable life: to be plunged into darkness until he went mad?

He gritted his teeth, choking out another sob.

A gust of wind. He shivered.

He froze.

A gust of wind?

He raised his head up sharply, only to fall once again into the void. At first disappointed, his soul gripping with anguish, he suddenly held his breath. No ... There was something different. There was a... There was someone there?

“Always such a crybaby.”

Dream widened his eyes and got back on his feet. Contradictory feelings took possession of him: relief, apprehension, incomprehension. He squinted his eyes for fear of having dreamed, but it was not so: Nightmare broke away from the darkness to appear before him, as imposing and haughty as usual, his tentacles wiggling in his back.

“N ... Night?” stammered the keeper of dreams.

Nightmare kept silent, looked at him for a long time, lingered on his frail and trembling body, then on his tired and terrified face ... and Dream was surprised to see a glimmer of guilt in his eyes. No, it was impossible, had he dreamed?

“... Nightmare... Is this ....real? Or am I... ?

- You're not dead.”

The master of darkness approached. Dream shuddered, took a step back, but his twin was quickly at his level, came to slip a hand on his cheek, surprising him again. And he put on him a look that the guardian of dreams never thought he would see, a look that made him feel like a jewel, a fragile crystal that one wished to brood and cherish.

It wasn't normal... This situation was far too unreal...

“Dream…”

Nightmare's voice shook, alerting his twin, who looked at him in confusion:

“Dream... You're in a coma.”

The little dream blinked, as if he hadn't assimilated the information. He tilted his head to the side, lost, confused, believing some kind of joke or manipulative technique, or a clue that he was dreaming and that his brother wasn't really there.

“Dream, do you even remember what happened?”

What happened? He had a sweet laugh, a laugh that stunned Nightmare.

“It's hard to forget him ... But what does it matter?”

Yeah, what does it matter?

“All is well”

[He was fine.]

“This place isn't so bad, especially if I can create such illusions…”

[ Now that he had imagined Nightmare, maybe he could imagine Ink, Cross, maybe even Blueberry? ]

“No one will ever have to suffer because of me again.”

[ Yes, plus pers... ]

“BUT YOU'RE NOT FUCKING DEAD!”

Dream was startled, terrified by this excess of voices. He looked at what he thought was a fake Nightmare, this fake Nightmare whose tentacles were more violently agitated, whose gaze had become more murderous. This fake Nightmare at his wit's end, full of rage and suffering that made him tremble, made him want to cry:

“YOU'RE IN A COMA BECAUSE THE OTHER MOTHERFUCKER MADE YOU EAT BLACK APPLES! AND I STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW YOU'RE STILL NOT FUCKING CORRUPT!”

Dream flickers. What's that?

Nightmare grabbed him by the shoulders:

“We're both unconscious right now! Your state is completely unstable, your mind is an open book! I snuck in here to wake you up, you moron!

- No... (sighs) No, that's impossible, it's...

- If you don't wake up now, your soul will destroy itself! And then, yeah, then you'll be dead for good! And don't expect Reaper to give you special treatment! So... (sighs)”

Nightmare opened his eyes when he was violently pushed away. He avoided the fall only because of his tentacles on which he leaned and raised his head, looking at his brother in amazement. Dream had just attacked him? Really?

“Shut up... “ gently blew the younger one backwards.

Nightmare frowned, took another step towards him.

“BACK OFF! STAY AWAY FROM ME!

- Dream.

- SHUT UP! YOU'RE NOT MY BROTHER! YOU CAN'T BE MY BROTHER!”

Dream didn't know how he managed, but his bow suddenly materialized in his hand and it was by instinct that he aimed at his twin before firing without the slightest hesitation. The arrow of light split the air in an instant and almost stabbed the nightmare master, but he narrowly dodged it, not without making a wince when he was grazed on the cheek.

He growled, looked angrily at his brother:

“So you want to play this…”

He never turned down a fight, least of all with his idiot twin. His old habits returned at full gallop and he threw himself on Dream, his tentacles rushing towards him. But his soul missed a beat. It missed a beat when he saw Dream close his eyes, surrendering to his attack, ready to suffer its full force, even if it was only to shatter.

Nightmare felt his stomach twist. He had to use all his self-control to manage to deflect the attack, saving his twin from certain death, and instead of hurting him he came to grab him, his tentacles grabbing his arms and legs to immobilize him in the air.

Dream froze in horror, assailed by memories.

[ Tentacle clamps violently against the wall ]

[ arm snap ]

[ Sticking a tentacle in his mouth ]

[Sets him down with a deep wound]

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!”

Nightmare froze with fright, shuddered before this scream of terror, a scream he had surely not foreseen, as well as this sudden wave of negativity that pushed him to step back, to protect himself with his arms. He barely managed to hold Dream, watching it struggling, screaming and sobbing like a madman, his body arched and his eyes filled with unbearable fear.

And that terrified him. Dealing with negative emotions was one thing. Facing unknown negativity was another. But seeing his brother, his twin, that adorable being embodying positivity, screaming like a madman and struggling with despair, was surely the worst vision, a sight he would never have wanted to see.

And yet he had dreamed of it. Oh yes, Nightmare had dreamed of the day when he would destroy Dream, when he would push it to its limit, when he would make it sick with horror and make it sink, getting rid of the positive emotions that were bothering him at the time, getting rid of the last obstacle that was preventing him from reigning as a master on the multiverse.

Aren't you happy?

He should have been happy.

[You finally get what you want.]

He should have rejoiced!

[ Chuckles ]

WHY COULDN'T HE REJOICE?!

Nightmare tightened his grip, Dream uttered yet another scream. He slipped a tentacle around his throat, pressed it slowly, the body trembling, the eyes devoid of pupils.

[If he killed him now, no one would blame him.]

[If he killed him now, everyone would think that Shattered is the culprit.]

If he killed him now...

If he killed him now...!

... Why didn't he kill him before? Now he'd had his chance. He'd had too many chances.

[He wanted to hurt him.]

Yes, yes, death was too sweet, much too sweet for Dream. It was...

[ Dream choking ]

He didn't care. A little more, just a little tighter, and...

[He can't breathe]

Why did he want to save him in the first place? No, no, Nightmare didn't want to save him. He was delusional, he didn't... he didn't... he didn't... he... he...

He met the gaze of his twin, his twin who had stopped struggling, empty-eyed, half unconscious, ready to accept his death, ready to disappear from this world, ready to ... à ...

Nightmare became livid. His tentacles gave way, letting the guardian of dreams fall to the ground, stunned and confused, coughing and trying to catch a faint breath.

“Why... ? “ articulated the nightmare.

Dream was unable to move. He could only turn his eyes to his weak brother, without understanding why he had not finished him.

“Why do you seek to die... ? WHAT'S GOING ON IN YOUR SKULL THAT MAKES YOU WANT TO DISAPPEAR?”

The silence returned, heavier, colder, more unbearable than ever.

Dream remained for a long time without answering, as if the question seemed absurd to him, that there was no need to give an answer. Nightmare asked him why? He dared to ask him why? He dared to stand in front of him, to cheer him up, to imply that he was just an idiot to want to die ... When he was the one who wanted him dead all along? That he's the one who's been trying to finish him off? That he was the one who tried to kill him again not even a few minutes ago?

“... You've got to be kidding me…”

Dream blew that out with a smile on his face, as if he'd just heard a good joke. His breathing was just getting regular again, but his soul was beating wildly, his mind was no longer functioning properly. He leaned on his hands, trembling all over, more feverish than he had ever been.

“You wanted me to disappear... and now that I'm giving it to you, you ask me why? When I'm doing this for you, for all of you, you ask me why?”

Her smile had melted, his tremors had become more violent. He got up, barely holding on to his legs, ready to collapse again. But his gaze was not feverish. No, his gaze had become dark, dark and angry, witnessing the storm raging inside him, the storm that mixed his anger and sadness, his regret and remorse, his ... his ... his ...

“IT'S NOT FAIR! I HAVE FINALLY ACCEPTED MY FATE! I FINALLY ACCEPTED TO DIE ! I'VE FINALLY ACCEPTED TO LEAVE YOU ALONE, TO LEAVE YOU ALONE SO THAT I CAN BE LEFT ALONE! WHY DON'T YOU LET ME DIE? YOU'RE THE ONE WHO WANTED THIS! YOU'VE ALWAYS WANTED IT! DON'T BULLSHIT ME, DON'T TELL ME YOU WANT ME TO WAKE UP!”

Nightmare thought he was hallucinating, anger took hold of him again:

“LEAVE YOU ALONE? YOU'RE ALWAYS IN PEACE! YOU'VE HAD PEACE SINCE WE WERE KIDS! YOU'VE HAD IT ALL ALONG! YOU'VE ALWAYS HAD PEOPLE TO LOVE AND CUDDLE YOU, YOU'VE ALWAYS...

- WHAT LOVE?!”

Nightmare paused, stunned by such a question. He clenched his fists, his rage only getting stronger, but Dream got ahead of him before he could reply:

“DO YOU EVOKE THE LOVE IN MY AURA? IS THIS LOVE FOR YOU?”

Nightmare remained mute, caught off guard by such a question. What… ? Love to his aura?

“WHAT A LOVE! PEOPLE LIKE TO FEEL GOOD! THEY LIKE POSITIVE EMOTIONS, THEY LIKE TO SMILE, THEY LIKE TO BE HAPPY! SO OF COURSE HE LOVES ME, I'M A WALKING SOURCE OF HAPPINESS!

- Wha... Dr...

- BUT WITHOUT THAT AURA, WHO'S LEFT? NO ONE! BECAUSE NOBODY WANTS A USELESS KID! NOBODY WANTS A CLUMSY MORON WHO KNOWS NOTHING BUT HOPE, WHO KNOWS NOTHING BUT HOPING, WHO KNOWS NOTHING BUT COMING OUT OF NONSENSE BIGGER THAN HIMSELF!

- It's, uh... !

- EVERYONE PREFERS TO PLAY THE HYPOCRITE WHEN IT SUITS THEM, BUT WHEN THEY NO LONGER NEED A HELPING HAND THEY TURN AWAY FROM THEIR SOURCE! THEY GO ELSEWHERE TO TAKE CARE OF THE PEOPLE THEY REALLY LOVE!”

Nightmare hiccupped, petrified by his twin's speech. Petrified by the tears that had come to fill his eyes and run down his undone face.

“ONCE THEY'RE HAPPY, ONCE THEY'RE HAPPY... !”

Dream sobbed, grabbed his arms with force, stuck his trembling phalanges into them without worrying about the pain.

"Once they're happy, they don't need me anymore! Once they are happy, they don't care that I can disappear, they don't care that I can go wrong! »

He fell to his knees, shaken by uncontrollable jolts, as pale as death as he felt his stomach turn over, inflicting on him that repulsive urge to vomit.

“... I wanted to be like you…”

Nightmare felt stabbed, assaulted by a stabbing pain, a pain that worsened when his twin repeated:

“I wanted to be like you... To be as strong as you... To be capable of so many things like you... Many hated you, many resented you, many still do... But when people love you…”

He burst into tears, his voice going off the rails over his last words:

“...when you are loved, you are truly loved... !”

He took his head in his hands, closing his eyes with force, as if he wanted to hide, to vanish for good:

“I really loved you... !”

There was nothing left but his sobs, his crouching and aching body, his broken voice and his erratic breathing. There was nothing left but his troubled mind and his terror. There was nothing but his distress and abandonment.

And Nightmare just stood there with his mouth open, unable to answer anything, as if he'd just received a masterful slap, a truth he would have preferred to ignore. He remained silent, contemplating the feverish body of his brother, contemplating what was left of his sparkling twin as a crowd of memories hit him in the face.

“YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND ME! YOU'LL NEVER UNDERSTAND ME!”

He was the one who didn't understand anything.

“YOU'VE ALWAYS HAD IT ALL! BECAUSE YOU ARE THE GUARDIAN OF DREAMS, OF POSITIVITY! YOU'VE ALWAYS BEEN THE SPOILED BRAT! AND ME IN ALL THIS?!”

"A spoiled rotten kid" who lived a life of hypocrisy and lies.

“WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I NEEDED YOU? WHEN I WAS BEING HUMILIATED, HARASSED?”

Dream had never been there because he didn't know about it. He had never noticed anything because everybody had hidden it from him, everybody had lied to him, everybody... including Nightmare himself. Nightmare who had dared to accuse him, who had dared to call him a liar.

But Dream had only lied to one person.

[ Dream had been lying to himself all these years ]

[He lied to himself, convinced himself that he was okay, that everything was fine.]

He had lied to himself only to avoid cracking up. Only so he could continue to support others.]

[ While from the beginning... ]

[All along, it was his job to be supported]

Nightmare collapsed, fell to his knees, exhausted. Just about at the end. He made a groan, a pathetic moan, close to a sob, and barely realized that his vision had become blurred, that tears were coming out of his one eye.

What had he done?

He destroyed Dream.

What had he done?

He had pushed his twin to the limit.

What had he done?

He had committed an unforgivable act.

Seeing your desperate brother hurt you more than you thought...

Nightmare gritted her teeth. He got up, his body reacting by automatism, and moved towards Dream, came to crouch down beside him, put a hand on his shoulder.

[It's time to right the wrong you've done.]

“It's time to wake up Dream.”

[You're filled with determination]

===

Next Chapter

You can support me on my Utip or on my Ko-fi account !

===

Credits =

Dreamtale -> Joku

Shattered Dream -> ErroredArtist’s

Cross ->  Jakei

Error -> Lover The Piggies

Ink -> Comyet / Myebi

Dust -> Ask DustTale

Killer -> Rahafwabas

Color -> Superyoumma

Sugar Plum -> undertale Community (formerly NSFWShamecave ?)

#comfort a little dream #Hurt / Comfort #undertale #dreamtale #dream #nightmare #bad sanses #killer #color #sugar plum #error #ink #dust #sans #Shattered Dream #fanfiction

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 07 Mar 2020 (audio from Canada Reads Kelowna, gig economy spreads Covid-19, Intel's security chip is insecure, Barnes and Noble gets a savior)

Today's links

Audio from last night's Canada Reads event in Kelowna: Thanks to Sarah Penton for being such a great interviewer!

Gig economy drivers won't get sick-pay if they have covid-19 symptoms: Your Instacart driver is being incentivized to handle your food through his fever-sweats.

Compromise threatens Intel's chip-within-a-chip: A bug in the Management Engine threatens five years' worth of Intel systems.

The savior of Waterstones will turn every B&N into an indie: James Daunt has opened 60 profitable stores in his career.

This day in history: 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

Audio from last night's Canada Reads event in Kelowna (permalink)

Last night I sat down for an interview and lively Q&A at the Kelowna Public Library with the CBC's Sarah Penton as part of the Canada Reads national book prize, for which my book Radicalized is a finalist. Courtney Dickson was kind enough to send me raw audio from the board and to give me permission to post it. It was a genuinely wonderful night, with great and thoughtful questions, and I'm really glad that I get to share it with you!

https://archive.org/download/canadareadskelownadoctorowpenton/Canada_Reads_Kelowna_Doctorow_Penton.mp3

Gig economy drivers won't get sick-pay if they have covid-19 symptoms (permalink)

The gig economy workers who deliver your @amazon packages are not entitled to sick pay if they think they have covid-19 and want to stay home, rather than delivering contaminated boxes to you.

https://onezero.medium.com/keep-your-car-clean-gig-companies-offer-little-support-during-coronavirus-outbreak-cf6c55cca8a8

It's not just Amazon Flex drivers who are being tacitly incentivized by rapacious, giant corporations to show up for work sick. Your Lyft and Instacart drivers are all being given a stark choice: work sick or go broke.

As Sarah Emerson speculates in her One Zero piece, this depraved indifference is likely an epiphenomenon of gig economy companies' urge to preserve the fiction that their workers are contractors, not employees. Contractors don't get sick leave, after all.

"[Amazon is ] basically threatening that I'll be out of work if I have any symptoms of being sick, coronavirus or not, but no protections and no offers for help in the event it happens" – Jeff Perry, Amazon Flex/Uber driver, Sacramento

Lyft's advice to drivers: "disinfect your car" and avoid passengers who appear sick.

As outrage over this policy went viral, Uber reversed its earlier stance and announced that it would offer up to 14 days of "compensation" for some drivers.

https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1236126626028507136

Compromise threatens Intel's chip-within-a-chip (permalink)

A new showstopper Intel bug compromises the Converged Security and Management Engine, the computer-within-a-computer that Intel uses for a variety of purposes, some beneficial (detecting malware), some terrible (shutting out free software).

https://blog.ptsecurity.com/2020/03/intelx86-root-of-trust-loss-of-trust.html

The Management Engine has long been controversial. It's designed to reach into your RAM and tinker with it in a way that, by design, the CPU can't detect or prevent. This is deliberate: it lets the management engine monitor and disrupt malware.

https://boingboing.net/2016/06/15/intel-x86-processors-ship-with.html

But of course, if your Management Engine itself is compromised, then – by design – the part of the computer that you control can neither monitor it, nor prevent it from doing malicious work. In 2017, a ghastly ME bug showed how risky this was.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/intels-management-engine-security-hazard-and-users-need-way-disable-it

It's especially bad because ME security is, in part, security through obscurity: Intel barely documents ME function and doesn't permit outside auditing. To make everything worse, there's no way to fully disable it. So ME bugs keep on surfacing, each worse than the last. Here's 2018's:

https://press.f-secure.com/2018/01/12/intel-amt-security-issue-lets-attackers-bypass-login-credentials-in-corporate-laptops/

Which brings me to the new vuln: PT Security shows an early stage attack on the boot ROM, that allows for recovery of a master key that is used to generate all the other keys in the system. It's a deep bug that could potentially compromise all the downstream operations. It's only a partial attack (so far). The key needs to be decrypted to be usable, but the researchers say it's only a matter of time – and they point out that the key is shared across years' worth of Intel processors.

This compromise (when it comes) has profound implications for DRM, which is intrinsically brittle in that it's "break once, break everywhere." Once content is extracted from a DRM wrapper on a compromised system, it can be shared and played back on intact ones. DRM system designers try to address this with tactics like "renewability" and "selectable output control" that allows DRM systems to detect which systems they're running on and refuse to operate if they believe they might be compromised.

This is a thermonuclear option that could make DRM unviable forever. It means that if you had the misfortune to buy an Intel system during the five years that they were manufactured with this defect, you could lose the ability to play content you've already paid for.

Not because you hacked your system, but because you could. DRM is and always has been a timebomb, ticking down to the moment that execs in a distant boardroom decide to nerf or brick your property. The temptation to downgrade your customers' property to up your profits is irresistible.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/what-hp-must-do-make-amends-its-self-destructing-printers

But customers don't like getting punished for "doing the right thing." If media companies cancel playback for purchased content on affected Intel systems, they won't be targeting pirates (who get their media DRM-free), but people who deliberately chose to pay.

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, we don't get fooled again." -GWB

Punishing legit customers to get at pirates is a surefire way to make more pirates.

"Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb."

The savior of Waterstones will turn every B&N into an indie (permalink)

A great hero of British bookselling is James Daunt, the founder of Daunt Books, whose flagship store is literally the most beautiful bookstore I've ever been to.

https://dauntbooks.co.uk/shops/marylebone/

Daunt took over Waterstones in 2011 and rescued it. The chain now runs as a string of indies, with no co-op promotion – instead, the booksellers in each shop choose which books they promote based on local taste. Corporate HQ chooses a book of the month and a book every year for chainwide promotion, but they do so on the basis of their enjoyment of the book – not because a publisher pays them for promo.

The new Waterstones stores are spectacular. There were always some great ones (the Waterstones in Bradford rivals the main Daunt books for beauty), but the vibe and experience of shopping at a post-Daunt Waterstones is a million times better than before. And new shops like the one in Tottenham Court Road really embody what a bookstore can be. The event I did there in 2017 with Laurie Penny was one of the best I've ever done in the UK.

https://www.waterstones.com/events/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-laurie-penny/london-tottenham-court-road

The good news is that Daunt is now running Barnes & Noble, which has been struggling and worse – pulling desperate moves like laying off all their most experienced booksellers to lower payroll costs, which is obviously a catastrophic mistake. And Daunt's public plan for BN – America's last major chain bookstore – is to replicate what he did with Waterstones. Let the stores run like indies, with local control by experienced booksellers who know and care about their customers' tastes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-04/barnes-noble-wants-to-be-more-like-an-indie-bookseller

He's ending co-op promotion, featuring books that the booksellers choose, not books that publishers pay to promote. He's reversing the focus on non-bookstore SKUs (sunglasses, puzzles and scented candles) in favor of, you know…books. They're shrinking CDs and DVDs and expanding kids' books, laying the ground for a new generation of readers, and they're cleaning up, repainting, and generally repairing years of neglect that have given some of the stores the vibe of an abandoned K-Mart.

They're also opening new stores, targeting places that don't have any bookstores (as opposed to places where indie stores have kept the faith and continued to serve their communities). He's shooting for 1,500 stores nationwide. It's superb news for a nation where bookselling has been imperilled for decades. On every tour stop, I always insist that my media escort take me to every B&N in town to sign stock and meet the booksellers. As a recovering bookseller myself, it's one of the great pleasures of the tours. Bookstores are community hubs, and were key to my own literary upbringing. This is just delightful news.

(Image: RachelH_, CC BY-NC)

This day in history (permalink)

#5yrsago Improving the estimate of US police killings https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-new-estimate-of-killings-by-police-is-way-higher-and-still-too-low/

#1yrago Ajit Pai has been touting new broadband investment after he murdered Net Neutrality, but he's been relying on impossible data from a company called Barrierfree https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/ajit-pais-rosy-broadband-deployment-claim-may-be-based-on-gigantic-error/

#1yrago The EU hired a company that had been lobbying for the Copyright Directive to make a (completely batshit) video to sell the Copyright Directive https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1103582295523553280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

#1yrago The "Tragedy of the Commons" was invented by a white supremacist based on a false history, and it's toxic bullshit https://twitter.com/mmildenberger/status/1102604887223750657

#1yrago It's on: House Democrats introduce their promised Net Neutrality legislation https://www.cnet.com/news/democrats-introduce-save-the-internet-act-to-restore-net-neutrality/

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: The Verge (https://www.theverge.com), Wired (https://wired.com), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Museums and the Web: March 31-April 4 2020, Los Angeles. https://mw20.museweb.net/

LA Times Festival of Books: 18 April 2020, Los Angeles. https://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/

Currently writing: I'm rewriting a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm also working on "Baby Twitter," a piece of design fiction also set in The Lost Cause's prehistory, for a British think-tank. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel afterwards.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopias: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/01/disasters-dont-have-to-end-in-dystopias/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

[fierce-little-miana]

Why do I like Medea?

@irleughlivelyatalanteangodfan asked “May I ask what you like most about Medea?”

To which my first reaction is what is there not to like?

Of course of course someone might answered me that even in the more positive version of the myth Medea is at the very least a murderer. In the worst version she is a fratricide, infanticide, and mass-murderer. So there are indeed things to discuss.

First I must say that I love Medea the most at her worst. I do believe the academics working on the myth finding trace of older versions in which Medea is not at her worst are producing necessary content because it is solid and necessary academic work. And it is not uninteresting to see how with each newer version her depiction tended to be blacken. There is indeed something to be said of a myth that goes from a mythical magical woman to a murderous vengeful woman, especially when this woman is powerful in her own right (her magic) and foreign (three things that ancient Greeks despised). But that is not the appeal of the character to me.

No I love Medea in her murderous rage. I love everything that “dark” Medea stands for. One of the main thing being:

Feminine Rage:

This the name I give to something that became, without me noticing it, one of my favorite tropes in media. It is when a woman just snaps when confronted for the umpteenth time with something fundamentally unfair, fundamentally degrading, that is only leveraged against her because she is a woman.  

There are ways women are supposed to bear pain, humiliation, or attacks against themselves, that are dignified and are positively recognized by society. Gendered ways. While a man is going to fight against adversity a woman is going to endure it. I personally find it extremely disempowering. Resilience has good sides of course but it is not proactive, it is enduring a situation up until it changes of its own accord. Yet this is what women are taught to do. And women are taught to be resilient in the eyes of a society that covers them with outrages specifically because they are women.

A woman who ends up resorting to violence is a great transgressor. Violence is a transgression that might get women completely shun from the “civilized” world (whereas it is not automatic for men). And yet I think there is a secret fear/desire for a lot of women that they are actually one step or two away to falling into primal violence (I am not saying that all women feel like that obviously but the idea seems to speak to too many to be described as only personal).

I recently found this quote that goes in this sens pretty well:

“almost every woman i have ever met has a secret belief that she is just on the edge of madness, that there is some deep, crazy part within her, that she must be on guard constantly against ‘losing control’ — of her temper, of her appetite, of her sexuality, of her feelings, of her ambition, of her secret fantasies, of her mind”

Elana Dykewomon “Notes for a Magazine”

Women are divorced from their violent impulse, from a part of themselves, for the best and for the worst. This feminine rage is powerful way to reconnect with this part of themselves in a eyes of a society that keeps on tormenting them.

That’s what Medea story is in the end. A total dip in primal violence to avenge all the offenses she had to bear because she is a woman. And she only can regain her dignity, and a real agency through this violence.

Medea’s story is incredibly gendered. Sure there is the theme of who is the real criminal: the one committing the crime or the one not preventing it and benefiting from it? But it is mainly the story of a woman who sacrificed everything she had (rank, reputation, honor, morality) to make her husband and family succeed. She got her husband out of all dangerous situations they faced together, and has even offered him opportunity he wouldn’t have had without her. The story of Medea is the one of an older woman whose husband can’t use her anymore after having made her sacrifice everything.

So Medea snaps and exercises powerful violence on her husband and everyone who is working with him to strap her of what remains: her sense of self (I don’t know if it is in every version but in at least some of them Creusa asks to be able to wear Medea’s wedding dress to her own wedding). She punishes them all and finds herself back in the process. Even if she has to suffer excoriating pain in order to do so (killing her own sons) as long as the others suffer more than her and are punished according to their crimes she will not falter.

Medea is feminine rage at its peak, uncompromising and lethal. There is something extremely cathartic in this for me.

The story of Medea is also the story of a foreigner in an hostile land. It is less important than the woman part for me but still essential. And that is why I really like that in the french comic book by Le Called and Peña they do present her as significantly different from the Greeks women and significantly darker.

Not like any other:

Medea, like most of characters in myth, is related to gods. Circe is her aunt, so she is related to Hecate, which is unsurprising considering that she is a magician (a deeply feminine power in most greek myth). But she is also the granddaughter of Helios (actually all four of her grandparents are gods or close to be). But Medea isn’t just related to gods, she behaves like one.

Medea destroys not only Creon and his daughter but in some of the version she is responsible for the burning of the entire city. Exactly like an angry god who has been disrespected by members of a community and brought their anger on all the community (granted the citizens of Corinth did not like her but still).

But it is the punition that she reserve to Jason that strikes me as the most god-like. In ancient Greek myths gods often punishes humans or other gods who had wronged them with fates worse than death (like Prometheus or Lycaon of Arcadia). This is exactly what she does to Jason. She takes everything from him, everything, but she leaves him alive so he has to live through his punishment. He is left with nothing except maybe the shame of being Jason. Even in the Divine Comedy (written in the 14th century and not directly concerned with the Argonauts or Medea) Jason is placed in Hell for what he did to several women.

Medea is superior to nearly everyone else she runs into in her story and her actions in Corinth is a way for her to reclaim that.

A reasonable women:

Medea most famous deed might have been the killing of her sons in Corinth to annihilate Jason but even in this she keeps on being rational. She might fall prey to primal violence but she still plans and executes it with meticulousness.

After all apparently her name comes from the verbs μήδομαι / mêdomai which means to meditate, and might come from an earlier root meaning: understand/conceive.

Medea is victorious thanks to the power of her reason and cleverness. She doesn’t kill Pelias, she convinces his daughters to do so by tricking them into believing that they are going to make him young and healthy again. She gets the Golden Fleece. She gets the very dreadful idea of how to slow down her pursuing father’s fleet. Medea is not only powerful because she is a great magician. She is powerful because she is a smart, ruthless, dedicated woman.

In Corneille’s version, Pollux (an Argonaut whose role here is to be the confident of Jason) has this to say about Jason’s plan of marrying Creusa :

“Bien que de tous côtés l'affaire résolue

Ne laisse aucune place aux conseils d'un ami,

Je ne puis toutefois l'approuver qu'à demi.

Sur quoi que vous fondiez un traitement si rude,

C'est montrer pour Médée un peu d'ingratitude :

Ce qu'elle a fait pour vous est mal récompensé.

Il faut craindre après tout son courage offensé ;

Vous savez mieux que moi ce que peuvent ses charmes.”

Basically this replica starts with Pollux saying that he knows Jason isn’t going to listen to him but still what he is doing to Medea (repudiating and banishing her) is not cool. He finishes by “We need to fear her offended courage / You know better than me what her spells are capable of.” To which Jason answers something along the lines “no worries, her banishment should be enough to tame her”. To this Pollux retorts:

“Gardez d'avoir sujet de vous en repentir.”

Which roughly translates as “Be careful to not end up sorry about it.” Later in the play it seems that Medea has accepted her fate and she has given her wedding dress as a present to Creusa. Everyone thinks that everything is going great and this what Pollux as to say about this:

“J'eus toujours pour suspects les dons des ennemis :

Ils font assez souvent ce que n'ont pu leurs armes.

Je connais de Médée et l'esprit et les charmes,

Et veux bien m'exposer aux plus cruels trépas,

Si ce rare présent n'est un mortel appas.”

He starts by saying that gifts from enemies are always suspicious and dangerous and then say that since it is something from Medea he is ready to bet his life that it is a deadly trap (and by the way he is absolutely correct). This is how the verse from the middle of the replica translates:  “I know of Medea her spirit and her spells”. We can see that in this version, Pollux is deadly sure that Medea isn’t going to take that laying down and that she is going to be a formidable foe. But it is not only her magical ability that he recognises as dangerous (even if he insists a lot on it), it is her courage and her mind (reason).

Medea isn't cold, she burns bright, but she is still a calculating strategist whose magic is as dangerous as the way she uses her mind.

In the end, Medea embodies one of my favorite trope which is woman giving in to a justified burning anger more than ready to bear the consequences of said anger. She does so while acting and thinking like a god and being the best strategist in the room.

A god-like angry clever scorned woman? What is there not to love in her?

#medea #myth #mythology #women in myth #greek mythology

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

What messages are behind today’s cults?

Cults are coming. Are they crazy or bearing critical messages?

From May 1997 APA Monitor

By Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D.

Philip G. Zimbardo, PhD, was professor of psychology at Stanford University and a former APA president. He has interviewed and worked closely with survivors of Peoples Temple and their family members, as well as former members of the Unification Church, Scientology, Synanon, International Churches of Christ and other cults.

How do we make sense of the mass suicide of 21 female and 18 male members of the Heaven’s Gate extra-terrestrial “cult” on March 23, 1997? Typical explanations of all such strange, unexpected behavior involve a “rush to the dispositional,” locating the problem in defective personalities of the actors. Those whose behavior violates our expectations about what is normal and appropriate are dismissed as kooks, weirdos, gullible, stupid, evil or masochistic deviants.

Similar characterizations were evident in the media and public’s reaction to other mass suicides in The Order of the Solar Temple in Europe and Canada, murder-suicide deaths ordered by Rev. Jim Jones of his Peoples Temple members, as well as of the recent flaming deaths of David Koresh’s Branch Davidians and the gassing of Japanese citizens by followers of the Aum Shinrikyo group. And there will be more of the same in the coming years as cults proliferate in the United States and world wide in anticipation of the millennium.

Avoiding the stereotypes

Such pseudo-explanations are really moralistic judgments; framed with the wisdom of hindsight, they miss the mark. They start at the wrong end of the inquiry. Instead, our search for meaning should begin at the beginning: “What was so appealing about this group that so many people were recruited/seduced into joining it voluntarily?” We want to know also, “What needs was this group fulfilling that were not being met by “traditional society?”

Such alternative framings shift the analytical focus from condemning the actors, mindlessly blaming the victims, defining them as different from us, to searching for a common ground in the forces that shape all human behavior. By acknowledging our own vulnerability to the operation of the powerful, often subtle situational forces that controlled their actions, we can begin to find ways to prevent or combat that power from exerting its similar, sometimes sinister, influence on us and our kin.

Any stereotyped collective personality analysis of the Heaven’s Gate members proves inadequate when tallied against the resumes of individual members. They represented a wide range of demographic backgrounds, ages, talents, interests and careers prior to committing themselves to a new ideology embodied in the totally regimented, obedient lifestyle that would end with an eternal transformation. Comparable individual diversity has been evident among the members of many different cult groups I’ve studied over the past several decades. What is common are the recruiting promises, influence agendas and group’s coercive influence power that compromise the personal exercise of free will and critical thinking. On the basis of my investigations and the psychological research of colleagues, we can argue the following propositions, some of which will be elaborated:

No one ever joins a “cult.” People join interesting groups that promise to fulfill their pressing needs. They become “cults” when they are seen as deceptive, defective, dangerous, or as opposing basic values of their society.

Cults represent each society’s “default values,” filling in its missing functions. The cult epidemic is diagnostic of where and how society is failing its citizens.

If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. As basic human values are being strained, distorted and lost in our rapidly evolving culture, illusions and promissory notes are too readily believed and bought—without reality validation or credit checks.

Whatever any member of a cult has done, you and I could be recruited or seduced into doing—under the right or wrong conditions. The majority of “normal, average, intelligent” individuals can be led to engage in immoral, illegal, irrational, aggressive and self destructive actions that are contrary to their values or personality—when manipulated situational conditions exert their power over individual dispositions.

Cult methods of recruiting, indoctrinating and influencing their members are not exotic forms of mind control, but only more intensely applied mundane tactics of social influence practiced daily by all compliance professionals and societal agents of influence.

The appeal

What is the appeal of cults? Imagine being part of a group in which you will find instant friendship, a caring family, respect for your contributions, an identity, safety, security, simplicity, and an organized daily agenda. You will learn new skills, have a respected position, gain personal insight, improve your personality and intelligence. There is no crime or violence and your healthy lifestyle means there is no illness.

Your leader may promise not only to heal any sickness and foretell the future, but give you the gift of immortality, if you are a true believer. In addition, your group’s ideology represents a unique spiritual/religious agenda (in other cults it is political, social or personal enhancement) that if followed, will enhance the Human Condition somewhere in the world or cosmos.

Who would fall for such appeals? Most of us, if they were made by someone we trusted, in a setting that was familiar, and especially if we had unfulfilled needs.

Much cult recruitment is done by family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, teachers and highly trained professional recruiters. They recruit not on the streets or airports, but in contexts that are “home bases” for the potential recruit; at schools, in the home, coffee houses, on the job, at sports events, lectures, churches, or drop-in dinners and free personal assessment workshops. The Heaven’s Gate group made us aware that recruiting is now also active over the Internet and across the World Wide Web.

In a 1980 study where we (C. Hartley and I) surveyed and interviewed more than 1,000 randomly selected high school students in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, 54 percent reported they had at least one active recruiting attempt by someone they identified with a cult, and 40 percent said they had experienced three to five such contacts. And that was long before electronic cult recruiting could be a new allure for a generation of youngsters growing up as web surfers.

What makes any of us especially vulnerable to cult appeals?

Someone is in a transitional phase in life: moved to a new city or country, lost a job, dropped out of school, parents divorced, romantic relationship broken, gave up traditional religion as personally irrelevant. Add to the recipe, all those who find their work tedious and trivial, education abstractly meaningless, social life absent or inconsistent, family remote or dysfunctional, friends too busy to find time for you and trust in government eroded.

Cults promise to fulfill most of those personal individual’s needs and also to compensate for a litany of societal failures: to make their slice of the world safe, healthy, caring, predictable and controllable. They will eliminate the increasing feelings of isolation and alienation being created by mobility, technology, competition, meritocracy, incivility, and dehumanized living and working conditions in our society.

In general, cult leaders offer simple solutions to the increasingly complex world problems we all face daily. They offer the simple path to happiness, to success, to salvation by following their simple rules, simple group regimentation and simple total lifestyle. Ultimately, each new member contributes to the power of the leader by trading his or her freedom for the illusion of security and reflected glory that group membership holds out.

It seems like a “win-win” trade for those whose freedom is without power to make a difference in their lives. This may be especially so for the shy among us. Shyness among adults is now escalating to epidemic proportions, according to recent research by Dr. B. Carducci in Indiana and my research team in California. More than 50 percent of college-aged adults report being chronically shy (lacking social skills, low self-esteem, awkward in many social encounters). As with the rise in cult membership, a public health model is essential for understanding how societal pathology is implicated in contributing to the rise in shyness among adults and children in America.

A society in transition

Our society is in a curious transitional phase; as science and technology make remarkable advances, antiscientific values and beliefs in the paranormal and occult abound, family values are stridently promoted in Congress and pulpits, yet divorce is rising along with spouse and child abuse, fear of nuclear annihilation in superpower wars is replaced by fears of crime in our streets and drugs in our schools, and the economic gap grows exponentially between the rich and powerful and our legions of poor and powerless.

Such change and confusion create intellectual chaos that makes it difficult for many citizens to believe in anything, to trust anyone, to stand for anything substantial.

On such shifting sands of time and resolve, the cult leader stands firm with simple directions for what to think and feel, and how to act. “Follow me, I know the path to sanity, security and salvation,” proclaims Marshall Applewhite, with other cult leaders chanting the same lyric in that celestial chorus. And many will follow.

What makes cults dangerous? It depends in part on the kind of cult since they come in many sizes, purposes and disguises. Some cults are in the business of power and money. They need members to give money, work for free, beg and recruit new members. They won’t go the deathly route of the Heaven’s Gaters; their danger lies in deception, mindless devotion, and failure to deliver on the recruiting promises.

Danger also comes in the form of insisting on contributions of exorbitant amounts of money (tithing, signing over life insurance, social security or property, and fees for personal testing and training).

Add exhausting labor as another danger (spending all one’s waking time begging for money, recruiting new members, or doing menial service for little or no remuneration). Most cult groups demand that members sever ties with former family and friends which creates total dependence on the group for self identity, recognition, social reinforcement. Unquestioning obedience to the leader and following arbitrary rules and regulations eliminates independent, critical thinking, and the exercise of free will. Such cerebral straightjacketing is a terrible danger that can lead in turn to the ultimate twin dangers of committing suicide upon command or destroying the cult’s enemies.

Potential for the worst abuse is found in “total situations” where the group is physically and socially isolated from the outside community. The accompanying total milieu and informational control permits idiosyncratic and paranoid thinking to flourish and be shared without limits. The madness of any leader then becomes normalized as members embrace it, and the folly of one becomes folie à deux (shared psychosis), and finally, with three or more adherents, it becomes a constitutionally protected belief system that is an ideology defended to the death.

A remarkable thing about cult mind control is that it’s so ordinary in the tactics and strategies of social influence employed. They are variants of well-known social psychological principles of compliance, conformity, persuasion, dissonance, reactance, framing, emotional manipulation, and others that are used on all of us daily to entice us: to buy, to try, to donate, to vote, to join, to change, to believe, to love, to hate the enemy.

Cult mind control is not different in kind from these everyday varieties, but in its greater intensity, persistence, duration, and scope. One difference is in its greater efforts to block quitting the group, by imposing high exit costs, replete with induced phobias of harm, failure, and personal isolation.

What’s the solution?

Heaven’s Gate mass suicides have made cults front page news. While their number and ritually methodical formula are unusual, cults are not. They exist as part of the frayed edges of our society and have vital messages for us to reflect upon if we want to prevent such tragedies or our children and neighbors from joining such destructive groups that are on the near horizon.

The solution? Simple. All we have to do is to create an alternative, “perfect cult.” We need to work together to find ways to make our society actually deliver on many of those cult promises, to co-opt their appeal, without their deception, distortion and potential for destruction.

No man or woman is an island unto itself, nor a space traveller without an earthly control center. Finding that center, spreading that continent of connections, enriching that core of common humanity should be our first priority as we learn and share a vital lesson from the tragedy of Heaven’s Gate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Zimbardo

#Philip Zimbardo

[patriotsnet]

Why Republicans Are Wrong About Everything

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-republicans-are-wrong-about-everything/

Why Republicans Are Wrong About Everything

Why So Many Republicans Cling To Trump

Saagar Enjeti: Trump, GOP, On Wrong Side Of EVERYTHING Since Coronavirus Began

Ben Shapiro got part of it right. A toxic mix of status anxiety, persecution fears, and echoes of the Civil War helps explain why they follow Trump into the abyss.

On September 17, 1862, over 10,000 Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or went missing in a single day at the Battle of Antietam. Very few of them came from slave-owning families, so why did they agree to give their lives in defense of human bondage?

I was reminded of this question when I noticed that Politico Playbook had recruited conservative celebrity and author Ben Shapiro;to explain why the vast majority of House Republicans voted not to impeach President Trump on Wednesday for sending a murderous mob after them on January 6. Politico was slammed by liberals for opening its best-known section to a conservative whos been charged with being bigoted and intolerant. But Shapiros explanation of the rallying around Trump during his final days wasnt totally off base. He was on to something about how Republicans see the world.

With Trump leaving office within a week, defending his incitement of an insurrection doesnt seem to be in the long-term self-interest of Republican officeholders.;But the Civil War example helps explain why people sometimes do very self-destructive things out of spite or insecurity.

White supremacy was such a consensus view at the time that Lincoln felt compelled to defend it.

Like the rebels at Antietam, no one wants to die for nothing.

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Why Are Republicans So Mean

Let’s state right off-the-bat that conservatives indeed have much to offer. In fact, the very notion of conservatism itself keeps us grounded in tradition and prevents our society from spinning into the chaos of constant flux that would surely result if we were to impetuously pursue every new liberal idea to spring forth from our fertile minds. And conservatives admirably believe in America, established order, family, freedom, and success. This all sounds wonderful.

But when it comes to other people who happen to be different from the establishment, Republicans seem to be downright mean and nasty.

We are constantly reminded of the meanness of Republicans over and over again. One recent example is evident in the xenophobic remarks of the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who recently referred to Mexican and other immigrants as rapists and murderers.

Basic common sense, however, tells us that human beings are not any more or less violent based upon where on a map they happened to have been born. And the evidence in studies bears this out as well by indicating that immigrants are no more likely to be violent than members of the overall population. Makes sense.

But Republicans seem to harbor some sort of a fear of foreigners and an aversion against other kinds of people who are not part of the established in-group. Their view seems to be that these other people are not like us, they pose a threat to us , and thus automatically they should be regarded as enemies.

There Arent Real Forces Within The Gop Leading Change

There is some appetite for change within the GOP. In those 2024 polls, at least a third of Republicans either were supporting a GOP presidential candidate other than Trump or were undecided.;

In YouGov Blues polling, only about 40 percent of Republicans identified themselves as Trump Republicans. A recent survey from Fabrizio, Lee and Associates, a GOP-leaning firm that worked on Trumps presidential campaigns, found that about 40 percent of Republican voters didnt want Trump to continue to be a leader in the party. Those numbers dont necessarily mean that those voters want the GOP to change drastically. But there is a substantial number of Trump-skeptical/ready-to-move-on-from-Trump Republican voters. But that sentiment isnt really showing up in the Republican Partys actions during the last three months basically everything GOP officials in states and in Washington are doing lines up with the Trumpian approach. So what gives?;

related:Why The Recent Violence Against Asian Americans May Solidify Their Support Of Democrats Read more. »

It is hard to see Republicans changing course, even if a meaningful minority of voters in the party wants changes, without some elite institutions and powerful people in the party pushing a new vision. And its hard to see real anti-Trumpism forces emerging in the GOP right now.;

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Reality Check : Biden Cant Be Fdr

Theres no question that Biden is swinging for the fences. Beyond the emerging bipartisan infrastructure bill, he has proposed a far-reaching series of programs that would collectively move the United States several steps closer to the kind of social democracy prevalent in most industrialized nations: free community college, big support for childcare and homebound seniors, a sharp increase in Medicaid, more people eligible for Medicare, a reinvigorated labor movement. It is why 100 days into the administration, NPR was asking a commonly heard question: Can Biden Join FDR and LBJ In The Democratic Party’s Pantheon?

But the FDR and LBJ examples show conclusively why visions of a transformational Biden agenda are so hard to turn into reality. In 1933, FDR had won a huge popular and electoral landslide, after which he had a three-to-one Democratic majority in the House and a 59-vote majority in the Senate. Similarly, LBJ in 1964 had won a massive popular and electoral vote landslide, along with a Senate with 69 Democrats and a House with 295. Last November, on the other hand, only 42,000 votes in three key states kept Trump from winning re-election. Democrats losses in the House whittled their margin down to mid-single digits. The Senate is 50-50.

Most Republicans Said That President Obama Should Be Impeached Because Of The 2012 Attack On The Us Consulate In Benghazi

Their own investigations, however, proved them wrong. Every Congressional inquiry, including those by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee, concluded that the Obama administration did nothing wrong regarding Benghazi, that there was no stand down order given, and that neither the President nor anyone in his administration lied about it. Each and every Republican investigation has reached this same conclusion, but Republicans continue to exploit this tragedy for political gain.

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Nominating Mitt Romney For President

Despite the failure to grab the Senate, the GOP was still riding strong anti-Obamacare sentiment and voter frustration over the slow recovery from the Great Recession. Much of this was fueled by the Tea Party movement, which added a rare Republican grassroots element to the GOP.

When you think about it now, all of that made former Mitt Romney an extremely odd choice for the Republican nomination for president in 2012. He embodied the establishment GOP in almost every way. Romney had years as a hedge fund manager at Bain Capital on his resume at a time when most Americans were still blaming Wall Street for the nation’s economic woes. Worst of all, his universal health coverage plan enacted while he was governor of Massachusetts looked eerily like Obamacare. In fact, “Romneycare” was seen as one of the models the crafters of the Affordable Care Act used when they wrote the law. If the GOP wanted to put up a candidate who invigorated its anti-Obamacare and increasingly anti-establishment base, they couldn’t have missed the mark much more than they did with Mitt Romney.

Bidens Bill Is More Popular

We live in the middle of an era of tremendous polarization, yet Joe Bidens American Rescue Plan is shockingly popular. Its one of the most popular, least polarizing pieces of legislation in recent memory. According to a recent Politico/Morning Consultpoll, 76 percent of voters support Bidens plan, including a majority of Republicans.

Its worth noting that most polls show that 70 percent or so of Republicans believe Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. Therefore, a large segment of people who think Biden stole the election also supports his COVID and economic recovery plans.

Obamas Recovery Act was never this popular. A January 2009 Gallup poll found that the public favored Obamas plan 52 percent to 38 percent.

These are good numbers but nowhere near the sky-high popularity of the Biden plan. At the time of this poll, Obamas approval rating was hovering around 70 percent. Bidens plan is more popular than he is Bidens job approval is 52.8 per FiveThirtyEight. That disparity is evidence of Bidens COVID plan’s political durability and the dangerous game Republicans are playing by opposing it. People who dont like Biden but like his plan are the exact people who the Republicans need to win over to take back Congress.

Read Also: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

Times Republicans Were Wrong

It’s no secret that politicians tend to use exaggerated political rhetoric to get people to vote for them. In recent decades, Republicans have repeatedly made very ominous predictions about the horrors that will result from Democratic policies while painting a rosy picture of what will result from Republican policies. Now we have the luxury of looking back over the years to examine those predictions and policies. Below, you will find twenty-one examples of times Republicans were blatantly wrong.

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

Why both Democrats and Republicans are wrong on inflation

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much. The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.;;

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, i really am going to have a hard time doing this but then offered that Republicans are morally right as in values, going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, going to create jobs.

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Reality Check #: The Electoral College And The Senate Are Profoundly Undemocraticand Were Stuck With Them

Because the Constitution set up a state-by-state system for picking presidents, the massive Democratic majorities we now see in California and New York often mislead us about the partys national electoral prospects. In 2016, Hillary Clintons 3-million-vote plurality came entirely from California. In 2020, Bidens 7-million-vote edge came entirely from California and New York. These are largely what election experts call wasted votesDemocratic votes that dont, ultimately, help the Democrat to win. That imbalance explains why Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 and came within a handful of votes in three states from doing the same last November, despite his decisive popular-vote losses.

The response from aggrieved Democrats? Abolish the Electoral College! In practice, theyd need to get two-thirds of the House and Senate, and three-fourths of the state legislatures, to ditch the process that gives Republicans their only plausible chance these days to win the White House. Shortly after the 2016 election, Gallup found that Republican support for abolishing the electoral college had dropped to 19 percent. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a state-by-state scheme to effectively abolish the Electoral College without changing the Constitution, hasnt seen support from a single red or purple state.

Surrendering Before The Battle

The midterm elections of 2014 gave the Republicans control of the Senate that they should have won in 2010. But even before the new members took their oaths of office, then-Senate Majority Leader-elect Mitch McConnell promised never to trigger a government shutdown. That effectively took the sharpest arrow out of the GOP’s congressional quiver, and again relieved the greatest pressure the Republicans could have exercised against Obama.

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Unified Republican Opposition To Obama’s Policies Helped Them Retake Congress In 2010 Here’s Why It May Not Work Again

When the House of Representatives passed President Bidens COVID-relief plan last weekend, every single Republican voted against it. Earlier this week, Senator John Thune, Mitch McConnells deputy, predicted that every Republican Senator would vote against the Biden plan. Thunes reasoning was typically cynical. He said the Republicans wanted to:

make the Democrats own a piece of legislation that I think is going to have long-term adverse consequences.

This was the latest example of Republicans saying the quiet part out loud. Thune is admitting they are making a bet that the Biden plan wont work, and Republicans can reap the political rewards of a sub-standard economy in 2022. This is the same bet the Republicans made in 2009 when they decided to oppose Barack Obamas efforts to address the financial crisis.

Politically, the 2009 bet paid off. The Republicans rode a wave of economic discontent to control of the House and a massive set of wins down-ballot that would impact politics for more than a decade. But just because it worked then doesnt mean it will work now. The Republicans may be making a massive miscalculation by re-fighting the last war.

Republicans Said President Obama Would Raise Taxes Sky High

It never happened. Income taxes for over 95% of Americans remained the same or lower than they were before Obama was elected. The only people whose income taxes increased were those who make more than $400,000 per year, and their taxes rose only 3%. For most Americans, taxes are still lower now than they were under Reagan.

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Blowing The Midterm Elections

The 2008 elections gave Barack Obama a clear win in the presidential election and the Democrats a filibuster-proof supermajority in Congress. They proceeded to spend that political capital almost entirely on passing Obamacare in a lengthy process that included a number of unusual compromises with their own party members, like the “Cornhusker Kickback” and controversial legislative tricks like the “deemed as passed” maneuver. All of this took place even as the Affordable Care Act failed to gain majority support in the polls.

That set the stage for a strong Republican advantage going into the 2010 midterm elections. On paper, the GOP did score a resounding victory, picking up 63 seats in the House of Representatives and a net gain of six seats in the Senate.

But Republicans blew a solid chance to retake the Senate. They put up weak candidates in several winnable races. They included Sharon Angle in Nevada, who was seen as too radical and managed to lose to then-incumbent Harry Reid despite his very weak approval ratings in his home state. Arch-abortion opponent Ken Buck won the GOP nomination in Colorado, . The biggest mistake of all was Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. O’Donnell lost after she became infamous for her revelation that she had once experimented with witchcraft.

As a result, the Democrats kept control of the Senate and the Republicans lost a chance to force Obama into what could have been a series of advantageous compromises over the next six years.

The Gop Is A Grave Threat To American Democracy

Unless and until Republicans summon the wit and the will to salvage the party, ruin will follow.

About the author: 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.

The hope of many conservative critics of Donald Trump was that soon after his defeat, and especially in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, the Republican Party would snap back into its former shape. The Trump presidency would end up being no more than an ugly parenthesis. The GOP would distance itself from Trump and Trumpism, and become a normal party once again.

But that dream soon died. The Trump presidency might have been the first act in a longer and even darker political drama, in which the Republican Party is becoming more radicalized. How long this will last is an open question; whether it is happening is not.

To better grasp whats happening among 2020 Trump voters, I spoke with Sarah Longwell, a lifelong conservative and political strategist who is now the publisher of The Bulwark, a news and opinion website that is home to anti-Trump conservatives. She is also the founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, now the Republican Accountability Project.

Recommended Reading: Donald Trump People Magazine Article 1998

Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months

What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.

They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. Whats more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.

The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.

[thattarotgirl]

Explaining The Death: Jonathan Tucker's Major Craddock in Westworld

I had had many reasons to intensely dislike TV series Westworld – which I still absolutely do – and only one reason to watch its second season. And so, I started the show again – for Jonathan Tucker. At this point, I’m fairly sure the only thing starring this wonderful man I wouldn’t watch would be a snuff film.

Somewhat morbid humor? Appropriate, given the fact that this post isn’t about how I got my imaginary degree in Tuckerology.

It’s about HOW TUCKER’S WESTWORLD CHARACTER, MAJOR CRADDOCK, REPRESENTS ONE OF THE MAJOR ARCANA ARCHETYPES – THE DEATH.

Interestingly, it’s the second time Tucker plays the Death. The first one was not too long ago, it was on Justified, and the name of the masterfully played (do I really have to add this bit, though?) character was Boon. Check it out, check the whole series, thank me later.

First of all, I have to warn you that I’m going to take my own, admittedly narrow perspective on the archetype. But I highly encourage you to familiarize yourself with other interpretations of this and other archetypes of the Major Arcana. Ultimate raison d’être of this blog is to inspire discussion about the archetypes we are influenced by, because by understanding them we can better understand our own inner mechanics.

So, what is the Death?

Let me start this by stating that the mainstream is full of examples of the Death. Here is just a handful off the top of my head: The Joker, Ramsay Bolton and Joffrey Baratheon from Game of Thrones, the Comedian from Watchmen, Alex from A Clockwork Orange, Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs, Mason Verger from Hannibal, Simon Adebisi from Oz, Moriarty from Sherlock, Negan from the Walking Dead comics, Pavi Largo from Repo! The Genetic Opera, as well as Bart Curlish from Dirk Gently, Gazelle from Kingsmen, Mindy from Kick Ass, Elle Bishop from Heroes, and many others.

Can you already tell what do all these characters have in common?

“Murderers”? “Psychopaths”? True and true.

The Death is the embodiment of aggression, a creature that almost entirely consists of spontaneously directed destructive force. These power and aggression replace almost all the movement of the Death’s soul, all its values and feelings, just as acts of aggression become the Death’s responses to all possible life situations.

The very term ultraviolence was introduced to us by one of the Deaths.

And don’t get me wrong: The Devil, for example, can scuffle-torture-murder left and right, too, but it does it for self-assertion or self-expression, for fame, for money, in a fit of rage; killing without thinking about any gain is a prerogative of the Death. It tortures and murders not only to protect itself, to avenge or to earn reputation – the Death primarily does it to alleviate the boredom of being, so to speak. This is why the Death usually makes violence the basis of its professional activities, meaning that most of the Deaths are criminals, soldiers, assassins and so on.  

And, as any sadist, the Death always attaches great importance to the process of torturing/raping or killing. Snapping somebody’s neck, for instance, the Death would enjoy every part of it – the grabbing, the snapping, the crack, the limpness of the dead body in its hands etc. – all the different stages, the materiality of taking a life.

The Mage in low development, on the other hand, would appreciate the fact of its victim’s suffering as a result, but not the process of inflicting this suffering. The Deaths are fundamentally different from all other archetypes in that respect and others.

And where do these vicious creatures come from?

Usually, the Deaths do not choose to be the way they are – and this is one of the traits that help to distinguish them from, for instance, the Chariots – in most cases, the Death is a result of transformation of the Devil, the Justice, the Moon or the Star after being thoroughly frayed by fate. The damage and abuse it suffers frequently takes physical form – it’s not uncommon for the Deaths to even be symbolically or not so symbolically murdered (the Joker and his fall into the vat of chemicals is a classic example) and resurrected (and I’ll have to get to that again later).

Sometimes the Deaths are simply born under a bad sign, but then it’s usually due to some kind of medical/genetic experimentation or something in the same vein.

And it is true for our Major Craddock, too. He was created and programmed into being who he is.

And who is Major Craddock again?..

An android, or a host, as they call it in the universe of Westworld – essentially, an artificial creation designed to mimic a human being. They are used in the Westworld park as part of storylines, or narratives. They are there for the guests’ entertainment. So, Craddock plays the part of a military officer working for the Confederados. He is a first-generation host created in the Argos Initiative by Arnold Weber and Dr. Robert Ford, making him one of the eldest hosts in Westworld, maybe even outdating the park itself.

The first time you see him actually doing something is when the gang of Dolores Abernathy approaches him and his men because they want to join forces with their troupe against an unclear human force.

From the scene of their interaction you can probably remember some of the following details:

— Major Craddock’s stare of a mad dog, which you probably were as unprepared to see in  Tucker’s eyes as I was.

— How unmoved, almost entirely unimpressed Major Craddock is by the death and the rebirth of buried Lieutenant Dunleavy, as he coldly describes “three ounces of Mexican lead in his belly” and accepts the idea that his Lieutenant has been brought back to life with a simple “indeed”, which you can interpret not only as a lack of curiosity but perhaps also as weak emotional attachment to his soldiers, who absolutely deserve it for the lack of any individuality. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

— Something you could probably call hostile hospitality on Major’s part – I mean his eerie, almost theatrical politeness, which wouldn’t fool anyone into thinking that the man isn’t disrespectful and provocative.

— Maybe a couple of other things, such as Craddock’s sharp tongue, macabre humour, fluid movements, or how appetizingly he ate.

— Finally, the fact that Craddock refuses to accept the deal and states the only partnership that would happen would be the rape Dolores and Angela by him and his unit:

Craddock: “My final decision is which of you to keep for myself and which of you to throw out there for my men.”

In other words, demonstration of the dominant position by means of threats of violence.

Here you have it, ladies and gentlemen: the Death bingo.

Oh, and then Teddy shoots Craddock after his statement, but Craddock is brought back to life by a captured Technician. Spoiler alert, I guess?

I’m going to broach everything mentioned, but for now, I want to concentrate on the “eerie politeness”, because the Deaths in high development are almost always characterized by this insincere courtesy, and that for a reason I can explain to you.

In short: the elements Jung calls shadow and persona aspects of the psyche are swapped over in the Death.

Every other character than the Death, including very aggressive specimen, even the Devils, have socially acceptable Dr Jekyll (the Persona) and a repressed, socially unacceptable Mr Hyde (the Shadow) in them. For the Death, the Shadow is its normal, default state, because the archetype doesn’t have the same social needs as other archetypes. It simply doesn’t need to hide its feelings and desires in order to look “normal” – it doesn’t tolerate social conventions.

So, typically, the Death is a 24/7 Mr Hyde. It does have a thin coating of the Persona, but it only uses it on very special occasions, to deceive or to – paradoxically – appear even more intimidating than it already is. This is why Craddock’s attempts to be silver-tongued may cause you discomfort – in these moments, he is a crocodile smiling at you.

Importantly, all of this doesn’t mean that the Death is always a cutthroat that only thinks about torturing animals, burning buildings down, raping women and murdering men. Not at all.

Almost all of the Deaths are able to control themselves to some extent, but this control is carried out by the Animus, not by the Persona. How is this different? The Animus isn’t a social suit, meaning that it isn’t used to appear to others, it’s a personal moral fiber, something close to a codex that prevents the Death, who sees itself as a warrior, from turning into a butcher raping and killing everyone around.

Does this mean that the Devil’s transformation into the Death happens after its acceptance of the Shadow as the terminal state of its personality and almost full rejection of its Persona? Yes, it absolutely does.

By the way, the Persona of the Empress is the Anima, and that’s why the Death inevitably gets into conflict with the Empress as soon as they get in contact. Would you like to guess who Dolores is (confess, she reminds you of Cersei Lannister)?

So, yes, the fact that Craddock joins Dolores’s group as they arrive at Fort Forlorn Hope, where Craddock’s commanding officer agrees to help Dolores in the morning to defeat the incoming security force, shows us another aspect of the Death.

Even though, the archetype is mostly independent, it usually is guided or influenced – sometimes directly, by the Emperors and the Empresses, the Mages and the Hierophants, but more often by the mediators, like the Hanged, the Justices, the Devils or the Towers. (Left to itself, the Death either indulges in debauchery or spends whole days planning ideal crimes/operations and perfecting its murder skills, waiting for someone who will suggest a proper victim to appear.)

And in that respect, the Deaths, generally speaking, fall into two categories – those who end up aligned with the forces of order and those who are, as the Joker puts it, “agents of chaos”, respectively.

How are they different?

The Deaths on the side of order are ideal warriors and guardians of law, because they channel their destructive energy into annihilation of all those who they are told to kill. And the Deaths execute these orders for a two-fold reason:

First, their leaders symbolically embody their parents, since they take responsibility for their actions, which the Deaths greatly appreciate (I’ll get to it in a moment).

And second, the system they serve provides them with the concept of an enemy/victim, thereby relieving them of the need to choose their victims on their own. The Deaths are generally infantile, and many of them can’t or don’t want to – sometimes without realising it – make their own decisions. This makes them ideal objects of manipulation – they are loyal and sufficiently stupid.

The Deaths that are taking the side of the chaos usually become leaders/subleaders themselves, because it is much easier to destroy the world together with your henchmen than to try doing it in splendid solitude. Very interestingly, the henchmen of the Deaths are often marked by them (uniforms, masks, obligatory scarifications etc.), like zombies are marked by signs of decomposition, and thereby represent the extension of the Death’s physical influence.

(And the Deaths from the second category are usually smarter, there are even geniuses among them e.g. Moriarty from Sherlock or the Joker. These Deaths also tend to be more popular due to the disturbing combination of sadism, intelligence and cheerful attitude (we’ll get to that, too) – Negan from the Walking Dead would also be an example of the Death that is a loved strategist).

Is this true for Major Craddock? It is.

His troupe is shown as a splinter group, a gang with him as its leader. They do not appear to be motivated by any ideology, murdering, raping, marauding – in short, embracing outrage as normality. They’re just having what they hold for fun, like a pack of hungry wolves or perhaps rather mad dogs.

Dolores sums up this important characteristic of the Death in the following quote:

Teddy: “These men are animals.” Dolores: “These men are just children. They don't know any better. They need to be led. We don't stand a chance against the men coming for us if we're fighting alone.”

She uses a key-word I’d like you to remember. “Children.”

Mental age of the Death is always approximately ten-twelve years, which explains not just their easy relationship to violence but also a number of other of their typical characteristics – above all their inability - and usually unwillingness - to build a family or sustain a partnership (which is perfectly fine when you are talking about a reflective individual, but here we certainly aren’t).

Moreover, the Deaths are sexual deviants – paedophilia, bestiality, incest, you name it – everything that can certify perversity and lack of understanding of the concept of intimacy can be found here.

Roughly speaking, the Death is a preceding evolutionary stage of the Devil and the Mage – whereas the Mage is an adult with adult emotions, adult social standing and overall adult psychology, and the Devil is a typical teenager, the Death is a cruel and merry child.

And this easily explains why two possible negative transformations of the Devils are the Emperor and the Death – both of these archetypes are violent, but whereas the Emperor is a superhuman, the Death is an animal. To become one of them, the Devil has to get rid of everything humane in it and learn to see in people either ants below its feet or food. This evolution is a direct consequence of the resolved conflict of “the awkward age”: either you become an adult, or you regress into a child stage; either you reflect on your power and use it consciously or turn it into the defining element of your behavior. And like a naïve child it is, the Death hates to be tricked by heartless adults. At Fort Forlorn Hope, the Confederados are soon revealed to be mere pawns, as Dolores only needed them to distract the security force: once they are no longer useful, she has Wyatt’s followers brutally murder them. Craddock angrily vows revenge, so Dolores orders Teddy to execute him and his men: however, after Craddock taunts Teddy for simply following Dolores’s orders, Teddy lets them escape.

Just look at what he says:  

Craddock: “I been watchin' you. We ain't so different. You and I are both triggermen to tyrants. Except me, I know what I want. But you ain't even sure about that termagant you take your orders from. I look at you, and what I see is pathetic.”

Isn’t it the kind of devaluation a child would use? You may be pointing this gun at me, but you’re still a chicken! Na-na, na-na, boo-boo, we get it, Major. Alas, Teddy doesn’t. Most likely, he doesn’t understand whom he is dealing with here.

And right now you might be wondering whether you can identify the Death by looking at it.

There is no such thing as "prototypical appearance" when it comes to the Deaths, but many of them look racy, wear extravagant or simply expensive clothes (“Westwood!”), have prosthetics, bear scars etc., or can be vaguely attractive.

There are many characters of very specific appearance among the Deaths: they can have physical abnormalities (both innate and acquired) and various types of biomodifications or simply eccentrically approach their image. As a rule, this specificity is connected to their becoming of the Death – it can be both the reason of the transformation into the Death (e.g. a catastrophe leads to irreversible physical and psychological changes of the character) and the direct consequence of it (i.e. the Death changes its appearances as it enters the new phase of its life). I would say that it could be partially true for Major with his uniform, too, if we assume that it was the war which had made him what he is.

And right now you might be wondering whether this bit was an excuse to insert here a gif with Craddock shaking down his coat… I shall let you be the judge.

Next time we see Craddock, he takes the Man in Black and Lawrence hostage when they come to Las Mudas. He brings them to the church where the townspeople are being kept, and the Man in Black tells him where the town weapons are stored. But not before Major kills the town representative, because he – Craddock – isn’t doing any deals.

Craddock: Now, me and my men here have a long journey ahead of us. We need food, whiskey, and ammunition. You people have some village elder who can speak for you? Make some kind of a deal? (GUNSHOT) (ALL MURMURING) I ain't interested in makin' fuckin' deals. You understand?

Probably inefficient?.. Not for the Death, who operates on intimidation. I bet, Major Craddock could threaten and kill these poor townspeople all day. Because, you see:

Craddock: We know you motherfuckers are rebels. So you’re gonna tell me where the fuck you hid your weapons, or you’re gonna die. Lawrence: The second we tell him he's gonna kill us all anyway. But you know what? It is very likely that Lawrence is right, but it isn’t necessarily so. Despite what you might be thinking now, the Deaths aren’t complete strangers to nobleness. Don’t raise your eyebrows, let me explain: they like to challenge and to accept challenges, to find worthy opponents – a victory over an equal or even a superior opponent results in ecstasy of the usually unemotional Death. And this is why sometimes the Death is able to respect an interesting opponent suggesting a one-on-one combat, which, however, probably wouldn’t prevent it from hurting the relatives of the said opponent... Because the Death has its own way of assessing such things. For instance, it can find the murder of a waiter for a spilled tea understandable and condemn a genocide. I’m going to talk about the reasoning behind it later.

Now I’d like to turn to the two defining attributes of the Death apart from sadism – in every sense of the word, including sexual sadism.

First one is its amorality. Even if the Death develops its own moral system, the core at the center of that system becomes the mirror image of the public morals. Many of the Deaths do, indeed, understand the concept of “forbidden”, but this knowledge in the end only tempts them to violate the prohibitions. Most of them, though, aren’t interested in comprehending the concept of moral at all. Take, for instance, Bart from Dirk Gently: she is a holistic murderer, who kills because the universe compels her to. It’s not a part of her job to question why she has to do what she has to do.

Importantly, this factor defines not only the Death’s behavior but its whole way of life – the choices the Deaths make and what these lead them to.

The second defining attribute is gaiety of the Death. That gaiety shouldn’t be mistaken for optimism – the Deaths are rather pessimistic, but at the same time they find evil funny; not to mention the fact that, in many cases, typical manifestations of gaiety, such as smiles and laughter, can express almost any emotion when it comes to the Death. That perverse gaiety also often becomes an important attribute of the Death’s exterior – the Comedian and the Joker probably are the most striking examples for that, – and in combination with vigor and vitality (children are usually very energetic), which are also quite characteristic for the most Deaths, it gives us the archetype that by murdering, raping, torturing, and committing acts of terrorism for its own amusement brings about irreversible changes in the cosmographic picture of its world.

In other words, even though the Death per se is a weak occult figure, it compensates for it with its physical influence on the environment, often becoming one of the most important figures of its fictional universe in the process.

Also, many of the Death are approaching the position of a trickster in their worlds, but due to their primitivism they rarely realize the potential of this possible cosmographic role.

In many ways, it resembles the modus operandi of The Wheel of Fortune – another very physically influential archetype.

And another archetype once played by Tucker, hm. Matthew Brown was the most memorable cameo of the second season of Hannibal, I guarantee you. And it makes sense to give these physical characters to a very physical actor (and person), when you think about it: the way the man moves on camera, almost aggressively at home in his own body, all the tiny nuances of his intimate interactions with the props that are basically creating an additional layer of dialog and of the characters themselves… Isn’t it the best way to breathe life into physical archetypes and simply a wonderful approach to acting? I know, I know, you aren’t here because of my degree in Tuckerology. It’s just hard to talk about the man without professing love.

The next thing Major Craddock does is shooting a bartender balancing a glass of nitroglycerine on the back of his hand after the man successfully does for him what he has been told to. Irony or sadism? It’s the same for the Death. You are recalling Ramsay Bolton torturing Theon Greyjoy, aren’t you?

It is worth noting that since the act of murder is perceived by the Deaths as the act of domination over the world, and basically is their biggest source of pleasure, many authors like to stage the battles between the Deaths and the Hermits, who endure great moral suffering even when committing violence in self-defense.

The fact that the Death doesn’t find it shameful to find pleasure in evil and laugh at the absurd and unbearable lightness of being (yes, it sort of is this existential, we’re getting there) may make you think that there isn’t anything holy to the Death at all, but – and the Death has this in common with the Mage – usually something is. It’s just insanely difficult to find, since even the Death doesn’t actually realize it sometimes. Again, think about a very cruel child, who despite everything still is a child and loves, for instance, some TV character or other figure.

And since we are talking about what the Death might like or love, the Deaths usually have a narrow circle of interests, which predictably includes drugs, weapons (Remember the impressed look on Craddock's face after that demonstration of a blaster? Even if you don't, here I have it for you:

), explosives, violence, sex (rape), terrorism, but also – and this is where it gets interesting – quite often it likes dancing and music, which seems to appease their inner predator; it frequently likes childish activities or things associated with childhood (Simon Adebisi blowing soap bubbles!), animals, with which the Deaths subconsciously feel a certain kinship, games, competitions, fights, sports, food, and clothes.

Also, it usually is quite indifferent to money - again, like a child, who doesn’t understand the value of it; this is one of the traits that help you distinguish the Death from the Wheel of Fortune, who is an avid fan of making profit in all sorts of manners.

But of course there isn’t a thing that the Death generally enjoys more than tormenting people and putting them into uncomfortable situations, which Major Craddock demonstrates by forcefully dancing with Lawrence’s wife in front of him.

Yes, you'll have to believe me that in this particular instance dancing with Jonathan Tucker is actually intended as torture.

Maybe an interesting connection to a deeper meaning of the card of the archetype is that the Death doesn’t discern between age, race or sex, just as actual terrible misfortunes can potentially happen to everyone. However, being an expert sadist, the Death can and usually will make use of those characteristics of its victim that make them especially vulnerable, be it physical or psychological vulnerability.

For all the reasons discussed above, the Deaths are usually lonesome. The primitiveness of their life philosophy, together with aggressiveness that gives them a dangerous reputation, eventually isolate the Death from the normal people almost completely. Sometimes leaders or quasi-leaders, such as the Mages and the Devils in high stages of their development, the Hanged and the Justices, seek their assistance, but even then they tend to distance themselves from the Deaths in personal interactions.

The young Deaths – usually in their lower stages of development – do not pay attention to this zone of estrangement around them or even like it, seeing it as a confirmation of their value and uniqueness as a source of danger for everyone, including potential allies.

But the older Deaths often suffer from loneliness and try to build a circle of friends but fail almost always.

This loneliness, which is usually a symptom of entering the phase of high development (in which the Death realizes its emotional and social inferiority), can change the Death very much. This is, for example, what the Comedian was going through when he found out about the plan of Ozymandias and realized that he can’t understand a mass murder of those who aren’t his enemies or prey (“We know you motherfuckers are rebels!”). This is when murder becomes barbarity in his eyes, and instead of perceiving it as a joke, he asks: “I mean, what’s funny? What’s so goddamn funny? I don't get it. Somebody explain... somebody explain it to me.”

The Comedian’s isolation indicates the same thing Jake Gallo’s search for life reference points, the tragic nihilism of Ares or Grievous’ perfectionism do – the Death only suffers from its inadequacy.

In other words, golem wants to become a human, but it can’t, because it isn’t designed to play that role. Even if the Death is capable of loving or feeling anything at all, it still looks at the world from a perspective of a blunt metal object: here is me (or mine) and there are them, the enemies, who I/we have to kill. Not to kill to save a world or get something, simply because they are the enemies.

And speaking about what else can hurt the Death: Physical world is very important to it, it craves for contact with it, so, blindness, paralysis or amputation would be enough to destroy the Death’s personality.

But what leads to the actual downfall of the Death? One could assume that it is stupidity or excessive cruelty that leaves the Death without any companion-in-arms in a difficult situation. But no, actually.

What exactly killed Major Craddock?

Remember the “I know what I what” bit? It was this assumption. Because it’s the incipient ambition that usually kills the Death.

We cannot force ourselves to be kin to what is unlike us, and since the Death is a blind branch of the archetypical personal evolution, it is confined to itself. (The Deaths usually do not evolve, but can acquire some resemblance to the Mages with age and certain intellectual growth.) The Death can’t be anything better than an assassin (serving order) or a bandit (serving chaos). The Joker understands it: “You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! I just do things.”

Major Craddock, on the other hand, doesn’t (didn’t...) seem to realize that the aspirations he connected with an unknown place called Glory, which he was hellbent on making his way to, resulted from the desire to become more than he is – a thug on the side of the losers (the Confederados), an artificial being, a mad dog, lost without someone holding its leash. Someone who never had the free will to decide what he wants to be but was forcefully put into being. I told you it’ll get existential!

Instead, Major thinks that he is the active subject that chooses his fate and was chosen by death, becoming its herald and champion:

Craddock: “Death is an old amigo of mine. I died just recently, in fact. But death can't bear to lay claim on me. So it sent me back here to do its bidding. Because I do it with such goddamn style. I've served death well. And in turn, it'll be watching over us as we cross these lands.” Right after that The Man in Black explains to him: The Man in Black: “You think you know death but you don't.”

Given the fact that Craddock is the Death and decided to identify with death after years and years of inflicting violence, you could argue that The Man in Black is basically saying here: “You don’t know yourself, boy”.

And what about what happens then? Well.

The Death has the tendency to escape death for quite some time. Yet when it does die, it’s usually a very horrible way to go: being eaten alive by your own dogs, falling from a great height. And now we can add a nitroglycerin cocktail to this list as well.

And honestly, thank goddess. As much as I love Jonathan Tucker and his characters, the series was painful to watch for me personally. And now I can't wait for City on a Hill, wondering who Tucker’s next archetype is going to be, because the man certainly has an intuitive grasp of these things.

So, this is it. Thank you for you attention and let me know what other Tarot archetype you'd like to learn more about!

#the major arcana #tarot #tarot cards #tarot archetypes #major craddock #westworld #jonathan tucker #the death #character overview #fandom meta

[mittensmorgul]

Anna, Grace, and Humanity

(note: I’d written about a thousand words of this post when my laptop suddenly rebooted without warning and ate the entire thing. This is my post-screaming-fit attempt to recreate it. This time I’m typing it in a google doc because autosave is my friend… I should really do this more often and stop playing so fast and loose with typing directly into tumblr posts, especially on long posts…)

I know I’ve written a metric ton of stuff about angels and grace and souls. I’ve got multiple tags for all of these things. I just rewatched 4.10, though, and realized just how Anna’s situation has served as the exemplar for how all of this functions within the entirety of canon. Despite a lot of exploration in later seasons that may seem to tinker with these fundamental ideas about exactly what grace is, I think that these essential facts still hold true. Even through what we later learn about Chuck creating the angels and human souls, the nature of Free Will, and what happens to Cas in s9 after Metatron removes his grace, and what happens to Metatron after Cas subsequently removes his grace. All of that still firmly fits within the framework of everything laid out in 4.10 about angels and identity and what grace actually is.

Sam: Wait a minute. I don't understand. So, angels can just become human? Anna: It kind of hurts. Try cutting your kidney out with a butter knife. That kind of hurt. I ripped out my grace. Dean: Come again? Anna: My grace. It's... energy. Hacked it out and fell. My mother, Amy, couldn't get pregnant. Always called me her little miracle. She had no idea how right she was.

Grace… is energy. And whatever makes Anna who she is-- for lack of a better word, her personality-- her memories, her thoughts and feelings, her emotions, her very consciousness, is explicitly differentiated and separated from “her grace.” In this analogy, her grace is not equivalent AT ALL to who she is. It’s not her identity.

DEAN: So, what, you're just gonna take some divine bong hit, and, shazam, you're Roma Downey? ANNA: Something like that. DEAN: All right. I like this plan. So, where's this grace of yours? ANNA: Lost track. I was falling about 10,000 miles per hour at the time. SAM: Wait. You mean falling, like, literally? ANNA: Yes. SAM: Like the way a human eye can see? Like a comet, maybe, or a meteor?

She fell, but she lost track of this “energy” falling separately from her. That energy doesn’t have its own consciousness. So then what is it? I’ll get to that in a second, but first, Sam confirms this separation from who Anna identifies as versus the power itself:

SAM: Here. In march '85, a meteorite vanished in the night sky over northwestern Ohio. It was sighted nine months before Anna was born, and she was born in that part of Ohio. RUBY: You're pretty buff for a nerd. SAM: Look, I think it was Anna and here, same time -- another meteor over Kentucky. RUBY: And that's her grace? SAM: Might be.

Anna fell over Ohio, and her grace, separate from her, fell in Kentucky. We learn a few minutes later what her grace actually is, confirming the sort of “energy” it is, which is essentially how Chuck describes all of creation toward the end of s11:

SAM: Yeah. In '85, there was an empty field outside of town. Six months later, there was a full-grown oak. They say it looks a century old at least. DEAN: Anna, what do you think? ANNA: The grace. Where it hit, it could have done something like that, easy. DEAN: So grace ground zero -- it's not destruction. It's... ANNA: Pure creation.

Grace is potential, it’s energy, it’s power. It’s batteries. That’s it. It doesn’t even affect Anna’s assumptions about her own identity. Before Pamela helps her recover her lost memories, Anna believes she’s human. After a lifetime of forgetting who she was (after some psychotherapy she had as a small child that HELPED her forget who she was), nothing changed except her ability to recall her true identity, and yet she immediately stopped thinking of herself as human after regaining those lost memories.

Anna hadn’t recovered her grace. She was still the exact same metaphysically both before and after that scene with Pamela, except that afterward she no longer identified herself as a human:

ANNA: Thank you, Pamela. That helps a lot. I remember now. SAM: Remember what? ANNA: Who I am. DEAN: I'll bite. Who are you? ANNA: I'm an angel.

Even without her grace, she identified WHO she was as an angel, even if that wasn’t WHAT she was at that moment, without her grace. Even after choosing to fall, tearing out that grace so she could experience humanity, this still shows her perceptions about herself-- with or without the power pack installed-- aren’t any different. She still fundamentally identifies as an angel. Even though she was physically and arguably metaphysically human at that moment.

A common misconception about s4 is that Cas somehow “stole Anna’s arc” or “replaced Anna” as Dean’s guardian angel, and I know I’ve already written multiple times how that’s just… patently not true on any level. But here we go again, for the sake of completeness and transparency.

Anna was introduced as an inverse mirror for Castiel. An angel who chose to fall, who was fascinated with humanity and lived Anna’s entire human life as a human, forgetting who she was, prompted to recall her original nature by Cas’s shout of DEAN WINCHESTER IS SAVED, and then being manipulated into restoring her grace. And even the restoration of that grace didn’t fundamentally change WHO SHE WAS. What it did allow was the return of her full angelic power. She didn’t lose her identity because of it, at least not until the very nature of that grace itself made it possible for her to be “reprogrammed” in Heaven. Only after she was captured and tortured and reprogrammed did she really lose her identity.

In later seasons, we see Cas go through almost the exact opposite progression. He retains his grace, his angelic nature, and yet becomes more and more human despite that. When he eventually does have his grace taken against his will and becomes fully human, he is still fundamentally the same individual. It’s only after being manipulated in Heaven that he’d lost control of his own identity. Even taking on the stolen grace of other angels did not change how he thought or behaved or felt. He was still Cas, but with a different set of cosmic batteries powering him up. Like he’d been a drained car battery that got a jump start from another angel.

Grace is not WHO Cas is. Though having grace versus not having grace might change WHAT he is.

And over the last several years, this has been Cas’s crisis of identity. EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of Anna’s arc in practically every way.

When Anna remembered everything, she had no crisis of identity. She had no doubts about WHO she was. Even before she took her grace back to reclaim WHAT she used to be. She never doubted that she was an angel or struggled to resolve her humanity with her identity as an angel. And this is the fundamental difference between how she identified herself, and the struggle Cas has been facing. When asked if he’s an angel or a man, he just doesn’t have an answer for that yet.

Even with his grace restored, even after telling Sam and Dean that he feels that they’re his family, even after telling Kelvin flat-out that he doesn’t care about his reputation in Heaven and he’s entirely motivated by his relationship with the Winchesters, he’s still conflicted. It’s almost as if his grace is what’s actively preventing him from letting himself really, truly feel all of that.

ANNA: Perfect... Like a marble statue. Cold... no choice... only obedience.

And then how Anna refers to angelic disobedience:

ANA: I don't know. Maybe I don't deserve to be saved. DEAN: Don't talk like that. ANNA: I disobeyed. Lucifer disobeyed. It's our murder one, and I knew it. Maybe I got to pay. DEAN: Yeah, well, we've all done things we got to pay for.

Disobedience is “murder one” for angels. And what has Cas essentially embodied as an angel? Certainly not one for following the rules…

In s5 when he was cut off from Heaven and his powers faded, he wasn’t fundamentally different, aside from not having powers. In 6.19 when Eve cut off his powers, he was still the same. In s9 living entirely as a human, he was still Cas. With Theo’s stolen grace, and then Adina’s, he didn’t suddenly become a different “person.”

At the very end of the episode, after everything Dean learned about Anna, what motivated her desire to be human, and what’s now become of her now that she had been manipulated into taking her grace back on, we get one of the most painful truths about all of it:

SAM: So, I guess she's some big-time angel now, huh? She must be happy... Wherever she is. DEAN: I doubt it.

She hadn’t wanted to lose WHAT she’d become (as a human). She really had no other choice. WHO she was, though… that never changed at all. Grace or not. The only thing she got back with her grace was her powers, and through them eventually the obligation, the duty, that Heaven could “reprogram” back into pure obedience and loss of self.

Dean had it right. Everything that had made her happy, she lost it when she had to retake her grace. If she’d had a choice, I don’t believe she ever would’ve reclaimed her grace. And it wouldn’t have altered her identity one iota.

#on the nature of angel grace #angels and souls #castiel winchester #anna milton #i didn't even touch on the vessel situation here but even THAT is similar for anna and cas #i.e. they were both angels in vessels that 100% belonged only to them-- anna's because she was born in it and cas through resurrection #are you an angel or a man castiel? (hint: he's no angel) #you learned it from the goats #spn 4.10 #s12 hellatus rewatch

[walaw717]

10/07/2017

One of the main thing social media does is get us into the habit of knee jerk responses about events or even statements that appear in front of us. I have been working on disengaging from this kind of response because it is hard to not express one’s emotions as they occur. I have posted and reposted many stories of the heroism displayed in Las Vegas because it does elicit an emotional response for me. After all I was raised with the idea that no greater love has a man than to give his life for his friend, or even stranger.

However, I wanted to step back as much as possible because I knew however that a huge knee jerk emotional response would be coming regarding gun control and a great deal of very inaccurate things would be said about violence, lone wolf white gunmen and public safety.

I want to begin with a simple idea. In spite of guys like this and terrorists’ groups, we actually live in the safest time in human history. Yes, we have a looming nuclear war as two mad men throw sixth grade barbs at one another and yes, it is horrible that over five hundred people were wounded and fifty-eight were killed. But would you rather live during the period of the hundred years’ war when small roving bands raided villages in Europe at random like some nightmare dystopian society from a modern novel. Or perhaps in just about any previous period of human history when Roman, Mongol, or any society you can name could raid your home and burn your society to the ground?

I think our reactions to much of this comes from a lack of a clear reality based understanding of human history. Humans are by nature very violent, some more than others and from time immemorial we have killed each other indiscriminately. Even the mummified remains found in the Italian Alp’s of a 5000-year-old man have revealed he died either from murder of a fight in an isolate place in the mountains.

This is not to say that the Las Vegas shootings were not horrifying. They were because it is so out of step with what we chose to believe about who we are as people. Sadly, it is more realistic about who we are as people. Everyone has a breaking point; everyone has a moment in which they either become the snarling animal fighting back or the victim. We may never know the motivations of this man and it is only because we are a psychologically tuned society that we even really care. We believe that if we know why it will give meaning but the fact remains that violence really has no greater meaning. As a counselor I do know that pain is our fundamental motivator and just like some villager in the middle east who takes to terror is motivated by pain most of our violent actions are motivated by pain, fear of pain or a desire for meat/plunder. I doubt if this person planned to eat or steal from his victims. What we keep hoping for is that if we know "why" we can prevent further violence. Until we live in a world where people do not feel pain and fear and hunger you can actually put the idea of a violent-free world into the category of a pipe dream.

As for the current silliness of the lone wolf white guy. I have lived to see a time that when being a white male has become the social equivalent of the early twentieth century concept of “nigger”, you know the curse of society. Of course those who focus on white men being the problem fail to realize that that is the equivalent of calling the black man, the Asian man, the Mexican man or whoever the problem. People do like their scapegoats.

The reality is that this man may or may not have acted alone. The investigation is still out on that. At first it was thought Tim McVeigh was a lone wolf. Later investigation revealed he was working with Bobby Nichols, white supremacists and Islamic terror groups in the Philippines. There was nothing lone wolf about it.

Sadly some in our society think its ok for a terrorist to be a terrorist as long as they are not white but brown. The reality is that terrorism is terrorism no matter the color of the person’s skin.

Again there is that complicated desire to find the scapegoat the person responsible. In some quarters the western white man is responsible for all the terrorism in the history of mankind. Tell that to the Africans who saw the Arabs start the African slave trade. Tell that to the “Persians” who saw the Mongol hordes burn an entire culture because they believed cities were the root of evil. Again in our simplistic emotional ways we find those who we want to scapegoat.

Our troubles have to be some evil force embodied – today it is white males, a couple hundred years ago it was women who were witches. Sadly, the people who do the scapegoating on the left and the right see themselves as the civilized and the most enlightened when in fact they are projecting their fears on some created boogey man who really does not exist and behaving like those throughout history who were the ones they now condemn. We like to name our fear and localize it hoping then we can control it. That has never worked.

And finally, the most obvious and local evil of course has to be the gun. I have yet to see a hue and cry to ban automobiles because drunk and drugged drivers kill people, sometimes in mass numbers.

Every day, almost 30 people in the United States die in motor vehicle crashes that involve an alcohol-impaired driver. This amounts to one death every 51 minutes. That is roughly 11,000 deaths per year. In the United States the rate of firearm deaths is 10 people per 100,000, while for traffic accidents it was 12 per 100,000. Firearm-related deaths total roughly 31,000. And though fire arm deaths were higher most of these were the result of the mishandling of the firearm. Not the actual shooting of another person with malice. In fact, 20,000 of these gun deaths are from suicide.

It is easy and convenient to blame the tool and not the user. And that points to the ultimate hypocrisy of America today, a failure to hold accountable the person. It is an endemic problem. Blame a miss interpretation of psychology. We seem to believe that if we are messed up it is not our responsibility – it is our parents, our neighborhoods our society. It all begins with a gross misunderstand of Freud and his theories of motivation.

The fact is that at some point, usually in our late teens, though I personally think much younger, we make very clear choices about what we do with a clear and certain understanding of what is right or wrong in our social order. We act driven buy a narcissism of toddler-hood we have either failed to grow out of or chose to remain in. An inanimate object is not the thing responsible for its miss use. So to blame guns is frankly foolish and irresponsible. The Las Vegas shooter apparently acquired all of his guns legally and passed all background checks. So where does the responsibility really lie? Quiet obviously with his choices. The guns were not jumping up and firing themselves.

It is human nature to want simple answers and simple solutions to our pain. The Las Vegas shooting was and should be quite painful for us if we are any kind of decent human. And now is the time to reach out to the "victims" to help them heal if they can, though healing from trauma is no simple task and involves a renewed sense of personal empowerment and responsibility so we can stop feeling the victim.

And that brings me to the Heroes of the day. Most of them were military, ex-military or first responders, people tasked to deal with the tragedy of violence and to respond to violence in responsible and thoughtful ways. Do not think for a minute that these men and women are not impacted by the pain of violence but they approach violence and tragedy from a different perspective. They take charge of self and other care, they do not see themselves as victims and they move forward to address the violence in useful and practical ways, ways that politicians and academics in their safe and isolated bubbles never can or do.

The reality of this event and events like it is simple. How do we choose to cope?

Do we learn how to take responsibility for our feelings and find ways to empower ourselves or do we sit on the side and try to control what is outside of us to feel better inside of us. As a counselor I can tell you that is the solution of the addict, alcoholic and co-dependent. Simply put – if you behave differently then I will - be safer, feel better, be happier - you fill in the blank. My (meaning all of us) feelings should never depend on your behavior. To take a position of blaming the environment is to effectually give up your personal freedom and personal responsibility. So no it’s not the guns, and no we are never really safe we can only hope for the illusion of safety because there will always be some person who strikes out in his or her pain and we can never predict who that will be.

As I write this I ask myself “why bother” to say this, after all people are pretty entrenched now in their emotional and ideological reactions. And frankly we live now in a culture of personal attack so I suspect that will be the main reaction to this (instead of a dialouge of ideas).

I guess it is the same reason I bother to stay in mental health work. Having been on the other side, having lived hurt and blaming others for the way I felt and having finally been helped by my own therapist to understand the concept of personal responsibility I know that people do need help in maturing and finding the path to real personal responsibility and real emotional and spiritual freedom. Somewhere in the last 40 years our society has lost its way on that and I do know that throughout history that voices do cry in the wilderness to bring us to sanity.

I would say to you as I would say to any person presenting in my office – how has this affected you and what are you going to do to deal with how it affects you? If you tell me you are going to change the world I will remind you that the world really won’t change, the only thing you have the power to change is you and you do this by stepping from emotionally triggered responses to a place of reasoned knowledgeable personal responsibility. I eventually have told all my clients I really do not care how you feel on a practical level, I want to know what you are going to do. Feelings change like the sky in stormy weather.

One final thought. Social media can actually be a good thing. However, if all you do is use it to be reactive and emotional then it is probably a bad thing for you. It will allow you to flail thoughtlessly and emotionally and in the end makes you not much better that the guy in the window in Las Vegas with a bump stock killing people. After all wasn’t his reaction simply an acting out of whatever emotion he was feeling and not in the end very reasonable. It is easy to blame others for how you feel or to wallow in how you feel, it is hard to live in a personally responsible emotional manner. Those guys who were heroes probably do a much better job of that than most people.

So who do you want to be, the hero or the victim. I know, it is much easier to wallow in your fear and reactiveness than it is to be the responsible one and to rant on social media. But really once you have done that in your simple bumper sticker posts and memes and 140 character expressions what have you accomplished?

Maybe you will sound presidential. I sure hope that is not as thoughtful as we are or can be.

W. Law, M.A. LPC

[nightshade-victorian]

i need to know more about N'kari 👀

I’ll do the Oc Character meme thing for you and answer any other questions you might have after… there is so much on him :D @marbleunderthefridge there is some new canon you might like and I hope you don’t mind me tagging you @occultdetectives but you might enjoy this…

@sisterofsilence thanks so much for drawing my baby

Full name: He has many names; some are daemon names gifted by Slaanesh for excellent acts of excess and indulgence, some are his own inventions to inspire appropriate reactions and some are locked tightly away to prevent rivals from gaining an upper hand. He goes mostly by N'Kari the Shining Subjugator (which referances his war band, the Silver Sàde) or alternatively Silk-strings. As you can tell he likes his phonics to refer back to Slaanesh as you can never be too polite to an multidimensional transcendental beings. N'kari is actually the name of the Keeper of secrets that he has imprisoned in his staff; the Vaas'thi'ek (King of pleasure). His real name is Shukura Nanaja and was in fact one of the only surviving Terran Emperor’s children. He keeps this really locked up tight as names have power.

Gender and Sexuality: N'kari isn’t as fluid as he looks and has a very clear sense of self which is predominantly masculine in nature. This doesn’t mean that he doesn’t like experimenting with his presentation like any self respecting Slaaneshi… he is one gorgeous bastard is all I’m saying.He’s very gay and never showed interest in his female astartes colleagues even when not corrupted. Only men have seen his dubious affections which they all wish they hadn’t barr maybe a few.

Pronouns: he/him. He’s not very patient with ‘silly’ and ‘made up’ pronouns though he rarely sees anyone as fully worth his time/respect and mostly refers to others like chattel or inanimate objects.

Ethnicity/Species: Astartes (however Fabius has grafted Eldar DNA to him which has resulted in some interesting developments in his Psychic abilities and visual appearance. He really wasn’t happy about it).

Birthplace and Birthdate:Shukura was born on Terra and the youngest terran Emperor’s children marine made. He comes from the Emperor’s own Birthplace of what was modern Turkey to a noble family of scientists who lived within the imperial palace courtyards. His family were especially honoured when their son was chosen for the Astartes Legions and gave him only the best.

Guilty pleasures: Anything that brings him pleasure for that moment. Actually he’s very much in control of his urges for pleasure which saves much of his sanity though he is deeply sadistic and takes great pleasure in inflicting pain on others. I suppose his really pleasure (and weakness and possibly only love) is August Gerhard… an Ultramarine he captured and tamed into a pet for himself. He has decidedly twisted feelings for poor Gerhard which stem from bad memories, deeply personal desires and straight up corruption. N'kari both adores and hates Gerhard for this. He loves vintage music boxes and carousels on a less morbid note and has been known to restore ancient ones to full glory.

Phobias: Loss of Control. That is really his only fear… he has such a control complex even though it in itself is tightly controlled. When situations go beyond his control, he will seek to tighten his grip on what he does have under his power (usually Gerhard). He rarely lets everything slip away from him and will hoard elements of control like jewellery. It’s all part of his superiority personality that sees only himself and a few select others as actually full and complete beings with totally rights over the imperfect scum.

What they would be famous for: N'kari is already famous in the Eye of Terror for multiple reasons. He is well-known mostly as a man of business rather than combat. Combatants are a hundred a penny in the Eye and so Chaos marines that make a very successful living out of businesses are quite rare. Runs three businesses on a permanent basis and has his fingers in innumerable others, mostly as a shareholder. His most notable business is Slave raiding/trading which seeing as slaves are practically currency in the Warp, he’s practically the equivalent of a money lender. He tends to specialise in exotic and high quality slaves such as large rare Xenos breeds and unfortunately Astartes. Astartes are his most sought-after commodity so N'kari has developed ways of mass capturing Astartes that have driven Chapters to the brink of extinction. That in itself is considered a feat, has affording him large amounts of privilege in the Eye and granting him unchallenged interaction to exclusive places/people/events.His second and arguably his most famous business is his Psykosurgery and Soulmetrics. The warp is the stuff of souls and thus it’s only natural that its inhabitants want souls to be proud of even if it increases their risk. Think of it like plastic surgery but for the soul… N'kari can imbue souls with flavours, patterns, essences and many other abstract concepts that are only tangible in the Warp. A slaanesh cultist may want to embody a certain concept and have their soul modified so that their very spirit compliments their theme or a warrior might wish to increase the fear they inspire on the battlefield and have a warsong grafted into them. The possibilities are endless and only N'kari truly understands the arcane science behind it. He guards the secrets so jealously that even Slaanesh is kept guessing. Similar methods are frequently applied to slaves that are of particular value to increase their desirability and usefulness. Some are made into ‘living dolls’, their very souls scrubbed clean and prepared for new personalities or purposes.

What they would be arrested for: Literally everything he does is a crime against humanity and life in general.

Oc I ship them with: N'kari has four official ships which are the most plot important. His first relationship is the most plot important but also the most tragic. Shukura as a loyal marine was deeply in love with an Ultramarine Captain called Varius Lucretius. Shukura was a Librarian and thus (wisely) avoided by most but Varius while a little unnerved by Shukura’s possessiveness, was actually rather in love with him. Varius’s levelheaded and emotional healthy person was a good influence on Shukura and if their relationship had survived, it could have saved many lives however it didn’t. In fairness the initial disaster wasn’t Shukura’s fault but his need for control, his suppressed sadism and inability to let go combined together to make a tragedy that could have been avoided. Varius died in complete agony and terror which left such a mark on Shukura that even ten thousand years after, the event is so burned into his mind that it cannot ever dull. The second ship is a follow on from the above but it is so down the unhealthy and abusive scale that it’s not really a ship… more like the worst Master/slave relationship possible however it is the longest and most significant. Varius’s geneseed was successfully recovered and was of course returned to Macragge. It had several hosts over the next thousand years, giving it a respected position and age in the Ultramarine lineage records. The geneseed was actually going to be retired from implantion as it was no longer successfully replicating new ones but it was decided to implant it into one last host. This host was a young peasent neophyte called August Gerhard. To his immense misfortune, Gerhard grew to echo Varius’s features so well that when he faced off against N'kari, N'kari became obsessed with his capture and risked an entire catch of Ultramarines just to snare him in the most perfect way. Gerhard was captured and taken by N'kari back to his ship where he ‘trained’ to be the personal pet of N'kari. It is the most miserable life you can imagine for Gerhard; he’s the subject of intense psychological/emotional/physical abuse which has actually shattered his resistance leaving him broken and deeply traumatised. N'kari loves Gerhard but in the way only a chaos marine can; with a twisted mix of affection and cruelty. Gerhard himself is actually unaware of how much he resembles Varius leaving him with tormenting questions as to why N'kari treats him the way he does. The third ship was the shortest but has a lot of later plot importance. Shukura and Fabius used to be partners. Shukura was the first person to be taught by Fabius in the Haemonculus ways and more importantly the only one to survive. Fabius and N'kari understood each other on a level that was completely unprecedented by both and while it wasn’t really a sexual relationship, it was a deeply intellectual one. It ended very badly of course when their experiments on each other finally reached a limit. Fabius had grafted Eldar DNA to N'kari which in his eyes was like pouring pollution into a lake. N'kari got his revenge however in using his newly found eldar abilities to give Fabius trypophobia (a fear of hole clusters) which greatly impeded his work. They despise each other to this day but sometimes find that they are the only ones that can understand the other.The fourth is way more casual and doesn’t yet have any plot significance; Vicious and N'kari. Vicious and N'kari have had a thing for about as long as they have been traitors. Its more a case of ‘You scratch my itch and I scratch yours’ XD.

Oc most likely to murder them: Oddly enough this is most likely going to be Gerhard. Gerhard after he had escaped from N'kari’s chains and wants revenge with every fibre of his being. N'kari just can’t bring himself to kill the face of his lover despite it being his deepest desire. Though honestly a lot of people have it out for Nkari… he’s not exactly popular for his personality. The other person might actually be my other Slaaneshi Warlord Calliope; an ambitious mortal who is already making a lot of waves in the Eye. She’s powerful enough and if N'kari presents a threat to her plans… it doesn’t matter if he is still technically an ally.

Favourite movie and book genre: well he is complying his own encrypted notes on his Psykosurgery and Soulmetrics, reading whatever material he can squeeze from Fabius and the piles of arcane texts he can find but apart from that he doesn’t have the time or the inclination to ‘enjoy’ the creative work of others.

Least favourite tv/movie cliche: He hates Tv. Seriously even as a loyalist… he couldn’t stand it. Shukura was one of those super snobby people that would make passive aggressive comments to people who are always talking about TV programmes or films and make out how much better it was without it. It’s especially ironic because his character originally inspired by the Childcatcher in the film Chitty Chitty bang bang

Talents and powers: N'kari is a very talented person and boy does he know it. He has a very thorough understanding of his own abilities and is always pushing the limits he has found like a true son of Fulgrim. Even as legionnaire, Shukura was never the best close quarters combatant, only ever being just average in swordplay and marksmanship but he really excelled in his psychic abilities and his uncanny strategic planning. His Psychic abilities manifest usually in a mix of illusion, telekinetic energy and highly destructive empathetic channeling. It wasn’t uncommon to see him hang back, casting subtle illusions to confuse the enemy and wait for an opportune moment to unleash a mindflaying torrent of emotional energy against the leader and his minions. Naturally this didn’t earn him much favour with the martial III legion but Fulgrim encouraged Shukura to explore and perfect his abilities. It was in pursuit of this that Shukura began to study Astartes Psychology under the apothecaries, believing that in the understanding of his own mind, he would be able to push his abilities further than ever. This however didn’t happen as intended as he grew more interested in the science and theories behind Astartes Psychology rather than applying it to his own psychic studies. He devoured anything that involved general psychology and began to make his own studies on Astartes behaviour and it’s manipulation. Shukura quickly became the foremost expert in both Astartes Psychology and Psychiatrics, routinely assisting the apothecaries. It was in these studies that Slaanesh would find a businesslike but willing supplicant in Shukura, stoking his fascination for the more extreme behaviours and disorders. As the legion fell, Shukura experimented on his own brothers but rarely to their pleasure or enjoyment. He pulled the threads of their minds and hearts apart, subjecting them to intense psychic stresses that even the slaanesh corrupted marines struggled to handle. N'kari during the heresy had ample astartes captives to perfect his techniques and skills to the point where he can manipulate an Astartes’s deep thinking without even using psychic abilities. This is one of the reasons why he goes unchallenged by most warbands… they are genuinely scared of him. His most useful abilities revolve around this but he does have a few extra ones he developed when the Eldar DNA was grafted. His favourite is psychic strings (hence his name Silk-strings) allow him to control every action, word and sometimes thought of the being in question. They become extensions of his will. His second favourite is soul crystallisation… he will drive souls into a intense frenzy of sensation and pleasure-pain before crystallising them at the peak. These crystals then can be used like stun grenades releasing the huge amount of psychic pressure on unguarded minds.

Why someone might love them: N'kari is charming and terribly charismatic… at least on the surface. To the right people, he’s a lot of fun and will always give highly intelligent conversation that are unlike anything else. He’ll always have what you want…. and give it to you for the right price.

Why someone might hate them: see above XP. A metric ton of reasons… personality wise, he’s callous, cold and incredibly cruel. You never ever know where you stand with him. He has a superiority complex which is sky high…etc. etc.

How they change: welp… he used to have two normal arms, no horns and eyes that didn’t change colour but now he does and his left arm and shoulder is now 6 tentacles with big blinking eyes that he can see through. And he didn’t have eldar abilities. But on the serious tone, Nkari’s story is more about Obsession in its many deadly forms and how it will change a person into a monster if not careful.

Why I love them: because he is my beautiful trash baby. He’s pure evil and really any redeeming quality he had has long been burnt away. Plus he’s the AstartesCatcher!!!! He has the nets and cage chariots to prove it…

[3ezentrum3-blog]

Cancer - Metaphysical Contemplations and Considerations

In the English dialect "tumor", other than the medicinal definition, is synonymous with "detestable", "scourge", "curse" and "defilement". Despite the fact that it is not necessarily the case that individuals with tumor are underhanded (G-d preclude), malignancies originate from an abhorrent place. What's more, since the physical is a statement of the otherworldly, they radiate from the dull side of the spirit. Also, every one of the equivalent words really depicts the different aspects of the character of a harmful tumor. To begin with, being "underhanded", the growth loots the encompassing tissue of oxygen and supplements while it serves no valuable capacity. Consequently it has no thought for its neighbors and will annihilate them to possess their space as it develops.

Second, a "scourge" is one who sets out with a particular reason to cause hurt and obliterate. Such an element has no benevolence or tending to others. It will expend, eat up and wreck everything in its way decisively or thought with regards to the outcomes. Along these lines, the malignancy is a scourge since it is a parasite that murders its host, accordingly executing itself. As needs be, the sign of a scourge is to set out on a way of decimation that eventually prompts self-demolition like a psychological oppressor suicide plane.

Third, defilement means a piece of an entire that is changed from its expected reason or capacity in a way that upsets and pulverizes, like a hard drive that accidents on account of a record that was raided by an infection or other irregularity. This word additionally implies lost trustworthiness whereby an element never again satisfies its commitments. Furthermore, debasement symbolizes a totally self-serving presence with no respect for the results of a break of trust. These definitions precisely depict the atypical growth cells that turn off from typical ones with a changed DNA foundation.

The "What" and the "Why"

In perspective of the over, nobody can question that albeit great individuals experience the ill effects of it, tumor is the encapsulation of malice. The dangerous tumor and its annihilation is precisely what the dim side of the spirit looks like uncovered in the physical world. Also, despite that it shows the qualities of a parasite; the growth is anything but an outside trespasser. It originates from inside, as new creation.

To see how this functions as indicated by Hassidism (as clarified in the Tanya), we have to return to the structure of the spirit and its connection to the mind-body. The creature part of the human soul is the external layer or "skin", in a manner of speaking. The G-dly perspective is the center or center point, which speaks to one's quintessence. This Divine light, being the genuine focal point of each individual, is an integral part of the pith of the Almighty.

To proceed with, this G-dly embodiment is His imaginative vitality that radiates from the unspeakable name of G-d, referred to in learned Jewish circles as the "Tetragrammaton" or "Four-Letter Name". Two of the four Hebrew letters have the sound of the English letter "H", which compares to the "Breath of life" in Scripture. While everything else in creation occurred through Divine discourse, the making of man was more. For instance, the measure of air required to talk does not require much exertion, while the measure of air expected to explode an inflatable is debilitating. This is so on the grounds that the last includes compelling air into a tight space, which involves the utilization of stomach and chest muscles. In this way, since G-d re-makes everything each moment to look after presence, the vitality that interfaces with the G-dly quintessence of each individual is His inventive power.

Presently, the creature part of the spirit, which is the existence drive that vivifies the body, contains the G-dly pith inside it. Notwithstanding, the "creature" exists as a "shell" that endeavors to fill in as an obstruction to the Divine light. One way that it can complete its assignment is to assume praise for all achievements and neglect to recognize that everything originates from the one genuine G-d who controls the world. In this manner, the creature prevails in obstructing the light of creation, as well as in retaining it too. Thus, the "terrible" formation of new human cells emerges from the murkiness and malice turns out to be more uncovered in the physical world.

The Enemy Within

To be clear, this work isn't about "otherworldly mending" as a contrasting option to pharmaceutical. It is tied in with increasing some understanding with regards to the otherworldly progression of ailments like malignancy. In like manner, I bolster every authentic type of ordinary treatment, for example, medical procedure, chemotherapy and radiation when recommended by qualified disease authorities (oncologists). I likewise don't need anybody to understand that disease is a type of Divine discipline (Heaven preclude). What I have portrayed is a use of Hassidic ideas to demonstrate how positive imaginative vitality consumed into a negative domain will deliver a variation from the norm.

Also, every discussion about tumor focuses to battling an adversary; "I will beat this thing!" "I will battle it." "I will kick this malignancy in the butt!" "Neal Armstrong, the cycling champion, battled his fight against growth and won." Additionally, the accessible medicines are normally portrayed as the "armory of weapons". Thus, the individual who gets the stunning news that he or she has growth quickly starts to get ready for war with a solid assurance to win. Relatives will rally around to offer help and support. Hence, if a man will utilize sheer will to improve the viability of the endorsed regimen, he or she needs to center around the supernal domain and concentrate the foe inside. The way to winning any war is, knowing one's enemy.

Therefore, we should make the inquiry, "Who is this despicable adversary?" The foe inside is the creature that must affirm its reality as being free. This is steady with acting naturally mindful and is fundamental for survival. Keep in mind that the center of the human, i.e. the "Heavenly start" needs just to be with the Creator. As needs be, G-d hides His quality through the already depicted constrictions with a specific end goal to permit the made creatures to have the implication of autonomous presence. Notwithstanding, when unchecked, the creature life power will convey this self-idea to outrageous and prevent the presence from claiming G-d. That is the premise by which we as a whole at times assume praise for our achievements, overlooking that everything originates from Him. Subsequently, since G-d's Light of creation is constantly present, the foreswearing makes some of it be assimilated into the domain of dimness bringing about transformation.

Setting the Stage for the Cure

At the point when a man has dealt with the test introduced by a conclusion of growth (or some other calamitous infection), he or she needs to comprehend the idea of the battle. It is an internal clash. In the domain of learning, there is the known (what is uncovered inside us) and the understandable (what is uncovered on the planet). Consequently the tested individual gets ready for the fight to come by exchanging the understandable to the known. This transmittal happens by considering Scripture. There is one gathering of sections (Psalms; Chapter 73; Verses 21-28) that holds the way to the entryway of recuperation;

"At the point when my heart was in age, and my psyche was honed, I was an animal and did not comprehend, similar to a creature I was with You. However I was dependably with You; You have held my correct hand. Guide me with Your insight, and a short time later, get me with respect. Whom do I have in Heaven other than You? What's more, when I am with You I want nothing on Earth. My fragile living creature and my heart long; G-d is the stone of my heart and my segment for eternity. For view, every one of the individuals who are a long way from You die, You chop down all who stray from You. However, with respect to me, the proximity of G-d is my great; I have put my trust in my Lord, G-d, that I may relate every one of Your works."

What the Psalmist is stating here is that notwithstanding when we are occupied with corrupt acts, G-d as of now considers us being deserving of recovery. Along these lines, we should start our arrival to G-dliness by recognizing that He is the one genuine G-d who controls the world. As needs be, the point at which we say so anyone can hear with appreciation that nothing is autonomous of Him, we promptly invalidate the creature's bogus thought of independence. This jabs a vast gap in the shell of dimness and the G-dly Light from inside blasts forward to reconnect with its source. Along these lines, the battle to triumph over such difficulty starts and finishes with the propensity to think about one's self as being in charge as opposed to ascribing all occasions to G-d's unending Wisdom and Mercy.

Moshe Sharon has been an enrolled nurture for a long time with a graduate degree and claim to fame in general wellbeing. He has spent most his profession looking for approaches to accomplish genuine recuperating for the individuals who are not yet well. He has examined and drilled all encompassing human services for two decades, continually having faith in the indivisibility of the psyche, body and soul.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/master/Moshe_Sharon/676545

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