#i like how everyone's morally gray and never truly bad or good either... it makes it hard to hate anyone 👁️👁️

[maxphilippa]

i think that the major misinterpretation that people have with taco is that she didn't get attached to mic because of her sad face in the end wanted to show regret because "she hurted her friend". like. no, she wasn't sad because she regretted what she did. she was sad because she's alone again, but she knows very well at the end that she had it coming. the reason as to why taco was so desperate of wanting mic to tell her that she did gain something is because. she SAW pickle in mic, but of course their situation is very different. "Oh but Taco couldn't have done what she did to Mic to Pickle, Mic was fully aware" but she did do that. Mic herself says it. That is pretty much what II is telling you. Taco isn't a good friend, and is not exactly a good person either. Mic was aware that Taco was/is a bad person, but Mic's nature makes her believe in whoever acknowledges her. Taco made Mic feel like she needed her, just the way she made Pickle feel back in s1.

she didn't really change thanks to mic. her faces of "regret" aren't her actually lamenting all of the stuff she did to microphone, but rather just her realizing that she proved what everyone said about her as a result. i will give it to that she might've tried to change, but not because of mic. she wanted to win the prize so she could prove others wrong on her being a loser and a coward, by being a loser and a coward. if anything, mic made her realize that she hasn't changed. she pretty much just ruined everything for everyone who saw her as a friend, and for herself.

taco's whole arc is constantly just downgraded to questionable takes and listen. i do agree that she is heavily flawed as a character. she is morally gray, but ii doesn't portray her as a good person with good intentions, nor she should be really be treated as if she was. neither she had those good intentions with mic at all, i mean, their "friendship" pretty much started because of taco wanting the prize money, taking a part of microphone's prize if she made mic won, you know, an offer. she would get the prize and mic would get recognition. but everyone seems to forget that probably, the main reason as to why she's doing all of this, is because she does regret how she acted on s1. she doesn't exactly regret doing all of that to microphone, and even if she does, it's for the wrong reasons. (that's because she did the exact same thing to you know, pickle, her once best friend, the only person she truly ever cared about)

people do tend to forget that taco keeps sending letters to pickle, and that's often just used for pickle angst and making it his only character trait, but. it's not that. it's the fact that taco keeps on writing those letters, despite fully knowing that she did hurt pickle because of her actions. taco's biggest flaw is that she can't accept that she has ruined everything and wants so desperately to be back on pickle's life because she ended up caring about him deeply as a person. as a friend. but she was never there at all, either.

taco can't seem to understand that she has hurted people badly. sure, she seemed like a "friend" to microphone, and you can argue whatever you want but a fact is that taco IS smart, and she knew that the only way to possibly keep mic by her side is pretending to want to be better, you know, the same way she pretended to be just a odd fella so pickle and her could remain together and have an advance at the game. she played with both of them. because both pickle and mic believed in her but were just used by her for the game.

however, taco does seem to regret the way everything went during-post s1. you can see how she yearns for another chance and is saddened about not getting it, but that's not only for comedic purposes, but that's because the writing is telling you that she won't get a second chance. at least not here.

what i want people to understand is that, yes, taco is a complex character, however trying to sugarcoat what she did is pretty much missing the point of her writing as a whole. she isn't a good person neither was she a good friend. she hasn't grown because she was never able to let go of something that she thinks that she can fix with some words and a prize. she thinks that she can still fix her friendship with pickle, she thinks that she can clear her name (even if she was the one who tainted it), but she only ended up proving knife right. she proved everyone right. she hasn't changed. a morally gray character is that. they're not exactly fully bad or fully good, but it's taco's actions that speak a lot. words are cheap, and taco's title is "The Liar", and that says a lot, because she kept on lying to microphone and to pickle on both of their games. she won't heal unless she lets go.

and i want to be clear here: i do think that taco can go through redemption. i do think that taco can become a better person, but not in the way people portray her to do so. because it just pretty much goes against what her arc has settled in for us, and the other arcs that were involved in hers as well.

taco's arc is meant to be somewhat a parallel with nickel's in a way. hell, even with knife's arc if anything. she treats knife as a simple bully, but when she saw that he became smarter and way more emotionally aware than what she had expected, she felt attacked by that, because he was stable. he became a better person and he was rubbing that on her, and it made her feelings of anger way worse regarding him, but it is true. knife is pretty much everything that taco wants to be, but here's the thing that made them so different:

knife stayed. taco didn't stay.

knife is accepted by everyone in the hotel because meanwhile he hasn't explicitly said that he had a change of heart, he has shown it through actions and a big difference too is that he was there for pickle, even if they weren't close in s1, and taco is on the woods because deep down she is aware that she can't go back. not if she doesn't have something to offer as an direct apology, but here's the problem. whether or not she got the prize, she still wouldn't get forgiven by anyone due to what she said that day.

again. her problem is not being able to let go and to accept when she has messed up badly. she has been lying to everyone but she has also been lying to herself as a whole. she can't keep on doing this because it's just hurting everyone and herself. keeping grudges and holding onto past friendships that were doomed to fall is just hurting her. she is not on the state to keep on trying, she wasn't at all ever.

taco's arc most likely will have closure on a way that fits her character, and i feel like that would be with her letting go of inanimate insanity as a whole and of what she can't fix anymore. her trying to find herself after years of lying to everyone and to herself. she's not a good person. but she can become one. only if she knows what she did was wrong and that her second chance isn't there, and never will be, and if she recognizes that meanwhile she did that damage, she can still become a better person. just not there.

pickle and mic don't owe her anything, especially pickle. taco does owe them an apology, but they won't accept that. the least she could do is to accept their wishes, understand that she needs to leave them and grow to be a better person. maybe, if she does that, she would actually heal.

she doesn't need anyone to fix her. she needs to fix herself.

#inanimate insanity #ii #inanimate insanity invitational #ii 2 #ii 3 #inanimate insanity taco #inanimate insanity microphone #inanimate insanity knife #inanimate insanity pickle #and no. this isn't to bring ship discourse or anything. get that away from my character analysis. #i feel like taco is a really interesting character. it is pretty sad that even if she's popular people don't get her #“she's a complex fem character” yes she is. however you are pretty much missing the point. a character regardless of the gender can do bad- #-things and have a good intention/or a way to try to make up for that in their actions. however she is a case where she can't get closure w #-ith anyone because of the way she is written/the way she was given that complexity. she won't get closure with anyone in the cast at all #because they won't really forgive her since she kept on lying and using them as puppets. she had a change of heart. sure #but that doesn't erase all the pain she has caused #i genuinely do hope she gets her eventual closure by letting go. she does deserve to be okay but not with the cast. #i feel like the best way to put is. she had a good wish (wanting to become friends with pickle and showing that she changed) #with bad intentions and bad actions (using mic to get the prize + lying to her + other bad stuff she has done to the contestants such as h #-arming them without a motive/just because.) #max does analysis

[gralunaisland]

being a Graylu shipper am i the only one that doesn't like the idea of Lucy or anyone else being a Gruvia Shipper?

About Fairy Tail members being either complicit or enablers of juvia abusing Gray

You're definitely not alone, my friend! I personally am a Gralu shipper, but I don't necessarily agree just because of that.

I've said it in a post before, but I became an Anti gr///vian first and a Gralu shipper second. I totally understand people who don't like a certain ship just because they ship those individuals with other people, and I think that's a perfectly valid reason to hate a ship, as we can hate ships for mostly any reason. So, yes, being a Gralu shipper gives me another reason to not like it if Lucy were to ship gr///via because that basically just reconfirms that they don't like each other.

However, for me personally, I hate it whenever Lucy (whom I don't remember supporting gr///via very much if at all, but she definitely didn't actively oppose it to the best of my knowledge), Erza, or anyone in Fairy Tail/the FT universe supports gr///via mostly because that makes them, at best, complicit in juvia's abuse of Gray, and, at worst, enablers of this abuse.

I refuse to believe that manipulative and toxic affection was the true moral of Mashima's Fairy Tail, even if his characters actively advocate for it. I think he lost sight somewhere along the line of what it truly means to be a Fairy Tail member, and that means to be a loyal, compassionate, brave friend who always looks out for each other and love one another. juvia is none of those things, not even loyal to Gray, because what she does is a detriment to him, and she's really just loyal to herself and her "love" for him. Yet, Mashima promotes her behavior by giving her what she so desperately coveted in the end and by forcing his characters to be completely OOC and back up juvia, the slobbering, nasty, selfish pig, and not their loving, stalwart brother-in-arms and victim here, Gray.

That is despicable.

What's more, beyond how awful it is that FT people would rather back juvia than Gray, it's just bad, lazy writing. In no world would juvia be able to abuse other people and manipulate them and bully women and yet also be praised and protected and loved by those same people. Erza should have never sided with juvia over the 413 days matter or berated Gray for "not being clear enough" when he's been plenty clear. The other FT members shouldn't have ever blasted Gray for "leading juvia on". No one should even like juvia or want to be her friend because of what a b*tch she is.

Yet of course, everyone loves her for NO REASON. There are so many reasons to hate her (and honestly not one good reason to love her in my opinion), but does Mashima care? Absolutely not. juvia is his self-proclaimed self-insert's waifu, after all.

Anyway, true FT fans should be enraged that juvia lockser is one of the main people we are encouraged to be like in this show. They should be indignant that juvia has been made a poster child for this anime, when she embodies none of its values. They should refuse to accept this as healthy and desirable. They should balk at the fact that their beloved characters endorse juvia's actions and life choices, which are wholly unacceptable and unhealthy not only to herself but most importantly to others.

But lots of fans delude themselves, and the fans drive Mashima, so unfortunately, here we are, with a whole cast of characters who promote and affirm juvia, the least deserving of the Fairy Tail members.

For the record, I am not really talking about the fans who acknowledge juvia's toxicity but still like her and the ship because of a sort of suspension of disbelief. Honestly, there are many problematic or evil characters that many people like, and I usually see no problem with it if you are able to separate your fictional fantasies with reality. (Some deeply problematic things I do not excuse though). For example, I like Sukuna from JJK. Do I think he's a good person? Aaaaabsolutely not. He's a completely awful person. But still, I think he's cool and his power is sick, so I like him.

My issue lies within the area of the FT community who refuse to accept that juvia's behavior is deplorable and who attack anyone who tells them otherwise. These are the rabid fans who'd go for Mashima's throat if he dared to not make gr///via canon. I don't believe the fans who know juvia is a bad person but still ship gr///via would be so up in arms about it because this sort of self-awareness indicates maturity to me.

[Sidenote, the really aggravating and only thing that sets juvia apart from the characters who are literal villains and douches is that juvia isn't treated like a bad guy within the story. Sans some uncomfortable stares and sweat drops, she is largely treated like family, and everyone loves her. When even the canon material itself won't acknowledge a character's toxicity and awfulness to itself, of course there'll be people who don't think she's toxic. I hate that Fairy Tail lies to itself in this way. It just helps to turn the deluded fans against well-meaning Antis who speak literal objective truth, that the way juvia acts is not okay in real life.]

Anyway, those are my two cents, thank you for your patience and ask!

#ill never get over how fairy tail members choose juvia over gray #it is just so effed up at its core #juvia is not yalls friend #she only cares about loving gray and nothing else when it all comes down to it #askgraluna #anti gruvia #anti juvia #anti juvia lockser #anti juvia loxar #fairy tail #ask #defend gray fullbuster #gray fullbuster #anti gray x juvia #lucy heartfilia #graylu #gralu #gray x lucy #what happened to being loyal to your friends? #gruviugh #gruvia can burn #gruvia sucks

[bihansthot]

This is a quick question?😳 Since you answered someone question about Naruto how would itchai and sauske react to the Lin kuei? Or bi han

This doesn't seem like a quick question lol I really don't write for the Naruto characters, so I'm not entirely sure, but I can see a lot of similarities between Bi-Han and Itachi. They're both older brothers who had to do unspeakable things to keep their younger brothers safe, even if Sasuke and Kuai Liang don't always understand their older brothers intentions. Bi-Han and Itachi are also both very cold and aloof to their younger siblings later in life, Itachi when he joined Akatsuki and Bi-Han once he became Noob Saibot. There's also a lot of similarities between Sasuke and Kuai Liang, at first they're both blinded by rage and will do whatever it takes to get their revenge the difference is who it's directed at. For Sasuke he blames Itachi for everything, for Kuai Liang he blames everyone but Bi-Han and just wants to know what happened to his brother and avenge his death. Sasuke of course goes apeshit and joins the bad guys to get his revenge wherein he learns the bad guy who's really behind things and eventually realizes his brother isn't to blame and had no choice in his actions and eventually grows to be a better person and atones for his actions and rejoins the good guys. Whereas Kuai Liang never loses his way, he does track down his brother's assassin but realizes he wasn't truly to blame either and was manipulated into his actions by another.

It's kind of an interesting parallel between the two sets of brothers, there's probably a lot more that could be said on this subject but like I said I don't write for Naruto, I haven't seen it in like a decade and honestly wasn't really into anyone other than Sasuke, but I didn't like his character arc overall btw. I'm an unapologetic villain fucker and wish he had stayed a villain, I say that even though I will defend to the death that human Bi-Han isn't a villain he's just morally gray. I don't make sense as a person lol this is why I'm a dinosaur, just ignore my rambling lol

#mortal kombat #naruto #bi han #sasuke uchiha #kuai liang #itachi uchiha #sub zero bros #itachi and sasuke #i make no sense #sol rambles about the sub zero bros #sol rambles about naruto

[revui]

levi's vagueposting. i'm genuinely kind of sick of the idea that a character who does bad things HAS to be suitably punished or reprimanded by the narrative itself or other characters within it because 1) sometimes half the point of a story is "guy does bad things and gets away with it" because it's something that happens irl and a great base for a tragedy, and 2) we all know that portrayal does not equal endorsement and you have to understand by extension that an author not punishing a character ALSO doesn't equal endorsement

on a certain post that i won't direct anyone to, i saw a bunch of people agreeing and fully understanding that having a character do bad things doesn't mean the author thinks those things are okay. and then a majority of those same people immediately followed it up with "but the bad character HAS to be punished or else it's bad writing"

i'm paraphrasing but not misrepresenting, that is the exact idea i saw repeated several times, and it's pissing me off. i fully understand when punishment can be a good thing. karmic justice is cathartic when it's earned. watching a villain lose everything at the end of a story and throw an evil tantrum is satisfying, especially when they're usually very collected. but in some cases, the lack of external punishment is a feature, not a flaw.

and i can get why some people dont like it. it's not satisfying to everyone to spend a story waiting for a character to get bit in the ass by consequences or have a secondary character pipe up to give a "the reason you suck" speech or whatever. but unless the writer was promising a downfall that never came, it was probably written that way on purpose. a writer can be fully aware of how and why their character is shitty and still deliver no external repercussions for it.

it's not everyone's jam. it's not my jam either, most of the time. i like watching fictional assholes get what's coming to them. but framing "something i don't like" as "a flaw within the text" would be erroneous on my part.

it's very hard to write morally gray characters if you're unwilling to swallow the fact that not all bad deeds will be punished or even really called out by anyone. maybe the character themself isn't aware that what they just did is shitty. if you think the only ending for a character who has done bad things is to make them face karma, it becomes easier to write a one-dimensional character who you set up just to knock down. you have to be comfortable getting in the mind of people who you think of as truly reprehensible if you want to portray them with any depth.

although i do also get the appeal of pure evil villains who are just... set up to get knocked down. your mileage may vary, the major point of this unfocused rant is that writing gray morality can be uncomfortable and fiction isn't inherently here to teach moral lessons, sometimes it's just about some kinda shitty people. something like that.

#levi rambles #<- this one really earns the ramble tag this time #writing dot fuck #long post #writing rant #basically: there is such a thing as theme without moral

[skulliecadaver-blog]

Loving his darkness.

This is my first time giving this fanfiction thing a try, so please let me know how I'm doing and if it's worth continuing the story.

Warnings: Mentions of abuse, death, and fear. If I've missed anything, let me know.

At one point in my life, I saw things in black and white; you were either good or evil, and that's how I viewed things for a long time. Then, he came into my life and made me question everything I once believed. I now live in gray. Everyone has a different idea of what constitutes evil. We each have our own moral compass, but I've learned that it can turn on a dime when your beliefs are torn apart, and you are shown the harsh reality. Some people don't deserve to live in this world, and that's just the truth, no matter how wrong it may seem.

Even if I wanted to run, I could never outrun the love I held for my beautiful monster. He clawed his way into my heart, impaled me deeply with his cock, dug a hole deep inside my soul, and buried part of himself there. I knew I'd never be rid of him, and I was okay with that now.

I'd been sitting against the window in his apartment, thinking about these things, watching him sleep. He looked so peaceful and innocent, but I knew the truth. He could be a cold, heartless monster to everyone but me, and I didn't know how to feel about it.

He told me I was the only person he'd ever let in, saw the real him, and loved him anyway. The only thing I was having an internal battle about was whether I was a bad person for accepting that part of him. I know he's done horrible things to people, but they deserve it. Rapists, child molesters that got off free, he made sure they could never hurt anyone again.

In the public eye, Chris was everything an endearing music artist should be. Charming, sweet, funny and charismatic. Very few people knew who Chris was behind closed doors. If people saw the real Chris, they'd fear him. It amazes me that he can go from a kindhearted, funny guy to a stone-cold killer in a matter of seconds, and you can physically see it happen if you know what you are looking for. I'm the only one who got to see who he truly was, good and bad. He didn't hide any of it from me. It's one reason I fell in love with him. He opened himself up and trusted me enough to let me behind the mask.

I was still learning about his life before we met. I knew his father was an evil man. I still don't know why, but I know he was dangerous. After his father died, he needed an outlet, thus creating the killer. He is now stopping people like his father, who caused so much pain.

I know that for someone like him, I can't push. He tells me as much as he can when he can. He tells me I'm the only soft thing he's ever had in his life, the only love, and that makes me sad. Everyone deserves love.

I must have been deep in thought because I didn't hear or see Chris get up until he slid his arms around me. "How long have you been awake, sweet girl? What are you thinking about?" He rasped out, kissing my shoulder.

I leaned back against the warmth of his naked chest. "Honestly, you and everything that happened over the last couple of months." Why was it that every time he was close to me, everything else just fell away? All the worries, all the 'what ifs' don't matter; it's just him and I.

One of his hands moves to my neck, wrapping his fingers around it, not hurting, just slightly squeezing. "Are you scared of me now? Do you want to leave?" I heard the slight tremble in his voice; the only thing that gives away what he's truly feeling, and I believe that is fear.

I turned in his arms, moving his hand to the back of my neck, the other falling to my hip. I cupped his face with both hands and kissed him, trying to push all my love and acceptance through it. 

"I love you, Chris, every part of you. I'm not going anywhere unless you tell me to go."

I watched his eyes close, and his shoulders relax. He leaned his forehead against mine. "I love you, sweet girl, and you'll always be mine, only mine."

After that small exchange of words, Chris pulled me back to bed, and he held me against his chest. I fell asleep to the sound of his heartbeat.

Chris woke suddenly, glancing around the room; sweat trickled down his spine. Another fucking nightmare. Since he'd been with Angie, they came less often, even rarely now, but when they did come, they were still horrible, tortured, and gasping for breath. He looked at the beautiful angel beside him, her blonde curls framing a sweet face. The thought of losing her was enough to make his heart stutter. No one had ever really cared for him or loved him like she did. He didn't have to hide from her, and now that he knew what that felt like, he'd never be able to give it up. He was in love with her, and the thought of losing Angie was his biggest fear. The nightmares served as a reminder of how much she meant to him and how grateful he was to have her by his side. I took a deep breath and lay back down, pulling her firmly against his chest. He knew he'd never get back to sleep, but lying here holding her was enough.

#chris motionless #chris cerulli #Serial killer #Dark romance #Dark love

[yeo-rims]

the thing about happiness is that none of the truly detestable people turned into zombies? which is kinda groundbreaking if you think about how shows will make a character antagonize everyone in order for the audience to root and expect the moment he becomes a zombie and it’s killed by the person he screwed the most. rich assh*les aside, most of the infected were either normal people or just morally gray people, like the pastor and the trainer. but the doctor, the building manager, even the serial killer they never got to be infected (even if andrew was bitten by yi hyun, but that was mostly because they would never let yi hyun bit another person but a serial killer lol). and i find that amazing because it honestly is the difficult choice to make, even in train to busan (which i'm only talking about because i've watched it again on saturday) the moment that awful guy turns into a zombie we riot because we hated him he was the worst. and those emotions are valid, fiction is just fiction that isn't my point. but happiness shows us another way of seeing how people would be if that were to happen, and how human everything is, to the point that being infected doesn’t make you bad, that it isn’t a punishment for your previous wrongdoings. i think it's nice, especially now that i'm watching aouad, that they didnt do what was the easy thing in terms of payoff but instead they let sae bom and yi hyun and even the other residents be decent and they didnt make the audience rejoice over something that even if it's good when it's happening, it's a bit of an overdone plot by now. idk if this is confusing. i do love it when bad people die on shows, but at the same time, it is a cheap narrative device so it’s nice when we see other stuff. idk idk

#tvn happiness #all of us are dead #my two brain cells are talking #it's more about the way the show sees the infected than the revenge thing for me #bc i dont mind hitting a bad person every now and then #but sometimes shows will be like see it's good that this person turned into a monster but is it? is it cathartic? sometimes it can be #other times i feel like i'm just being manipulated to enjoy it #(and yeah i know im always being manipulated but you get it!!) #like that moment in train to busan when they have to go thru the zombie students and cws cant even move #so GOOD #and when phj hugged her friend too even tho she was already a zombie #i guess what i mean is i wish more shows would show us the human/sad part about zombies and not just the killing yknow #like happiness did lol

[dreamteamspace]

They really went there huh

/rp (good lord I rly hyperfixated on this essay huh)

torture tw, abuse tw, manipulation tw, gaslighting tw

So the Dream SMP built a character, once maybe morally gray, who slipped straight into villany with little to no desire to change, and willing to cause a LOT of pain to get his way. Despite this, he doesn’t question what he does enough to stop, justifying his actions with a good intent that doesn’t come close to justifying what he’s done.

C!Dream is unremorseful of what he’s done, he’s quite literally manipulated and gaslit (like actually, not in the way everyone keeps throwing the word around) c!Tommy, almost drove him to take his last life- like, jesus christ. That’s not even to mention blowing up L’Manburg three times, encouraging c!Wilbur, wanting the discs JUST to have power over c!Tommy, etc.

SO, he gets thrown in a box for it so he doesn’t hurt anybody anymore, making his own hubris his downfall (narrative consequence my beloved). This leads us to a good finale - the bad guy, the person who’s caused objectively the most pain and destruction, is now unable to do so anymore, taken down by the person whom he tried to weaken. It is also revealed he was planning on blackmailing and threatening pretty much everyone, but now everyone gets their stuff back.

Good, right?

Especially for the finale, yeah! The message of the finale is good, c!Tommy manages to escape his abuser with nothing more but his clothes on his back and fights his way back to c!Tubbo and his home.

He doesn’t let his trauma (which is still very present!) let him become a terrible person (arguably the way that c!Dream DID let his frustrations make him a terrible person, c!Tommy, despite bearing quite a heavy weight, recognizes when he begins to turn that way and actively works against it).

It shows that while alone, c!Tubbo and c!Tommy were outfought by Dream, but because c!Tommy went the length to ask for help (which he didn’t even really seem to be relying on actually showing up), he wins! It truly is a good message.

C!Tommy escapes his abuser and manipulator, refuses and fights his trauma to not become someone he doesn’t want to be, and defeats his abuser by asking for help and receiving it, even more than he thought he’d get. He refuses to play c!Dream’s “game”, refuses till the very last moment to let c!Tubbo die, to surrender and say goodbye to him.

So, great! Good finale! C!Dream The Villain is boxed like a fish in a prison of, quite literally, his own making. It sent a good message to people. C!Tommy wasn’t expected to forgive him and did, in fact, axe him down twice, causing c!Dream to finally fall from his high horse.

Most media would stop at this point, say the villain is now defeated and never show them again, or have them come back another one or two seasons later, escaped and seemingly unharmed and worse than ever.

Alternatively, there’s a throwaway line, (or, in good media, a genuine, reasonable backstory, complete with remorse and bad role models and complicated situations), that allows the villain to be redeemed.

In GOOD redemption arcs (See: Zuko from avatar tbh), the villain was already never quite as heartless, or stressed their good intent, or felt remorse for what they felt they “had to do”. Then, ideally, the villain takes a looooong time adjusting their habits, regretting their actions and changing until they’re considered redeemed.

Not on the Dream SMP, though.

They don’t stop at c!Dream’s defeat.

He doesn’t dissapear off-screen and is never spoken of again. His life continues on, everyone’s does, just like it would in reality. He doesn’t magically want to become a better person, far from it. So no redemption. But he doesn’t dissapear, either.

They go on to, slowly, stress how awful the conditions in Pandora’s Vault are. c!Bad says c!Dream should be imprisoned, but at least at slightly better conditions. We’re in very VERY morally gray territorry here. Nobody says c!Dream is a good person, of course not, but even c!Bad - who knows Dream was planning on keeping c!Skeppy in a cage to control him with - goes, “yeah, he should stay boxed, but does he really need to like... suffer suffer?”

Still, c!Dream seems to be kindof inconsistent in his behavior. Is he faking his pain? Is he not? His actions don’t fully make sense for either take. He acts differently to each person, but at the same time some things he does don’t make sense if he were just fishing for pity.

Then c!Sam admits to trying (and thinking he succeeded) to “break Dream’s will”, to quite literally starving him for weeks.

Okay, so now we’re a step further. C!Dream is now suffering even more, although already boxed and unable to hurt anyone. Pandora’s Vault is one thing, but now c!Sam just seems to be out for revenge and nothing more. Instead of spending his time with c!Tommy, he spends his time pickaxing(?) c!Dream.

C!Sam isn’t an angel, and we should all know that by now. He does what he thinks is right, but he’s deeper than that, all characters on the DSMP are.

He cares deeply for the Badlands, and would always choose them above anybody else. He’s a capitalist. He built the prison because it would benefit the Badlands resource-wise, despite knowing Dream would probably use it on his enemies, and it was no secret that ALL members of L’Manburg, especially c!Tommy, are his enemies. C!Sam, undoubtedly, knew that. He still built it.

Arguably, he didn’t know about c!Dream’s attachment obsession at the time, but the point still stands.

People have already latched onto the untold story happening between c!Dream and c!Sam, and frankly, we barely know enough about it. Does c!Sam torture him regularly? Do they talk? Does c!Dream try to verbally fight back? CAN he fight back? We don’t know! We’ve gotten proof for both, between c!Sam saying that c!Dream is terrifying even in prison and c!Dream going silent to go on strike. We don’t have enough of an idea how bad or how good it truly is.

So the people who prefer to humanize c!Dream and explore morality imagine c!Sam to downright torture him, people that prefer to see c!Dream as nothing but evil due to his actions imagine prison on the DSMP to not be equivalent to real life prison, and thus nowhere near as torturous as people are making it out to be.

Now all that is thrown out the window as c!Quackity quite literally tortures him.

So now the internet is faced with a question that, judging by some of the impulsive reactions *cough cough* celebrating torture *cough*, it didn’t turn out to be ready for.

Tell me.

How far do we go?

C!Dream hurt a LOT of people. He did a lot of things that caused irreparable damage. Now what? Do we torture him forever? Why? Because he deserves it? How do we determine that without comparing one kind of pain to another?

It’s custom and kindof generally respectful not to compare people’s pain too accurately, because different things vary greatly in severity depending on the person that experiences them.

At what point do we say he’s suffered enough without comparing exile to the prison?

And if we DO compare, does that even make the question easier to answer?

And if he’s never suffered enough ever, killing them would be a mercy...

At what point has a person done enough damage that they “deserve” to die? What if someone only did half of the things c!Dream did. But if c!Dream gets infinite punishment, and half of infinity is still infinity, do they ALSO deserve endless suffering?

Do you think every person that did something you can’t emphasize with deserves to suffer for eternity and die?

I’m not saying we SHOULD emphasize with c!Dream. He did things we cannot justify, that NOTHING can justify. He did things that were, by their nature, unjustified.

I’m also not saying anybody should forgive him. I think it’s a GOOD thing that c!Tommy doesn’t want nor is narratively pushed to forgive c!Dream.

But c!Dream doesn’t need c!Tommy’s forgiveness to be... a person.

There’s a saying that I’m sure you know, that goes “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”, because there’s things you wouldn’t want any human being to experience. Not because you like them, not cause you think they’re right, but because they’re human.

And perhaps this is my personal opinion, but I don’t think c!Dream being a bad person justifies dehumanizing him, because then we get into an area where someone needs to meet criteria just to be human.

-

I met someone once, whom, because of outside circumstances I knew I probably wouldn’t meet again. We’d been getting along just fine for people who just met, and were both getting into an interesting discussion about morality. They kept insisting upon something I kept refuting, so they said they needed to get something off their chest.

They proceeded to tell me that they had, years ago, while a teen, manipulated someone in a relationship, pushed boundaries and tried to convince them to do things they didn’t really want to do to get what they wanted.

They cried, while telling me, too terrified to tell anybody they know, terrified nobody would ever speak to them again, insanely regretful of their actions. They didn’t know whether to go back and apologize or just stay as far away as humanly possible, didn’t know which one the right thing to do is.

It had been years, by then, and I talked them through it. I said that what they did was bad, and there’s no going around that. But I also said what I saw, which is someone who would never do something like that ever again. I saw a human being. Someone who regrets a mistake they did and now, after enough time has passed, would do anything to make it undone.

Someone who is too terrified to be close to anybody in fear that they would do it again. I don’t remember if they already went to therapy or not, but it was definitly on the table, or in the near future.

They asked me how I could possibly even keep talking to them after they told me all that. They implied they felt like some kind of monster despite literally chocking back tears, firmly convinced they don’t deserve to be close to anybody in their life ever again.

I never swerved from the fact that what they did was wrong, and harmful. But I also told them they’re human. The universe isn’t keeping score. They want to be a better person now, and they were never going to learn how if they never let themselves be close to anybody.

I told them to seek therapy, and to slowly, carefully, try. Assured them that the fact that they regret it so strongly will at least help them in not falling back into the same pattern, and if they do, they can learn to recognize that.

They thanked me after the conversation, genuinely, especially for the fact that I didn’t sugarcoat what happened, because I know otherwise it would’ve felt like I was lying, like I was just sparing their feelings. I wasn’t. I was thinking about how to make sure they get to live without hurting anybody.

As per the circumstances, we didn’t speak again after that, which we knew basicly from the very start.

-

I still think about that conversation a lot.

Do you think they should’ve been locked up for life after it happened, instead?

Do you think this real human being, that I spoke to, that took years to realize their mistake - and never would have realized it if they hadn’t had the time to, if they’d been killed right afterwards - deserves to suffer forever?

Let me tell you something, from someone who’s been in more than one abusive situation: People that hurt you are human.

That doesn’t mean you have to forgive them. That doesn’t mean you have to like them. That doesn’t mean you have to make an effort to understand them. That doesn’t mean you need to go anywhere near them ever again.

You can hate them. You can be angry at them. You can (and should) go as far away from them as possible, and/or defend yourself.

But that doesn’t mean you have to dehumanize them.

You’re allowed to hate and dislike people that are human, because you’re human, especially if they hurt you. That’s how life is.

And to go back to my original point - c!Quackity torturing c!Dream is not something that should be celebrated.

There’s a difference between necessary measures (locking c!Dream up so he doesn’t hurt anyone), and torturing people for fun.

It’s not right. It’s never going to be right, and do not justify literal torture on human beings, and do not make someone lower-than-human to justify torturing them.

Taking revenge on someone for what they did tenfold is romanticized, I know, but I promise you it’s not actually as cool as it sounds.

#dreamwastaken #quackity #awesamdude #dream smp #dream smp analysis #dreamteamspace speaks #negativity #fandom critical #its finished and Im finally free #c!Dream #c!Quackity crit #c!Quackity critial

[yourheartonfire]

When they found Superhero, he was gardening. Down on his knees in the dirt, in a stupid khaki hat to keep off the sun, hands deep in the rich black earth in front of the tidy little cottage.

"You're him," they said, outside the little white picket fence. 

Superhero stopped. Then he brushed the dirt off his hands, looked up with a friendly smile. "Well, I'm someone. What 'him' are you looking for?"

Somehow it was an answer, not a question. The hair was graying, the physique not quite so chiseled, but it was clearly Superhero. 

They pushed the gate open. The Superhero did not invite them in but neither did he make any move to stop them, watching patiently from his knees to see what they would do next. So they stepped in from the street and let the gate fall shut behind them. The Superhero smiled and rose.

"Not a lot of people track me down these days," he said, gesturing them towards the pair of chairs on the porch. "You don't look like a reporter. Something I can do for you?"

"Sort of," They waited until Superhero sat then took the other chair, digging their toes uneasily into the freshly painted white boards. 

"Can I get you something?" Superhero said, picking up his own bottle. "Water? A beer?"

"My mom died in the attack on the Civic Plaza," they blurted.

Superhero squeezed his eyes shut and open. He looked pained - but not surprised.

"I'm truly sorry to hear that," he said with practiced, professional empathy. Like cops or doctors who deliver bad news for a living, and then go home to eat dinner and  watch TV and laugh and sleep soundly. And garden.

They looked down at their lap, where their fists were clenched around the edges of their jacket. "No, you're not," they said under their breath.

Superhero went... alert. That was the only way to describe the sudden snap to attention, the slight tensing of muscles, powers or no powers. He said nothing but somehow he was listening harder.

"That was the twelfth major disaster caused by [Villain]," they said. Hot tears were spilling over and they couldn't stop them, couldn't stop the shake in their voice. "You fought him ten of those times before. Any one of those you could've just - just ended him!"

"Murdered him?" Superhero asked, face impartial.

"Yes! Fine! Murdered him!" they cried. "He killed hundreds of people and you could've stopped him for good any time you felt like it! And you didn't - for what? Your moral code? My mom died for your morals!"

Superhero let out a slow breath. "You have every right to be angry," they said quietly. "What happened to your mother was awful and unfair. I have some phone numbers inside. People who can help you, who helped me."

"Helped you?" they cried. "Helped you find peace with failing?"

"Yes," Superhero said simply, folding his hands across his chest as he leaned back in his chair. "I saved a lot of people but there's many more, like your mother, that I didn't. I had to learn that I'm not, in fact, a god. I had to accept that I made the best choices I could, in the moment, but my powers don't include omniscience or omnipotence." He shot them a sharp sideways glance. "I'll bet your powers don't either."

They jolted. "How did you...?"

Superhero shrugged. "Like I said, not a lot of people seek me out these days. But you're not the first with that look. The power's just coming in, huh?" They bunched their hands in their pockets and didn't answer. Superhero nodded like that was what he expected. "The Hero Foundation has resources that can help you - medical help, housing help, crisis support-"

"I don't want your stupid foundation!" they screamed, leaping to their feet, hands blazing with unearthly fire. "I don't want a therapist or crisis support. I want you to be sorry you killed my mother!"

Superhero did not flinch. He did not stand. He did not even move, other than his eyes, locked on them like a missile tracking system.

"If that's what you want, kid, we can do that," Superhero said softly. "Why don't we head out back, go a few rounds where nobody will get hurt?"

"Oh, people are going to get hurt," they hissed. The flickering yellow and green aura spread up their arms to shoulders, head, torso. "I want you to know that. You're gonna be the first to die, but I'm going to make everyone hurt, just so they know how pathetic and useless you so-called heroes are!"

They expected a condescending sigh, a patronizing eye roll, a supercilious pat on the head and false sympathy. But Superhero did none of those things. He tilted his head the other way, then nodded gravely. Even through their rage, they felt an absurd surge of gratitude that at least Superhero took them seriously.

"There's a couple reasons I retired," Superhero said, hands tightening around the arms of the chair. "One is to help people like me avoid the mistakes I made when I was younger. I've forgiven myself but that doesn't mean I don't deeply regret making them. For your sake, not for mine, please believe me when I say you don't want to cross this line."

"No more talking," they hissed. "Time to die."

They reached inwards and pulled all the power they could muster, enough to level the house, most of the block. They stretched out their hands and screamed -

And Superhero raised a hand and snuffed their power like a birthday candle.

"Wha- What?" The yellow and green aurora was gone. So was the power. They reached for it desperately, found nothing within but a weak little flicker.

Superhero opened his fist, yellow and green pulsing in his palm.

"No," they breathed. "They said your powers were gone!"

"My powers are fading," Superhero corrected, focusing on the yellow and green flame until it condensed down into a perfect sphere, no bigger than a marble. "But I've got enough. As it happens, I agree with you about Villain. And what I should've done, right from the start." His gaze flicked back up, eyes marbled with unearthly fire. "If it's any consolation, think of all the mothers you'll never kill."

With a panicked gasp, they turned, they ran-

There was a sharp burst of energy, as focused and deadly as a laser blast. 

A couple neighbors noticed the flash of light across their ceiling, across their window, and forgot it just as fast, chalking the silent burst up to a weird reflection or the local kids playing with flashlights.

On his porch, the Superhero sighed deeply and let the power dissipate into nothing, never to be called again. He took a final swig from his bottle, then put it down, got up, and headed out to the shed for the paint brush and another bucket of white paint for the latest scorch mark across the porch.

#my fiction #heroes and villains #hero and villain #be careful what you wish for #evil hero #maybe? #100

[saberies-stuff]

Random Ramblings: Lena Luthor

Welp, when I came up with the idea for this series a month ago, I couldn’t imagine how drastically necessary it would turn out to be. I won’t get into my finale thoughts, I already said some of that last night and I’m working through the rest of it via fanfic, so I’ll just say WHAT A MESS and leave it there. As promised, now that the show’s over I’m going to be discussing each major character and throwing out ideas for how the show could have given each one a better, more coherent storyline. And since there’s no sense leaving the elephant in the room, I’m going to start with what I feel to be one of the worst storylines and arguably one of the worst characters of the whole show: Lena Luthor.

Probably my biggest criticism of Lena's storyline is the way she was constantly going back and forth between good and evil. This got old fast, folks. It made it impossible to tell what kind of person Lena really was, and the show often presented her in different ways at different times. Sometimes she was a stone-cold villain, sometimes she was a good person who'd let herself be led astray, and sometimes they tried to make her both at once (and failed miserably). In my opinion, one of the best ways to improve Lena's plotline would be to pick one option and stick with it.

Option One: Lena Luthor Is A Good Person

If we're going with this option, we can wave goodbye to a pretty large portion of the show- Lena's whole tantrum over Kara's secret (which is a good thing to wave goodbye to, because it was infuriating). The Lena we'd get in this storyline would be the Lena we were introduced to all the way back in Season Two: someone who is genuinely good at heart, but tripped up by the evil associated with her family name, and that would be her arc through the entire thing. No more wondering whether she's really good or bad deep down; this Lena would know from the start who she is, and the struggle would only come from getting everyone else to believe it, sparing the viewers a whole unnecessary ton of "am I truly a Luthor?" melodrama in the process.

I'm not saying Lena would have to be a wholly good, morally upright person like Kara. I actually quite like the two as foils to each other, and I think Katie McGrath plays the morally gray type of characters very well. But this version of Lena would never do any "villain" things, like Non Nocere or using Kryptonite on Kara; instead, I'd like to see her as someone who, though mostly good at heart, is a little darker and willing to do shadier stuff than the rest of the Superfriends. Ideally her role would be quite a bit smaller as well; she took a lot of screentime away from characters who were more crucial to Kara's journey, like Alex, and since Kara should have stayed the center of the show, that's a problem that needs to be fixed. I never liked how Lena replaced Winn as Kara's best friend, either. Winn and Kara's friendship broke the cliche that women can't have close male friends, and I think something important was lost when Kara's best friend was changed to a woman. I imagine Lena playing a role similar to Clark's or M'gann's: she pops in when the Superfriends need her and there's something story-wise for her to do, and the rest of the time the show focuses on people who mean more to Kara.

We can actually keep a lot of the show's storylines by going this route. Everything with Lillian and Project Cadmus still works in this context, but instead of Lillian tempting Lena back to being a "real Luthor," the conflict between them would stem from the fact that, if anyone found out it was Lillian behind Cadmus, Lena's efforts to prove the Luthor name could stand for good would be worthless. We can also keep Lena's involvement with the Worldkillers. That lines up with her new role as someone who does the shadier stuff the rest of the Superfriends can't or won't do. (I think I would drop the part about her making Kryptonite and hiding it from Kara, though. That's too villain-y for this version of Lena).

What we can't keep with this Lena is pretty much everything from Seasons 5 and 6. I'd be okay with her shooting Lex and him revealing Kara's secret, but everything after that? Out the window. A Lena who's a good person would never be angry at Kara for withholding a secret that Lena was never entitled to. A Lena who's a good person would never try to mind-rape the world, turn Eve into a flesh-and-blood robot, or poison Kara with Kryptonite. Those, ladies and gents, are villain things, so they need to be axed if we're going to call Lena a good person. But if you happen to be attached to those plot points and want to keep them, there's always another path...

Option Two: Lena Luthor Is A Villain

I'm going to come right out and say that I favor this one. I think there's more evidence pointing towards it in canon. The Lena we got in the show failed to convince me that she really is, deep down, a good person, despite how much the show tried to make that case. I actually think it would have been very impactful for Lena to be shown as a straight-up villain; sure, Supergirl was about hope, but I think it would have meant quite a bit for Kara to realize that she can't inspire everyone to be better, that some people are the way they are and aren't going to change and there's nothing you can do about it. That's a lesson I was learning first-hand while watching the show as things came to a head with my abusive father, and it would have meant the world to see a TV show address it, as opposed to the same tired "you can fix everyone if you just try hard enough!" narrative. That's not true, in some cases it's not safe, and it's a trope that needs to die.

So in this version of things, the final two seasons of the show wouldn't be about the fight for Lena's soul, but about Kara, who's canonically described as "believing that everyone is as kind and good as she is," coming to grips with the falseness of that belief as she deals with Lena's betrayal. The Kryptonite poisoning, the enslaving Eve, the Non Nocere, that all happens. But this time around, they're presented as what they truly are, the actions of a villain, and Lena would be held fully accountable for them instead of getting by scot free with a tearful apology or two. I don't care if that means she ends up in prison, if she dies, whatever. She could even have an "earns redemption by sacrificing herself" moment, if the show really wanted that. But there would be some kind of price to pay for the abuse, narcissism and flat out evil she inflicted on so many people, because that's justice, and justice is one of the things the Superfam is supposed to be all about.

(The other good thing about this? It keeps the focus on Kara. Ya know, where it BELONGS).

Other Things We Can Axe

--The Walmart Witch plot. Oh, God, the Walmart Witch plot. It wasn't needed, it wasn't done well, and on a show where most of the action was sci-fi rather than magic, it didn't fit. In fact, we can lose Lena's bio mom too. Lena's conflict was supposed to stem from her identity as a Luthor, and Elizabeth Walsh adds nothing to that conversation. I would even say we can drop Ireland altogether; it always felt forced, like it was just there to explain Katie's not-so-great attempts at hiding her accent. We didn't need it.

--The romance with James. That poor man did not deserve that, especially seeing how the racist crazies reacted to it. Do James and Mehcad both a favor and drop it.

--Everything with Andrea. Honestly, how many rich narcissistic billionaires did this show make apologies for? And what was Andrea's whole point, again? She was a replacement for Cat and a mirror of Lena and we didn't need her either way.

One last thing: I've seen some people suggesting that the show should have included Lena's disability from the comics. I, as a disabled person, am here to tell you GOOD GLORY NO. There's already a stereotype of disabled people as selfish manipulators who try to make everything about them and their issues. We do not need that literally playing out on our TV screens and I am so glad the show didn't go there.

So there you have it, my thoughts on Lena Luthor! These posts are probably going to be quite long, so if you made it this far down, thanks for reading! Leave me a comment and tell me who I should tackle next!

#supergirl #lena luthor #random ramblings

[lokilickedme]

The Way

I’m writing horror again.  I guess it’s that time, you know, that time that has nothing to do with Halloween or the seasons or whatever, that time when it just hits me for some reason.  And just like I always do, I’ll say I don’t know why.

Even though I know why, and you know I know why.

Because the truth is always so much weirder and worse and more disquieting than any excuse I could make up for it, and sometimes I just feel the need.

Today I felt the need, and I couldn’t make it go away.

And so I sat down, and words I didn’t want to write were written.

.

8592 words I would rate this Mature 18+ if it was a fic, strictly because of the subject matter.

Warnings: Death, mostly.  Religious trauma, brief descriptions of abuse, mentions of mental illness, domestic violence, grief, familial dysfunction, religious abuse, emotional abuse, medical conditions, brief mentions of drug use/abuse, mild gore in reference to corpse decomposition, psychological unease and mild terror, child abuse (mental/emotional/psychological), brief allusion to physical child abuse, cult references, loss of faith, attempted murder, possible actual murder.

A Note:  I love you guys, you’re always so quick and willing to be helpful and offer advice and suggestions and such, and I adore that about you.  But on this piece of work I ask that nobody offer any theories about what happened to my brother - medical, criminal, or otherwise - and please no suggestions on things we could do to pursue investigation, that ship has long sailed.  It’s been 23 years and he’s a cold case.  We spent years trying to sort it out but in the end it’s just something that happened, and we moved on because we had to.  There are a lot of open ends, a lot of question marks, a lot of suspicious details that never connected to anything - and we tried, we truly did.  If anyone out there knows the truth, they’ve never shown themselves to us.  We do have our theories, but my brother was a secretive person living a life none of us knew about, and the people he knew weren’t people we knew.  Everyone involved is either dead or moved on or got away with whatever it was they did, and there are only three of us who still care.  It’s over.

Until today, I’ve never put these events into words.

It was something I needed to do, finally.

This is PART ONE.  There may not be a part two, unless doing this ends up making me feel better.

Please feel free to comment if you wish.  As you can see, pretty much nothing triggers me.  I just ask that you please refrain from the type of comments noted above.

And thank you.

----------

This is, regrettably, a true story.  Nothing has been changed but the names, because the dead don’t like being talked about, and James was just enough of a shit to haunt me for it.

----------

----------

They made up their minds And they started packing They left before the sun came up that day An exit to eternal summer slacking But where were they going without ever knowing the way

They drank up the wine And they got to talking They now had more important things to say And when the car broke down They started walking Where were they going without ever knowing the way

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

Their children woke up And they couldn't find them They left before the sun came up that day They just drove off and left it all behind them But where were they going without ever knowing the way?

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today, today

- The Way, Fastball, 1998

.

That was the year James died in his sleep.

Or that’s what they say, anyway.  Asthma, the likely cause based on his medical history, our first and least disturbing assumption.  Undetermined, the official determination based on the hastily scraped-together autopsy, the best that could be done under the circumstances.  We tell people he had breathing problems, and they nod their heads and agree because they knew he did, and now he’s been gone so long that nobody asks.  Most of the people who ever met him have long moved on or disappeared or died themselves, or just remember him as the enigmatic middle son from the Keithley family that nobody really knew very well.  You know, the odd one, the one that showed up at meetings maybe once a year and smiled nervously but didn’t really talk to anyone and always seemed anxious to leave?  The one who died under mysterious circumstances?  That one.

He left the way he always came in.  Quietly, unexpected, without anyone being aware of either his entrance or his exit.

But me and mom know some things, and she’s not talking.  She probably never will.

So maybe it’s time I did.

December 1998.  I’d gotten married two years previous and moved back to the family land with my new husband.  He hated it there, but we had an affordable place to live.  It wasn’t bad.  He’d tell you otherwise.  The land never sat right with him, but I’d lived there too many years to see it.  I’d been fifteen when my father uprooted his large family from the city and hauled us out to the great back door to nowhere, and even though I’d left several times to wander elsewhere, I always came back.

I didn’t realize why at the time, at any of the multiple times.  But now I know.  That place gets you, and it holds you, and unless you’re goddamned devoted to staying gone you will always be pulled back.  It took me till I was 49 to funnel the necessary amount of devotion away from the religious dedication I’d had jackbooted into me and turn it toward getting out, but against a great number of overwhelming odds I finally did it.

But this isn’t about that, not yet anyway.  This is about my brother James, and how he went to sleep one night and found his own way out.

----------

It was snowing, had been for days, a bit unusual but not unheard of.  The part of the state we lived in was notorious for extended ice storms and we knew a bad one was coming, but until it hit we played in the snow like it was a gift and we were deprived children who knew it was all going to be taken away soon.  My brothers and I were adults but you wouldn’t know it, watching us sneak around in the woods staging elaborate commando attacks on each other.  James was the best of us, a stealth king who could stand in the middle of a room for an hour without a single soul seeing him.  Perception bias, he said.  Your brain ignores me because I obviously don’t belong, like those puzzles where you circle what’s wrong but it takes you forever to find them.

He crept around in the forest scaring the shit out of people, dropping his long tall self out of trees, appearing from nowhere to administer a well aimed snowball to the face of whoever happened to cross his path and then disappearing just as quickly.  We called him a wraith and it wasn’t a good natured jibe.  We meant it.  He made people nervous.  He was the stealthy kind of quiet you associate with danger, and he knew how to do things an average person doesn’t ever have any need to know.  It was a quiet cool that we admired him for, because none of the rest of us had it.

The religion we were raised in kept a tight lid on us, but me and James, we never really let it get into our bones.  We were the smart ones, in retrospect.  I went through the motions by force of habit and a sense of self preservation, doing what was expected and demanded of me, following the rules and making myself a perfect example of a young member of the church so I wouldn’t bring shame on the congregation and my family.  But mostly the congregation.  It was always more important than anything else.  And I had behaving down to an art form, but mostly when people were looking.  Usually also when they weren’t.

But sometimes, not quite.

And then I prayed for forgiveness about it later because God was supposed to forgive you if you asked him to, right?  The tenet of willful sin being unforgivable never took root with me even though that was what the church conditioned into us through fear and constant repetition.  They said it from the stage two nights a week and again on Sunday to hammer it home.  Two nights a week and again on Sunday my head silently disagreed.  God’s not like that.  And then I did the praying for forgiveness thing even though I knew I was right, because I was disagreeing with the church, and the church was God’s channel here on Earth, wasn’t it?  I committed a mortal sin at least three times a week on that subject alone, and though the dread of divine punishment was hardwired into me, I never could reconcile the concept of a loving and forgiving God destroying me simply for knowing better.

I’m not sure the comprehension of an overwatching deity ever actually established itself in James’ brain.  A moral code, yes.  But isn’t that what God is, really?  Maybe he understood more about God and forgiveness than the rest of us.  But he was considered an unapproved fringe member of the church because he couldn’t suffer people and noise and being looked at and he refused to preach, and he was soft-shunned as a result.  Because if you weren’t all in to the point of being willing to die at any moment for your faith, you were as good as faithless.

And faithless meant condemned.  And the congregation couldn’t be bothered with condemned people, regardless of their reasons for not having both feet in the water.  The first and only option on their list was to put the person out and let them find their own way back once they realized they had nobody left in the world who cared about them.

James escaped that somehow.  He was supposed to be shunned whole scale, but he wasn’t trying to convince anyone to leave the faith and he presented no threat to anyone’s strength of belief, and so far as anyone knew he’d committed no grave sins other than disinterest.  So the rule that dictated we cast him out was bent enough to allow him to remain living on the family land, though at one point during a fit of overzealous righteousness my mother had tried to have a family meeting to vote on whether or not we were going to let him stay.  I refused to vote and when I walked out of the house the meeting fell apart.

I’ve never forgiven her for that.  Her son’s life being put to a vote with her presiding over the proceedings, vengeful and unfeeling and devoid of compassion on behalf of God himself.  It takes my breath away, the anger, still to this day.  The only thing I ever truly learned from my mother about parenting was a long and intensely detailed list of what not to do to my own children, and I suppose I should be grateful for that.  It’s a bitter thank-you to have to give, but it’s something.

We knew James as much as he would allow us to, and not an inch further.  Which meant the extent of our knowledge of him pretty much stretched to include the singular fact that he was different.  What that meant, I still don’t really know - but it was there from the day he was born, that slight off-ness, the oddly off center calibration that you can’t really see so much as sense in a person.  I know now he was likely on the autism spectrum and he walked through life seeing and reacting to everything differently than most of us, but that wasn’t a thing back then.  You were just weird, or you weren’t.  And I’m not convinced that was a bad thing for him, strictly speaking.  But in the confines of our religion and our family’s devout and sometimes violent dedication to it, it took its toll almost daily.

He stood out, and he was very much a person who didn’t want to.  He wanted to fade into the background, to not be seen, to not be known.  And our religion didn’t tolerate that kind of nonsense, because we were commanded to be bold bearers of The Word Of God, and no exceptions were made.

None.

I’m going to stop calling it a religion now.  I beg your indulgence as I shift to calling it what it is, because calling it a religion is an insult to actual religions that don’t destroy peoples’ lives with callous indifference and murderous glee.

We were raised in a doomsday death cult.  There’s no other name that fits.

And we were trapped in it and its ugly cycle of neverending mental and emotional manipulation and abuse until we were adults, and some of us are still bound to it.  My oldest brother worked his way up to the upper levels of oversight in the local congregation and was solidly entrenched in it until his death, which is a story for later.  My youngest brother, the last remaining living blood sibling I have, is still deeply in it to this day and will likely never leave it.

I took the hard way out, three years ago, by walking away.

James, though.  He took the easy way.  He simply closed his eyes, and he was free.

----------

December 22, 1998.  Three days before Christmas, though that meant nothing to us.  The cult told us Christmas was a filthy demonic pagan ritual that was condemned by God, so to us the season was just a nice chilly time of year with lots of time off from work.  We’d had an unusual amount of snow, the most we’d had in years.  The roads were impassable and everyone was home except my husband, who worked close enough that his boss at the glass shop came and picked him up that morning with chains on his tires.  Lots of windshields had shattered from the sudden violent cold that had struck the previous night and Scott had the only glass shop for sixty miles.

I think it must have been around noon, and likely my mother had sent my dad up the hill to see if James wanted to come down for the lunch she was making.  He and his wife had split up against the strict rules of the church after a few years of suffering through an ill advised marriage, an important detail to this story that will come into the tale later, and he was alone up there at the top of the hill a lot.  Sometimes he forgot to eat, or he got so busy that he just didn’t bother, so our mother always made something for him because even though he was in his 20′s he was still a kid who needed looking after and her zealous fervor against him had died down with time.  I think he let her believe he was helpless because it worked in his favor and there was always lunch waiting for him in her kitchen as a result.

He was different, he wasn’t dumb.

We all lived on the hill back then with the exception of our youngest brother.  He’d moved to the city with his new wife not long prior.  The locals jokingly called the place a commune, and I guess they weren’t completely wrong.  Thirty-eight acres of wooded land far beyond the city limits that we’d painstakingly spent years carving a livable space into, with five houses, all built from the ground up and inhabited by an extended family of well known culties from a well known cult.  It’s almost comical, looking back on it, knowing now how they kept an eye on us for years to make sure we weren’t doing anything weird up there.

They should have run us off with pitchforks and burning stakes at the very beginning.

Things might have ended differently for us if they had.

----------

My grandparents lived at one end of the property, an old couple as simple and solid as salted soup, devoutly religious and devoted to the cult and very much cut from the can survive anything and probably will cloth like so many old country folks of their generation.  They were waiting out the end of days up there in their little wooden house, expecting the final hour of this old system to come long before their own demise.  I liked my grandmother, she had a sweet smile and fell asleep every time granddad started talking about the Bible and she paid me five dollars every Wednesday to drive her into town to get groceries, and years later, when she was dying, she told me she’d had a dream where she met my unborn son.  I was four months pregnant and didn’t know yet that I was having a boy.  She died before he was born, but to this day, fifteen years later, he tells me he’s sure he met her, he just can’t remember when.

I was scared of my grandfather.  Not terrified, but there was nothing grandfatherly to him and I always suspected he never actually liked kids much.  He’d once told us a story about the great Fort Worth flood that wiped out most of the city when my mom was a baby, and how he had told my grandmother to let go of my 2-year-old mother while he was struggling to get them across a rushing flooded creek in water up to their shoulders.  My grandmother couldn’t swim.  We could make another Ruthie, he said.  But I couldn’t get another ‘Nita.

He said it proudly, like he was to be admired for his choice.  I was young when he told that story, but it settled into me that this was evil.

Even when he was old as dirt and dying of a brain tumor in hospice care, he made me uneasy.  I was never close to him.  But for some reason, in his final days, he forgot who everyone was except me.  I had been living in another state for years and he hadn’t seen me since before the tumor started taking his life.  But when I walked into the room he turned his head and looked at me, and he mouthed my name.

He couldn’t speak.  I don’t know what he was trying to say, struggling with words that nobody could hear.  And I felt bad.  I didn’t want to be the last person he recognized.  My cousins adored him and had spent the last few years constantly at his side, and they were angry, maybe justifiably, that I was the one he reached for.

I didn’t want that at all.

I don’t believe he was a bad man, but he never spoke of anything except the cult’s interpretation of the Bible, and it was as tiresome as it was terrifying.  Granddads are supposed to be fun.  Ours quoted doctrine at us in a deep loud commanding voice that you couldn’t interrupt and you couldn’t tune out, and once he got going you had to just settle in and wait for him to run out of zealous steam.  And then he would suddenly stop and command grandmother to turn on a John Wayne movie and bring him some ice cream, and it was over until the next time.

I know my mother resented him.  She knew grandmother was the one that had refused to let her go, the one that had held onto her even though she almost drowned by the simple act of holding on.  She knew her father had been willing to let her wash away and drown.  That he thought she was interchangeable with whatever baby they would have next.  How she could spend her entire life with that knowledge and not be deeply affected by it was something that never made sense to me, but now, when she’s in her 70′s and I’m in my 50′s, I finally understand.  It affected her.  She’ll just be damned if she’ll let anyone see it.  And she had stood there in that hospice room watching him mouth my name with resentment burning in her eyes, though she would have rather died than let anyone know what it was for.  He’d forgotten her weeks ago.

The house in the center of the hill was mom and dad.  The homestead.  The house we’d all lived in together, that we’d built with our own hands, the first thing that marked that wild overgrown hill as a place where people actually lived.  A long path through the woods connected it to the grandparents’ house, and it was the epicenter of everything in our lives.  James and I had lived in the upstairs rooms of that house until we both moved out and married our respective mates years later, a reprehensible act on our part that was never okay with my mother and that she never forgave either of us for.  She’d wanted us all to stay.  We can all live here together until the New System comes, she always said.  That’s how the Bible says it’s supposed to be.  We can all keep each other safe and on the right path until the end comes, and then we’ll all be here together forever.

A decade later when I sat up on the hill watching that house burn to the ground, there was as much relief as grief billowing into the sky with the black smoke.  It was the end of an era, and it was far beyond time for it.

Nobody saw it but me.  James was dead, had been for years.  Robbie was dead now too.  Dad was gone, so was granddad.  Me and my youngest brother David were the last two left of the kids, but he had moved to a neighboring city when he got married and he has never seen things the way I see them.  We were of different generations, we weren’t raised the same way, and he’d never experienced the abuse I lived with for the first half of my life.  And he had dedicated his own life to the cult with all the honesty and lack of guile that I didn’t have when I’d made my own dedication vows at the too-young age of sixteen.

It was the end of an era, but apparently only for me.

James’ house was up the hill, past a clearing where my dad used to keep old cars that he cannibalized for parts.  Our oldest brother Robbie, long married with kids of his own, lived at the bottom on the farthest corner of the land.  And my house was on the slope to the west, built on the spot where we’d cleared off an old half-fallen homestead from the late 1800′s, dutifully paying no mind to the fact that a grave was nestled into the slope, right where the yellow daffodils grew.  The cult told us superstition was tied up with the demons and false religion, so we didn’t have the built-in human instinct that tells most people to stay the hell away from certain things.

We just pretended it wasn’t there, and put no importance on it.  It was just an old grave.  The soil was good and the garden I planted next to it did well, though those strange daffodils always wound themselves through everything I put in the ground.  My husband said something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t pay any attention to him.  He hadn’t been raised as devout as me.

My dad knocked on my door around lunchtime and I opened it.  He backed up, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, the fancy leather coat the dealership had awarded him when he was designated a five-star Chrysler technician and given the state’s first and only license to work on the new Vipers that had recently rolled off the prototype line.  It was a cool jacket.  Made him look like the old pictures my other grandmother had shown me of him from the early 1960′s, when he was young and very much a product of a fancier era.  He’d never stopped greasing his hair back and was still so thin that he and I wore the same size jeans.

I’ve never understood the look on his face when I opened the door.  To this day I can’t sort it.  It wasn’t a blankness like so many people who’ve seen death wear without awareness.  It wasn’t grief.  It wasn’t even shock.

He was sorry.

Those were the first words out of his mouth.

I’m sorry.

I stood there, not knowing what he was sorry for.  It was cold.  I couldn’t push the screen door open very far because of the snow blocking it.  And my father was standing at the bottom of the steps James had helped my husband build, his hands shoved down far into his pockets like a penitent child about to get in trouble, telling me he was sorry.

James is dead, he finally said.  He’s in his house.  I went up there and he’s dead.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I do now - just now, this very moment in fact, I know that I was the first person he told.  He came straight from James’ house to mine and told me my brother was dead.

I don’t know what I said back to him, I just remember sitting down on the top step and feeling the cold bite of the snow through my pajama pants.  There’s a vague recollection of putting my face in my hands, and the embarrassing knowledge that I did that simply because I didn’t know what else to do.  And dad just stood there, nervously stepping from foot to foot in the snow, because he didn’t know what else to do either.

I think I asked How at some point.  He said he didn’t know.  He had something in his pocket but to this day I don’t know what it was.

I don’t know if it was important.  Something tells me it was.  Or maybe it was just the eternally present handkerchief he always kept on him.

I’m sorry, he said again.  He seemed to feel like it was his fault somehow.  I’m sorry.

What do we do?  I asked him.  I’ve never felt more blank.  What are we supposed to do?

I don’t remember what he said, other than he was going to get my older brother.  I remember thinking that was a good idea.  Robbie would know what to do.  He always did.  Brash and blustery and bigmouthed, he got things done while other people stood around debating how to do them.  He would get on it, whatever needed doing.  He would figure it out.

I went back in the house and dad walked away, headed down the path through the woods that connected my house to Robbie’s, hands still shoved deep in his pockets, the big retro vintage Chrysler emblem on the back of his jacket the last thing I saw before I pulled the screen door shut.  I stared down for a minute at the mound of snow it had scooped into my livingroom, still with no clue what I was supposed to do.

No clue at all.

I kicked the snow back outside and shut the door.

----------

It’s an odd thing, watching the coroner’s van drive away with someone you know inside it.  Someone you saw just yesterday.  Someone who was alive.  Someone who should still be alive but isn’t, somehow.  And since there’s really no way to earn a ride in a coroner’s van without dying, there’s an awful unsettling sensation to it that you can’t get away from.  The last time I saw James he was laughing that devious little laugh of his, his eyes red and bloodshot from the ever present asthma he’d suffered with his entire life.  I don’t count the sight of the coroner’s van leaving the hill via our long steep driveway with his cold corpse tucked into a black zippered bag, because I didn’t see him.  I never saw him.  I didn’t see him dead in his house and I didn’t see them carry him out, I didn’t see them put him in the van.  I didn’t see him later, when it was all over with.  And if I try hard enough I can imagine that van empty, with that long black bag tossed crumpled in the back without a body in it, and James somewhere else living his life however the hell he pleases.

I hold onto that.  Some days it helps.  And some days I think I see him, walking by the side of the road or getting out of a car in the post office parking lot, and it makes me happy thinking he escaped.  I see him in every hitchhiker, in every wandering traveler making his way down the interstate, in every tall thin man I glimpse from the corner of my eye as I go about my business in town.

He’s out there.

I hope he’s happy.

The ice storm hit the next day.

----------

For the next two weeks we were stuck on our hill.  Power out, no electricity, no heat, no lights, roads iced over and impassable.  We all piled up in mom and dad’s house, quietly grieving James, trying to stay warm.  Most of the state lost power for days, including the city 150 miles away where his body had been taken to the state coroner’s office.  There was no apparent cause of death, so the state ordered an autopsy.

His body had just been placed into cold storage to wait its turn when the power grid went down.  And then, by some unholy stroke of nightmarish luck, the facility’s generators failed.

Nobody could make it in to work because of the ice.  By the time someone finally got into the morgue the cold storage had been down for four days.

Six bodies melted, including James.

----------

No viable autopsy could be done, though they tried their best I suppose.  The end report was obtained two months later.  It was mostly inconclusive due to the long delay and resultant decomposition of tissue.  There was apparent scarring on James’ heart, but it was old scarring and had nothing to do with his death.  His lungs were scarred as well, but that was no surprise, he’d had severe asthma his entire life.  There was no determinable cause of death, no inflicted trauma, no presence of illicit drugs as far as they could tell from the limited toxicology report they managed with what they had to work with.

No reason.

He’d simply died.

It seemed fitting, to me at least, that the end of him be enshrouded in an unsolvable mystery.  He was a secretive person, intensely private.  He would have loved knowing nobody had a clue what happened to him.

And so we drew our own conclusion as a family.  He’d had an asthma attack in his sleep.  There had been an inhaler next to his bed, but it was new and still in the box.  He simply hadn’t woken up to use it.  Dad didn’t participate in the drawing of this conclusion, his input kept stoically to himself, like he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

We pretended not to see it.

He and mom braved the last of the ice a few days later to make the 150 mile drive to see James one last time.

They came back different.

You couldn’t tell it was him, my mother said.  He was melted, literally.  It was like one of those science fiction movies where they melt you with a laser beam and you turn to goo.

Dad had nothing to say.  He went to bed and stayed there until the next day.

You can go see him, mom told me.  I’ll go with you if you want to go.  But I don’t recommend it.

I decided not to go.

And so I never saw my brother dead.  I never saw any proof that he was gone.  He just wasn’t there anymore.  There was no funeral, he was cremated and his ashes were sent home weeks later, and I went on with my life with the image in my head of James, alive, somewhere else.

----------

Dad was different from that day on.  He’d always been stoic, terse, strict.  My childhood had been spent in fear of him, an eternal dread of making him mad and feeling his temper erupt keeping me from showing any hint of a personality during my formative years.  The cult had forced him to abide by the violent tenet of Spare the rod, spoil the child and there was never any risk of me being spoiled.

James being gone flipped a switch in him.  He was nicer suddenly.  Mellow.  Kind.  After the trauma wore off his humor discovered itself and he was funny.  The dour angry demeanor fell off and revealed a man that I was sad never to have known before.  He and I became friends.  I could sense in his new attitude toward me that he regretted how he’d raised me and respected the way I’d always stood up and been my own person despite it.  But my mother was falling off the deep end and for all the newfound easygoingness of my father, she counterbalanced it with an extremism born of the religious fervor of a mother determined to gain enough favor with God to see her dead child again.  And she was going to make sure the rest of us did too.

We all had to get good and straight on the path, get completely right and stay that way, or we’d never see James again.  He’d be in the New World and we wouldn’t, and how would she explain that to him?  She and I worked together in a law office at the time and as she became more unhinged and unpleasant, I reacted by becoming more outgoing and accomplished.  Our boss changed my work designation from receptionist to Executive Assistant and started teaching me how to do everything from filing papers at the courthouse to photographing accident scenes.  I no longer answered to my mother, the office manager.  I answered directly to the boss.

That didn’t go over well.  She was a control freak with heavy untreated trauma, and the one person in the world she felt the most obsessive need to control was suddenly no longer under her thumb in a workspace where she considered herself the supreme authority.  She countermanded every order the boss gave me and tried to load me up with general office chores that left me no time to do the important assignments he’d given me.  I had no choice but to tell her she wasn’t my superior anymore.

She chose that day to have her nervous breakdown over James, jumping out of my car at a red light on the way home and storming angrily through a shopping mall with me trailing frantically along behind her, yelling for security to arrest me while I tried to get her to calm down.  I ended up telling her she wasn’t the only person who lost James but that none of the rest of us were allowed to experience our own grief because we were too busy catering to hers.

She sat down on a bench outside the sporting goods store and glared at me with a cold hatred I’ve seen on very few other faces, ever.

I knew it would be you, she hissed at me.

That moment changed our relationship forever.  It changed me forever.  That was the day I decided my life was my own, that she not only didn’t have authority over me at work, she didn’t have authority over me anywhere else either.  She could no longer dictate my actions, my behavior, my thoughts and feelings.

For this she disowned me.  It was the first of several disownings over the next few years.  I got used to it.  We went to work the next day like nothing had happened, and I didn’t do a single thing on the task list she slapped down on my desk.  It was a metaphor for the rest of my life, but I didn’t know it yet.

My husband and I moved out of state a couple of months later, away from that hill, away from her increasingly controlling paranoia and bitterness, the first of many small steps toward freedom.

As we were driving away with our trailer full of personal belongings behind us, he said one thing that I tried to argue against, but that somewhere deep inside I knew was probably right.

That land is cursed, he said.

----------

A few weeks before we moved my youngest brother came to town and we went into James’ house together.  It was exactly like it had been the day my dad found him.  The only thing that stood out as different was the bare mattress on the bed - the men from the coroner had wrapped him up in the sheet he’d been laying on and took it with them, leaving just the naked springform mattress James had bought for Jessica right before her final breakdown and their subsequent separation.

It took me a while to go in the bedroom, but I knew from the moment I walked into the house that I was going to end up there.  I needed to see it, the place where James had closed his eyes and left us.

There was a small puddle of dried blood near the foot of the bed, brown and stained into the fabric.  James always slept backwards, with his head at the wrong end.  The blood had come from his nose.

I touched it.  I don’t know why.  It was dry.

He was gone.

----------

David and I laughed a lot that day.  James had been funny in a way that was distinctly him, quiet and of few words, but those words had always counted.  And as we sorted through his things and talked about him and moved some of his stuff into boxes to be stored away, I felt as much awed respect as befuddlement at what was around me.  He’d never been a conformist, which I knew was why the cult had never gotten a firm grasp on him.  He was unknowable and therefore unbindable.  But his house was proof that he didn’t conform to any human expectations either, and nothing in it made sense unless you’d spent time around him.

There was an engine in the bathtub.  I’m not sure what it went to.  Another engine, in the beginning stages of disassemblage, rested on a blue tarp in the center of the livingroom floor, obviously the last project he’d been working on.  There wasn’t much furniture - his wife had taken most of it when she left and it would have never entered his mind to replace any of it.  Jessica’s cookware was in the kitchen cabinets, unused, some of it still in the original boxes, some not even fully unwrapped from their wedding shower years before.  Jessica didn’t cook, she microwaved.  David asked me if I thought it would be okay for him to take a glass Pyrex measuring cup because he’d broken his.  I told him to take it.  It had never been used.

I didn’t want anything, but knew I needed to take something.  One of my husband’s solo CDs was sitting on the entertainment center and the cover, the cover I’d designed, caught my eye and brought me to the CD player to pop the tray open.

Inside was a CD single of The Way.

It was the only thing I took.

----------

My husband told me some time later that my dad and older brother had altered the scene before the police arrived.  After the phonecall from me his boss had rushed him home and he’d gone up to James’ house without my knowledge.  He’d thought it strange that he’d had to step around at least a dozen empty compressed air cans scattered haphazardly around the place as he entered, like they’d been used and tossed aside one after another.  There had been several more on the floor around the bed.  My father had told him to go back down and see how mom and I were doing, and when he returned to James’ house after the coroner’s departure, the cans were gone.  Other than that he said things seemed different, but he couldn’t say quite how.  Just not the same.

He told me my dad didn’t call the police until after he and Robbie had been in there at least an hour, alone with the body.

It’s not something we’ve talked about often, because there’s no satisfactory explanation for it that either of us can come up with.  My mother says they probably didn’t want the police to assume the cans meant he was huffing compression fluid and accidentally killed himself, because Look at the shame and reproach that would bring on the congregation if anyone thought such a thing!  We all knew he used the compressed air to clear the valves on the engines he was working on, all mechanics do, it’s common.  Wouldn’t the police have accepted that explanation?  Dad was the only one that spoke to them.  They wrote down whatever he said, and then they left, and then the coroner came and took James away and that was that.  My father, the most upright straight-and-narrow devoutly dedicated man I’ve ever known in my life, misled the police for a reason that he took with him to his own grave.

The only other person in the world who knew the truth about it took it to his grave too.

At the same time.

In the same car.

Four years later, on October 18, 2002.

----------

The big garbage bag of empty air cans and whatever else that was removed from James’ house that morning had been stashed in my dad’s garage and stayed there until a few weeks after he and Robbie’s joint funeral, when my mother asked my husband’s old boss to come and dispose of it.  Scott was a man who knew people who could do things.

The evidence, whatever it was evidence of, vanished.

----------

The mystery around James never dissolved and eventually no one talked about it anymore, I guess because there was no way we could ever truly find out what happened without him here to tell us.  There were a lot of details that we could never find a way to weave together into anything that made sense and a lot of it was probably inconsequential anyway.  There was a girlfriend that he’d tried to keep hidden from us, a woman that was quite a bit older than him who wasn’t a member of the cult and therefore needed to be kept a secret.  In the end she had convinced him to stop hiding their relationship and he’d bought her a ring.  We met her all of twice before he died, and within days of his passing she left town with her brother and never came back, taking whatever she might have known with her.

James’ ex Jessica had sneaked onto the hill and broken into his house to put a dead raccoon in his kitchen sink a few days prior to his death.  We were shocked when he told us she trespassed on the land often without anyone knowing, and my mother made my father fix the electric gate down at the road so that it wouldn’t open without one of three clickers in the possession of herself, my father, and me.  James would have to come to her house and get hers any time he needed to leave the hill, an arrangement he agreed to because Jessica stole things from his house all the time, she would absolutely take a gate opener if she saw it.

He told us the gate wouldn’t keep her out though, and that she didn’t come in that way anyway.  The only way to protect ourselves from her was to lock her up and he doubted even that would do it.

He died less than a week later, and twenty three years later we still don’t know how or why.

----------

We never felt safe on the hill again.  Jessica was deranged in the worst possible way, we’d known it for a while, and James was her obsession.  She’d threatened to kill him multiple times and had tried twice.  We hadn’t known this, because James, big strong stoic Clint Eastwood type that he was, wasn’t about to tell anyone he was violently abused for years by a skinny little woman that everyone believed was not much more than a meek dormouse with shyness issues and a case of painful awkwardness.  But we knew she was evil.  We just didn’t have any proof.

The first thing my mother said after the initial emotional breakdown of finding her son dead was Jessica did this, I don’t know how but I know she did it.

I believe she was probably right.  But if Jessica was anything she was wily and devious with a strong survival instinct and an uncanny ability to lie convincingly and draw sympathy onto herself.  She’d convinced us for years that she was the perfect combination of sweetly harmless and endearingly clueless, but that only lasted until the day she called 911 screaming that James was beating her and then threw herself face first into a tree in their front yard and sat, calmly singing and coloring in a coloring book on the porch with blood running down her forehead, waiting for the police to arrive.  The act she put on when they got there was one for the Academy, but the officers didn’t buy it.

James calmly rolled up his sleeves and showed them his scars where she’d burned him and slashed him with a kitchen knife.  He pulled up his shirt and pointed out the marks she’d left on him with her teeth and nails.  He hooked a finger into his mouth and showed them the empty hole where she’d knocked one of his teeth out with a baseball bat.  One of the officers asked him why he hadn’t killed her and buried her somewhere on the land already.

She left in the back of the squad car, and my mother took James to the courthouse to get divorce papers started two days later.

Jessica came to his memorial service when we finally had it, several weeks after his death.  She wasn’t invited but we couldn’t keep her from coming.  She wore black like a widow and created a dramatic disruption complete with loud wailing and declarations of undying love, and afterward she stood to one side of the room, smirking at us with the kind of icy malice that you only see on the dangerously deranged, and then usually only in the movies.  Several people commented in hushed voices, asking why she’d been allowed to come.  At one point she started wailing They killed him!!, but everyone with the exception of her mother ignored her.

Her mother, who was still in our congregation, flitted around the room chatting with everyone, sobbing her heart out like it was her own son we’d just memorialized.  She was an ER nurse and had been famously fired from her job at the hospital for taking locked-cabinet medications home by the purse load.  She claimed she put them in her pocket to use on her shift and forgot to return them to the cabinet before leaving.

Jessica had been staying with her for a while.

----------

We fed the crowd at mom’s later that afternoon with my husband and his boss guarding the gate, making sure she didn’t try to come into my mother’s house.  The police were called preemptively, and because this was a town of 300 with not much of anything else to do, a squad car was dispatched and stationed near the inlet to the main drive.

Jessica showed up not much later, like we knew she would.  She drove past the police and parked a few yards down from them in plain sight, just sitting there by the side of the road, far enough away from our property that we couldn’t legally do anything about it.  The officers got out and talked to her, warned her not to cause us any problems, and she fed them a woeful tale about being banned from her beloved husband’s memorial service and denied the right to say goodbye to him.

The officers knew there was no body at that service to say goodbye to.  They also knew her.

My husband came up the hill and told us she was down at the road and that Scott was blocking the driveway with his truck to keep her out.  I told my mother it was time to file a restraining order against her.  She was living in fear and Jessica was known to be trespassing on our property frequently.  No, she told me with tears in her eyes but not a sign of distress on her face.  It was a look I knew, because my mother rarely showed emotion unless she was angry and the rest of the time it was this cold detachment.  That would bring reproach on the congregation because everyone knows what we are.  I can’t do that.  I won’t let her win that way.  I won’t let her cause us to bring shame on God’s name.

God’s name.  I took it in vain that day.

More than once.

I was leaving in a few weeks, moving a thousand miles away.  My husband and I weren’t going to be there to help her keep an eye out, and thirty eight acres of heavily wooded land is impossible to protect and easy to sneak onto from a hundred different directions, James had shown us proof of that.

God will protect us as long as we do the right thing and leave it to him, she said.  He knows what she is.

I think it was just a coincidence that nothing terrible happened in the following weeks, because my faith was getting tenuous and a lot of prayers were going unanswered.  But Jessica quietly disappeared back to her own world after a couple of infuriating weeks of putting herself in our paths every chance she got, and not long after that my husband and I moved away, and as we left the driveway for what we thought would be the last time he sighed and shook his head with the exasperation of a man about to say I told you so.

“That land is cursed,” he said.

I tried to disagree, though I don’t know why.

----------

Less than a mile up the road we passed a man walking.  He was tall and thin and covered in the dust of a long journey with a ratty backpack strapped to his back, and as we passed him I caught his reflection in the side mirror.

It was James, I knew it in my heart every bit as strongly as I knew it couldn’t be.

He was walking away from the hill, toward the west.  The way we were going.  And I swear on whatever holy relic you wish to place under my hand that he raised his head and met eyes with me in the mirror, and he smiled.

.

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved in gold And it's always summer They'll never get cold They'll never get hungry They'll never get old and gray You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere They won't make it home But they really don't care They wanted the highway They're happier there today

.

[itsclydebitches]

I was once more thinking of vol 8 and other works to compare it to. I hit Harry Potter, specifically Order of the Phoenix. Literally all that happened there showed a much better "proactive Hero" and "Big Bad vs Big Good" battle that it feels unfair to compare. What say you Clyde?

It's been a very long time since I read Order of the Phoenix, but putting aside that and the series' problems with representation (something that always feels like it needs to be acknowledged when discussing HP nowadays), Rowling did a good job of setting up both motivation and justification for Harry's actions. Which isn't to say that he was never wrong — quite the opposite, especially in OotP — but that Harry's involvement in this war is justified in a way that Ruby's involvement is not. He's not just generally active (no tea sipping equivalent scenes), but we understand why he's the one taking that action.

Harry is an unwilling participant forced to fight due to a prophecy, so when he stumbles along the way, we as the reader are understanding because jeez, what else what he supposed to do? Literally no one else can do this and he's trying his best. Ruby, in contrast, is not necessary to this fight. We might have gotten that with her silver eyes, but we didn't, so when Ruby willingly steps up — or, in Volume 8, forcibly takes control — and then gets upset because things didn't go well, the viewer (or at least some viewers: us) are far less forgiving because she demanded this responsibility and then found she didn't like having it. When Harry rushes off to the Department of Mysteries, endangering many of his friends in the process (even if they volunteered) we understand that this action is done out of love. We've spent five books establishing Harry's desire for a family, it's literally his greatest wish according to the Mirror of Erised, so going after Sirius, while reckless, is such an in-character, relatable, human decision. It's integral to who Harry is as a person. Compare that to the lack of work done surrounding Summer and the unanswered question of why Ruby is fighting Salem. Because it's the right thing to do? Great, fantastic, but uh... that doesn't really explain or justify why she's leading the charge when all these other huntsmen — with the same goals, more experience, better plans, etc. —are trying to do The Right Thing too. When thinking about HP vs. RWBY, my mind always goes back to that moment at the end of the first book when Harry tries to tell McGonagall about the stone and she brushes him off. "Ah," I thought later. "That's why three 11yos are going off to save the magical artifact when there are adult, full-fledged wizards around to do it instead. The kids tried to turn hand this off to the adults and the adults failed them." Now, combine this with Harry's growing tendency to go it alone, the implication that Dumbledore may have been allowing him to face certain threats to get stronger, each book's individual situation like a hidden chamber that only Harry can enter, his Godfather being on the run, a magically binding contract that keeps him in a competition because the bad guys are specifically after him... Harry is at the heart of the story. He's integral to it, his part in the fight inevitable, so all that's left is to see how he bears that burden.

Ruby is not integral to this fight, her presence and even her silver eyes are not necessary, her facing down Salem is only inevitable from a meta perspective regarding expectations for a protagonist (and then, in Volume 8, Ruby didn't face her.) There's no clear personal motivation to drive her. There's not even a Guardian's of the Galaxy-esque motivation in the form of, "We'll step up because no one else will." Others do keep stepping up and Ruby keeps forcing them to follow her instead, insisting that her way is better. Only problem is, it's arguably not and that's when she has a plan at all. It's like if instead of going after the stone because his professors won't, or going after Sirius because he loves him, or going after Voldemort because a prophecy and a life of having a saving-people-thing has pushed him to that, Harry made his way to the front of this war Just Because, rejecting everyone else who fought in the first war, has more experience, and actual plans along the way. Why does he do this? Because his name is in the title of the book, I guess.

RWBY throws in lost of classic ideas and setups, but doesn't seem to understand their point. Even something as simple as that Big Bad vs. Big Good conflict in Volume 8. Putting aside how muddied this has gotten between the Gods' involvement and Salem's dip in the grimm pool, Volume 8 took the threat of our Big Bad arriving with an army and... ignored it. Instead, they ran with Ironwood as the primary antagonist of the volume, the guy trying to stop Salem, a previously established ally, the guy who just gave up his arm to capture another clear-cut villain, and who throughout Volume 7 demonstrated none of the manipulation we would attribute to a Dumbledore-like figure. Rather than running with their Big Bad's arrival, RWBY asked how they could force one of the good guys to become a bad guy instead, hence the sudden shooting of Oscar and murder of the councilman. This is a far from perfect comparison (and I take my virtual life in my hands bringing up another controversial character lol), but it's a little like if after we learned about which side Snape was truly on, he suddenly tried to kill Hermione, succeeded in killing a minor character like Professor Flitwick, and then made plans to destroy all of Hogwarts. Meanwhile, everyone is ignoring Voldemort standing on the front lawn because the narrative randomly made Snape the biggest problem instead. So a lot of the fanbase is like, "Yeah he's absolutely a dick and his horrific past/contentious choices are the point of his character... but he's also supposed to be one of the good guys at the end of the day? And the Big Bad is right there? We can argue about how 'good' Snape is until we're blue in the face, but he's no Voldemort. Why did you feel the need to chuck the morally gray character off the deep end for our heroes to oppose when our primary antagonist is literally right here, trying to kill them?" From this, to introducing a dead mother that in no way motivates our cast, to having Oscar face down Salem with an improvised weapon instead of Ruby with her eyes, to giving Penny an arc about accepting her android body only to rip it away, etc. etc. RWBY continuously throws out ideas without understanding what they're meant to accomplish. There's a lot to criticize about Harry Potter nowadays, but a lack of logical development isn't one of them.

And just to chuck in another text — because I too think about what has done Volume 8 themes better lol — consider: Loki. Stop reading now if you don't want spoilers, but a couple episodes in Loki and Sylvie end up on a dying planet that is only evacuating the rich. That's said overtly in both the dialogue and visually in the mise-en-scene, with poor people screaming that only the rich are getting tickets for the rocket and elaborately dressed elites enjoying the comforts of that ride. Then, just as they're about to escape, leaving the rest of their world behind, a piece of the moon hits the ship, either killing them instantly or stranding them with the people they abandoned. And I thought to myself, "See, this makes sense in a way RWBY never did." Evacuation was never about wealth in RWBY, despite what the fandom continually claims. Ironwood was trying to evacuate everyone and only stopped because they all assumed Salem would be killing them momentarily. This situation included Relics and a Maiden that would easily turn the tide of the war, meaning their safety influenced the whole world, not just these people. Mantle was not necessarily about to be destroyed — indeed, we find out later that Salem had no interest in it — and it was always a bad faith (and OOC) assumption that Ironwood was leaving his kingdom for good. The story doesn't even acknowledge the huge number of Mantle citizens already on Atlas when the attack begins. I was just sitting there thinking, "This two episode mini conflict in an insane show with alligators and time shenanigans somehow holds up better than RWBY's 27 episodes that are trying to be deep. How does that happen?"

#rwde #rwby #Harry Potter #HP #mymetas

[mbti-notes]

Hi MBTI. Not type related but I still want to ask because of your social insight. What does respect mean to you? I’ve met people who preach feminism but do not communicate honestly and clearly with girls they sleep around with (eg ghosting), which makes me think that feminism is just political theory, but in practice it means to truly respect other people regardless of their gender (ie being honest, clear and able to put ones anxieties/insecurities aside momentarily to ensure the well-being of

[con't: the other person). I asked myself exactly what respect entails, it’s a concept Ive taken for granted and thought I knew but realized I’ve never actually read/heard someone really putting into words. I’ve been reading online and a lot of people seem to muddle it with the word “admiration” and I think I disagree because I think respect is more about being open to sharing common ground and not placing someone above or below you, as admiration could cause. To me respect and  equality are more similar, and that’s how I linked it to feminism. How would you define respect? And what do you think about this? Thank you and all the best!<3 ]

You're mixing several issues together, which makes your question too complicated. Respect and making moral judgments are big enough topics without adding gender into the mix.

I remember once, a long time ago, I was grappling with a difficult moral dilemma. I approached a few people to talk about it. One person judged me as "incompetent" because the matter seemed quite easy in their mind. One person judged me as "weak" because I wasn't willing to just do what I wanted to do. One person judged me as "fake" because they thought I was only worried about appearing like a moral person in the eyes of others. One person judged me as "selfish" because I wasn't willing to sacrifice myself for the greater good. One person judged me as "overthinking" the matter because I was worried about more than just myself.

Of course, not being assholes, their judgments came out as veiled implications rather than direct criticisms. However, this example reveals some truth: People's moral judgments are often quite egocentric, a mere reflection of their own subjective ego conflicts about what it means to be a "good" or "bad" person. Whichever way they choose to conceptualize morality is what they expect of others (i.e. projection).

We all have to make moral judgments and navigate difficult moral situations. One thing that significantly influences people's ability to make good moral decisions is their level of ego development, you can read more about it in the Type Dev Guide. Suffice it to ask: Is your conception of morality more rule-based (i.e. about the power to judge) or more virtue-based (i.e. about the wisdom to do right)?

The more egocentric someone is, the more invested they are in maintaining a positive self-image, and the more sensitive they are to any data that would threaten their ego and suggest that they are a "bad" person. Egocentric people are more likely to use a rule-based approach to morality because its starkness and simplicity allow for easy detection and deflection of ego threats. If morality is a simple matter of knowing the rules of right and wrong, then moral judgments are a simple matter of whether people followed the rules.

For example, society says that you should work hard in school, get a good job, earn money, and your reward is that you are able to afford your life. Therefore, if you didn't succeed in school, you didn't get a good job, you can't earn much money, you can't afford the things you need, then there is something "wrong" with you. In short, you failed to follow the rules, so you deserve to be punished with the negative consequence of poverty. Rule-based morality is "safe" for the ego because there's no ambiguity that makes you doubt your moral judgment, and hence no reason to doubt your own moral worth.

People often talk about whether someone "deserves" respect, often because they want to make an argument that someone doesn't deserve respect for something bad they did. The more "admirable" someone is, the more respect they deserve? I will respect this person because they are "nice"? I will not extend respect to that person because they are "mean"?

If you approach respect with these "rules", you essentially get to play god. You get to sit on a high horse and judge people as worthy or unworthy. If you obey the rules of being an "admirable" person, you are called a "good" person, so you get rewarded with respect; whereas if you disobey the rules, you are a "bad" person, so you get punished with less respect or even disrespect. This way of thinking is rather childish. Notice how kids argue that they don't have to follow the rules when they see someone else breaking the rules. Their idea of morality boils down to whether they themselves win or lose.

Children, understandably, think in stark terms of reward and punishment because they are only starting to learn what it means to be an "acceptable" member of society. They only see what's on the surface because they aren't yet capable of more sophisticated moral reasoning. When an adult hasn't learned more sophisticated moral reasoning, they continue with the superficial idea of reward and punishment, only they take it further. Now that they are "adult" by society's superficial age standard, they possess the social status and thus the social power to dole out rewards and punishments to anyone "beneath" them in status. In essence, "I was subject to the rules as a child, and now I get to enforce the rules as an adult."

Adding gender into the mix, a lot of people abide by "rules" that they learned in childhood about what a "man" is, what a "woman" is, how they are different, and how people "should" behave according to their gender. Men, as a social group, are taught to obey one set of rules, while women, as a social group, are taught to obey another set of rules. This social conditioning shows up in people's implicit gender biases as well as outright gender discrimination.

If men, as a group, possess the majority of social power and privilege, they become the default reference point for everyone. Social and political decisions are predominantly made from their point of view, in accordance with their needs and desires, and this encourages them to treat women as objects that are only worthy of respect as long as they prop up masculine power. Women, as a group, are taught to see the world through the masculine perspective and believe that masculinity is superior to femininity, so they must behave submissively and serve their purpose to men.

As an individual man, if you follow the rules and elevate masculinity over femininity, you get rewarded with status and power. If you don't follow the rules, you get punished with lower status and being branded as undesirable (not a "real" man). As a woman, if you follow the rules and elevate masculinity over femininity, you get rewarded with some privilege and favors, but always safely within the bounds of masculine dominance. If you don't follow the rules, you get cruelly shamed into compliance and even ostracized if you are deemed a lost cause (not a "real" woman).

It is very difficult for individuals to counter social conditioning because so much of the learning happens unconsciously. It's a steep uphill battle for people to develop more self-awareness about the "rules" they have been taught to follow. And even when one becomes aware of having implicit biases or prejudices, it's not easy to rise above them. It takes a lot of conscious effort to go against lessons that were ingrained into your psyche since infancy. Furthermore, when you're a member of the social group that enjoys more power and privilege, there's very little incentive for you to change, in fact, you have much more incentive to preserve the status quo, which is why inequality is so difficult to remedy.

The unconscious nature of bias and prejudice is why ego development is very important. When you reach higher levels of ego development, your self-awareness grows, and that allows you to gradually shift from a simplistic rule-based morality to a more complex virtue-based morality which recognizes that moral issues aren't always black-and-white. Virtue-based morality is about what's actually in people's hearts and the role that moral conscience plays in decision making.

Taking the example from above: WHY did the person fail in school? Was it simply because they didn't follow the rules and work as hard as they should have? Or was it due to factors that were beyond their control, such as: an untreated learning disability, lack of school funding due to living in a poor area, a dysfunctional family situation that interfered with their learning process, etc?

Rule-based morality is about compliance and shaming people into the appearance of compliance. Virtue-based morality is about understanding and addressing the root causes of moral failing. To be capable of more complex moral reasoning is to dig deeper and ask more questions to get to the truth, which means that morality is no longer a simple matter. The gray areas start to appear, you start to see exceptions to the rule, and you become more empathetic because you're looking into people's hearts and seeing how they have suffered unfairly. You no longer stereotype and generalize about people but treat everyone as a unique individual with unique circumstances to take into account. Egocentric people don't want this level of moral responsibility because then they'd have to always question themselves about whether they are truly doing the right thing, and they would constantly have to confront the many ways they fall short in their morality.

When you truly see the harm of judging people by superficial appearances, you would never want to be a victim of it, and that helps you understand that you shouldn't be a perpetrator of it, either. When you truly see the harm of treating people unfairly based on gender, you would never want to be a victim of it, and that helps you understand that you shouldn't be a perpetrator of it, either. When you're able to empathize with people who were treated unfairly or victimized by unjust rules, you can't help but want to make things fairer for everyone (yes, equality). Virtue-based morality is about moral conscience in terms of what kind of person you hope to be, what kind of influence you want to have, what kind of society you want to live in, and whether you are actually a virtuous person in your heart rather than just appearing like one in public. When you show respect to people, it's not because they "deserve" it, it's because you know that you being respectful to everyone is the first step in helping to create a society that is more respectful to everyone.

#morality #moral development #moral philosophy #respect #virtue #rules #gender #egocentrism #empathy #ask

[rosyfingereddawnn]

only the black rose (chapter 5)

pairing: jimmy page x layla porter (oc)

warnings: talks of parental abandonment, off-scene injury, drug use (legal!), fluff, and me waxing poetic about one of my favourite books. and more fluff.

words: 3.1k

summary: in the blink of an eye, it’s 1975 and layla’s suddenly joining led zeppelin for their north american tour. throughout the chaos, the band take a liking to her, she builds friendships with the boys, and love blossoms. but all good things must come to an end.

author’s note: this one wrote itself. i expected to take longer with it cause of this. this is the start of the Chaos seen in the 1975 North American tour, so hold onto your hats and enjoy! congrats! you’ve unlocked layla’s tragic backstory! unbeta’d as always, and here’s the link to the playlist :)

masterlist

playlist

chapters: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

----------

Soon enough, the band make their way home, basking in the golden glow of a couple of excellent shows. It’s only a matter of days until the start of the North American tour, and the excitement is palpable. The boys find themselves at the studio, running through some last-minute tour details, accompanied by a certain brunette firecracker, who sits reading comfortably in the lobby.

Layla, sitting on a luxurious couch just outside of the meeting room, is drowning in a hardcover book, consuming every word at a ravenous pace. The sound of pages flipping periodically is accompanied by the light din of voices detailing the upcoming tour. Lost in the story in front of her, she is surprised when she hears a person clearing their throat, seemingly right in front of her. Looking up, she spots the secretary of Swan Song Records, a woman with glasses and long brown hair ran through with gray, pinned up in a low bun. Light freckles dusted her cheeks. Judging by the crow’s feet at the corners of her hazel eyes, the secretary had to have been older than Layla, perhaps around 50, though her bright smile gave the impression of youth.  

“Sorry to interrupt, Miss… I just couldn’t help but notice the book you were reading. I don’t see many fans of the classics around here, especially ones so young.”

Recovering from the shock of being ripped out of the hypnotising story she was wrapped up in, Layla gestures to the seat next to her. With a bright smile, the secretary smoothes down her pencil skirt, and sits down.

“My mother was a literature buff, and it seems she’s passed that down to me! My name’s Layla. You’re Evelyn, right?”

“Y-Yes, I am! How do you…”

“Well, I had to put a name to the lovely secretary that gives me a smile whenever I see her. Makes my day, if I’m being honest.”

“You’re too sweet, darling,” Evelyn says, lips turning up warmly, eyes dancing with joy. “If I may, what are your thoughts on the book? It’s a personal favourite of mine, and it’s always nice to hear new opinions.”

“Well,” Layla starts, lighting up as she speaks. “Wilde’s language paints such a beautiful, vivid picture, and the characters are so interesting, even if they aren’t morally likeable, most of the time. They make mistakes… Many mistakes… but we sympathize with them.”

At this, Layla cups her hand around her mouth, whispering to Evelyn mischievously, as if what she was about to say was the world’s most important secret.

“It’s a favourite of mine too.”

The two women laugh, Evelyn’s hand falling across Layla’s arm, a comforting, grounding weight. Evelyn, with a warm smile gracing her face, crow’s feet as prominent as ever, sends a pang of longing into Layla’s heart. Not for love, but for her old life. Her friends worried out of their minds over her disappearance; her mother, left alone not once, but twice. Her father had left when she was a child, and it had been her and her mother ever since. Layla learned to put up walls, so that she’d never be hurt like that again. They all leave in the end. It’s better that way. Better not to get attached. Better not to get hurt.

“That’s a lovely interpretation, Layla. You know,” Evelyn says, interrupting Layla’s train of thought. “For someone so young, you have an old soul. Wise beyond your years, for sure.”

“You have no idea…”

“Well, I must get to work, darling,” Evelyn claps her hands together, and stands up, resting a hand on Layla’s arm once more. “I’d love to chat again, though. Such refreshing opinions from such a young woman. I’ll let you get back to your book.”

“I would love to! We’ll make plans soon, I promise. Have a wonderful day, Evelyn!” With that, Layla opens the novel, and is taken once again by the current of the story. Minutes pass, until Layla is interrupted once more, this time by a soft press of lips against the crown of her head.

“Everything alright, Layla?”

“Of course, Jim,” Layla says, reaching out to grasp Jimmy’s hand in return. “How did the meeting go?”

“Well, you were right outside the door, I’m surprised you didn’t eavesdrop,” He takes a seat beside her, and reaches down to tap at the book still nestled in Layla’s hand, her finger keeping the page. “You were too engrossed in this, I bet. What are you reading anyways?”

Layla lifts the book to show the cover, which is a slightly worn navy blue, with golden accents in the form of small droplets. In metallic lettering, read ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’.

“Oscar Wilde, hey? Wouldn’t have pegged you for a lover of the classics.”

“I spent my teenage years with Austen and Dickens, after all.”

“I didn’t think you were that old.”

Layla rolls her eyes, a fond look upon her features. Smiling at the man in front of her, she puts a hand to his cheek.

“Yeah, I’m a real cradle-robber.”

“Just make sure my mum doesn’t hear about this relationship: she’ll have a fit.”

“I’ll be careful, angel,” Layla laughs, putting a pensive finger to her chin. “Hey, Jimmy? Do you have a good relationship with your parents?” Jimmy smiles wide at the question and nods, dark curls bobbing at the movement. He absentmindedly takes Layla’s hand in his, rubbing his thumb in soft circles across her wrist.

“My parents… They’ve always been very supportive of me in every way, and I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to find a way to thank them,” Jimmy squeezes her hand briefly, meeting her eyes. “You know, I bet they’d love you.”

“Do you really think so?” Layla’s cheeks grow warm, and her lips tilt upwards in a smile that is uncharacteristically shy.

“Of course I do, petal,” Jimmy says, pushing a fallen lock of hair behind Layla’s ear, his touch featherlight. “How about you? What are your parents like?”

“Well… My dad… He left us when I was young, so it’s been me and my mom ever since,” This is marked with a moment of silence, and Layla’s eyes meet her shoes, pointedly not looking at Jimmy. “My mom’s probably the strongest person I’ve ever met, and I truly can’t thank her enough for everything she’s done for me. She’s my best friend.”

The silence continues, until Layla feels a calloused finger at her jaw, lifting her chin. Finally flicking her eyes up to gaze at the guitarist, she’s shocked by the concern and sadness she sees in those emerald green eyes.

“Petal, I…”

“Jim, it’s fine. It—”

“It’s not fine, Layla. It’s not. I’m so sorry, you didn’t deserve that. Either of you.” Jimmy pulls her into a tight hug, long arms wrapping around her, making her feel safe. They stay like this for what feels like hours, breaking apart slowly.

“Jimmy, I… Thank you.”

“Of course. Now, how about you read me some of that book of yours?”

Layla laughs brightly, albeit a little watery, and smiles at Jimmy, eyes shining with gratitude. Shuffling, she positions herself in his lap, legs hanging off the end of the couch as his arm comes to rest across her back, holding her steady against his chest. She opens the book, dog-earing the corner of the page she was reading, before flipping back to the start.

“Petal, as much as I like this, I thought we were gonna take it slow? I don’t think public places are the best idea to… Well…”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jimmy,” Layla says, smirk gracing her face as she speaks. “You just make a very comfortable chair.”

Jimmy’s laugh is music to her ears, and she presses a light kiss to his cheek. Focusing on the book in her hand, she begins to read:

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”

----------

‘Was it all true? Had the portrait really changed? Or had it been simply his own imagination that had made him see a look of evil where there had been a look of joy?’

The next day had arrived, and Layla sits at her kitchen table, enraptured once again by the writings of Oscar Wilde. The words on the page enchant her, and she has no desire to put the novel down anytime soon. She’d have to tell Evelyn all about it, the next time she sees her.

‘Surely a painted canvas could not alter? The thing was absurd. It would serve as a tale to tell Basil some day. It would make him smile. And, yet, how vivid was his recollection—’

A shrill ringing pulls her out of the carefully crafted narrative of Dorian Gray. Layla huffs, annoyed at the intrusion, and moves to pick up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Layla! Hi, good to hear from you, hope you’re having a great day so far! Lovely weather we’re having, hey?” The slightly nasal voice of one Robert Plant, crackles through the phone, and Layla sighs at his exuberance.

“Robert, hey. What is it?”

“Uh… Please don’t freak out. It’s really not that bad, and everyone is… mostly… fine?”

“Rob—”

This is followed by a noise in the background, a sort of crackle, as if Robert had shifted the phone to his other hand. Layla can hear the way his breath picks up, the way panic seeps into his voice. “Just a heads up that we’ll be at your place in about… 10 minutes! See you then!”

“What is going on? I was reading, I’m really not in the mood for—”

Another crackle, and a sigh from Robert’s end of the line. Layla runs a hand through her hair, biting her lip in an attempt to quell the panic rising in her throat.

“Promise me you won’t freak out, little dove.”

Layla exhales sharply through her nose, unimpressed at the plea of the man on the other line. Coiling the telephone cord around her finger to calm her nerves, she responds.

“Fine, I’m not gonna freak out. Now, tell me what happened.”

“Well… Um… Jimmy, well, he kinda… got his… finger slammed in a train door?”

“...”

“Layla? Are you still there?”

“How?!”

“I told you not to freak out…”

“Robert!” Layla exclaims, concern painted clearly on her flushed face.

“Okay, okay, he told us he was holding the door open for someone on the way to Swan Song, and well… You know the rest.”

“Is he going to be okay?”

Another sigh sounds from the other line, and Layla waits in anticipation for his response, growing anxious with each passing moment. Finally, she hears the man’s response, and deflates with relief, sinking into the chair beside her.

“He should be fine. Like I said before, we’re gonna come get you right away. He’ll be okay, Layla.”

“Okay…Robert?”

“Yes, little dove?

“Thank you.”

“Of course,” Robert chuckles lightly, bringing a smile to Layla’s face, the undercurrent of anxiety still coursing through her. She thinks it will stay that way, until she sees Jimmy, makes sure he’s okay. “We’ll be there in 10 minutes. Sit tight, Layla.”

Layla sits at the kitchen table, biting her thumbnail, mind elsewhere, until she hears the telltale sound of a car pulling up, engine cutting out. Flying out the door, She spots Jonesy in the driver’s seat, Bonzo next to him, with Robert in the back. Opening the door, she sits next to the blond, and he gazes over at her, putting a hand to her shoulder. Sympathy flashes across his face as he takes in the shocked look Layla’s sporting.

“He’ll be okay, Layla. He will.”

“Robert, I… Jonesy, please, just drive?”

“Right.”

The engine rumbles to life, and they’re off, no doubt speeding to whatever hospital Jimmy’s holed up in. Layla lets her thoughts drift to Jimmy. She wonders how he’s doing, if he’s in any pain, if they’re treating him well. She’s distracted enough that she barely feels Robert’s hand, warm and comforting, on her knee. Layla is snapped out of her thoughts by a particularly sharp turn, and she looks up at Robert, her eyes brimming with tears.

“Rob… What if he’s… not okay? It was his finger. That means that he might not be able to play, if it’s bad enough,” She stammers, eyes frantic in their search of the blond’s face. “His guitar is his life, and—”

“Layla, calm down. It’ll be okay. It won’t do us any good to think like that.” Robert leans over, throwing his arm around her shoulder as best he could in the cramped car. To his surprise, she leans into him, resting her head on his shoulder. Layla unconsciously brings a hand up to bite her thumbnail, and catching the action, Robert places his hand on hers, pushing it back down to rest in her lap. They stay that way until the car rolls to a stop in the hospital parking lot. Layla lifts her head from Robert’s shoulder with breakneck speed, scrambling out of the car.

“Layla, wait!” Jonesy calls out, running after the woman, who dashes through the door. Robert and Bonzo catch up, just as Layla reaches the front desk, panting from exertion. The nurse on shift looks at her, eyes wide, shocked at the display.

“Excuse me, love,” Bonzo says, tucking Layla under his arm as he speaks to the nurse. “We’re looking for James Page? He was brought in for a fractured finger, I believe?”

“...Yes, right. What is your relationship with the patient?”

“We’re his bandmates, we can call our manager if you need proof. Please, we just need to see if he’s okay.”

The nurse eyes the group dubiously, and grabs the chart sitting next to her, looking through it. Glancing at the group again, she points behind them, to a room packed with seats, posters and pamphlets lining the walls.

“It seems that Mr. Page is still with the doctor getting X-rayed, so I’m going to need you to take a seat in the waiting area. Give that manager of yours a call, and we’ll see what we can do for you.”

“Thank you, love.” Bonzo says, as he herds the group over to the soft, patterned armchairs, plopping down with a sigh. Jonesy excuses himself to make a phone call to Peter, the others left waiting for news that won’t come fast enough.

Jimmy has to be okay. He has to.

----------

“For James Page?” The nurse’s voice rings out across the waiting area, and the group shoot up from their seats, stiff backs groaning in protest. “Follow me.”

The nurse leads them through a labyrinth of hallways, stopping finally at a room with a large 164 pasted on the closed door. Through the window looking into the room, Layla spots Jimmy asleep under the covers, his hands atop the sheets, resting on his stomach. He looks peaceful, she thinks, like he’s devoid of pain. If she couldn’t see the injured hand at all, she’d have thought he was perfectly fine.

The group finally walk into the room, the sharp smell of antiseptic burning their nostrils. Hearing the click of the door opening, Jimmy opens his eyes, pupils blown wide. His irises are almost black, and he sends them a dopey smile, a giggle bursting out.

“Hey, guys. Fancy seeing you all here.” Jimmy slurs, laughing harder now, as though he had told the most hilarious joke in the world. The boys join in, amused by the antics of their guitarist. Layla hangs back, staring at Jimmy, concern clear on her face. She had spotted the injured finger on the way in, which was already bruised a deep purple, the fingernail completely blackened.

“They give you the good stuff, Pagey?”

“You know it, Jonesy.” Jimmy shoots the bassist a sloppy wink, and the group erupts into soft laughter once more. Taking a dazed glance around the room, the raven-haired man pouts, completely endearing in his drugged state. “Hey… where’s Layla?”

Peter, who had been standing next to the bed, moves aside, and glassy green met warm brown. The guitarist smiles softly, relaxing back into the pillows. He sticks out his uninjured hand, and she walks closer to take it. Never lessening her grip, Layla threads the fingers of her free hand through Jimmy’s messy curls, and looks down at him fondly.

“How’re you doing, champ?”

“Good, now that you’re here. I would kiss you right now… if I wasn’t seeing two of you.”

“They must have him on the really good stuff…” Layla throws over her shoulder, looking back at the injured guitarist. He’s looking up at her with unabashed affection, and she can’t help but blush at the adoration in his gaze.

“Sorry to interrupt,” comes from the open doorway, as Jimmy’s doctor steps through. “I’m Dr. Vane, I treated James when he came in. If you’d kindly step out for a moment, I’d like to go over his prognosis.”

The boys file out of the room, and Layla goes to follow, stopped in her tracks by Jimmy tugging her back towards him with a whimper. She gives in, sinking back down in the chair at his bedside.

“I’m so glad you’re okay, Jimmy. I was so scared when Robert called. I thought...”

“I’m glad you’re here, petal. Now, come into bed with me. I want to see you better.” Jimmy mutters, scooting over to make room for her to fit in the small hospital bed. Layla laughs, nodding, and crawls in beside him, careful not to hurt him. She turns on her side, her hand landing in his hair again. Jimmy looks up at her, pupils still dilated, and presses a quick peck on her lips, giggling anew.

“You’re so beautiful. Have I ever told you that you’re beautiful? ‘Cause you are.” He insists, slurred speech returning in full force, his eyes fluttering closed.

“Go to sleep, Jimmy. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

He hums softy in response and a few seconds later, Jimmy’s breathing evens out. He’s dead to the world. Through the door left ajar, Layla can hear snippets of the conversation with the doctor.

“... Fractured the tip of his finger… At least a month.”

“Will he be able to play anytime soon?” That was Peter, voice soft with worry for the frail man in the hospital bed.

“He should rest… Not good to put too much strain on it… Keeping him here until the anaesthetic wears off.”

Tuning them out, Layla looks down at the man sleeping beside her. His hair is matted on one side of his head, and he snores louder than he’d ever admit, but he looks peaceful. He’s not in any pain, and that’s enough for Layla. She drifts off, as the sound of footsteps against the floor draw near. Her tired eyes open to slits, and she sees a shadow with dark, shoulder-length and a beard. It must be Bonzo, she thinks. The last thing Layla hears before succumbing to the exhaustion that plagues her, is the drummer’s soothing voice, hushed to a whisper.

“Let them sleep.”

----------

taglist: @jimmys-zeppelin @salixfragilis @timetraveller4 (let me know if you want to be added!)

#only the black rose #led zeppelin #jimmy page #jimmy page fanfiction #jimmy page fanfic #led zeppelin fanfic #classic rock fanfic #jimmy x oc

[chenqingssuibian]

Jiang Yanli and Wei Wuxian for the ask meme

two-for-one special, huh?

from this post!

How I feel about this character:

Jiang Yanli: ULTIMATE EXAMPLE OF CHARACTERS WHO DESERVED BETTER. Jiang Yanli is everything. She is the it girl. She is my favorite female character except for MAYBE A-Qing. She makes me wish I had a big sister, y’all. God, I wish she had gotten to meet her son - like, actually meet him, and get to know him. (When she died, he was... what, a year old at most? Not MUCH personality there, gotta say.) I wish she had gotten to grow old, man. Jiang Yanli was born to be a grandma, and the fact that she never got to be. Is upsetting. My girl is artistic, she is smart, she is brave (standing up to Jin Zixun!!!! A man who is 100% stronger than her!!!!! From a much stronger and wealthier sect!!!!) and GOD is she kind. Yanli, my beloved <3

Wei Wuxian: He is the main character and he is the main character for a REASON. This man? A mess, through and through. He is also a genius and he will not let you forget it, nor will he let you forget how SEXY he is. Yes Wei Wuxian we know your ass is fat you don’t need to remind me. I love this freaky lil necromancer. So sexy of him to invent that. He doesn’t have a SINGLE uncomplicated relationship, no, that’s too easy. He doesn’t even get to have a simple relationship with A-Yuan, because of course he doesn’t. Wei Wuxian is a flawed man who has committed atrocities and kindnesses in turn. He is simultaneously a grave robber who desecrates corpses on the regular, and ALSO the kind of dude who will attempt (and succeed) to resurrect a guy who he barely knows, even though it seems hopeless, because he is duty-bound. He takes his debt to the Wen siblings so, so seriously, he takes so much so seriously and that is why he doesn’t put effort into, for example, naming his weapons, or other bullshit. He has priorities, man. I love him. 

Romantic Ships:

Jiang Yanli: I’m a slut for xuanli, my token straight ship. Half of it is because I just really love Jin Ling, and if they weren’t a thing... he wouldn’t be either. But ALSO: Jin Zixuan resents her not because she’s her, but because he is being forced to marry her. Once that pressure is pulled off (though honestly? Not completely, because let’s be real - Madame Jin was probably pushing for that marriage all through Sunshot) and he gets the chance to... actually get to know her? He falls in love, y’all. I like to think Jiang Yanli, softhearted as she is, made him work to woo her as much as she was able. Gotta put effort into Jiang Yanli, Zixuan, it’s what she DESERVES! Other than them, yanqing is very good! I read some fics where she married Lan Xichen, which was lovely, and then there’s that series where she gets married to Jin Guangyao instead of Zixuan (though I can’t remember the name of it, rip.) There are very many options, for Yanli, and all of them good. give her a harem

Wei Wuxian: Wangxian goes without saying - they’re the core of the series, after all, if I didn’t like them at least a little... there wouldn’t be a point in me running a blog for this series, would there? Ningxian, unrequited or otherwise, is also very sexy. Wangningxian, too, and, as mentioned in the ask about Lan Xichen, I am into xixian! Xiaoxian also slaps - I’ve written a blurb for them, and plan on expanding it into something larger... at some point. Also, there are some really great (though DEFINITELY not for the light-hearted) xuexian fics out there, if you’re interested.

Non-Romantic Ships/BroTPS:

Jiang Yanli: Yanli and her brothers, Yanli and Wen Ning, Yanli and Everyone, Basically. Everyone should be friends with Jiang Yanli. She is very friend-shaped, and honestly? If everyone was her friend, a lot of shit would’ve gone down better. 

Wei Wuxian: I think the dynamic between Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng, and Jiang Yanli is just. So fuckin’ delicious. There are layers of love and devotion and propriety and conflicts of all of those things and GOD. I love them. I also thing Wei Wuxian should’ve been a menace as a child on the streets with Xue Yang. I would’ve liked to see it. Nie Huaisang is also a Very Good Bro, who I love him with immensely (and also think he should kiss a little bit)

Unpopular Opinion:

Jiang Yanli: Not to NSFW, but a lot of y’all seem to think she’s the kinkiest bitch on the block, and honestly? I don’t see it. I think her favorite position is missionary. I am so sorry to the pegging stans I just don’t think she has the core strength to make that good.

Wei Wuxian: HE. IS. MORALLY. GRAY. AT. BEST. Particularly during Sunshot and the immediate aftermath, but honestly, Wei Wuxian is not the liberator of the people, or something. He is a very talented man who, when he feels it is the right thing to do, will do anything - and what is right can be subjective and situational. He’s his own villain in a lot of ways, and the villain of many other people’s stories. Honestly, I can’t blame people for being afraid of him, or trying to put limits on what he can do - unchecked power is always bad. Always. Even when someone I like has it. 

What I wish would happen/had happened in canon:

Jiang Yanli: Uh. I wish she had fucking LIVED? I get WHY she had to die, so Jin Ling could... be Jin Ling, and Jiang Cheng would finally have something he really, truly couldn’t forgive Wei Wuxian for. I get that her death is the final nail in his coffin, or whatever. But seeing her simply get INJURED for him would’ve been enough, I think? I don’t think she needed to die, is what I’m saying, and I think MDZS could’ve been even more interesting, narratively speaking, if she hadn’t. Then again, I’m a Xuan Lu simp, so it is possible I simply wish we had had More Of Her.

Wei Wuxian: Therapy, as always. Otherwise, he’s pretty much got it made? Man came back from the dead, got some old friends back, solved a mystery, found out his sort-of son he raised in a graveyard for a while wasn’t dead at all, and then got married to the love of his life. He’s good on that front. Reconciliation with Jiang Cheng is really all I want, past that.

#ask game #anon #wei wuxian #jiang yanli #so many opinions.... SO MANY OPINIONS #do you enjoy this glimpse into my mind prison? hmm?

[carlyserrano]

[ GEORGINA AMOROS, SHE/HER, CISFEMALE ]  —  [ CARLOTA “CARLY” SERRANO ]  is a child of  [ HYPNOS ]  with the power of  [ SLEEP MANIPULATION AND INDUCEMENT ] .  they were born in  [ 1998 ]  and have been in nemean lion since  [ 2016 ] .  with the change, they  [ ARE TRAINING IN ]  the  [ STANDARD ]  role which makes sense since they’re usually  [ HAVING AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS AND NAPPING ] .  if you’d like to meet them try the [ SUN ]  building .  —  kati / she & her / est / 18+

links: stats / pinterest . 

background

carly spent most of her life knowing this : her mother died of sadness. it must be a terrible thing, to be a mortal that loves a god that deeply. so much that not being able to be with them tears you apart. 

she doesn’t really remember her mother, she was only three years old when she took her own life, but carly still wishes she could have done something, that she could have been enough to make her happy – or at least to take away that overwhelming sadness. 

as a result, carly was raised by her mortal grandparents. this accounts for some of carly’s old-fashioned taste in film, music and even fashion, raised by guardians fifty years her senior. 

carly loved stories. whether her nose was stuck in a book or she was daydreaming herself, her mind was always exploring fantastical possibilities. sometimes daydreaming would take a step further into actual dreaming, which was something teachers started to struggle with in class. prone to fits of sleeping – which would be diagnosed as narcolepsy by her teachers – it became problematic. it was very difficult, pretty much impossible to wake her if she didn’t want to be woken up. as her powers grew, people around her would be prone to sleeping as well, but she didn’t understand how she was doing it or what exactly triggered it.

on carly’s thirteenth birthday, her grandparents sat her down to have “the talk” – they told her about her father’s identity and the true story behind what happened with her mother, finally thinking she was old enough to understand. it devastated her, how truly sad things had been for her mother and the circumstances surrounding her life. she honestly just wanted to be NORMAL. when her grandparents brought up nemean lion and suggested sending her there, carly refused. only thirteen, she didn’t want to travel to a new country and leave behind her grandparents. the changed scared her and she still held out hope of living a somewhere ‘normal’ life. she was legit just thirteen and scared to travel overseas and leave home...but with some new added trauma, too. 

but things started to get worse from her going forward. children of hypnos are extremely powerful and carly didn’t know how to control any of the things that she was going through. her sleep patterns as a teenager became erratic, insomnia for days on end and then the inverse. after carly slept for a week straight, her grandparents felt like they had no choice. they couldn’t care for her and weren’t properly equipped to handle what she was going through, and when carly was seventeen, she had no choice but to pack her things and move to america. 

despite missing her grandparents terribly, carly wanted to make the most of a bad situation. mentors at nemean lion taught her about her powers and more about how to use them – her ability to alter someone’s consciousness with a snap of her fingers. slowly, she started to become more confident in powers that she’d never thought she would be able to control. carly is the sort of person who tries desperately hard to make others happy, to look after them, and she considered switching to the hero track when she had a better handle on things, but she never got that far. 

all of these people telling her how gifted she was definitely added to her confidence, but maybe...overdid it a little for a girl who had never felt special before, for someone that felt like an outsider and now was very much an insider with a lot of friends and like, the ability to have a social life now that she could maintain a normal sleep schedule. she really started to envision herself as this bold hero. 

i’m having trouble putting this articulately and i keep rewriting this so i’ll just present this part. messily. naive, romantic carly falls for a fuckboy > loses her virginity then he totally ditches her like there was never anything between them > she’s pissed off and hurt so they get into a fight in the middle of the training room > she snaps her fingers to get him to shut up while her emotions are at an all time high and...he ends up in the infirmary in a coma. that was enough to teach her that her powers were not a good thing.

not only did she land the reputation of being the-person-most-butthurt-from-being-ghosted-ever but she also realized that her powers are STILL growing. she never thought she’d be capable of doing something like that, and she doesn’t know her own limits, and the realization scares her. she doesn’t feel like she’s capable of controlling her own emotions under pressure and she loses the confidence that she’s built – remaining in the standard track for the next two years or so. 

homeboy likely did wake up from the coma as a result of NL having the best healers in the world but it took like some months, like he got his shit ROCKED. 

so, that’s kind of in the past for her now, though it’s something she still struggles with, not knowing her own strength and being scared of letting her emotions get the best of her again. she now rarely uses her powers and is a bit scared of her own self, kind of just floating by in the standard track and only thinking of the hero track in like, her wildest daydreams. she just doesn’t really trust herself and doesn’t even know the full extent of her abilities, especially because it’s possible that as a child of hypnos she’s probably still developing more over time. 

personality

FAIR: carly tends to stick to her morals, a distinct sense of what’s right and wrong. this can have some gray areas on the godly world, but she sees good guys and bad guys. due to her diplomatic world view, she’s pretty good at looking at a situation objectively and treats people and situations with fairness, apt to try to be the peacemaker in a friend group or during a disagreement. she also thinks that everyone inherently wants to be good and do good, so she’s inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and second chances going forward. 

SOCIABLE: extroverted and loves being around people, once you get started on a conversation with her, she could go for hours. definitely not one to isolate herself, she’s happiest when hanging out with friends or at social gatherings, doing things with other people. if she is awake, she is probably either reading or talking to someone and i’m sure her friends think she could learn to shut up sometimes but she can’t help but share her every thought, really lacks a filter. 

LOVING: carly will freely give her whole heart to people, i think ! she’s not afraid to put her heart on her sleeve for people and she honestly puts a lot of her own value in the happiness of others / needing to make others happy, so she’s pretty selfless about wanting to show great love and care for the people in her life. i think of carly as a pretty big-hearted person who is not afraid to put herself out there and say how she feels about someone or something and she will show great affection for her friends, who she considers family. 

i suppose some people could feel smothered by her at times but truly her heart is just so full

NAIVE: often thinks what you see is what you get with people, which...rarely the case. but she’s just so inclined to believe in the goodness of people and give second chances that she can sometimes get in over her head. the fact that she sees things in such black and white can be hard for her, because she’s seen her powers do bad things and she’s inclined to believe that she herself might be bad, or that those powers are bad, and she refrains from using them. essentially, she still has so much to learn. 

STUBBORN: once she gets an idea in her head, it is really hard to change carly’s mind or get her to waver on it. she can be a bit infuriating in an argument because of this, and this also tends to get her to believe that her very first judgement of people is correct. very firm in her ideas once she has her mind made up, to a fault. 

ANXIOUS: literally has anxiety but tends to get really nervous about being liked or doing things wrong, overthinking the small stuff. and the big stuff, like her powers. when she gets overwhelmed, however, her favorite escape mechanism is simply to go take a nap and then she’ll deal with it when she wakes up. essentially prone to nervousness, which is why she can sometimes overcompensate by talking a lot or going to great lengths to make sure someone likes her or to make sure that person knows she likes them. 

headcanons

honestly is so fulfilled by reading like, she’s the sort of person to get really attached to characters in books and feel like they are her best friends ! so, she gets a lot out of stories and spends a lot of her alone time a ) reading or b ) journaling/scrapbooking.

is a really meticulous record keeper ! she keeps track of her days and is probably the one snapping photos when hanging out and she keeps scrapbooks over the years at NL and beyond, has the most fun collection of colored paper on her shelf that you’ve ever seen. 

big angel energy ? i think. she doesn’t really partake in drinking or smoking ( though she’ll have like, a glass of wine during dinner or before bed, she really likes white wines bc she basic ) and do be wearing her heart on her sleeve, a very trustworthy person, i would call her dependable in situations though she’s too naive to be your mom friend because her advice definitely does not come from wisdom – she can be a bit of a ditz/airhead, actually. 

if she sees something shiny and pretty in nature, she will keep it. so, that means she’s got flowers pressed between books, pretty rocks lining her windowsill, and some colorful leaves probably crumpled up in the bottom of her backpack. just loves collecting STUFF. 

lots of her clothing is either vintage/thrifted or sweatpants/sweatsuits. generally she will go for comfort first when picking out something to wear. 

favorite ice cream is cookie dough and she could eat it all day.

takes a nap every day i feel like most of her friends know they probably can’t reach her between like 3pm-6pm because she is having her little nap. 

i might give her another power at some point idk i read on the hypnos wiki that his children are mad powerful and sometimes develop additional abilities later in life so who knows but prob something cute with dreams idk

wanted connections

gal pals, girl besties, girl squad ?? i just think that women, essentially, and i feel like the vibes of movie nights and sleepovers together and painting each others nails and gossiping late into the night would be super wholesome and would make me feel at peace in my soul and such. 

i also want like a brooke to her haley james !!! sort of. i want this vibe, where carly is 🌼👼🧸 and ur muse is kinda 💃🍷💋

also gal pals in the way that they kiss sometimes but it’s not serious or is it !!! show ur friends u love them by kissing them on the mouth !!!

that boy she put into a coma. idk if your character fits sort of that player archtype and would be kind of a dick / would ghost a girl after sex then maybe this is for you !! if you’d be down to have your character have been in a coma for like 2 months a couple years ago. she feels so so bad about it though.

an ex? probably on good terms so we can talk about why things didn’t work out but honestly break my heart and fuck me up because it probably would have been like, her first love and there’s still a bit of a soft spot even if it’s not the same i’m sure she just wants them to be so happy ! maybe she’s trying to like, set them up with one of her friends and it’s weird. 

married couple friends. you know, that best friend she has where they kind of bicker like a married couple and they’re both really stubborn but there’s a lot of love and mutual respect there. 

a mentor or something? maybe someone in the hero track that sees how much she’s struggling with her powers and puts in the extra work to help her train a little. she says she doesn’t care about being a hero but maybe they can see right through her a little bit. 

someone she can actually help. i’d love a way for her to realize she can use her powers for good a little bit! maybe if your char suffers from insomnia, bad dreams, something in their trauma makes it hard for them to have a regular sleep schedule...she feels inclined to help them a little bit? this would take time and some build up because she’s not really comfortable using her powers, but i’d love a storyline where she learns how she can use this power positively like that and she helps someone sleep a little better. 

yearning. i don’t know <3 carly can have a little crush on someone who doesn’t give a fuck about her. i feel like she’s the type to have little crushes on everyone she’s prob a little in love w all her friends. 

old friendships. maybe something that fizzled out after the incident a couple years ago, like maybe they were close before but they were really pissed at her for what she did and the two of them were just never able to make up afterwards, maybe they were pals with the guy that she hurt !! 

bad influence? she’s so LAWFUL and GOOD, i’d love for someone to help her see the grey areas a little bit and crack her out of her shell or something, just kind of soft. in a healthy way, maybe they bring out the best in each other but also maybe one day it gets taken too far ! 

#nlintro #* ☁️⠀ / ⠀ 𝙁𝙄𝙇𝙀𝘿 𝙐𝙉𝘿𝙀𝙍 ⠀ ﹕ ⠀ ❪ ⠀ intro. ⠀ ❫ #suicide mention tw

[splendid-teeth]

sjm and crescent city and misogyny

so i finished house of earth and blood and i have some Thoughts. i didn’t think i’d like it and actively hated it as i read so clearly there are still some lessons to be learned in how useless hate reading a book is. and i’m still personally trying to figure out how to like something while also criticizing it/ acknowledging flaws (to be clear this is not about hoeab because i straight hated it but i do like parts of acotar). this isn’t gonna be a review cause this ain’t goodreads but here we go

why are all of sjm’s worlds so misogynistic? like i genuinely don’t get it. the amount of times cunt/ whore/ slut was said in hoeab was absolutely ridiculous (i know there’s widespread complaints about the amount of cussing and maybe it ties to that idk). maybe i don’t have enough sworn enemies or whatever but i literally never hear people say those words without it being a Big Fucking Deal and yet sjm is like the goddamn salt bae meme with them. she couldn’t figure out one other reason to make Amelie and Bryce enemies besides being jealous over a dude. in acotar the sexism inherent to the Illyrians, the lack of high ladies when not only does it add nothing to your narrative besides making your characters seem super duper for not being sexist, it actively makes no sense as there are plenty of powerful women so why wouldn’t they be leaders??? by force if nothing else. i know there’s other examples in throne of glass it has just been a hot sec since i read them. idk if these all seem small and petty but there’s just a pervasive misogyny to all of her worlds and it’s difficult to put my finger to how it shows/ how to address it. 

and i don’t think sjm is fantastic at characterization in general but something really rubs me the wrong way with her female villains. it’s not that women are villains because i’m all about that. it’s the female villains have no personality beyond evil/ lusting after whatever love interest, being utterable unable to root for them (i liked micah, i was all about that but sandriel ehh) and just being 2d as hell. and the fact that sjm is willing to redeem anyone and everyone but no women. at all. i do think sjm is not good at writing actual morally gray characters or villains that make you root for them cause she either takes the literal worst would eat babies if they could route or they are secretly a good person you cannot hold their sins against them or the i say they’re complex and morally gray but they’re actually a marshmallow route. so maybe someone else can tell me what i’m picking up on with her female villains cause i’m just rambling. 

she’s creating an actual made up fantasy world where everything is created by her. and it’s one thing if you’re making your world sexist on purpose and are then saying something about it/ addressing it but she just treats it like the default?? why tho. i know this is a widespread issue so i don’t mean to hold up sjm as some peak misogynist or something but she’s an author who has mostly female MCs and seems to be trying to make them strong and well rounded (we can argue about the effectiveness but there’s an effort) and so for her to have sexism as the default flavoring for everything. i’m just tired.

minor aside for LGBTQ+ rep which we all know she is the WOAT at (i hate acowar with such a passion but beyond the slaughtering of mor’s character and resultantly their friend group i’m not sure i remember another thing i hated that much ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). idk who told sjm that all queer people feel the need to keep it a desperate secret but that is a blatant lie and most queer people i know never shut the fuck up about it. and while some queer people are in the closet and are still coming to terms with it, the secrecy to your closest friend group just tells me as a queer person that the friend group isn’t close full stop. 

i know the fact that sjm creates sexist books and is bad at diversity in terms of LGBTQ+ rep and characters of color (i spoke on the first two because that is my expertise as a white bi women but i don’t mean to diminish the racism inherent to her worlds too) is not new info. and i also think she’s average at best at characterization, relationships, world building, and pacing so it just irks me to see how popular and recommended her books are and i know at some point i just need to get the fuck over the fact that things i think are awful will sometimes be wildly popular. and this is a very negative post about an author that has written some characters and scenes i truly adore (lol just look at my posts) but i’m just tired of how little care is put into propagating sexism, racism, and homophobia into fantasy worlds and how low the bar can be for books (i promise i know good books and don’t need recs and am just a bit of an idiot in terms of picking the worst books of my tbr list)

#anti sjm #anti hoeab