#lots of compelling insights from this book

[fideidefenswhore]

She continued, 'After all, there was another cause which would convince your queen and Catherine to pursue a good amity. There was an old acquaintance between your queen's mother and the queen regent, when the former was one of the maids-of-honour of Queen Claude, sister of Renee of France, my own mother-in-law and dear friend to Catherine de Medici herself. They were friendly towards another. There is no reason for Elizabeth and Catherine not to continue that friendship.' The mention of Anne Boleyn stunned the English ambassador; it had never crossed his mind that the reputation of Elizabeth's mother in France could be used as a diplomatic tool to reinforce Anglo-French relations.

Blood, Fire and Gold: The Story of Elizabeth I & Catherine de Medici, Estelle Paranque

#lots of compelling insights from this book #like that the french court suppressed a book which 'slandered' anne boleyn in 1562 #had it been published in the midst of the timeline of marian england #it would not have been considered slander; one imagines..... #estelle paranque #elizabethan #anne boleyn #renee of france #catherine de medici #anyway posting this also bcus some of the HTF reviews have been. annoying #'aha isn't it funny anne had no friends that were women. isn't that telling. aha' #nicholas throckmorton

[physalian]

Pacing your Story (Or, How to Avoid the "Suddenly...!")

Arguably *the* most important lesson all writers need to learn, even for those who don’t give a damn about themes and motifs and a moral soap box: How your story is paced, whether it’s a comic book, a children’s chapter book, a doorstopper, a mini series, a movie, or a full-length season of TV (old school style), pacing is everything.

Pacing determines how long the story *feels* regardless of how long it actually is. It can make a 2 hour movie feel like 90 mins or double the time you’re trapped in your seat.

There’s very little I can say about pacing that hasn’t been said before, but I’m here to condense all that’s out there into a less intimidating mouthful to chew.

So: What is pacing?

Pacing is how a story flows, how quickly or slowly the creator moves through and between scenes, how long they spend on setting, narration, conversation, arguments, internal monologues, fight scenes, journey scenes. It’s also how smoothly tone transitions throughout the story. A fantasy adventure jumping around sporadically between meandering boredom, high-octane combat, humor, grief, and romance is exhausting to read, no matter how much effort you put into your characters.

Anyone who says the following is wrong:

Good pacing is always fast/bad pacing is always slow

Pacing means you are 100% consistent throughout the entire story

It doesn’t matter as much so long as you have a compelling story/characters/lore/etc

Now let me explain why in conveniently numbered points:

1. Pacing is not about consistency, it’s about giving the right amount of time to the right pieces of your story

This is not intuitive and it takes a long time to learn. So let’s look at some examples:

Lord of the Rings: The movies trimmed a *lot* from the books that just weren’t adaptable to screen, namely all the tedious details and quite a bit of the worldbuilding that wasn’t critical to the journey of the Fellowship. That said, with some exceptions, the battles are as long as they need to be, along with every monologue, every battle speech. When Helm’s Deep is raging on, we cut away to Merry and Pippin with the Ents to let ourselves breathe, then dive right back in just before it gets boring.

The Hobbit Trilogy: The exact opposite from LotR, stretching one kids book into 3 massive films, stuffing it full of filler, meandering side quests, pointless exposition, drawing out battles and conflicts to silly extremes, then rushing through the actual desolation of Smaug for… some reason.

Die Hard (cause it’s the Holidays y’all!): The actiony-est of action movies with lots of fisticuffs and guns and explosions still leaves time for our hero to breathe, lick his wounds, and build a relationship with the cop on the ground. We constantly cut between the hero and the villains, all sharing the same radio frequency, constantly antsy about what they know and when they’ll find out the rest, and when they’ll discover the hero’s kryptonite.

2. Make every scene you write do at least two things at once

This is also tricky. Making every scene pull double duty should be left to after you’ve written the first draft, otherwise you’ll never write that first draft. Pulling double duty means that if you’re giving exposition, the scene should also reveal something about the character saying it. If you absolutely must write the boring trip from A to B, give some foreshadowing, some thoughtful insight from one of your characters, a little anecdote along the way.

Develop at least two of the following:

The plot

The backstory

The romance/friendships

The lore

The exposition

The setting

The goals of the cast

Doing this extremely well means your readers won’t have any idea you’re doing it until they go back and read it again. If you have two characters sitting and talking exposition at a table, and then those same two characters doing some important task with filler dialogue to break up the narrative… try combining those two scenes and see what happens.

**This is going to be incredibly difficult if you struggle with making your stories longer. I do not. I constantly need to compress my stories. **

3. Not every scene needs to be crucial to the plot, but every scene must say something

I distinguish plot from story like a square vs a rectangle. Plot is just a piece of the tale you want to tell, and some scenes exist just to be funny, or romantic, or mysterious, plot be damned.

What if you’re writing a character study with very little plot? How do you make sure your story isn’t too slow if 60% of the narrative is introspection?

Avoid repeating information the audience already has, unless a reminder is crucial to understanding the scene

This isn’t 1860 anymore. Every detail must serve a purpose. Keep character and setting descriptions down to absolute need-to-know and spread it out like icing on a cake – enough to coat, but not give you a mouthful of whipped sugar and zero cake.

Avoid describing generic daily routines, unless the existence of said routine is out of ordinary for the character, or will be rudely interrupted by chaos. No one cares about them brushing their teeth and doing their hair.

Make sure your characters move, but not too much. E.g. two characters sitting and talking – do humans just stare at each other with their arms lifeless and bodies utterly motionless during conversation? No? Then neither should your characters. Make them gesture, wave, frown, laugh, cross their legs, their arms, shift around to get comfortable, pound the table, roll their eyes, point, shrug, touch their face, their hair, wring their hands, pick at their nails, yawn, stretch, pout, sneer, smirk, click their tongue, clear their throat, sniff/sniffle, tap their fingers/drum, bounce their feet, doodle, fiddle with buttons or jewelry, scratch an itch, touch their weapons/gadgets/phones, check the time, get up and sit back down, move from chair to table top – the list goes on. Bonus points if these are tics that serve to develop your character, like a nervous fiddler, or if one moves a lot and the other doesn’t – what does that say about the both of them? This is where “show don’t tell” really comes into play.

4. Your entire work should not be paced exactly the same

Just like a paragraph should not be filled with sentences of all the same length and syntax. Some beats deserve more or less time than others. Unfortunately, this is unique to every single story and there is no one size fits all.

General guidelines are as follows:

Action scenes should have short paragraphs and lots of movement. Cut all setting details and descriptors, internal monologues, and the like, unless they service the scene.

Journey/travel scenes must pull double or even triple duty. There’s a reason very few movies are marketed as “single take” and those that are don’t waste time on stuff that doesn’t matter. See 1917.

Romantic scenes are entirely up to you. Make it a thousand words, make it ten thousand, but you must advance either the romantic tension, actual movement of the characters, conversation, or intimacy of the relationship.

Don’t let your conversations run wild. If they start to veer off course, stop, boil it down to its essentials, and cut the rest.

When transitioning between slow to faster pacing and back again, it’s also not one size fits all. Maybe it being jarring is the point – it’s as sudden for the characters as it is for the reader. With that said, try to keep the “suddenly”s to a minimum.

5. Pacing and tone go hand in hand

This means that, generally speaking, the tone of your scene changes with the speed of the narrative. As stated above, a jarring tonal shift usually brings with it a jarring pacing shift.

A character might get in a car crash while speeding away from an abusive relationship. A character who thinks they’re safe from a pursuer might be rudely and terrifyingly proven wrong. An exhausting chase might finally relent when sanctuary is found. A quiet dinner might quickly turn romantic with a look, or confession. Someone casually cleaning up might discover evidence of a lie, a theft, an intruder and begin to panic.

--

Whatever the case may be, a narrative that is all action all the time suffers from lack of meaningful character moments. A narrative that meanders through the character drama often forgets there is a plot they’re supposed to be following.

#writing advice #writing tips #pacing #writing tools

[nanowrimo]

Beyond the Word Count: A Book Editor's Guide to Writing a First Draft

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. First Draft Pro, a 2023 NaNoWriMo sponsor, is a beautifully designed writing app for fiction writers. Today, they've partnered with Kelly Norwood-Young, former book editor for Pan Macmillan and Penguin Random House, to bring you some pro tips on writing your first draft:

In my career as a book editor, I’ve reviewed hundreds of manuscripts. I've seen the joy of authors creating compelling tales, but also how disheartening it can be to rewrite a disjointed story. I’m here to give you some strategies to address common pitfalls so that you not only reach your NaNoWriMo goal, but also lay the groundwork for a manuscript that truly deserves to be called a gripping novel.

1. Have a plan.

Even if you’re more of a ‘pantser’ than a ‘planner’, it's really helpful to have an outline. I have two favourite approaches for this: the structure-first approach, and what I call the ‘Phoebe Waller-Bridge approach’.  

The structure-first approach

There are a lot of narrative frameworks for story structure, but the most foundational in Western fiction is the three-act structure. Here’s a handy guide that breaks each of the classical three acts into a day-by-day guide to NaNoWriMo: 

8-day guide to Act 1

14-day guide to Act 2

8-day guide to Act 3

The Phoebe Waller-Bridge approach

I love this quote from Phoebe Waller-Bridge: ‘I’ve never thought structure first. I’ve always thought material first, jokes first, character first ... But knowing the end really helps. Then you just go as far away from the end emotionally as you possibly can.’  

Sketch out your major story arcs, your character’s desires and conflicts, and the world they inhabit. The more you know your story's world and inhabitants, the less you'll stray into scenes that lack purpose or create plot and character inconsistencies. 

2. Keep the story moving.

Each word needs to propel your story forward. Superfluous details or tangents that don’t serve the narrative stall the momentum you’re trying to generate for your reader. 

There’s a trick you can use to move your story forward, called the question of reversibility. Ask yourself: How difficult would it be for my character to reverse their decision? The harder it would be for them to turn back, the more you’ve moved the plot forward. 

3. Plant clues carefully.

Plant important elements early and make sure every element, however subtle, serves a purpose (i.e. Chekhov’s Gun). 

Be sure to set up necessary components for your climax so that you can steer clear of Deus ex Machina (having that strong outline will help you here), and avoid red herrings unless they serve a clear, meaningful purpose (e.g. you’re writing a mystery and your readers expect some false leads). Misleading your readers without a payoff can erode their trust.

4. Write for the reader, not yourself.

‘There is only one thing you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list,’ insists Umberto Eco in On Literature. Even if writing, for you, is a therapeutic outlet, a form of self-expression, or a way to leave a legacy, you’re still writing to say something to someone else. Your story simply won’t be as strong if you forget your reader’s perspective. 

5. Keep daily editorial notes for your future self.

While editing should wait until at least December, end each day with a brief reflection, noting any off-course deviations, potential inconsistencies, areas to research further, or moments of inspiration to revisit when you start editing. 

These daily notes will be invaluable during the editing process, helping you to remember insights that are no longer fresh when you come back to the manuscript later.

6. Embrace the first-draft mentality.

There’s a lot you can do to ensure that your first draft is the best it can be before the end of November—but just as important is to understand that all first drafts have flaws.

As a book editor, I've witnessed manuscripts transform, sometimes unrecognizably, from their first drafts. Embrace the uncertainty and creative detours—because it's from this beautiful chaos that your story will find its true voice. 

Kelly Norwood-Young is a seasoned book editor and proofreader with comprehensive experience across various facets of manuscript editing. Her background includes roles at Pan Macmillan and Penguin Books, extending into a successful freelance career working with award-winning authors. Kelly's work, known for its precision and sensitivity to the author's voice, has been integral to the success of both new and established writers globally.

Try out First Draft Pro: All NaNoWriMo participants can use the discount code NANOWRIMO2023 for 20% off a premium subscription to First Draft Pro! Offer expires January 31, 2024.

#nanowrimo #writing #first draft #writing advice #by nano sponsor #first draft pro #kelly norwood-young #plot #planning

[greenerteacups]

Hi! I am an ardent fan of your writing, and I hope to be as sorted and planned as you some day in my own writing journey.

My question is: you have a keen eye when it comes to planning character personality, dynamics, and such. I've also been wading through your ask replies, and your insights into how you write people and how you make them play off of each other is so wonderful to read. If it's not too personal a q, how did you learn how to write like this? Did you go to school for writing, does it come from years of observing people, do you have reading list recs for "how to write real people and real interactions"?

Thanks! This is a really flattering question. I'll try to answer it honestly, because I wish someone had been brutally honest about this with me when I was a young writer.

I didn't go to school for writing. I started doing it when I was about nine years old. It sucked very badly. I kept writing throughout high school, and it still mostly sucked, but some of it was occasionally interesting. ("Interesting" here does not mean "good," by the way.) I took a break in college, and then came back. I've been writing ever since. Sometimes, I feel good about it. A lot of the time, I don't!

I hate giving this advice, because I remember how it feels to get it, and it's the most uninspiring, boring-ass, dog shit advice you can get, but it's also the only advice that is 100% unequivocally true: you have to write, and specifically, you have to write things that suck.

I do not mean that you should make things that suck on purpose. I mean that you have to sit down and try your absolute hardest to make something good. You have to put in the hours, the elbow grease, the blood, sweat, and tears, and then you have to read it over and accept that it just totally sucks. There is no way around this, and you should be wary of people who tell you there is. There is no trick, no rule, no book you can buy or article you can read, that will make your writing not suck. The best someone else can do is tell you what good writing looks like, and chances are, you knew that anyway — after all, you love to read. You wouldn't be trying to do this if you didn't. And anyone who says they can teach you to write so good it doesn't suck at first is either lying to you, or they have forgotten how they learned to write in the first place.

So the trick is to sit there in the miserable doldrums of Suck, write a ton, and learn to like it. Because this is the phase of your path as an artist when you find what it is you love about writing, and it cannot be the chance to make "good writing." This will be the thing that bears you through and compels you to keep going when your writing is shit, i.e., the very thing that makes you a writer in the first place. So find that, and you've got a good start.

Some people know this, but assume that perseverance as a writer is about trying to get to the point where you don't suck anymore. This is not true, and it is an actively dangerous lie to tell young writers. You are not aiming to feel like your writing doesn't suck. You are aiming to write. You are aiming to have written. Everything else is dust and rust. And of course, you'll find things you like about your pieces, you'll find things you're proud of, you'll learn to love the things you've made. But that little itch of self-criticism, in the back of your brain — the one that cringes when you read a clunky line, or thinks of a better character beat right after it's far too late to change — that's never going away. That's the Writer part of you. Read Kafka, read Dickens, read Tolstoy, you will find diary entries where they lament how absolutely fucking atrocious their writing was, and how angry they are that they can't do better. A good writer hates their sentences because they can always imagine better ones. And the ability to imagine a better sentence is what's going to make you pick up the pen again tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Which is what I mean, and probably what all those other annoying, preachy advice-givers mean, when we say: a good writer is just someone who writes every day. It's that easy, and that hard.

#by the way a lot of this draws on ideas inspired by 'letters to a young poet' by rainer maria rilke if you're interested #that's a formative text for me as an artist #it won't teach you how to write but it will teach you how to think perhaps #and once you know how to think. well. life is just pretty good #and i can't say the writing gets easier but when life is pretty good i find myself enjoying it a lot more #this word vomit was prompted by the question 'how do you write real people and real interactions' #because that's like — i'm not trying to be pedantic but— #that's kind of just 'how do you write literature'? #because that's all literature is. what are human beings? how do you write a person? how do they interact with each other? #like shoutout to the void if you know for sure how to write real interactions then please for the love of god tell the rest of us #because i think most of all authors in history have just been giving it our best stab #'this is how the world looks for me. is it how the world looks for you?' #so my advice on that score is: try to see how the world looks for you #and then try to share it with me #don't worry about whether it looks the same for me. it won't

[hayatheauthor]

Writing Believable Teenage Characters: Dos and Don'ts

Creating compelling teenage characters is crucial for engaging young adult readers and immersing them in your story. However, it can be challenging to capture the authentic essence of teenage experiences. In this blog post, I’ll explore essential dos and don'ts for crafting believable teenage characters that resonate with your audience. 

By understanding the unique mindset of teenagers, conducting thorough research, developing distinct personalities, mastering dialogue and communication, and navigating relationships and social dynamics, you'll be equipped to bring your teenage characters to life. I would also like to mention that a lot of these tips stem from the fact that I myself am a teenager, so I speak from experience. 

Understanding the Teenage Mindset

To create convincing teenage characters, it's crucial to grasp the complexities of the teenage mindset. Teenagers are undergoing a significant period of growth and self-discovery, facing numerous emotional and psychological changes. Here are some key aspects to consider:

Emotional rollercoaster: Adolescence is often characterized by intense emotions and mood swings. Your teenage characters should exhibit a range of emotions, such as excitement, fear, anger, and insecurity. Explore their emotional landscapes and provide relatable experiences for readers.

Identity formation: Teenagers are exploring their identities and seeking independence. They might question societal norms, challenge authority, and embark on journeys of self-discovery. Show your characters' struggles, personal growth, and the conflicts they face while finding their place in the world.

Peer pressure and self-image: Teenagers often experience the influence of peer pressure and societal expectations, which can impact their self-esteem and decision-making. Highlight the conflicts arising from these pressures and their impact on your characters' choices.

Evolving identities: It's important to acknowledge that the teenage years are a transformative phase, and who teenagers are during this period might differ significantly from who they become as adults. If you're writing a long-term story that spans several years, consider the potential growth and changes your teenage characters will undergo.

Research and Observation

In order to create authentic teenage characters, conducting thorough research and observation is vital. This enables you to understand the nuances of teenage behavior, language, and experiences. Here are some key steps to consider:

Immerse yourself in teenage culture

Dive into the world of teenagers by exploring contemporary media, such as books, movies, TV shows, and music targeted at young adults. Pay attention to how teenagers are portrayed and the themes that resonate with them.

Example: By reading popular young adult novels like "The Fault in Our Stars" by John Green or watching coming-of-age films like "Eighth Grade," you can gain valuable insights into the lives and struggles of teenagers.

Engage with real teenagers

Interact with teenagers in various settings to observe their behavior, conversations, and interests. Volunteer at youth organizations, attend school events, or join online communities where teenagers discuss their experiences. Take note of their mannerisms, slang, and current trends.

Conduct interviews or surveys

Reach out to teenagers for interviews or surveys to gather firsthand information about their lives, experiences, and opinions. This allows you to capture diverse viewpoints and ensure your characters reflect the realities of teenage existence.

Stay updated on evolving trends

Teenage culture is dynamic and constantly evolving. Stay informed about the latest trends, technological advancements, and social media platforms that shape teenagers' lives. Incorporate these elements into your storytelling to add authenticity and relevance.

Developing Unique Personalities

To create believable teenage characters, it is crucial to develop distinct and authentic personalities. Avoid falling into the trap of using stereotypes or clichés. Here are some dos and don'ts for developing unique teenage characters:

Avoid stereotypes and clichés

Do: Challenge common stereotypes associated with teenagers, such as the rebellious troublemaker or the socially awkward nerd. Instead, aim for multifaceted and diverse characters.

Don't: Rely on one-dimensional clichés that flatten the depth of your characters and make them predictable.

Example: Instead of portraying the teenage girl as a shallow cheerleader, consider a character who balances her cheerleading passion with academic ambitions and a talent for playing the guitar.

Individual motivations and aspirations

Do: Give each teenage character their own motivations, desires, and goals that drive their actions and decisions. This adds complexity and realism to their personalities.

Don't: Make your characters solely defined by their relationships or generic goals like popularity or romantic interests.

Example: Rather than having a character whose sole purpose is to pursue a romantic relationship, create a character who aspires to become an environmental activist and fights for climate justice.

Embrace a range of emotions and conflicts

Do: Explore a broad spectrum of emotions and internal conflicts that reflect the emotional rollercoaster of teenage years. Show their vulnerability, fears, and inner growth.

Don't: Present your characters as emotionless or overly dramatic caricatures.

Example: Allow your character to experience moments of doubt, heartbreak, and self-discovery. Let them wrestle with ethical dilemmas, confront their fears, and learn from their mistakes.

Show growth and change

Do: Portray character development and growth over time. Teenagers evolve, learn from their experiences, and develop a deeper understanding of themselves and the world.

Don't: Keep your characters static throughout the story, ignoring their potential for growth and transformation.

Example: Begin with a shy and reserved character who gradually gains confidence and finds their voice, evolving into a leader who inspires change in their community.

Dialogue and Communication

Creating authentic dialogue and communication for your teenage characters is essential to make them believable. It helps readers connect with the characters and enhances the overall realism of your story. Here are some dos and don'ts for portraying teenage dialogue and communication:

Portraying authentic teenage dialogue and slang

Do: Pay attention to the vocabulary and speech patterns commonly used by teenagers. Incorporate slang and colloquialisms that are prevalent among the target age group and location. This helps establish a sense of realism and relatability.

Don't: Overdo the use of slang or rely on stereotypes. Avoid using excessive amounts of trendy slang that may quickly become outdated or confusing for readers. Remember to strike a balance between authenticity and readability.

Example: Avoid using every popular slang term in every sentence. Instead, sprinkle them sparingly and purposefully throughout the dialogue.

Balancing realism with readability

Do: Aim for dialogue that feels natural and mirrors real-life conversations. Use contractions, pauses, interruptions, and hesitations to mimic the ebb and flow of spoken language. Consider the rhythm, pacing, and tone of teenage conversations.

Example: "I can't believe she did that! It's, like, totally unfair," Lisa exclaimed, her voice filled with frustration and disbelief.

Don't: Overcomplicate dialogue or make it overly formal or stilted. Avoid unnatural speech patterns or overly polished language that doesn't reflect how teenagers typically communicate with each other.

Example: "I cannot fathom the injustice of her actions. It is thoroughly unfair," Lisa protested, her tone composed and articulate.

Addressing the role of technology and social media

Do: Incorporate technology and social media platforms into your characters' communication. Depict texting, instant messaging, social media interactions, and the use of emojis or GIFs. These elements reflect the reality of how teenagers communicate and form relationships in the digital age.

Example: Emma sent a quick Snapchat to her best friend, sharing a funny meme they had discovered, and eagerly awaited her response.

Don't: Ignore the influence of technology or limit your characters' communication to face-to-face interactions alone. Technology plays a significant role in how teenagers connect and express themselves, so it should be integrated into your storytelling.

Adapting slang to match the era

Do: Recognize that slang and language usage evolve over time. If your story is set in a different time period, research and incorporate the appropriate slang and language of that era. This attention to historical context enhances the authenticity of your characters and setting.

Example: In a story set in the 1990s, a character might say, "That's phat!" to express excitement, reflecting the slang of that era.

Don't: Use modern-day slang and language for characters in historical or past settings, as it will undermine the authenticity of the narrative and make it less believable.

Remember, the key is to strike a balance between authenticity and readability when crafting teenage dialogue and communication. By incorporating realistic language, capturing the nuances of technology and social media, and considering the appropriate slang for the era, you can create engaging and relatable teenage characters.

Navigating Relationships and Social Dynamics

One of the essential aspects of creating believable teenage characters is accurately portraying their relationships and navigating the complex dynamics of adolescence. Here are some dos and don'ts for capturing authentic relationships and social interactions:

Depicting the complexities of friendships and peer groups

Do: Showcase the diverse nature of friendships and the dynamics within peer groups. Explore the highs and lows, loyalty, conflicts, and the evolving nature of these relationships.

Example: Showcasing a group of friends who support each other through challenges, celebrate successes together, but also experience occasional disagreements and conflicts.

Don't: Present stereotypical or one-dimensional friendships. Avoid relying solely on cliques or popular group dynamics without exploring the complexities and individuality within them.

Exploring romantic relationships and the challenges they present

Do: Develop romantic relationships that are realistic and nuanced. Highlight the ups and downs, the emotional intensity, the exploration of boundaries, and the growth that comes with these experiences.

Example: Depicting a budding romance where the characters navigate uncertainties, communication challenges, and personal growth while discovering their feelings for each other.

Don't: Romanticize or trivialize relationships. Avoid portraying idealized or overly simplistic love stories without addressing the complexities and challenges that arise in teenage romances.

Incorporating familial relationships and dynamics

Do: Include meaningful interactions between teenage characters and their family members. Explore the influences, conflicts, and support systems within these relationships, capturing the range of emotions experienced in familial dynamics.

Example: Showcasing a strained relationship between a teenager and their parent due to contrasting values, but also moments of understanding and eventual reconciliation.

Don't: Neglect the importance of familial relationships or portray them as insignificant or nonexistent. Avoid relying solely on negative or stereotypical family dynamics without showcasing positive aspects as well.

By authentically depicting the complexities of friendships and peer groups, exploring realistic romantic relationships and their challenges, and incorporating meaningful familial relationships and dynamics, you'll bring depth and relatability to your teenage characters.

Conclusion

Creating believable teenage characters requires a thoughtful approach that captures their unique mindset, conducts thorough research, develops distinct personalities, masters dialogue and communication, and navigates relationships and social dynamics. By following the dos and avoiding the don'ts, you can craft teenage characters that resonate with readers, providing them with relatable experiences and enriching your storytelling.

Remember, authenticity and attention to detail are key. Embrace the diversity and complexity of teenage experiences, staying true to their emotions, motivations, and growth throughout your narrative. By doing so, you'll create memorable characters that captivate your audience and bring your stories to life.

I hope this blog on Writing Believable Teenage Characters will help you in your writing journey. Be sure to comment any tips of your own to help your fellow authors prosper, and follow my blog for new blog updates every Monday and Thursday.  

Looking For More Writing Tips And Tricks? 

Are you an author looking for writing tips and tricks to better your manuscript? Or do you want to learn about how to get a literary agent, get published and properly market your book? Consider checking out the rest of Haya’s book blog where I post writing and publishing tips for authors every Monday and Thursday! And don’t forget to head over to my TikTok and Instagram profiles @hayatheauthor to learn more about my WIP and writing journey! 

#writing teenagers #ya writing advice #hayatheauthor #haya's book blog #haya blogs #writers on tumblr #writer community #writer tools #writer blog #writer stuff #writer wednesday #writer tips #creative writing #writers of tumblr #writerscommunity #writeblr #writing community #writer spotlight #writer things #writing prompt #writing tools #writing stuff #writing #writing life #writing inspo #writing help #writing advice #writing inspiration #writing ideas

[malicious-compliance-esq]

Why the World Needs Black Jack Randall: Queer Representation at Its Worst and Best

On March 29 my amazing mutual and fellow Evil Redcoat Pipeline traveler @meerawrites tagged me in a reblog of this video essay from @rowanellis about media literacy and queer villains that mentions both Lestat de Lioncourt from Interview with the Vampire and Black Jack Randall from Outlander. Double bisexual representation from an openly ace creator? Be still my heart!

I’d seen a few of Rowan’s other videos on YouTube—not ever having looked for her on Tumblr before Meera sent me that video—and often enjoyed both the content and the nuance. Certainly true for many aspects of this one as well. I want to make it very clear before going into detail here that I ardently support Rowan as a creator and appreciate that advocacy for diverse queer representation tremendously. I’m tagging her blog here primarily to promote her work and to encourage folks to explore for themselves. Her video essays are excellent in general and this one certainly has its fair share of wonderful content just the same.

I love the analysis here of why queer villains often get embraced as folk heroes by the LGBTQIA+ community, and many of the specific commentaries on beloved characters from iconic films and shows I grew up on like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Lion King. Of course, I’m no expert on any of those canons despite many viewings. I don’t consider myself an expert on Interview with the Vampire by any means either, but I’ve read all the books and seen the film and the available season of the new television adaptation. I found a lot of the commentary here insightful and resonant as a more casual consumer of media in that universe. I fully expect that folks who truly do have that depth of expertise would have much to say about the specifics of Rowan’s analysis of Lestat.

If y’all are on my blog, you know why I’m here and you know where my expertise lies. I am here to sustain the collective derangement of the few and the proud who take a deeper interest in Black Jack. Who see him for the complex and complicated person he is rather than writing him off as a Complete Monster or hand waving the things he does that truly are monstrous. And oftentimes who take that deeper look at him from the informed perspective of lived experience with sexual abuse. Many of the folks I’ve met who find Black Jack uniquely resonant and compelling do so from the firsthand perspective of submissiveness and masochism—of finding him alluring because of what he could do for them.

Well then. You could fix him. You could make him worse. I could rail him.

I’m going to out myself in no uncertain terms here because I need to make my authorial standpoint painstakingly clear. Hi, my name is Malicious Compliance. In addition to being quite openly bisexual in every possible area of my life, I am Dominant and sadistic. Are those the only things I enjoy sexually? Not at all. Although I’m not switchy in the slightest when it comes to D/s and S&M activities, I absolutely enjoy sex that does not involve BDSM elements as well. I’ve also had intensely kinky sexual relationships that involved no physical practice of sadism whatsoever. This will come back later—just like Black Jack does at Versailles in S2E05 “Untimely Resurrection” after supposedly being dead from a cattle stampede at Wentworth Prison. Awesome, right? Like me, our favorite randy Redcoat is tough to kill.

Given all this and my general level of immersion in all forms of Outlander canon, once I finally could make the time to give Rowan’s video essay my full attention (more on that below) I found myself going from pumping my fist to shaking my head. I knew I’d have to say something in response. That I would need to address the Republic and set the record accurate if certainly not straight.

Initially I thought about doing a brief reblog commentary noting that although the analysis in the video gets several things quite twisted about Randall, these are understandable omissions considering Rowan does not position herself as having intensive expertise on Outlander canon. But then I started thinking about Rowan’s stated purpose in making the video. The sorts of deeper analysis and nuances that, as Rowan herself points out in her own ways, often get missed with intent in considering the actions of queer villains who are specifically bisexual and sadistic.

And as a bisexual sadist who has frequently encountered the framing of my own sexuality as an automatic threat even by other queer people who otherwise support kink practice I knew it could enhance the positive impact of the original video essay to provide some detailed commentary. Broader systemic issues that Rowan references herself can make it altogether too easy to reproduce the same harms one looks to dismantle. Black Jack Randall is a fictional guy in a fictional world. Yet how the non-fictional world views people like Black Jack—and especially people brought to those dark places in their own minds and actions by their familiar cycles of abuse—matters tremendously to me. Not because I’ve gone down his path myself, but because I understand the stakes of not going down his path.

One thing about me is I would rather pull out what remains of my natural dentition with pliers than take no action when I know I can do something uniquely impactful in addressing that passive reproduction of harm to our community, which very much is our community as both bisexual and asexual creators. In the interest of directly unpacking harmful stereotypes about bisexual sadists, building on the video essay’s overall spotlighting of queer villains and some of the specific ways biphobia factors into those characterizations and storylines, I’m taking this deepest of dives. Doing more. Because it’s my brand, certainly. But moreover because it’s my duty.

As blazingly gay Will Tavington so eloquently stated in The Patriot amid some premium sinister flirting with his enemy Ben Martin: It’s an ugly business doing one’s duty. But sometimes, it’s a real pleasure.

So here, point by point from my own manual transcription of Rowan’s comments—using both the audio and captions for the video to ensure full accuracy, y’all know both my style and my propensity for em dashes—I give you a detailed analysis of the analysis. If you’re envisioning me gesturing wildly at a tangled yarn map like the Pepe Silvia conspiracy theory one from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia then you’ve got the measure of things entirely. Much more this energy here than the XKCD angle of Someone is wrong on the Internet. Indeed, I’d say Rowan is very right on the Internet to open this dialogue and provide folks who’ve made this depth of engagement with various characters referenced in this video the opportunity to build on her own insights.

But “duty calls” nonetheless! Happy Culloden Day to all ye Randallites near and far. Have fun and try not to get disemboweled too much.

Across the seven seasons of Outlander, a drama about a World War II nurse who travels back to 1740s Scotland—I know, don’t question it—perhaps the most loathed character amongst the show’s many villains is Captain Jonathan Randall.

The phrasing here made me reflect with sorrow on how that same premise of time travel elements automatically making something not worthwhile for reasons of implausibility—and thus perceived frivolity—has often made others pass on exploring Outlander at all. It also made me wonder, as many other things in the video essay continue to do, if perhaps the commentary draws on familiarity with only the first season of the show despite Black Jack’s storyline extending into the third season in live action and beyond that in impact. That would seem a lost opportunity considering the depth of analysis of other canons like Interview with the Vampire and Hazbin Hotel here. Both of which I highly recommend for folks who’ve not yet had the pleasure!

I also noted how the video essay makes no mention whatsoever of Randall’s canonical nickname of “Black Jack” anywhere, which seems strange given what a major plot point this becomes right from the start in S1E01 “Sassenach”. I see this as a missed opportunity to get into some of the basic nuances here about his sadism, which itself only gets mentioned minimally despite the surrounding context. The video essay sets Randall up as a sadist with the framing of this segment but then doesn’t really connect those dots. I’ve done that for y’all before with my “Red Black and Shades of Gray” meta comparing sadism themes in Outlander and The Patriot canons, which contrasts the former’s frequent depiction of sexual interest in actions causing intentional pain in Black Jack Randall’s actions with the latter’s depiction of strategic interest in actions producing incidental pain in Will Tavington’s.

Speaking of the Outlander and The Patriot contrast between the canons’ respective evil Redcoat characters, I had some notes jotted down in the background of my various in-progress BJR fics that explores canonical nicknames for Randall and Tavington and what these monikers lampshade about their respective characterizations. I also had another meta in much more primal stages of development exploring rape themes in both canons and the nuances of how sexual violence gets invoked in storylines featuring Randall and Tavington. That phrasing is very deliberate for good reason; Will Tavington doesn’t rape anyone. And Randall’s own sexual violence doesn’t play out remotely the way one might think from watching this video. Apropos of this, I had another meta envisioned about homosociality in Outlander and how Randall’s bisexuality makes him an outcast among straight and queer characters alike—inspired of course by a dear mutual exploring similar themes with Tavington in The Patriot canon.

In the first of what became many drafts of this Very Long Essay, I said “it will probably be quite some time until I get any of these finished” and then spent a few days turning that over in my head. Indeed, the process of drafting this piece to encourage readers to peek behind the curtain of Black Jack Randall’s life has necessarily involved some deeper reflection on things behind the curtain of my own life. Including how I still—at 40 unlikely years old and counting—often do things out of feelings of obligation rather than genuine desire.

Did I mention I’m a rape survivor? And that I couldn’t possibly count how many times I’ve let someone take dozens of “no” signals as a “yes” because of what it would cost me to refuse? It’s okay to enjoy certain aspects of fandom casually. Even if one isn’t already doing tons of other activity that’s anything but casual. Let yourself enjoy things. This world robs us of so much joy even when we try with all our might to protect it, to hold onto it. I am begging all of you to let yourself enjoy things before it’s too late. To do what Randall didn’t in canon—to live, and to stop willfully breaking his own heart.

If you read my blog, you know that this year has been an absolute hellscape on many fronts and that I am constantly slammed with even more of a professional overload than usual while dealing with A Lot in both the mental and physical health domains. And I generally publish at least one novella-length transformative work for Outlander each month on top of that. As a good friend put it: If I had a full-time job and had the energy to volunteer on top of that, I don’t think I’d ever write. I do what I do not because it is good for me, but because I am certifiably insane. This is not hyperbole or satire. I easily qualify for the designation per the DSM. Which has faults in spades and I’m not endorsing in the slightest, mind. My point is that I write not because I have the time or the energy to spare, but rather because if I do not write I will feel as if I cannot breathe. Why? Asked and answered.

So, a note for the good of the order: I can wait a long, long time before I write another fandom essay. This is a Sisters of Mercy reference, because of course it is. I’m writing this response to the video essay instead of finishing development on the fic I otherwise could probably have released for the Battle of Culloden anniversary on April 16. Ideally I would have done both, wouldn’t I? In addition to already releasing the prior installment of that continuity on April 13 no less! Perhaps if I’d just tried harder I could’ve given you two different lengthy writings in honor of the specific day. Or at least released something else on AO3 for April without waiting until the last minute like a slacker.

That’s the kind of thinking that made me stop sleeping entirely and wind up having a complete breakdown both mentally and physically. For those who are new around here, this is an even worse idea for me than it is for most humans because of a progressive genetic disease that kills people on the regular even when they do sleep and eat adequately and generally show compassion for themselves.

Accordingly, that sort of thinking about my own self-worth as anything other than an ATM for other people’s consumption of output is also what made me complete a PhD in literally two years while working full-time and being actively in the process of dying from my disease. I got on a medication that saved my lungs and my life just over a year after defending my dissertation. It’s taken another decade to learn the lesson I should have learned back then. How did Annie Lennox put it? Dying is easy; it's living that scares me. Paging Black Jack Randall—because if that isn’t the absolute biggest Culloden energy I don’t know what is.

It is amazing and terrible what sadism can do when turned inward on a person. The original video essay I’m responding to here never quite got around to how masterfully Randall’s character spotlights this pattern in several ways. Because the video is much broader by design than it is deep, and thus does not allow for more thorough engagement of the source material in commenting on Black Jack’s character, a lot of the same tropes the video essay aims to unpack could get repackaged with new hats instead without these additional details. So in the interest of not sending people who aren’t bisexual sadists to do bisexual sadists’ jobs, I’m giving y’all the goods.

As a British captain in an occupied Scotland, Randall radiates pure villainy.

Does he? I’m not so sure at all. First, see here for details focused closely on Outlander itself. Second, see here for use of Black Jack’s storylines in Outlander as examples of a larger trope. Search both of those pages for “Even Evil Has Loved Ones” using your browser’s Find function and you’ll get some telling material. Catch that reference to the Duke of Sandringham and Mary Hawkins in the second link, did you? We’ll get to those in time. Oh, how we will get to those.

The complete lack of mention of Season 2 and especially the iconic BJR episode near the end makes this oversight unsurprising. I think touching on that content just briefly would have supported Rowan’s overall purpose in making the initial video. At the same time, I’m guessing that stimulating nuanced and enduring dialogue about queer villains is the most important aim of the original essay! Indeed, S2E12 “The Hail Mary” represents the absolute pinnacle of my plunge into permanent derangement about Randall for reasons likely obvious considering everything I’ve already shared about my own backstory in the process of waxing loquacious to fill in additional canonical details that didn’t feature in the referenced video essay here.

I promised that the notes about my own sexual proclivities would come back, did I not? As BJR is canonically known for doing, I always keep my word. Not hyperbole in the slightest for either of us. On Black Jack’s end this gets referenced explicitly by Claire in Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber when she is helping Randall care for his dying brother Alex. It also gets demonstrated consistently by other characters and Randall himself throughout his storylines in both Season 1 and Season 2 of the show.

So indeed, oneof the things I find most resonant about Black Jack is that he leans into whatever the other person in an encounter is giving him and bases his own behavior on that. This is made quite clear on the show in numerous ways—and arguably even clearer in the source novels by Diana Gabaldon, wherein we learn from Book 1 / Outlander that Black Jack frequently has trysts with domestic employees in the Scottish countryside.

Many people find Black Jack charming and handsome, to the point that he has a drawer full of perfume-scented love letters in his office at Fort William. Hilarious comic relief because he’d clearly have no reason for keeping those around other than masturbation fodder. Those of you who’ve circulated that meme about jerking off face down on the bed with the #black jack randall tag applied are entirely understanding the assignment.

For all the times he’s sexually assaulted someone—which seems to be countable on one hand for any person who isn’t Jamie himself, and near zero for anyone who isn’t associated with Jamie Fraser in some way—Randall has clearly had plenty of consensual sex with people who are not only willing but also entirely enthusiastic to get in his breeches. In the books we also learn about some rumors surrounding another prisoner named Alex MacGregor. These are never confirmed and it’s unclear even from the rumors themselves what the exact nature of Black Jack’s relationship with MacGregor was.

Why is this so important to highlight in analysis of queer villains? Here I go again quoting Carmen Maria Machado as I have before in both fic and commentary and surely will again: The world is full of hurt people who hurt people. Even if the dominant culture considers you an anomaly, that doesn’t mean you can’t be common, common as fucking dirt. This, friends, is the thesis of Black Jack Randall.

He shows little to no redeeming qualities, offers no sympathetic backstory to why he acts the way he does, and appears purely to have been driven by rage and violent pleasure.

Oh my. I’m going to leave S2E05 “Untimely Resurrection” and S2E12 “The Hail Mary” alone for the moment. But even in S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” and S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” we start to get some light shed on what Randall is really doing in Scotland. We learn by degrees later just how much his reasons for being there belie what we see on the surface. This gets expanded on in the books where the reveal on Randall’s benefactor the Duke of Sandringham being a secret Jacobite is much more detailed. But even on the show, we learn by S2E11 “Vengeance Is Mine” that Sandringham got outed as a suspected traitor to the Crown.

Goodness knows he's been outed as gay from the start to everyone but Claire, who didn’t learn this until much later after making the initial blunder of falling for Black Jack’s gambit about Sandringham having a wife. Not that this would have stopped him from being gay, of course. So-called “lavender marriage” was indeed relatively commonplace—and remains so now in some communities—both generally and in Outlander specifically. I’ll cover that in detail when we get to the points about Lord John Grey below. Notably for now, Sandringham rather than Randall himself is much more centered in a villain role in Season 2. And apropos of other content here, he absolutely doesn’t qualify for tropes about redeeming qualities. The extent of his monstrosity gets revealed in that same episode near the end of Season 2 when it comes to light that he ordered his valet Albert Danton to attack and rape his own goddaughter Mary Hawkins in an alleyway in Paris.

Even early in the series it thus seems difficult to consider Black Jack the most loathsome villain in Outlander. We’ll get to Mary in earnest—and the extreme tenderness with which Black Jack always treats her from their first meeting until his death at Culloden Moore—as we go along. For now, remember what Claire learned about Black Jack’s fate all the way back in S1E01 “Sassenach” where she and her husband Frank Randall were looking into his family genealogy in the Reverend Reginald Wakefield’s office at Inverness during their long-belated honeymoon. Some details missing there certainly, which only get revealed by degrees in Season 2. Black Jack really is Frank’s 5x great-grandfather though; he’s just not his only 5x great-grandfather.

I should probably mention here that I’m donor conceived and that I wasn’t told the truth… No, that’s putting it too kindly. I did note that I’ve always been quite dedicated to seeing the good in people who do bad deeds, and to working tirelessly to bring it out. But enough is enough. My parents lied to my face for 18 years about my ancestry. I asked them point-blank about it several times and they still told me lies. I finally got the truth out of my mother on a balcony overlooking an olive grove halfway around the world. The bus ride to get back to the nearest city and the airport were the longest four hours of my life. I never traveled with them again. And the hole inside of me never fully closed, and never will.

This too will resurface when I get to the content about Mary Hawkins and her marriage to Black Jack. I’m getting there, I promise. As my spouse once put it: I knew you were going to land the plane.

Getting back to early portions of Outlander canon and what we learn about Black Jack in Season 1 though, there’s also the iconic S1E08 “Both Sides Now” extended scene in which Black Jack gives Claire his own perspective on what he’s doing in Scotland in the first place and how distasteful he finds his work. How badly he wishes he could just go home and be warm and take a bath. How little he cares about the outcome of the conflict and how futile he feels it all is. We already know from a couple episodes prior that he loathes both the British aristocracy and his own superiors in the Army, who treat him like he’s lower than the dirt he then passive-aggressively shakes out all over their wardroom at Brockton. Including and especially his commanding officer Lord Thomas, a general who’s about as flamingly gay-coded as Will Tavington in The Patriot.

Oh, and speaking of being driven only by violent pleasure that is entirely incorrect—S2E02 “Not in Scotland Anymore” alone makes this perfectly clear. I’ve previously covered the finer details about Black Jack bottoming enthusiastically, and also enjoying gentler sexual experiences as well as rougher ones.

Black Jack’s interactions with Jenny in her flashbacks from S1E12 “Lallybroch” also shed light on this; once she goes inside the house with him, he only touches her with gentle curiosity until she bashes him over the head with a heavy object. Even then, he responds by…tossing her onto to the bed and getting partially undressed. When she starts laughing at him because he can’t get an erection (a telling piece of evidence of how Black Jack ultimately loses interest in sex if the other person doesn’t want it to at least some degree, or feel strong emotions about it that they’re willing to show) he panics and conks her head against the bedpost so he can flee without it being obvious that she chased him off.

Then there’s also the prior content from Book 1 / Outlander about the scented letters and the maids, some of which also comes back in Book 8 / Written in My Own Heart’s Blood when Roger Wakefield goes looking for Black Jack at Fort William after time traveling to 1739 a couple of weeks after Randall’s installation as commander there. I’ll come back to that a bit later given how much that scene reveals about Randall’s character and his reasons for being in Scotland.

And most of all, his villainy is compounded by the fact that he will rape, torture, and murder men and women alike—an equal opportunity monster.

Correct in essentials on the first two items as I cover elsewhere. Not so much on the third, though! In fact, the TV adaptation clarifies this beyond the information we get in the books. Whereas Book 1 / Outlander features murky rumors about Randall possibly killing one of his own soldiers at Fort William so he can pin the murder on Jamie, show canon makes little of this and indeed offers several opportunities to see Black Jack deliberately not killing people who attack him.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the final episode where he appears, S3E01 “The Battle Joined”. In that Culloden-centric episode, we watch Randall get fully pulled from his horse by a group of Scots warriors who then proceed to attack him. Up to that point Black Jack has just been shooing people away from his horse by swinging his cavalry saber in the air. Once on the ground, he basically just elbows his way out of the cluster of Jacobite soldiers and makes a beeline for Jamie instead.

Then of course there’s also Black Jack’s aggrieved, hesitant behavior at Wentworth Prison in S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” right before the cows show up to give him the business. Although Randall is well known for keeping his word, even by people who despise him absolutely, he looks defeated and anxious when Jamie reminds him that he owes him the debt of taking his life ahead of the gallows in exchange for finally “[making] free of [his] body” (see S2E02 “Castle Leoch”) in the night. Jack takes out a dagger and sort of swings it around idly—with a look on his face that can only be described as “Really?” Any playfulness remaining there seems to come from Black Jack eyeing Jamie’s nude body and thinking about what else he might do with the blade besides killing him.

Randall has a zero kill count onscreen in the television show. I’d be remiss not to note here how this places him behind even his own eventual wife Mary Hawkins, often heralded quite accurately as one of the characters in Outlander who comes closest to embodying pure goodness. But of course, the trauma of sexual violence can twist a person’s mind horribly. I might know just a little about this myself. And it only takes one experience, more so given the horrifying context outlined in S2E11 “Vengeance Is Mine”. Like anyone else, Mary has the capacity for brutal violence herself if pushed sufficiently far. I consider it something of a miracle I never went that route myself considering my own experiences can scarcely even be counted in any meaningful way. I can only think in terms of years. Seven of them whose shadows will never fully retract. When I say Black Jack and Mary were a perfectly arranged marriage, it isn’t for nothing.

We’ll get to her in earnest, I promise! Of course, I’ve already covered that ground in fiction before.

Randall makes his monstrous mark on Season 1 by sexually assaulting both of the show’s protagonists, Claire and Jamie.

Correct in essentials, but potentially a false equivalence. I’m not sure how much the video essay was intended to set the assaults on Jamie and Claire up as direct mirrors of one another. There is however a common thread here worth pulling out: How in Season 1 Black Jack only goes through with assaulting people who show at least some sexual interest in him.

Randall assaults three people in Season 1 overall: Claire in S1E01 “Sassenach” and S1E08 “Both Sides Now”; Jenny in flashbacks from S1E02 “Castle Leoch” and S1E12 “Lallybroch”; and Jamie in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” and S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul”. He also propositions Claire and Jamie together in S1E09 “The Reckoning” in an echo of propositioning Jamie individually in the S1E02 “Castle Leoch” flashback. But of the three people he assaults, only two respond with any sustained evidence of interest amid their anger and indignation.

The hateful attraction Jamie feels for Black Jack has been flogged—to borrow Frank’s phrasing about press coverage of Claire’s mysterious disappearance and return from S2E01 “Through a Glass, Darkly”—almost as badly as the man’s own back by this point. So I won’t belabor that here except to say it’s entirely nonrandom that Jamie keeps enticing Black Jack into further conflict after recovering from the brutal assaults at Wentworth and discovering Randall alive in Paris. He’s still having horny nightmares over two decades later about everything from weird group therapy scenarios with shamans on misty mountains (not hyperbole, see Book 6 / A Breath of Snow and Ashes for the goods) to fighting a totally naked Black Jack at Culloden and winding up covered in his “hot, hot blood” while they lie on the ground in a clinch (see Book 9 / Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone for that especially choice sequence) and exhausting Claire’s patience so badly in rehashing these that he eventually resorts to rambling about the dreams to Jenny instead.

What doesn’t tend to come out as much in analysis of the TV series is the key plot point from Book 1 / Outlander that Claire feels attracted to Black Jack because of his resemblance to Frank. Not just in appearance, but also in certain mannerisms and pleasures—see the shaving scene from S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” and Claire’s flashbacks to shaving Frank thusly with the very same razor, for example. Little surprise then how in Book 1 / Outlander she specifically mentions feeling “compelled to open [her] legs for him” when he ties her hands behind her back at Fort William in the equivalent sequence to later portions of S1E08 “Both Sides Now”.

By her own admission this latent attraction-by-association does not wane entirely until after she and her friends rescue Jamie from Wentworth Prison at the end of Season 1. After that point, things go the other way. Although Claire spends Season 2 in an odd state of détente with Black Jack himself, even after the events of S2E07 “Faith” for which neither she nor Jamie explicitly blame Jack, she initially feels afraid of Frank when she reconnects with him back in the 20th Century as seen in S2E01 “Through a Glass, Darkly”. Why mention this here? That fear only subsides when Claire sees how much Frank treasures being a father to Brianna, the child she conceived with Jamie before going back through the stones to her own time. Indeed, later installments of the book series also show Claire deliberately striving for accuracy in her remembrances of both Frank and Black Jack as complicated men who were capable of deep love.

Scuffling is also arousing for Black Jack. Although the shaving scene demonstrates that this isn’t the only sort of physical pleasure he enjoys, he certainly gets a kick out of it regardless. So Claire’s willingness to scrap with him—including when she literally gives him a kick to the testicles with her knee in S1E01 “Sassenach” after he pins her to the ground in the forest—heightens the arousal and feels like play to him. Contrast this with Jenny’s incredulous laughter and complete unwillingness to take the fight further after hitting him over the head with a blunt object to get him to back off.

Does this take any of Randall’s actions out of the territory of assault? Nope. But it does provide a context to his motivations. Although his means of seeking affection are entirely warped, at the end of the day Black Jack really is after human connection. I’m entirely in agreement with other Outlander fans who’ve mentioned wanting a companion series about the Randall family. I have my own ideas about that history that I’ve referenced in transformative works. I would also love to see Gabaldon’s own perspective on what damaged Black Jack’s psyche so badly.

Finally, Randall’s treatment of women often differs from his treatment of men just in general. By his own admission in S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” he is “not a casual person with women” usually. He says this while expressing regret for how he treated Claire in the woods outside Craigh Na Dun. Which is very genuine per his actor’s own comments about playing the character; Tobias Menzies has mentioned in interviews that Black Jack always believes whatever he’s saying fully in the moment.

Something to note about Black Jack in general is that he will express regret and then claim he doesn’t feel it. This is probably quite accurate considering Jack shows a lot of signs of dissociation and may not feel much of anything most of the time. We see an example of this simultaneous expression and negation of regret in S2E12 “The Hail Mary” during the sequence at the tavern. And although the meaning of Randall’s comment about not being casual initially seems ambiguous, we get the reveal on it entirely in that same episode via the dynamic between Black Jack and Mary Hawkins. He takes her well-being and her safety so seriously that he’d rather die than risk any chance of hurting her.

Of course, his brandy-soaked mind isn’t realizing that she’ll get hurt far worse if he does die. We see enough in both book and show canon to understand how Black Jack treated Mary in life. Even that single moment where he enters the room at the boarding house says a lot; his entire face lights in a genuine smile that reaches his eyes as soon as she looks at him. The interactions between the two of them are some of the most delicate and tender moments of the entire season.

These sequences also provide some context for the different handling of the moments after Alex’s death. In the Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber version of this sequence Black Jack is crying and so drunk he can barely stand, whereas in episode S2E12 “The Hail Mary” he’s more lucid and vacillates between catatonic silence and a harrowing moment of punching his brother’s cadaver. Calls back to Claire’s comment in S1E02 “Castle Leoch” about how “there’s no joy in flogging a dead man” because of course this wasn’t about joy. Black Jack is entirely devastated, both for himself and for Mary. And although Mary herself looks pained at seeing this unfold, and clings to Claire in response, she looks more heartbroken than afraid. Her depth of emotion in that moment contrasts clearly with her apathy at gazing upon Danton’s dead body and Sandringham’s decapitated corpse back at his Bellhurst Manor estate (or Belmont House depending on which version of canon one consults) in the previous episode.

Finally and perhaps relatedly, I should spotlight Black Jack’s “I choose the whore” comment from S1E01 “Sassenach” about his own taste in women. Although part of an ironic commentary on the juxtaposition of Claire’s accent and vocabulary with her ample use of profanity, this also tells us a fair amount about Randall’s overall attitudes toward class. We learn in other portions of canon such as S2E06 “Best Laid Schemes” and various sequences in the first two books that Randall visits sex workers and that there aren’t lurid rumors swirling around about his treatment of feminine prostitutes. Black Jack’s sexual antagonism toward other men is more intense by design.

Randall’s queerness is a weapon that he wields indiscriminately.

Not really. That would be his dick. Randall generally doesn’t go through with assaulting people who don’t show any sexual interest during the initial scuffle. In fact, he can’t even get aroused physically when the other person isn’t fighting him in a horny way. Even when the person is somewhat horny it still doesn’t work for Randall unless their level of arousal is high. We see this with the assault on Claire during S1E08 “Both Sides Now” and especially in the equivalent scene from Book 1 / Outlander.

The only exception to this is an assault that happens during Season 2—which definitely seems like a missed opportunity to mention in direct parallel to the reference to preying on children in Rowan’s analysis of Lestat from Interview with the Vampire. During the S2E06 “Best Laid Schemes” chronology later revealed in full during S2E07 “Faith” Randall assaults Claudel, a boy who either pickpockets or works (depending on whether one goes with the show or book version of the canon backstory) at the Maison Élise brothel in Paris.

On the show it’s clear that he does this specifically to get Jamie to fight him; he knows Jamie is on the premises collecting debts and that Claudel has been walking around with him. Sure enough, upon hearing Claudel scream Jamie comes bursting into the room, hauls Black Jack into the hallway, and proceeds to beat the daylights out of him. The look of delight on Randall’s face at seeing him appear and subsequently getting pummeled by him leaves little doubt as to his objective in assaulting Claudel.

In Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber the timing and particulars of this storyline differ substantially. But as in the show, Randall is canonically an alcoholic and gets progressively deeper into his cups throughout the Paris storyline and his brother’s subsequent health decline. At the brothel he’s so drunk he doesn’t know where he is, what is going on around him, or even seem to remember who he is. Given the greater development of intrigue in the books surrounding whether Randall had a sexual relationship with his younger brother Alex, it seems likely that the angle here is Black Jack somehow seeking Alex in a person who reminds him of his brother during his early adolescent years.

No one is safe.

Aren’t they? Here we go, then. Time for some detailed Mary Hawkins content at long last.

The basics: We learn all the way back in S1E01 “Sassenach” and equivalent sequences from Book 1 / Outlander that before dying at the Battle of Culloden, Black Jack Randall married someone named Mary Hawkins and that she later gave birth to a son named Denys. Claire encounters Mary Hawkins for the first time in France in S2E02 “Not in Scotland Anymore” and grows closer to her while having the vague sense that she knows that name from somewhere. It isn’t until learning in S2E03 “Useful Occupations and Deceptions” that Black Jack himself is still alive that Claire realizes where she’s seen Mary’s name before: Frank’s family bible during a meeting with the Reverend Wakefield.

At first glance, Mary is everything one wouldn’t expect in someone who’d eventually marry Black Jack—or at least Claire thinks so. She feels completely befuddled by how someone who seems so meek and timid could possibly end up with someone like Black Jack. This becomes all the more confusing for Claire in S2E04 “La Dame Blanche” when Mary is getting involved with Jack’s younger brother Alex, a curate who has accompanied his employer the Duke of Sandringham to Paris. After Claire and Mary are attacked in an alleyway at Sandringham’s behest, resulting in Mary getting raped by a mysterious assailant later revealed to be the Duke’s own valet Albert Danton, Alex cares for her—and then gets locked in the Bastille for his trouble. Claire wrestles with her conscience about whether to get Alex freed given her own knowledge of how Black Jack and Mary are supposed to wind up together if Frank is ever to be born at all.

Leave it having half the information resulting in getting things half right, as often happens in Outlander and in life alike.

Mary has been leveling up her confidence throughout Season 2 and corresponding portions of Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber while growing closer to both Claire and Alex. We don’t see onscreen how her social relationship with Black Jack himself evolves once he arrives in Paris—but in the TV series the two clearly know one another well already when Jack shows up at the boarding house in S2E12 “The Hail Mary”. In book canon the different pacing of events puts Black Jack’s wedding to Mary and Alex’s death earlier in the year, leaving a couple months until the Battle of Culloden. On the show Black Jack and Mary are only married for three days but have substantially more history with one another prior to their wedding. Blending the canons offers a portrait of two people uniquely poised to understand each other, united through their shared love of Alex but also oddly well matched on several other fronts.

Have I freeze-framed those sequences of S2E12 “The Hail Mary” that feature Mary and Black Jack interacting? Yes. Several times. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to plummet into that sort of derangement.

For the rest of you fine folk, the cocktail napkin summary here is that Mary represents both the shining gentleness that Black Jack so prizes in his younger brother—and I’d encourage anyone who still thinks of him as a Complete Monster to consider how Alex turned out so well in the first place given Jack is documented as the only member of their family who’s taken responsibility for his well-being—and the capacity for ruthless violence that Black Jack repeatedly points out in himself.

Here I should mention though that Black Jack remains as dedicated to veracity in this as in anything else. When he says “I dwell in darkness, madam—and darkness is where I belong” to Claire at Brockton in S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” he’s saying this as much to convince himself as to convince her. Ditto his comments to her at the tavern, most of all the haunting question: “Do you really want Mary in my bed?” Where exactly would she be safer than with someone who has consistently treated her like gold, who looks at her as if the sun shines directly from her face, and who would move mountains to honor his beloved brother’s wishes? And wouldn’t Captain Zero Kill Count also understand well from Mary’s own history what would happen to him if he were to lay so much as an unwanted finger on her? She killed a practical stranger in all but cold blood with a triumphant hiss of satisfaction!

Badass, by the way. Judging by his responses to Claire throughout the series—see his comments in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” describing Claire as “no coward” and “a fit match for [her] husband” for example—I suspect Black Jack agreed. He even said explicitly in the same episode that he “cannot give [Claire] a better compliment than that” regarding her bravery and nerve mirroring Jamie’s own. I imagine quite a bit is happening behind those hazel eyes (described by Claire oftentimes as cold but noted distinctly by Roger in Book 8 / Written in My Own Heart’s Blood as being warm) whenever Black Jack looks at Mary.

Especially because Mary herself got Randall’s own abuser offed via Murtagh Fraser keeping a promise of his own in S2E11 “Vengeance Is Mine” by following up Mary’s own dagger-assisted disposal of Danton with an axe swing to Sandringham’s neck. Consider one of the only things Black Jack tells us verbatim about his life offscreen: In S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” a visibly shaken Randall tells Claire about finding Private McGreevey beheaded a couple weeks prior. By contrast, Mary regards her own godfather’s headless corpse with a shrug and says “I think we’d better go” in a matter-of-fact tone. Mary, all of 16 years old at the time, has no combat experience whatsoever and keeps her cool about this absolutely. Quite an evolution even from earlier in the same episode when she questions her ability to assist Claire in communicating with Hugh Munro just outside to help Murtagh and Jamie sneak into the Duke’s house.

Our girl comes through in the end—right before we watch the steel in her spine break through in earnest as she picks up a dagger from a table full of food and ends her rapist’s life after the reveal of this being the same man who attacked her in Paris. And she doesn’t lose her nerve after the immediate danger has passed, either. When we next encounter her at Inverness in S2E12 “The Hail Mary” she’s bullying a pharmacist into giving her more laudanum to ease Alex’s coughing and pain as his illness progresses. Then when Claire recognizes her and says hello, Mary immediately lights into her for conspiring to keep her and Alex apart.

I’ll note that as a person with progressive lung disease myself, I really appreciated Mary’s ire here. However strategic and born of understandable fears that Frank would never get to live, Claire’s invocation earlier in Season 2 of the tired old idea that chronically ill people make undesirable partners—that we can only take from the world and never give—rings both hollow and sour. After all, I’ve been there before. And in many ways I’m still scrambling frantically to escape the shadow of those ideas. To quote my spouse again: You never stop running until long after the demons finally stop chasing you.

I admire Mary Hawkins because she knew when to run—and moreover, because she knew when to stop running and bring the man who chased her in the first place down in sniveling puddle with a knife through his kidney. “It’s messy,” Black Jack said back in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” of killing people with daggers. But the visceral impact there—exact words and no mistake—never fails to feel any less relatable for me, considering my own experiences.

Here’s the other thing: People came to save Mary Hawkins. When she needed help, people showed up. She killed her own rapist but she had an audience and she had backup. Murtagh demonstrated how seriously he took the promise to avenge Mary if he ever found out who was responsible for the attacks on her and Claire. Black Jack took showing up in Paris to help Alex earlier in Season 2 with similar gravity. In Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber Claire specifically reflects on how “Jack Randall was a gentleman” with all his promises, and has never given anyone reason to doubt his word despite being awful in many other ways. The fact that Black Jack chose to keep his vows to Mary by caving to the self-loathing fear of being able to love her better by dying and leaving her and Denys his pension than by living and showing her the same fierce devotion he showed Alex doesn’t negate the seriousness of those promises in his mind.

Again exact words there regarding love as action. I’m certain from her own subsequent sharing about Black Jack to their son that Mary would have appreciated both the devotion and the ferocity. And likewise, that Jack himself already appreciated Mary’s own variety of darkness and the specifics of how it manifested after first taking root.

In that spirit I highly recommend visiting the Outlander Wiki page about Mary for additional specifics on her background and character arc. Don’t sleep on the pictures if you do venture over there, especially the ones featuring her looking deep in thought while wearing an elaborate silk gown. That’s not the face of an innocent little lamb with no capacity for brutality of her own. And even prior to her rape, Mary often manipulates people to get what she wants by pouting and playing coy. Which of course tracks—Siri, play “Rich Girl” by Hall and Oates! See also my reblog commentary on a dear mutual’s wonderful art envisioning Black Jack and Mary in a happier timeline.

TL;DR: Mary has a lot of steel in her spine. But it doesn’t save her from additional tribulations. Indeed, those further struggles wind up serving as evidence of Black Jack’s own character and how he treated her himself during their brief marriage prior to his death.

I don’t tend to cry over media. But I absolutely teared up reading Denys Randall’s words about Black Jack in Book 9 / Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone. Denys is Black Jack’s son who—true to the expanded version in Book 1 / Outlander of the prophecy Claire whispers into Randall’s ear in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison”—never got to meet him because he died in battle. I won’t go into this in detail just here, but that book resoundingly refutes the idea that Black Jack ever treated his family like anything other than gold.

Even in Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber he speaks with grace and understanding about his older brother Edward, the family heir who is stingy and neglectful and married to a person who clearly and openly hates Black Jack for being queer. In that later book though, we learn how Black Jack actually treated Mary and how carefully he made sure that Denys would always be taken care of financially even if something happened to Mary later on and the income from her widow’s pension was lost. He specifically set aside money for Denys to buy a commission in the Army—or to get an education if he had been considered female, so that he wouldn’t wind up trapped in a loveless marriage for the sake of survival.

The contrast Denys then draws with how Mary’s second husband Robert Isaacs—who was very materially wealthy and very kind to Denys but not a loving spouse—gave me chills. Yeah, Mary Hawkins did get abused by one of her husbands. Just not Black Jack Randall. The clarity with which Book 9 / Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone shows how much better off Mary would have been socially and emotionally if Black Jack had survived to raise Denys with her wrecked me and still does.

I was and am lucky to have an amazing dad. The lies he and my mother told are wholly understandable stains on the records of two people who have always done their best in an absolutely garbage world that thinks very little of fathers who do not sire their children. And I know some of the members of the sperm donor’s family as well, though not my biological father himself. They’re pretty cool people too. One of my great-cousins on that side said he’d be proud to have been my biological father if he too had chosen to donate to that research study. I did cry then. I’ll never forget opening that letter with my hands shaking while I sat on the stoop of my old house. I can’t impress enough on those of you who are direct genetic descendants of both your parents what that meant to me. I can’t tell you how it feels to look in the mirror and always see a huge question mark. To miss a person you’ve never met, to feel them there like the phantom sensation from an amputated body part.

Denys Randall understands that entirely. And as much as Alex clearly loved his son in life and death alike, we come away from that storyline knowing just how thoroughly Black Jack was a real father to Denys. We also learn how Mary keeps his memory alive and still carries a torch for him as she also continues to mourn Alex. Knowing how much she withdrew into herself haunts me. I keep fixing it in my fics. There will never be a story of mine where Mary isn’t loved and cherished—no matter how much trauma she goes through.

Which also seems to have been Black Jack’s philosophy about both her and Denys. Tragically if quite understandably, he deluded himself into thinking he could love them better in death than in life. The reveal in Book 9 / Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone on just how tragic a choice this wound up being still crushes me. Because it’s such a hopeless lesson, isn’t it? The idea that cycles of abuse and violence can only be broken by meeting a gruesome end oneself. That humanity has no hope for redemption. That rapists can only ever be rapists, nothing else. Even if they were clearly many other things all along.

This is, incidentally, why as much as I enjoy exploring continuities in which the specific canonical unfolding of events from Wentworth Prison gets averted to at least some degree, I have more active continuities in which this does not happen. I even retconned one of my older stories somewhat because I realized that for the rest of the continuity to play out as I envisioned it, and fully develop the ideas I wanted to develop, straying more than a hair from the exact canonical take in the initial arc didn’t make sense. The results from that deeper thinking are what I just dropped this past Saturday in observance of Alex Randall’s death anniversary. Among my published stories, I presently have three continuities that feature some aversion of the canonical Wentworth sexual assaults and three others that feature no aversion whatsoever.

Someone once asked me if I thought Black Jack and Jamie could ever have a healthy relationship after what happened at the prison in canon. It certainly seems unlikely. But fiction isn’t exclusively about showing healthy relationships. To me, it’s about showing relationships that make sense for the story being told. And in that regard, I do explore the strange intimacy that sometimes grows between trauma bonded people. After all, it’s a tale I’ve come to know well. One I’ve written in my own life. One I’m arguably still writing.

I cannot bring myself to swallow whatever poisonous purity philosophy would lead me to believe that people who have sexually assaulted others in the past cannot have consensual sexual relationships as well. I also can’t ignore the considerable data I’ve amassed on this from direct personal experience.

If people cannot change, what are any of us even doing here? Why not just give up the ghost of life on a burning planet—leave the indignities and hurts of corporeality behind forever? That sort of thinking seems more bleak than anything Black Jack Randall could possibly say or do. Indeed, him winding up looking at his own choices that way in the end broke two hearts irrevocably. And that’s a charitable estimate. Jamie’s own haunting memories, vivid dreams, and enduring obsessions about Black Jack throughout Book 4 / Drums of Autumn and beyond make clear that killing Randall didn’t solve anything, or diminish the formidable pull Jamie feels toward him. Even in show canon, when Claire reveals in S2E03 “Useful Occupations and Deceptions” that Jack is still alive Jamie breathes a sigh of relief and expresses joy at having his will to live restored.

Sure, he frames this around a specific interest in getting revenge against Randall. What’s that saying about digging two graves? There’s no exact source for this in any documented Confucius writings, but the idea certainly holds up. Jamie almost heads to his own grave for the sake of tangling with Randall one last time. For his trouble he winds up nearly dying on the battlefield, then doing the same from a severe infection secondary to his wounds, then goes on the lam for several years and lives in a cave, and then winds up incarcerated under especially deplorable conditions before getting paroled to indentured servitude and winding up coerced into sex again. All while still having relentless horny dreams about Black Jack—which only get hornier after Claire returns to him nearly two decades later. Amazing.

It perfectly correlates that he’s not just a sadistic person, but also holds a powerful position as a member of a colonizing military force.

This came so close to full accuracy. Like frostbitten Edward Little gasping his last with chains in his face levels of close.

Sadistic person? Yes. Powerful position? Kind of. We’ll get to that in a minute. Colonizing military force? Yes. However, is Black Jack himself a colonizer? Only if one discounts what gets revealed in Season 2 and the equivalent portions of Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber about the Duke of Sandringham having Jacobite sympathies and pulling the strings of Randall’s posting to Fort William.

The Reverend Wakefield and Black Jack’s fifth great-grandson Frank Randall unpack this to some extent in S1E01 “Sassenach” when discussing what Jack was doing in Scotland in the first place and the kind of reputation he built. We don’t get the full goods until close to the end of Season 2 with those scenes in S2E11 “Vengeance Is Mine” where the British Army has Sandringham’s estate surrounded with a massive encampment.

To lay things out quite clearly for those less familiar with Outlander canon: Sandringham was deliberately and strategically trying to incite the Jacobite rebellion. He got Black Jack posted to Fort William specifically because he knew Randall could stir up sentiment against the Crown if given the proper conditions. What’s a better weapon of mass agitation than a terrible guy already maligned by his superiors for being bisexual and kinky and having “unnatural tastes” as Randall himself puts it in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” while rambling to Claire? If he didn’t give direct orders for Black Jack to lean into his worst impulses when presented with worthy adversaries, the Duke certainly gamed the system as much as possible by marooning Randall in a cold and isolated place where most of the civilians thought he was weird and most of the soldiers thought he was creepy.

Jack doesn’t connect all these dots directly during the scenes at the prison. But in S1E08 “Both Sides Now” during the Fort William sequences—in the broadcast version but even more so in this extended cut—we get Black Jack’s own perspectives on his posting in Scotland and how thoroughly he isn’t invested in the conflict there. All he wants is to go back home and be warm again. Which of course he can’t do, because it would spell serious harm for his younger brother per everything we learn throughout Season 2 and Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber.

Is Randall powerful in the Army? More so than the soldiers under his command, certainly. But as a Captain—per both what we see in the Brockton sequences of S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” and historical information on British Army ranks—he’s subordinate to many others. Who very much enjoy putting him in his place, at that. So in terms of power relative to other English soldiers, he’s somewhere in the middle of the structure. To those now busily envisioning Office Space type corporate middle management AUs: I salute you! And I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturday.

So what about with respect to other people and contexts? Black Jack definitely isn’t powerful relative to the Duke of Sandringham, per other content here. Indeed, he spends at least the last decade or so of his adult life quite firmly under Sandringham’s thumb. Probably other body parts too—see Randall’s hedging comments in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” about the Duke liking to talk “especially when he drinks” for example. Book 1 / Outlander and Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber provide additional context about Black Jack’s positionality relative to others in his world—especially via the Duke telling Claire how much Randall craves punishment.

Finally, let’s talk about Black Jack’s status relative to his self-made enemy Jamie Fraser. By which I mean not at all that Jamie is self-made, because of course he isn’t. As a Laird in charge of his own family estate on which tenant farmers pay taxes, Jamie comes from a more powerful family in the Scottish Highlands than Black Jack’s own back in southern England. We learn more from meeting characters like Mary Hawkins later in canon about how “not all baronetcies are created equal” as I once phrased it. Randall’s own father Sir Denys being a baronet didn’t mean much, as evidenced by Black Jack’s own comments to Claire during S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” and equivalent portions of Book 1 / Outlander about his parents paying for tutors to help their son disguise any hint of a Sussex accent.

Ironically the most power Black Jack could’ve had over Jamie in any structural sense would have come from serving as his commander when the younger man fought in the British Army himself. Which would absolutely make for a splendid fic premise, but never happened in canon. Jamie and Black Jack don’t meet until the former is already back from France and settling in anew on his family’s Lallybroch estate in October of 1740.

We certainly meet other people connected to Jamie’s own family who would qualify as colonizers though. Given I already discuss Lord John Grey elsewhere, here I’ll mention Jamie’s aunt Jocasta Cameron as a prime example. Storylines set at her River Run plantation—yikes—beginning in Season 4 of the TV series and corresponding portions of the novels reveal her as not merely a colonizer but an enslaver. One who has the means—and indeed the implements ready at hand—to liberate her slaves but declines to do so. Even after pressure from people close to her. Double yikes.

I don’t want to set Jocasta up as somehow being more villainous than Black Jack; the two characters show us different aspects of the human capacity for knowing harm. However, I do find it telling that a bisexual person whose worst behavior focuses almost entirely on one guy—and otherwise gets directed at people somehow in his orbit—often gets held up as this shining paragon of evil by viewers outside the queer community, a point Rowan makes herself in the original video essay. What I’m specifically unpacking here is the colonialism angle. The bleak side of humanity shows up in many forms in Outlander with respect to colonialism as well as other forms of violence.

The queer figure is not just a danger to the individual, the men or women who might be their victims, but also a danger to society at large—because their existence contradicts oppose truths about what is natural and right.

This tracks. Randall would say so himself—and indeed he does, in almost those same exact words. “I may have what are called unnatural tastes,” he muses to Claire in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” while letting her hair down around her shoulders and then giving her a big old sniff and shivering with delight, “but I do have some aesthetic principles.” You know, just in case anyone was still wondering if Black Jack’s interest in women was genuine. Whether in the show or the books, we get plenty of evidence that Randall is in the mood for cunt as often as not, to borrow his own phrasing.

Incidentally, I need to point out how “me myself, I’m not in the mood for cunt today” is probably the most bisexual line ever uttered on television. Today. Mercy.

And so here we see this twisting of a homophobic rhetoric of queer danger to create a monstrous rapist colonial figurehead.

First, a clarification: The relevant phobia here is biphobia rather than homophobia. Rowan’s video essay covers this overall topic and the distinction between the two phenomena with substantial detail and insight. What doesn’t come through clearly in the video is how gay people are treated with much more respect in the story world of Outlander than their bisexual peers. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than with Lord John Grey, another queer Redcoat whose path intertwines with Jamie’s in numerous ways over the years.

After first encountering Grey as a scared teenager whose life Jamie spares in S2E09 “Je Suis Prest” we encounter him anew years later starting in S3E03 “All Debts Paid” as the incoming warden of Ardsmuir Prison where Jamie is incarcerated. Swiftly mortified by conditions at the prison, Lord John enlists Jamie’s help in working with prisoners and eventually forges a tenuous friendship with him. Much chess is also played. However, a wedge also gets driven between the two men when Lord John places his hand over Jamie’s one evening during a chess game, unaware of his history with Black Jack or how it would make him react to any expression of affection by another man.

But over time, Lord John secures Jamie’s parole to the Helwater estate where each of them respectively wind up entangled with one of the Dunsany sisters. The younger Geneva, a feisty and cantankerous person who develops quite a fondness for Jamie, coerces the Highlander into sleeping with her when she reveals that she knows his true identity and could get him in a lot of trouble. To get Jamie employment and ensure that he could stay out of prison, Lord John had to pass him off as a run-of-the-mill parolee instead of the fabled “Red Jamie” who helped to lead the Jacobite rebellion. Rather ironic considering Jamie killed one of the actual leaders of the rebellion and could likely have gotten significantly better treatment from the Crown based on that—but that’s beyond the scope of this analysis.

Throughout his storylines, whether serving as warden at Ardsmuir or Governor of Jamaica or any of the other roles he occupies over the years, Lord John is shown to be empathetic and kind. Not without fault certainly. Amongst other things there’s an intriguing storyline later in canon involving him and Claire that serves as a reminder of how sexuality is often not black and white. But he does get set up consistently as a foil to Randall, perhaps most effectively in his choice to marry Geneva’s older sister Isobel and care for the child she conceived with Jamie prior to dying while giving birth. Lord John presents a different take on fatherhood, choosing to give of his presence to William Ransom rather than feeling he can love him best in absentia.

The books offer some fascinating scenes in which Lord John’s son William and Black Jack’s son Denys encounter each other while both serving in the British Army in the American Colonies. That’s how we learn some of the information referenced elsewhere about what Mary Hawkins has passed on to her son about his father, and how she feels herself. I resonated a lot with both men’s sense of having a hole inside them. At this point William has lost two mothers and two fathers—Jamie having had quite a hand in the boy’s upbringing until age six. By 1778 when he encounters Denys again, he has learned the truth about who sired him.

I could write a whole other essay about that considering how relatable the entire storyline surrounding William’s parentage is. Folks who read my work likely know by this point that I got into Outlander because the interconnected storylines surrounding the Randall and Fraser families resonate with my own trauma in a way nothing else ever has. For purposes of this essay though, I’ll point out that even after lying to his kid for many years and dealing him a psychic wound that will never heal as a result, Lord John gets hailed as a good dad and a good person.

John Grey absolutely isn’t a rapist. In fact, in S3E04 “Of Lost Things” he reacts with horror at the idea of Jamie giving him sexual favors in exchange for raising his son. It turns out that Grey is already marrying Geneva’s older sister Isobel—another fascinating subject for deeper analysis that I’m planning to incorporate into my “Dispatches from Fort Laggan” continuity.

Brief sidebar apropos of general queer representation themes: The relationship between Lord John and Isobel offers an undersung illustration in Outlander canon of the diverse dynamics in queer marriages. I think there’s ample ground for reading the union between Lord John and Isobel as either a “lavender marriage” between a homosexual and homoromantic man with a heteroromantic or biromantic woman who’s asexual or a purely romantic marriage that doesn’t involve any sexual activity because one person isn’t interested at all and the other person is only interested with members of their own sex.

What’s more relevant here is how Lord John and Isobel clearly share a deep affection for one another that engages their shared love for other family members—quite similar to the dynamic between Black Jack and Mary. In serving as a foil for Black Jack on some fronts, Grey serves as a mirror in others. Unsurprising then how by the time he encounters William again, Denys Randall has dropped “Isaacs” from his surname entirely after the death of his stepfather Robert.

On the colonialism front, it would be difficult to frame Black Jack as being somehow the worse offender. Although not a Jacobite himself because he doesn’t care about the outcome of the English-Scottish conflict one way or another, he serves as an agent for the Jacobite cause de facto by agitating unrest at Sandringham’s behest. Ironically an example of punch-clock villainy in that regard. Although I wouldn’t ordinarily associate that trope with Black Jack for his zeal in antagonistic behavior towards Jamie and anyone in his orbit, it certainly seems to reflect how he approaches his career. Randall has no less antipathy for his fellow English people than he does for Scottish Highlanders, and indeed awkwardly hopes for acceptance by the local people while new at Fort William per his exchange with Roger in Book 8 / Written in My Own Heart’s Blood.

Meanwhile, Lord John’s storyline sees him become Governor of Jamaica. Governor of Jamaica. If that isn’t the epitome of white settler colonialism I don’t know what is.

Here’s a monster against which are two culturally opposed heroes; English Claire and Scottish Jamie can feel equally threatened.

I think I covered most of the relevant contrasts here in my musings on the sexual assaults against Jamie and Claire during Season 1. Here I’ll add that indeed a major plot point for Claire is how she often does not feel threatened by Randall—and how readily he comes to consider her an ally deserving of his deepest respect. This seems especially interesting in the context of Claire’s own ambiguous sexuality, which I touch on directly in some brief discussion of Geillis Duncan. And from their encounter in the gardens at Versailles from S2E05 onward, Claire by her own admission doesn’t consider Black Jack any sort of threat. She wants Jamie to leave him alone and let him help his brother out without the two of them getting into trouble for having horny fights. Dueling was illegal in Paris at the time, and indeed Jamie gets arrested for fighting Black Jack at the Bois de Boulogne a couple episodes later.

Prior to that though, Claire frantically ruins Jamie’s original plans for dueling Black Jack by getting Randall locked in the Bastille overnight on suspicion of raping Mary Hawkins. The irony to end all ironies, surely! Randall himself doesn’t even seem that aggravated about it given Claire did this in an effort to spare his life. He does however feel aggravated about Jamie apparently deciding he’s not worth the trouble to fight, not knowing all the history surrounding Frank Randall or why exactly Claire seems certain that he’ll die in April of 1746.

Both Black Jack and Claire wind up badly injured following the duel—her with a complicated stillbirth that leaves the placenta inside her body and nearly causes death from sepsis, and him from a significant stab wound to the groin. In show canon per S2E07 “Faith” this appears to be mainly a soft tissue injury to the pubic mound and possibly a cut to the side of the base of the penis; in the novel version it’s more extensive and involves some maiming of the penis and one testicle. I mention this now because in Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber Claire reflects specifically on Randall being even less of a threat because of his injuries. He’s also very ill in the novel version, likely from a recent bout of cholera, whereas in the show his physical impairments are caused by the cattle stampede from the rescue sequence at the beginning of S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul”.

So it seems unsurprising that when Black Jack reconnects with Claire at Inverness (Edinburgh in book canon) and begs her to use her skills in healing to save his brother Alex’s life, the two characters find themselves on remarkably even footing. Claire lampshades this herself in repeating Randall’s “I am not the man I once was” line from S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” back to him. Randall also acknowledges this amid strong praise for her medical acumen. He has long since gotten direct perspective on those competencies himself considering the aid she rendered to a badly injured British soldier at Brockton in the same episode, along with her clear success in rehabilitating Jamie’s hand following the extensive injuries Black Jack inflicted to it in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison”.

In both the show and book versions of canon, Claire shows Randall as much compassion as she can, and also expresses respect in her narrations for how he has shouldered the financial and instrumental costs of caring for his brother largely alone. When she urges him to wed Mary in their interactions at the tavern in S2E12 “The Hail Mary” she echoes many of Alex’s own sentiments about Black Jack’s capacity for tenderness and how seriously he takes caring for his family.

Given she already knows how Randall will die, and continues caring for him as best she can even after it gets revealed that Frank’s family line descends genetically from Alex rather than Black Jack himself, her “I’ll help you bleed him myself” comment to Jamie in S2E05 “Untimely Resurrection” seems more for his benefit than her own. Indeed, in book canon Claire feels threatened by Jamie’s lingering obsession with Randall and his repeated rambling about the strange erotic dreams he has about Black Jack. She wants him to have closure on that part of his life, thinking that Randall dying will put a stop to that fixation. Unfortunately for Claire it’s not that simple.

Even Jamie himself doesn’t consider Randall much of a threat in the end. In the book version of canon, he even attends Black Jack’s wedding and serves as a witness for him, whereas Murtagh does this on the show. Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber details how Jamie escorts a drunk and crying Black Jack back to his own quarters, holding him up because he can’t walk on his own. We never find out what exactly happened between the two of them in that room, though goodness knows a couple of enterprising fan authors have done heroic work in envisioning potentialities.

Show canon does deliver entirely on the erotic tenor of the final encounter between the two men just as Book 3 / Voyager does, with much of S3E01 “The Battle Joined” getting devoted to Black Jack and Jamie grappling with each other while moaning against each other’s ears and looking as if they’re about to have orgasms. Makes sense considering the showrunners reportedly instructed Tobias Menzies and Sam Heughan to go for a combination of the final battle sequence from The Patriot and the sex scene from Cold Mountain in their choreography. They definitely nailed it on the filming. Very much the same energy in the books from all of Jamie’s flashbacks to those moments and the time he spent lying under Black Jack’s body.

An irony that seems worth mentioning itself for how Randall’s last act was to protect Jamie from getting finished off himself during the British Army’s death sweeps of Culloden Moore. In light of this and all the other history between the two of them, it seems less surprising that Jamie left his wedding present—which Claire had returned to him for safekeeping before going back through the stones to her own time—of a dragonfly preserved in amber on the battlefield with Black Jack’s body.

And it’s by standing up to his reign of terror that the two come together, eventually falling in love.

Reign of terror? Not so much, for reasons I’ve already gone into elsewhere. What precisely is Randall “reigning” over in the first place? He’s an exiled soldier who got given a remote fort on a bunch of barren rocks surrounded by water in a freezing cold place that he hates. He has no power over anyone except his own soldiers.

In terms of more overt antagonism, Black Jack focuses the vast majority of his awful behavior on someone who even while chained to a dungeon floor could still kill him with his bare hands. Jamie does kill Black Jack’s much larger and stronger bodyguard Marley in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” while restrained thusly. If Randall is keeping the Highlands in any kind of iron grip, it’s so weak that he can’t even keep his own bodyguard alive with a chained-up prisoner. Who isn’t even there by his own doing, mind—Jamie gets picked up by a random Redcoat patrol after getting coerced in S1E13 “The Watch” into joining the Watch with Taran MacQuarrie, a suspected Jacobite accused of treason. More details on this get revealed in S1E14 “The Search” as Claire, Jenny, and Murtagh all strive to locate Jamie.

Much of that falls beyond the scope of this analysis. Directly within that scope though is how whether or not anyone likes it, Jamie survives his incarceration at Wentworth Prison because Black Jack raced down there just in time to get him brought down from the gallows. Given canonical knowledge of how Randall does nothing without sincerity—however twisted that sincerity may be—this paints a complicated picture of his impact.

Indeed, one of the things that makes the dynamic between Black Jack and Jamie so interesting and satisfying is how in many ways they’re equals. I covered that extensively in my Ask response about foil dynamics in Outlander canon, so I won’t rehash it in this analysis. But TL;DR: Black Jack assaulting Jamie, and Jamie assaulting Black Jack in kind, was never an exercise in one person punching up and the other punching down. Rather, it is very much an exercise in two people punching sideways. Which a dear mutual illustrated masterfully in their “Killer” sketch previously shared here on Tumblr.

Claire and Jamie do fall in love though. That process is fairly telling on its own—as Rowan points out herself with the very next insight in the video essay. But a few additional details can further unpack sexuality in the context of that relationship, especially in the context of both characters’ interactions with Black Jack.

By opposing Randall’s villainy, they are essentially fighting to maintain the political and social beliefs of the 1740s Scotland, while also solidifying their own relationship and sexual identities—which are heterosexual and monogamous even across time and space.

Okay, folks. I’m flicking on my megaphone here to remind everyone reading this that Jamie is bisexual and that the omission of this key canonical detail could inadvertently reproduce some of the stigmas against bisexuality the video aims to dismantle. I absolutely do not think Rowan did this intentionally. It may stem from limited engagement with the source material in general. I wouldn’t expect a video essay covering a wide scope of media to go into 16K+ words of detail about a single character! That’s what I’m here for. In that spirit, I highly recommend folks interested in going deeper with Outlander canon revisit Jamie’s own narration of his experiences in S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” and the many things he says and does in later episodes regarding Black Jack. The books go into even more detail about how much Jamie still lusts after Randall even after the assault at Wentworth, I’ll note.

The more important point here though is how erasure of Jamie’s bisexuality via inattention to his own words can inadvertently reflect Claire’s own behavior at the abbey in that episode: refusing to listen to Jamie unless he tells her what she wants to hear, and specifically shutting him down every time he tries to make her understand that Black Jack made him face things he already wanted beneath the surface.

Even regarding Claire, nuances abound that seem especially important to explore given the above. Specifically concerning the ambiguity of Claire’s own sexuality—how although she never narrates herself clearly in bisexual context, she certainly gets into some telling situations with Geillis Duncan. Claire may not be explicitly bisexual per her own words as Jamie reveals himself to be from S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” and equivalent portions of Book 1 / Outlander onward. But we can certainly spot multiple bi-coded elements of her character before even getting to the whole Malva Christie business in Season 6 and Book 6 / A Breath of Snow and Ashes.

Geillis herself is another bi-coded villain who could put Randall to shame for the extent of her agenda and advance planning. Indeed, Geillis’s deeper intent and systemic aims qualify her much more classically for the villain designation than Randall himself, who behaves much more opportunistically. Let’s not forget that he leaves Jamie entirely alone for three years until the Highlander turns up in his office window at Fort William with an empty pistol! Likewise, Black Jack’s own service as an instigator of Jacobite rebellion only comes in exchange for the Duke of Sandringham protecting his beloved brother Alex—including not raping him, which gets further lampshaded by Jamie’s comments about how the Duke has treated him over the years.

It also seems worth noting how Claire offers a good example of how people who might be capable of polyamory through their capacity to love two different men at once don’t necessarily want polyamory. That’s why I abandoned a storyline in one of my early fic series development efforts—my first actually, which never saw the light of day in its original form because it morphed into “Dispatches from Fort Laggan” with a much greater depth of attention to the relationship between Black Jack and Jamie in parallel to his evolving relationship with Mary. Which winds up catapulting Jamie headlong into a raging attraction to Geneva Dunsany, someone much better equipped to meet his needs as a bisexual and kinky guy who’s perfectly capable of sustaining unspeakable horniness about an absurdly complicated man while also being a loving and devoted life partner to a woman.

But by making Lestat the only bi vampire in the show, his moral depravity can be seen as in some way linked to an assumed sexual depravity too—specifically of voracious appetite that separates his bisexual nature from either straight or gay counterparts.

This would be pretty accurate for Randall too. Kind of a missed opportunity to get things close to spot-on. With Randall though there’s even some Zig-Zagging of this aspect, which is part of what makes his character great. Although Black Jack has a voracious sexual appetite and is pretty much always DTF, he is also very much a Regular Guy with Regular Dick Function. He can’t just constantly get it up over and over. Between his alcoholism and his constant pursuit of sexual pleasure, he sometimes can’t get hard at all. He even has concerns about this with Jamie at Wentworth, gloating in delight when he does get an erection. The “can you feel that” scene in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” wherein Black Jack pulls Jamie’s hand against his crotch and expresses jubilation at having a boner is one of the funniest moments in the entire series to those of us who enjoy Randall’s character.

This is perhaps a good time to note that one thing queer villain representation often does beautifully is imbuing characters with hilarious and often bizarre senses of humor. When I’ve seen other writers frame Randall as humorless or “harrowingly joyless” I’ve wondered again if we watched the same show. The Brockton sequences from S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” alone ought to debunk this, from Randall’s passive aggressive dust party right down to his impish little wink at Claire while he dumps out the prized claret the senior officers were drinking before getting called out on some kind of wild goose chase.

Then there’s also his sardonic monologuing in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” about possible methods of killing Jamie in the morning, which is entirely tongue-in-cheek and intended solely to make Jamie get annoyed enough to tussle with him. I also consider the weirdly earnest threesome proposition from S1E09 “The Reckoning” when Jamie appears in the window of his office holding an empty pistol. It’s quite clear here that regardless of whether Jamie takes him up on it or just gets irritated enough to fight him fisticuffs and thus give him some nice opportunities to rub up against him, Randall is delighting in the offering.

Finally, we can’t forget his overjoyed little smiles whenever he sees either Jamie or Mary Hawkins. I covered much of this previously via in-depth discussion of Mary’s storylines. So here I’ll note that for all his own efforts to convince Claire that he’d be terrible for Mary, she doesn’t believe Black Jack in the slightest—because she’s already seen how he behaves with her, and likewise both seen and heard directly from Alex how kind and tender Randall has always been with his younger brother. Whom he basically raised, which is a whole other yarn.

Here’s the thing though: One doesn’t need to watch Outlander in any great depth to see that for Black Jack, much of the point of sadism lies in the aftercare. I haven’t belabored that point here overmuch because I don’t want to suggest that caretaking afterwards in any way negates harm done beforehand. However, Randall does consistently show genuine pleasure in taking care of another person. We see this in some ways with Jamie at Wentworth Prison in S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” but then get a whole different context on it in Season 2, especially with S2E12 “The Hail Mary” when the curtain finally pulls back fully on Black Jack’s family life. The only moments where he seems to relax at all is when he’s helping someone feel better after a horrible privation—either by his own hand or from the ravages of illness. And in those moments, we see plenty of vulnerability. Which brings us to…

Unlike Randall, there is a vulnerability in and understanding of Lestat’s backstory that contextualizes his behavior.

I’m not so sure about this. Even midway through Season 1 starting with S1E06 “The Garrison Commander” this understanding of Randall’s character begins to fray at the edges. More details on that below. Likewise, we learn a good bit in Season 2 about Randall’s family and what has been going on behind the curtain of his own life as a result. But even beforehand, the scene in S1E15 “Wentworth Prison” where Black Jack forlornly talks to Jamie in the dungeon cell while seated and looking at him with sad eyes says quite a bit. He finds Jamie’s rejection in the face of a clear attraction painful; this is no less important for his own vicious response to that pain after Jamie taunts him about having no self-control. Subsequently we see in S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” the lengths Black Jack will go to for the sake of affectionate treatment.

Not all love is constructive or good, but Randall leaves little doubt in his own behavior that his actions are very much in pursuit of love. This gets lampshaded a final time in Book 6 / A Breath of Snow and Ashes with the reveal of what Randall mouthed to Jamie in that one sequence of S3E01 “The Battle Joined” just before collapsing on top of him and dying from his wounds. During the abbey sequences in Book 1 / Outlander Jamie also recalls Black Jack lying beside him on the dungeon floor, crying profusely and begging him to speak words of love. Adding in the murky context missing from the show—about Jack having some sort of sexual history with either the deceased prisoner Alex MacGregor and/or his own younger brother Alex Randall—paints a telling portrait of a man desperate for affection and connection.

Though he doesn’t excuse it, we see his traumatic past, and feel how much he yearns for family and love.

Very true about Lestat, certainly. But I’d say this could also have easily been written about Black Jack.

In other portions of this essay I cover Randall’s behavior at Wentworth Prison in Season 1 and the Inverness storyline at the end of Season 2. To rehash here in brief, the only things that matter to Black Jack are (A) someone loving him back in a way he understands and (B) doing whatever he can to take care of his family. Black Jack doesn’t say as much directly to this effect, but he certainly shows us through action that yearning for family and love motivate a lot of his behavior. The fact that his pursuit of these things often happens through twisted means scarcely means he doesn’t want them. Quite the opposite.

As for the traumatic past, Black Jack and other characters alike (especially the Duke of Sandringham) drop hints throughout the Season 1 and Season 2 storylines—and even more so in corresponding portions of Book 1 / Outlander and Book 2 / Dragonfly in Amber—that Randall grew up in an abusive home and imprinted on that. It’s also clear from his interactions with Alex that he’s been protecting his brother from a lot over the years. The Duke himself certainly, but also other things. And in the corresponding sequences from the novels Jack goes into some detail about how little support he and Alex have ever gotten from their family back in Sussex, including from their older brother Edward even now that Alex is dying.

Then of course Black Jack himself talks aloud to Claire at Brockton about his traumatic present and how the armed conflict in Scotland has further warped his mind. He’s clearly shaken about finding one of his own men brutally beheaded and speaks in more general terms about being “not the man [he] once was” as a result of his military service. No surprise either that he looks like a fish out of water the one time we see him in non-military dress during S2E12 “The Hail Mary”. Black Jack may not like what serving in the Army has done to further damage his psyche, but at this point it’s all he understands and the only place he feels he belongs at all. On that front…

It’s not difficult to see the parallels between his existence as a vampire, and the isolation and threat many members of the queer community feel.

Here I should also include my response to the aforementioned excellent meta on homosociality in The Patriot canon. As noted previously I’m hoping to release a similarly focused reflection of my own in time addressing Outlander canon directly. For now I’ll applaud Rowan’s general attention in the video to how bisexual people often become isolated within the queer community as well as in the world at large.

Double marginalization is a lonely experience in the utmost—and one that can breed tremendous resentment. That anger has to go somewhere more often than not. Even without the added burden of silent rage from sexual violence and the constant “insult to injury” experience of having our own trauma collide with that of others walking a similar path, things are tough. And the data on experiences of rape and abuse in the bisexual community remain incredibly damning.

So again, I think Lestat and Black Jack would find plenty of common ground in one another’s histories. Although Lestat himself doesn’t really meet the criteria for sexual sadism, he certainly enjoys bloodplay and the general aesthetic of violence as part of intimate congress. This isn’t surprising in the slightest considering how the capacity to enjoy such pleasures often grows and sharpens in response to abuse of any form, including rape and domestic violence.

My own life has certainly been an exercise in this. If that seems confusing, consider: For people who are well accustomed to people bleeding on us when we didn’t cut them, it can feel immensely satisfying to have someone bleed on us because we did cut them.

Whereas the initial seasons of Outlander have no sympathetic or heroic queer heroes at all, Interview with the Vampire does give us another lead who fulfills this protagonist role in Louis.

I’m glad this was the last content in the video that mentioned Outlander directly. I think there’s enough context from the rest of this segment for viewers to understand the intended contrast here. Prior to Season 3 we don’t encounter characters in Outlander who are fully immersed in their queerness other than Black Jack, whereas Interview with the Vampire centers characters who show more of that immersion from the beginning on both the protagonist and antagonist sides.

Given the centrality of Jamie’s character arc to Randall’s though, the omission of his own bisexuality from this video essay seems quite the lost opportunity. To reiterate, in both versions of canon beginning with S1E16 “To Ransom a Man’s Soul” and equivalent sequences from the novels we get verbatim documentation directly from the source that Jamie is bisexual himself. This is in addition to his earlier comments about considering the prospect of sleeping with Randall at Fort William and only turning him down because he thought his dad would be disappointed in him. Not for having same-sex relations, but rather for capitulating to another man. That’s a lot to unpack, folks.

Indeed, Jamie’s storylines throughout the TV and book series alike are often demonstrations of how the ideation of heterosexuality and the pressure to live a heterosexual life do deep harm to bisexual men. This gets lampshaded further by the anvilicious contrasts constantly drawn between Black Jack and the decidedly gay Lord John Grey. The latter is set up as a perennial foil for Randall, getting into similar scenarios with Jamie—starting with his time as warden at Ardsmuir Prison in Season 3 and Book 3 / Voyager—but taking them in entirely different directions. Which I appreciate in essentials for the spinning of a superb narrative about complex post-traumatic stress. More so for living with that particular set of issues myself.

Once again for the good of the Republic: If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you.

Apropos of this, I want to express particular appreciation for the video’s exploration of the “puriteens” phenomenon—and incorporate a caution for those slightly elder members of fandom. It can be very easy for people to fall into the trap of assuming that bisexual people are always hypersexual. And even easier to assume that those bisexual folk who truly are hypersexual are automatically threats because of this. More so if said individuals also happen to be kinky, and especially if they are specifically sadistic.

I mention this now because as queer people marginalized from within the queer community as well as without, bisexual and asexual folk stand on common ground. I have seen the transformative power in allyship between bi and ace people in fighting our shared oppressions. Sadly I have also seen many successful efforts to tear that natural solidarity asunder by making ace people fear us as predators. And the first against the wall, same as always, are the hypersexual and kinky among us.

So I’m happy beyond words to see openly ace creators like Rowan Ellis standing up for bisexual people. Making sure that our struggles and our humanity alike are always seen and valued. In kind, I strongly encourage everyone reading this to take this analysis of Rowan’s commentary on Outlander in the spirit in which I intend it. To say that I strongly support both the general content and overall standpoint of this video would understate the case.

Indeed, I offer this detailed analysis now because I know the depth of Rowan’s commitment to diverse queer representation. I want to build on the dialogue sparked by the video and to bring that depth on Randall’s character to the impressive breadth of focus in Rowan’s overview of queer villains. The fact that doing so amplifies the labor, effort, and insight of an asexual creator made me even more inclined to give this my full effort. I hope Rowan will keep putting her voice and perspective into the world for many years to come.

For now, I’m grateful for this opportunity to once again bring Black Jack Randall to my little corner of the Internet in dizzying detail. And moreover, to do so in amplifying the work of a fellow creator explicitly naming the harm done by respectability politics surrounding queerness.

Randall may not be the bisexual representation everyone wants, but he’s absolutely the bisexual representation the world needs. Because if he isn’t a resounding comeback to respectability politics that attempt to deny “problematic” bisexual people their basic human rights—and indeed an effective illustration of the deep harms those kinds of approaches to queerness not only do directly but also reproduce in cyclical patterns—I don’t know what character possibly could be.

#media analysis #rowan ellis #queer villains #media literacy #outlander starz #malicious meta #niche outlander musings #villain discourse #character analysis #bisexuality #black jack randall #jamie fraser #claire beauchamp #geillis duncan #homosexuality #lord john grey #duke of sandringham #plus more characters! #frank randall #mary hawkins #alexander randall #interview with the vampire amc #lestat de lioncourt #the exposition will continue until erasure improves #rowan thank you for leading on this front! #fandom culture #the patriot #will tavington #queer community #bi representation

[deeplyridiculouslyinlove]

Thinking a lot about how Moiraine and Lan in Season 2 is essentially an exploration of the “does the bond chafe” scene from The Great Hunt, and how it turned something I disliked in the books into something I really love.

While there is a lot going on for Moiraine in this scene in the book, a core part of it is that she’s worried about Lan feeling compelled to abandon their mission both because she is worried she will die and he will freak out and because she is worried he will come to care more about Nynaeve than their battle against the Shadow. I get where this scene is coming from, both in emphasizing that Lan and Nynaeve are made for each other and in giving us insight into Moiraine’s calculating nature and the amount she is willing to sacrifice goodness for rightness, but I feel like this does Lan and Moiraine both a disservice, as well as their bond. Despite 20 years together, it feels like she doesn’t fully trust him. It also doesn’t quite make sense to me how they could have a conversation like that if they can feel each other’s emotions - it reads to me as blunt but not honest, and I’ve always assumed a core tenant of Moiraine and Lan’s relationship is deep honesty since they’re each feeling the other person reacting on a gut level in real time to every sentence said. Anyway, the scene landed poorly for me on my first read through and I still don’t love it even with a far better understanding of each of these characters on a reread.

So I really appreciate how the show flips this on its head and makes it about Moiraine doubting herself, not doubting Lan. In Season 2, Moiraine is embarrassed and insecure that the thing that made her who she is and that connected her to Lan has been taken away without her consent. You can extrapolate from this that she could also be worried or sad or insecure because she fears Lan might want to be Nynaeve's warder instead now that Moiraine is (in her eyes) useless in their quest, but there’s no indication that Nynaeve as she stands on her own is a primary motivation for Moiraine’s worrying about Lan. Moiraine’s callous actions towards Lan are so clearly rooted in Moiraine’s own fear, and not in Lan’s behavior. And then we get the final scene where Lan asks to be let back in to their bond. He has his out right there, he could go off and find Nynaeve and he chooses not to. Yes, this is because he is a man of his word and he took an oath, but it's also because he is devoted to Moiraine as a person, for who she is and their shared dedication. We aren’t left with Moiraine wondering when Lan will ask Moiraine to release him from his bond, but instead with him doing just the opposite and asking affirmatively to be rebonded. I find it really beautiful and it just speaks to this core of each of their characters that feels really authentic to me. And I think it will strengthen Lan and Nynaeve’s eventual relationship because it will feel like a very purposeful choice he’s making to enter into it, instead of something he’s pushing against. (It will also make the red door that much worse helpp.)

#the one thing I LOVE about the ‘does the bond chafe’ chapter tho #is the note that moiraine had never thought of lan as an object of jealousy #or indeed thought of any man that way #it can’t say any person bc in new spring she is so obviously jealous of siuan kissing boys to get intel!! #reminds me of that post circulating with the excerpt about siuan charming women all the way to salidar #these ladies are so gay I’m sorry it’s a crime they BOTH end up with men #wheel of time #wot book spoilers #moiraine damodred #lan mandragoran #dril reads wot (again)

[inkdemonapologist]

wdym by malice's writing being incoherent

NOTHING IN THIS SCENE MAKES SENSE! Malice sweetie i love u but what r u doin

Why does she have an electric chair party. If her goal is to take apart Audrey on the operating table because she’s A Unique Specimen That Will Finally Make Her Perfect why is she exclusively using death methods guaranteed to damage A Lot of the body when she originally had access to a passed out Audrey?? Why does she want to do a riddle? Why is she angry when you solve the riddle? Like she specifically tells you at the start “yeah, I want to take you apart and use your insides as beauty products, but first we’ll do a little riddle and we can do that other stuff later” so why does she say you’ve “humiliated” her later? You didn’t cheat, she didn’t make the puzzle unsolvable, you just literally did exactly the thing she told you to do.

For the record, Malice is also kinda incoherent in BatIM, but her screaming rage as the elevator falls feels more like her Real Feelings Finally Showing after being mockingly sweet to Henry thus far, while in BatDR she hasn’t really been keeping her cards close to the chest or pretending to be helpful, so it just kind of feels like “and then she loses it and starts screaming, because she’s crazy, of course” logic. Why does Malice have a bunch of loyal lost ones who dutifully repeat their riddle clues with zero additions? Like, this is a tangent, but wouldn’t it be creepier if they were obviously under duress when you speak to them? Why is the logic puzzle not bendy or angel themed in any way, like it was lifted out of a Book O’ Logic Puzzles directly and not even reskinned? WHY ARE THERE BUTTONS THEMED FOR IT, set up in wilson’s retreat????????? how often does Malice run this thing? Malice getting Henry to do her chores at least makes a little sense in that he’s doing things she didn’t particularly want to do herself (tho I agree with Mochi’s suggestion that it would’ve felt less arbitrary if it were made very clear afterwards that you had helped her get everything she needed to do her Boris Experiment), but what does she get out of this? If she’s enjoying making people squirm then there’s a distinct lack of squirming going on!!! Girl go back to unethical experiments that you’re in control of, that’s way more effective!! Her hint of a motive – Audrey is unique, the One That Came Out Right, and might be the key to Malice finally getting the perfection she craves – is ACTUALLY REALLY INTERESTING and works well with the story and plays into everything that’s going on with Audrey discovering her past, and for incomprehensible reasons it’s just kind of not really driving Malice’s actions here?

Anyway, this fun but baffling scene aside, the original reason I felt like Malice was sort of oddly written was the note you find from her:

This is actually pretty compelling. Malice has always seemed Vanity Obsessed and to give her a reason that’s not just “i want to be pretty” but “so many doors are closed to me unless I’m gorgeous, so if I could Just Be Beautiful I could have the things I want most!” is a great insight… into a character who is not in Malice’s situation. You could roll with this – framing it as these feelings being left over from when she was human, and she’s not coherent enough now to logically think through the fact that “doors will open for you if you’re gorgeous” no longer applies to her in Ink Hell. But was that ever Susie’s motivation…? She just wanted to Be Alice. And you could so easily get to her Perfection Obsession through that – I really like the repeated “angels are beautiful” because it gets the closest to that idea, that she’s desperate to fix the dysphoria of Not Really Being Alice Angel, the thing she sacrificed everything for, and she’ll sacrifice and sacrifice until she has it again.

So, this all just feels like….. Like, the way Malice IS is great. She’s great. Her delivery is fun and of course we’re all thrilled about “honey”. But her actions don’t make much sense, and the reasoning and motivation we’re given feels less like “here’s what’s really going on in this character’s head, here’s what’s motivating her” and more like “here’s a motivation that could explain why someone wants to be beautiful so bad”. It’s kind of generic rather than growing out of Malice’s particular feelings and history; it’s just to the left – and overall, this whole thing kinda feels like they did their best to create some scenario to replicate Malice’s vibes from BatIM, rather than really trying to understand her character and what this situation would drive her to do. Unlike BatIM (where she just wanted your buddy), in this game she wants YOU, and it’s a shame they didn’t lean into that more!!

#batdr #bendy and the dark revival #i know you have questions you always do #batim malice angel

[fintan-pyren]

honest opinion of book 9.5?

It's not what I'd have chosen.

If you saw the post I made earlier, the one about why I like the first three books, it's somewhat related to that. The recent books generally lack the feeling of mystery that the first three books did, but it feels like the parts focused around Keefe are the worst culprits.

Sophie, in the first three books, searches for clues on her own. She's fairly independent.

In the Keefe-centered portions, they're fairly reliant on adults. Gisela is his main villain, and she's almost working with them most of the time. Most of the clues they have are actually given to them by her directly.

The clues that aren't given to them are memories recovered from Keefe, which isn't very compelling. They're just relying on Sophie's abilities. We, the readers, don't have those abilities, so it makes her a lot less relatable. You can't put yourself in her shoes.

In Sophie's original story, she spends her time doing things like searching for books about pyrokinetics, looking through old photographs and trunks, decoding Jolie's diary. When she does get clues, they're not handed to her on a silver platter like Keefe's clues. She has to work to figure them out. Figuring out what the compass charm meant, for example. The Black Swan is watching from a distance, limited in how much they can help her. She's relying primarily on problem-solving and perseverance.

When she does use her telepathy, it's mostly just for flavor. When she reads Prentice's mind, she gets a memory of Jolie and a snippet of a dwarvish poem. It led her to search Jolie's room, but it didn't tell her anything directly. And she had figured out there was an unregistered pyrokinetic by the time she read Fintan's mind. The mind break and the healing just gave us more insight into his character and motives.

Speaking of motives—Gisela's motives are boring. What does she want? To rule the world? Fintan and Brant want something that's understandable, that could be the right thing. That introduces moral dilemmas, and doubt. Sophie doesn't even know if the Black Swan is evil. She doesn't know who to trust. With Gisela, it's straightforward. There's no sign that she could be good. It's clear that she needs to be defeated.

Sophie is also significantly more serious than Keefe. A bit of humor is nice, but he's kind of best as a side character who shows up every so often. He's not ideal for serious moments, and a book made up solely of him sounds kinda boring and flat.

#kotlc

[starsofatlantis]

nurse she’s out again

I’ve been thinking a lot about who Treech and Lamina are and their relationship to each other and mostly the downfall of it. I wanted to put all those thoughts down into one place and I always enjoy reading character analyses so I thought I’d share!

To preface, this is my own personal take on them and an insight to the way I write them in fics. This is entirely the movie side of them. I enjoy their book versions, but the movie created a very compelling relationship that I have yet to move on from. I would love to hear other thoughts and opinions so please don’t hesitate to share if you feel the need to!

To start, I view them as childhood friends. There are a few options of how I think their relationship could have gone (that is to say developing into a romantic relationship or staying friends) pre-hunger games, but I know that in all of them, they care deeply about the other.

Individually, this is how I write them:

Treech:

To me, Treech is the oldest of two younger sisters and the burden of that is a defining part of his character. His entire family is still intact and that also weighs heavy on him. I think he lives in fear of what could happen to him, his family, and everything he cares about. This leads to an attempt at trying to care about as few people as possible. He tries to keep his head down and mind his own. He keeps everyone at arms-length. He has friends but they are shallow relationships and only viewed as people to spend time with. He will not do anything to put his life and his family’s life at risk. They get by and in that world, have a good life. He is not going to be the one to ruin that. He has not lost anything of value in his life and in turn, that makes him terrified.

Treech has never lost anyone. He doesn’t know how he would react to grief. It terrifies him because he’s never done it. As much as he tries not to he loves deeply, but he is so afraid of loving more than necessary because he has never lost, and when you live in the world they do, losing is inevitable and simply a matter of waiting.

I view him as a slave to self-imposed duty, someone who would sacrifice anything for the few people he loves (*cough cough* his own innocence), as well as someone with an unhealthy dose of self-hatred.

I think Treech is constantly fighting with himself. His dislike for himself, his inability to allow himself to be close to people and his unwavering kindness and sense of duty are in direct opposition of each other at all times. Everything in him is always fighting to gain the power and it really is just a matter of what day it is as to which trait is the strongest.

He is not consistent with his thoughts and feelings and switches up very easily. He’s hard to get a read on because you think you understand him and you do but only for that moment because the next minute he feels the opposite way.

I think Treech views himself as uninfluential and not really someone of any consequence, which to me is why he becomes so infatuated with Lamina.

Lamina:

Lamina lost a mother during the war, and later two older twin brothers who were rebels and died because of that. It is just her and her father (which in my head also meets the headcanon of why she is better dressed than Treech; family of two vs. family of five). Where Treech has never lost anyone he’s loved, Lamina has lost nearly everyone. While a lot of times this would make someone cold, it makes Lamina even more determined to relish in the things she values. She loves, and she refuses to lessen that love just because she may lose it.

I think when you lose someone, it forces you to face not only your own mortality but also everyone else’s. Lamina takes that mortality and instead of being scared of it promises to make the most of it. Not only that but I think it makes you even more confident in your own strength. If you can get through the loss of someone you love, I think there are very few things you can’t get through. Lamina knows this and she knows how she reacts to grief. She trusts that she has the strength to love and lose because she has done it— multiple times— and she has survived.

I think Lamina is wickedly smart and enjoys learning. I view her as someone who is extremely emotionally intelligent and mature, but for all her confidence in her strength, I think she is also insecure. Typically, I find that people with that kind of maturity at such a young age are ostracized because their peers simply aren’t at that level yet and most of the time what kids don’t understand they label as weird. I think Lamina became very used to the feeling of being alone and at times fed into the notion that her differences were bad. I imagine Treech was the first person to ever treat her intelligence as something that is simply “cool” and not something that makes her incapable of being a kid.

I picture Lamina as someone who is cohesive and a flowing picture of all of her different traits. She accepts each one for what it is and allows it to do its job in her life. She tries to always be better but she doesn’t drown in her faults.

Notice how above I say often “this is what they think about themselves”. They think certain ways about themselves when the opposite is true. Perspective!

In actuality, Treech is strong in his devotions and uneasily swayed from them. He views himself as weak-minded when really he is so stuck in his views he cannot change. He believes that keeping everyone at arms length will keep his heart safe when in reality it does more harm than good. He thinks he is of no consequence to anyone, tries so hard to not cause any trouble, yet makes an impact on every person he’s come into contact with. I believe Treech’s number one character trait is that he is kind. It’s in his nature to help and I think he physically cannot stop himself. It’s just something that happens. It’ll be one instance that he thinks means nothing but means everything to someone else (i.e. being kind to Lamina as children is something he doesn’t even think of because “anyone would do this” yet none of their peers had ever done it before). He thinks he’s inconsequential but he impacts people without even knowing it.

Lamina believes she is unnerving to others when in reality she has that kind of spark that makes it hard to look away. Think about those people who are inexplicably infatuating. So yeah, in a way she is unnerving, but only because you can’t help but notice her. She’s an enigma who’s been labeled as weird.

However, I don’t think they are that different from each other. Instead, I think it is the way they go about those similarities that make them different.

For example:

Treech is kind and he wants so badly not to be. Lamina is kind and wishes she were more so. Where she sees her kindness and empathy as a strength, Treech views his as a weakness.

I think they both are intense about their love, but where one runs from the strength of his love, the other does everything she can to make it stronger.

They both are fiercely loyal. Treech tries to limit that loyalty to his family, but Lamina wishes to give it to everyone.

The ironic part about this is that the traits Treech sees as faults in himself he sees as otherworldly in Lamina. (Perspective 😍)

I picture Treech to have almost in a sense placed Lamina atop a pedestal. She is everything he wishes he were; open, free, and believing in good. Lamina in his eyes is something he is unworthy of, but also something he thinks would ruin him should he ever lose it. She is something to be protected but never touched.

This is so unhealthy though, because it’s impossible to be in a relationship with someone you don’t view as an equal.

Lamina, however, grounded sweetheart that she is, views Treech as human. She adores him for all that he is— good and bad. She adores him for his kindness and for his fearfulness. Lamina values Treech because she values every living being. But she loves him because he is Treech.

However, the downside of this is that I imagine she lets him get away with many things because he was the first person outside of her family to be kind for the sake of being kind. I think Treech would reject a lot of her attempts at getting closer and refuse to admit how much he cares about her. I think Lamina, who is so declarative with her love and wants the same back, is only able to look past this because she convinces herself that the only thing that matters about him is his kindness. Kindness she has been a firsthand witness to and kindness that impacted her at a young age. She’s seen the good in him and refuses to let that good be outshined by all his bad, even if that means becoming a bit of a doormat for his bad habits.

Lamina grows to love Treech over a period of time as she forces herself to push past all his flaws. Treech loves her in an instant because he can’t help himself.

This plays into the part above where I talked about how Treech thinks he doesn’t impact anyone when in reality it’s impossible for him not to and how Lamina has that quality about her that forces everyone to at least look at her.

When Treech shows Lamina that first act of kindness as kids, he impacts her life in a way that makes it impossible for her to not want to know him. Lamina inherently has that quality about her, the quality that makes people want to know her, and Treech, guarded, closed-off Treech, is unable to escape her pull.

In my head, there is literally no world where they don’t immediately mean something to each other, because it is literally engraved into who they are. Treech impacts everyone, Lamina forces everyone to impact her.

In a perfect world, Treech goes to therapy for his self-hatred and Lamina gains a little bit of self-worth (i.e. tells Treech to figure his shit out instead of taking it out on her) however they live in Panem and that is not possible.

Thus their downfall.

#tbosas #treech tbosas #lamina tbosas #treemina #the ballad of songbirds and snakes #tbosas fanfiction #character analysis #sawyer do you ever shut up

[oddygaul]

Chain Gang All-Stars

Great book.

I sort of hope Chain Gang All-Stars is never adapted into a show or movie. It’s certainly possible that it could be done with proper deference to the tone and message of the book, but I think it’s far more likely that it would end up essentially being what Chain Gang is in the story itself - a hyper-violent spectacle that people tune into because they think it’s cool and action-packed. I think Chain Gang All-Stars is very successful at walking the tightrope line of drawing the reader into the story and letting them flirt with what it must feel like to be a viewer of the program, while presenting enough reminders of its grim reality to prevent you from being totally sucked in. While there were times during the LinkLyfe segments where I was drawn in the way a viewer absorbed in a reality show would be, the battles themselves never give in to ‘just’ being badass. They were tense, certainly, and I was on pins & needles reading them, worried about the characters, but there’s a certain utilitarian brutality to the writing in those sections that keeps them grounded. I’d be worried any adaptation would make everything too stylish and exciting, thoroughly missing the point*.

*To say nothing of any potential dilution of the politics to appeal to a wider audience.

— “All other sport was just a metaphor for this.” —

Chain Gang All-Stars is incredibly good at giving every single character a depth and fullness, even ‘antagonists’, so that even the characters who infuriate us, we understand to a degree. The book doesn't justify evil deeds - there’s no excusing Wil’s dumb ass self - but it shows how easy it is for someone to placate themselves, to keep themselves on a surface level and not dig too deep into their own morality, to convince themselves that they’ve done what they could and that all those who have wrong done to them deserve what they get. The fluid perspective switches it accomplishes this with are fascinating, too. We get chapters dedicated to different characters, of course, be it our leads, our deuteragonists, and plenty of one-off side stories - standard stuff. But Adjei-Brenyah also rapidly switches between multiple perspectives within the same page, hell, the same paragraph at times, which gives us insight into a much wider breadth of viewpoints than we normally would.

By getting to see into the inner thoughts of quite a few Links, we get to see how, while their individual experiences are different, their imprisonment has broken them all in tragically similar ways. From Bishop to Sunset to Thurwar to Staxxx, we see a consistent, crippling lack of self-worth. The A-Hamm chain is unique in preaching a vision of solidarity, accepting one’s past mistakes, and focusing on how they’ve grown and changed as people. Despite this, at their core, none of them can truly find it in themselves to be forgiven, because Chain Gang grinds their lack of perceived value into them unceasingly - ultimately resulting in what is essentially suicide. The carceral system does not allow for or encourage rehabilitation, only suffering and self-hatred.

I thought it was a compelling decision to make the majority of the imprisoned characters we follow legitimate violent offenders. A lot of the abolitionist / prison-critical literature I’ve read often focuses on, or at least begins with, incarceration that is plainly, nakedly unjust, like long-serving non-violent offenders and mandatory minimum sentencing. Conversations about the treatment of murderers, rapists, etc., are naturally more fraught - it’s harder to get someone to imagine an entirely different system, rather than just adjustments to the current system.

Chain Gang All-Stars does not shy away from it one bit. We get self-reflection from multiple different Links, both those who regret what they’ve done and those who don’t; we get conflicted thoughts from family members who recognize that their lives have been fundamentally changed by the imprisonment of their kin, but are still ambivalent about forgiveness; and we get, of course, the fearmongering and appeals to pathos used by government and the media to try and stop any ideas of abolition from even beginning to take root in the minds of the public. The book understands that there’s no easy answers, and instead brings all of these perspectives to the reader, demanding they grapple with the issues themselves.

It does, however, make clear the absurdity of pretending that taking someone whose life has been indelibly touched by violence and putting them into a system that encourages and requires additional violence, by the state, by their peers, is somehow rehabilitation. It’s brought to an extreme in the novel, of course - Thurwar’s overriding instinct that every problem can potentially be solved by violence due to the constant killing she’s done is more reminiscent of a soldier returning to peacetime than anything else - but the message stands.

Some of the most powerful parallels shine through as-is, though. Even when you put aside the horror the Links are put through on a daily basis and the rampant normalization of state-sanctioned violence, the base lack of freedom and personal autonomy is what breaks people. Both during Chain Gang and our looks at other prisons, the regimented days, planned schedule, and inability to spend time or talk with the people they care about are basic human rights that are removed from prisoners every day. Hendrix’s silent prison (an idea I was horrified to find has been enacted before) shows this in one extreme - after being robbed of something as simple as his own voice for so long, Hendrix is willing to risk everything just to be able to reclaim that part of himself. Most heartbreakingly, the morning of the final doubles match, Thurwar’s only desire is to stay in bed longer with Staxxx. Leisure time with your loved ones, one of the most basic luxuries a person ought to have, seen as an unobtainable prize. Don’t need a dystopian near-future novel to see that happening.

Speaking of Hendrix Young, the voice Adjei-Brenyah uses for his sections was absolutely beautiful and oozing with character and I loved it. The way he speaks is simultaneously poetic yet so pragmatic - there’s an idiosyncratic turn of phrase in nearly every paragraph, and his love for the world and its beauty is never eclipsed by his cynicism and the horrible things happening around him. His sections were handily my favorites, despite the looming dramatic irony that overshadows them all.

— “I thought of how the world can be anything and how sad it is that it’s this.” —

As a literary device, the interspersing of worldbuilding notes and Actual Fucked-Up Prison Facts was a genius touch. By priming your brain to expect something more fantastical, the more grounded notes become something of a sucker punch. The first few are all in-universe lore explanations - they’re not entirely necessary, you could’ve pretty much got the gist through context, but the thorough explanation written almost as an ad read pulls you into the mentality of this world… so then, when it drops, say, the net worth and founding members of the Corrections Corporation of America and you get the inkling that this tidbit feels a little too specific to be made up, the lines between the book’s world and our own start to blur.

In addition to the unique cognitive dissonance it invokes, I think it’s a pretty effective strategy to convince or teach a reader who perhaps hasn’t done as much digging about the nightmare that is the American prison-industrial complex. Especially given that the main conceit of the book is a little outlandish, it’s very easy for me to imagine such a reader enjoying the story for its plot, but deflecting or doubting the themes with the classic “Oh, but this is an exaggeration - it would never happen like this! It would never be that sadistic”. In some way, the footnotes feel like the author directly responding with a “Yes, it would, and in fact has already happened this way previously”.

I do wish the footnotes stayed as dense throughout the entire book as they were at the start. In the beginning, they come hard and fast, blending the real and the fictional, keeping the reader on their toes. About a third of the way through, though, they slow to a trickle, becoming a rarity. Adjei-Brenyah keeps experimenting with what the footnotes can convey (“Don’t look down. Help me.” was particularly chilling), but the infrequency starts to make them feel like an afterthought.

— “Just jump.” —

The closer I got to the end of Chain Gang All-Stars, as fewer and fewer pages remained, I was increasingly desperate for something to break. Even as the story continued towards the inevitable, even as it showed me there could be no other way for things to go, I hoped for something else. Anything but what happened.

And yet… the ending gives this book’s message a lot of its power. It’s not a story where things always work out and the good guys always win - it’s a reflection of real problems, and those real problems don’t have such a simple solution. Chain Gang All-Stars is about people living in an unfair world, working within a cruel, unjust, system, and still finding the strength and conviction to believe that there can be positive change. It’s about knowing that progress can be slow, and that the system can feel daunting, and feeling powerless to enact change, and still imagining and pushing for the world to be better anyway. And somehow, that it faces that hopelessness head-on makes it more uplifting than a safer story with an easier ending.

#will's media thoughts / virtual brain repository #books #chain gang all stars #just for the sake of the journal i'll add #that reading this after rewatching the hunger games #only lowered my esteem of them even further lol

[vintagerpg]

I am further flummoxed by The Ninth World Bestiary (2014). Monster books are where I go to figure out how I would run a game. Coupled with an equipment catalog, I feel like I can get more practical/mechanical understanding of a game world than through the gazetteer. Weirdly, for Numenera, the opposite is true for the most part.

Befitting a game organized around experiencing wonder, the monsters are frickin’ weird. There is very little here that conforms, visually, to fantasy tropes. Which isn’t to say there is nothing prosaic — there are bug monsters and lion serpents and things I can intuit at a glance how they act. But I admit I am slightly overwhelmed by the lack of anything so obvious as a dragon to kind of ground my understanding. The art is pretty mushy to my eye. I can sort of see a through-line in all the monster designs, but I’d like a little more.

Again, I find my best touchstone is Talislanta, which just excels in excess (the Mercandian Soldier even reminds me of Talislanta’s Thralls). For whatever reason, I don’t expect the monsters of Talislanta to form a compelling gestalt, though, where I do for Numenera. It seems like that’s what the designers want! But when I start trying to piece stuff together, it winds up being too much to parse. This is the rare time a monster book isn’t my way in.

There are lots of cool monsters I want to lift for other things, though. A monolith that hungers for flesh? A titan whose head is an abandoned city? Heck yea. I really like the ghouls who lick their blades after they attack and get insights into their opponent from tasting their blood. That scratches at one of the problems, though — there are lots of monsters with cool little puzzle details that I want to see solutions for sussed out in play, but for a game arranged around discovery and awe, the bestiary has far more opponents than inhabitants.

#roleplaying game #tabletop rpg #dungeons & dragons #rpg #d&d #ttrpg #Numenera #Monte Cook #Ninth World Bestiary #noimport

[cowboyinternist]

what makes sam and jackie compelling/interesting as a ship to u? /gen :O (not related to anything ive been meaning to send u this ask for a while and only just got round to it lol)

i think a big part of it is that the way jackie talks about sam makes them a lot more interesting as a character?

because objectively, sam sucks! as we see them about 90% of the time, they’re incredibly self serving and negligent. and that’s putting it in as simple terms as possible.

but we get these small implications as time goes on that there’s something beyond that! which is most notable in the interaction they have with dana in episode 83 (another thing i could talk about for a million years (i could also go on a whole other tangent about how them showing their face is another really huge example of this but that’s off topic rn)). but none of them are necessarily set in stone, outright saying who they are. like MAYBE sam isn’t completely horrible, but who can really be sure?

but then Jackie says this in it devours,

sam is nice! really nice, actually! outside of the specific context of them being the sheriff and instead them,,, fundamentally as a person. and it isn’t like jackie is this one off character whose judgment we can’t trust. we spend an entire book getting to know her! and i feel like jackie is reliable in this aspect, especially post novel 1. this is the first and really like,, ONLY time we get info on sam from somebody who actually knows them personally. and interestingly enough, the next time we get insight on this aspect of their character, it can be linked back to jackie. they only decide to stand up against the university of what it is once they threaten josh, who is jackie’s half brother. and it is IMMEDIATE they are,, FRONT and fucking center in that movement. like their relationship is so interesting because jackie saying something as simple as that shakes up everything we know about this character.

and this all makes it very interesting to explore just,, what makes sam so fucking horrible outside of that? like what is it that drives them to be that way. and there are so many possible answers to that question and i have my own extensive thoughts on that but again,, off topic.

i love it all so much because it plays into the major themes of perspective that wtnv has? which i think is my favorite thing about the podcast. cecil has his own perception of sam, so does dana, so does jackie. and none of those perceptions are necessarily false, because they’re based on those people’s individual experiences.

also i enjoy the way their relationship is foreshadowed in the novel because i think that with the way she describes it, sam is like the LAST character you’d expect her to end up with lmao.

but yeah TLDR; i find them compelling because sam is absolutely awful and jackie is not, but she describes them as a really nice person anyways ^-^

#tysm for asking!! i’ve been wanting to talk about this :3 #i was gonna put a cut on this but no… in 2024 we are irritating…. #they’re also both just really weird but in different ways which is funny #number one obscure wtnv ship in my heart #i think what sams character gets reduced to a lot in the fandom is like. their weird art shit and their ~opinions~ on desert bluffs? #but they literally have not done the art thing since episode 93 (EIGHT YEARS AGO) #and they have implied (really implied) character development on the desert bluffs thing #guys they’ve done other bad things too okay 🙄 #idk they’re very multifaceted. #also this is mostly unrelated but i’m SO UNBELIEVABLY UPSET that sam won’t be in the live recording for the attic #like i was so so so excited i was gonna analyze the fuck outta that #it’s okay though #wtnv #welcome to night vale #sheriff sam #jackie fierro #horsetalk

[nanowrimo]

Making Time: 5 Ways Writers Prepare for Success With Timelines

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Aeon Timeline, a 2022 NaNoWriMo sponsor, is a visual hub for your entire story. NaNoWriMo writers can try out a free trial of Aeon Timeline through December 15! In this post, the folks at Aeon share a few ways that making a timeline for your novel can help your story:

If you are like me your story has been gnawing inside you for months. An intriguing premise; a character to explore; a surprise twist; a cliffhanger ending—something is telling you that you are the person to write this story.

Yet every year, only one in ten Wrimos make it to the end. Over 200,000 promising novels are abandoned—typically in the sticky middle stages.

At Aeon Timeline, we believe that visual planning with timelines can bring purpose to your writing, add depth to your characters, and sustain your creative energy until the end.

With help from authors David Williams and Andrew Hanson, let’s look at why so many stories fail in the middle stages, and the planning you can do now to avoid those mid-novel traps.

1. Steer your story in the right direction

Writing a novel any time is tough; finishing one in a month is crazy. To get to the finish line, you need to make sure every scene is pulling in the right direction. 

I find it easier to maintain momentum when I have the lure of a compelling climax to write towards. Creating this sense of direction is what building a visual story timeline is all about.

Don’t worry: 50,000 words provides abundant room for creativity. Planning a few signposts won’t change that, but it will make writing less stressful.

“I like to write fast and I like to write loose. Aeon Timeline allows me to do more of that, because it encourages me to be spontaneous in the space in-between. It’s actually going to enhance your creativity, and give you more freedom.”

– David Williams

2. Perfect your pacing with the right time frame

We writers talk a lot about setting, but stories live in time as much as they live in space. Time is crucial to controlling pace and tension.

Ask yourself:

What is the chronology of my story? What are the key moments and when do they need to happen?

What if I compressed my timeline? Would it increase tension, and force my characters to act impulsively? Or do my characters need more time to grow?

You could use pen and paper, but using a digital timeline encourages you to freely experiment and find new possibilities:

"Looking at this on the timeline, I thought, that's actually the beginning and end of the story. I’ve taken 20-odd years of information, and reframed it around a single weekend. Just the freedom to be able to throw these events around made me realize I had been getting it entirely wrong.”

– David Williams

3. Cultivate characters with purpose

You determine every choice for your characters, but you want them to bring their own goals and motive to every scene. To pull off this magic trick, each character’s stakes need to be high enough that they can’t simply walk away.

To ensure authentic choices, it helps to build thorough backstories for your characters and your world. What recent events instigated your story? How are they compelling your characters into action? Which historical scars and social pressures provoke their reactions in each scene?

By plotting these histories visually, you can cross reference personal and world events—prompting fresh insights about your characters.

“I start with the characters, and then flesh out the backstory events to make sure that the story logic makes sense. By story logic, I really mean that the events leading up to the present day of the story make sense to the reader.”

– Andrew Hanson

4. Amplify tension throughout your middle chapters

The first quarter of your book is done—your characters have taken that first irreversible step. The final chapters are whispering to you with the siren call of crisis and resolution.

But first, you have half a novel to increase stakes and layer pressure on your characters. That is a lot of empty space to fill with complications that don’t feel repetitive or contrived. You can drop another dead body, but can you really drop five?

It is easy to see why so many stories are abandoned in the middle. Why not plan your escalations in advance, while you have time to experiment and your story feels fresh?

If a better idea strikes while writing, that’s great! But if it doesn’t, your story timeline can keep you on solid ground: 

“The timeline is my barometer of story. It gives me an idea of where the pressure points are in a story, whether the story is working or not. It’s my eyes and ears on the story.”

– Andrew Hanson

5. Plan scenes as agents of change

We have all stumbled on that one scene that doesn’t want to be written. You can’t wait to throw yourself at the next crisis point, if you could just get that one scene right. But until then… Everything. Just. Stops.

Often, this block is surprisingly simple: your scene isn’t doing anything:

“The most important thing that every single scene has to have is change — external plot change or internal character change, but ideally both. If I am struggling with the writing of a scene, I can go into Aeon Timeline and fill in the details to work out where the scene has gone wrong.

– Andrew Hanson

Aeon Timeline is a flexible visual hub for planning your entire story. You can find detailed case studies describing how David and Andrew use Aeon Timeline on our website.

Download a free trial on Mac, Windows and iOS.  Discounts are available to all NaNoWriMo participants until December 15. To claim, log into your NaNoWriMo account and visit the Offers page.

#nanowrimo #writing #nano prep #nanowrimo 2022 #amwriting #by nano sponsor #aeon timeline #andrew hanson #david williams

[the-owl-tree]

you said alderheart works more as a supporting character and you know what? THAT’S what I’ve been trying to figure out was so boring about the books since this new trend of male characters. they’re not nearly compelling enough to be mcs. they’re supporting characters that the plot revolves around simply bc they’re men and the much more interesting female characters are interesting on ACCIDENT and sidelined or altogether forgotten because they are women. I’m just trying to understand how it keeps happening. how many years of this has it been? I can’t remember when avos came out. it’s gotta be like 8 right? damn near 10 years of this shit 😭

AVOS came out in 2016 so that's around 8-7 years (which. got damn). Like idk Alderheart is...fine, I guess. I'm sure if I reread AVOS I might get some enjoyment out of him, but as a protagonist, he just isn't what the story needs. A key part of AVOS is the growing instability of ShadowClan, something that should arguably be established in the first book...which since we're locked into Alderheart's POV, we don't really get a good enough glimpse. He's got no real particularly interesting insights on the situation from afar, and a majority of the apprentice's quest is essentially him being ushered into the plot by other characters (becoming a medic, going on the journey, and so on). I get people like his more anxious/timid nature, it's fine, but is is just....not the character I would have picked to be the POV. I honestly think he'd be better as a cute little guy on the side trembling and being silly.

Even thematically wise, the plot they have for him is just sort of...meh? I'd argue a key theme of AVOS is family (dare i say. kin), and Alderheart's parental troubles never really go anywhere because the writing team doesn't really want to make Bramblestar looking bad despite him agreeing to separate two orphan babies (and he doesn't even break out into song and starting calling alderheart an entitled piece of shit just a pot smoking good or nothing-). The most we get is the rift between Alderheart and Sparkpelt growing + some Twigbranch issues, but even then the former has a lot of issues in the writing that have only been exacerbated and the writing team has dropped any sort of familial bond Twig has with Alder. As much as I'd like a Spark POV, Alderheart more so makes me wish we'd gotten a ShadowClan POV instead! seriously we need to break the thunderclan pov curse especially after the recent asc book there should not be two povs on the same damn plotline-

Note: not Needletail, i think she's at her best when we don't know what she's thinking. she's a good supporting character

I don't think there's anything particularly new about the disinterest in the women with warriors, but it is feeling exacerbated with the new team's reluctance to try and carry over plotlines to keep arcs more self-contained (at least to me).

#deer rambles #i just find alderheart so boring im sorry lol i want a meaty protag #sad boy number 23213 is not interesting

[athena-85]

Why it isn’t in Sarah’s best interest to write an Elain POV

I have often heard authors that have characters with powers, such as foresight or insight avoid writing point of view scene from those characters.

The reason:

When writing a novel, you must create suspense and conflict. Characters that know what will happen can sometimes make it more difficult to create a compelling novel. You have to remember and weave what they see into the plot. You have to deal with the fact that if you know the future ; does that change the outcome? You loose the suspense or you have to create it another way. 

For example, in the story line from a kingdom of the wicked, one of the main plot points that caused a lot of suspense was what the heck was going on with Emilia.🤐 The author purposely did not put us in the POV of any characters that knew the curse that was on Emilia😈, so we were also in the dark as to who Emilia was, and why Wrath behaved the way he did, and why Victoria was such a asshole for most of the book. We wouldn’t have an emotional response, the same way, if we knew the motivations behind Victoria’s actions. We wouldn’t be upset with her. Preventing us from being inside the other characters heads made it more suspenseful. If the author put the reader inside Wrath’s head, or even Victoria’s head, we would know the outcome before the end of the book. That’s Boring! And most likely would’ve ruined the book and the suspense. These young adult romance fantasy novels are not masterpieces. They are main stream blockbusters need to appeal to many different people of different backgrounds. You have to make it simple.

Has Sarah commented on this?:

I even think an interviewer with Sarah J mass has said if we were to get inside Elain‘s head we would know too much. Depending on Elain‘s story arc, and the development of her powers, Sarah may never give Elain a POV.

Sara wants us to be guessing what is going to happen. We knew exactly what was gonna happen at the end of A court of silver flames. We knew that Nesta was going to end up with Cassian, it actually diminishes the angst in the book.

For example: A court of mist and fury;We did not know that Feyre was Rhysand’s mate until much later. We did not know if they were going to end up together. It made the angst better, and I think we lacked this suspense in A court of silver flames.

Imgaine if we get inside Elain’s head through a POV, and we see a vision of Lucien with Vassa that totally gets rid of the will She won’t she plot line.

Just some thoughts 🤔

#elain archeron #sarah j maas #acotar 5 #Elain’s POV #cc3