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parismemes · 4 years

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SENTENCE STARTERS FROM RED VS. BLUE SEASON 15

“you touch my baked beans, i put dog shit in your pillowcase.” “every other person in this miserable place is literal garbage.” “books on tape? what's the appeal of that? don't the pages get stuck together?” “when in doubt use a confusing acronym. military types love acronyms.” “FML. that stands for fu--” “i’ll bend down and kiss your boots, how’s that?” “i wanna know every step you take and how much shit gets stuck on your shoes and in-between your teeth.” “you know, i think i'll probably move to LA, but that's like what everyone does. i mean, what do you think?” “i’m gonna skin your cat for this.” “i’m actually thinking of adopting a stage name.” “i’m gonna smash cut your empty skull against that rock if you don’t shut the fuck up!” “i wanted to call it desert titties, but that shit was taken.” “ah, there goes the bechdel test.” “you should interview the illuminati!” “real talk here: i'll be your genie in a bottle, i'll do whatever you want, but after i grant you your three wishes, you gotta do something for me, whaddaya say?” “my ceaseless existence is an eternal torment!” “next time he calls you please, just, let it go to voicemail. don't transfer to me. okay?” “i can’t even hear myself think in this blizzard of idiocy!” “did you attempt to witness any other particular individuals in the general vicinity of the area in which the crime scene was alleged?” “i just wanna be included!” “funny, the vultures usually show up after the slaughter.” “you’re a little bit crazy, aren’t you? i like that.” “consequences... don't always take the shape we expect them to, do they? they're funny like that.” “...are we still married?” “people are quick to jump to conclusions. they see something, or hear something, and fit it into a preconceived emotional box.” “please don’t make me regret what i’m about to tell you.” “whoa, hold up--i just realized how much i don’t care.” “SUCK IT, NEWTON!” “we said we wouldn’t talk about that!” “help me be the best at being lazy.” “it was a simple mishap with my vanilla-satin scented candles!” “why is he naked?” “HOW DO YOU BURN DOWN A WATER PARK, ___?!” “we’re definitely not just saying that because she could kill us.” “for far too long our people have been oppressed, crushed, under the weight of ourselves! if we don't start standing up to our mortal foe gravity, by god, who will?” “we’ve never needed intelligence before!” “why doesn’t anybody die and stay dead?” “oh, cool! foreshadowing.” “who wants a poisoned pumpkin frappuccino?” “i quit. i’m not going. i’m staying here.” “you’ve always been selfish, but this is bullshit!” “you know, i liked them better when they were funny.” “it’s a bop-it.” “sleep. means. death!” “i know ___ said we should split up, but i was thinking maybe we split up together, you know, because it's scary!” “you talk about ___ a lot.” “this is a big city. so many places for snakes to hide. they could be everywhere all around us. watching us... licking their snake lips...” “jesus, doesn’t anybody speak esperanto?” “err is not a word.” “why do you look alone?” “why don't you tell us what's going on, and we can decide whether to kill you or not?” “looks like we've got quite the sticky mess on our hands!” “oh, i know all about sausage parties! uh, wait, that came out wrong.” “when I least expect it: whambo! you pry open my mind prison and suck out my brain beans!” “i realize now that i’ve just spilled all my brain beans.” “we're just a bunch of dumb rejects hurling ourselves against impossible odds.” “i’m only saying something because i’ve been used enough times in my life already.” “nice! super awesome of you guys! that was sarcastic.” “don’t care. just help me with my dramatic exit.” “that's a great idea! i was just about to suggest it.” “i always say a marine without a code is like a car without a road.” “i always say the best defense is a really tall fence.” “i always say a good soldier is like a rollin’ boulder.” “i always say a mantra a day keeps death at bay.” “i've grown soft around these uncultured philistines.” “goddamn, i can’t believe i have to hear this shit in stereo now.” “you two look cozy.” “i didn’t realize you two were close.” “you’re being too hard on yourself. you’ve changed over the years, i’ve seen it myself.” “i've grown from being a dishonorable killing machine to an honorable killing machine. that's quite the journey.” “i changed my mind. you are evil.” “you don’t have to destroy the past to have a future.” “strategizing can wait until breakfast, at least.” “i killed them. i MURDERED them. i set my vengeance free upon them and it felt so good!” “are we gonna do some snooping around?” “have you ever considered a life in showbusiness?” “try harder, fuckface!” “can we please just bury the hatchet and focus on what's important?” “your mother’s lasagna is mediocre!” “if you guys had to get shot somewhere in your body, where would you do it?” “i can't hear you because some idiot shot my ear off!” “this whole situation is garbage enough to begin with, but... at least we're in it together.” “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.” “the only thing that would make this better is some music.” “we were pawns in their game. but the thing that I love about chess is that sometimes pawns kill kings.” “no, actually, i was raised by wolves. in the forest.” “sometimes i feel like people barely acknowledge my presence.” “something weird might be going on around here.” “anyone who's acting that squeaky clean must have some deep dark secrets.” “ha! gotcha! that's exactly the kind of things bad guys say!” “they used us, they destroyed our lives, and they haven't been made to pay for what they've done.” “you obviously love the sound of your own voice, so why don't you use it to tell its where the fuck our friends are?” “i’m going to kill you so hard, you’ll wish you were dead.” “we fought alongside each other for fucking years. how can you just turn your backs on us like this?” “you don't get to give orders if you're on the bad guys' side!” “now I have gonorrhea and a dead friend.” “stop. touching. my face.” “buckets! oodles! oodles of noodles and toaster strudels! tiempo de mucho. mucho de tiempo!" “yeah, well, i don't remember you being anything but a huge dick, but here you are being cool, so people change.” “yippee-ki-yay, motherfuckers!” “but.. i never got to say goodbye. or thank you for being my friend.” “i'm gonna need a week at the chiropractor when we get out of here.” “is it possible to hallucinate with your ears?” “i’m not here to kill you.” “uh-oh spaghetti-o’s.” “fuck me! fuck all of this!” “you should totally kill me if it strikes your fancy! no pressure!” “the world's best swordsman doesn't fear the second best. He fears the worst, because he can't predict what the idiot will do.” “i can't imagine us doing anything but making this all worse.” “shit, dude! you’re the best we’ve got!” “i like pushing small children down wells.” “can we please settle on a consistent denomination? are we using cardinal directions or are we using clock positions?” “i'm so sneaky. they don't even know what's happening. you can't even see me right now, ___. you're so confused.” “shut up and help me punch this fucking tank!” “as far as days to die go, it's a little overcast. so let's check our corners and make these bastards pay!” “let's light the fires and kick the tires!” “let’s dance with these monkeys and give ‘em what for!” “let's put the pedal to the metal and the rubber to the road!” “let’s get jiggy with it!” “let’s shoot this monkey full of heroin and put it on youtube! actually, let's not do that, it sounds completely horrible.” “let’s teach these midgets how to tango!” “honor, schmonor.” “scout's honor! except I was never a scout because I'm afraid of badges.” “why are we here?” “we don't know why we're here. it's still one of life's great mysteries, isn't it?” “i’m sorry i tried to kill you, it wasn’t personal!” “you'll be stuck between a rock and the frying pan.” “if i said that i would weep for them, would it make you feel any better?” “best friends should be able to say goodbye.” “i think you are cool. like, super awesome, amazing, cool and... i, i always felt like really awesome too, when we were hanging out together.” “i know with my other friends--who, even if you add them all up together aren't really cool as you--i know we're all gonna be okay.” “if you kill me, you'll just perpetuate this never-ending cycle of revenge and retaliation!” “he asked us to deliver an important message to you all. but then he just sang the ducktales theme song and fell back to sleep.” “you know i’ll never forget this, right? i mean, PTSD is forever, isn’t it?” “it’s not the sum of your parts that makes you who you are.” “these people have shown me that real heroes are not born, they're forged. a friend told me once that there's no fate but what you make. and i think he's right.” “alright, well, i'm just gonna try to forget that ever happened and never bring it up again.”

#sentence starters #rp memes #rp meme #ask memes #ask meme #long post

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sciencespies · 3 years

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America's First Black Physician Sought to Heal a Nation's Persistent Illness

https://sciencespies.com/history/americas-first-black-physician-sought-to-heal-a-nations-persistent-illness/

America's First Black Physician Sought to Heal a Nation's Persistent Illness

James McCune Smith was not just any physician. He was the first African American to earn a medical degree, educated at the University of Glasgow in the 1830s, when no American university would admit him. For this groundbreaking achievement alone, Smith warrants greater appreciation.

But Smith was also one of the nation’s leading abolitionists. In 1859, Frederick Douglass declared, “No man in this country more thoroughly understands the whole struggle between freedom and slavery than does Dr. Smith, and his heart is as broad as his understanding.” A prolific writer, Smith was not only the first African American to publish peer-reviewed articles in medical journals; he also wrote essays and gave lectures refuting pseudoscientific claims of black inferiority and forecast the transformational impact African Americans were destined to make on world culture.

John Stauffer, a Harvard English professor who edited The Works of James McCune Smith, says that Smith is one of the underappreciated literary lights of the 19th century, calling him “one of the best-read people that I’ve encountered.”

“The closest equivalent I really can say about [him] as a writer is [Herman] Melville,” adds Stauffer. “The subtlety and the intricacy and the nuance…and what he reveals about life and culture and society are truly extraordinary. Every sentence contains a huge amount.”

Smith was born enslaved in New York City, in 1813, to Lavinia Smith, a woman born in Charleston, South Carolina, who historians believe was brought to New York in bondage. While James McCune Smith never knew his father, a white man, university records indicate he was a merchant named Samuel Smith. (Amy Cools, a University of Edinburgh scholar who has conducted the most extensive research into Smith’s paternity, maintains, however, “Meticulous research has thus far failed to yield any records of [such] a Samuel Smith…indicating the name “Samuel” may possibly have been entered into [the] university records for convenience or respectability’s sake.”). Smith received his primary education at the African Free School #2 on Lower Manhattan’s Mulberry Street, an institution founded in 1787 by governing New York elites. Their aim was to prepare free and enslaved blacks “to the end that they may become good and useful Citizens of the State,” once the state granted full emancipation.

The school graduated a roster of boys who would fill the upper ranks of black intellectual and public life. Smith’s cohort alone included Ira Aldridge, the Shakespearean tragedian and first black actor to play Othello on the London stage; the abolitionist minister Henry Highland Garnet, the first African American to address Congress; Alexander Crummell, an early pan-Africanist minister and inspiration to W.E.B. DuBois; and brothers Charles and Patrick Reason, the first African American to teach at a largely white college and a renowned illustrator-engraver, respectively. These men’s achievements would be exceptional by any standard, but even more so, for a group who were born enslaved or deprived basic rights as free blacks.

They were also all leading abolitionists, contributing their varied talents to the cause. University of Connecticut literature professor Anna Mae Duane, who tells the intertwined life stories of Smith and his classmate Garnet in her book Educated for Freedom, says the boys at the African Free School spurred each other on to great success and that the school’s innovative method of teaching contributed to that. The schoolmaster, a white Englishman named Charles C. Andrews, brought with him from his home country the Lancasterian system to help one or a handful of teachers instruct a class of 500 boys. “The boys would teach other,” Duane says. “They were all deputized as assistant teachers, basically.” This had a galvanizing effect on their confidence.

“When you are learning something, you are learning from another black person,” Duane says. “There was so much they did for each other because of way the school was run. It gave this incredible sense of authority and community.” Just as they elevated each other, the boys were destined to do the same for their people. Garnet formed a club of among the boys, Duane says, and the boys took an oath to “get their education and free everyone down south.”

Even among this exceptional group, Smith stood out as the school’s star pupil. In 1824, the school selected him to address the Marquis de Lafayette when the abolitionist Revolutionary War hero visited the school during his farewell tour of America. Freed by New York’s Emancipation Act of 1827, and after graduating the African Free School at 15, with honors, the next year, Smith apprenticed to a blacksmith, while continuing his studies with area ministers.

He took instruction in Latin and Greek from his mentor, the Reverend Peter Williams, Jr., another African Free School alum, and the pastor of St. Philip’s Church, the leading black church in the city. Garnet recalls his friend working “at a forge with a bellows in one hand and a Latin grammar in the other.” In time, Smith would master French, and demonstrate proficiency in Spanish, German, Italian and Hebrew.

When Columbia University and Geneva College (now Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York) refused Smith admission because of his race, Smith’s benefactors raised funds so he could attend the University of Glasgow, which Stauffer describes as “a deeply abolitionist university at the time,” with ties to the abolitionist movement in New York. “Glasgow was a far better university than any American college at the time,” Stauffer said, and “on par with Oxford and Cambridge.” The university had been the seat of the Scottish Enlightenment just decades earlier, and had graduated pioneering thinkers including Adam Smith and James Watt.

At Glasgow, Smith was a charter member of in the Glasgow Emancipation Society, joining just before Britain abolished slavery in 1833. In a span of five years, he earned his bachelors, masters,’ and medical degrees, graduating at or near top of his class. Then, he completed his residency in Paris. The African American press heralded his return to the U.S. in 1837.

In New York, Smith established his medical practice at 55 West Broadway, where he also opened the first black-owned pharmacy in the United States. He saw both black and white patients, men and women. “[Whites] were willing to go to him because of his reputation,” Stauffer says. “He was widely recognized as one of the leading medical doctors in New York.…Even white doctors who were racists couldn’t help [but respect his expertise] because of his publications.” In 1840, Smith authored the first medical case report by an African American, titled, “Case of ptyalism with fatal termination,” but was denied the opportunity to present this paper on fatal tongue-swelling to the New York Medical and Surgical Society, “lest it might interfere with the ‘harmony’ of the young institution,” the society insisted. His paper, “On the Influence of Opium upon the Catamenial Functions,” was the first publication by an African American in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

While the foregoing represents Smith’s contributions to conventional medical research and treatment (and concerned mostly white patients), Smith dedicated considerable attention to challenging pseudoscientific justifications for African American oppression. The moment he stepped back on U.S. soil, he delivered a lecture titled “The Fallacy of Phrenology,” where he attacked the notion that head shape and size dictates the relative intelligence of different racial groups.

Having embraced at Glasgow Adolphe Quetelet’s pioneering application of statistics to social science, Smith frequently marshaled sophisticated statistical analysis to make his case. When the federal government used data from the 1840 census to argue that emancipated blacks in the North, when compared to those still enslaved, were “more prone to vice and pauperism, accompanied by the bodily and mental inflictions incident thereto—deafness, blindness, insanity and idiocy,” Smith mounted a campaign to refute the claim.

The Harvard-trained physician Edward Jarvis, who had initially supported these government findings, later joined Smith in exposing fundamental errors in the census. For example, Smith demonstrated that the census often tallied more infirm or “insane” black persons than there were black persons in a given state (“to make 19 crazy men out of one man”). More fundamentally, he showed the census failed to account for the higher mortality rate among the enslaved population—the murder of blacks, he charged, at young ages. In an 1844 letter to the New York Herald on the topic, he writes, “What mockery it is for men to talk of the kindness of masters in taking care of aged slaves, when Death has relieved them of so large a share of the burden!”

Smith served for 20 years as the medical director of the Colored Orphan Asylum, a position he assumed some years after he accused the asylum’s previous doctor of negligence for concluding that the deaths among his charges were due to the “peculiar constitution and condition of the colored race.” Smith made great improvements in the medical care at the institution, containing outbreaks of contagious diseases by expanding the medical ward to allow for greater separation and isolation of sick children. He saw the Quaker-run institution as one of the best schools in the city for black children, providing for them what the African Free School provided for him, with a critical difference: Duane says the philosophy of the African Free School was, “You need to admire a version of history that disconnects you from the history of slavery in this country…your own mother… You’re not orphaned but you orphan yourself. You leave the past behind.”

The leaders of the African Free School contemplated the children would educate themselves, gain freedom and repatriate to Africa. By contrast, Smith, says Duane, “saw education [at the orphanage] as a way of supporting families, of putting down roots in the U.S. And fighting for citizenship.”

He also knew an educated black population marked the beginning of the end of slavery. Slavery, Stauffer says, relies on a “totalitarian state” where no one is permitted to question the status quo. So, in the case of enslaved persons like Smith and his cohort who become free, he says, “That’s when they start speaking and writing profusely, and that’s what really fuels or creates the abolition movement.” Education and freedom of expression is anathema to slavery. “All slave societies do their best to prevent slaves from having a public voice, because if they do it’s going to wreak havoc on the society.”

Havoc was necessary if abolition could not be achieved by other means. Smith defied the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required that citizens in free States aid in the recapture of persons fleeing bondage, as he met with other black activists in the back room of his pharmacy to arrange for the protection of runaways. In 1855, he co-founded the interracial Radical Abolitionist Party, with Frederick Douglass, former Congressman Gerrit Smith, and John Brown, the abolitionist man-in-the-arena, who in 1859 would lead a foiled attack on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in an attempt to instigate a revolt among the area’s enslaved population. The party advocated a pluralistic, egalitarian society, for men and women of all backgrounds.

Unlike William Lloyd Garrison advocated “moral suasion” as the means to rid the nation of slavery, these radical abolitionists were prepared to use violence if it would liberate their brethren from bondage. Smith reasoned in an 1856 essay in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, “Our white brethren cannot understand us unless we speak to them in their own language; they recognize only the philosophy of force. They will never recognize our manhood until we knock them down a time or two; they will then hug us as men and brethren.”

Smith predicted the institution of slavery would not give up the ghost on its own. “African Americans recognized that violence is at the heart of slavery,” Stauffer says. “Without violence, slavery cannot exist…And so, [African Americans] were practical.”

In general, Smith and the Radical Abolitionist Party believed that white Americans needed to embrace African-American perspectives in order to see America in its true light and redeem it. He wrote, “[W]e are destined to spread over our common country the holy influences of principles, the glorious light of Truth.” This access to truth, he predicted, would be manifested in African American oratory, poetry, literature, music and art. Stauffer says that one of Smith’s lifelong interests was to reveal to people the unrecognized influence of Africans and African Americans in the advance of scholarship and culture. An 1843 publication records Smith proclaiming in an 1841 lecture:

“For we are destined to write the literature of this republic, which is still, in letters, a mere province of Great Britain. We have already, even from the depths of slavery, furnished the only music this country has yet produced. We are also destined to write the poetry of the nation; for as real poetry gushes forth from minds embued with a lofty perception of the truth, so our faculties, enlarged in the intellectual struggle for liberty, will necessarily become fired with glimpses at the glorious and the true, and will weave their inspiration into song.”

Indeed, as Smith observed, songs among the enslaved were already shaping American music in his time. “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” a haunting spiritual about the separation of children from their mothers during slavery, would later, as musicologists acknowledge, form the basis for George Gershwin’s 1934 song, “Summertime.”

Smith himself made significant contributions to the American literary canon with a series of narrative sketches in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, which he called, “The Heads of Colored People.” With its title mocking the attempts of phrenology to diminish the worth of African Americans, Smith paints dignified portraits of everyday black people—a bootblack, a washerman—as examples of the unique personalities inherent to every human being.

Smith died in November 1865 of congestive heart failure, living his final years in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He and many black families fled Manhattan after the 1863 Draft Riots, where largely working-class Irish draft resisters assaulted and killed black New Yorkers and attacked charitable institutions associated with African-Americans and the war. Most distressing for Smith were these events of July 13 of that year, as reported by the New York Times:

“The Orphan Asylum for Colored Children was visited by the mob about 4 o’clock. … Hundreds, and perhaps thousands of the rioters, the majority of whom were women and children, entered the premises, and in the most excited and violent manner they ransacked and plundered the building from cellar to garret.”

The rioters burned the building to the ground. Fortunately, the staff managed to escort all the children to safety through a back exit. An ailing Smith was not at the asylum that day, and despite attacks in the vicinity of his home and pharmacy was not harmed. But he and other black New Yorkers were shaken. The mob ultimately killed an estimated 175 people, including many who were hanged or burned alive. It’s estimated that in the riot’s aftermath, Manhattan’s black population declined by 20 percent, many departing for Brooklyn.

“I didn’t know he was my ancestor,” says Greta Blau, a white woman who learned about Smith when she wrote a paper on the Colored Orphan Asylum for a class at Hunter College in the 1990s. While she had seen his name in her grandmother’s family Bible, he was a “Scottish doctor” in family lore. Only later did she make the connection. “I think all his children “passed,” she said, meaning that Smith’s descendants hid their black ancestry in order to enjoy the privileges of whites in a segregated world. The 1870 U.S. census recorded Smith’s children as white and they, in turn, married white spouses.

Knowledge of Smith’s achievements as an African American might have endured had he published books, but his essays from periodicals were more easily forgotten. Whereas Douglass was the most photographed American of the 19th century, only one portrait of Smith exists. Blau realizes why Smith’s children did not seek to keep his legacy alive: “In order for his children to be safe and pass, he had to be forgotten,…which is tragic.” In 2010, Blau arranged for the placement of a new headstone at Smith’s grave in Brooklyn’s Cypress Hill Cemetery.

Remarkably, several white descendants of Smith are interred in the same section established by St. Philip’s Church, the black church Smith attended. Blau’s grandmother, who died in 2019 at 99 years old, joined her for the ceremony at the gravesite, as did descendants from Smith’s other children, whom Blau first met when she contacted them to share the news of their ancestor. While other descendants she contacted did not welcome the news of her discovery, these distant cousins who joined her for the ceremony made the journey from the Midwest to be there. “They were proud of it. Just proud.”

#History

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qqueenofhades · 5 years

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Do you think society as a whole understands and values history? I don’t think they do. And I don’t understand why.

HoooooWEEEEEE, anon. What follows is a good old Hilary History Rant ™, but let me hasten to assure you that none of it is directed at you. It just means that this is a topic on which I have many feelings, and a lot of frustration, and it gets at the heart of many things which are wrong with our society, and the way in which I try to deal with this as an academic and a teacher. So…. yeah.

In short: you’re absolutely right. Society as a whole could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing history, especially right now. Though let me rephrase that: they could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing any history that does not reinforce and pander to their preferred worldview, belief system, or conception of reality. The human race has always had an amazing ability to not give a shit about huge problems as long as they won’t kill us right now (see: climate change) and in one sense, that has allowed us to survive and evolve and become an advanced species. You have to compartmentalize and solve one problem at a time rather than get stuck in abstracts, so in that way, it is a positive trait. However, we are faced with a 21st century where the planet is actively burning alive, late-stage capitalism has become so functionally embedded in every facet of our society that our public values, civic religion, and moral compass (or lack thereof) is structured around consumerism and who it benefits (the 1% of billionaire CEOs), and any comfortable myths of historical progress have been blown apart by the worldwide backslide into right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, nationalism, racism, and other such things. In a way, this was a reaction to 9/11, which changed the complacent late-20th century mindset of the West in ways that we really cannot fathom or overstate. But it’s also a clarion call that something is very, very wrong here, and the structural and systemic explanations that historians provide for these kinds of events are never what anyone wants to hear.

Think about it this way. The world is currently, objectively speaking, producing more material resources, wealth, food, etc than at any point before, thanks to the effects of globalism, the industrial and information revolutions, mass mechanizing, and so on. There really isn’t a “shortage” of things. Except for the fact that the distribution of these resources is so insanely unequal, and wildly disproportionate amounts of wealth have been concentrated in a few private hands, which then use the law (and the law is a tool of the powerful to protect power) to make sure that it’s never redistributed. This is why Reaganism and “supply-side”, aka “trickle-down” economics, is such bullshit: it presupposes that billionaires will, if you enable them to make as many billions as possible without regulation, altruistically sow that largess among the working class. This never happens, because obviously. (Sidenote: remember those extravagant pledges of billions of euros to repair Notre Dame from like 3 or 4 French billionaires? Apparently they have paid… exactly not one cent toward renovations, and the money has come instead from the Friends of Notre Dame funded by private individuals. Yep, not even for the goddamn cause célèbre of the “we don’t give a shit about history” architectural casualties could they actually pay up. Eat! The! Rich!…. anyway.)

However, the fact is that you need to produce narratives to justify this kind of exploitation and inequality, and make them convincing enough that the people who are being fucked over will actively repeat and promote these narratives and be fiercely vested in their protection. Think of the way white American working-class voters will happily blame minorities, immigrants, Non-Murkan People, etc for their struggles, rather than the fact of said rampant economic cronyism and oligarchy. These working-class voters will love the politicians who give them someone to blame (see: Trump), especially when that someone is an Other around whom collective systems of discrimination and oppression have historically operated. Women, people of color, religious minorities/non-Western religions, LGBT people, immigrants, etc, etc…. all these have historically not had such a great time in the capitalist Christian West, which is the predominant paradigm organizing society today. You can’t understand why society doesn’t value history until you realize that the people who benefit from this system aren’t keen on having its flaws pointed out. They don’t want the masses to have a historical education if that historical education is going to actually be used. They would rather teach them the simplistic rah-rah quasi-fictional narrative of the past that makes everyone feel good, and call it a day.

The classic liberal belief has always been that if you can just teach someone that their facts are wrong, or supply them with better facts, they’ll change their mind. This is not how it works and never has, and that is why in an age with, again, more knowledge of science than ever before and the collected wisdom of humanity available via your smartphone, we have substantial portions of people who believe that vaccines are evil, the Earth is flat, and climate change (and 87 million other things) are fake and/or government conspiracies. As a medievalist, I get really tetchy when the idiocy of modern people is blamed on the stereotypical “Dark Ages!” medieval era (I have written many posts ranting about that, so we’ll keep it to a minimum here), or when everything bad, backward, or wrong is considered to be “medieval” in nature. Trust me, on several things, they were doing a lot better than we are. Other things are not nearly as wildly caricatured as they have been made out to be. Because once again, history is complicated and people are flawed in any era, do good and bad things, but that isn’t as useful as a narrative that flattens out into simplistic black and white.

Basically, people don’t want their identities, comfortable notions, and other ideas about the past challenged, especially since that is directly relevant to how they perceive themselves (and everyone else) in the present. The thing about history, obviously, is that it’s past, it’s done, and until we invent a time machine, which pray God we never fucking do, within a few generations, the entire population of the earth has been replaced. That means it’s awfully fragile as a concept. Before the modern era and the invention of technology and the countless mediums (book, TV, radio, newspaper, internet, etc etc) that serve as sources, it’s only available in a relatively limited corpus of documents. History does not speak for itself. That’s where you get into historiography, or writing history. Even if you have a book or document that serves as a primary source material, you have to do a shit-ton of things with it to turn it into recognizable scholarship. You have to learn the language it’s in. You have to understand the context in which it was produced. You have to figure out what it ignores, forgets, omits, or simply does not know as well as what it does, and recognize it as a limited text produced from a certain perspective or for a social reason that may or may not be explicitly articulated. The training of a historian is to teach you how to do this accurately and more or less fairly, but that is up to the personal ethic of the historian to ensure. When you’re reading a history book, you’re not reading an unmediated, Pure, This Was Definitely How Things Happened The End information download. You are reading something by someone who has made their best guess and has been equipped with the interpretive tools to be reasonably confident in their analysis, but sometimes just doesn’t know, sometimes has an agenda in pushing one opinion over another, or anything else.

History, in other words, is a system of flawed and self-serving collective memory, and power wants only the memory that ensures its survival and replication. You’ve heard of the “history is written by the winners” quote, which basically encapsulates the fact that what we learn and what we take as fact is largely or entirely structured by the narrative of those who can control it. If you’ve heard of the 1970s French philosopher Michel Foucault, his work is basically foundational in understanding how power produces knowledge in each era (what he calls epistemes) and the way in which historical “fact” is subject to the needs of these eras. Foucault has a lot of critics and his work particularly in the history of sexuality has now become dated (plus he can be a slog to read), but I do suggest familiarizing yourself with some of his ideas.

This is also present in the constant refrain heard by anybody who has ever studied the arts and humanities: “oh, don’t do liberal arts, you’ll never get a job, study something worthwhile,” etc. It’s funny how the “worthwhile” subjects always seem to be science and engineering/software/anything that can support the capitalist military industrial complex, while science is otherwise completely useless to them. It’s also always funny how the humanities are relentlessly de- or under- funded. By labeling these subjects as “worthless,” when they often focus on deep investigation of varied topics, independent critical thought, complex analysis, and otherwise teaching you to think for yourself, we therefore decrease the amount of people who feel compelled to go into them. Since (see again, late-stage capitalism is a nightmare) most people are going to prefer some kind of paycheck to stringing it along on a miniscule arts budget, they will leave those fields and their inherent social criticism behind. Of course, we do have some people – academics, social scientists, artists, creatives, activists, etc – who do this kind of work and dedicate themselves to it, but we (and I include myself in this group) have not reached critical mass and do not have the power to effect actual drastic change on this unfair system. I can guarantee that they will ensure we never will, and the deliberate and chronic underfunding of the humanities is just one of the mechanisms by which late-stage capitalism replicates and protects itself.

I realize that I sound like an old man yelling at a cloud/going off on my paranoid rant, but…. this is just the way we’ve all gotten used to living, and it’s both amazing and horrifying. As long as the underclasses are all beholden to their own Ideas of History, and as long as most people are content to exist within the current ludicrous ideas that we have received down the ages as inherited wisdom and enforced on ourselves and others, there’s not much we can do about it. You are never going to reach agreement on some sweeping Platonic ideal of universal history, since my point throughout this whole screed has always been that history is particular, localized, conditioned by specific factors, and produced to suit the purposes of a very particular set of goals. History doesn’t repeat itself, per se (though it can be Very Fucking Close), but as long as access to a specific set of resources, i.e. power, money, sex, food, land, technology, jobs, etc are at stake, the inherent nature of human beings means that they will always be choosing from within a similar matrix of actions, producing the same kind of justifications for those actions, and transmitting it to the next generation in a way that relatively few people learn how to challenge. We have not figured out how to break that cycle yet. We are an advanced species beyond any doubt, but we’re also still hairless apes on a spinning blue ball on the outer arm of a rural galaxy, and oftentimes we act like it.

I don’t know. I think it’s obvious why society doesn’t understand and value history, because historians are so often the ones pointing out the previous pattern of mistakes and how well that went last time. Power does not want to be dismantled or criticized, and has no interest in empowering the citizens to consider the mechanisms by which they collaborate in its perpetuation. White supremacists don’t want to be educated into an “actual” version of history, even if their view of things is, objectively speaking, wildly inaccurate. They want the version of history which upholds their beliefs and their way of life. Even non-insane people tend to prefer history that validates what they think they already know, and especially in the West, a certain mindset and system of belief is already so well ingrained that it has become almost omniscient. Acquiring the tools to work with this is, as noted, blocked by social disapproval and financial shortfall. Plus it’s a lot of goddamn work. I’m 30 years old and just finished my PhD, representing 12 years of higher education, thousands of dollars, countless hours of work, and so on. This is also why they’ve jacked the price of college through the roof and made it so inaccessible for people who just cannot make that kind of commitment. I’ve worked my ass off, for sure, but I also had support systems that not everyone does. I can’t say I got here All On My Own ™, that enduring myth of pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps. I know I didn’t. I had a lot of help, and again, a lot of people don’t. The academy is weird and cliquish and underpaid as a career. Why would you do that?

I wish I had more overall answers for you about how to fix this. I think about this a lot. I’ll just have to go back to doing what I can, as should we all, since that is really all that is ultimately in our control.

#history #rant #long post #i'm sure i have more to say #but that's enough for now #anonymous #ask

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zithjen · 5 years

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Some Core Issues of this World

Before we dive into the execution of a revolution we should probably address why change is necessary and why it is so important that it happens soon.

The issue that has always bothered me personally the most is that of the exploitation of the worker. To think that the t-shirt I was wearing was sewn by a girl my age or younger, in a run-down factory, breathing in poisonous gases, continuously working her hands bloody (literally) because she has no real choice but to let companies exploit her, just to ensure that her family can afford the barest necessities of life. It is one of the most disgusting things I can think of. She doesn’t have the option of doing something with her life that fulfils her. She has to sell her labour at a wage that is no where near enough to provide for her loved ones. And to top this off employers could not care less for their employees’ safety and thus the working conditions are often insecure and endanger the workers. Phew, all the topics that come to my mind when thinking about this. Apart from endangering their workers, big companies and employers take away people’s means of living by for example pressuring them to sell their farmland which has been their main source of food and income for generations or buying up a vital fresh water source, bottling it up and selling the water these people used to get for free straight from nature for money which they simply do not have (not to mention the pollution created during the process if plastic bottle-making and then the shipping of the goods (I tip my hat to you if you also immediately thought of companies like Nestlé who are one of these monsters)). Or, which I might find even worse, such factories polluting their environment with chemicals either out of self-servitude or ignorance. Excuse me, I get carried away. Awful things that we let happen.

Now, as for the reason why this is an issue that could and needs to be ended by a system change is that this exploitation is the absolute base on which capitalism is built. Capitalism relies on the means of production getting cheaper and cheaper and the market to continue expanding. And seeing as we as consumer ship expect less expensive products the money we do not want to pay needs to be taken from somewhere. I can guarantee you that CEO’s will not part with a single penny which means that labourers (this includes office workers as well nowadays, contrary to Karl Marx’ time where this particular class struggle was first properly studied and where Marx’ oppressed class, the Proletariat, was made up by all workers (meaning factory and manual labourers) of the world) will have to deal with worsening working conditions and even less pay.

Instead of having only a handful of people in a company call the shots, make most of the money and not care about the people doing the actual work, anarcho-syndicalists as well as communists suggest self organisation and the complete abolishment of hierarchies, as well as a reconnecting with the work we are doing. The people working in a factory deciding how, when, and what they want to do that is, however, just a small part of that change.

While we are on the topic of exploitation, something else that is grossly being exploited is our earth and her resources. I don’t know where or when people got the idea that the earth is a 24 hours unlimited all you can eat buffet but it isn’t. Get that idiocy out of your heads. On the bright side, not all people are completely unaware. So there have been multiple trends in recent years such as a ban of plastic bags in supermarket chains all over the world and the most recent trend of refusing plastic straws. While it is admirable that some people are doing something it is hardly enough. What needs to change is again the system. 100 companies are responsible for 70% of emissions and although I do not know the numbers for the responsibility of ocean pollution I’d wager our plastic sins, while despicable and under all costs needs to be reduced, if not stopped, are nowhere near as harmful as that of big companies. Now, more important than continuing to reduce the harmful ways in which we impact our planet as individuals, is that we pressure big companies to either do the same or make sure they disappear forever. Aside from harmful emissions and plastic, in order to make profit, companies destroy enormous amounts of forest (especially in South America) for mono cultures of plants such as soy and palm trees. I have to admit geography is not my area of expertise, however, if I’m not mistaken then the hummus layer (which is the layer with most nutrients) in the ground in the rain forests is rather thin and can only be used for a short amount of time before yield is close to non existent without massive fertilisation. As though removing a big chunk of our planet’s lungs, our oxygen provider, wasn’t bad enough, using such amounts of fertiliser is incredibly harmful. And eventually these big stretches of land will have to be abandoned and by then the ground is so exhausted of nutrients that the forest struggles to reclaim the land. I can not even express my disdain for such reckless and stupid actions. And again we have only scratched the surface of these atrocities. We have yet to address the massive loss of life and habitat during deforestation. But I’ll leave that to organisations such as WWF and Green Peace.

Another topic close to my heart is discrimination. This will take me some time to cover as we are talking about discrimination against different ethnicities, people in the LGBTQ community, women, and, tied to the discrimination against ethnicities, xenophobia, and I’ll scrape the topic of the absolute brainlessness of borders and keeping people out of a country.

As a foreigner who grew up in the central European country I quickly learnt how normal discrimination is. As a child I got harassed and called slurs due to my origins. I wasn’t alone in this. If you didn’t absolutely adapt to the predominant culture you would have a though life. While this can be rather traumatising it is nothing compared to what prejudices for example black people in Europe as well as the US have had to live with. Shot at, killed, unjustly taken into custody, wrongly imprisoned. To name a few. I can’t believe that I am explaining this because the only right thing, on which I will not argue with anyone, is to judge a person based not on their skin colour, clothes, physical appearance, piercings, tattoos, hair colour, headscarf, burka, or anything like that, but on their actions and their capacity to show kindness. Back to the topic at hand. While there may be a lot of minorities, such as black people who live in poverty, which in no way represents their laziness or inferiority, they are not given the same opportunities as other people because of their skin colour. Prejudice and decades of oppression has forced them into impossible situations, where for many survival is their biggest concern. Being denied access to education or having to “sit with the brown kids” at lunch is what keeps them imprisoned in a lower class. This struggle is exceptionally painful as black people freed themselves of slavery mere decades ago just to be continuously mistreated.

Unfortunately, discrimination is not limited to people of colour. Modern women’s rights movements, which have been going on for over 100 years also still struggle and have to fight for each scrap of equality. I will not delve too deep into the topic. I will say though. My body. My choice. You can fuck the hell off if you tell any woman who did not specifically ask for your opinion how she should live her life. This is regarding clothing choices, choices regarding children, or how many or few sexual partners she has. Aside from that, many people see equality between men and women as achieved when plain and simple it has not been. The pay gaps being the smallest issue. Women are denied jobs for which they would be the perfect candidate for the reason of being female. The annoying thing about this is that many are not aware of their own prejudices, which makes it that much harder to battle. Women are naturally assumed to be the stay-at-home parent and are pressured into the “right” gender role. This applies to both men and women of course and the issue of bigenderism will be another point of discussion in the future. DISCLAIMER: Just because you do not do one of these things that does not automatically make you a non-sexist. It just makes you not quite such a sexist. Treat women as equals and there you go. Now actively say or do something for equal rights for women and you’ll be a feminist. This includes all women; white, black, Muslim, Christian, trans, etc. (We will discuss feminism and the fears connected to it at a later point as well.)

Speaking of trans (great TRANSition). Acceptance towards the lgbtq community is lacking as well. Not only is there a lack of acceptance but people actively hinder lgbtq members from being happy and living their lives the way they want to. I will try to make this very clear: they are not harming you by loving who they love and fucking who they want as you are. Who do you think you are, attacking them when they do nothing to harm you. Instead of complaining or hating queer people you might want to judge people based on their morals, as I have said before. A gay guy that’s rude is just as much of an unlikable person as a straight guy. He is, however, not an unlikable person because he’s gay. Never. Let people do what they want as long as they don’t harm anyone. And no one has a right to harm them for being who they are. Not civilians, not police. We just passed pride month, which, apart from reminding us to love who we love, should remind us of those who have fought for the rights of lgbtq members. It should remind us of those who were crushed and prohibited from loving and those who were suppressed by their governments and their police. Hatred will not stand against love.

And it is in these times, I believe, that we need love for one another more than ever before. We have reached a certain standard of living in western society that we do not have to fear for our lives. Unfortunately, not all people are that lucky. People flee from their home countries, whether it’s because it’s at war, or they can’t provide for their families. For whatever reason they flee, they are looking for a better life for their families and themselves and they need to be given a chance. Of course the problems in their countries need to be solved, but until they are these people need a home. Instead of pretending that they are all evil you could get over yourself and get to know some of them. Yes, there may be a cultural difference but it might be interesting to get to know it, broaden your horizon. Everyone is a human as you are. Some where just more or less fortunate in where they were born and how their country has been or is being governed. They have worries enough. Be kind to them. There is no need to put them in concentration camps, build walls to keep them out, separate children from their families, or be scared of them altogether.

Speaking of concentration camps (aka ICE). Many anarchists will agree that we hold no love for the police. I only briefly mentioned police brutality in the paragraphs about discrimination. I did not even scratch the surface of the disgusting things they do. They have been given the power and the right, by their government, to use force when they deem it necessary. Keep in mind they choose when they want to use force. It is no coincident that there are more black people being shot than white people by police, or that more lgbtq members are beat up than cis men. There is an imbalance in the distribution of power. We are governed from the top down and it is all we can do not to submit and accept this injustice.

If you take anything from this, let it be that we are all human beings, who deserve to live our lives as we choose, without fear for survival. Assuming we are different from one another because we are born in different places marked only by an imaginary line, or the colour of our skin, sexuality, or gender (which is also an ide constructed by our society).

It is not a coincidence either that all the oppressed are not white, straight, old men who sit in positions of power and assure that these few named injustices continue. It is our duty to ensure that no innocent is harmed and every moment we fail to do just that, is one moment too much. We need to fight this. Now.

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asiryn · 5 years

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tagged by @primrose-path-of-dalliance (!!!!!! thanks!!! (lmao, it’s been so long since i’ve been tagged in anything XDD))

Rules: Name your top 10 favourite characters from 10 different fandoms, then tag 10 people!

i’m putting this behind a cut, bc i rambled on for quite a while XDD these won’t be in any particular order, and the fandoms will be chosen based off of what i’m currently most into/whichever ones i think of first XD

1. Maleficent [Disney]

okay, i lied a little.....she is clearly my #1 favorite character of all time, so of course she’s first (the rest of the list won’t be in any particular order :P). but....yeah, i love her forever and for all time and eternity, i love her class and elegance, my hunt for all merchandise of her that i can get my hands on is legendary and knows no bounds, she’s my forever girl, etc, etc. if you know only one fact about me, it’s probably that i love maleficent. there’s nothing i can say here that i haven’t probably already said a million times over, so i’ll move on XD

(moana has risen to be a pretty close second, tho)

2. Anthony J. Crowley [Good Omens]

i read the book from a library over a decade ago, and i liked it well enough, but it like....wasn’t an instant new fave that i had to immediately buy for myself (tho it is on a list of books that i wouldn’t mind owning...but maybe it’s finally time, who knows). i’m halfway through the show, and i’ve finally fallen in love with it (i think it finally being a #confirmed love story between our favorite ineffable idiots finally gave it the push it needed XD). it’s still a bit early for me to have a solid, definite fave, but lbr, if i know myself at all, it’s gonna be crowley XD i love this dumb demon (who’s rivaled in his idiocy only by his equally dumb angel husband), i love how he’s so soft even as he tries desperately to convince himself and everyone else that he isn’t, that he loves so many things and humanity and an angel even as he tries to say that he isn’t capable of it, that he never stopped questioning even after it had made him Fall. also, i am so thankful that the fandom has really embraced the potential for the shenanigans of crowley’s snake form.👍

(second place is probably aziraphale, but i also really love anathema too)

3. Namine [Kingdom Hearts]

another one that probably comes as no surprise, if you know me. i love this girl to the ends of the universe. i love the way she reclaimed her agency, her selflessness and determination, her empathy and kindness, how she went from a damsel in distress to pretty much saving everyone, over and over and over again. she deserves only happiness and the best things from now on. and please, for the love of god, give her some new clothes, nomura. >_>

(second fave is roxas, tho really, i love 98% of all the characters in this series ;;;)

4. Aerith Gainsborough [Final Fantasy VII]

my precious sunshine girl 💖 i prefer her in the original game, where she was sweet and optimistic, yes, but she was also sassy and fierce and took shit from no one. i love the girl that decided she wanted to wear a sexy red dress just for the hell of it, and threatened to rip off a mafia don’s balls. i love the girl that was confident and flirty with cloud, but never let any kind of bullshit ‘rivalry’ get in the way of being friends with tifa. i love that she always called cloud out on his bullshit, that she never let tragedy and oppressive shinra forces grind out her optimism, that she never stopped dreaming of a better future. i love that she was exposed to the worst of human nature, and yet still believed that they were worth saving. i love all versions of aerith, obvs, but they’ve definitely smoothed out her edges over the years, and i think that’s a shame. so here’s hoping that she’ll be more like her original self in the remake.

also, can’t wait to see aerith die again :)))))))

(my second fave tends to flip between cloud and sephiroth)

5. Ling Yao / Greed [Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood]

look. listen. i can’t choose between them, i just can’t. and hey....technically they sort of combine into one entity, so it’s totally fine to count them together, right?? XDD so yeah, it’s really fucking hard to pick a fave out of this cast, bc there’s only like....3 characters?? that i don’t love. but ultimately, it had to be these two. every single second they’re on screen, they totally steal the show, and they have a lot of the best scenes and moments in the series. i love ling, how he seems like a total goofball and comic relief at first, but fairly quickly you come to see just how fucking seriously he takes his duties and responsibilities, how selfless and devoted he is to his people, how he would walk through hellfire for the people he loves. he’s just....he just loves, so fiercely and intensely, that he moves even greed into loving him and the people he cares about without even trying.

and then there’s greed, who even from the beginning, you can’t help but be charmed by, with his sarcastic slow claps and laidback attitude. but over time, you see that he’s just like ling, really, in that he can’t help but get attached to these humans, that he loves them just as fiercely and intensely, even as he desperately tries to play it off. i love the way his character serves as a means for the story to have a really thought-provoking rumination on the nature of sins and desires, and on humanity (as do all of the other homunculi). i could go on forever about these two, and about the show in general, bc it’s just so deep and incredibly layered and complex, so i’ll stop here.

(next fave after them is winry)

6. Bucky Barnes [MCU]

it’s hard for me to talk about bucky without just dissolving into endless sobbing, but i’ll try my best. he’s just.....he’s someone who has ended up suffering so fucking much, who has every reason in the world to be angry and bitter and resentful and if this was the villain origin story, you’d probably find it hard to blame him. (also, i refuse to say that bucky was ever a villain, bc he never willingly chose to be with hydra, he’s a victim goddamn it--) and yet....he still chooses to be good. to be kind. he could have chosen to go on an endless revenge tour against hydra, but instead he focuses on his own recovery. and always, always, always, he puts other people first. he chooses to goddamn freeze himself, possibly forever, so that he doesn’t hurt people again. he’s truly an inspiration to me, because even after everything he’s been through, he still doesn’t give up. ......and if you’ll excuse me, i need to resume crying about bucky barnes for the rest of eternity 😭😭😭

(next faves are sam and steve. what can i say, i love my caps XP)

7. Keladry of Mindelan [Tortall]

speaking of inspirations, few (if any) characters inspire me more than kel does. unlike every other tortall protagonist, she has absolutely no magic at all, and she starts her story with more odds stacked against her than any of the others. the system and institution are against her, and most people actively, viciously hate her and want to see her fail, all for being a girl and daring to openly step outside of her gender roles. and yet, kel never gives up, and wins through pure will and determination. more than that, she never stops fighting any oppression that she sees, and is always looking out for the abused and marginalized of society. she is fair and just and righteous, and full of a quiet, immovable strength that i, frankly, envy. she’s a fucking mountain; you haven’t a hope of ever tearing her down.

(other faves....george, raoul, and dom. it’s really fucking hard to choose between them, i can’t even)

8. Oree Shoth [Inheritance trilogy, by N. K. Jemison]

oree is pretty much single-handedly responsible for me loving this trilogy, and is the reason why The Broken Kingdoms (the second book, of which she is the protagonist) is in my top 3 favorite books of all time. she is....just so fucking radiant. she’s a blind artist, and is flung so far out of her depth in the story, and yet she holds her own. in this world of gods, she brings this incredibly human element, and is celebrated because of her humanity. she’s angry and flawed, but also full of love, compassion, kindness, and mercy. she teaches gods the meaning of forgiveness. she takes shit from no one. just....do yourself a favor, and read this series, even if it’s only so that you can read this book.

(second fave....it’s probably shiny, lbr XD)

9. Sirius Black [Harry Potter]

ahhh, a classic fave. but yeah, i still love him, even after all these years. yes, he’s incredibly flawed, but at his core, he’s just so loyal, and he loves so fiercely, and he tries his absolute best to be there for harry, that i can’t help but love him. also, i have a Thing, for characters who suffer so tremendously, but who don’t give up, and still try their best to be good people anyway. also, wolfstar was the foundation of a very formative part of my life, and put me onto the road of accepting my queer identity, so i’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for the characters who were a part of that. 🤷‍♀️

(other faves are luna and harry, always)

10. Gladion [Pokemon]

mostly his anime incarnation, tho i do like him in the games as well. i love this soft goth boy with all of my heart. he’s so gentle and kind and loving, and i can’t even with him.

(other faves are lillie, n, zoey, and kukui)

if you guys want to do it, i’ll tag... @dabiden, @green-piggy, @seasbelow, @theroyalweekend, @toomanyfeelings5, @ashetrashe, @neddea.....i can’t think of anyone else, and i’m running out of steam, so if you want to do it, then consider yourself tagged! :)

#kiryn rambles #ask meme #tag meme #primrose-path-of-dalliance #favorite characters #maleficent #crowley #namine #aerith gainsborough #ling yao #greed #greed the avaricious #bucky barnes #keladry of mindelan #oree shoth #sirius black #gladion

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hiilikedragons · 5 years

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With Halloween having came and went, got two questions regarding the Vampire Astrid AU. First, how might the two spend the holiday? Secondly, do you have any ideas regarding Astrid's origins, how she became a vampire and such?

I’m so happy you like the vampire AU– I’ve been weirdly fond of it lately.

The holidays are actually something I’ve thought a lot about in this AU. Hiccup is always trying to humanize Astrid, to bring him into his life and his family and his friend group. She manages to convince him that inviting a vampire over for Thanksgiving is just a couple brain cells shy of idiocy, but she’s not able to talk him out of Christmas. She drags him to a Christmas Eve service at church– and I don’t know why this picture is so clear in my head, but I love the idea of her in a bun and pearls, all proper like, and Hiccup next to her in grease-stained jeans and a leather jacket. And then he insists she come over Christmas day.

“It’s just me and my dad all morning,” he insists. “My godfather might stop by. And then my friends and I do pizza and exchange gifts.”

So she really really really doesn’t think it’s a good idea to get so involved in this human’s life, especially if she ends up accidentally killing him one day. But she obliges, and she’s greeted by Stoick with a crushing hug. She’s the one who saved his son’s life, after all. Astrid hadn’t even considered it, but Stoick’s falling all over himself to fix her cocoa, get her an afghan, wait on her hand and foot. Every now and then she’ll watch the father and son tease back and forth, and she’ll think that maybe she did the right thing in saving him after all. The same thing kind of happens when Gobber comes over, more bear hugs and fawning. It actually embarrasses her a little, how much they seem to adore her.

It’s easier with Hiccup’s friends, who she’s met a couple times before. They end up in her bar sometimes, and once in a blue moon she’ll join them for a night out at Hiccup’s behest. She’s usually quiet, though she likes adding the occasional jab at Hiccup’s obnoxious, hyper-masculine cousin when he makes some misogynistic or generally offensive statement. She and Fishlegs get along really well, and he can usually lure her into a rousing history discussion. The twins are the ones she most runs into when she’s out clubbing, which she does less now that she has to hunt less. But she’s still nervous around them, because she always wonders what they might see or have seen. It doesn’t help that Tuffnut’s a zombie apocalypse enthusiast, always talking about people getting eaten. Ruff’s not so bad, but she’s got a friends-with-benefits thing going on with Snotlout that brings her entire sense of judgement into question. They’re both kind of unpredictable, and that always unnerves Astrid a little. Sometimes she’ll slide them a free shot when she’s bartending, just to stay on their good side.

But on the whole, the gang likes her pretty well. And they have a tradition of getting take out on Christmas for their little get-togethers. They’ve all been friends since they were little kids, something Astrid can’t even imagine, and she watches them banter and laugh and bond with a kind of ache in her chest. Watching them trade presents, tussle Hiccup’s hair, make jokes about his nerdiness or his one-leggedness– it makes her feel so torn. She doesn’t belong here with them, in this kind of warmth. She’s a creature of death and blood. Will she even be in the same city as them next year? Would they hate her if they knew what she was? What if she accidentally kills Hiccup– they would mourn him so fiercely. And then she’ll feel his calloused hand squeeze her own, and she’ll look over to find his eyes smiling at her over the rim of his beer. And even though her heart hasn’t beat in centuries, she’ll feel it kind of flutter. Maybe this could work, if only for a little while. Maybe she should just allow herself to be happy tonight, for the sake of Christmas.

So yeah, I have a lot of feelings about Vampstrid and the holidays.

I mentioned Astrid’s origins a little bit in the original post. She was born and raised as a human during the French Revolution. Very poor, but impassioned and bold. Very ahead of her time so far as feminism, and always at the front of any protest or fight. The violence of the time draws the attention of a few vampires, Heather being one of them. It’s kind of a predatory thing– so much bloodshed in the city mean that nobody looks too deeply into a dead body here and there, but the vampires begin to fight over territory. Heather begins thinking that she needs a helper of sorts, and Astrid’s fierceness draws her attention. She turns her, and though Astrid kind of balks at first, she’s gone from feeling powerless and oppressed to one of the most powerful creatures in the world. The two become really good friends– Heather the mastermind, Astrid the muscle. Astrid’s protective of her maker, of course, so she protects Heather from any threats, kind of like a bodyguard. Heather teaches her how to stay under the radar, how to drink without killing, and they end up spending about a century together.

After a while, Heather begins to feel stifled and wants some space. She urges Astrid to go off and find her own way. Though she protests at first, Astrid eventually agrees. She sails off to Industrial Revolution America and kind of settles into the wild west. Maybe it’s silly, but I love the idea of a Kissin-Kate, Quick-and-the-Dead esque Astrid. A lone, fast-drawing cowgirl that roams the country. Sometimes she’ll come across a kind gentleman interesting enough to share stories around a campfire with, and she’ll leave him alive. Sometimes she comes across wanted men and will turn in their corpses for bounties. And then once the twentieth century hits, and the first World War comes around, she signs up as a nurse. Again– the more bodies there are, the easier she can eat without being noticed.

She ends up with her kind of moral crisis here. She was raised catholic, and she’s always been a little religious, but when she sees so many young men dying, she really starts to kind of consider her immortality and how it plays into her beliefs. It crosses her mind a thousand times when she sees an injured soldier suffering– I could change him. End his pain. Brave boys– practically babies from her two-hundred year old perspective– losing their lives to the petty violence of men. It breaks her heart, and she almost does it so many times. But she considers herself to be damned, religiously speaking. She thinks she’s going to hell. And she doesn’t want to condemn someone else to that fate. Not to mention, she has no guarantee that without a guide like Heather, these young men turned vampires wouldn’t become cold-blooded killers. So she abstains. Watches a lot of people die. Sometimes she thinks she’s hardened her heart against it, and then she’ll try to save a soldier that doesn’t make it, or she’ll see a child caught in the crosshairs of war. That kills her all over again. But every life she saves, she feels like maybe she’s a little forgiven. Maybe God will be merciful. Maybe there’s some balance, a killed to saved ratio that she can weigh in her favor to avoid an eternity in hell. But it never really feels like it’s quite enough.

Then, after the wars, she settles on the upper east coast. That’s always approximately where I imagine Berk to be, in the Pennsylvania area. It’s less of a strange thing for a woman to live alone, so she gets her own place, finds jobs here and there. She tries to put all the death and destruction out of her mind and live a quiet, detached life away from conflict. It’s a few decades of quiet and boredom and loneliness, and then Hiccup comes into her life.

#vampire!astrid #ask #vampire au

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echodrops · 6 years

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Issues with Voltron Season 6 (Part 2)

A continuation of my extremely long vent about the most recent Voltron season.

<- Part 1 is back here.

This time, it’s all about Lotor!

3) Lotor’s entire character makes no sense.

This is such a mess that I really don’t even know where to start. I’m just gonna make a bullet list and then try to break things down from there:

Lotor’s endless drive to harvest quintessence is never grounded in a visible need; therefore, the extent to which he is willing to go to get that power feels entirely unjustified.

The executive producers, VAs, and the show itself went out of their way to flat out tell us that Lotor is a “genuine” character who meant well and really did want to bring peace to the universe--which leads to the frightening conclusion that the EPs think someone who engages in genocide can actually be genuine about wanting peace.

Lotor’s casual disregard for life is utterly at odds with someone who would genuinely want peace--and even more at odds for someone who had actual Alteans to learn from, which leaves the viewers confused about his motives in a way that is terrible for young watchers and bad even for older viewers.

The extent to which the rift influenced Lotor’s actions throughout the course of his life is never clarified, leaving viewers completely unsure whether he would have taken any of the actions he did without the influence of the rift. Clone Shiro in this season tells us the rift only amplifies evil that already exists--ergo, Lotor is, contrary to everything we’ve been told--not genuine about wanting peace and is, instead, at his core, evil. The conflicting messages here are ridiculously unorganized.

Lotor’s desperation to regard himself as a member of the Altean race is almost unspeakably horrific in retrospect, and the fact that the show went so far out of its way to portray him as a person who saw himself as Altean and nevertheless chose to murder them by the thousands is disturbing in the extreme. Even more unsavory are the implications this entire thing has for mixed-race people, since the show also went out of its way to treat Lotor as a mixed-race character--and then gave him absolutely nowhere to fit in. And that’s not even mentioning the implications for abuse survivors...

The idea that Lotor’s feelings for Allura were real is so gross I almost can’t even bear it--and this as someone who was FIRMLY on the Lotura ship before season six. If you can go from claiming you love someone to wanting to kill them in one line of dialogue, your feelings weren’t real! That’s all there is to it. “But he was corrupted by the rift!” Except the rift only amplifies what was already there, right?

Okay so, let’s just start with that first idea, because honestly, fixing that problem could actually have fixed many of the others. We know that Lotor’s plan is to harvest the infinite quintessence between universes in the rift. Sure, makes sense. Except for the part where the reasoning behind that plan is never examined in detail. Why does Lotor need that much quintessence? We viewers assume that it’s because the entire Galra Empire runs on quintessence--that the empire will crumble without a constant supply of energy. I can only guess what we, as viewers, are supposed to believe that this will be a terrible thing and that, at this point, the universe actually needs the Galra Empire in order to survive... Except that’s surely only true in a significantly smaller capacity. There are undoubtedly planets that rely on Galra technology in order to ensure survival--but not every planet. Probably not even MOST planets. The Galra Empire does not need to exist in its current capacity by any means--significantly scaling back on the expansion efforts alone would easily save the amount of quintessence necessary to begin transitioning Galra-dependent planets to independence from both the Galra Empire and quintessence use.

The only conclusion I can come to here, and the one I think the writers want us to come to, is that Lotor had no intention of ever dissolving the Galra Empire and freeing the universe from his control. Which is all well and good. Power is appealing, especially to someone like Lotor who likely desired that power his whole life. As far as villains go, this is stock behavior and I totally get it--what I don’t get is why in the world any of our intrepid heroes bought into this? When I said there was an idiot plot raging, this is exactly what I meant.

Viewers accept Lotor’s plan because we know he’s villain-coded. But the team supposedly believed him to be a good guy--in what way, and in what universe, would have supplying the Galra Empire with infinite quintessence helped anyone except the Galra Empire? “No, no,” you might say, “Lotor convinced the team that the Galra Empire was only expanding because they needed to harvest quintessence from other worlds! Without that need, they would have stopped oppressing other planets, obviously!”

Great--except they seemingly weren’t using that quintessence for any purpose but to continue expanding! The show never--at any point--shows us the Galra using the quintessence they harvest for any purposes other than evil. There’s never any moment of “Actually, we need this quintessence to power lifesaving hospital technologies for our sick and elderly!” or “We use this quintessence to amplify our food production so that we can feed all our children!” This isn’t something you should leave it up to the viewers to assume--the writers needed to do this work at least in part, to ensure that Lotor’s entire plan made sense in the first place. Until we really SEE the need for the quintessence, Lotor’s entire scheme looks like nothing more than a power-hungry bid for endless energy to continue fueling his dark empire--and our heroes look like the complete and utter idiots who thought that sounded like a good idea.

Pidge’s lines from this season confirm that Coran really did share the entire story of what happened to Zarkon back in the day with all the paladins. This means that Allura--knowing that it resulted in the zombification of Zarkon and Honerva and ultimately the death of her father--still went with Lotor into the rift in this season. I can hardly fathom the degree of idiocy it would take a real woman to choose this course of action. Poor Allura did not deserve this treatment.

Which leads into the second issue: it’s impossible--literally impossible--to see Lotor as a genuine character who really did want to bring peace to the universe unless a serious need for endless quintessence is properly articulated. There are plenty of powerfully advanced races like the Olkari who do not appear to fuel their creations by harvesting life energy. We, as viewers, cannot buy into the idea that Lotor absolutely needs this quintessence--enough that he is willing to kill thousands of people--without that need being better explained on screen.

Because it never was, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the writing of the show that makes Lotor’s treatment of the captive Alteans seem justified. The show didn’t portray this as a difficult choice for Lotor to make, didn’t give him a scene where he had to choose between say... one or two Altean lives and harvesting enough quintessence to save a whole planet or something. We never see him do ANYTHING positive with the quintessence he harvested from the Alteans or even expressing any regret for the act of harvesting it in the first place--and yet we’re somehow supposed to believe that he “genuinely” wanted peace for the universe? That he meant well? That he did what he “had” to do? Are the EPs literally crazy?

Nothing from the many interviews about Lotor’s character makes sense. This is not a portrayal of the nuanced, complex villain we were promised--even the show’s depiction of Zarkon as a semi-well-intentioned extremist was more believable and sympathetic!

By definition, a complex villain is one whose motivations are deeply explored and even more deeply-rooted in their actions, who exhibits enough “human” qualities to make the character compelling even as we recognize his or her evildoing, and whose actions, in turn, have logic behind them--the line separating a complex villain from a complete monster is that the audience can, at the end of the day, understand why the villain made the choices they made, and come to the nerve-wracking realization that, in that specific character’s shoes, we too might have made the same choices.

Because we’re never given deeper insight into Lotor’s motivation--never really shown why that quintessence was so very important to him--any degree of complexity, humanity, sympathy, and relatability Lotor had is chucked wholesale into the garbage after “The Colony.” How are we as viewers supposed to “genuinely” buy into Lotor’s rhetoric after this, to believe he wanted peace despite being seemingly remorseless at the slaughter of thousands of people?

At best, all the EPs’ talk of Lotor being authentic and complex and meaning well was empty air to hype up the audience. At worst, the writers of this series actually think they can actively include Holocaust imagery into their show and then still call the perpetrator of it “genuine.” I don’t know whether to be mildly insulted or outright infuriated.

I won’t even touch on the gross implications this whole thing has for real life abuse survivors, given that it implies they can’t rise above their parents’ actions. (Even worse that Haggar’s motivations continue to be unclear--is she headed to some kind of redemption, instead of being the supreme villainness she SHOULD have been all along?) Other people have posted about this issue and probably have more personal experience with the topic, so they can express that part better than me.

But I do want to talk about the whole super gross implications this has for mixed-race people, since that’s a little closer to my personal realm. In a previous post, I cautioned that Keith should not be read as a mixed-race character and that doing so was dangerously reductive of the show’s narrative. I still hold to that--because the show clearly has NO interest in portraying Keith as a mixed-race person. He’s literal walking, talking proof that you can include something in your show and still not have it be “representation.” Despite his alien mother being shown on screen as part of his life, there is still zero effort on the part of the show to portray Keith as actually part-alien or deal, with any degree of seriousness, with the emotional, psychological, and social implications of his being a mixed-species character. It’s simply not part of his narrative and, at this point, I somewhat doubt it ever is going to be. Keith’s being part-Galra is little more than flavor text and a convenient excuse to get him out of Team Voltron during the Clone Shiro plot line.

But Lotor is a totally different story. The show writers went out of their way to emphasize his existence as part-Galra, part-Altean, and to deliberately portray him as--up until season six--deeply longing to be discover more about his Altean heritage, to be part of that culture, and to seek--supposedly--the same aim as his Altean ancestors: universal peace. We’re led to believe that for him, Altea was something that existed like a fairy tale, something that he desperately craved to learn more about his whole life. Therefore, his coming into contact with Allura was painted (in the show!) as a chance for him to learn more about his other half, to finally come to truly understand what it meant to be Altean, to learn not from artifacts but from a real person who could understand his goals, desires, and beliefs. He began referring to himself as Altean. He called Allura’s people his own. We were supposed to see this part as “genuine.”

And then “The Colony” came in like Miley Cyrus to utterly undermine all this emotional labor the previous seasons had been building up. Lotor didn’t need to learn about Alteans from legends--he had ACTUAL ALTEANS he could have spoken to and spent time with. He didn’t need to treat the Altean culture like an anthropological study--he had real Alteans who were happy enough with him that they would have welcomed him living among them. I’m sorry, let me just go back over this point one more time: By virtue of the location of their colony in the time-space abyss, he could have spent literal years living among the Alteans and no one in the Galra Empire would have noticed.

He had every opportunity to connect to the people he supposedly idealized so much--the people whose values he claimed to espouse--the people he is related to--and he instead chose what? To run some like weird captive breeding program to build up stock for his quintessence draining plans as if they were animals, rather than a people of which he supposedly sees himself a part.

As a pure, complete monster type villain, this is actually pretty compelling. It is indeed the story of many REAL cultures around the world, who now deal with mixed-race individuals (namely half-white/half-minority people) coming back and trying to appropriate or capitalize on the minority culture that makes up their other half. (As a personal aside, I’m half Native American, a registered member of my father’s tribe, with grandparents who were essentially kidnapped and forced to attend Christian schools--and there’s a very good reason that I don’t attend any tribal events or attempt to assert myself into Native American spaces: because I recognize that, by virtue of being mixed with the race of my own grandparents’ oppressors, minority spaces are not a place where I belong.) All that to basically say that if the writers had committed to making Lotor a pure villain, this would actually have been a very realistic and tragic point, and his desire to be seen as Altean could have (should have) been treated as a deeply insidious attempt to gain even further control over his victims and to more potently manipulate Allura.

But the writers didn’t commit to that. They and every additional piece of information about Lotor given outside the show waffles painfully, leading to the implication that Lotor really did want to see himself as Altean, that he really believed he could follow in Alfor’s footsteps to bring peace to the universe. Which is honestly more fucked up than I really have any words for, because it directly implies that mixed-race people do not ever--perhaps cannot ever--fit in. By bringing up this issue of race, placing Lotor in that liminal zone, making him express a desire to be part of one of the cultures that make up his genetic background--and then effectively ending his story with “And then he killed thousands of the people he wanted to be a part of for profit!”--the writers might as well have said “He can’t be Altean because he’s too Galra” while also saying “But honestly, he’s genuine at heart--he’s much too Altean to be Galra!” The writing of the show created a situation in which there was no place for Lotor--and then made Lotor look like the bad guy for it. What the hell kind of message does that send to real mixed-race kids out there? YIKES YIKES YIKES YIKES.

And I’m saying all of this as a Lotor fan! Lotor was a favorite of mine in the original Voltron, and a favorite of mine here in Legendary Defender too. Whether they painted him as a complete monster or a redeemable anti-hero, I wanted to love this character. But the wishy-washy, conflicting messages the writing of the show is giving is beyond frustrating. I would have loved a pure villain Lotor--a true magnificent bastard, a master manipulator. I would have loved a misguided anti-hero Lotor. But a character placed half-way between not by intentional design but by clumsy and callous execution? Sorry, I can’t accept that. I love Lotor, so seeing him done so dirty by bad writing is one of the premiere moments that made me realize I can finally give up on this iteration of Voltron ever truly becoming great.

I still had more to say, so here’s:

My Issues with Voltron Season 6 (Part 3)

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sophiehunteroctopussyblog · 6 years

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As Benedict Cumberbatch returns to screens big and small, he tells Craig McLean the secret to building a blockbuster body – and why his Sherlock co-star is wrong to fret about the fans

The last time I met Benedict Cumberbatch he was wearing only a pair of trunks, eating wine gums and worrying about the size of his abs. It was April 2017 and we were on the suburban set of The Child in Time, the first drama from his production company, SunnyMarch. In the lead role as a children’s author overwhelmed by grief following the disappearance of his daughter, Cumberbatch was preparing to shoot a scene in a bathtub – and was painfully aware that his toned torso looked out of place.

Shortly after the five-week shoot, the actor explained, he was due to fly to America to reprise his part as the disarmingly buff, dimension-bending Marvel superhero Doctor Strange. The year before, his stand-alone Doctor Strange movie had taken almost half a billion pounds at the international box office – and when it was announced that the character (also glimpsed briefly in Thor: Ragnarok last autumn) would be making a prominent return in this year’s Avengers: Infinity War there was no question of Cumberbatch returning to the role without first hitting the gym.

By the time we met, the actor’s pre-shoot fitness regime – which he described as “pretty full on… but a mental sorbet” – was well under way; hence those abs.

Fast forward to April 2018 and Cumberbatch – a 41-year-old father of two – is in front of me once again, in a London hotel room, midway through the global press tour for Infinity War. This time, thank God, he is fully clothed (in blue linen, denim and suede), but he’s still eating sweets.

Bulging with stars (Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldana and Josh Brolin for starters), the biggest Marvel film to date promises to be a superhero Greatest Hits, featuring all of the Avengers, Spider-Man, Black Panther and the Guardians of the Galaxy. Such is the secrecy surrounding it that I’ve only been shown 25 minutes, all superhero banter and ear-splitting battles against Brolin’s intergalactic villain, Thanos.

Doctor Strange appears to be the main goody, no less. Coiled in his chair, Cumberbatch admits that, after all those hours in the gym, he “bristled” earlier in the day when a journalist commented that his Doctor Strange “wasn’t very brawny”.

“How dare he?” he tuts now in mock-outrage, “Didn’t he see my shirt-off scene? Just hours before we shot it, I was told to do nothing but drink coffee and eat Skittles. ‘What,’ I said, ‘you want to turn me into a trucker?’ But they said it’s about dehydrating – if you have that much of a sugar- and caffeine-hit, the skin ‘shrink-wraps’ round your muscles”. He grins toothily. “And it worked!” He frowns. “I would never advise it, though.”

Still, however Doctor Strange’s physique looks on screen, one place the Oscar-nominated, Harrow-educated star can count on his character having rock-solid abs is on the associated merchandise, from T-shirts to figurines. “It’s the lunch box moment,” says Cumberbatch, wryly.

He tells me about a recent visit to the home of his friend and co-star, Tom Hiddleston (“Hiddlebum”) who has been a member of the Marvel family since 2011 when he appeared as Loki in the first Thor film. “I went into his kitchen and I just said: ‘Holy s---, you’ve been merch’d: you are on the lunch box.’ And he went: ‘I know, it’s great, right?’ And, yes, it is great. It’s also slightly terrifying. I thought: ‘Oh, is that one of the hurdles? Is that a Hiddlebum moment or a McAvoy moment?’” (another peer, James McAvoy, got his “lunch box moment” with the X-Men films). That is: does the actor have to make peace with being turned into a moulded plastic souvenir?

He does, and Cumberbatch evidently has. “It’s terrible but I actually look for kids wearing Marvel gear,” he admits. “And there are very few Doctor Strange lunch boxes or backpacks.” Ten years and 19 movies into the Marvel Cinematic Universe – and with this year’s Black Panther receiving unprecedented critical acclaim – does Cumberbatch think the time for snobbery about superhero movies is over?

If, say, Eddie Redmayne asked him if he should put on cape and tights, would he encourage his friend? “I’d say he’s got his plate quite full with wizardry right now,” he chuckles, referring to Redmayne’s role in J K Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts franchise. “But, yeah, if you really are bored of that, come and join the party!”

With great franchises come great responsibilities, however. Recently, Cumberbatch’s Sherlock co-star, Martin Freeman, grumbled to me about the oppressive level of expectation created by the series’ obsessive fans. “Being in that show, it is a mini-Beatles thing,” the actor who plays Doctor Watson said. “People’s expectations, some of it’s not fun any more. It’s not a thing to be enjoyed…”

Did the fans’ obsession with Sherlock kill the fun for Cumberbatch, too? “Mmm, not really ’cause I didn’t engage with it that much,” he says. “I’m very grateful for the support, but that’s about it.” His attitude is that fan fervour becomes a separate, uncontrollable force, that “it takes on its own thing. But that happens with every franchise or entity like this.”

He pauses, frowns, then continues with what sounds like a bracing criticism of his co-star. “It’s pretty pathetic if that’s all it takes to let you not want to take a grip of your reality. What, because of expectations? I don’t know. I don’t necessarily agree with that. There is a level of it [where] I understand what he means. There’s a level of obsession where [the franchise] becomes theirs even though we’re the ones making it. But I just don’t feel affected by that in the same way, I have to say.”

He is similarly forthright on the subject of Patrick Melrose. In David Nicholls’s forthcoming five-part television drama, adapted from Edward St Aubyn’s autobiographical novels, Cumberbatch plays the lead, a character who, on the page, can appear to be an unlikeable, heroin-taking posho. “Well, your words not mine,” he replies. “I don’t think he’s unlikeable at all. I think he’s fiercely funny, erotic, charming and dangerous. And incredibly, incredibly damaged. So you should feel for him.

"The posh bit? I mean, what, you think people who are sexually abused by their father from the age of five to 10 aren’t worthy of our attention because they’re posh? You need to go back to ethics school, surely. That’s a terribly shaky moral position to hold. So,” he concludes briskly, “I don’t bounce with that.”

Neverthelesss, I suggest, it’s hard to imagine that Melrose’s life – from childhood abuse to the drugs with which he self-medicates to escape his pain – will make easy viewing. “I think at heart it will be a really enjoyable watch,” says Cumberbatch. “But it’s not for the faint-hearted. It is a story of salvation. But it is blisteringly funny. That’s the real hook for me. Even among the depth-charge moments of abuse, you’re kind of mesmerised by Hugo Weaving’s David Melrose [Patrick’s father], as you are in the books. He’s a really magnetic character.”

While researching the part, Cumberbatch talked to counsellors and former addicts. Was he also able to draw on his own school days? Surely, at Harrow, he wasn’t short of classmates weighed down by their heritage. “Well there was a prince of Jordan, so that brought a level of weirdness. But the more English version? I didn’t get an intro much into that world. I was very privileged to be at Harrow, but there’s not some part of Wiltshire that belongs to the Cumberbatches.

“We have our past – you don’t have to look far to see the slave-owning past, we were part of the whole sugar industry, which is a shocker,” he says of the revelation four years ago that an 18th-century forebear was a Bristolian merchant who established plantations in Barbados. But, no, he didn’t know “Lord and Lady Such and Such”.

His only ennobled classmate was Simon Fraser, whose father and uncle died “tragically close to one another in our last year,” making him the 16th Lord Lovat. “He suddenly became titled, and we didn’t even know. “The point is,” he continues, “weird though it might be [given] the perception of me out there, I had to push some to get to the right level of class for this. And that was a very important part of the process. Because Patrick Melrose is very much a study of class, and the disintegration of the moneyed, landed gentry to cash-poor, still possibly land-rich idiocy. Their hypocritical, cynical, back-stabbing, malicious, ironic unsympathetic behaviour is really exposed with a scalpel in this.”

Speaking of men behaving badly, if things had gone according to plan, we would by now have seen Cumberbatch’s performance as Thomas Edison in the historical epic, The Current War. At one point mooted as an Oscar-contender, the film’s original release was scrapped after its producer Harvey Weinstein (with whom Cumberbatch had previously worked on The Imitation Game) fell spectacularly from grace. Cumberbatch sounds far from disappointed.

“If it takes us not releasing our film for a couple of years just to be rid of that toxicity, I’m fine with that,” he says, adding that he wants “to step back and be as far removed from that influence as possible, both as filmmaker and as human being.”

He recalls being on the Avengers set when the Weinstein story broke. “You could feel people going: ‘This is important and this will change things…’ And that’s terrific,” he says. “But having worked with the man twice…” he exhales heavily. “Lascivious… I wouldn’t want to be married to him… Gaudy in his tastes, for all his often-brilliant film-making ability ...

But did I know that was going on? A systematic abuse of women, happening through bribery, coercion, trying to gain empathy, to physical force and threats, physical and to career? No. No,” he says firmly. “That was the true shock. That this has just literally happened. And it’s been covered up by an entire body of people through lawsuits and gagging and money – hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to silence victims and survivors.”

He shakes his head, aghast. “That truly was a revelation. I have a film company. Our head of development is a woman. There are two women running the television side of SunnyMarch. Adam [Ackland, his SunnyMarch co-founder] and me are the only men in the office. Countless times I’ve brought up issues of equal pay and billing. And so to realise that this attitude is so deeply culturally ingrained – that was my rude awakening. We have to fight a lot harder.”

That’s toxic masculinity dealt with; now bring on Thanos!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/benedict-cumberbatch-privilege-marvel-muscles-martin-freemans/

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Mr. Hypocrite in action. Seems lying is his second nature now. Everthing for the image. What Martin said about Sherlock days ago is pathetic? Riiiiiight!

Sure it was controversial but pathetic?!

For those of you who think there will be another season of Sherlock: Think again!

And BC didn't know about Weinstein's "methods".

Doing a "Meryl Streep" here BC?!

I'm going with Martin here:

#benedict cumberbatch #martin freeman #sherlock #sherlock season 5 #bbc sherlock #harvey weinstein #hypocrite

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arrogance-is-my-middlename · 6 years

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Lesson Learned

How my Hunter OC came to learn the Sword Logic. A prequel of sorts to To Sit on a Throne.

“We’re here.” The words are pointless, really, kind of stupid if you get down to it. Of course they are here, of course they arrived, of course they followed the clues and the signals and ended up on a Luna that is no longer theirs, but to Snow maybe it never was his in the first place. He is Awoken, grey skin and orange eyes and hair that is silk. Inside he is Light and freshly rezzed, barely a year back, but the pride of every Hunter hangs off his back as naturally as it does on any veteran.

His partner is human, and she is everything a Titan should be. She is strong, unwavering, confident, but she is unceasingly wise in ways that few Titans (especially as fresh as her) are. Snow is the leader of their little fireteam of two, Snow is the leader because he’s been at this longer and he’s been to the moon, and more to the point, he is a Hunter and this is a hunt. He’s also new enough to attempt this little venture of theirs without double checking with Cayde while being experienced enough to think he can handle it. Alex, the Titan, she knows all too well that this can end poorly. Her Ghost doesn’t like it, but he’s as curious as she is. Snow’s Ghost is quietly smug, somewhat aloof, but doting on her Hunter. Alex’s Ghost thinks he’s nothing impressive, but he keeps that to himself.

“Snow, look.” The Hunter turns from examining the fallen guardian half buried in the lunar sand, and on the ridge above them is an exo, silent, but clearly waiting for something.

Alex can hear the suspicion in his voice, underlined with a challenge (always eager to unsheathe the knife, she thinks). “Who…?” but the question never gets finished.

The massive door in front of them parts slowly, unexpectedly, and both of them are stumbling back as the screech of angry thrall pours out of the darkness. Neither Guardian hesitates to draw their respective weapon (Alex is low and precise, her pulse rifle already blazing. Snow is landing precise shots with his hand canon and spinning his knife in the other hand) and begin to thin the massive surge of Hive in front of them. Thralls give way to acolytes, who give way to massive lumbering knights. A wizard appears, but she hangs back and directs the mob with screeches that grind into Alex’s ears in horrible ways that will haunt her dreams.

There is a louder scream, deeper and reverberating and a giant lumbering thing is clawing through the door and blasting energy at her flimsy cover.

“OGRE!” Snow is screaming, hurling a grenade at the beast. “THEY BROUGHT A FUCKING OGRE!” His indignation makes Alex laugh, but it’s laced with hysteria that just makes her shots more accurate. Adrenaline is pumping through her blood and her Ghost, panicked but always helpful, is telling her to watch her six when she doesn’t pay close enough attention to her proximity sensors.

Out of the corner of her eye Alex watches Snow stand on top of a rock and nail shot after shot into the few remaining acolytes and the hulking ogre, and she thinks that he is beautiful in the way that only unmitigated destructive power can be. Arc energy crackles around him and suddenly he is Dancing and his blade sings through everything near him. Acolytes, Knights, thrall, none of them matter because his song his death and he Dances to the beat in a synchrony that only Bladedancer Hunters know.

He sinks his Arc Blade deep into the ogre’s eye, and this time its scream is shrill and full of pain, but it silences like all the rest. The body collapses and Snow stumbles off of it, exhausted and shaking out the last bits of Arc. Alex slowly stands, daring to smile and laugh. Snow is too, and they’re both a little hysterical and shaky but they can’t deny that this song and dance of killing and almost dying is fun and Alex is struck with the overwhelming urge to dance.

He’s about to say something, something witty and stupid and full of puns because he’s a Hunter and in the month that Alex has been alive, she knows that Snow and the rest of his caped brethren live and breathe these stupid little jokes but he never makes it because that awful screech is back and they’re turning but it’s too slow. The wizard picks up Snow by his throat, who responds by jamming his handcanon under her chin and pulling the trigger till it clicks empty, but her shields only waver and the oppressing feeling of power and darkness makes Alex’s heart flutter in a newfound fear.

The Wizard hurls Snow through the doorway to the Temple of Crota with a strength that should be impossible for her frail body, but his body hits the ground too hard and he crumples and lays still. Rage and fear fill Alex and there is Arc in her fist and Ghosts’s screams of Turn back and run! are just extra noise. The Fist of Havoc connects but Alex is new, her Light is strong but not strong enough and the Wizard only laughs as she summons more thrall. The Titan has no choice, between the clawing scrabbling rage of a thousand thrall or the retreating form of the wizard and the now closed doors, Alex can only flee. She can only hope that Snow’s Ghost will keep him alive long enough for Alex to drag him back to the Tower.

***

“Snow!” The voice is garbled, like he’s hearing it through three feet of water and a solid seat of earmuffs. “Snow!” Traveler, his body hurts everywhere and he can feel the freshly repaired bones scream in protest as he shifts. Everything is pain and the voice won’t stop screaming his name, it’s familiar though. It’s almost—

“Ghost!” Snow sits up suddenly and instantly regrets that decision as his entire body begins to kindly report just how much the act of living and moving hurts.

“Oh you’re awake thank the Traveler your Light was so weak and I wasn’t sure if—” Ghost’s words fade into the buzz that’s at the back of Snow’s head as he takes in his surroundings, his small companion buzzing around him and repairing his armor and wounds as quickly as she can. A pang compassion surges through him, she followed him down here to this… pit. The memory of what happened comes back to him slowly, and Snow realizes that he his deep in Hive territory, and worse, he is chained to a wall with some kind of metal that feels like it’s sapping his very Light out.

A screech that is now all too familiar rings through the caverns, and the strange oozing Hivespawn on the walls and floor almost seem to react in excitement to the Wizard behind that screech.

“Hide Ghost! If she catches you, you’ll die, then we both die!” Snow hisses, crushing the feeling of fear and panic under the cold hard logic that escape isn’t an option yet and that his Ghost needs life more than he does.

She’s clearly unhappy about it, her tines are spinning in the way that tells him she wants to argue, but she knows he is right. She fizzes into the pocket space she inhabits, out of reach from the Hive but still present in the back of his mind. The fact that she is not gone is a comfort he shares with her, his emotions linked to hers so very intimately. She refuses to let him ride out whatever is next alone, and for this he is grateful.

The Wizard is all limbs and cloak, and her claws are caked in blood and gore that he hopes doesn’t belong to Alex. She hisses at him, and begins to speak in a garbled language that makes his spine tingle. Magic. There is a shift, a click in reality and suddenly there are words.

Most of you die before I can make my examinations. The others die as I’m approaching. You are the first in a very long time who has the audacity to live, Light-Maker.

The voice is in his head but it’s real, it scrapes along his scalp with all the gentleness of a rusty and chipped dagger, but Snow forces himself not to be afraid. He is never afraid. He can’t be.

“I’ll be sure to repay you for all the dead you’ve accrued then. Hunters always collect their debts.”

Your bravado and bravery is false, Light Slave. Your God is dead and mine will feast on its corpse. I wonder if you’ll live long enough to watch. She drags a claw down his mask, then with a vicious yank she tears the helm from his head and crushes it beneath her hands. Without the respirator, Snow is choking on the air down here, it’s filled with poison and Hive magic (perhaps they are one and the same) but the gift of Light means that he will never want for breath. You shall make a fine subject, Hunter of the Dark. It is unfortunate, for you, that your prey is mightier than you. A lesson that you will never get to teach.

“Try me,” he snarls, straining against his chains. “I’ve gunned down countless of you boney fucks, watch me pry out your eyes and use them as decoration for my helmet.”

The wizard pauses, and for a second Snow thinks he might have cowed her. A thought that is idiocy incarnate, because she begins to laugh. I think, perhaps, you need a different lesson. Before he can retort, the wizard shoves her claws into him, wrapping her long fingers around one of his ribs. She is saying something, telling him some horrible joke that she laughs at but he can’t hear her over a pain he has never before felt. She pulls and there’s a horrible snap of bone, and she is wagging his rib in front of his eyes. It is covered in blood and he can see the marrow drip from the end. Snow’s world is going dark, but he hears the last words with perfect clarity.

I know your little Dead Light is here with you. I will let her heal you, bring you back from the clutches of your final Sleep, and then I shall teach you the most powerful of Logic.

***

The Ghost was forced out of the pocket space the second Snow died. The Wizard stared down at her, unmoving a silent. Something close to a grin crossed her face, and she left the cave, message clear—you are trapped, and you live because I say so.

Resurrection is a tricky in places like this. Light exists in all things, but in places of oppressive darkness, Light flees the body so much quicker. Ghost was grateful that her guardian was as proficient with Arc Light as he was. Arc Light, more so than any other form, was connected with life. Arc was in everything that lives, and that made the process easier by far. If he was a Gunslinger, or worse, a Nightstalker, the process might not work in time at all. It was one of the reasons Bladedancers were such effective assassins, though their speed and invisibility certainly helped.

Snow came sputtering back to life, coughing up blood and panting heavily as his rib was restored. Ghost spun around his head, checking for any more injuries she missed and making as many repairs to his armor as she could.

“We need an escape plan,” his Ghost muttered as she fussed. “I refuse to watch you sit through that again.”

Snow lifted a manacled hand weakly. “Hadium cuffs. Infused with whatever the fuck makes Light weak. Hive magic, darkness, and something slimy probably.”

Ghost whirled on him, and he swore she could glare. “Take this seriously, Snow. When you die, I can’t hide. It’s only a matter of time before you don’t get to come back.”

Her Hunter nodded. “I know. But the thing is, we both know how Hadium works. Can’t break it till you have something strong enough to overpower whatever is infused inside. Only thing we’ve got is the Light, my guns won’t put dents in these, and they’ll just be confiscated. Kind of need those to get the hell outta here.”

“But your Light isn’t strong enough, and the only way to do…. That….” Ghost trailed off, quickly realizing what he was implicating.

Snow smiled grimly. “Gotta keep dying. Thanatonauts do it all the time, right? Die, understand the nature of life and death, come back stronger. Ikora did it, and look at her.”

“It’s forbidden for a reason,” she insists.

“You got a better option?” he shot back. “We’re too deep for radio to work properly, and the second the Wizard kills me and you don’t pop out, they’ll hunt you, they’ll find you, they’ll tear your Light out, and then they’ll kill you in a very painful way. I can handle dying over and over again to this, but don’t you dare make me go knowing you’re doomed too.”

Moments like these were rare. Snow was happy to walk into a fight cocky and full of swagger, but very rarely did he let people know how much he cared about them. It was his defense mechanism, and Ghost never bothered to argue with it; she had seen far worse in her time. So she listened to her partner, she slipped back into pocket space, but she let his consciousness connect with his. It wouldn’t lessen the pain, but she wasn’t going to let him suffer alone.

***

Are you ready to learn, Light-Maker?

“Shall I take notes?” he asked sarcastically. The retort earned him a slow claw down his face, deep enough to catch on bone. Snow forced himself not to show any signs that it hurt, grateful for the incredibly high pain tolerance that came with being a Guardian.

Your spirit is strong. Surprisingly so. I shall teach you, Light-Maker. The Wizard drifted closer, her face so close that Snow could almost taste her rotting breath. And in the process, I shall break you and remake you. How glorious your new Shape shall be!

And so it began. Snow didn’t have much of an indication of time to begin with, but with the endless torture things began to blend together. It was never quick. The Wizard knew exactly how far to push him till he died, and then she would use darkness and magic to keep him kicking just that much longer. She would force him to watch as she slowly moved up his legs, removing each bone with painstaking precision. When he finally began to scream, she tore his jaw off and kept the bleeding down with arc burns and darkness that seeped into his skin and burned him in ways that transcended the physical. His Ghost, even in her pocket space, could feel the Darkness burn its way through him and soon it wasn’t just his screams he was listening to. The first time she took his jaw, the Wizard forgot to stem the blood properly, and he choked to death almost mercifully. She didn’t grant him such easy outs after that.

The Wizard kept her promise to teach him this Logic she crooned about. Her voice echoed through his mind and across his mental connection to his Ghost, even when he was in so much pain that his entire world was pinpricks of the deepest agony he had ever known.

The Sword Logic is our entire existence she would whisper to him, almost lovingly digging a claw under his armor and deep into his skin. She tugged underneath his sternum and Snow gagged at the feeling of being pried apart. We live and we die by it. It is our philosophy, it is our Power. Do you understand, Light-Maker? It is as tangible as your Light, and it feeds us.

She recited to him the Books of Sorrow one day, revealing him the entirety of the origin of the Hive and their strength. His existence was pain and the Hive, and for a time he began to forget just who he was. His only respite was death, and in those moments Snow would force himself to do what Ikora Rey and so many of the thanatonauts had done: walk death and become its equal.

Snow came so close to failing so much that it was hard not to just give up entirely and just let the Wizard destroy him. She would become bored eventually, and just crush his Ghost and then him. It would be easy to let that happen, wouldn’t it? But Snow pulled himself from such thoughts through gentle reminders from his Ghost. It wasn’t just his life on the line, and he would not disappoint the one being of Light down here in this hell with him.

It was slow, but he began to truly Learn. He saw death and its endless cold expanse, he saw Light, he saw pain, and he saw Logic. Distantly, he was aware that some other creature was watching, something far stronger than the Wizard who never failed to remind him of his pain. Something far Darker.

To kill is to become strong. Strength is the only path to survival, but to survive is simply not enough. Power is life, to live is to be powerful. To face battle is to test your power, your right to live. It is a reciprocal that cannot end, for it is the truth of the Universe, and any Truth of that nature is as eternal and infinite as the Deep.

Without realizing it, Snow came to cling to this truth. To face violence with your own violence was to prove your right to life. The Wizard wasn’t just telling him the Sword Logic, she was enacting it upon him. A lesson through doing. He forced himself to survive longer each time she came to visit him, to embrace this logic. Snow clung to life and forced himself to earn it. When he died, he demanded strength and forced his Light to grow stronger. It was gradual progress, slow and ever so painful, but Snow saw his first victory when he died and was back before the Wizard had fully retracted her hand from whatever organ she had entangled it in.

He smiled, all blood and teeth and grim victory. The Wizard only laughed, and slowly, so did Snow.

***

Revenge is not a concept within the Logic. Vengeance is not real. Vengeance is weakness given shape, and the Logic does not accept weakness. Should you fail, you deserve Death, and the only way to regain life, honor, and your right to both is to become strong again. You are lower than those who defeat you, who lay you low, and you must show them your respect because of it. There is Hierarchy here, but one need not lay low forever. Even the lowliest Thrall can become a mighty Knight should he learn to gain strength and drink deeply from its wells. Oryx was defeated once. Do you know this? Do you remember this lesson? The Wizard tore at him until Snow was screaming that he remembered, till he was reciting the verse from the Books themselves. Very good. Did Oryx seek revenge? No. Our King knows this Logic well, he instead sought strength. He sought the right to Live, and there is only one path to life.

“That path is death,” Snow whispered, slipping into its embrace once more. This vision was different. This vision was Truth.

Snow saw the Hive, he saw the Vex and he saw the Cabal and even the Fallen. Last, he saw Humanity. The Fallen tore their arms off in reverence of strength, the Cabal led through power alone, the Vex sought to become so mighty that they were the Universe itself, and the Hive judged all who crossed them by the edge of their broken, shattered blades. Humanity had been crippled, hobbled by these four, but Humanity had something up their sleeve. They rose again, they grew fat from strength, and they clawed back to their feet. The Fallen were pushed back, twice, and given sweet death ever-after. The Vex sought might but Snow saw them fail to defend even their strongest fortress from the Guardians. Now only the Cabal and the Hive remained standing.

A voice, deep and terrible, spoke. Do you see the Logic now, Light-Slave? They all are ants, they are nothings, yet even they live and die by its Blade. The Sword Logic is in all, it is the very Truth of the Universe. The Vex seek to replace it, but they will always meet failure because they are weak. You think yourselves outside it, yet you meet out the judgement of this great Logic at every step.

Snow wanted to turn, he could feel the voice there. It was so close, if he turned he would face it and know this being that now spoke to him.

You may have strength by my Hand. It is a Knife, and it is for you. Take it. It’s shape is—

Snow gasped back into life, feeling his skin, bones, and organs knit themselves back together. The Wizard had her back turned to him; she was leaving. Snow felt calm. There was no dread, no fear, no pain, no anger. Just calm understanding.

He looked down at the Hadium cuffs that shackled him so perfectly, and he understood. The Hive knew the truth of the Logic, and so they put it in everything. If what they made was stronger than you, it would never falter, it would never break. Hadium took on any aspect it was exposed to, and these cuffs were exposed to the Sword Logic. They would hold him so long as he was weaker than the cuffs, the Darkness and magic that ran through them. They had held him for so long, and now he knew why. I was weak, he thought, but no longer.

The cuffs simply fell off him, the Logic demanded that they submit to his power. The Logic was the Truth. The Logic was his.

Snow blinked forward, his knife pulled from the pocket space his Ghost had stored it in. He kept himself from completing the strike, instead pulling the Wizard down to his level and holding her gently to him, blade pressed to the back of her skull.

“Thank you for your lessons,” he whispered, sliding his blade through her shields and deep into her bone without any resistance. “I have drunk deeply from strength, and now I know.”

Her body fell to the ground in a heap, and Snow regarded her with a calm disgust. She was weak. Worthless. Not worthy of life, not worthy of shape. He would take that from her.

Snow switched his knife into a forehand grip, hacking away at the Wizard’s body. He tore carapace from skin, muscle from bone, letting the blood and ichor flow over his armor and his naked face without a care. He paused only to carefully cut her robes away from her. His cloak was so tattered, he needed a new one. Hers would work nicely he decided.

He wrapped the new cloak around his neck and pulled up the hood, taking a breath and standing.

“She deserved worse,” his Ghost said quietly. He glanced at his companion, only nodding in agreement, listening to the sound of approaching footsteps. Heavy, full of sureness. A Knight. “Do you want your guns back?”

“No. I don’t need them. Not yet.” A knife would do just fine. This was after all the Sword Logic, not the Bullet Logic. What better way to demonstrate his new path?

The Knight stopped when it spotted him, covered in the gore of the Wizard. There was a heavy moment of silence and stillness, the Knight caught between the urge to strike down Snow and the deepest feeling that this Guardian was a little too confident.

“I’m stronger than you,” Snow declared. “I judge you unfit to live.”

A single blink strike was all that was necessary, the Sword Logic singing deeply in his ears as Snow demonstrated his strength and fed off of the conquering of a second opponent. He picked up the Knight’s Sword, examining the dulled, chipped edge in a brand-new light. The chips and cracks were testaments to the wielder’s strength. A mighty blade that had destroyed so many, its blade was nearly broken because of its own strength. A deeply Hive concept, but not necessarily the Logic’s.

A chipped blade might show its strength from battles past, Snow thought, cutting through waves and waves of thrall and acolytes. But that it chipped at all is a sign of weakness. The other blades were strong enough to crack the blade. The Knight was by far too weak. My blades will be tested, but they will never crack.

***

Snow stumbled out of the Hellmouth, the Knight’s Sword little more than a hilt at this point. The moon’s expanse was cold and quiet, and or the first time in what had probably been months, there was quiet. Sweet, blessed, quiet. How long had he sat in the dark, listening to the screams of the Hive? Their Darkness had been forced down his throat, he had tasted their rancid life and now he had escaped. Snow wondered if he felt relief.

His ghost floated beside him, brazenly out in the open. She had once been chatty, happy to exchange quips with him and laugh. Now they were both very quiet, and through sharing his pain, she too had been changed. She had been so very happy to watch him cut through the Hive and take their lives for his own. She had wanted the Wizard to suffer so much for what she had done, and he knew she was quietly angry that he had not dragged her death out longer. Not at him, but rather, for him.

“You need a name,” he decided. “I think we’ve earned a certain kind of genesis.”

Ghost swiveled towards him, her one pristine shell now coated in dust and blood—both his and the Hive’s. “What will you call me?”

Snow shrugged. “That’s on you. Your identity, your decision.” He hesitated. “You felt everything I felt. You didn’t have to, but you did. You deserve your own decisions outside of my influence.”

“I will always be under your influence. You’re my Guardian. We can’t be separate, and I don’t want to.”

Snow smiled, genuinely, for the first time since he had entered that accursed pit. “Fine. I named myself after the first thing I saw when I walked out of the Cosmodrome. Why don’t you do something similar?”

“All I see is dust and dead things,” she replied flatly.

“Then what do you feel?” he prompted.

“…cold. It’s cold up here. And down there it’s… worse.”

“Everything we experience, we defeat and grow stronger from. That’s our way now,” Snow said.

There was a long beat of silence while his Ghost thought, but finally she spoke up. “Thandaa.”

He recognized the word. Urdu, a golden age language, one that she had been fascinated by shortly after he had first been rezzed. Snow had often scrounged around the Cryptarchy for old manuscripts full of it, and whenever they found a library, they scavenged the place for any hint of the long dead language.

“Cold and Snow. Kind of fitting, isn’t it?” he mused.

“Matching motifs are a necessity,” Thandaa huffed. “Besides. I think it’s pretty.”

“Your name literally means chilly,” he teased.

“And yours is the white fluffy stuff that falls on the ground.”

“Touché.”

***

Alex was the one who had caught Snow’s distress signal, and she had been the one to move out to it first. She suspected a trap (how could it not be?), but months of no contact from her fireteam partner meant that any sort of sign was one worth following. Besides, she had slain the Heart of the Black Garden. Not really a whole lot left to fear after you do something like that.

To her surprise, he was waiting for her on top of a crashed dropship on the lunar surface. His armor was beaten and broken beyond belief, his helmet looked like it was pieced together from scrapped fallen tech and pieces of Hive carapaces. His cloak resembled what the Hive Wizards liked to wear, and the only weapon she could see on him was his knife held closely in his hand. He was relaxed, completely at ease in the middle of the deadzone that was the lunar surface. What struck her the most however was his Light. Most Guardians carried it around them naturally, it emanated off of them so strongly it was impossible to miss. Snow however held his close, wrapped up tightly with perfect control; despite this Alex could feel it’s raw strength, and she was shocked to find that it was so much stronger than her own.

“Hey Alex,” he called out. “Been a while, huh?”

***

The following months were full of action for Snow. Alex tried to keep up with him, but he was so rarely in the Tower that it became increasingly difficult for her to so much as wave hello to him. He was frequently sent back to Luna (“He requested it, don’t look at me!” protested Cayde when questioned), and every day he brought back more intel than the rest of the Guardians stationed there. He had gained a far deeper understanding of the Hive in his months imprisoned there, and with it came a deadly efficiency in sneaking in, stealing information, and slaughtering everything on the way out.

The first time Alex saw her friend back in the Tower for any extended period of time, it was to talk to Eris Morn. The two of them spent hours discussing the Hive, and oddly, he seemed to enjoy her company. It was only natural, Alex supposed, that it was Snow who was assigned to Eris. He finally left Luna to eliminate the Hive elsewhere at her request, and when the time came, Alex was unsurprised to see him be responsible for assembling the fireteam to take Crota down. It was the first time she saw him excited about something since he had been taken to the Hellmouth by the Wizard.

“You’re really raring to go, aren’t you?” she asked after she accepted his invitation to come along.

Snow smiled. “Testing my blade against his has been a long time coming.”

“Didn’t know you had a personal grudge against Crota.”

“I don’t. But the Logic demands it. He beat us on the moon, we have to prove our strength now.”

***

Snow did not expect the fight to be easy. Crota had been a part of the Logic so much longer than he had been, but both the Prince and the Hunter could feel it demand their clash. When the sword fell, there was no question over who should pick it up.

Snow flipped the familiar weight of the Hive weapon around his hand, charging forward as Crota knelt from an onslaught of rockets. The Prince raised his head to Snow as he approached, and with a grim smile the Hunter told him one last thing before he cleaved the ancient Prince to nothing: “I bring the Logic’s judgement.”

***

“Oryx will come,” Eris said softly. “He must prove himself before you, now that you have slain his own brood.”

“Two of them,” Snow reminded her. “I was the one who removed Urrux’s head in the Prison of Elders.”

“A scion is not a son,” Eris reminded him. Snow simply shrugged.

“If Oryx wants vengeance, he can come and try for it. This fight was bound to happen eventually. The Logic demands it.”

“Vengeance is only a portion of it. Oryx will be here because he serves the Sword Logic. You have to face him because you wield the Sword Logic, and you’re the only one that understands it like I do,” Eris said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he despises you for the way you dirty its sanctity.”

“The Sword Logic is written in blood by a pen of bone. Fuck its sanctity,” Snow scoffed. “It’s a power, and one we need. I’ll use it to tear down the Hive King if I have to.”

In the back of his mind, Snow felt Oryx’s presence. I still have a Knife for you. Would you know it’s shape?

The Knife is mine, God-King. Snow responded. I will not accept your gift. I’ll rip it from your corpse.

And in time, he did.

#Destiny the game #Destiny2 #Destiny 2 #fanfiction #my writing #Destiny Hunter #Destiny Titan #OC #The Hive #Crota #Oryx #slight AU #cus fuck the whole chosen one bullshit #The Sword Logic #blood #gore #destiny fanfiction

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