#mayhew sees my vision

[saturdaysky]

a little morning pick-me-up

-

A morning on the way to Baldur's Gate. The party booked themselves into an inn and enjoyed real beds, hot baths, and privacy for the first time since the Nautiloid.

Gale and Mayhew shared a room, of course. They were filled with the relief of surviving the shadows and the glow of finally getting together, so their private room was probably a blessing for the whole party, honestly.

-

This was some ascended anatomy practice! Referenced some great stock from @null-entity.

#some people speed run the galemance but i played it as the world's longest slow burn #act 1 was fuuull of uneven feelings and perceived unrequited feelings and slow-building respect #mayhew was immediately down bad & suffering after the weave scene. Plus Gale's lukewarm reaction to flirting felt like people-pleasing #gale slowly emerged from his depression hole much later and only then caught real feelings - but the orb put paid to acting on them #so in my game they simply had a very loaded laden-with-unspoken-feelings friendship until near the end of act 2 #they got like one (1) week of happiness before the horrors of act 3 hit. starting with Mayhew getting unwillingly astral tadpole'd #it's tragic and i love it #also: chubby gale. tumblr do you see my vision #mayhew sees my vision #please also appreciate mayhew's bed head and the too-big-for-gnomes dishware. i chuckled about those #my art #mayhew #gale dekarios #gnome tav #gale x tav #bg3 #baldur's gate 3

[spookywhumping]

Whumptober Day 16

No. 16 NO WAY OUT | Paralytic Drugs

Was this supposed to happen?

Simon didn’t know if this was supposed to happen. He couldn’t see Dr. Mayhew’s reaction from where he was laying. Not because he was standing far away. In fact, Mayhew was standing uncomfortably close. But although Simon could practically feel the doctor’s breathing, he couldn’t turn his head to look at him.

It must have been an hour since Mayhew had walked into his room, accompanied by a pair of orderlies—just in case Simon started fighting back. He hadn’t. He was feeling oddly tired and drained lately, and didn’t have the energy to do much more than mutter the occasional snippy comment.

But now he wished he’d done a little bit more to stop the doctor from injecting him with that...that...whatever was in that syringe! He’d been prepared for all sorts of horrible consequences: nausea, dizziness, more hallucinations, even coughing up blood from a raw throat. But this? Simon hadn’t expected this. And if he was asked to choose, he would have chosen any of those other symptoms before this.

“Hmm.” Mayhew grabbed his arm. Normally, Simon would have pulled his arm away, or at least flinched at the unexpected touch. But not now. Even that instinctive reaction was muffled. All he could do was lie there, on the old mattress of his bed, and breathe steadily. “Hmmmm,” Mayhew hummed again, lifting up Simon���s arm. Simon tried to get a glimpse of him on the edges of his vision, but he was just out of sight. “Nothing? Nothing at all?”

There was a quiet voice on the edge of his hearing. Simon dismissed it at first, but then Mayhew said, “Please refrain from making inane comments like that during my observations,” and he realized the voice must’ve been one of the orderlies, and not just in his head. What were they saying? Were they staring at him? Stop staring at him! Stop it! He wanted to sit up and shout at them to stop stop stop stop STOP—but his muscles wouldn’t respond, not even to that desperate desire.

Mayhew’s fingers pressed against his wrist, holding for a while as he took note of Simon’s pulse. Then he abruptly let go, and Simon’s arm fell. It didn’t land on the bed, but instead dangled off the side, his fingers brushing against the floor. The slight contact tickled a little, but he couldn’t even twitch his fingers away.

What if there was something on the floor? What if someone stomped on his hand because he couldn’t pull it away? What if a bug crawled up his arm? He wanted to shudder at that last thought, especially as his imagination continued to give him images he didn’t want. That hypothetical bug crawling up his arm, across his chest and neck, over his face—he tried to pull his hand off the floor, or even just curl his fingers up, something, anything. And yet, his hand stayed still.

“Good,” Mayhew said, the slightest hint of satisfaction in his voice. The sort of satisfaction you get from having a plan go smoothly. Finally, he leaned into Simon’s field of view. And a split second later, a bright light shone into Simon’s eyes. It was bright enough to make his eyes water, but his eyelids wouldn’t close, leaving a few tears to leak out and trickle down his face. Mayhew disappeared again. “Good,” he repeated.

Then he left. Simon heard his footsteps retreat, felt his presence depart. He heard more shuffling footsteps, then the door opened, and closed.

Were they gone? Simon tried desperately to sit, or roll over, or even turn his head. But all he did was lie there, breathing slowly and steadily.

“Very good.” Mayhew’s voice came from by the door. No, he hadn’t left. He just wanted to see if Simon would sit up the moment he thought the doctor was gone. But he hadn’t. “You two. Wait outside. I’m going to stay and see how long this lasts.” More quiet voices. “I will remind you who pays you,” Mayhew said coldly. Silence. And then the door opened and closed once again.

And they were alone. Simon was alone with Mayhew, and he couldn’t even say anything to the doctor. He just had to lie there. Knowing Mayhew would be staring at him.

He prayed that this new drug would wear off quickly.

#whumptober2022 #no.16 #paralytic drugs #OC #medium writing #whump writing #whump #whumptober #oc tag: simon underhill #oc tag: dr mayhew #needles #tw needles

[midnightp0sts]

A New Face

This is a OC x Creepypasta fanfic and its mainly just to amuse myself and challenge myself to get back into writing. Some of the introduced characters I will try and have as canonically accurate, but there will be a lot of characters that will be heavily affected by my own personal headcanons. Again, its nothing to take seriously.

This first part, or chapter I guess, is just me trying to set the motions in place, so this one is a bit of a slow burn.

Characters:

Mayhew (OC)

Dr. Locklear

Stetting:

Unknown

Words:

881

Roughly proofread

She awoke.

Darkness greeted her vision, a cold air surrounded her body, the thin blanket doing little to protect her. The woman laid in bed, sleepily staring up at the ceiling as her body was starting to come back to its senses. She sharply inhaled, her lungs filling back up with oxygen so desperately needed, before slowly exhaling as she tried to figure out why her head was writhing in pain. A migraine, she assumed, as she typically suffered from them, but it felt worse. She closed her eyes, hoping to go back into the dark abyss that previously held her, but it rejected her. Groaning, she tried to shift her body into a more comfortable position, but her body refused her too. Full of a stinging sensation, all the poor woman could do was lay there in pain with her eyes being the only thing that seemed to obey her command.

Trying to see through the darkness, her eyes darted around her surroundings, but everything was blurred and all she could really make out were oddly shaped shadows of objects she could not recognize. With not being in control of her own body, her chapped lips parted as she anticipated to call out to someone for help – but only her own shaky breath escaped. No names formed in her mind, they all danced on the tip of her tongue, so close to her memory, but she couldn’t reach any. In fact, she couldn’t remember much of anything. She knew she had a family but couldn’t recall any of their names or faces. She had friends, but none of them came to mind. Her mind was beginning to race to find answers as she fought to remember anything.

Who was she? Where was she? What was she?

Her heart started to pound rapidly in her chest as panic began to settle in, but before her voice could erupt in a panicked scream, there was a light. A light had, almost instantly, swept into the room causing her to scrunch her face and squeeze her eyes in discomfort. She heard footsteps approach her side before an eerie chuckle met her ears.

“Ah, good to see you awake Ms. Mayhew.” A deep, yet cherry voice greeted her. Mayhew – although she knew that the voice was addressing her, that didn’t seem right – familiar, but not right. “I’m Doctor Locklear, I’ve been keeping track of your recovery and I had almost given up hope,” he introduced himself with a dark chuckle at the end. She felt a cold hand press against her neck, and she flinched at the feeling, but all the man, or Locklear, did was simply hum in response. “Don’t worry, the feeling will come back to your body soon. Can you speak, or are you having difficulty?” He asked. Her mind was a haze, she didn’t recognize this man at all, but he seemed to know her. Maybe something happened to her? He was a doctor… He mentioned recovery… Was there an accident?

“Ms. Mayhew?”

“Yugh,” she sputtered out. Her tongue felt odd in her mouth and her throat ached as it vibrated with the noise, causing her cough dryly in response to the uncomfortable sensation – only making it worse.

Dr. Locklear hummed again and there was a sort of shuffling sound that she couldn’t quite make out. “I’ll go get you a cup of water in a bit. Don’t fret, your voice is the least of your worries. I need to continue with the rest of this examination though, if you feel any sort of discomfort or pain, just grunt.” He added.

As he began, the examination would feel like hours to her, but with her body being so sore from some undisclosed accident he ordered her to stay in bed for one more night. He showed her some stretches she could try and do to help circulate her blood flow, or something along those lines she honestly wasn’t paying too much attention.

“It’ll just be for one more night, then you can meet you’re…” He paused, trying to find the right words, “I suppose… Friends?” He laughed at the idea but could see her brows furrow in confusion before reassuringly patting her head. “Admittedly I don’t know them. They seem to know you though, so you must be close with them. Not a lot that I would associate myself with, but to each their own I suppose.” He said, starting to trail off in thought. “Ah, but… They’ll be here tomorrow evening to take you home – wherever that may be.” He added. She couldn’t recall any friends of her though and only stared back at him with more worry and confusion.

“I wish I could answer your questions darling, I know you have them. Who you are, where are you, what happened to you? But…” He sighed, his gloved hand gripping her shoulder. “I can’t tell you, not tonight at least. Just you rest and leave the questions for tomorrow. I’m sure your friends would be happy to answer.” He added, giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “You go off to sleep, I’ll see you in the morning.” And with that, the only person she had name of, walked out the room she was confined in. Left alone with the darkness...

#creepypasta #oc #original character #oc x creepypasta #fanfic #creepypasta fanfic #mayhew

[bedlamsbard]

All right, reactions to Mando 2.05, “The Jedi”, in...semi-coherent form. Spoilers, obvs. I hated this episode, so keep scrolling now if you don’t want to see negativity.  This is not in any kind of order except stream-of-conscious.

again, I reiterate, spoilers.

again, I reiterate, this is REALLY negative.

Rosario Dawson...yikes.

how...did Bo-Katan know that Ahsoka was on Corvus? are they in contact? since when? Ahsoka seems to have been on Corvus for long enough to be a nuisance to the Magistrate (Morgan Elsbeth), but normally Ahsoka is very efficient and she just...really does not seem to be here? I did not get the impression she was planning on sticking around for any period of time.

(the same could be true for Frog Lady and Bo-Katan on Trask several episodes back. that wasn’t a convert, that was three Mandalorians hanging around the port in cloaks. I guess they could be doing that on the regular, but? would the Empire not then be more worried about being attacked by Mandalorians?)

there was only ever a very, very slim chance that I was going to be happy with any translation of Ahsoka from animation to live action.  I am on record as thinking that animation is the medium for Star Wars and that live action is always going to be a weaker medium than animation and that a lot of things that can be done in animation just cannot be translated to live action in any meaningful form.  I knew Ahsoka’s fighting style couldn’t translate to live action convincingly (here’s what I said about the mo-capped duel in TCW); it never occurred to me that they couldn’t pull off TOGRUTA given that Shaak Ti, you know, exists, and also there are so many excellent Ahsoka cosplayers.

(Consider KM Creations’ excellent silicone lekku (S7), which have beautiful movement; the cosplayer behind that is CallMeSnips and her epilogue prototype is from SWCC is in there somewhere.  I think Rei Kennex’s are latex (you can tell they don’t have much movement) but at least they’re the right length.  I think Ahsoka94′s are also latex (again with the movement); this is her Mortis vision grown-up Ahsoka.)

AND YES, THE LEKKU/MONTRALS WERE A DEAL-BREAKER FOR ME.

I feel very “you have made your bed and now you have to die in it” about that -- apparently the reasoning is for stunts and movement, but for me here’s the thing: her lekku length wasn’t optional.  This is not the equivalent of changing a hair style, which some people seem to think (believe me, I have read so many hot takes); this is like...I’m trying to think of a good comparison.  Like putting Peter Mayhew or Joonas Suotamo in a wig because Chewie’s head was too hard for the actor to see out of, or giving them normal human hands because they can’t grip with the Wookiee hands.

Also your main character wears a helmet at all times that (if it’s anything like my Mandalorian helmet) is pretty poor visibility and full body armor and THIS was your breaking point for stunts?

Ahsoka’s lekku and montrals grow as she ages. These are about S7 length; as @reena-jenkins put it, THEY DE-AGED HER HEAD.  Ahsoka fans coming in know this.  PEOPLE SAW THE REBELS EPILOGUE.

I wonder how many of the people being self-righteous about being totally fine about Ahsoka’s lekku are the same people who claim that Katee Sackhoff is too young to play Bo-Katan.

this also puts them in a weird position in regards to the inevitable merchandise: do they go with normal Ahsoka from TCW and Rebels, the one everyone is familiar with, or do they go with these stunted lekku?

(I can’t believe they’re going to make Her Universe sell merch with this Ahsoka on it. it’s not going to happen but I wish HU was going to be petty enough to not sell any nu!Ahsoka merch.)

Here is some nice art of how Ahsoka’s lekku and montral should have looked.

hoo boy were those prosthetics also just Bad.

“but the stunts” buddy I’m sure Pedro Pascal and his various stunt doubles aren’t having a great time in full armor with almost no visibility either

if you’re going to put the character in, do it right

YOU CAN’T CHEAT

look, I am really, really aural -- the best example I can give is that even though intellectually I know that Matt Lanter and Hayden Christensen both play Anakin Skywalker, I literally cannot parse them as both being the same Anakin Skywalker and for that reason TCW and the PT don’t exist for the same continuity for me.  (This also goes for Ewan McGregor and James Arnold Taylor, Natalie Portman and Cat Taber, and Samuel L. Jackson and TC Carson. I can kinda cope with the multiple Palpatine VAs. Yes, the decision to use Hayden and Sam in Ahsoka’s vision in “Shattered,” even blending into Matt’s voice from Hayden’s, threw me so badly I couldn’t take the vision seriously.)  Ashley Eckstein has a very distinctive voice, and moreover has been the only person to ever voice Ahsoka up to this point (even in the Ahsoka novel audiobook). Barring a MIRACLE I was never going to be able to parse another actress’s voice as Ahsoka’s, solely because of how my brain works.

I could probably have parsed someone else’s face because animated Ahsoka is pretty stylized but the voice thing is a huge problem for me because of how aural I am.

(I say this but when Squadrons did a more live action-style Hera -- knowing they mo-capped Vanessa Marshall I think they used Vanessa’s face for Hera’s, which is also what it looks like on the revised art and face sculpt for the Black Series Hera -- I kind of had a meltdown about it (for...weird reasons). And that was the same VA.)

(The timeskip between TCW and Rogue One, then Rebels, probably saved Saw Gerrera for me here, but he was also never a main character.)

can you believe that Sam Witwer’s Maul got more live action respect than Ashley Eckstein’s Ahsoka

I love Sam’s Maul but wow

this is particularly jarring because Dave Filoni and Ashley Eckstein always seemed like they were friends? I realize that this gets skewed by how little of their actual lives we see online, but that is the vibe that I’ve gotten from interviews and social media posts.

can you believe that TROS gave more respect to Ashley Eckstein’s Ahsoka than Dave Filoni’s Mando episode did (here is her statement on TROS.)

back in March, when the Dawson casting rumors first dropped (or leaked, as the case may be), Ashley posted a statement about it saying that she was not involved in The Mandalorian. she has over the years been very vocal about desperately wanting to play live-action Ahsoka, who is a character solely associated with her up until today, and honestly this just breaks my heart.

I am not the massive Ashley Eckstein fan that many Ahsoka fans are, but I have never heard anything bad about her (I saw her at my hotel at SWCC while I was waiting for my roommate to arrive! that’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to her, a distance of about six feet), and I really desperately hope that someone told her about this beforehand and she didn’t find out from watching the episode.

Also, while I’m here talking about Ashley Eckstein, the characterization here was extremely off, in that specific way that happens when a writer/director is working with their absolute favorite character, DAVE FILONI. I do trust Ashley to course-correct Dave on Ahsoka (in the same way we’ve heard about Sam Witwer pushing back on people about Maul), and that...was not happening here.  (I think Katee Sachoff said something similar to this about Bo-Katan in her interview last week, as well.)

how did you get Bo-Katan so right and Ahsoka so wrong

look, Dave Filoni is truly living up to George Lucas’s legacy in that he can story tell pretty well but he’s not actually that great at nitty-gritty of writing and directing. (none of the really good TCW episodes are his.)

this episode made me think of A Friend in Need (which he directed) which is not, like, a BAD episode but quite notoriously includes the Bo-Katan ass-slap and also Ahsoka beheading four Mandalorians at once.

it also includes a helpless village of oppressed and exploited Asian-coded civilians who are there mostly as background scenery so the bad guys can be bad and the heroes can feel righteous

I’ll come back to that one

the level of violence in this episode was...weird. honestly, too high? in a way that probably would not have registered if it was anyone but Ahsoka. look, I am an animated shows person. I know TCW and Rebels inside and out. I know that neither one is particularly shy about killing off faceless bad guys (though if you watch Rebels S1 compared to Rebels S4 they really dial back the amount of fatal violence the main characters commit in the last season, lol).  But this felt off for Ahsoka in a way I can’t really articulate.

why is Ahsoka attacking a random Mandalorian (her allies are Mandalorians!) who is walking through the woods WITH A BABY? WITHOUT WARNING?

part of that is just her movement -- when they animated her for TCW back in 2008, they made a deliberate decision to give her mannerisms and movement and a fighting style that a human can’t do because she isn’t human and animation can do that. which means that they hobbled themselves when they came to translating her to live action because uh a human can’t do that.

something about her lightsaber blades looked really, really wrong and I can’t put my finger on what. it’s like they just used the illuminated blades of the stunt sabers but didn’t do the extra CGI that the films do? I don’t know.

Ahsoka did a LOT of dramatic posing and what WAS that?

Dave can’t direct live action, that’s what that was

since when can you canonically convey that much information mind to mind

are Ahsoka and Grogu a dyad in the Force (I know the answer is no but also: what? what was happening?)

the only people we’ve seen who can do that sort of thing are Quinlan Vos and Cal Kestis, who both have the rare talent for telemetry, and even that’s not mind to mind communication, that’s touching a thing and going “YIKES”

you are telling me that Ahsoka Tano, whom six months ago we saw take on Darth Maul, a whole barrage of Mandalorian warriors, and her entire clone trooper battalion and walk away without a scratch, had to work up a sweat fighting one woman with a spear

you do know that we all saw TCW and Rebels right

and here’s the problem! this episode makes zero sense if you HAVE seen TCW and Rebels because (1) she doesn’t look right (2) she doesn’t fight right (3) timelines? we’ve never heard of them? (4) is Thrawn back? did you find the Chimaera? (you all do remember that Ezra and Thrawn aren’t out there alone and are in fact with a 40,000 man crewed star destroyer right) (5) did you NOT find them? (6) are you even looking? (7) this is supposed to be AFTER the Rebels epilogue unless you’ve decided to take advantage of that specific ending scene not being super specifically dated and if it’s before IT MAKES IT EVEN WORSE! because I desperately hate that epilogue and its implications EVEN AS IT IS! (8) why would you call this episode “The Jedi” when since 2013 Ahsoka’s whole thing has been not being a Jedi

to be fair I’m pretty sure S7 tried very hard to course correct that but unfortunately, they could not because the rest of canon exists

are you still trying to deny me grown Ahsoka and Rex when we know you got Temuera back for a five second shot of Boba

to be fair I would have the same aural problems with Temuera voicing Rex because that’s Dee Bradley Baker as far as I’m concerned (I reiterate that this is because of how my brain process character and sound, not anythign else)

if you haven’t seen TCW and Rebels this is a random Jedi wandering around for no specific reason namedropping a completely random person who has no prior significance unless it’s going to turn up later

this entire show has consisted of namedropping random people and things with no prior significance within the show itself and it remains entirely unclear whether they’re ever going to have significance within the show itself

look, I can buy Ahsoka not wanting to train the kid both for her stated reasons and for some implied stuff from earlier on in canon (the kids in the Ahsoka novel, the babies from Future of the Force), even what happened with Ezra, and obviously she has Plans and cannot haul a baby around with her when that baby is going to be a baby for an indeterminate amount of time

which honestly is something that ought to come up because even if Ahsoka wanted to train the kid by the time she grew old and died he might, if we were very lucky, have advanced to being essentially a pre-teen and then would be on his own again? this is also true for Din.

lol sure go cast yourself out into the Force, I’m sure there’s absolutely not a single darksider still wandering around the galaxy who might perk up at “ooh, free apprentice!”

I’m literally starting to think that this show takes place in an alternate universe where Luke and Leia either don’t exist or died at some point in the OT

me, baffled, last season: you’re telling me Cara Dune, Alderaanian, had never heard of the Jedi? was she not keeping up with whatever Leia Organa was doing? was the Rebel Alliance actually big enough that PEOPLE IN IT HADN’T HEARD OF LUKE SKYWALKER?

what...is Luke doing right now. isn’t he training Leia?

WHAT HAS AHSOKA BEEN DOING FOR TEN YEARS are we seriously supposed to believe she peaced out of the Rebel Alliance after Malachor and whatever the hell they’re going to make that out to be (honestly at this point I’m betting on “they will never touch it”)

does or does Ahsoka not know that Luke exists

hoo boy can you just see them trying to cast a younger Luke, or do you think they’d CGI de-age Mark Hamill?

oh yeah let’s go through this again in a season with someone else playing young Luke, let’s, I’m not emotionally invested in that so I’m prepared to be entertained

hasn’t Sebastian Stan been floated (even if just on Twitter) for young Luke?

why are these not-imperials on this planet. what are they doing here. what’s the point.

 why is the planet...being burned? I was half-expecting, like, normal deforestation (in terms of logging for lumber) but I’m also a bit ??? about this.

since when is beskar resistant to lightsabers, I thought cortosis was the only thing that was? whatever, it’s new canon, they can do whatever they want. (ETA: apparently that’s been true for a while; I am more a Jedi person than a Mandalorian one as far as the EU goes and my Mandalorian lore is my weakest point.)

dear god were these fight scenes bad

I did spot Morai and I appreciated the tookas

okay, I am taking the next thing out of bullet points because I was really, really upset by it, and as an Asian-American woman it affects me directly.

I was really, really shaken by the use of village of (space) Asian people who were portrayed solely as background victims to be tortured and exploited.  Star Wars has a long history of Orientalism, and some of it I can look away from and some of I can’t.  Mando especially has a very bad track record with its treatment of Asian characters (Fennec Shand), and in recent years the rest of Star Wars live action has also been pretty bad about it; I will never forget how shaken and upset I was by Paige Tico’s death at the beginning of TLJ, and Rose’s sidelining in TROS was a lot to deal with. There has also been some pretty appalling anti-Asian racism from the Mandalorian fandom that I have seen in regards towards casting rumors about Sabine (which brought me to the point of tears as recently as yesterday).

I had been braced for Rosario Dawson Ahsoka because it’s been rumored for so long, if never officially confirmed by Lucasfilm, and after they pulled the original VA for Leia from Resistance a few years ago (without ever making an official statement but it was after she made really dismissive statements during the Kavanaugh hearings) I was still really hoping they’d pull Dawson for the transphobic assault allegations, or that the rumors were false, or...something.  I was not expecting the way that they treated the Asian civilian population here.  I kept hoping that there was going to be something, and it’s like they kept almost going there with Governor Wing (you want to make either his name or his position clear in the actual episode, maybe?) but then kept pulling back, which just made the whole population victims that had to be rescued by outsiders. And exploited, and tortured, and abused in general.

And yes, I’m aware the Magistrate/Morgan Elsbeth is an Asian-American woman.  That doesn’t make it better?  Since Ahsoka presumably kills her offscreen?

(Also Diana Lee Inosanto is a stunt performer and a fight choreographer, why is that fight scene so wooden, damn.)

okay back to bullet points to wrap up

I realize I haven’t said much about Din and the kid and that’s because they didn’t...do...much? I guess if you’re actually invested in them “YAY HE HAS FEELINGS” is a major thing but I’m not

I have flashes of being invested in Din, but the problem is that I never know what the hell this show is doing because it’s all over the place.  We are 5/8 of the way into season 2 and I have no idea what it’s trying to do: they keep setting stuff up and then not doing anything with it. I can make vague predictions based on what’s set up and based on my knowledge of canon, but this show is so weirdly set up and paced that I can never tell if they’re something for A Reason, for the lulz, or for the Aesthetic.

I feel extremely vindicated by the revelation a few weeks ago that Din grew up in a cult but I also straight-up feel like I spent the past year being gaslighted about what Mandalorians were, and that’s...not a great feeling. Do I think that the show is going to do anything with that? Fuck, I don’t know. I hope so. I know what I’d do as a writer. But I can’t predict anything they’re doing and that makes me really uneasy.

jeez, at least when George Lucas was making Star Wars you knew he was doing it to entertain himself and tell a specific story rather than constantly having to go back and wonder what story lines got compromised for a project down the road.

like, is this why they did mo-cap Ahsoka in S7, to brace us for live action Ahsoka here? I know they had already filmed Mando S2 before S1 came out. WHY THEY DIDN’T THEY REUSE LAUREN MARY KIM AS AHSOKA’S STUNT DOUBLE THEN? it’s not like she hasn’t stunted in Mando before?

if this was supposed to be a backdoor pilot to a Rebels sequel...I will flip a table

I enjoyed the Bad Batch eps in TCW S7 but knowing that there’s going to be a Bad Batch show I’m now wondering if they’re only in S7 to backdoor pilot that show

how far back does this go? did they put the Legacy of Mandalore story line in Rebels S4 solely to set up for this? especially considering that that’s the one thing in S4 that actually has saga weight and then they immediately got rid of everything it accomplished to set up for this?

I presume that this is the reason they refused to release the turnaround for Ahsoka’s epilogue look two years ago. apparently it doesn’t matter given they changed her entire epilogue color scheme and also her lekku and personality.

Look -- at the end of the day, there was only about a 2% chance I was ever going to like this episode, but I was holding out for it nevertheless. I do get surprised from time to time! I liked the Bo-Katan episode! This was, however, a hot mess. And yes: a lot of the things that bother me are not going to bother other people. (I haven’t seen anyone comment on the Asian villagers, for example.)

#just so there is no doubt: I HATED THIS EPISODE #the mandalorian spoilers #bedlam watches the mandalorian #mando the jedi

[stealingpotatoes]

First Meeting

Ao3 link

Summary: Alexi Mayhew meets Empress Emily Kaldwin for the first time. But it doesn’t really happen how she thought it would.

(nb: Going off extra lore stuff, Alexi and Emily were close good friends when they were kids, so I thought I’d write a little thing on smol Emily & Alexi meeting cause ya know… why not? Also realised I never posted this to tumblr so... here it is now!)

---

Alexi hated getting dressed up. Back in Potterstead, she almost never had to get all dressed up formally, but she’d barely lived in Dunwall more than two months, and it already felt like she’d been to more formal things here than she had in her whole life before moving here. And in Dunwall Tower -- because that meant they were at the Empress’ court, apparently -- Alexi had to be even more formal. Her almost-floor-length green dress was too stiff and her mother had done her hair up with too many pins. Alexi hated it. 

And they were at a boring meeting or talk or something. But the Empress wasn’t even there, because they were actually seeing her this evening, so really Alexi didn’t even need to look ‘nice’ until then. She didn’t even know what they were doing in Dunwall Tower, really. Her parents owned shops; they weren’t nobles.  

But one thing Alexi did know was that she was unbelievably bored just standing there. So she had slipped out of the room, taken her hair down, and began wandering about the Tower. None of the guards seemed to pay her much mind, so she guessed that she was allowed to. She eventually wound up in a hallway with a bunch of paintings along the walls. Some of them had various Emperors and Empresses, some of them were just random places or maybe events. Alexi found herself particularly drawn to a large painting of an Emperor in a formal-ish military outfit, holding a sword in the air in a very commanding way while on a rearing horse, with parts of a battle going on in the background. Alexi began imagining herself as this great general-Emperor. 

Alexi was so caught up in the painting that she didn’t notice the sound of someone running down the hall until it was too late. The second she turned around to see what was happening or who it was, she was met by the full impact of someone running into her. Alexi painfully fell straight on her butt.

After a second, she opened her eyes to see a young girl with short-ish black hair, probably about eleven or twelve- Alexi’s age, quickly pushing herself up from the floor. 

“Oh! I’m so sorry-- I didn’t see you,” The girl, now standing, extended a hand to Alexi.

Alexi took her girl’s hand, and she helped pull Alexi to her feet.

“It’s nothing, don’t worry.” Alexi said, moving her braided hair behind her back and dusting herself off, “Though, maybe look where you’re going next time?”

“...I had to check if I was being followed!” The girl exclaimed, “But- yes, sorry, I’ll… do that.” She rubbed her arm sheepishly. 

Now that they’d both stopped moving, Alexi had a better look at the girl in front of her. She was taller than Alexi, a little lanky really, and wearing an expensive-looking black trouser suit with fine silver embroidery and white trimmings. Her hair had been messed up, probably from the speeding down the halls and the running-right-into-Alexi. 

“Who might be following you?” Alexi asked. 

The girl tilted her head to the side, “Um- a few people...” she paused and looked Alexi up and down, “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before?” 

“This is my first time in the Tower” Alexi fiddled with the fabric of her skirts a little, “I’m here with my parents. We’re supposed to be meeting the Empress later today or something.”

The girl looked at Alexi thoughtfully before smiling like she knew something Alexi didn’t, “Why aren’t you with them?”

“I was with them, at some really boring meeting-talk-thing. But it was um-- really boring. So…” Alexi shrugged, “I thought I’d explore.” 

The girl laughed a little, “There’s no shortage of boring meetings in Dunwall Tower.” 

“Do you have to go to those things with your parents too?”

The girl did that smile again, “Something like that…”

Alexi ignored how vague the girl was being, “Um- what were you running from?”

“My lessons.” 

“Oh- That explains why you were running so fast.” Alexi said, smiling. Did people have lessons in the Tower? 

The girl giggled. “What’s your name?” 

“Alexi Mayhew.” Alexi said proudly, “What’s yours?”

“Emily Kaldwin.”

It took a second for the penny to drop. Alexi knew that Empress Emily was her age, had black hair, and she had a rough idea of what the Empress looked like from newspapers and various images. Maybe she just wasn’t actually expecting a child, someone like her -- maybe she’d imagined someone more like the paintings around her, all regal and not running down hallways at great speeds. But Alexi really should’ve noticed it sooner. 

This realisation must have shown on her face, because Emily giggled a little. 

Alexi’s brow furrowed, “Um- Do I have to call you Your Majesty? Or bow…?”

Emily seemed to think about it for a second, “Technically yes, but you can call me Emily.”

“ Phew. Well uh-” Alexi put her hand out, quickly recovering- “it’s nice to meet you, Emily.”

Emily looked at Alexi’s hand, slightly confused, for a moment, before suddenly shaking it, “It’s nice to meet you too, Alexi.”

Neither of them said anything for a few moments, and Alexi found herself looking at the painting that they were both standing under again. 

Emily glanced up at the painting too, and then at a clock near them, “Do you want to see some actual fighting?” 

Alexi nodded enthusiastically. 

Emily gestured for Alexi to follow, and led her along two halls, until they reached a window seat. Emily climbed into the alcove on her knees, before looking back and gesturing for Alexi to come up, “Come on!”

Alexi pushed herself onto the window seat to kneel next to Emily, and looked out the window. Alexi put her hands to the window sill. Below them, the Dunwall Tower guards were sparring with each other in the training yard. There were maybe 20 guards, plus a captain walking in the space between the sparring matches, yelling things Alexi couldn’t hear. They were all duelling with swords- properly fighting

“ Cool, ” Alexi grinned.

“I know,” Emily said, still staring out the window. 

The guards continued to duel below. They were all good duellists, which made sense, seeing as only the best of the City Watch guarded Dunwall Tower. It was impressive to watch all of them fight. 

“I want to be able to fight like that,” Alexi said, not taking her eyes off the

“Me too,” Emily said, a little quieter than before. 

“When I’m old enough, I’m going to join the City Watch.” Alexi turned to Emily.

Emily faced Alexi, “Maybe I’ll see you training out here soon.”

“Yeah! And you- when you learn to sword fight too.”

Emily chuckled a little, “I don’t think the City Watch will let me spar with them.”

“Why not? It’s technically your training grounds, right?” Alexi twisted her hand on the sill in Emily’s direction. 

Emily tilted her head and smirked, “I suppose so.” 

Alexi turned back to the window and stared at the guards, still duelling. But she saw Emily looking at her in her peripheral vision and turned her head to face her. “What is it?” she asked, suddenly feeling a little self-conscious. 

Emily half-shrugged, “Everyone’s usually so weird around me. But you’re… not. You’re different.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Alexi asked, cautiously. She was pretty sure that she was ignoring every single piece of ‘etiquette’ she was meant to know, but etiquette was dumb, so she didn’t care. 

“Oh- no! Definitely not. No, it’s a good thing.” Emily smiled reassuringly.

Alexi smiled back, “So what’s weird? Do they ”

Emily returned to looking out the window and Alexi did the same. “No, people just act like I’m made of glass or-- Woah , did you see that?!” Emily asked.

“See what?” Alexi looked between the guards. 

Emily pointed to a guard on the floor, “His opponent just dodged him perfectly and did this uh- leg swipe, and floored him! It was awesome!”

“Maybe he’ll do it again--”

“Emily?” A man’s rough voice came from the end of the hall, interrupting Alexi.   

Emily glanced behind her before looking back to Alexi, annoyed, and huffing, “Callista got Corvo to find me.”

“As in Corvo Attano?” Alexi asked, eyes widening.

Emily nodded. 

Alexi knew she’d get to see Corvo Attano today, because the Royal Protector was almost always with the Empress. And if Alexi was being honest, she’d been way more excited to see him than she had been to see the Empress. Because- well, Corvo Attano was a legend! Alexi had heard that he could fight ten armed men at once, with just his bare hands . And that he was the best swordsman and hand-to-hand combatant in all the Isles. And that last year, he’d escaped Coldridge Prison (Coldridge! Nobody escaped Coldridge!), saved Empress Emily twice, taken down the evil Lord Regent (and those other bad people who ruled for like 2 days afterwards) and cleared his name, almost entirely by himself! Earlier, Alexi had almost been hoping that some assassins or something would show up when she was meeting the Empress, just so she’d get to see him in action. And so everything would be less boring. 

Emily got down from the seat and Alexi followed suit. 

As they got down, a man in a long dark blue coat with gold-yellow trimmings walked around the corner. “Emily-” he said, seeing them and picking up his pace a little. He stopped when he was about a step or two away from them. 

Alexi looked up at the man in front of her. She could definitely believe that he’d done all she’d heard. He was so tall as well. There was a sword at his belt- well, a sword hilt. It didn’t have a blade, which was weird. 

Alexi stood up a little straighter. 

“Corvo, this is Alexi Mayhew. Alexi, this is Corvo.” Emily said, gesturing between Alexi and Corvo. 

Corvo gave Alexi a nod and a smile in place of a greeting. Alexi copied him and smiled and nodded back, hoping she didn’t look too in awe. 

Corvo turned to Emily, “You’re meant to be in lessons, Your Majesty.”  

Emily huffed and dropped her shoulders, “I know, I’m coming.”

“Miss Mayhew, do you need someone to escort you back to your parents?” Corvo asked, looking at Alexi again.

Could he read her mind?! Or… was it just his job to know everything that happened in the tower…? Probably the second one. “I um- yes please.” Alexi said, fiddling with her dress again. 

Corvo gave her another single nod, before turning away slightly and making eye contact with Emily. 

Emily moved next to Corvo, “It was nice talking to you, Alexi.”

“You too!” Alexi smiled.

With that, Emily and Corvo turned and began walking away. Emily smiled and waved over her shoulder as they walked, “See you later!”

Alexi waved back. 

-

“You took longer than usual,” Emily said once she and Corvo rounded the corner. 

“You two sounded like you were having a nice talk. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“Then why did you?” Emily looked up at her father. 

“Because you’re supposed to be in lessons, and you can’t keep Callista waiting forever,” Corvo said, glancing down at Emily. 

Emily let out a little ‘hmph’ and continued walking, “Can I see Alexi again? I liked her.”

“You’re meeting the Mayhews later today.” 

Emily tilted her head, “Alexi said something like that.” She was glad that at least Corvo remembered her schedule and knew what was happening. Emily knew she didn’t most of the time. 

Emily and Corvo walked on for a bit before Emily spoke again, “You know, really I was performing my Imperial duties by showing Alexi around.”

“Oh? Well, right now, you need to perform your Imperial duty to go to your lessons.” 

“Not if I run off again,” Emily said with a sly grin. 

Corvo put a hand on Emily’s shoulder -- gentle, but firm enough to stop her from moving off too fast -- and looked down at her with an amused expression “ Lessons. ”

Emily sighed, “Fine.” 

#alexi mayhew #emily kaldwin #corvo attano #dishonored #potes wrotes #fanfic #Hope everyone is having a great day

[chchanging]

Finally time for the time jump. They get to be happy this time, good for them.

Mc: Rossi Mayhew, worlds hottest centenarian

“That was a little disappointing,” Rossi flicks some blood off of her blade, gazing down at the man scurrying across the floor. He cradles his bloody stump of an arm and whimpers as he scoops back as far as he can before hitting a wall. “Then again, men usually are.”

The red seeps out of his eyes, leaving them a pale green.

“Please...I’ll give you whatever you want...”

Rossi laughs out loud, rolling the kinks out of her sword wrist. “What I want...” She crouches one front of him, teasing smile on her face. “Well, I’m a simple girl, Milton. What I want is to get this over with so I can head back to my shitty little apartment and sleep off this hangover in the making. Then, in the morning, I can head back to your ex-girlfriend’s place and let her know you won’t be bothering her anymore.”

She places the point of her sword against his chest, right over his heart. With a little press, a bead of bright red blood dribbles down and soaks into his half-unbuttoned shirt.

“No...” He whimpers, shaking his head.

“It’s not nice to pick on poor little humans, you know.” She grins dangerously, fangs extending. “Not smart, either. At least while I’m in town.”

He groans desperately through his teeth as the blade sinks further and further into him. Rossi watches with that same cold smile on her face. He kicks and presses back further into the wall.

“Goodbye, Milton.”

With a final, pained cry he crumbles to ash.

Only then does Rossi allow herself to shudder. It always reminds her of...

She shakes her head, braids swaying from the messy knot she’d tied them up in. He sword finds its home on her back once more and she straightens up, brushing herself off as best she can.

150 years and she could honestly say she was starting to notice improvement where her fighting was concerned. Kamilah had been right when she’d told her that eventually it would begin to feel like she knew what she was doing—at least it did when all she was up against was a baby vamp like Milton Stevens.

She thinks about going home, but the call of the closed bar’s top shelf is too tempting. She sidles up to it and hops up onto the counter to slide around to the back. Then, she grabs a bottle of the finest stuff they have and pours herself a glass.

Something disturbs her, though. It’s a presence, somewhere across from the bar. All the lights are off, save for the neon signs hung up around where she stands. Even with her impressive night vision she can only make out a vague shape.

“Can’t sneak up on a psychic.” She calls out, sipping from her glass. “Love that you tried, though. Bold.”

The floor freaks as the figure steps slowly closer. A quiet chuckle finds its way to her ears. The hair on the back of her neck stands up—not out of fear. She knows that voice...doesn’t she?

“I was merely waiting for you to conclude your...business.” The figure seems to glance at the pile of ash on the floor when they pause. As they continue to approach, Rossi finds she can make out more details.

An all-black ensemble makes for a sleek way to blend in with the shadows. Expensive-looking shoes, slim pants, a neatly-buttoned shirt, and a long coat draped over his shoulders in place of that awful cape he used to wear.

But what strikes her most is what lies above the fancy new outfit.

His dark hair is slightly longer than when they’d first met—tied up in a stylishly unkempt knot behind his head. It leaves his angular features and silver-blue eyes on full display.

She nearly chokes on her sip of whiskey, sucking in a gasp of surprise at the same moment she goes to take a swig.

“Gaius!” She coughs out his name, feeling the alcohol’s burn get caught in the back of her throat. Her eyes water as she tries to catch her breath through the fit. He watches her with a satisfied, smug look in his eye. “What are you doing here?!”

He looks good. Better than he had when he’d left. There’s an air of contentment around him, and more life in his eyes than she thought she’d ever see again. When he smiles there is no trace of the man who’d destroyed New York, or even the man who’d been lost and without purpose afterwards. It’s gentle and warm and seemingly genuinely pleased to see her.

How ironic that the normalcy that surrounded him is so...surreal to her. She realizes how even after all these years she’d still had him categorized as such an angst trope in her head that seeing him healthy and happy made it almost impossible to reconcile in this man with the one she’d known in her mind.

“In the city? I’ve been here for nearly a year, now.” He replies nonchalantly, taking a seat at one of the stools in front of her. He shrugs the jacket from his shoulders and sets it neatly on the bar top beside him. “Here, specifically? I heard you were in town. Thought I’d pop in.”

Gaius Augustine. Just popping in.

Her brain is short circuiting.

“You...uhhhh. Well, hi...” She says, intelligently. He gives a short scoff, rolling his eyes. He’s still smiling, though, just a little bit.

“Eloquent as ever.”

Her heart skips a beat.

“Stop making fun of me!” She huffs, pouting. Her cheeks are warm with blush, but she can feel herself coming back from the shock. “It’s been over a century!”

“You’ll get used to it.” He chuckles, nodding at her glass with a question in his eyes. Despite her indignation, she grabs him a matching one and pours him a generous portion. Perhaps she is a little happy to see him, too. “The first few times running into someone from your distant past can be jarring. It wears off after about the third.”

“You’re my first.” She mutters. He smirks and raises his glass.

“I’m honored.” She huffs, feeling her cheeks redden further. “May I ask after your business with poor Milton? Or his previous girlfriend, rather?”

“Why? Did you know him?”

He shakes his head with a shrug. “Not personally—although I’ve come to know most of the vampires here at least by face and name. Keeps me from getting caught off guard. Still, if you had to kill him...”

“Worried I’m the one falling off the deep end this time?” She asks with a sly grin, and he raises a single brow as he sips from his glass without deigning to answer her. “Well, don’t. The girl hired me to work her case—wanted me to find some dirt on him that might get him to back off. She ended things but he couldn’t take the hint—was pretty much stalking her.”

“A case, hm?” He hums curiously.

“You haven’t heard? I’m the friendly neighborhood private dick.” She snorts, “Anyway, I was looking for some good old fashioned blackmail, but what I found was evidence linking him to about four other missing girls nearby places he used to live. Figured it was safer to just...”

She reaches back to tap on the hilt of her sword meaningfully.

“I made sure, first, of course! Turns out mind powers come in pretty handy in this line of work.”

“Quite the career change.” Gaius notes. “I don’t imagine Adrian fired you.”

“Got me out of New York.” She shrugs, downing the rest of her drink. “That’s really all I could ask for.”

He seems to perk up at this, watching her closely as she pours herself another. She glances up at him through her lashes and smiles again.

“Kamilah’s fine,” She states knowingly. “They both are.”

He keeps his face carefully blank, but she sees the relief pass across his eyes anyway. He swirls the whiskey in his glass. “I meant to ask about you, actually. New York was your home, once. You would’ve done anything for it. But you wanted to leave?” His gaze bores into hers. “What happened?”

Rossi gives a sarcastic smile. “You know what happened. Frankly, I’m surprised I stayed as long as I did.” She swallows, hard. Even now the emotions can hit her hard and fast, and she takes a moment to compose herself. “I just couldn’t...I couldn’t be there anymore. We all keep in touch, of course, but I had to jet before I drove myself batshit.”

“I see...” he hums gently, eyes softening with sympathy. He can sense easily that she doesn’t wish to talk about it, though, and makes to change the subject quickly. “Perhaps I should make myself scarce—I seem to remember promising your tagalong that we would stay out of each other’s way. Don’t think we should test his forgiveness just yet, do you?”

She picks up on the subtle teasing tone, and the corner of her mouth perks upward. “No need to worry—I’m on my own. Have been for a while.” He glances at her curiously. “I just...I think...”

She shakes her head, clears her thoughts. She remembers how she’d broken Jax’s heart—how he’d tried to fool her into thinking she hadn’t. Losing Lily had take its toll on Rossi in a multitude of ways. She hadn’t been the same woman afterwards, even if she’d spent a long time trying to convince her friends—and her lover—that she was.

Eventually it all had come crashing down.

The worst part of all, perhaps, had been how understanding he had been. Jax had lost things, too—lost people he cared the world for. He’d lost the man who had been his father in all ways but blood, and he knew that those things changed you; even if it was the last thing you wanted. He’d understood that she could never be the woman that he’d fallen in love with again. He’d let her go knowing that he may never get her back.

The guilt of it twists her insides the way it does when she thinks of Lily.

“We’re still on good terms, it’s just that I...” She ponders the right way to word it, wondering, herself, what had really gone wrong. “I think I just tried to force things back to the way they were. To ignore everything that had changed. It just...wasn’t sustainable. I left before I could cause any of them more trouble.”

His eyes flick up to hers from where they’d come to rest on the liquid in his glass. There is understanding there, too. That night he’d left because he had to, but she thinks he would’ve anyway if they’d given him the option to stay.

Kamilah and Adrian had both wanted him gone, and at the time it had been the greatest gift he’d been able to give. So he’d left to find himself, to perhaps become a person who could one day face them proudly.

Rossi wants to laugh at the similarities that tie them together like little threads. It seems like a lifetime ago that she would’ve despised any connection to him. It had been a lifetime ago.

They look at each other in silence for a long time. It’s a loaded look, filled with years and years of things left unsaid. She wonders if he can tell how many times she’d considered tracking him down—saying what she’d meant to the night he’d left.

Funny, how it had taken her the rest of her natural life to figure out what it was. Funny, how all the experience and confidence in the world couldn’t quell the fear of finding him with someone new.

That strange flutter inside is back. It seems that hadn’t dulled with age.

When she speaks again her words are barely above a whisper, and they are too breathless for a being who doesn’t technically have to breathe.

“Another life...” She murmurs, and the connection between their eyes seems to ignite with electricity. “Is it as different as you imagined?”

His head tilts. With quizzical eyes he studies her closely, and she holds her breath as she waits to see if he finds what he’s looking for. After a moment he stands from his bar stool. She bites her lip, heart racing.

Maybe he will leave, she considers. Perhaps what little interest he’d had all those years ago had faded. Worse, maybe she had imagined it in the first place.

Thoughts swarming, she doesn’t really register he’s moved again until he’s rounded the bar and stopped in front of her. His thumb grazes her jaw.

“Would you like to find out?” He breathes, leaning over her and tilting her chin gently. “With me?”

The last time they’d been so close—looked so deeply into each other—she’d been possessed by the same power that had ruined Rheya.

The thought gives her pause enough that she comes back to herself. A smile teases the edges of her mouth until it’s a full-blown grin.

“Missed you...” She says instead of answering his question, deflecting seriousness with levity as is her specialty. “I seem to remember requesting a postcard.”

“I’ll find some way to make it up to you.”

His smile is wider, brighter, happier than she’s ever seen in an instance outside of memories of the past, and it remains that way up until the moment their lips collide. She loops her arms around his neck and tangles her fingers in his hair. His arms lock around her waist.

Another life, she thinks, excited for what something like that may bring.

#bloodbound #fic #my fic #gaius x mc #I might write cuter stuff from now on depending on any ideas i get #this was as far as I thought ahead as far as writing her canon

[thedeaditeslayer]

My worst moment: Bruce Campbell and unmanageable costumes — 'no one ever talks about the pinches, the scrapes, the chafing'.

Here’s an article where Bruce Campbell shares an interesting story from on the set of Army of Darkness. 

According to Bruce Campbell, who hosts the latest version of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” on the Travel Channel, there is a decent percentage of risk-takers featured on the show. “Probably 20% of our stories are daredevil-ish and that’s always fascinating,” he said. “Who does that? Who are these people? Who’s crazy enough to launch themselves on a motorcycle doing flips? Or smash things with your head or pull things with your hair? How did that all come to be?”

Campbell’s role is mostly to provide voiceover, which means he has yet to meet the individuals spotlighted. “But I hope to because I do a lot of conventions and I tour and man, nothing would be better than to get some of these folks doing a live demonstration at one of these conventions. There are astonishing skills here.”

Does Campbell have any notable skills?

“Oh, amazing skills. I can read a teleprompter like nobody’s business. I do have one skill I developed: It’s a diagonal banana slice. If you just slice your banana — bing, bang, bing — the little slices that land in your bowl, 42% of them are going to stick together because they’re all the same shape and angle. So I do an alternating angular slice. You cut diagonal, spin the banana, cut on the opposite diagonal. And now these diagonal chunks are falling in and when they hit each other, they are bouncing off each other there’s no way they’re going to stick together. You’re welcome.”

He was quick to point out the skills highlighted on the show are “things that you and I could not do. When you see what these folks have gone through in their lives and what they’ve overcome, talk about their worst moment! A lot of people in these episodes have had moments that changed their lives and this is what they did to overcome it or deal with it. It’s surprisingly uplifting.”

When asked about his own worst moment in a career that has spanned many incarnations of the “Evil Dead” franchise as well the USA series “Burn Notice” (and much, much more, detailed in his memoir “If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor" and its sequel "Hail to the Chin: Further Confessions of a B Movie Actor"), Campbell recalled a story about a costume that got in the way of a certain bodily function.

My worst moment …

“I was shooting ‘Army of Darkness’ (from 1992), which was the third ‘Evil Dead’ movie and it was our version of ‘The Vikings’ — when we were kids, (director) Sam Raimi and me and some of the other guys, we liked ‘The Vikings,’ which is this Kirk Douglas movie (from 1958) where it was like, attacking castles and burning oil and stuff like that. We were all at our physical and mental best and we had enough of a budget that we could make this big epic.

“In the movie, I play two characters: Good Ash, who is the main character, and also his rival, Bad Ash, who is possessed and is a demon. The demon makeup took three hours to put on and I’m in a demon costume with a demon suit-of-armor. And because I’m possessed, I’m wearing contact lenses that blocked out my vision and I have these demon gloves that are like these Playtex gloves you would wear to wash your dishes or whatever, but they’re monster gloves and they have two-inch nails on them. Like, sharp, menacing fingernails. They were so clumsy. I couldn’t do anything once I had them on. Couldn’t open the door, couldn’t hold a cup of coffee.

“We were shooting in the desert outside of Palmdale, California. It’s the middle of the night — and I have to go to the bathroom. And my only option was out in the darkness, somewhere in the desert. There was no port-o-potty at this particular place.

“So someone, like a production assistant with a walkie talkie, was like, ‘Alright, I’ll take Bruce by his arm and lead him off the set over to some yucca plant that’s out of the light.’ It was probably out behind this castle where we were shooting.

“So I’m standing there and realize, I can’t unzip my own fly — let alone get access to it in order to do what I needed to do, because of the fingernails on the monster gloves. It takes two people to put those gloves on and they’re not easy to remove. Once they’re on, you’re not taking them off to do anything. They’re on. They’re yours for the night.

“So, what am I going to do — call my wife over to help do this? Because I wasn’t going to ask the walkie-talkie person to do this. So I said, ‘You need to find my wife and bring her over because there’s an issue here. I cannot access myself to do what I need to do.’

“And I’m thinking: Is this what I’ve stayed in the film business for? For this? Is this what it’s come to? You know, you work hard and train hard and you can’t even urinate in the dessert. The raw indignity of it!

“My wife did end up helping out. She figured out what was going on pretty quick, no one needed to explain it. She was the costume designer on the movie so she was partially to blame for my misery. Her name is Ida Gearon and I said, ‘Ida, look: You and your department, we gotta figure something out here! I need easy access.’ She laughed but it wasn’t funny to me. After that, I think we cut a slit in the glove so you could bend the glove back and pop your real hand out of it. So a box cutter was the solution. Easy solution, took four seconds.

“If she hadn’t been on set that day, the makeup effects guys would have had to come out and remove the gloves — and that would have been a half hour that we didn’t have.”

How long before was Campbell able to laugh about the moment?

“About 10 years later it got funny (laughs). It took about a decade to get funny. It’s still not really hilarious. That was early in our marriage so it was a good test of our relationship, I suppose. It encouraged her to come up with a solution so it was a win-win, as they say.

“Sometime costume designers don’t think about the practical side of things. Or just the weight of what you’re wearing. I did a TV show called ‘Jack of All Trades’ where I was a masked marauder that always wore this velvety red cape, and I put the thing on and it almost gave me scoliosis. I gave it back to the costume designer and said, ‘Put this on and do a sword fight, I dare you. This needs to be a half or a third of the weight.’ She wanted it to flow right, which was absolutely correct. But I was like, ‘We’ve got to find a middle ground between what looks good and what is manageable.’

“The Batman costume? No thanks. Everybody’s like, ‘Bruce, would you ever want to be Batman?’ Not a chance in hell. I would be Commissioner Gordon, no problem — wear a nice suit, double-breasted pinstripe, everything’s good. But nothing could compel me to take a role where there’s a lot of prosthetics or that kind of all-encompassing costume. Earlier on in my career, no problem, get me in that suit, heck yeah! But now, you couldn’t write a soliloquy that could get me into one of those suits. I’m busy fishing.

“I’m not the first guy to say this, by the way. If you get cast as Batman or Spider-Man or Superman, kiss your bathroom goodbye. Or wear a catheter, or something. It’s the nightmare of these costumes. Hey, hurray — you’re Iron Man! Guess what? You’re never urinating again unless it’s in your suit.

“I mean, this is the nightmare of the modern-day actor wearing these stupid costumes (laughs). Everyone’s saying, ‘Oh God, Robert Downey Jr., he’s Iron Man, what a great career!’ and he’s probably cursing that stupid suit to this day. And the rashes, no one ever talks about their rashes — the pinches, the scrapes, the chafing, oh the chafing! I bet they sell more talcum powder to Marvel productions than to anybody else. Our beloved Chewbacca just passed on (played by Peter William Mayhew) and the only thing he ever talked about was how stuffy and uncomfortable that suit was. It’s like acting inside of a yak.

“So that was a real low point for me. People think you’re starring in a movie for Universal, this is the highpoint of your life. And actually it’s like, no, this is a low point.”

The takeaway …

“Don’t wear elaborate costumes (laughs). It’s almost as simple as that! Just don’t go there.

“Or, make sure you go through a NASA-style testing process where it’s like: Put me through all the possibilities. I’m sure the new Batman is going to benefit from everything they learned from all the previous Batman costumes, all the predecessors. Plus, I’ll bet the materials are lightweight now. If it were me, I’d call them all — George Clooney, Val Kilmer, Christian Bale — and be like, ‘Guys, what do I need to know about the dumb suit?’ I’d be right on top of that.

“It’s a thing called prep and it’s a lost art. I actually ran into a producer who had a T-shirt that said, ‘Prep is for (losers)’ — on his shirt! That’s what we’re dealing with.”

#Bruce Campbell

[tshepiso-reads-books]

Well, That Didn't Go As Expected | The Invasion of the Tearling by Erika Johansen

Started: July 7th, 2018

Finished: July 13th, 2018

I had such high expectations for The Invasion of the Tearling [Goodreads] by Erika Johansen. It's predecessor blew me out of the water and set up an intense political fantasy with well written characters and an erapturing plot, but this sequel failed to deliver and left me very disappointed.

Summary

Invasion of the Tearling kicks off immediately after the events of Queen of the Tearling as Kelsea has the face the ever encroaching Mort invasion. Kelsea is also thrust 300 years into the past as she experiences vivid visions of a pre-Crossing dystopian America. As the Mort move closer to New London her visions consume her more and more and her Tear Sapphires cause a transformation in her.

What I Liked:

Invasion of the Tearling is set both in the fantastical timeline as well as flashing back to 200 years previously to a dystopian New York. While skeptical of the dystopian subplot at first I got really invested in Lily Mayhew's story.  It was very well written with interesting characters and a fast paced narrative that I ended up liking much more that the main plot.

Johansen's character writing is still great especially her side characters. I thoroughly enjoyed every every one of them; from Aisa’s fierce determination to become a Queen’s Guard to Father Tyler's balancing act in the citadel. She manages to flesh out her side characters well enough to be interesting and make this world feel lived in.

Kelsea has an interesting internal conflict in the story. She's battling with the choices she made in book 1 and that has some very interesting effects on her psyche and the choices she makes throughout the story.

What I Hated:

What frustrates me the most about this book is that, while it has the appearance of a plot in actuality nothing of consequence happens until the last two chapters. The plot is forced into passivity, Johansen throws away the possibility of either militaristic or  political solutions to the Mort invasion in favor of a magical Hail Mary at the end of the book. This means our story lacks any real tension because for the entire book I knew we were waiting for Kelsea to pull out some magical solution to their problems in the final act.

What also really bothered me is that none of Kelsea's actions had any direct consequences for her. In this book Kelsea makes bad decision, after bad decisions both in her personal life and as queen, but that's not the problem. I don't need my main characters perfectly competent all the time, let their emotions get the better of them, let them do dumb shit. But every bad choice must have a consequence. While Kelsea is constantly told she's doing dumb shit, nothing comes from it. The plot isn't significantly affected and no major confrontations are had. This just left me underwhelmed.

Minor Things That Peeved Me (Mild Spoilers):

Johansen doesn't develop any characters in the Queen's Guard (except Pen and Mace) yet I'm supposed to care about them.

There was an entire plot point surrounding Kelsea's beauty. (again)

The Holy Father was set up to be a major threat in the last book but does nothing to significantly hurt Kelsea or people she cares about.

I'm Very Salty™ that Colonel Hall (aka the best character in this book) got like 2 scenes in his POV.

Still no female friendships. I really thought Margarita was going to be much more significant.

Why did Mace let a 12 year old guard Kelsea to a Mort encampment?????

Kelsea traded the Tear sapphires for a three year guarantee. Three years!!!!!! That's  just a shitty fucking deal right there.

Stars 

🌟🌟🌟

Ultimately, I think this book suffered from major second book slump. You can see this in the absence of a plot that built to a (frankly underwhelming) cliffhanger ending and the lack of consequences I know are being saved for the last book. The sequels I've read these past 4 months have been pretty bad, maybe I should learn to lower my expectations.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

CW: Self harm, graphic rape 

#YA #Fantasy #YA Fantasy #Book Review #Queen of the Tearling #Invasion of the Tearling

[isingonly4myangel]

Sibella's pregnant and she slips on some ice and falls while exiting her carriage at Highhurst.

So I might have gone a little (a whole lot) more in-depth than I’m sure you were expecting- whoops! If people like it, I’d like to add another section, so let me know if you read it and want to see more! Also, could be potentially triggering. Thanks!

Sibella couldn’t wait to get to Highhurst. She had been with Lionel in their house for nearly two weeks, on the verge of twenty-two weeks pregnant, and she was absolutely miserable.

The doctors had warned her against getting pregnant again. Rose’s journey into the world had nearly ended very badly for both of them, and Sibella had every intention of heeding the doctors’ advice. But Lionel had other ideas. Namely, a son.

She felt awful. From the moment she knew she was pregnant she had been terrified. At times she grew so anxious that her heart would race and she felt as though she couldn’t breathe. And then there were the headaches. So painful she could do nothing but draw the curtains against the winter sun and crawl into bed, they were persistent and nothing seemed to make them go away. In the last few days she was so upset that her stomach had begun to hurt, a sharp pain that she was sure would disappear if she could only calm down.

Rose was with the nanny for the afternoon, playing in the snow in the park, and would join her mother at Highhurst the next day. Lionel had taken the car to drive out to the seaside on business, leaving her to hire a carriage. As they jostled along on the way to Highhurst, she found herself staring blankly at the wall opposite her, and the print on it seemed to blur together into an abstract pattern. Blinking hard, she turned her gaze to look out the window, but the passing trees hung with snow were fuzzy as well. She covered her face with her hands, praying that the driver would somehow know that he should move faster.

After what seemed like an eternity, they finally arrived in front of the castle, and the driver jumped down from his perch to help her out. But as she stood up and took his hand, she felt terribly lightheaded and everything she looked at was blurry. Taking a deep breath of cold air, she knew that everything would be alright if she could only get inside. She could see Monty coming towards her, but there were two of him, which she found peculiar.

In her confusion she did not notice where she was placing her foot stepping down onto the ground. The moment her shoe came in contact with the slick ice, she was falling. She landed hard on her side, feeling nothing but cold for a moment. Remembering to breathe, she forced frigid air into her lungs, and turned her head slowly to look at Monty, who had come running to her side.

“Sibella, my god, are you alright?” he questioned, but she did not reply. It was dawning on her that there was pain in her ankle and hip from the fall, and she felt strange. Then, suddenly, her hand flew to her chest. Her eyes grew wide, staring at nothing, and Monty grabbed a hold of her as she began to shake.

Convulsing violently, her breath came only in sharp gasps. Monty tried to hold her still while shouting for help. Phoebe came tearing through the castle doors, followed by several members of the staff.

“Sibella!” Phoebe cried as she skidded to a stop by her husband and dropped to her knees. “What happened?” she asked frantically.

“She slipped on the ice, and then she- I don’t know what’s-”

“Monty, she’s having a seizure!” the brunette exclaimed. “Jamie!” she cried, turning to look behind her.

“Yes ma'am!” the chauffeur stepped forward.

“Bring the car, now!” the brunette commanded, and the boy took off running. Sibella’s body seemed to slow its movements and before long she was still. “Monty, we have to take her to the hospital.” He nodded his agreement and lifted the blonde woman carefully to place her in the back of the car.

***

Sibella’s first thought was that every muscle in her body hurt. Her head was throbbing and she ached everywhere. Her eyes fluttered open, but she quickly closed them against the harsh light coming from above. She heard people talking nearby but could not decipher their words. A slight whine escaped her as she began to stir, and the voices were immediately silent.

“She’s awake,” gasped Phoebe, immediately in the chair beside the bed. Sibella opened her eyes upon hearing her and the brunette took her hand. As she looked around her slowly, Sibella recognised that she was in a hospital. The sheets covering her were a stark white, as were the curtains and the coat of the older man standing next to Monty.

“Mrs Holland,” spoke the man. “So glad you’ve rejoined us. My name is Doctor Mayhew. How are you feeling?”

“Everything hurts,” mumbled Sibella. “What happened? I remember falling, and then… I don’t know what I remember.”

“As I understand it, you slipped on some ice getting out of your carriage. You then had a seizure, and were brought here by Lord and Lady Navarro.”

“A seizure?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. I have a few questions for you, if you would be so kind,” said the doctor with a gentle smile. Sibella nodded, and struggled to sit up. With help from Phoebe, she was propped up against a pillow, her body resenting the movement.

“Mrs Holland,” Doctor Mayhew began. “Have you noticed any unusual symptoms over the course of your pregnancy? Perhaps a sense of anxiety, any pain, shortness of breath?”

“I have indeed experienced a great deal of anxiety. As I’m sure the Earl and Countess have told you, my first pregnancy was… difficult, and I was advised by my doctors not to have another baby.”

“And yet you are pregnant again?” asked the doctor, only curiosity in his voice rather than the judgement that Sibella had braced herself for.

“I am,” she replied, a touch of bitterness to the statement. “My husband… well, he does not take kindly to refusals of any sort.” Phoebe pressed her hand reassuringly, knowing all too well what Sibella was referring to.

“Has this second pregnancy been as difficult as your first?”

“Even more so, I’d say,” sighed Sibella. “You mentioned anxiety, which has certainly been present, and a shortness of breath comes with it. As for pain, I have terrible headaches, and often a pain in my stomach, though I don’t know how unusual any of that might be.” The doctor scribbled a few notes on the clipboard that he held before looking up at her again.

“And how were you feeling prior to your fall today?”

“Honestly, I felt terrible. I’d been rather upset since the morning, somewhat on edge. My back hurt, and in the carriage I grew slightly dizzy. There was something wrong with my vision, too, things looked… blurred, and sometimes duplicated.” Mayhew wrote for a moment, before turning to address the three other people in the room.

“Thank you, Mrs Holland. I’m going to share your file and my notes with one or two of my colleagues- I’d like their thoughts on the matter. I should be back very soon, and hopefully we’ll be able to tell you what’s going on.”

The doctor excused himself and left the three of them alone. The moment the door had closed behind him, Sibella leaned back against the pillow, her fragile mask crumbling and her eyes drifting closed. She felt Phoebe’s soft hands against her skin, resting on her cheek and tucking back her hair. One of Monty’s hands pressed hers, and his other rested on her rounded stomach.

“How are you, my darling?” questioned Phoebe, her fingers brushing against Sibella’s temple.

“I ache everywhere. What do they think is wrong with me? And the baby? Have they said anything to you?”

“You have a twisted ankle, a sprained wrist, and possibly a concussion from the fall,” Monty told her. “There’s obviously something else, but they won’t tell us. They just asked a lot of questions about you and about Rose, and Lionel. We told them you were only coming to the castle for tea today, we decided it was best.”

“I feel awful,” the blonde murmured, tears welling up in her eyes. “Something’s wrong, I know it.”

“Oh, my love, everything’s going to be alright. The doctors are going to make you well again,” Phoebe spoke, wiping away a tear on the blonde’s cheek with her thumb. Sibella wrapped her fingers around Phoebe’s and her other hand held more tightly to Monty’s.

“Please talk to me?” Sibella looked pleadingly at each of her lovers.

“Of course,” said Monty gently, with a smile. “Do you remember the games of tag that you and Grahame and I would play?”

“In the back yard of my parents’ house,” Sibella nodded and returned his smile tearfully. “And when we’d run ourselves into exhaustion, we’d collapse on the lawn until we caught our breath. But then one of us would tap another and scream ‘you’re it’ and off we’d go again.”

Stories continued even long after Sibella’s tears had turned to smiles, but she felt her heart drop through the floor as Doctor Mayhew entered the room. Behind him was another man, his white medical coat matching the older doctor’s.

“This is Doctor Jones, I’ve been consulting with him. Doctor Jones, this is Mrs Holland, and Lord and Lady Navarro.” The younger doctor tipped his head to each of them as they were introduced.

“Mrs Holland, your condition is… concerning,” spoke Doctor Jones, choosing his words carefully. “The symptoms you described are all cause for concern, but it is the seizure that is most alarming.” He glanced over at Mayhew and cleared his throat before continuing. “Mrs Holland, it is our belief that you had a condition called pre-eclampsia, which has now escalated into full eclampsia. Signs of pre-eclampsia include the severe headaches you told us of, as well as the dizziness, the anxiety, and the pain in your abdomen. The most common characterisations of eclampsia are blurred or double vision and seizures, and we understand that you’ve experienced both.” Sibella nodded mutely.

“How do we treat it?” asked Phoebe, doing her best to sound regal and controlled and not let anyone know that her heart was threatening to pound right out of her chest.

“The only cure is birth. After you have delivered your baby, your symptoms will disappear in a matter of days. But every moment your child is inside you is a moment that the lives of both you and your baby are at risk. Pre-eclampsia is a very serious condition, and usually develops later in a pregnancy. But if it progresses into eclampsia, as it has with you… Well, we cannot wait for you to carry to full term.”

“But it’s so early!” gasped Sibella, placing a hand protectively over her stomach.

“It’s too early,” Phoebe breathed. “It’s not enough time.” Both doctors looked grave. 

“No,” said Doctor Mayhew, stepping forward. “It is not enough time. But as of this moment we have a chance of saving Mrs Holland’s life. Surely that is better than losing them both.”

“Do it,” spoke Monty quietly, his voice shaking and his face drained of all colour. “Save her, you must save her.”

“And we will,” said Doctor Mayhew reassuringly. “Provided we can induce labour as soon as possible.”

“I can’t!” exclaimed Sibella, and all heads turned to look at her in shock. “Not without Lionel here, he’d be furious. He wasn’t present for Rose’s birth and he didn’t believe me when I told him what the doctors said, if I do this without him here, he’ll-” Her voice broke as she choked back a sob.

“Where is your husband?” asked Doctor Jones.

“Brighton. If you telephone him at the office there, he’d be back in only a few hours- he’s driving a motorcar.” Words fell desperately from Sibella’s lips, laced with fear, and her grip on Monty’s hand tightened considerably. There would be such hell for her to pay if Lionel was not present. The two doctors looked at each other for a moment before Jones answered.

“I’ll be blunt with you, Mrs Holland- it would make me nervous to wait. But if you are adamant that your husband be here, I’ll telephone him at once myself.”

“Thank you,” Sibella breathed, fighting back tears. “Thank you.”​

#gglam #writings

[seeselfblack]

The Quilt of Romare Bearden’s Life

For 30 years, the artist worked for the New York City Department of Welfare, a day job that was much more than a necessary evil... 

...It’s a time-honored tradition for artists to have a day job to make ends meet: Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive; Philip Glass a plumber; Richard Serra, perhaps predictably, worked in a steel mill. But it’s generally understood that the day job is a necessary evil, providing the rent money that makes the art possible. For Bearden and many other artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals, though, a day job in the Department of Welfare (renamed the Department of Social Services in 1967) was a formative part of their art and commitment to social justice. Especially during the ’60s, a circuit of artists-cum-social-workers in New York City formed across the disciplines: Writers Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, painter Danny Simmons, and playwright Loften Mitchell are just a handful. Yet none stayed as long as Bearden.

Lloyd Addison, a fellow caseworker with the department, coined the name “the Umbra Workshop,” a precursor to the Black Arts Movement. Other co-founders of Umbra who worked for the department included poet Tom Dent and novelist and sociologist Calvin Hernton, best known for the 1965 study Sex and Racism in America. 

Novelist, playwright, poet, and professor Rashidah Ismaili, who attended many of the Umbra meetings, recalls the intellectual ferment and burgeoning social consciousness of the Lower East Side during that period of unrest in the 1960s. “We all found a way to survive,” she says. As for working for the Welfare Department, she recalls that “it was the easiest way to get a job, because they only required a bachelor’s degree. You could be a music major.”

“I think everybody saw themselves as being political and progressive and involved,” Ismaili adds. “It was extremely vital and important to the African-American artistic community, because there were so few places where the kind of life that they needed to live in pursuit of their work was available to them.”

Many African-American novelists who worked for the department became forerunners of intersectional feminism and womanism, positioning their work as a tacit response to the demeaning rhetoric that would culminate in the controversial Moynihan Report, published in 1965. Lorde, the self-identified “Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother” and author of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, worked as a social investigator for the Bureau of Child Welfare from 1959 to 1960. When Lorde was growing up, her mother worried that “daughters who want to write don’t get civil service jobs,” Lorde recalled in a 1976 interview with Deborah Wood. “In those days, if you got a good job with the city then you were set.” 

“Bearden’s many years working in social services positioned him for a close-up view of the life of people,” says Diedra Harris-Kelley, co-director of the Romare Bearden Foundation. “He likely saw the persistence of family rituals and human bonds across cultures, and this bolstered the universal concepts he often spoke to so well. He was a keen observer, and like a good storyteller, took it all in, then riffed from his memories.” According to Robert G. O’Meally, the editor of the forthcoming The Romare Bearden Reader, “The figure of the artist as active in the world and trying to make sure people get fed and sheltered and justice is quite true to his vision of what the artist has to be doing.” 

This collection of artists working as civil servants was not without precedent. Starting in 1935, the $4.9 billion New Deal–era Works Progress Administration employed millions of people, and many artists found work through the various subagencies, including the Federal Writers’ Project, the Federal Music Project, and the Federal Art Project. One of the largest public-works and infrastructure initiatives in the nation’s history, the WPA employed many of Bearden’s peers, including his cousin and 306 group co-founder Charles “Spinky” Alston; painters Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence; and writers Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Nelson Algren. Bearden likely would have participated in the WPA, but his family’s household income was above the prescribed limit. In 1943, the WPA was dissolved, and in its absence, in New York at least, civil-service jobs, particularly in the Department of Welfare, became the best recourse for many fledgling artists trying to cobble together an income.

According to the municipal archives, Bearden began as a social investigator on July 29, 1935, just after he graduated from New York University with a BS in education. He initially worked at 100 West 116th Street and earned $1,680 a year—equivalent to $30,852 in 2018. Later, he was transferred to an office on 139th Street, and eventually to the Non-Residence Welfare Center at 119 West 31st Street. Toward the end of his career, he was earning $8,200 ($60,000)—around what is now the low-end price for some Bearden collages. His tenure with the department constitutes a kind of shadow to Bearden’s artistic career, trailing along his picaresque journey from social realism to abstract expressionism and finally to collage: his studies with George Grosz at the Art Students League; his military service as a sergeant in the all-black 372nd Infantry; his early-’50s sabbatical from painting during a foray into songwriting, resulting in the Billy Eckstine hit “Seabreeze”; his return to the Department of Welfare in 1952, when he was assigned to the Romany caseload; the formation of the Spiral group, a civil-rights-minded collective of African-American artists that included Alston, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff; and, ultimately, his international success...   read full article over at the nation.com

See also: 

- Post Colonial Thoughts: Romare Bearden and Kitsch

- The Romare Bearden Foundation 

- Romare Bearden, Spiral Group and the March Toward Artistic Identity — WHO IS THE NEGRO ARTIST and what is his responsibility? Ever mindful of the pivotal period in which he was living, Romare Bearden (1911-1988) set about answering these cultural questions by bringing together the Spiral group and embarking on a monumental effort to document the canon of African American artists.As civil rights leaders prepared for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Bearden gathered with fellow black artists in New York to discuss their role in the movement. Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, James Yeargans, Felrath Hines, Richard Mayhew and William Pritchard were all in attendance at the July 5 meeting at Bearden’s studio. 

The collective formed the Spiral group, “for the purpose of discussing the commitment of the Negro artist in the present struggle for civil liberties, and as a discussion group to consider common aesthetic problems,” according to “A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present,” a comprehensive reference volume by Bearden and Harry Henderson (1914-2003)...

[warrioroflondonbelow]

II @coinflippedhumanity

Blank, blue eyes stared up at the room’s ceiling. For what felt like hours the Scotsman did nothing but toss and turn in his bed, constantly bundling up and shedding off his blankets; he didn’t even bother to check what time it was anymore. The facts were these, yesterday at 1:45 a.m. on the dot Richard Mayhew witnessed the brutal murder of his beloved brother, Andy before the police stepped in, scaring the perp away, and sending Richard into some rinky-dink hotel as a sad excuse of a place for him to go into hiding (Were no other hotels available? Perhaps, one with less roaches?). Worst of all, Richard could have sworn that the person that killed his brother wasn’t human at all. He caught sight of the dead give-away upon the killer’s temple. A glowing circle. Andy’s killer was an Android, they had to be.

Of course, the cops didn’t seem to buy into that. They dubbed the Scotsman’s accusation as nothing more than shock, after all, they had little to no evidence. To make matters worse, Richard got a call some hours ago that they’d be sending him something of a bodyguard to keep an eye on him. Bodyguard my arse. Richard knew the only reason they were stationing one of their people to watch over him was to make sure he doesn’t act on his erroneous mistake and ruin the case.

He was just about to pour himself his third class of scotch until somebody began knocking on the door. “Comin’! Comin’! Hold yer’ horses,” he yawned before downing his next glass. Throat burning, vision growing blurry, not to mention his muscles getting weary from the plummet of adrenaline due to the hours passed, Richard meandered his way to the door. Not his fault that his soon-to-be bodyguard would see him in such a chaotic state. Who knows, if Richard was lucky, perhaps his presence would scare the other away.

“You must be the-...” The Scotsman stopped dead in his tracks, words lagging against the tip of his tongue. His brows shot up when he noticed the circle round the stranger’s temple. “Who the bloody hell are you?”

#dbh;au #the blog train goes queue queue #conflippedhumanities #//hope this is alright? :>//

[corellianangel]

Fan Review: Solo: A Star Wars Story

May contain minor/some spoilers after the cut.

I suspect that Solo: A Star Wars Story might be a bit like its title character. A bit rough at the start, maybe shady, pretty good-looking, and definitely out to get your money. But, as it goes on, it becomes more and more apparent how good and truly nostalgic and lovable it is.

This is a film that “nobody wanted.” Which means...what? I wanted it. When I saw Star Wars ANH, I wanted to know all about that cool Solo guy. And finally, 41 years later, I got my wish. And yeah… I’m mostly happy. After Last Jedi, I was pretty much done with the franchise, so it’s not like I went in with high hopes.

Solo is a relatively low stakes reprieve from the “we must save the world/galaxy/universe” all-or-nothing epic trope that has plagued us for the last few years. This is an adventure, a coming of age, and a western heist. Stakes are high, but only for the characters you are relating with onscreen, making it a curious addition to this year’s blockbusters.

Make no mistake; This is a love-letter to original trilogy Star Wars fans. It’s Han Solo in an Indiana Jones style adventure ( and what could be more fun than that).

4 out of 5 stars.

The first minute of Solo is exactly how a movie about the titular character should begin. But then it immediately lags, then even more so under ill-paced exposition. As soon Han goes solo though, it gains momentum. Then a short few minutes later as Woody Harrelson appears, things get rolling outright.

Alden Ehrenreich takes a bit of time to slide into Han’s scuffed boots, both onscreen and in our fan hearts. But when he does, it works wonderfully. He’s not the sexy gruff cynic Harrison Ford portrayed. No, he’s a “Kid,” who's got dreams. He’s a romantic. He’s wide-eyed, immature, and even petulant at times. But like Harrison’s portrayal, he’s arrogant, talented, goofy, jealous, easily embarrassed and will gladly spin a terrible lie. And oh yes… he can turn it on. Not at first, no… that’s really awkward ( more on that with Emilia). He’s not Harrison Ford by a long shot, but when given the chance later in the film, he makes a scene his own, and it’s HOT.

Unfortunately though, Alden is easily five inches shorter than 6’ 1” Harrison. And it’s glaringly obvious (especially to me, as I am quite a tall person). Sadly, Alden’s 1” platform 2”+ heel boots can only add so much. Otherwise, I’m satisfied with his portrayal. Alden’s a great actor, he had huge boots to fill, and I think he’s really been treated unfairly by the fans. Give the kid a chance, he might win you over.

Donald Glover IS Lando Calrissian though.  He’s sexy, sauve and even a bit silly ( in all the right ways… make no mistake).  I daresay Mr.Glover has taken Billy Dee William’s place in my heart as the epitome of Lando. Whether he’s coming on to Han, or Qi’ra or some unspecified alien species, he’s a pansexual on the level of Oberyn Martell from Game of Thrones. An arrogant playboy badass, who loves all the finest things. He is willing to enjoy everything life has to offer, and why not? It’s hard not to love him as a result. Lando movie, anyone?

Tobias Beckett is everything Han wants to be. Beckett is also in love with fellow crook Val, and his attachment to her is cemented firmly in a couple of scenes, which unlike the Han/Qi’ra scenes–have great chemistry. And Woody Harrelson’s portrayal of yet another grizzled mentor is stunning. I found him much more appealing than Harrelson’s equivalent character from Hunger Games. Though the mantel is starting to wear. Don’t get me wrong. I adore Woody Harrelson. His being in this film gave me a reason to think I might just like it. I’m just not sure I want to see him as yet another badass mentor after this.

When Thandie Newton appeared in Beloved back in 1998, I was an instant fan. I’d seen her before in a few other flicks, but she blew that one out of the water as the title character. Since then she had worked steadily in a number of critically acclaimed roles. I was absolutely thrilled to see her in this as Val. And utterly heartbroken that she was totally underused. When Val is onscreen, she overshadows everyone else, even Beckett. It’s a shame we don’t see more of her than we do. Boo!

Emilia Clarke as Qi’ra…Hmm.  She’s cute, charming, and tries her hand at swordplay here. But honestly, the Queen of Dragons is a poor fit. The original casting call was for anything other than yet another white brunette. And with amazing ladies like Tessa Thompson in the running, why oh why did we end up with Emilia? If not racism (God, I hope not); Ang’s answer: Think $$$, from Game of Thrones fans in theatre seats. I can think of no other reason. Her chemistry with Alden is tepid at best ( and any of that comes much, much later). I feel bad for Emilia here. I think she was miscast, and that tarnish will always stay with the fans. ( P.s. : the three adult heterosexual males I watched the movie with, were over-the-moon smitten with her. To each his own. I guess…)

On to the non-humans...

Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca is physically brilliant. He’s stolen my heart as Chewie from the lovely Peter Mayhew (sorry Pete) over the last three movies. But honestly, we discover nothing new about Chewbacca in this. Zero. It’s rather unfortunate. I wish I could say more. But we learn more about Chewie in episode three than this. A missed opportunity. Sorry Chewie. For some reason Disney put your character in the doghouse here.

L3-37 is another definite weak spot in Solo. We have a snarky female droid (yay!) as a droid-rights advocate (cool!).  But it’s so completely overwrought. Only Lando’s constant eye rolls save this character from being as ridiculous as Jar Jar Binks. Which is another shame, because I felt she fills in the current canon equivalent of Lando’s copilot droid Vuffi Raa, from the EU/Legends novels from waaay back in the 1980’s, (interestingly they are both pilots, are both self-aware droids and have vaguely parallel fates) Some editing issues arise as far as L3′s character is concerned too. She’ll be leaning, casually watching,  while droids are being slaughtered in front of her, but only interferes with other robots later in the same scene? Why?? Were the first dead droids not good enough for her to save? It’s inconsistent, poor editing; and that really hurts the character. Sorry Phoebe Waller-Bridge, you did great job with what you had. I’m not sure that the script/editing was as good as you deserved.

The spaceship the Millennium Falcon is 100% a full character in this too. Without giving too much away, she represents her pilots as they sit at the helm. She’s treated with more respect - reverence even -  in this, than any other film. And I can say this is her movie as much as it is Han’s. Millennium Falcon fans, you are in for a treat!

And the bad guys...or one guy anyways....

Paul Bettany is chilling and utterly convincing as the gangster Dryden Vos. He also has much better chemistry with Qi’ra than Han.  I’m fairly certain this is mainly due to Paul’s astonishing acting ability.  He first came to my attention as the title character in the darkly funny UK crime film Gangster No.1. I was floored by him then and he’s still blowing me away, even as the rather challenging character Vision in the MCU. Bettany does not disappoint in Solo either. He took over this role with zero preparation, with the weight of replacing another respected actor at the last minute in an extremely troubled production. And the optics of having a white European actor taking over from an African-american are...ermm...not the best. He pulls it off, though. But I can’t help but wonder what Michael K Williams would have brought to the role. Vos is a soulless psychopath under Bettany, not unlike his character in Gangster No.1.  Would Williams have brought the tragic–almost romantic deep spirit and inner strength he brought to his gangster Chalky White in Boardwalk Empire to Vos instead? It’s rather sad we will never know.

I don’t think I can say much else about the other antagonist(s) without spoiling a bunch. But let’s just say...wow! Well done! Surprises and fan service all around!

There is something missing here too. We never see Han as an imperial pilot. Nor the promised Shakespeare-inspired comedic comic book characters that Ron Howard teased last fall.  These gems may be reserved for DVD releases, but I feel Han’s missing academy stint is definitely a gap in this story. And the movie lacks because of it.

Importantly, I do recommend seeing this in IMAX 2D as it is a very dark and muted film.

The usual amazing, special effects, costumes and sets we’ve come to expect from the Star Wars film franchise are all present here.  The styling is different from the previous films, as it takes place about halfway between Episode Three and Rogue One.  It’s neat to see the evolution of the Empire’s gear. 

And the easter eggs are everywhere; prequels, Rebels, Clone Wars, Star Tours ( the Disney Park ride), the comic books from the 1970′s and 80′s, the EU/Legends Han Solo novels by Brian Daley, the Lando Calrissian novels from the same era are especially referenced numerous times. Even the Indiana Jones franchise gets a significantly placed nod.

To say the least, the fan-service is strong with this one.

But not the Force. Not at all. None of that simple tricks and nonsense here at all.

Because I’m a pretty hard-core fan, I pre-bought two showings on initial release. The first time I saw Solo, I was unsure if I actually liked it, but it seemed to be a decent film.  The second viewing ( the same night) was an absolute joy. Times three and four were with different groups of adults, and they all had a blast. Five was with a group of 13 year old girls, and they all enjoyed it too.

So let’s call my rating of Solo then, 4 out of 5 stars. 

Honestly I don’t get the backlash against it.  Don’t take your Last Jedi hate out on this. It’s a fun ride with decent jokes and no space-boob-milk monsters—honest!

And if you think Solo offers nothing different, new, or imaginative. You are 99% correct...Remember, we got that full package of “different and innovative” in Last Jedi. If that’s your schtick, watch that one instead then.

Oh, and one more thing- that 1%?... two words:

Shower scene.

#movie review #spoilers #Solo a Star Wars story #was fun #4 out of 5 stars #Han Solo #that was long #i liked it #han solo movie #Lando Calrissian #l3-37 #Val #Alden Ehrenreich #donald glover #thandie newton #Legends Canon #Disney Canon #Star Wars Expanded Universe #star wars #fan review #Harrison Ford #Goddamned long #i had to get this off my chest

[skepticaloccultist]

The Confederacy of the Green Door

There is a door in the lower basement of a London bookshop that I frequent that has long perplexed any of the handful of astute observers who linger in the musty depths of that bibliographic cavern.

The bookshop itself is of the typical central London lot, haphazard bare wooden shelves cover all of the walls of the tiny cramped rooms. Each room leading onward into another, a maze of gravity defying structures burdened with far more than their fare share of aged paper. Tiled floors and low ceilings that creak with the footfalls of customers above who have yet to dare the half curved illformed lump of twisted wood that calls itself a staircase.

Such a descent, though not for the temeritous, is rewarded with considerable treasures, should a sprained ankle not inhibit the would be book hunter.

It is in these depths that I can often be found on those rare occasions that I venture out into the world. The triangle of London with Bloomsbury, Soho, and Leicester Square as its corners is the circumference of my interests in the world of humanity, excursions to the British Library notwithstanding.

Yet my frequency in this subterranean space has not yet solved the question of the door. For set at the very bottom of the last room, beyond rows of shelves bowed under the weight of sci-fi and discount volumes, there is a door.

The door is an aged emerald green, of a wooden type typical of the early 20th century, its paint layered with many years of re-coating though fading in areas to a patina. It fits in its frame at a slight angle, where either the door or the frame has shifted in the many years it has stood. It has a brass handle of the type that matches its rectangular escutcheon, a pattern around its edges worn from many years of use. The handle shines just slightly under the dim basement light.

Once, some years ago, in the first year or so of frequenting the bookshop, I witnessed a gentleman emerge from the door. It was a swift action, simply appearing and closing the door behind himself, turning and locking the door with a key. I first assumed it was the loo, but then the gentleman's appearance seemed out of the ordinary. A well cut suit of wool, a book tucked under his arm. He lingered for just a few moments before he turned and wend his way to the treacherous staircase and I could hear his footfall as he bee-lined for the shop door.

I stared at the door, wondering of what lie behind it. Yet when I inquired with the young girl who works behind the counter I was told that it was a storage closet and nothing more. I clarified where the door was, pointing to the spot on the shop's floor above where the door is in the layout of the space. It was then that I realized the door faced toward the high street in front of the shop. If what lie behind the door was more than a meter at most deep it would be under the street itself.

This perplexing event of the man leaving the storage closet would be repeated just over a year later. Again I was on my knees in that last room, digging through boxes of unsorted books, and behind me I heard the door open and close. This time an older man with a tweed jacket was standing there, having locked the door behind himself already, I caught him putting the key in his pocket and saw that it was of a brass colour.

As the tweed jacketed man made for the stairs I turned to a fellow customer who was standing nearby perusing the natural history selection and asked if he had "seen that?" To which he replied that he had no idea where the gentleman had come from as he himself had been there an hour. He then laughed in that uncomfortable British way that secretly pleads that the subject be changed and never, ever thought of, let alone spoken of, again.

The thing about this bookshop is that it has an incredible amount of volumes that seem to center around an endless supply of a single collector's habits. Either through years of their own customers dying and reselling their estate collections or of some more obscure modern source the bookstore is always able to cough up a copy of some G.K. Chesterton you have never yet read, perhaps and essay on Faust, or a consideration of anarchist societies. As well P.G. Wodehouse, William Sharp (Fiona MacLeod), rare sci-fi first editions by Clifford Simak, Ursula Le Guin, Theodore Sturgeon, and more obscure authors are tucked continually onto the shelves. A Richard Jefferies, T.H White and the occasional more occultish volume might be misplaced in the poetry section for a tenth of its actual value. As if the ghost of A.H. Mayhew still lingers just around the next corner.

As one would then imagine it is a place for the most insular hermits and bookish recluse to be found. Ill kept academics, sharp suited magicians, and the gamut of motley eccentrics find themselves in familiar territory.

On the third occasion I happened to see something all the more surreal. It was a kind of winter evening that is rare in London, bitter cold and windy. The basement was, on the other hand, cozy from the perspective below street level. I had just happened onto some volume that excited me in the way that they sometimes do. A quickening of the pulse as you realize what it is you've just pulled off of the shelf. A quick scan of the title page and dates and a flip back to the price; checked twice to make sure you aren't imagining things.

As I was catching my breath over some obscure volume I noticed a woman walk by behind me. She had the air of someone who didn't frequent bookshop basements often, but her step was rather confident that it knew where it was headed. She walked right up to the door without hesitation, and as it took me several seconds to shift focus from the glee of the book to the event unfolding, in a flash she open the door and closed it behind her as she stepped beyond its threshold. I caught just a glimpse of brick or stone wall behind her and nothing more, and the door clicked locked from the other side.

As I paid that day I inquired again about the green door at the end of the rooms, this time to the older woman who seems to be the shops manager. She repeated that it was a storage room and added that they had lost the key to it years ago.

There are a handful of other instances of my seeing people come out of the door and once a gentleman just disappearing behind the closing door when I turned the basement corner. And while each of these seems to happen at precisely the moment I am otherwise distracted I have spent the remainder of several of these afternoons dwelling on some mentally re enacted plan of action where I intercede and demand to know what is the story of the green door.

Alas each of these visions of bravado are stultified by each successive instance of the door. I have on two occasions had short and awkward conversations with regular customers I see now and again in the shop. Like myself though, these are not people accustom to social exchanges beyond the niceties of British colloquy. Never the less I sense in each who understood my inquiry a hesitation to speak of what they themselves know.

The green door thus remains a mystery, and while the events of this short essay may be overly condensed, giving the impression that movement to and from the door is common, please understand that can not be further from the case. For in my several hundreds of visits to the shop over the decade past only 5 or 6 of these have I experience the door enigma.

Yet the friction polished handle of so dusty a green door begs the question of its past, its present and its passage. What lies on the other side may only reveal itself to those who hold the door's key. Whomever that confederacy may be.

#skeptical occultist #witch #folkwitch #witchcraft #london occult #magicallondon #grimoires #occult books #occult #ghosts #secret societies #cult #cunning craft #curse #fae #sidhe #folklore #folklorist #alchemy #necromancy #freemasonry #masonic #secret london #hidden london #bruja #bruxas #poisoner's path #veneficium #hedgewitch

[gokinjeespot]

off the rack #1295

Monday, January 6, 2020

 I hope you're having a better start to the new year than I am. I figure I'm about 90% recovered from a cold that started with a sore throat New Year's Eve. There's still a little gunk in my lungs but my nose has stopped leaking and I have energy to do stuff now. The house has been undecorated and I am looking forward to things getting back to normal. With Christmas and New Year's falling on a Wednesday my routines were discombobulated even more than usual due to the holidays. I'm not a fan of holidays.

 I Can Sell You A Body #1 - Ryan Ferrier (writer) George Kambadais (art) Ryan Ferrier (letters). I believe that this is the first time that I have seen a letterer become a writer. This 4-issue mini stars ex-TV psychic Denny Little. He can communicate with the dead. He can also put the spirit of the dearly departed into another body for clients. Unfortunately, one of those clients is a violent criminal and Denny is having a hard time finding a body for the mobster's dead father. Ryan tried to make him come across as a lovable screw-up. I was not enamoured of Denny however. Maybe it's the man bun. What he does in desperation at the end of this issue made me like him even less. I'm ghosting this one.

 Detective Comics #1018 - Peter J. Tomasi (writer) Scott Godlewski (art) David Baron (colours) Rob Leigh (letters). It's a winter time mystery as Batman investigates a Christmas tree adorned with dead bodies. His usual suspects are incarcerated and a pagan clue points to a new killer on the loose. I like this title best when Batman is solving crimes so I look forward to him figuring this one out. The scenes at Wayne Manor sans Alfred made me sad.

 Thor #1 - Donny Cates (writer) Nic Klein (art) Matthew Wilson (colours) VC's Joe Sabino (letters). Jason Aaron's War of the Realms and King Thor brought to a close one era and this starts a new one for the God of Thunder. King Thor looks old as the story starts but Donny and Nic fix that at the end of this issue. There are a bunch of surprise guest stars here and if you're a fan on Donny Cates's other books you'll see a definite connection. Just when Thor thinks that he gets to sit on the throne of Asgard in peace he's off to save the universe yet again. This new story is going to be epic too.

 Lois Lane #7 - Greg Rucka (writer) Mike Perkins (art) Gabe Eltaeb (colours) Simon Bowland (letters). I didn't like that Lois's suspicions weren't aroused by the new maid. It made the cliffhanger ending fall flat for me.

 Web of the Black Widow #5 - Jody Houser (writer) Stephen Mooney (art) Triona Farrell (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). Mission accomplished. Natasha clears her name and the imposter is taken into custody. The lesson here is to never underestimate the Black Widow.

 Punisher Soviet #3 - Garth Ennis (writer) Jacen Burrows (pencils) Guillermo Ortego (inks) Nolan Woodard (colours) Rob Steen (letters). Now we know why the Russian guy is helping Frank kill the Russian mobster guy. It's a gruesome back story and goes to establish what motivates these characters. Garth is a master at this stuff.

 Daredevil #16 - Chip Zdarsky (writer) Jorge Fornes (art) Nolan Woodard (colours) VC's Clayton Cowles (letters). Wilson Fisk is one tough Kingpin. He survived being thrown out of a window and winds up in the hospital where he gets a surprise visit from Matt Murdock. Matt and Elektra know that it's the Stromwyn family that is their real enemy and they go after them financially. Meanwhile, Hammerhead is at war with the Owl for control of Hell's Kitchen. I love all the stuff going on in this book now.

 Action Comics #1018 - Brian Michael Bendis (writer) John Romita Jr. (pencils) Klaus Janson (inks) Brad Anderson (colours) Dave Sharpe (letters). This should have hit the racks before Superman #18 where the secret identity is smashed to smithereens. I did like the origin story for the super villain the Red Cloud. I am very disappointed with the art however. I used to love John Romita Jr.'s art but now it looks rushed and lacking in detail. I feel the same about Frank Miller, another artist that Klaus Janson inks. I don't blame Klaus though.

 Hawkeye: Freefall #1 - Matthew Rosenberg (writer) Otto Schmidt (art) VC's Joe Sabino (letters). This reminded me of Matt Fraction's run writing Clint's adventures and although the art wasn't very appealing to me I liked the attitude and the mystery. Someone is running around in the Ronin costume committing crimes and Clint's "friends" Falcon and Winter Soldier thinks it's him. I was surprised at how many other good guys wore that costume too. I want to find out who this new guy is. Like Action Comics, I'm going to keep reading this despite not liking the art much.

 Tarot #1 - Alan Davis (writer) Paul Renaud (art) Paul Mounts (colours) VC's Clayton Cowles (letters). Not to be confused with Jim Balent's Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose, this is an old school Marvel team-up story featuring the Avengers and the Defenders. It starts with Namor and the Invaders fighting a Nazi named Oberfuhrer Okkulte in WWII and continues to the seventies with the Defenders showing up at Avengers Mansion just in time to help the team deal with a rampaging Vision. The villain will be familiar to older Marvel fans. If you're feeling nostalgic for these old super teams then this is the story for you.

 Star Wars #1 - Charles Soule (writer) Jesus Saiz (art) Jesus Saiz & Arif Prianto (colours) VC's Clayton Cowles (letters). Here we go with a new number one. The writing is good and the art is nice but it would be nice to get a story with some new characters. This one starts with Leia, Luke, Lando et al escaping Darth Vader's clutches on Bespin. Dyed in the wool Star Wars fans will probably love these stories filling in what they know happens next but I've read enough of these characters not to care anymore. Everything is so familiar to me that I find it kind of boring. I'd rather be in another galaxy far, far away, so hasta la vista and may the Force be with you.

 Marauders #5 - Gerry Duggan (writer) Matteo Lolli & Lucas Werneck (art) Federico Blee (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). They were introduced in another X-book but the new enemies of the mutants are named in this issue. Wilhelmina Kensington, Manuel Enduque, Chen Zhao, Kade Kilgore, and Maximillian Frankenstein may just be children but they are kids with billions of dollars and money is power. Collectively they are known as Homines Verendi. I Googled it. It's Latin for "people feared". Their first plot may be to frame mutants for the mass death of humans by poisoning the new mutant drug that's helping everyone right now. These new X-books are intensifying my FOMO.

 Miles Morales: Spider-Man #14 - Saladin Ahmed (writer) Ray-Anthony Height (art cemetery scenes) Ze Carlos (art Brooklyn Academy scenes) Belen Ortega (art Home scenes) David Curiel (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). It's one thing to want your secret identity revealed voluntarily, it's quite another to have that secret found out by an enemy. Miles has a major problem now that his private journal has been found by a hostile person. I want to see how this pans out.

 Doctor Doom #4 - Christopher Cantwell (writer) Salvador Larroca (art) Guru-eFX (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). Victor is in New York City trying to find out who tried to kill him. Meanwhile there's a coup back in Latveria. I know Doc Doom will return to his homeland triumphantly but it's fun seeing how he gets there.

 Joker/Harley: Criminal Sanity #2 - Kami Garcia (writer) Mike Mayhew & Mico Suayan with Jason Badower (art) Richard Starkings of Comicraft (letters). I think the criteria for using the larger magazine size for DC Black Label stories should be the art. The art in this deserves the larger size. I really like this reimagining of the Joker and Harley Quinn. The abuse that this Joker suffered as a kid would warp anybody. I highly recommend this book.

 X-Men #4 - Jonathan Hickman (writer) Leinil Francis Yu (pencils) Gerry Alanguilan & Leinil Francis Yu (inks) Sunny Gho (colours) VC's Clayton Cowles (letters). The mutants are invited to the World Economic Forum and Charles/Professor X, Erik/Magneto and En Sabah Nur/Apocalypse accept and attend. It's a good thing they brought their own security team Cyclops and Gorgon (not the Inhuman). One human delegate had two strike teams ready to kill Charles again. Most of this issue is talking heads but the conversations are intense and enlightening. If you only read one X-book this should be it.

[warrioroflondonbelow]

“No, please don’t leave me…” (*cackles in the distance*)

Send  “No, please don’t leave me…”  for my muse’s reaction to dying in your muse’s arms: Accepting

( @ericbrandonrp )

That ring. That stupid, fucking ring! If only Richard had listened to Eric and Pheli. If only he had taken the damn thing off. Why did he have to be so stubborn about it? Then again, he wasn’t fully in control of his actions when wearing it. Still it was his choice to wear it. Sure, Emilia gave it to him in the first place. There was no point in pointing fingers now. It was too little too late.

“Leave you? I’m not goin’ anywhere, Eric,” coughed Richard, as he managed a weak smile up at the other. “Honestly, I don’t get what yer’ fussin’ about. I’m fine. Really!- Agh!” Another jolt of pain in his side. Or was it in his head? Richard had no idea anymore. 

“Rich, for once in yer’ life I need you to stay still and keep yer’ trap shut, although that may be hard for you to do,” said Eric. The two managed a dry chuckle at the other. The Slytherin’s gaze continued to be drawn towards the black mark clawing up Richard’s arm. Shite! Shite, Shite, Shite. This was bad. This was really bad.

“Eric…”

“What did I tell you about talkin’? Y’have to save yer’ energy, Rich.”

“Eric, I’m so, so… so sorry. I should’ve-… I didn’t mean to….” Richard’s eyes were reddening up. A few tears began to stream down the young Hufflepuff’s cheeks.

“Shh. Shhh, Rich.” Eric wrapped his arms a little tighter around the other. As if doing his best to not let whatever life was left in his friend slip away. His knees were beginning to cramp, but he wasn’t going to dare let go of Richard.

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

“What are you sorry for? The ring? This wasn’t yer’ fault. None of this was yer’ fault. I-..”

“No. The night before we left for Hogwarts, I talked to Emilia in the hallway. I told her to stay away from you. I told her to never come near any of us again.I told her-… I told her-…I thought I was doin’ the right thing that night, but I just made everythin’ worse.” A beat. “I should’ve told you about that. I’m an idiot and a liar… I’m sorry.” As a matter of fact, that wasn’t the only thing Richard was sorry for. He had hurt Eric and Pheli, his two closest friends- the only people he truly counted as family. He had hurt them too many times to count. It wasn’t fair to them. They didn’t deserve that. As far as the Hufflepuff was concerned, perhaps this was for the best. 

“What? No! Rich, that doesn’t matter now.”

“It does matter.” Eric could feel Richard shivering in his arms now. “If I hadn’t done that then this never would’ve happened. I need you to apologise for Pheli for me, okay?”

“ ‘Ey, don’t give me that! Don’t you dare give me that, Richard Oliver Mayhew! You can apologise to her yer’self,” scolded Eric. The tears were beginning to sting his eyes now. He had to stop them from dripping. Eric had to not let Richard see. 

A few more coughs. “Since when have you ever been able to boss me around? You may be older than me, Eric, but yer’ awful at puttin’ yer foot down. At the end of the day yer’ just a big sofite,” he chuckled, weakly.

“Shut up,” sniffled Eric through a broken smile, as he quickly wiped the coming tears. 

Richard’s smile faded. His face had become paler than usual. He had given up continuously blinking because his vision had become nothing more than a blur. His chest heaved just barely now. And yet, amidst all of the paralysing pain shooting up in his body, Richard Mayhew was mainly feeling one thing. Richard wasn’t scared. He was terrified. “Eric…. I feel so cold.”

“Just hold on a little longer.”

“I’m really tired… I’ll just close my eyes for a few minutes…”

“No. I need you to hold on just a little longer. You can do that can’t you? Huh? All you have to do is stay awake. That’s not so hard, is it? After all-… Rich?” 

Richard’s body went completely limp.

“Rich?”

His once bright eyes, dimmed.

“….Richard?”

The Hufflepuffs lips were slightly agape, as if a few words remained hanging on the tip of his tongue. His entire body was stone cold. 

“Richard? Richard! Richard, answer me!- C’mon! Don’t-… Oh, god please! Richard! Oh,God no!” sobbed Eric, as he embraced Richard now, letting the Hufflepuff’s head rest on his shoulder. Not him. Please! Take anything you want, but just not him! Don’t touch him! Eric began to sob into the crook of his dead friend’s neck. His fingers dug into the Hufflepuff’s shoulders. All he could do now was yell Richard’s name in vain.

At least Richard wouldn’t be able to hurt Eric or Pheli ever again. Maybe it was for the best.

#ericbrandonrp #so i just remembered that #the longer you have a Horcrux on you #the more it will drain your life away #until you have nothing #and thus.... this painful mess in its place! ;-; #always; #accio;v #i hope this is alright? o3o #and thanks so much for sending this!- despite it giving me a ton of feels! ;-;