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ververa · 5 years

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“Asylum” (2/?)

Part 1

It took me forever to finish it. Sorry for this

@misssmephisto thank you so much for your help <3 I’d never finish it if it hadn’t been for you.

Dr Ellie Staple x patient

Warning: mention of eating disorders, degradation, abuse, homophobia

A human’s body is said to be a kind of sanctuary – and ought to be treated as it. Though, after two weeks at the ward you already knew they do not consider it that way. The duo from hell steadily, but effectively makes you feel like a trash. Your blood may remain pure – as long as you’re not an addict – though your body and then soul is completely destroyed. You’re losing indications of humaneness. It’s unavoidable, though the speed of this process depends mostly on your character and psychological strength. It’s kind of incompatible, actually, for a psychiatric hospital’s aim ought to be helping patients to regain their emotional stability and well-being, not to cause further damage. But that place and those people seemed to have their own laws.

It was hard to say why it didn’t work on me the same way it did on the rest. Maybe it’s because I was already used to being treated this way – a troubled childhood it was – maybe it was thanks to the conversations I was having with Doctor Staple or maybe she was right saying that I’m stronger that I think. Whatever it was it put me in an awkward position. Sister Janet was treating me as a danger to her position – for which she had been working hard to maintain. The power and control that she was holding was at risk, when the patients were around such an outstander like me. I was afraid of her, of course, cause she was an obstacle that could effectively prevent me from leaving that place.

The only thing I desired was remaining sane in that place – deprived of sanity. And that was the reason for her to acknowledged me as a rebel. And the one rebel is enough to bring up the fighting spirit in the whole tribe.

I had never meant to get in her way – it was only a temporary, not permanent, destination for me, and getting on her nerves wasn’t something unplanned. Actually, I didn’t even realize I was doing it. How could I know that by talking to other patients I may somehow overstep particular boundaries of her rules. But, apparently, I did it. Sister Janet perceived my getting on with others and helping them to feel more secure, simply by talking, as undermining her authority.

And so, as I broke the rules I was going to get punished.

You may think that you know what a humiliation is, yet she can show you it from a different – even worse – perspective. She along with Doctor Schulz can make your nightmares come true. They are capable of making what’s the worst in you to come out and destroy you from inside. That’s how their tactic works.

Janet’s favourite method of punishment or rather the beginning of the whole penalty process – was the room search. If you think that you’re safe, as you do not hide anything, you’re naive. It’s not about checking if addicts or anorexics hide some illegal substances for real. The purpose is to find “the thing” that will provide her with justification for punishing you. And trust me, if she really wants to make you suffer, she will find a way.

That’s exactly what she did with me. Of course, she needed to make sure nobody would stand in her way. She waited for Doctor Staple and one more psychiatrist, who were more likely to disturb her, to leave the clinic. Ellie was going on a business trip and so everybody knew she would be absent for 3 or so days. That clinched our fate.

Sister put two contiguous wards on the state of alert. It was already quite late – and it was quite unexpected when they told us to stand at the corridor.

At first it was hard for me to figure out what exactly was going on. Though Martin – who was himself for the last few days – explained it to me. We kind of befriended with each other. He was a man, of course, but he was so different to all of them – and instead of making me scared he was actually the one who could calm me down. I failed to understand how he could have no friends being such a kind and caring person. I couldn’t make them like him, so I became his friend instead. And in return he was my guardian.

I could feel how he was trembling when one of the male nurses walked out of the room that I was sharing with two more women. The nurse was holding a little bottle of some sort of laxating drug.

He handed it to Sister Janet and she looked at us.

“Well, what we’ve got here? It seems that somebody has broken the rules” she stated triumphantly

None of us dared to say anything, not even look at the woman.

“So, I expect the person did it to confess their guilt. Miss Jones?” she addressed one of the woman

It was the very same girl, who almost committed a suicide because of doctor Schulz and his therapy.

Her state still wasn’t really good. Even me – the person who knew nothing about the psychiatry could say she was on the edge of breaking down.

“Do you want to tell me something, Miss Jones?” the sister continued

The patient shook her head – no.

“Cat got your tongue?”

The girl didn’t answer once again and it was enough to punish her – obviously. Sister Janet slapped her in face with such a force that her haggard body stumbled.

“When I ask I expect an answer! Understood?”

The poor girl was, both, shocked and scared, which simply made her unable to speak. Sister was ready to hit her again and Martin – as a sensitive person turned back wanting to hide his face in my shoulder. I didn’t really know why, but I felt a weird need to do something – to help the girl somehow. And so, when Janet was about slapping her again I spoke up

“For fuck’s sake she didn’t so anything!”

At that everyone’s attention was on me.

“Do you have anything to say?” she turned to face me

Martin’s hold tightened as she addressed me. I squeezed his hand reassuringly, before answering the nurse’s question.

“I do” I said courageously

“I’m listening then”

“You scared her and then expect to answer you right back. What you’re doing is ridiculous. That’s not how the medical staff is supposed to work. It’s against the rules!”

“I am the one who makes the rules here. And nobody is going to call them into question! Definitely not an insane, scared, pathetic little girl!” her voice was full of venom

“I’m not insane!”

“You are not? What are you doing here, then?”

“I… I just…”

“Have issues?”

I didn’t answer. Well, I didn’t even know what to say.

“Oh, darling that’s typical of people in psychiatric hospitals” she laughed

Martin pulled me closer, probably thinking that if he would let me go I may get into fight with her.

“I’ll make myself clear. I’m going to punish the one who had broken the rules and if you don’t want to be punished as well you’d better shut your mouth”

“I’m not afraid of you. And at this point I don’t care”

“You’re not afraid? Well, let’s see then”

“See what?”

“Oh, you claim you’re not afraid, so I bet you won’t mind if I search your things”

“I-”

“Do you have anything to hide?”

“N-no…”

“Even that notebook? What is it? A diary? A sketchbook?”

I was standing there dumbfounded – cursing myself for letting my emotions carry me away.

“I’ve been watching you. I know you’re going with that notebook everywhere” she stated entering the room “So, where did you hide it?” she began searching my things

I was just standing there. Standing and praying for her not to find the notebook, that was hidden in my pillowcase. But well, she did.

“Let’s see what we’ve got here” she said flicking through the pages

She continued until she found something that drew her attention. She looked at me

"You won't dare" I wanted to approach her, but one of the male nurses caught me, before I managed to do it

"Oh, you're really naive thinking that I won't" she laughed

"You bitch!"

At that she came closer and slapped me. That hurt, but I couldn’t give her the satisfaction, so I remained silent. Martin though let out a weird noise – resembling a cry, that he muffled with his hand.

"I’m okay" I whispered to him, seeing his worried look

I was everything, but okay. The perspective of her invading my privacy – reading my thoughts and feelings out – and the possibility of my most precious secret being revealed made me more terrified that I could remember being.

As I saw her malicious smile, I already knew there was no use asking or begging. Neither she nor Doctor Schulz know what mercy was.

Helplessness. Shame. Humiliation. It all hit me at once – as it did only once before. Never did I expect that it could come back to me, so suddenly and unexpectedly. But there I was. Held by a strange man – almost like then – powerless and browbeaten to something I didn’t want. It wasn’t the same situation. It wasn’t a rape – at least not physically – but mentally it felt the same.

I felt naked and vulnerable as she was reading out:

___________________________

“I was sure my world has already ended. That I was already dead. It felt as if my soul was on fire. But then she appeared. And just then I knew that no one could save me, but her.

There was no place for feelings – yet being around her I feel. Feel everything more & deeper than I have ever done before.

I've never dreamed that I'd meet someone like her. I didn't want it.

I didn't want to fall in love. It wasn't the right thing to do and yet it felt so good.

In my whole life I had never known what I wanted. Until she came and saved me from my own demons. She found the light that I couldn't find in me on my own. And when she kissed me... Since then the only thing I wanted was to be next to her. Cause it just feels so right.

And now I can only hope that she could still be with me, when I'm not quite myself.

I know that when we're together nothing can stop us. And we will both find a way to make a pure love work in a dirty way.

I just hope it's alright if in our safe place I'll tell you that I'm going to love you forever, El...”

___________________________

Sister Janet didn’t finish the sentence. It seemed that for some reason she couldn’t say that name out loud.

She looked at me – her face was unreadable, but those eyes. They were so cold, that when she was looking at you – you beginning to wonder if she still had a soul.

The thought of her soul comes automatically. She’s a great believer, a Christian – who considered herself as a God’s envoy whose mission was delivering the world from a sin. She was more like a holy fool for whom everyone was sinners, but her.

It was pretty clear she was heartless, but what came out of her mouth was unexpected and I already knew it was a promise of something bad.

“You think you can be loved? That someone will care about you? I’ll tell you a secret dear child” she came dangerously close “You are mistaken. It’s pathetic. And you’re sick. Only a God could love you, but for such a sinner like you nobody would have a mercy… even the God” she paused

“Luckily for you I’m ready to help you”

“H-help me?”

“Yes. I know exactly what you need”

I looked at her confused. I already knew it wasn’t a promise of anything good.

“You need some alone time, so that you can think about it. A seclusion room seems to be the best idea”

“W-what? No no no! Sister Janet, please, no. I…”

“Don’t worry, child. We will help you. We will cure you”

I shook my head frantically, but before I managed to form any coherent sentence he appeared.

“What’s going on in here?” Doctor Schulz asked looking at the gathering

“We’ve just searched the rooms and found some pills. Also it turned out that our new patient has a lot to think over” she handed him the notebook

The man took it and read the part that she showed him. Nobody dared to look at him except for me and it was a mistake.

He was a creepy man in general, but his hands were the worst. They were so big that if he would want to he could choke you using only one of them. And when he was rubbing his chin you already knew that something terrible was about to happen.

“What are you gonna do now, Sister?” he asked smirking

“I decided that seclusion room is the best idea”

“I agree”

“Sister Janet… I didn’t do anything bad. Please, don’t…”

“We are doing it for your own good” she said “Everyone go back to your rooms” she ordered

The patients, except for Martin, moved almost immediately. He looked at me. He was even more scared than I was. It was heartbreaking to see him with tears in his eyes. He was the only person, except for Ellie, who somehow made me feel safe in that awful place. I didn’t want him to go, though he had to disappear. That devilish woman could hurt and I couldn’t let it happen.

“Didn’t I make myself clear?” Janet addressed him “Do you want to be punished as well?”

“Go” I whispered knowing that she’s capable of truly everything

Martin looked at me for the last time and disappeared.

“Dear child, you’re lost. You need to realise that you will never be enough for anyone to love you…”

And it felt as if my mind broke. All the things she said were continuously running through my head.

I wasn’t enough… I will never be the thought was slowly overwhelming my mind making my body limp.

It got even worse. I felt dizzy when the doctor came closer and smiled. It wasn’t a normal smile. It was rather the one of those horrible and terrifying. He was so close. Too close…

“Don’t worry, we will take care of you”

He wanted to touch my cheek, but I began to struggle with the nurse that was still holding me.

It’s hard to understand, but sometimes people are just like that. They hate you for some unknown reasons. And that is how it was with Doctor Schulz. He hated Ellie, even though she did nothing to him. He simply couldn’t get over the fact that she’s better than him and was a new boss. So, when he found out about us and had the opportunity to take revenge he couldn’t miss it, could he?

“Stop fighting!” Sister yelled

But I didn’t listen.

“Put her in a straitjacket” Doctor ordered calmly, but sternly

It was impossible to ignore that tone. Who could ever dare to do it?

Before I knew two more nurses came and not only straitjacketed me, but also gave me an injection with tranquilliser. It must have been quite a huge dose, cause it worked really fast and soon I was too weak to move.

And then there was only a darkness, which made everything blank out…

_______________________________

Ellie couldn’t stop the tears that were escaping her eyes. She had never been that sensitive, though reading about Ronnie being so helpless and scared broke her heart again.

She could remember how it was when she came back to the hospital then as if it had happened the previous day.

She had been cooperating with the organization for quite some time, but at that time she spread her wings for real. They did notice a great potential in her and valued her knowledge and work. She became such an important person and the main doctor working for them that at some point she got her personal bodyguards. She didn’t really like it, claiming that was unnecessary, as noting bad could happen. Though when she finally arrived at the clinic, after her business trip, those men turned out to be pretty useful.

As Ellie entered the building she could already feel that something was wrong. The receptionist and guards greeted her as politely and respectfully as usually, but they were looking at her a bit different.

It’s because of those big guys or the fact that I’m a new boss – she thought to herself. But she didn’t care about it. The only thing she cared about was to see Ronnie. She had been absent only for a few days, but it felt like eternity. Each hour without the girl was dragging mercilessly for the woman and as she finally arrived at the clinic the only thing she wanted was to go to her office and start the session with her favourite patient and the only person that mattered for her.

But as she got to the second floor she saw Martin, instead of Ronnie, waiting for her – nervously wandering around the corridor – she already knew it wasn’t about her bodyguards or her being in charge.

“Doctor Staple!” he moved towards her so rapidly that her gorillas were ready to down him, so as to protect Ellie

Martin stopped as the guards moved forward. He looked at Staple confused as she shook her head.

“It’s okay guys. He’s only a patient. He’s harmless”

The men looked at the psychiatrist, then exchanged knowing looks and let Martin come closer.

“What is it?” Staple asked

“T-t-t-they t-t-took her” he stuttered

It was obvious for Ellie that something really bad had happened, as Martin wouldn’t began to stutter again with no reason.

“Easy. Calm down and tell me who and where?” she asked calmly

Martin shook his head. He took a deep breath and tried to speak again

“S-siter J-J...”

“Sister Janet. Okay”

“A-a-and D-Doctor S-Schu-u...”

“Doctor Schulz. Who did they take?”

“R-Ronnie”

At the name Ellie’s eyes widened.

“Where?!” she wasn’t calm any more

Martin tried to calm down, so that he could be able to explain everything to the psychiatrist.

“Martin! Where did she take her?!”

“I-I...”

“It’s okay. I’ll take care of it” it sounded more as if she was trying to calm down herself rather than Martin

The patient was about to say something, but Ellie didn’t let him

“Doesn’t matter. You’ll explain it later” she said heading in the direction of the other doctor’s office

Staple’s mind was speeding. All possible scenarios were multiplying with every minute.

She was furious. They had no right to take her patient, her little and defenceless Ronnie.

Ellie, followed by her bodyguards, got to the ward and seeing her being so angry even the guards there didn’t dare to stop her. The psychiatrist entered the other Doctor’s office without knocking

“Where is she?!”

Schulz looked at her.

“Good morning Doctor” he said nonchalantly “I’m afraid I don’t know what are you talking about” he answered smiling innocently

“I’ll make myself clear. I do not like to repeat myself. So, I’ll ask once again and you’d better think about your answer” Ellie said perfectly mimicking the man’s smile “Where is Ronnie? And who gave you the right to even talk to her? She’s my patient and that was beyond your eligibility”

“Doctor Staple I graduated the same studies as you did…”

“It’s a shame then that you’re not able to make use of it”

“As I’m older and have more experience than you, you owe me some respect” he stood up visibly resentful of Ellie’s words

“Your age or experience means nothing. To be respected you need to earn it. And let me tell you that nothing you do deserves even a drop of respect. You’re not allowed to treat people – whether they’re patients or not – the way you do. I’ll never regard you and what you did only proves that you weren’t meant to be a doctor”

Schulz seemed as if he wanted to say something, though Staple cut him off before he managed to speak up.

“At this point I believe the only thing left for me to say is for you to bring me all your patients’ files then take your staff and get out of my face” she said sternly

The man looked at her surprised.

“You cannot fire me!”

The woman’s lips curved into a fake smile

“I’m the boss now, so I do believe I can” she moved to leave the room, but stopped “Oh, and if you won’t leave on your own the security will surely help you”

With that Staple left the office and not losing any more time headed to the nurses station.

“Wait here” she told the men before entering

There were a few nurses, except for Sister Janet, in the room. They all stopped their talk, as soon as their boss appeared.

“Leave us!” Staple ordered looking directly at Sister Janet

The women stood up and left immediately. They all could feel the anger radiating from the psychiatrist, so they didn’t dare to say a word. As they left the room filled with fraught atmosphere.

“Good morning” Sister Janet tried to sound confident, but failed feeling Ellie’s intense and full of rage gaze

“I wouldn’t call it “good” especially in your situation”

“What do you mean Doctor?”

“I mean that you’re overconfident of yourself and your position here. I blinked at you and your exceeding your powers. And it was a huge mistake. Let me tell you something. You’re not the one in charge here. Neither are you allowed to make your own rules. You’re supposed to help the patients, look after them not threaten them!”

“Ohh, so this is about that abomination of yours”

“I beg you pardon”

“That disgusting slut of yours. I know about you two. And I did what I had to do. You as a Doctor should know that it’s an illness, but I understand that she vamped you? Whatever she did, that isolation is for the good of your both. And you dear Doctor should understand that this and pray is the only way to save yourself”

Ellie looked at the other woman. She couldn’t believe what she had heard.

“Unbelievable. It’s simply unbelievable. You think you’re a saint while in fact you’re a horrible person. You and your medieval methods are sick. When will you finally realise that we’re not living in the Middle Ages any more? And when it comes to pray… You are the one who should pray for me not to fire you, as your demeanour is a ground for me doing it!”

“You may think I’m a horrible person, but she did deserve it. And what you are doing… all of it… it’s wrong”

“I can’t remember asking about your opinion. It’s none of your business what and with who I am doing. So, you’d better shut up if you still want to work here!”

“Are you threatening me?”

“I…” she was about answering, but stopped “I’ll deal with you later”

Staple left the nurses station and almost immediately bumped into Martin, who was again nervously wandering around the corridor waiting for her.

“Martin!” she addressed him louder than necessary

The man stopped and turned to look at her

“Where is she?” she asked in a bit calmer way

“I-I can take you Doctor”

“Yes, please” she took a deep breath “And you” she turned and pointed at one of the bodyguards “Stay here and make sure she won’t go anywhere”

The man only nodded

“You” she addressed the other one “Come with us”

Martin leaded them back to the isolated block.

“Doctor…” he started hesitantly

“Yes?”

“She is… Her condition is really bad”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t really know what happened, but Doctor Schulz did something to her. When I came to her for the first time she was still fine. Scared, but fine, but then… He applied some of his therapies on her and she… broke? I’m not a doctor like you, but I just know it. She was crying and calling your name at night. That was scary…” he paused as they got to their destination

“I don’t know how the hell you managed to get here on your own, but I don’t care. Thank you. Thank you for taking care of my girl” she tried to smile, but in that moment it was impossible

Staple was too angry and worried

“Doctor Staple just promise me one thing”

“Yes?”

“Promise you won’t leave her. That you won’t get scared, because behind this door… it’s not the Ronnie that you used to know”

“Martin, I’ll never… I wouldn’t be able to leave her”

The patient nodded and moved so that the psychiatrist could approach the door

As one of the guards opened the door the psychiatrist froze. Ellie was sure her heart stopped for a few seconds. Her eyes widened with terror at the sight of Ronnie – curled up on a small bed.

The girl was in the straitjacket, which unable her from moving too much. She was almost as white as the walls in that room and even more skinny than before. She was looking at a wall with demented eyes. It seemed as if there was something completely occupying the girl’s attention, but unnoticeable for the psychiatrist.

“Ronnie?” Ellie quickly moved towards her and kneeled next to the bed

Staple was more than terrified, as her patient didn’t respond. She didn’t even notice Ellie being there.

“What has he done to you?” she asked and wanted to caress the girl’s cheek

Though as soon as her hand made a contact with Ronnie’s skin the girl flinched. She turned and Staple could finally see her big, red and puffy from crying eyes.

“E-Ellie?” she stuttered

“Yes. Yes, it’s me. I’m back Ronney. I’m back. I won’t leave you again. I’m so sorry” she wanted to cup her face, but the girl moved back rapidly

“No, no, no!” she shook her head frantically “You cannot. It’s bad. We’re bad. This is wrong!”

“No. It’s okay. Ronnie, please, look at me. It’s alright. You’re good. We’re good”

“Noo. I’m bad. I’m a freak…”

“You are not”

“I-I am. I’m a misfit”

“You are everything, but a misfit” Staple reached for her again “Come on. Let me take that thing off of you” she said pointing at the straitjacket

Ronnie sat still as the psychiatrist unhooked the white clothing. Ellie slowly and carefully slipped it down the girl’s shoulders revealing her skinny body. She inconspicuously checked if the girl wasn’t injured. Though the only noticeable and worrying thing was her being thinner than before.

Ellie, however, already knew it was only an outer layer. A shell that was slowly being destroyed from inside, because of what people had been doing to the girl. The external wounds weren’t as serious as those internal, which healing process was going to take far more time than Ellie had supposed.

Seeing Ronnie in such a state was the last straw. Staple was ready to destroy whoever had anything to do with the girl’s state. She wasn’t going to shy away from doing anything what would be needed to keep the girl safe. Despite all thoughts and questions that were clouding in Ellie’s head, she managed to compose herself enough to carefully pull Ronnie’s weak and trembling body to herself. She wiped the tears from the girl’s gaunt face with such a gentleness that Ronnie gave into her touch and let the woman hold her.

“Hush, little girl” Staple hugged her

“I-I’m s-sorry” she sobbed

“No no no. It’s okay. You have nothing to be sorry for” she kissed her forehead

“It’s m-my fault… Because I-I am weak” she whispered

“No. You are not. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever known. You are not weak. Scared? Maybe, but it’s okay to be scared sometimes. And you have the very right to be scared. Though nothing of this is your fault. It’s on them and they’re going to suffer the consequences of their incompetence. I’ll see to it. But look, you’re safe now. They won’t hurt you again. I won’t let them. I won’t let anybody”

@crazycatladycaceta

#dr ellie staple #dr ellie staple x patient #sarah paulson imagine #my own character #asylum #part2/?#glass #glass movie #sorry if this is shit #hope you like it

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amarits · 5 years

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Common People - Chapter 9

Jason carefully turned a page of the copy of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens he’d found in the manor’s library. All the Peter Pan books he’d seen at the public library either had the Disney character on the cover or another redheaded kid in a green tunic. This one was different. Its green suede cover felt old and the image showed a baby sitting in a tree with a large black bird. The pages were stiff, but not yellowed or crumbling. Was this what the Disney movie was based on? He’d never actually seen it, but the little six-year-old down the hall had once claimed she was Tinkerbell for Halloween. None of them had gone out, because they weren’t idiots, and the only costume she’d had was a wooden spoon she called a wand and a bookbag she called wings, but they’d all spent the night pretending they were flying and ignoring the screams outside anyway.

A loud chime almost caused him to drop the book. It was immediately followed by another, then another, at different tones. He turned to try to find where it was coming from. It wasn’t quite like an instrument or music. It was more like…

Was that a doorbell? Did they have a doorbell? He carefully put the book back on the shelf and took note of its position to come back to later. Now that he thought about it, it was weird that with Dick’s apparently neverending supply of friends, none of them had ever come to the front door.

He trotted down the stairs towards the foyer, wondering who’d be there at 4 p.m. on a Friday. They’d only gotten back from school half an hour ago. Dick was already out with friends, and he wasn’t sure Tim even had friends. Wouldn’t most people be at work? Bruce wasn’t, but that was because Bruce apparently worked whenever he felt like it. So far, Jason had seen Bruce stumble down the stairs at almost noon on a weekday, go into work at 2 p.m., and then apparently work through midnight. He guessed you could get away with that when you owned the company.

Alfred strode past as Jason reached the first floor landing, looking like he was on a mission. Were there police at the door? He had no idea why there would be police, but it was the only immediate explanation he could think of for Alfred’s severe expression.

Maybe Jason didn’t want to barge in on whatever this was. He backtracked into one of the side rooms and started making his way through a winding path of connected rooms and hidden service corridors towards the foyer. The manor’s first floor was like a labyrinth, but he was starting to feel more like the Minotaur than one of its victims. He went through a kitchen, past a bedroom-sized closet, and peeked out a door that he was pretty sure was meant for servants to take guests’ coats and subtly disappear.

The woman standing in the foyer looked like she could murder a man with her high heels and her only regret would be ruining a good pair of shoes. He couldn’t name any of the brands she was wearing, but from the perfect, crisp cut, he could tell they were expensive. Maybe even custom. At Bruce’s appearance in the main doorway, a large, insincere smile spread across her face. “Ah, Bruce. I have exciting news. I’m taking Timothy to a historic archaeological dig in the Balearic Islands. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.” Her voice didn’t match her words. It was too professional, too practiced, like a telemarketer trying to sell a cruise.

Jason ducked behind the doorframe more from instinct than any conscious choice. He felt like a mouse that had unexpectedly found himself in the presence of a cat. Bruce’s eyes flickered towards him, but didn’t acknowledge him further. Probably for his own safety.

Bruce turned his full attention to the woman that Jason was starting to, terrifyingly, suspect was Tim’s mother. “Tim has school.”

“Oh, I’m sure he can afford to miss a week,” she dismissed with a sharp wave of her hand. “He’s still getting straight A’s, of course. I would expect no less from him. This is a learning experience that he won’t get from that sham of a school you have him enrolled in.”

Bruce rubbed his temple like he had a budding headache. “Logerquist is one of the best primary schools in the country.”

“But not the best, is it?” she said like she’d won a point. “Besides, he would be better off at École des Roches or Westminster, away from the States’ grisly educational policies.”

“Janet, I’m not taking Tim out of school to go on a last minute trip to Spain. He has a test this week.”

“You don’t seem to understand,” Janet said. She leaned to the side and put her hands on the shoulders of a man that Jason had entirely failed to notice before now. He had no notable characteristics, and didn’t seem like anything that would hold Janet’s attention for more than a minute, but she displayed him proudly. “Jack is an archaeologist,” she said slowly. Bruce’s temple rubbing became more intense. Jason could see the deep lines he was pushing up into his forehead. “He does important things. Things that I would like to share with Timothy.”

Jack looked up from the phone he’d been engrossed with to Janet’s hands on his shoulders, then at Bruce. “Oh, hello.” He waved his phone. “I’m reading the most fascinating research about...” His eyes drifted back down to the phone and stayed on it.

When it became clear Jack wasn’t going to continue, Bruce turned back to Janet. “I think this sounds like a great experience for Tim,” he said through gritted teeth with what sounded like a lot of effort. “When he doesn’t have school. Perhaps we can schedule something for his next break.”

“Oh, who knows what we’ll be doing then,” Janet said disdainfully. “I don’t understand why you need to be so unyielding. Is this some power fantasy you have?”

Jason was starting to understand Tim far more than he’d ever wanted to. He decided it was time for a strategic retreat, but as soon as he started backing away, Janet’s eyes snapped to him.

“Is that the new one?” she asked. She raised her eyebrows at Bruce. “I’ve heard some—” She paused before continuing delicately, “—interesting rumors about him.”

Jason couldn’t see Bruce’s face, but his shoulders tensed. Then he turned to Jason with a forced smile and said, “Jason, come meet Tim’s mother.” Jason hesitantly crept forward. “Janet, this is Jason.”

Janet gave him a thorough once-over that made him feel judged to his core. “A pleasure,” she said, tone bored. “Tell me, what do you think of this whole debacle?”

“I think people should mind their own fucking business,” he said on automatic, then winced. One of these days he would learn to think before he spoke.

A smile spread across her face, far more genuine than any she’d given Bruce, but still with a sharpness that he knew could make him bleed. “You seem like a smart young man. Unpolished, but heaven knows that’s easier to fix than stupid.”

“Why don’t you go get Tim?” Bruce asked stiffly, words meant for Jason even as his gaze stayed locked on Janet. Jason nodded and hurried away. He could feel Janet’s eyes on him until he turned a corner.

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#common people #batfam #batman #jason todd #tim drake #janet drake #bruce wayne #mywriting #batfic

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etoiledunord · 5 years

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The Magicians S4 Thoughts

Now that everybody has moved on to Good Omens, I’ve caught up with The Magicians. Please excuse my rambling. Many spoilers below the Read More.

Let’s do this (mostly) by character, because that way I’m less likely to forget stuff.

Quentin: For most of the season, I basically didn’t think much about him other than “Oh, shit, trying to keep the monster happy is horrible.” (Seriously, though, random people dying all over the place was awful and I wish the main characters had more of a reaction to that.)

When the whole going back to the past thing happened and he got back together with Alice, I think I kind of got what they were trying to say. It seemed like it was a matter of “life is crazy and good and bad and everything, so make your own happiness.” And, like, I get that it’s supposed to be a self-actualizing thing that’s part of his character arc, but the character arc was kind of oddly placed relative to the main story of the season. Also, Quentin and Alice have so much shit between them in the show that I’m not sure I’ll ever be really convinced by them getting back together.

As for Quentin’s relationship with Eliot, I had kind of expected there to be more of it, based on what I’d seen of people’s reactions. Quentin let the monster do basically whatever he wanted without trying to monitor most of it, and we never saw Quentin appearing to actually miss Eliot. I mean, I love them together as much as the next person, but I totally get how the show producers didn’t think they were writing a story about their relationship.

Quentin’s death was slightly ridiculous. First of all, that spell didn’t have to kill him. If Penny and Alice could get out, it wouldn’t have strained credulity for Quentin to be able to get out. Secondly, I’m calling bullshit on him being permanently dead. I don’t think he’ll be in most of season 5, but the groundwork for getting him back is all there. I have half the fic planned in my head already. That said, I did cry a stupid amount because of the quasi-suicide nature of his death (no matter what Penny said), and the way that all his friends were so upset. And while I can see what the showrunners were trying to do, that doesn’t excuse what they actually wound up doing, and I think people who are pissed off about Quentin’s death are right.

Eliot/the monster: I was surprised at how little the monster was actually in the show. He was almost a subplot, which was not how I was expecting the season to go. He was also surprisingly boring. Like, assuming he wouldn’t actually kill any of the main characters made him way less threatening and more of a nuisance than anything. I did like his little bit of humanity-ish-ness that showed up near the end, though. Also, I’m confused by how the gods could make something infinitely more powerful than themselves, but that’s small potatoes compared to most questions I have about this show.

Eliot himself was also quite absent, which saddened me. I was expecting there to be more of him hanging out in the mind cottage. I missed him. His list of potentially-worst memories was hilarious, though.

Julia: I rolled my eyes last season at the fact that Penny 23 was in love with her, and I’m still rolling my eyes at it now. It’s a forced romance for a character who was on hold for most of the season. That invincibility thing was indeed handy, but I’m glad she’s human again. Her divinity in the books doesn’t translate well to an ensemble tv show, and I actually like her friendship with Quentin, so I like that she sticks around.

The Pennys (Pennies?): I am so mad about Penny 40 being replaced. If they could have Alice be a niffin for less than a season and have Julia be a goddess for barley any longer, then there’s no reason Penny 40 should have to stay in the Library. And the fact that they had to have a sit down between the two Pennys so that Penny 40 could “objectively” state that the timeline was now Penny 23′s just made it worse because it was inorganic. I’m in the corner being grumpy right along with Kady.

I don’t dislike Penny 23, though. He’s a bit more compassionate than OG Penny, but he still has the sass that I like. If he’s going to stick around, though, he needs more of a storyline than being a traveler/psychic and being in love with Julia.

Kady: I honestly thought she was in fact going to die the world’s most ironic death. Not that she would have joined the Library, but I kind of wanted her to ride off into the sunset with Penny 40. Alas. I guess she’s sticking around as the ambassador to the hedge witches, since Julia’s only kind of in that world now. Kady also needs more to do. I’m glad they gave her that bloodworm subplot, and I know it’s hard to keep a whole ensemble at the forefront, but more story for Kady is still near the top of my wishlist.

Alice: Nice to see that she’s regaining her sense of nuance after being a niffin. She was a bit annoying with the whole “Magic can be used for evil and therefore it is evil” attitude. Her attempts to atone have been only marginally less stark, but I did like that she let Sheila go work with the Library. I’m genuinely curious what Alice might agree to do with the Library. Her role in the books was so limited that expanding it to something like the Library in the show might actually work well. I will never understand how she’s persistently in love with Quentin, though.

Margo: If I’d never read the books, I would have loved Margo’s desert storyline. And I did really like it. But the difference between book Janet and show Margo makes it feel just a bit lacking. Book Janet was so concerned about keeping relationships together that she did manipulative things while being scared as hell. Her desert storyline taught her that people will still accept her if she fails, so she doesn’t need to be manipulative, and then it taught her that people who don’t respect her don’t deserve her respect, so she doesn’t need to be scared of losing them. It kind of made her into show Margo. So having show Margo just go remember to be herself was slightly underwhelming.

Overall, though, I loved Margo. She’s uncompromising and she missed Eliot and she was just badass and wounded at the same time all over the place.

Josh: I was not expecting to like Josh and Margo together, but I do. I wasn’t terribly impressed by the sexually transmitted lycanthropy in season 2, but it being an actual Thing instead of a throw-away joke is better. The Quickening was horrifying. In the books, Josh and Poppy getting a happy ending was one of my favourite things, and it’s kind of weird that I’m not so much rooting for that in the show. When I first heard that Poppy was pregnant, I just assumed that Josh was the father, but now I’m really hoping he’s not. Also, I love that Josh stress bakes. I am very upset about him being cursed and potentially dead.

Other characters: Fen being cursed and potentially dead is also horrible. I’m surprised by how much I love Fen. I’m also surprised by the fact that I don’t completely hate Zelda anymore, though I don’t like her, either. I’m kind of sad that they made Lionel and the blackbird into irrelevant bit characters, and I’m hoping they’ll be relevant at some point in the future. Also, hi, Stoppard! Now I want Plum to show up. I love Plum. Also, I am sad about the potential lack of Tick and Rafe going forward. And Abigail.

Other random things: I really hope the whole “mixing elements from different timelines messes with horology” thing isn’t a Thing going forward. God only knows what Jane did to that branch of magic, and having it be a plot point later would be nothing but a headache. Julia as the other monster was much scarier than Eliot as the first monster. I’ve come to accept that the Library itself isn’t inherently evil, just a little corrupt and horrible about accessibility, but I still want to see it humbled.

And that’s about it for now, I guess.

#The Magicians #this turned out longer than I intended #oh well #spoilers

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a-shape-changer-in-winter · 6 years

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What We Owe to Each Other: On Contractualism

* note: this post contains spoilers to "The Good Place" seasons 1 & 2

"The Good Place" (both literally and figuratively) has been a godsend for me. The plot feels like a storytelling magic trick. There just aren’t that many, if any, shows tackling metaphysics, applied philosophy, and the hardest questions this life (and whatever comes next) throws at us with grace, and tactful humor. "The Good Place" doesn't lecture; it teaches and demonstrates by doing, and it's not afraid to let its characters fail, have defects, or to become disheartened. It gives us different perspectives on the same questions, and it's rare for the show to miss a viewpoint or experience. Whether you relate to Eleanor, Chidi, Tahini, Jason, or even Janet or Micheal - there's a point in every episode where the show speaks directly to you.

“The Good Place” reminds us how exhaustive, difficult, and scary it is to become the best version of ourselves. We all experience hopelessness, grief, despair, and sadness - and Kristen Bell's Eleanor reminds us that's just part of being human. “All humans are aware of death. So we're all a little bit sad all the time. That's just the deal.” she tells Micheal when he’s coming to terms with his own mortality and is paralyzed in an existential crisis. When he tells her that seems like a crappy deal, she responds: “Well, yeah. It is. But we don't get offered any other ones. And if you try and ignore your sadness, it just ends up leaking out of you anyway. I've been there. And everybody's been there. So don't fight it.”.

"The Good Place" doesn't disregard where anyone is coming from; it embraces each experience with vitality, understanding, and tenderness.

Even while Jason’s setting off Molotov cocktails and Janet’s drunk on magnets, there's a deep sincerity and an absolute commitment to the seriousness, terror, and beauty of becoming who we're meant to be. Reaching for our true-est, most sincere, and empathetic selves can mean running counter to everything we’ve learned from an early age. And breaking free of the oppressive systems we all live in (some to a greater degree than others) is never, ever easy.

But what does it mean to be “good?” (I type this while donning a graphic tee that states "Born a Bad Seed"). We all know, and the show reminds us through Tahini and Eleanor, that doing good things for the wrong (selfish) reasons won't make us better people. There are real stakes for becoming a better person in "The Good Place"; because there are tangible consequences. The characters, and we as viewers know there's a real "bad place," and each character has to examine their motives for becoming better people: Are they doing it to avert damnation? Are they doing it because of what they've experienced in the after-life? It's impossible to know for sure; after all, each character has been fundamentally changed by waking up the real bad place, by being rebooted over and over, and by seeking each other out, and helping each other every time - there's no going back, no unknowing of what they/we now know.

When they present their cases before the eternal judge - everyone, but Eleanor fails their test. They are about to damned forever right before Michael and Janet show up. Micheal pleads to the judge that the system is broken. He's witnessed (over 800 times) each of the humans helping each other become better people in the afterlife - which should be an impossibility. The judge suggests shipping off each of the four humans to separate purgatories (their each unique "middle place") while she investigates the system. But she's not convinced any of them deserve a second chance, after all - they failed her test.

Michael proposes a compromise: a second chance at life, beginning at the moment when they died, without the knowledge that there’s a just reward for being good once you’re dead. With no memory of her time in the afterlife, Eleanor is zapped back to Earth, where a mysterious man saves her from the shopping cart mishap that led to her death in the first place.

It’s not clear whether some unconscious part of Eleanor’s brain is retaining what she learned in the afterlife, or whether her brush with death is enough to inspire a dramatic reinvention—but either way, Eleanor resolves (publicly, on Facebook) to become a kinder, better, more generous person. She quits her scam-artist job stealing from the elderly, is honest with her roommate about making a cruel internet viral meme off her - and profiting (therefore getting kicked out of her apartment), takes a low-paying job helping the Clean Energy Crusaders save the environment, becomes a vegetarian, and leaves a note with her contact information when she bumps a stranger’s car in a parking lot. From the afterlife, Michael and Janet watch her progress with glee.

But on Earth, Eleanor finds that personal progress is exhausting, inconvenient, and strenuous; she doesn't reap any benefits by doing the right things - her life gets harder and lonelier. If virtue is its reward, as some long-forgotten Pollyanna once said, why is she so miserable? Why doesn’t life get any easier? Why do shittier people seem to be doing better than she is? Is "a feeling of fulfillment in your soul," which she’s not feeling anyway, the only tangible reward for all this effort?

A key image of The Good Place’s Season Two finale (and maybe the entire series) is an extreme close-up of Eleanor’s eyes as they open. This shot—which recurs over and over again in the finale—is a callback to what is the show’s first image, as Eleanor wakes up in the afterlife to the comforting message "Welcome! Everything is fine."

Back in the real world (and not just the show), everything is not okay. Anyone fixated on how to be good seems to be stewing in needless anxiety, and anyone who’s alright with being a selfish/self-centered person appears to be breezing through life without any consequences. Look at the most powerful person in the world. Does it seem like he’s spent a single second of his life thinking about how to be a good person?

Eleanor backslides, like any person who makes an earnest resolution to improve their life before falling back into their old patterns. We see her eyes, over the course of a full year, as they go from bright and eager to bleary and exhausted, waking up each morning to push a boulder up a mountain that only seems to be getting steeper.

Of course, we know The Good Place posits a world where there is an apparent and selfish reason to be good: the afterlife. But Eleanor doesn’t know that, and the show doesn’t present that cold fact as the actual answer to Eleanor’s problem. Instead, Michael sneaks down to Earth, where he nudges her toward the philosophy of T.M. Scanlon, as filtered through the interpretative lens of Chidi Anagonye via Youtube.

The answer, according to Scanlon, is not that we should be good for our sakes. We shouldn’t be good for the sake of a hypothetical cosmic reward. We should be good because it’s what's best for other people. It’s difficult to be alive, and one of the only ways we can help other people is by doing what we can to improve and enrich their lives.

The joy of living is that we don’t always know the ways we’re helping other people, or the unexpected gifts we might receive in return. Eleanor finds one of Chidi’s four-hour lectures on YouTube after Googling what Michael had asked her “The real question is ‘what do we owe to each other’”, when she asked for the bill” and binge-watches it, re-internalizing the lessons she one consumed in the afterlife. It took a reminder, perhaps even a push from Michael, but Chidi’s lessons—cast out into the incomprehensibly massive, often entirely vapid void of YouTube—have once again found the person who needed them most.

So often, in my own life, I feel an insurmountable heaviness; a combination of grief, loneliness, & exhaustion. Sometimes it's combined with shame, confusion, despair, hopelessness, disappointment, anger - and other dichotomies of abuse. Grief and shame rob me of joy sometimes and it's not a livable space; I cry in the shower almost every morning. But I always stand up in it. I embrace tiny microcosms of joy: my puppies licking my face in the morning, climbing a mountain, embracing and drinking coffee with my loved ones. I write and live what's necessary for me - and sometimes it reaches other people. Whether it’s something I’ve written, shared, or lived - someone will message me and ask me to meet them where they are - because a part of me already has.

Sometimes I'll be standing in a friends kitchen, doing their dishes - and they'll walk back inside and I can see them fall apart as they cross the threshold - and I turn to them, open my arms, and hold them to my chest after they run to me. I let them sob, even if it stains my shirt. Being a safe space for others is vital because it allows people to feel heard, understood - and nourishes them so they can heal. Of course; I can't do anyone's healing or work for them - but I can guide and equip them. I can show them that it's ok to cry in the parking lot and walk into work while your face is still wet. Despite everything I've been through - I wholeheartedly believe in the goodness and conviction of others. I believe that when we're who we are called to be - it improves our lives and every life that we come into contact with.

The Good Place and Ted Danson's bar-tending Micheal serves as a reminder that what we owe to each other is simply that we show up (willing to encourage, change, help, & perform emotional labor) when others need us the most.

What we owe to each other is the courage the bring out, nourish, have faith in, equip, and reveal who we each are in the process of becoming.

We’re in this journey together.

#blog #the good place #writing on the subject of light #what do we owe each other?#selections

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boonies · 6 years

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802 reboots and there's only one thing Eleanor wants more than redemption. Eleanor/Chidi; PG-13; 2,200 words.

"You're like goldfish I let loose in a great big ocean," Michael complains tiredly, Eleanor 13 sitting before him with a defiant scowl, "but you just keep—but you just keep swimming in a circle." "Fun fact, Michael," Janet 13.5 lectures over his shoulder, producing a deformed fish tank, "goldfish are strictly freshwater fish." Michael gives the fish tank a bleary-eyed look. "It's just," he starts again, resigned, scrubbing at his stubble, focusing on a distressed Chidi 13 instead, "I gave you a literal eternity to do literally anything you want, and what do you keep doing." "Each other," Janet cuts in helpfully. Michael clicks the button. * Sleepy, Eleanor 16 sighs into the table, cheek pressed to a coffee-stained essay, sprawled over a scattering of dogeared books, eyes focused on Chidi's broad back. "Steven Seagal." Chidi 16 pauses to process. "Oh," he corrects her, patient, offended, secretly flattered, tapping a stick of chalk to the blackboard, "Senegal." "Steven Senegal," she nods wisely. * "You've been my own personal GPS," Eleanor 75 confides with an earnest, desperate grin, fingers digging into his arms, "recalibrating me no matter how many wrong turns I chose to take—" "Ironic," Chidi 75 mutters under his breath, shoulders stiff, eyes averted, "considering my directional insanity—" "—which is how I know The Good Place isn't really a place," Eleanor argues, undeterred, turning her face to glare at Michael with a perfectly confident smirk, "it's a person." "No," Michael frowns, head tilted in consideration, "no, it's definitely a place—" "No, it's definitely Chidi," Eleanor huffs with unholy determination, "I finally figured it all o—" Sighing, Michael snaps his fingers.

* Eleanor 121 settles on the outskirts of a deserted kebab neighborhood. "You're our first resident or something," Michael tells her and books it. She spends two weeks alone. "Janet," she sighs, bored, lifeless, looking up from her pillow when Janet dutifully pops in. "Can you get me a turtle. I kinda really need a turtle right now." One fresh turtle takes a heavy hesitant step atop her skewer-cluttered nightstand. "Janet," Eleanor calls again. "Can you get me tiny glasses to put on the turtle." Janet gets her tiny glasses to put on the turtle. "Hey, Janet," Eleanor asks, lost, "why the fork am I doing this." Janet offers her a cheerful, "Unclear." * "Lemme try... Perfect Credit Score," Eleanor 204 tells the froyo dude, scanning the menu, "And Glasses here's gonna have... how's New Socks sound?" Visibly pleased, Chidi 204 shuffles closer. * "—she lives to vex me," Chidi 321 tells Tahani 321 with a long-suffering, impatient huff, stranded in her greenhouse during a daily shrimp air raid. "Technically, buddy," Eleanor 321 defends, almost fondly, crouched behind a large fern, "we're kinda dead." "This is what I mean!" Chidi points out, incredulous, adjusting his glasses. "I mean," Eleanor shrugs, tugging at one of his belt loops to scoot closer as a giant shrimp flies overhead, "I could maybe be responsible for our shrimp kamikaze friends or I might not be, is this really the hill you wanna die on, man." "As you pointed out, Eleanor," Chidi argues hotly, fixated on the insistent fingers wrapped around his belt loop, "I'm already dead." "This is precisely," Tahani snaps, the brim of her stupidly large hat shielding her stupidly beautiful face, "why I've banned you both from seeking shelter on these premises—I shan't allow myself to become a personal mediator again like I felt obligated to when my good friends, Ben and Jennifer and Jennifer—" A severed shrimp carapace crashes through the greenhouse, nicking her hat. "Out." * "Huh," Eleanor 401 nods to herself, realization dawning, "you and me—I guess we're technically illegal immigrants." Jason 401 cocks his head at the Xbox. "That's racist." Eleanor ignores him, crossing her arms and sinking deeper into the couch. "I smuggled myself into forking heaven." She pauses for a beat. "Wow, this has gotta be the worst thing I've ever—nope. Sold bags of Zayn's breath at two One Direction concerts." Unconcerned, Jason squints at her, controller held loosely in his palms, lollipop dangling from his mouth. "If I had to pick one direction I guess I'd pick south. No, left. No, up—" "We need to turn ourselves in." "Pass." "Listen," Eleanor starts, "Chidi would say it's our moral imperative to—" "Noooo," Jason whines loudly. "Chidi would say," Eleanor persists, then pauses. "Oh." * "Look," Eleanor 599 starts the negotiations, clasping Chidi's clammy hands between hers, "you should come with me to Mindy's. Because..." she takes a shaky breath, nape and collarbones itchy, "because you're the Bonnie to my Clyde, Chidi, the Karl to my Hans Gruber, the Kronk to my Yzma—" "I... " Chidi 599 manages, traumatized, "I don't even know where to start, Eleanor, you understand that all of these are bad guys, please tell me you understand, it's very important to me that you understand—" "Chidi, I only understand that you have to come with me," Eleanor tells him, soft, sincere, scared. "It's important somehow." Chidi watches her for a moment. "Okay." * "Everyone else is forking," Eleanor 666 announces casually, breezing into the guest room, mouth full of popcorn shrimp, "so we should, too, you know, probably." "Eleanor," Chidi 666 bristles, flustered, uncomfortable, visibly struggling to keep his composure and his bookmark in place, "if everyone else jumped off a building, should we?" "Bro," she points out, kinda smug, kinda shy, gesturing at the book in his lap, "we literally just finished a chapter on how conformity makes us human." "Oh, of course," he complains, nervously adjusting his glasses, "now you pay attention to my lessons. Wait. You're paying attention to my lessons, Eleanor, that's—sadly—the proudest I've been—" "Cool," she says, tossing her bucket of popcorn shrimp aside, "but are you turned on." Chidi stares. "Weirdly," he blinks, "yes." * "Perhaps," Michael says into his recorder, perched precariously atop his windowsill, only peripherally aware of Eleanor 704, "next time I could maybe tinker with the bluetooth settings—" "Wait," Chidi 704 says, gripping his chair, glasses slipping down his nose, "next time?" "Oh, right," Michael summarizes flippantly, "yeah. Okay. So we've been through some version of this like 704 times." Unenthusiastic, he sticks his hands up in surrender. "Surprise. I'm a bad guy and so are you. Let's see, what am I missing—ah, yes." He spares them an accusatory glance. "I had to reboot you jerks, like, every couple of months." "Wait—wait, what—704 reboots?" Chidi asks, horrified, vein in his forehead pulsing. "No, what—at an average of two months per cycle," he turns to Eleanor, eyes wide, left shoe tapping restlessly, "that's... 117 years." Eleanor waves him off with a dismissive scoff, "That can't be right but I don't know enough about math to dispute it." She pauses for a beat. "Why do I know that word." Michael arranges his face into a desperate sort of condescension, thumb poised over the clicker. "Character development." * "The bad place must be frozen over," Eleanor 782 tells Nightmare George Washington, "because I definitely think I have the hots for a nerd. Like. I'm not super into him or anything." The clown painting stares back. "Fine," Eleanor concedes, "I might be super into him." She turns. "Tahani, at the risk of failing Bechdel, what do you think." Tahani 782 looks up from a Better Homes and Gardens magazine, criminally long legs crossed at the ankle, hair swept to the side like a sexy mermaid. "I think dedicating an entire article to snacks is a neoteric atrocity. In this economy?" Eleanor narrows her eyes. "About feelings, Tahani. These terrible things I'm apparently having." Tahani rises with elegance, the hem of her dress sweeping down her perfect calves. "Eleanor, I must, as the Floridians say," she lectures airily, patting Eleanor's shoulder, "respectfully stay in my lane." "Fine," Eleanor complains, agitated, unnerved, defensive, "fine, I'll just figure out feelings and how to "have" them on my own—" "Eleanor," Tahani points out, placing one of Chidi's tabbed books in Eleanor's hands. "Not quite on your own." * "We don't belong here," Eleanor 800 murmurs lazily, cheek smushed against a couch cushion, ripped bag of chips cradled in her arms. Squatting by his Playstation, monk robes caught on a stack of games, Jason 800 nods sagely. "Ya, we musta used some legit cheat codes, dog." Expression blank, Eleanor watches him blow a peace kiss at the ceiling. "Dude, we have to leave." Jason gives her a scandalized pout. "Before we get Chidi in trouble," Eleanor clarifies, coaxing, "before we get Tahani in trouble." Petulantly, Jason sprawls on the floor. "I don't wanna leave. I like it here. I like how the pizza is always deep dish and how the Jaguars air on every channel and how my budhole—" "It's the right thing to do," Eleanor eulogizes. "You and me, we gotta do what's best for Chidi and Tahani." "Noo, homie," Jason sits up, slapping the rug, "what about what's best for us, huh." Eleanor nuzzles the bag of chips. "What is best for us, Jason." "I dunno," Jason admits, looking constipated, "but I do know Tahani makes me smarter and Chidi makes you gooder, so." Eleanor opens her mouth to protest, then bites down on a chip with an affectionate, lopsided smile. "He does make me gooder." * Eleanor 802 says, "Do you think it's weird." Chidi 802 says, "Always and everything, yes, but what specifically?" "That Michael deep-fried our brains 801 times and I still just..." she gives him a sideways glance, sitting by the kitchen counter, VCR queued up. "Found you." Chidi shifts atop the stool, brows knitted, fingers anxiously clawing at his knobby knees. "Perhaps, mathematically, it was mostly inevitable, since there were only four—" "I have to show you something," Eleanor interrupts, thumb paused over the play button. "Do you wanna see? It could, you know. Totally change everything, be a total plot twist, a jumping of the shark, maybe." Pained, Chidi offers her a tiny indecisive wheeze. "Well," he starts eventually, wary but focused, "according to Thomas Gray, ignorance is bliss. But also, uh, there's Francis Bacon, who argued that knowledge is power—" "I'm not gonna lie, Chidi," Eleanor shrugs one shoulder, palm upturned. "Imma side with food, not colors." Chidi pauses, a brief hint of surprised admiration softening his features. Eleanor's heart catches in her chest. "So can I show you." "Yeah." * "Hey, quick question," Chidi says on the train, fragments of the neighborhood dismantling behind them, "and I feel like I need to qualify it with a—" "Chidi." "Right, sorry," he says, pressed to her side, studiously examining his knuckles. "I've been thinking a lot lately—" "Shocker." "—and I think—feel—think I should mention a principle we didn't have time to cover in class," he rambles, adorably sweaty, "one that closely relates to skepticism, in which we have to assume that because we can only experience our own mind, every bit of knowledge outside of it is unsure and unreal—" "Solipsism," Eleanor nods politely. Chidi pauses, almost awed, lips parted, eyebrows raised. "What," Eleanor offers defensively. "I read ahead." "Oooh," Michael calls from the back, "that's how she got you in Reboot 413." Thoughtful, Chidi turns to meet her eyes. "Wait, so you know about solipsism but not where Senegal is?" "Chidi," Eleanor whines, "I'm from Arizona. We get our maps from... 1886. Countries like Africa—" "Again, Africa is not a c—" "Haven't we left The Bad Place?" Tahani demands sternly, then demurs, "I mean. Do carry on..." Awkwardly, Chidi squares his shoulders. "It's just that, hypothetically, what if none of this is real." "The probability of that is absolutely high," Janet agrees. "Oh, my stomach," Chidi groans, then refocuses. "If none of this is real, then none of the reboots, including the one where..." he trails off guiltily, "Cannonball Run II happened, happened." "Oh no, Burt Reynolds doesn't win the race?" Jason asks, noticeably upset. Eleanor ignores him, gently slipping her hand in Chidi's. "Look. What matters to me is that none of the reboots erased what I care about." She hesitates, mumbling, "You." "Oh, dang," Jason hoots, "Chidi's a virus." Five pairs of eyes laser in on him. "Yea, Chidi's like this one virus Pillboi got that one time we tried to download Party in the USA on LimeWire but it was actually a," he crooks his fingers at an angle, aghast, "cartoon porn, yo." He nods in remembrance, somber. "He never could get rid of it after that." "Are you saying, Jason, in your... graciously simple manner," Tahani translates delicately, "you believe we are inside a computer simulation." Jason purses his lips, thinking. "Okay... yeah?" "Oh," Chidi says, seeking guidance from the train's ceiling, "that wasn't helpful at all, Eleanor." Eleanor knocks his knee with hers, smiling brightly, hand still in Chidi's. "It was for me." Incredulous, Chidi observes her for a moment. "How." Eleanor's smile grows. "I'm cool with a computer simulation or eternal damnation or even Alabama," she tells him with a kind of unshakeable trust. "As long as I'm stuck with you."

#the good place #eleanor shellstrop #chidi anagonye #♪ idk the tags for this ♫#eleanor x chidi

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Why The Woman in the Window Fails to Channel Alfred Hitchcock

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This article contains The Woman in the Window spoilers.

Joe Wright’s The Woman in the Window is not shy about its Hitchcockian influence. It’s there in both subtle and overt ways from the very first scene. During one of the film’s opening shots, the camera pans around Amy Adams’ ridiculously spacious New York City brownstone and passes a television screen that is inexplicably playing the ending to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) in slow-motion, with Jimmy Stewart wrestling against the grip of an out-of-frame Raymond Burr.

With a very similar premise to Rear Window—a slightly deranged New Yorker pries into the hidden lives of her neighbors—The Woman in the Window freely owns up to its influences and aspirations. Sadly, Rear Window, this is not. Which may explain why 20th Century Studios (back when it was called 20th Century Fox) delayed the movie for reshoots, and then Disney ended up selling this otherwise incredibly polished and stylish thriller to the industry’s algorithm farm upstate: Netflix.

Admittedly, The Woman in the Window is not intended to be a direct remake of Rear Window or any other Hitchcock picture. The talent involved is too smart for that. Rather the film is taking a plethora of inspirations from various Hitch joints, and marrying that Master of Suspense ethos with a modern sensibility created by author A. J. Finn, who wrote the novel the film is based on. I have not read the book, but the bestseller clearly benefited from the boom of “grip lit” novels—thrillers often centered around the unreliable perspective of flawed female protagonists—in the 2010s.

So it is that The Woman in the Window’s Dr. Anna Fox (Adams) is an exceedingly troubled individual, suffering from a trauma we only learn late in the story was caused by the tragic death of her husband and child. Those deaths were in turn precipitated by Anna’s own infidelities, which left her distracted while driving on an icy road. Hence the audience is asked to question everything we see in The Woman in the Window, including whether Anna really met the woman she thinks is Jane Russell (Julianne Moore) and if Jane was then actually murdered across the street.

In essence, it’s the same setup of Rear Window where Anna thinks her neighbor (Gary Oldman in the newer movie’s case) murdered his wife, but the accusation is clouded in doubt for even the audience since Anna is such an unreliable narrator that for two-thirds of her movie, she convinces us that she’s going through a divorce instead of grief.

And yet, none of these added elements distract from the fact that this movie wants to be Hitchcock, or at least the heir to what many consider to be his masterpiece. It’s there every time Anna spies on her neighbors through the long lens of her old school camera, which unsubtly harkens back to Stewart’s Jeff doing the same in Rear Window. And it’s woven into the silver mane of hair on Oldman’s head, which intentionally echoes Burr’s sinister everyman who lives in the apartment across from Jeff’s.

Even the film’s opening shot more covertly recalls another Hitchcock classic starring James Stewart: Vertigo (1958). With its slowly spiraling image of snow drops drifting in a circle through the air—an image we later learn is the last thing Anna saw before her family died—we’re retroactively reminded of the spirals that consumed the mind of Stewart’s Scottie in that film. The zoom-in, pullback dolly shot Hitch also made famous in that movie of nerve-inducing stairwells is likewise visually referenced in The Woman in the Window, with the stairwell in Anna’s home recreating the same high anxiety composition as a set of stairs in one of Hitchcock’s earliest films, the silent British production, Blackmail (1929). I’m also fairly convinced that the shot of Adams opening her eye in the second image of The Woman in the Window is a visual recreation of Janet Leigh’s frozen death stare in Psycho (1960).

Right down to its plot about wives causing a case of mistaken identities, the Hitchcockian overtones are heavy in The Woman in the Window. So why doesn’t it work?

For all of Hitchcock’s innovative understanding of the filmmaking craft, and panache for droll showmanship as the “Master of Suspense,” his own passions and fixations (particularly at their most perverse) colored his work with an eerie madness. Or at least the best ones. Sure, he is one of the first directors to make himself a household name via attention-grabbing cameos and almost car dealership-like theatrics in the rollout of new movies’ marketing. And when Tippi Hedren asked him why her character in The Birds (1963) would open a door if there are menacing noises on the other side, he replied, “Because I said so.”

But then, despite its popularity, The Birds is hardly one of Hitchcock’s best films. And the hypnotic effect he created with the better ones often spoke to something truer, and frankly uglier, than the glossy veneer of his star-studded casts. Ironically, this is probably truest about the two Hitch films Woman in the Window most desperately emulates: Rear Window and Vertigo.

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In both films, one could sense the devious pleasure Hitchcock took in casting Jimmy Stewart—the all-American face of Frank Capra classics like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)—as his on screen avatar.

In the case of Rear Window, Stewart still plays an ostensibly heroic individual. Jeff is a man’s man and a photojournalist who goes into warzones, vacations on safaris, and breaks his leg while covering a high performance car race from a dangerous vantage point. But there is something more unsettling beneath all that machismo which is what won the attention of a much younger high society girl, Lisa (Grace Kelly).

There’s a gnawing suspicion about the awfulness of his fellow man, and a peculiar desire to revel in it. When Jeff can’t do that from behind enemy lines, he’ll settle for studying it in his own backyard—it’s a view he shares with a slew of neighbors overlooking a lower Manhattan courtyard. He doesn’t start spying on them though because he heard a scream and fears for a woman he just met. He does it out of boredom while his leg is bandaged up. Well that, plus a perverse curiosity, be it in the form of lust for the dancer across the way, Miss Torso, or a voyeuristic fascination with the despair of a woman he nicknames Miss Lonelyhearts. That he discovers a man murdered his wife is entirely happenstance.

Only after he seduces Lisa into sharing his obsessions—to the point where she’ll break into the neighbor’s home—does he realize she’s the perfect girl for him. And after she’s been fully indoctrinated, she shares his “ghoulish” disappointment (her word) when they’re falsely made to believe for a moment that Lars Thorwald’s wife is alive and out of town. That of course turns out to be a misdirection. Lars (Burr) is having an affair and has his mistress pose as his dead wife for a train ride.

Mistaken identity becomes even more pivotal in Vertigo, Hitch’s most revealing cinematic manifesto for how he sees himself. In that film, Stewart appears again but as someone who is hardly depicted as an alpha male. The only hero in this story dies at the beginning when Stewart’s Scottie is so crippled by terror that he cannot save himself as he dangles from a rooftop. The police partner who comes back for him to lift him up ends up taking the literal fall.

Afterward, Scottie (like Anna Fox) is seen as damaged goods by himself and everyone who knows him. Particularly in the 1950s, being diagnosed as suffering from acrophobia or any form of mental illness was treated as an inherent form of weakness and a deficiency of character. An onscreen judge spells this out after Scottie again appears to let his vertigo ruin him, causing him to fail to save the woman he thinks is Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak). He can’t find the wherewithal to follow her up a bellow tower, and is then treated to the horror of seeing a woman fall to her death outside.

Of course the twist of the movie is that Novak is not playing Madeleine; she’s Judy Barton, the woman whom Madeleine’s husband Gavin (Tom Helmore) has hired to impersonate his wife and seduce Scottie before running up a high stairwell. At the top, Gavin waited to throw his actual wife to her doom. Unfortunately for Judy, Scottie’s broken mind wouldn’t stop looking for her until one day he found the woman he thought he loved still walking the streets of San Francisco.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The Woman in the Window blends these narrative elements. Once again, a protagonist with a phobia (agoraphobia here) mistakes a blonde woman—Julianne Moore’s Katie—for another character’s wife. When Jennifer Jason Leigh barges into Anna’s brownstone, it’s meant to be as bewildering as when Scottie sees Novak still walking around, now as a brunette, in Vertigo. Of course Woman in the Window plays with the convention by making it the biological mother of Oldman and Leigh’s adopted son whom is murdered, as opposed to the actual wife. Indeed, Moore’s Katie just enjoys playing into Anna’s misconception that she’s the wife of Oldman’s Alistair Russell.

But these reliances on miscommunication and unreliable narrators aren’t really in service of anything other than the twist. The thrill, such as it is, amounts to little more than Anna’s epiphany of staring into a photograph and realizing thanks to a reflection that a blonde woman played by Moore really was inside her home. The rug is then even further pulled when it’s revealed that (SURPRISE!) it wasn’t Alistair who murdered Katie, but Katie’s actual biological son, Ethan (Fred Hechinger).

However, the twist is as empty as Anna’s painfully quiet home. It’s intended to be a “gotcha” reveal, but it never really gets under the skin.

By contrast, the idea that Madeleine is really Judy in Vertigo is a gateway to explore Hitchcock’s vices: blondes and the desire to control them. It’s why Stewart’s Scottie becomes as manipulative as an auteur with a fetish, and as possessive of his new paramour as the filmmaker who’s still trying to replace his greatest leading lady collaborator after she’s retired from acting to be the Princess of Monaco. Scottie maniacally remaking Judy into Madeleine, and Jimmy Stewart remaking Kim Novak into Grace Kelly, is some bizarre but intoxicating allegory about Hitchcock and his own self-image of his obsession.

Notably, Vertigo wasn’t a hit in 1958. In fact, it flopped at the box office and was only reevaluated as a masterpiece in the 1980s, after Hitch’s death. It was too weird and, intentionally or not, introspective for the ‘50s. And personally, I still prefer Rear Window for better balancing the director’s eccentricities with his commercial instincts to make a top notch thriller which can be revealing about the darker side of human nature yet still remain addictively entertaining and playful.

Woman in the Window attempts to wear the style of both, but has no controlling idea to add to those affectations other than a subversion of their twists: it’s the son who murders the other woman instead of the husband who kills the wife. The meaninglessness of this mangled reversal is why it feels so cheap when the movie devolves into a slasher flick, with Ethan chasing Anna to the rooftop as if he were attempting to star in “Scream 5” instead of “Rear Window 2.”The Woman in the Window is a loving impersonation of Hitch, but be it a thriller or a comedy, an impersonation is never going to carry a movie.

The post Why The Woman in the Window Fails to Channel Alfred Hitchcock appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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yespoetry · 6 years

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Mother Said, Nobody Becomes An Artist Unless They Have To

By Claire Rudy Foster

My mother said she’d kill me if I wrote about her. She laughed, because it was a joke, because of course she’d never actually kill me. She’d just make me wish I was dead.

As an adult, I have written about many kinds of mothers; I have become a mother, myself. But I have left the place in my heart where my real mother lives wild, unexplored, and dark.

I believe that she wants it that way.

My mother, for better or worse, finds her way into my stories. I’ll start a new story and there she is, looking at me over her glasses. She’s a great reader, my mother, perceptive and sharp. She misses Michiko Kakutani’s column in the New York Times and hasn’t bonded to the new book review editor yet. My mother is a critic, like me: she’s impossible to impress.

She doesn’t read my writing. It upsets her too much.

Yet, when I write, she is often the reader I’m envisioning. I practiced my first stories on her, after all. I keep offering her things when I know she won’t take them. I can only make one thing, sentences, and I bring them to her like dead birds, watch her step over them, watch her carefully bury them in the rubbish heap.

I revisited the unidirectional relationship between mother and child when I picked up a battered copy of White Oleander from a free library box this summer. I read the novel in 1999, right before it got selected for Oprah’s Book Club and became a #1 national bestseller. It represented everything that I wanted: everything I wanted to experience, everything I wanted to be as a writer and a person. Janet Fitch and I were alumni of the same college: she graduated in the same class as my father, when he went there. Her prose was fiery, floral, packed with images that dripped like LSD trails. Astrid, the main character in White Oleander was the same age I was when I first picked it up, and as I read it, I felt myself maturing, hardening.

At night, I prayed for a life worth writing about. I didn’t know what I was asking for.

Yes, I got what I wanted.

What I didn’t get was a mother like Ingrid Magnussen: the white haired Viking poet whose bond to Astrid prevails through a decade-long separation. Serving a life sentence for poisoning a lover who jilts her, Ingrid sends Astrid letters from prison. Her sections of the novel, I remember, felt flat to me, and when I first read White Oleander I admit that I skimmed those scenes, flipping through Astrid’s visits to the prison and the strange notes she received from her mother at her many addresses. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those letters were missives from my future.

She writes, “Remember, there’s only one virtue, Astrid. The Romans were right. One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.”

When I revisited this novel, I realized that Ingrid was the mother I wanted, back then. She was also the mother I had become.

My teens and twenties were the kind of miserable that breeds artists or suicides. I overdosed on heroin at 18, lost my virginity to a rapist in a Mediterranean hotel, saw a few gunfights, learned how to take a punch. I survived myself, as Astrid did, and those experiences became a patchwork of scar tissue that covered my heart. Like Astrid, my pain protected me from the way the world continued to batter me, the way the first slap will numb your whole face, overstimulate your nerves, so that the next one and the next one feel like nothing, not even when his ring catches your lip, it’s nothing, just impact, and you’re used to that, you know the feeling, you’re tired of it before it even gets going.

When I was 19 years old, I came home from college and went to a party, where someone put a roofie in my drink. Drinks. I remember standing near the bonfire on the beach, surrounded by people I used to know, and then the next thing the whumph of my body hitting the sand, rough hands hauling me up, touching under my arms, my breasts. I remember trying to find my feet as they pulled me down an alley; who did this to me? I stumbled, and then everything was grey, and then everything was black.

I came to with my friend Scott on top of me. It was dark, early morning.

“Scott, are you fucking me?” I said.

He didn’t answer. He hauled me on top of him and continued, although I pushed him back and turned my face away from his kisses. He put his mouth on my breasts. He smelled like leather that has been soaked in speed and salt, dried in the sun. I knew he was injecting---I tried to think about HIV transmission, Hep C, how the barriers of my body had been breached without my knowledge. I could be dying, right now. This could be the thing that killed me.

My voice shrank in my throat. This is my friend, Scott, I said to myself. What had I done to deserve this?

When he was finished, he said, “Be grateful I didn’t cum.”

He hadn’t used a rubber. My physical self woke up one limb at a time. There was the nightmare feeling of panic, and being trapped in a body that is not responsive and can’t run when you need to get away. I eased myself out of bed, onto the floor. It took a few minutes to stand up, and although I was ashamed and wished I could wrap myself in the sheet at least so that he could not see my nakedness, I felt a terrible, tearing heat between my legs and it was more important to get away so I did, and there was some blood on the toilet paper and on my lip where it had split, how did that happen, what did I do? What was done to me?

I put my hands on the bathroom sink for balance and tried to wash my face without looking in the mirror. I didn’t want to see myself as a sick animal. Next to my right hand were the dozen hairpins I’d used when I got dressed up for the party. They were laid out in a perfect line, each one square and symmetrical to the others. Who did that? I scooped them into my palm and held them. More than anything, I wanted my mother.

Scott walked me home, as though we’d just been on a date, and when I staggered into the house my mother saw me and asked me and I told her. It was not my first rape, or my last one, but it is the only one she helped me with. She called the police, and she rode with me in the squad car to the place where they scrape cells from the inside of your body to see if they can find any incriminating DNA. My mother, who said nothing, sat by me and held my hand while the person collecting evidence from me - me, I was a crime scene - slipped a tiny speculum into my ass to swab for semen.

“Wow, yours is so easy,” the person said. “Most people, it takes more than one try.”

I was ashamed. Because my ass opened easily, maybe I was easy, maybe I was built for all kinds of violation. My mother passed me a piece of candy and I put it in my mouth, trying not to cry. We never talked about what happened. I blamed her, of course. I thought of all the things I wished she’d said or done. When I hear other people’s stories about their supportive mothers, I quivered with jealousy. My mother was not like other people’s mothers.

I didn’t understand that, in my moment of pain, she was as vulnerable and scared as I was.

Probably, she wanted her mother.

Nobody came with me to give my statement to the police. I brought a stuffed toy my mother had given me, a pudgy wad with string bean arms and legs and a Muppet nose. There was an advocate sent by some nonprofit, who sat next to me making faces of disgust when I described what I’d experienced.

“Did you say ‘no’?” the detective asked. She was young and pretty, with a high curly ponytail. She looked like she was going to coach a cheerleading practice after this. She made notes on her clipboard.

“I couldn’t speak,” I said.

She put the pen down. “In the state of California, it’s not ‘no’ unless you say ‘no.’”

“It was rape,” I said. “I’ve been raped before, I know what it feels like.”

The detective shook her head and closed the book of mugshots. Scott’s was in there: I’d pointed to him, identified him, and repeated my story into the detective’s tape recorder. I said things I couldn’t say in my mother’s presence, about my drug use and the other people who were there. Exactly the positions. Exactly the feelings. Yet, I resented her for not leaving work to be with me. The detective stood up.

“Are we done?” I asked. “That’s it? You’ll arrest him?” “You didn’t say ‘no,’” she repeated, and left the room. I was numb. I sat outside the police building for a long time, crying and holding this silly, stuffed animal. The advocate stayed for a few minutes. I tried to put my head on her shoulder and she scooted away, until she was sitting a good three feet away from me on the concrete bench. Then, she also got up and left me alone. I was 19. A child. I needed my mother; where was she?

Ingrid said, “Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment.”

I cried until the bus came, and then I went home and lay down in my bed. When the winter break ended, I went back to college. I have never talked about this, or any of my sexual assaults, with my family. I believed that their silence meant that they did not care what happened to me. I treated myself accordingly. It was not the last time I woke up with someone raping me, or the last time institutional justice failed me. Like Astrid, I was hardening, losing faith. Every time I was hurt, my armor got thicker. I drank more. I was never not ready to die.

But now, when I revisit that memory, all I can think about is how my mother silently watched me bear the pain and humiliation of that exam. It never occurred to me that she was suffering too. I didn’t think about this until I had a child of my own. Loving him introduced me to real vulnerability. I couldn’t be weak anymore: I had someone to protect. For the first time, I understood how my mother felt about me, when I was new. It was an animal feeling. I loved him so much, I could have committed terrible crimes.

The first words I said to him, into his new, perfect ears, were, “If anyone ever hurts you, I will fucking bury them.”

My son has a ferocious mother. Before he existed, I was a victim: at best, someone who would survive. Six rapes, heroin addiction, overdoses. It was the kind of life that pounds you into the ground like a wooden stake. Then, I got pregnant, and my entire outlook on life changed. I had someone to stand up for, so I had to learn to defend myself.

Imagine my discomfort at opening White Oleander again, and seeing Astrid not as a reflection of myself, but as her ferocious, unforgiving mother. I saw her monstrousness and her total disdain for human weakness, but this time, I wondered what she’d experienced that made her so hard. I was learning how to be a single mother, an easy target for unscrupulous men. I knew what it meant to walk around in a woman’s body - the price the world exacted from us from being beautiful. I wondered where Ingrid’s mother was.

Part of being a good mother is letting your child learn to bear their own trouble. I couldn’t be with my son every moment: I couldn’t stand between him and the bully at school. I had to let go of him in small ways, at the right times, and it burned me like coals. I felt like my one hand reached for him and the other restrained it.

At the same time, I went through my own processes. My son saw me messy, tired, crying, out of money, scared. He saw me asleep and awake, laughing and mourning. He witnesses my vulnerability. I think that is the fear of all mothers: that we will raise a child who sees our weaknesses and shares them with the world. We trust them to keep our shortcomings to themselves. Yet, always, they see us and they hear us and our failings make indelible marks on them.

By the time Astrid reaches adulthood, she’s covered in scars, inside and out. She’s been chewed up by the foster system. She’s had many mothers. As I finished White Oleander this time around, I wanted to hug her. Pass her a piece of candy.

“You poor thing,” I’d say. As though she hadn’t just given birth to herself. As though she hadn’t studied, her entire life, how to be a survivor.

Claire Rudy Foster's essays on addiction, queer issues, and writing are featured in The Huffington Post, The Rumpus, and Racked, among others. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her fiction can be found in McSweeney's, Thrice Fiction, and many other rad journals. She is a book reviewer and very gentle rabble-rouser. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon.

#essay #lgbtq #me too #claire rudy foster

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bevioletskies · 7 years

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20 questions [12/20]

characters: peter/gamora, guardians-centric

fandom: avengers academy/marvel cinematic universe

summary: wasp has a new competition in store for the students of avengers academy, and there’s money involved. so obviously, peter and gamora have to pretend to be a couple in order to win. wait, what?

chapter preview: janet announces two new school-wide events, gamora tries to change her strategy when it comes to dealing with her feelings, and yondu is the captain of this ship, and no, I'm not talking about the eclector.

word count: 5301 | total word count: 118k

a/n: listen, yondu being alive and well in this au of mine might be one of my favourite parts about writing it.

ao3 | previously | next | masterpost

So maybe, just maybe, it was a little narcissistic for Peter to think this way, but it seemed as if the entirety of the Academy was breathing a little easier once he and Gamora had made up, and were successfully faking it again. They held hands wherever they walked (so long as the others weren’t with them - Rocket had taken to making kissing noises whenever they stood a little too close together), kissed whenever they had to part ways for classes, and told stories about their “dates” to anyone who would listen.

Except this time, unlike their “origin story”, as Peter had called it, the “dates” were nearly one hundred percent truth. They talked about the rude SHIELD agent, the date in Shakespeare Park, the musical, the museum - they even mentioned dancing in the hotel room, in which Gamora rolled her eyes in pretend fond annoyance, while Peter winked at their enraptured audience. “Can always count on a romantic song to set the mood,” he had said cheerfully. Hey, if they weren’t going to talk about how that night had ended in private, they could at least play it up in public.

On Friday afternoon, after classes were over and everyone had dispersed out onto the quad, Janet was once again poised to make announcements, this time sitting atop the bulletin board, megaphone in hand. “Attention, Academy students!” she hollered, as if she wasn’t already amplifying her voice enough. “Just a reminder that voting ends in two weeks, so get your ballots in. We need more volunteers for ballot counters, sign-ups are available at Avengers Hall. Also, we have two new super exciting events ready to share with you guys!”

“Now what,” Rocket groaned. “She ain’t gonna break out a confetti gun, is she?”

“Ten units it’ll be a fog machine instead,” Yondu said.

“Deal. Shake on it.”

“As a school of heroes, we’re always working towards saving the day. I mean, that’s our number one goal here, right?” The crowd cheered ecstatically. “But I think there’s one more thing that we can do to close out this school year as a way of giving back - a fundraiser festival!” Janet kicked her legs up and down in excitement. “There’s so much talent at this school that doesn’t always get celebrated the way that our hero-ing skills do. So, you can either sign up to present a talent, or, volunteer to run a booth! There will be a bake sale, a dunk tank, a temporary tattoo artist, and maybe we can get a kissing booth set up?” She winked, causing giggles to ripple through the crowd. Director Fury was shaking his head nearby, arms folded in defiance. This was what he got for running a superhero school full of teens and young adults.

“I am Groot?”

“Kissin’ you’s like kissin’ a baby, Groot. Don’t think anyone here’s running for president anytime soon, ‘cept maybe Cap.”

“I have also finally gotten Director Fury to agree to host a prom this year! Tickets are on sale now at the Avengers Hall, and ticket sales, plus all our fundraising money, will go towards various charities around the world and Damage Control right here in New York.” Janet beamed. “The theme for this year’s prom will be…”

“Ten units it’s Under the Sea.”

“I bet ten it’ll be A Night to Remember.”

“...Masquerade Madness!” Janet squealed. Yondu and Rocket muttered “damn!” under their breaths in sync. “Everyone will be wearing a mask - bonus points if it looks like your actual superhero mask. But don’t actually wear your superhero mask, that’s lazy and I’ll be mad.” The students exchanged dubious looks - they didn’t like Janet when she was angry. “Anyways, that’s all! Thank you, lovelies!”

As the crowd began to disperse, chattering excitedly to their friends about what they were going to do for the fundraiser or who they wanted to go to prom with, Peter stepped closer to Gamora, hands moving to settle on her waist. She shivered at the touch as he bent towards her ear, kissing the side of her head before whispering, “I have an idea. Follow my lead.”

“I would if I knew what your idea was,” she muttered back, though he ignored her in favour of walking around her so he was facing her front. Her eyes widened in alarm as he got down on one knee, arms spread wide.

“Gamora,” he said loudly, and what was that odd not-British accent he was doing? Out of the corner of her eye, she could already see other students forming a circle around them, whispering to each other as they watched their spectacle. Janet had flown over, phone in hand, eyes the size of saucers. Kamala was bouncing up and down nearby, tweeting with reckless abandon and trying not to squeal too loudly. “My incredible, beautiful, deadly, powerful, deadly powerful - ”

“Quill,” she huffed, though she tried and failed to hide her smile behind her hands.

“ - will you go to prom with me?” Peter finished, looking so wonderfully earnest she could feel her grin spreading even wider. It was as if he was really hoping she would say yes, but that there would be a chance she would say no, and really, why would she say no?

“I thought it was a given, considering you’re my boyfriend,” Gamora said, and wow, she did not say that word out loud enough, it felt too foreign on her tongue, “but yes, of course I will.”

A cheer went through the crowd, firmly solidifying Peter’s somewhat arrogant belief that his relationship with Gamora had become a beloved part of the school’s social environment. As he got to his feet, his usual cocky grin on his face, he wondered how else he could possibly play up the moment. Gamora seemed to have the same idea, launching herself in his arms with surprising force, burying her face in his neck. “Smart,” she murmured, breath hot against his ear. “Our classmates will definitely know we have made up by now.” She pulled away, but not before taking both of his hands in hers, squeezing gently.

“And we continue to be the cutest couple in school,” Peter replied softly, smiling. “Let’s go get our tickets.”

“Wait! I have a confetti gun I want to use on you guys! Come back!”

“HA! Pay up, blue boy.”

“Ain’t never betting on nothin’ with you again, rat.”

______

Dinner that night on the Milano was a much more raucous affair than that of the previous three nights, now that Peter was back with his team. Everyone’s spirits were lifted, relieved that their leaders were once again back in a good place. Peter even offered to help Mantis and Drax cook (“You have burned water, Quill, get out”), but instead was relegated to setting the table.

“Man, I missed you guys,” Peter sighed happily. “The whole ‘broody loner’ schtick really doesn’t work for me.”

“I don’t understand none of the crap that came outta your mouth just now,” Yondu said, slapping him on the back. “But we missed you too, boy. Twig got all weepy, it was awful.”

“I am Groot,” he protested, though he jumped up and down, arms outstretched, for Peter to scoop him up.

“I missed you the most,” Peter told him, resulting in a tiny wooden smile so cute that even Nebula, who was otherwise sulking in a corner, had to fight the urge to grin. “But hey, while I was away, I watched a couple movies with songs you might like. I’ll play ‘em for you sometime.” Groot nodded eagerly, patting his small hand against Peter’s cheek before jumping back down again onto the kitchen counter.

“You done cryin’ about your own problems yet?” Rocket entered the room, lugging what looked like a giant detonation device behind him. “Found this mysterious piece of crap dumped outside. Probably Stark’s. Has all the parts we need to get the Milano finally back up and runnin’. This your doing, Quill?”

“No, but he’s been sneaking stuff in for us, as far as I can tell,” Peter replied. “It’s a good thing, right? You don’t have to acknowledge he helped, and we can finally get my baby working again.”

“Your insistence on referring to the Milano as a child is disturbing.” Gamora had walked into the room and swatted Peter’s arm playfully in a surprising display of casual affection, a stoicism in her eyes that didn’t match the gentle smile on her face.

“Not a child, my child.”

“Do you people ever talk about anything of significance?” Nebula’s sigh was almost impressive as Director Fury’s. “Gamora and I have decided to kill the Black Order. We apparently require your assistance.”

“Oh, hell,” Yondu groaned, throwing himself down on the couch. “Can’t we focus on one thing at a time, girl? Got enough on our plate as it is.”

“Your failure to perform well at school has nothing to do with the rest of us,” Nebula shot back. “Try harder.”

“Nebula.” Gamora clicked her tongue at her sister disapprovingly. “Let’s not turn this into a fight for once, okay?”

“That’s hypocritical, considering you and Quill having a lover’s spat nearly made this whole team fall apart in a matter of days.”

“We had a misunderstanding, it’s fine,” Peter said defensively. “Mantis, Drax, is dinner ready yet?”

By the time everyone had finally sat down to eat, Peter was reminded of how exhausting it was to keep up with his ridiculous team of misfits, but damn if he wouldn’t trade them in for all the units in the world (alright, maybe Nebula, but she was slowly growing on him, too. She was important to Gamora, so by extension, she was important to him as well).

“I spoke with Janet earlier today,” Mantis said after a few thankfully silent minutes of everyone stuffing their faces. “She said she didn’t want to give away the current voting results, but that you and Gamora seem to be in second place at the moment.”

“Second? Who’s in front of us?” Peter exclaimed, food nearly spilling out of his mouth as he spoke.

“Captain America and Agent Carter, of course,” Mantis replied with a shrug. “Even students who do not care much about love voted for them because it is a love that spans decades.”

“Gamora and I have literally seen each other almost die, like, ten times each. Isn’t that romantic?” Peter was flailing again, waving his fork around haphazardly. Gamora moved to gently push his hands down before he could knock over everyone’s cups in the process.

“The almost dying isn’t romantic, Quill, the ‘saving each other’s lives’ part? Maybe,” she said dryly, letting her hand linger for an extra moment before moving away.

“We could stage a - ”

“No, no, boy, you are not riskin’ your hide just to win sympathy points from those fools,” Yondu said fiercely, slamming a fist down on the table, causing the dishes to rattle. “You’ve had some stupid ideas in your life, but that might be one of your worst yet.”

Sulking, Peter slumped back in his chair, throwing down his fork in defeat. “We gotta give it one last boost. Two weeks, and voting is over. It doesn’t even matter what we do afterwards, but something’s gotta be done now.”

“What happened to the other categories? You are all acting as if this is the only one that matters,” Nebula said with a smirk. “Have we all become so invested in this lie that we’ve forgotten about winning ‘Best Team’?”

“You technically are not part of the team,” Drax reminded her. “Frankly, I’m unsure if it will ever happen for you.” Nebula sneered in response. Gamora stomped on Drax’s foot from the other side of the table, shooting him a warning glare. He let out a howl of pain.

Mantis’s hands shot out to clasp at both Gamora and Drax’s wrists, quick to subdue them before it could escalate. “Actually, Janet says we will probably win that one,” she said, brightening. “The Avengers fight too much, the Defenders are scary to a lot of the newer students, and the other teams are not as prominent in popularity. Peter is especially recognizable to the general public. There are many girls who like to post on social media about him.” Peter could see Gamora’s nose wrinkle in disapproval, so he reached to gently pat her on the leg under the table, hoping no one else could see.

“Awesome, so that’s fifty thousand units in the bag. No, Drax, there’s no physical bag,” Peter interrupted himself as Drax opened his mouth. “And as much as I want to win Most Attractive Team...because that’s apparently a thing, the Avengers look like freaking models. And we have a raccoon.”

“I’M NOT A - ”

“I am Groot.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay, that’s fair.”

“As always, I’ve gained nothing out of this.” Nebula stood to leave with her plate and cutlery, half of her food still left over. Her dramatic exit was ruined by getting stuck behind Drax’s chair on her way out. They all watched in awkward silence as Drax scraped his chair along the metal floor to allow Nebula to side-step with her back against the wall, an increasingly murderous scowl forming on her face.

“We should figure out a plan of attack against the Black Order or she might attempt to leave again,” Gamora muttered to Peter.

“You think we can wait until after the voting’s done?”

After dinner was over, Gamora went to go give Groot a bath (it was usually Drax’s chore, though he’d been protesting against it ever since Groot had been sick that one time and puked on him in the shower), Rocket disappeared to start taking apart the device Stark had “donated”, and Drax followed him to “help” (more like observe and criticize despite knowing nothing about engineering compared to Rocket), leaving Yondu and Peter to take care of the dishes.

“I think I finally figured Nebula out,” Peter said as he dumped a generous amount of dish soap into the sink. “She doesn’t make dramatic exits from dinner because she’s mad or irritated, she does it to get out of dish-washing duty.”

Yondu started opening all the cabinets in search for a clean washcloth. “And y’all say I’m irresponsible.”

“You literally haven’t done homework in like, three months, man,” Peter pointed out. “You’re smarter than this, Yondu.”

“Don’t lecture me about smarts,” Yondu grumbled, finally locating one behind a stack of suspiciously foggy-looking shot glasses. “I know what I’m good for, and it ain’t school.”

“Doesn’t mean you can’t try,” Peter said. He began scraping the food scraps off the plates into their composter. It seemed slightly clogged, but he couldn’t tell if it was because it was a terribly cheap machine or if Rocket had been messing with it for parts.

“I’m done talkin’ about this, but you know what I wanna know more ‘bout? You and Gamora,” Yondu said, straightening up with a smug grin. “What happened? Y’fought for like, five days straight. That’s a record for you two.”

“We both said stuff we regret, no need to share the details,” Peter mumbled. “She might’ve also made it pretty clear she doesn’t actually want to date me, and I guess it just made me kinda sad, but, y’know, I’ll get over it.”

“You asked?” Yondu’s eyes widened. That seemed like an unlikely turn of events. Peter was overconfident at times - well, most of the time - and might’ve overdone it, whatever it was he had done, but Gamora didn’t seem like she would turn him down. She was starting to look just as gooey-eyed around Peter as he did around her. Not that Yondu was paying attention, of course.

“No, but she’s weirdly trying to set me up with girls I barely know,” Peter huffed, throwing the plates into the sink a little more aggressively than he needed to. “You don’t do that with a guy you want to date, therefore, she doesn’t wanna date me.”

“You do if you think it’ll make ‘em happy,” Yondu said, frowning. “If you love someone, you do whatever it takes to make ‘em happy. Don’t you know anything about love?”

“Come on, Yondu,” Peter sighed. “We grew up together. You know that ‘love’ wasn’t ever really a part of my relationships, if you could call ‘em that. Gamora’s...the closest I’ve ever had.”

“Now, now, Quill. You put on a big show, make them girls think you’re smooth,” Yondu said, pacing around Peter. Oh no, Peter thought, it’s Yondu’s Dramatic Speech Time™. “You charm ‘em, kiss a fair bunch, sleep with a couple ‘cause you think it makes you happy. And it does, for a while. But then, you ditch the Ravagers, try to start over, fresh, at the Cosmic Conservatory, and you see a girl that spins you on your head.”

“The pacing really isn’t necessary,” Peter interrupted, but Yondu just continued as if he hadn’t heard him.

“It’s not just that she’s pretty - and she is - it’s that she’s clever, she’s resilient, she’s strong, she’s unlike all the girls you been after your whole life. You flirt with her, but it don’t work ‘cause she’s smarter than that. You don’t wanna give up because she’s somehow different. But then this whole orb business, and Ronan, and you go back and forth, saving each other’s lives, and next thing y’know, you’re runnin’ a team together, living on a ship together, goin’ to school together. She’s everywhere, and she’s almost too important, so you play house instead.”

“Yondu - ”

“You’ve gotten too comfortable in pretendin’, boy,” Yondu said, brandishing a wet spoon at him. Peter winced as it made an incredibly disgusting squelching sound. “You gonna let a good thing like that slip away ‘cause you think she don’t feel the same? Here’s an idea - ask her.” He stood even taller, a satisfied look crossing his face. “I’ll only believe ya if she actually says no.”

Peter blinked at him in disbelief. “Do you know how dramatic you look when you do that? No, don’t answer that, you definitely do.” He sighed, turning back to the sink so he could scrub at the last plate instead of looking at Yondu’s smug expression. “Look, I’ve only just sort of acknowledged that I have feelings for her, okay? And this isn’t the first time - for some stupid reason, I - you know what, I’m not telling you about that. But now, I know for sure, that I like her, a lot, and I’m not ruining a good thing by telling her.”

Yondu snorted. “That’s what all those idiots in those films a’yours say. What’re you waitin’ for, boy, some big, life-changing moment?”

“No,” Peter snapped. “I’m waiting for proof that she feels the same. You think I like getting hurt?”

“So all them girls you flirted with before, you knew it was a sure thing? Never thought you’d get turned down?” Yondu leaned against the counter. “I don’t believe that.”

“Getting turned down for a date or a casual hookup is one thing,” Peter said, setting the last dish down, staring at it intensely like it had personally offended him. “Being rejected when you tell someone how much you like them? When they’re one of the most important people in your life? A whole ‘nother ballgame.”

“So you’re sensitive,” Yondu shrugged. “Your strength and your weakness, if y’ask me. Love, compassion, that’s your real power, ain’t it? You care so much about people you don’t even know. I’m just sayin’, a girl like Gamora, she’s a toughie, but she’s got some baggage. Insecurities, like everyone else. She might need you to spell it out for her before she shows her hand at all.”

He walked away with a knowing smile and wink, leaving Peter feeling thoroughly chastised. Yondu was only older than Peter by a year or two, so why did he feel like just got lectured by a father he didn’t have? He shivered a little at the thought of what his actual father had been like - a “complete and utter jackass”, to quote Yondu’s apt description of him. The way he’d tried to get between Peter and the other Guardians, the way he’d taunted him about his mother. Peter winced when he remembered how Ego had compared his relationship with Gamora to be like his own relationship with Meredith. Never, Peter thought fiercely.

Left alone with his thoughts for a few minutes as he mindlessly rearranged the kitchen cupboards (who thought it was a good idea to put preserved eyeballs next to the jam? Why did they have preserved eyeballs, and who was eating jam?), a voice pulled him back to reality. “What’re you doing?” Peter jumped, turning to see Gamora standing there, leaning against the wall, wearing one of his hoodies, her hair slightly damp at the ends. He raised an eyebrow. “Groot was fussy and splashed me, don’t look at me like that,” she chuckled. “Why are you moving everything around? Do you not have homework?”

“I do, which is why I’m doing this instead,” he lied smoothly, shutting the cupboard door. “You staying here tonight?”

“Are you?” She stepped closer, blinking up at him. “It’s the last Friday before I finally get back to performing at Club Galaxy. I thought we could do something.” Peter was pretty sure his brain short-circuited when she bit her bottom lip, an impish grin forming on her face.

“You, uh, have something in mind?” Peter was very confused. He couldn’t be sure, considering he’d never seen her do it before, but was she flirting with him? He’d been surprised enough yesterday when Gamora had ended up sleeping in his bed, but now her tone suggested she wanted a continuation. Before his brain could take him to a different line of thinking, he weakly suggested, “Another movie, maybe?”

Which is how he found himself, once again, in his (other) bed with Gamora pressed against his side, showing her -

“Dirty Dancing?” she said. “You’re not even trying to pretend anymore, are you?”

“Why’re you wearing my jacket?” Peter blurted before he could stop himself. He wasn’t sure why the thought to ask had suddenly registered in his head, as if she hadn’t been wearing it for the past twenty minutes already. She looked so at home in his clothes that he could feel all those feelings bubbling up again in his stomach, both something oddly warm and comforting, and something that was urging him to do something he’d regret.

“Janet is having some girls’ tea party - I don’t even know why - and I thought that showing up wearing what is clearly my boyfriend’s jacket would help,” Gamora said. She didn’t even look convinced of her own words - as valid as her point may be, it explained nothing about why she was wearing it now. Still, he decided not to comment as he mulled over what Yondu said. She was, despite her warrior’s exterior, still a young woman with sensitivities. He’d seen it in the discomfort on her face when he’d confronted her about what she said about him, how words could hurt her more than any weapon ever would. It wouldn’t do him any favours to point out the flaws in her logic.

He hummed, laying his head down on the pillow, wondering vaguely if she was planning on staying in his bed tonight as well. Probably not, considering her room was just next door, but it was a nice thought. Unlike Gamora, Peter had shared a bed with people before. Not always for sexual reasons, but with his mom when he’d had a nightmare, or even with Yondu when the Eclector was particularly overcrowded (Yondu didn’t like to talk about it). There was something about waking up to see her next to him that made him feel safe. And maybe, for a moment, he could pretend it was a result of something real. He stole a glance at her, watching as her dark eyes fixated on the screen, taking in Baby and Johnny’s dance practice. “Maybe we should do the lift at prom,” Peter said, half-jokingly.

“I hope you’re not expecting that,” Gamora said, pointing as Jennifer Grey crawled across the floor. He momentarily got distracted by the mental image that her idea had provided him.

“That would be really difficult to do in a prom dress,” he chuckled. “Hey, so do you really want to go to prom?”

“It would be odd if we didn’t,” she replied.

“That’s not what I’m asking,” Peter said softly. “Not for the con. For you.”

“I like experiencing the things I missed out on,” Gamora said thoughtfully, finally turning back to look at him. “I guess it makes me feel like I've become a part of something meaningful, even if it is just a school dance.”

“Then I'm glad to be a part of it,” he declared. “Now, after this movie is over, you have to tell me whether you've had the time of your life…”

______

The weekend passed by with little issue, all things considered. After the turmoil the team had gone through in the past month, they were grateful for the mundane, monotonous crawl of a lazy weekend. Peter was still a little rattled by Yondu’s speech, but he knew it came from a place of caring, as much as Yondu would deny it.

Peter and Rocket even managed to fix the Milano and finally get her up and running once more. True to his word, Peter started off by doing his repairs in a T-shirt, stripped down to a muscle tank, and eventually decided to go shirtless for the last couple hours in the height of the afternoon sun, sweat dripping down his forehead. He was pretty sure there was some irony in being cat-called by Tigra and Black Cat as they passed by the loading bay.

“Is this display necessary?” Gamora sighed when she had dropped by after spending most of her day with Janet and the other girls. “It’s not that hot.” He noticed she was still wearing his hoodie, now fully unzipped over her usual “uniform” of a blank tank top and leather leggings. It was a good look on her.

“You might be used to wearing all-leather outfits in the peak of summer, but I’m not,” Peter replied with a smirk. “I thought you’d enjoy the view, honey.”

“Yes, I don’t know why you’re complaining, Gamora, unless you want to keep him all to yourself,” Felicia purred. “You could cut diamonds on his stomach. I should try that sometime.”

“Don’t talk about him like that, his ego is already the size of his ship,” Gamora said, frowning, though she moved closer so she could kiss him. If her hands lingered on Peter’s bare torso for a little while longer than they needed to, well, that was her business.

Sunday was when the Guardians caught up on homework, albeit separately. Yondu also took the opportunity to chase the others down and chastise them about slacking. “You are telling us not to slack?” Nebula said, eyes narrowed. “That is a first.”

“Not on homework, girl. Your sister and Quill,” Yondu said, causing her to groan.

“Still on about that, are we? You seem oddly invested,” Rocket commented slyly. “What’s going on there, Yondu?”

“You really wanna know?” Yondu snapped.

“Yeah, actually, I do.” Rocket stood to his full height (three feet tall, so hardly intimidating, but to his credit, he had one of his signature BFGs by his side). “I wanna know why you care so d’ast much.”

“Then I’ll tell you.” Yondu settled into the armchair, glancing around to make sure Peter and Gamora were nowhere nearby before starting. “I might not’ve been captain yet, but when I was a kid Ravager, we had a job to go pick up some skinny kid off Terra. Weren’t allowed to ask questions about why or what we were doin’ with him. I watched ‘em big boys haul in that snot-nosed kid, who wouldn’t stop cryin’ about his mama. I was one of the only kids on the Eclector, so they told me to shut him up by any means possible. I didn’t wanna hit him or nothing, he was probably 60 pounds soaking wet. So, I asked him if he knew why he was here, what happened to his mama. Next thing I know, kid’s rattlin’ off about his music, all the shit he’s got in his backpack that she bought him, stuff like that.”

Mantis leaned forward, eyes wide, enraptured. “And then what happened?”

“One of the men - not the cap’n, just one of them commanders - came in and yelled at me for makin’ it worse. I say, ‘kid’s scared, he thinks we’re gonna sell him into slavery. We ain’t doing that, are we?’. The guy decks me across the face - me, also just a kid.” Yondu sighed slowly. “Then Quill, ‘cause he’s a dumbass, starts hittin’ the guy - who’s prob’ly 300 pounds on an off day - kickin’ him in the shins, hollerin’, saying ‘leave my friend alone, he ain’t done nothing’. We been talking for an hour tops, and he already thinks we’re friends.”

“That sounds very much like Quill,” Drax said, smiling fondly. “A man of good intention and terrible execution.”

“The guy don’t leave ‘til Quill’s got another black eye and a couple bruised ribs, but he’s smilin’ like he won a million units, ‘cause he’s decided that I’m stuck with him,” Yondu continued. “All cheery-like, tells me his face hurts, like I can’t tell. Won’t shut up about nothing ever since. And we get older, we start talkin’ about girls we like. Go out on jobs, see pretty girls, we flirt with ‘em, it can’t hurt. And I’ll admit, Quill’s more successful ‘cause he’s got that something special, y’know, but then he ditches the Ravagers for the Cosmic Conservatory. When I finally see him again, he’s talking about some girl with a sword who kicked his ass. And yeah, he mentions how pretty she is, but it’s everythin’ else that makes me realise there’s more to her than that. In some ways, feels like the way he used to talk about his mama - with love, with respect. He got it bad.”

“You really trying to say Quill’s had a crush on her since the beginning?” Rocket said, skeptical. “I mean, yeah, now he’s pretty obvious about it, but what about before when we were fighting Ronan? He was all business once we got down to it.”

“Gotta have your priorities straight, boy,” Yondu said, wagging a finger at him. “No time for nookie-nookie when there’s a maniac on the loose. Anyways, I been listening to Quill yammer on about nothin’ for years, and all a’sudden, he’s reluctant to talk. Something’s changed - it’s for real this time. For the first time, he’s nervous about losing. So we gotta help him out, push ‘em both in the right direction.”

The group fell silent for a moment, considering. “I have been helping,” Mantis piped up. “They are both too stubborn to admit it, but I can tell they both want it to be real.”

“Admittedly, I’ve not really done my part,” Drax murmured, head bowed as if he were ashamed. “But neither of them listen to me as much as you or Yondu.”

“I am Groot?” He blinked up at them slowly, hopeful. Rocket nodded approvingly.

“That’s actually not a bad idea, Groot,” he said. “Groot thinks he can use the ‘child’ angle to his advantage. Y’know, bring out the parenting instincts.”

“That’s good, twig,” Yondu said, smiling. “So, we all clear now? Get ‘em together so Quill can get back to normal. This weird, evasive crap? Ain’t like him.”

“If it will get you to shut up about it already,” Nebula muttered.

a/n: fluffy ridiculous OTT team dynamics are everything. hope y'all found this chapter to be a breather after the ridiculousness of the last one. next chapter's a fun one - the team finally take on a new job now that the milano's up and running, which may or may not make our lovely "couple" question whether they're doing this for the money anymore. also, black cat and tigra for those of you who don't know who was hitting on peter in that end bit there.

#starmora #peter quill #gamora #gotg #avengers academy #myfic #myfic: 20q #marvel #who likes writing cliches? sammi likes writing cliches #i have a weakness for clothes sharing ok #i mean...imagine gamora wearing peter's jackets...

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simonsoys · 7 years

Note

What kind of music do u hc the undertale characters listen to?

I feel like it’s hard to say since I think anyone can like any kind of music. I know I’ve been surprised by a lot of people’s tastes.

But I’ll give it a shot!

Frisk

Neutral, generally likes everything. [Insert your own musical preferences here]

Toriel

Maybe owns a radio?? On the surface someone gets her an mp3 player and she only put like 20 songs on it. 11 of them are the Frozen soundtrack.

Historically likes gentle songs. Likes contemporary classical music. Guitars. Cellos. Piano.

Since arriving on the surface, likes girl power pop music. Stuff like Roar and Fight Song and Mr. Know-It-All. Alphys and Frisk help her use the iTunes.

(A part of me also feels like she might have a passing interest in pop-country music? Summer nights and trucks and daisy dukes SOUND nostalgic and relatable, even though she’s never experienced those things.)

Sans

Classic rock and experimental stuff from the 70s. Out of everyone I feel like he’s the most likely to have a secret bitchin’ record collection. –I say records, but I also think he’s the sort of person who keeps a cassette walkman in his pocket on sentry duty. Between both bros, this is the format most frequently picked out of the dump.

Appreciates jazz too, but not for any reason related to the trombone. He literally only learned how to play the three notes required to do WOMP WOMP WAAAA and nothing else.

Also found a Dr. Demento mixtape once and has cherished it forever.

Papyrus

80s and 90s hip hop? He tries really hard to rap along with the words. He’s gotten very good at enunciating! Had a brief period of his youth where he wanted to be a professional rapper spitting sick rhymes, probably.

Also Janet Jackson for some reason?? And similar pop ladies from that era. I want you to visualize Pap singing and dancing along to Paula Abdul.

Has not learned how you can get the tape back in a cassette. He thinks Sans has a special device for fixing them in his workshop. Technically he does, it’s called a pencil.

Metal. All kinds of metal. #1 Underground headbanging champ, 201X.

Undyne

Piano! Has a surprising softer side that is appreciative of the classical arts. Actually does some in depth music theory studies.

Also likes the high energy theme songs from Alphys’ anime and wants one for herself.

She prefers her music live. It’s better when it’s fresh.

Alphys upgraded her phone to hold music too now! She’s secretly an analog purist, but appreciates the gesture! Alphys claims the difference between a digital file and a live performance is negligible. In relationships though we have to overlook some of our partners’ flaws.

Napstablook

Likes to take in lots of different stuff. Appreciates virtuosity. Not committed to any one genre.

They love electronic music the most though, and it’s what they write the most of themselves. Also likes to do remixes. They’ll remix their own songs, or other people’s. They’d love to collaborate more, if they weren’t so shy…

Despite sharing a dedication to music with Undyne, they’re like, polar opposites on the digital v. analog debate. Blooky thinks digital is the way of the future. Has a Soundcloud account and wants their music to be free to the widest audience possible.

Downloads a lot of illegal music. Like, has terabytes of the stuff on hard drives in their house. You feel your sins crawling at 56kbps.

Alphys

Weeaboo trash. Her music collection looks roughly the same as mine did in 2007.

Also follows KPop religiously. Knows every band member’s name. Knows the all labels they work under. Oh, so like Gangnam Style, asks Undyne. Alphys sucks on her teeth and says sure. In relationships we have to overlook some of our partners’ flaws.

Tends to like upbeat pop stuff more than anything else. She just likes catchy music and fun dance routines.

Listens to everything digital. Any CDs are ripped immediately.

MTT

Lots of showtunes. Likes songs that require over-singing and belting out long notes. Fascinated by Broadway and performance art, but feels like humans don’t push it far enough.

Feels like disco was the right direction for music to go in, and he doesn’t understand why it was abandoned.

Dislikes the aimless electronica that Blooky creates (not that he’d ever say it), and likes music better when it’s got a bumping beat and fun vocals.

Actually shares Alphys’ love of Asian pop groups. He’s all about style and presentation, and baby, they’ve got it!

Is in a constant state of borrowing other people’s music. Doesn’t really have a personal library– he just points at the nearest person and is like “find me something I can dance to!” …That usually works, actually.

Failing that, he’s more of an internet radio kind of guy. Since becoming famous on the surface, fans have been making fan playlists for him and his show. He tries to listen to all of them and leave a personal comment and like. Eventually it gets to be too much to handle, but he still always has a fanmix on in the background when he’s doing other things.

Asgore

Would actually prefer some peace and quiet, tbh.

He’s never really gotten into the newer music (newer meaning, created in the last 1000 years). He misses the chants people had in the Dark Ages. They just don’t make them like they used to.

All the same, he likes to attend concerts. Especially chorus concerts. He probably cries when the voices are really great. He never misses a single kids’ concert at Toriel’s school.

Undyne found a nature sounds disc when they were still Underground and gave it to him. It makes him sad, but he cherishes it and has thoroughly worn it out. He liked to share it with other people when they asked him what the surface was like. It is the only recorded album he owns.

Asriel

Liked upbeat songs that were popular at the time. He was a wiggly kid that danced to everything (really badly). He looked like a goof, but he never realized that about himself and had a lot of fun.

As Flowey, he claims to hate everything. And it’s true that music doesn’t move him the same way it did. Sources say they saw a flower bobbing to the beat in the crowd during MTT’s fight with the human though.

Since coming to the surface, it’s become a dream of his to crowd surf at least once in his life.

Chara

Likes sad songs. Likes to listen and stare at the ceiling and think about life. Asriel doesn’t understand how listening to something that makes you feel bad… could make you feel good?

They find it calming and it brings them to another place. It’s nice to just… detach for awhile.

#there's a weird mix of old and new formats in the underground as people update their collections #also a notable surplus of barbara streisand albums #monsters just take what they can get #ask #anon #simon undertalks #undertale spoilers #Anonymous

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lakecountylibrary · 7 years

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Taking the PopSugar reading challenge this year? The LCPL reader’s advisory team has some suggestions. Don’t strain your eyes reading the pictures - we’ve put our suggestions for each category under the cut, plus the suggestions we couldn’t fit between the lines! The person who did the recommending is in parenthesis after the suggestion (just in case you’re a fan of one of us in particular...)

A book recommended by a librarian

Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man by Fannie Flagg (Chris)

A book that’s been on your TBR list for way too long

Obviously we don’t know what’s been on your TBR list for eons, but Chris picked A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving from her own. (Chris)

A book of letters

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn (Chris) (Seconded! --Rachel)

An audiobook

I Am Half-Sick of Shadows by Alan C. Bradley (Read by the amazing Jayne Entwhistle. --Chris)

A book by a person of color

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines (Chris)

A book with one of the four seasons in the title

Cheating answer: Before the Fall by Noah Hawley Legit answer (but a children’s book): The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy by Jeanne Birdsall (Chris)

A book that is a story within a story

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Chris) The Princess Bride by William Goldman (Rachel)

A book with multiple authors

The Heist by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg (Chris Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan (Rachel)

An espionage thriller

The Expats by Chris Pavone (Rachel)

A book with a cat on the cover

Into the Wild by Erin Hunter (Christina W) Dewey by Vicki Myron (It’s a cute story --Amy V)

A book by an author who uses a pseudonym

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith (Chris)

A bestseller from a genre you don’t normally read

So we don’t know what you don’t normally read, but Beth and Robin usually don’t read realistic fiction or superhero comics, respectively. If either of those describes you, give one of these a try: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (I normally read fantasy and sci-fi, while this is realistic fiction --Robin) Ms. Marvel by G. Willow Wilson (Beth)

A book by or about a person who has a disability

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes (Chris) (YES! --Beth) (Editor’s note: We understand that the movie portrayal of this novel has been criticized for clumsy handling of a sensitive subject. You may find that the novel handles these issues with more grace, or at least more thoroughness. Either way, books like this one are a good springboard to critical discussion and we encourage everyone to read thoughtfully.)

A book involving travel

This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison (Chris)

A book with a subtitle

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (Chris)

A book that’s published in 2017

Girl in Disguise by Greer Macallister (Chris)

A book involving a mythical creature

His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik (Chris)

A book you’ve read before that never fails to make you smile Again, we can’t say what you’ve read before or what will make you smile, but here’s a great re-read Robin and Chris both suggest:

A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens (Chris) (I recommend listening to Neil Gaiman’s performance of it for extra smiles --Robin)

A book about food

Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton (Rachel)

A book with career advice

The Intern’s Handbook by Shane Kuhn (Chris)

A book from a nonhuman perspective

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (Chris)

A steampunk novel

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest (Chris)

A book with a red spine

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld (Amy J) The Mangle Street Murders by M.R.C. Kasasian (Chris)

A book set in the wilderness

Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat (Chris)

A book you loved as a child We don’t know what books YOU loved as a child, but here’s one Robin loved!

Talking to Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede (Robin)

A book by an author from a country you’ve never visited Chris hasn’t visited Australia! If you have also not visited Australia, this suggestion is for you.

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty (Chris)

A book with a title that’s a character’s name

Forrest Gump by Winston Groom or Doc by Mary Doria Russell (a novel featuring Wyatt Earp and John Henry "Doc" Holliday --Chris)

A novel set during wartime

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (There’s a prequel coming out in 2017. --Amy J) Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay (Beth) The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah (Chris)

A book with an unreliable narrator

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Still the best in the genre! --Chris)

A book with pictures

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (Chris)

A book where the main character is a different ethnicity than you We don’t know what ethnicity you are, so here are a few options:

African-American Protagonist: The Mothers by Brit Bennett (Chris) ; The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Beth) White Protagonist: You probably didn’t really need help finding one of these, but I recommend Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard. It also has an Arab-American, Muslim protagonist. (Robin) Vietnamese-Australian Protagonist: Cloudwish by Fiona Wood (Robin) Chinese-American Protagonist: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (JBill)

A book about an interesting woman

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik (Chris)

A book set in two different time periods

The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler Chris

A book with a month or day of the week in the title

One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde (#6 in the Thursday Next series; start with The Eyre Affair --Chris)

A book set in a hotel

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (Chris)

A book written by someone you admire

The Long Way Home by Louise Penny (written while her husband was in the final stages of dementia --Chris)

A book that’s becoming a movie in 2017

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (Chris)

A book set around a holiday other than Christmas

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny (set around Easter --Chris)

The first book in a series you haven’t read before

Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart (Chris) In the Woods by Tana French (Rachel) If you happen to have read both these series already, we’d be happy to rec others based on your tastes! Just let us know!

A book you bought on a trip Chances are you didn’t buy this book on a trip, but Chris did, and she recommends Time and Again by Jack Finney (Chris)

ADVANCED:

A book recommended by an author you love

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale (recommended by author Louise Penny --Chris) If Louise Penny isn’t an author you love, we’re happy to look around at recs from an author you DO love! Just send us the name :)

A bestseller from 2016

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley (Chris)

A book with a family-member term in the title

My Sister Lives on the Mantlepiece by Annabel Pitcher (Chris)

A book that takes place over a character’s life span

The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer (Rachel)

A book about an immigrant or refugee

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Chris) Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok (It is fiction but it’s a story of the author’s own story (she immigrated from Hong Kong) --Amy V)

A book from a genre/subgenre that you’ve never heard of

Beauty and the Clockwork Beast Nancy Campbell Allen (steampunk romance --Chris) Possibly you’ve heard of steampunk romance as a subgenre. If yes, let us know, and we’ll dig for something more obscure to help you out.

A book with an eccentric character

Ten Second Staircase by Christopher Fowler (Bryant & May/ Peculiar Crimes Unit #4 ; start with Full Dark House --Chris)

A book that’s more than 800 pages

City on Fire by David Hallberg (Chris) One Rainy Day in May by Mark Z Danielewski (He’s an… unusual author --Amy V)

A book you got from a used book sale Orleans by Sherri L. Smith (Robin) Didn’t buy that particular book at a used book sale? Talk to your library! Most of them have used book rooms with books at ridiculous prices (ours are all under a dollar) so you can find something excellent for this category.

A book that’s been mentioned in another book

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (One of the many great books mentioned in Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club, which is kind of cheating. --Chris)

A book about a difficult topic

Columbine by Dave Cullen (Chris)

A book based on mythology

Anansi Boys Neil Gaiman (Chris)

#lcpl recs #reading challenge #2017 reading challenge #robin's recs #beth's recs #amy j's recs #chris's recs #amy v's recs #christina w's recs #rachel's recs #recommended reading #popsugar reading challenge #fiction #nonfiction #book lists #booklr #tumblarians

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heyyabooks-blog · 7 years

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Book 1/100

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

I started this book under the assumption that this story would be similar to Harry Potter, but for a more adult audience. Somehow, I was both wrong and right. Grossman creates a world that is beautiful and complex and intricate, filled with structure and rules and negative repercussions for wrongdoing. The Magicians, however, stops on these similarities. All at once this novel is depressing and almost clinical in its description of what should by all accounts be a fantastically exciting subject. The book felt flat while remaining just interesting enough to encourage the reader to continue in hopes of redemption or a somewhat satisfying ending. Ultimately, I found myself disappointed on both counts.

The plot in this novel felt stuttering. For every detailed and beautifully crafted scene there follows a muddled or unsatisfactory or seemingly pointless observation inserted only for the sake of reasserting for the thousandth time the strict guidelines to magical pedagogy that Grossman so painstakingly established. The scenes that made me genuinely feel something – terror, sympathy, amusement – were quickly and unfortunately followed by bumbling and often confusing descriptions of life outside the classrooms of Brakebills. Mundane conversations and actions between characters were highlighted seemingly for the sole purpose of distinguishing drunken folly in the otherwise academic setting toward the beginning of the book.

The characters in this novel seemed to have a complete and total lack of self-preservation, empathy, or redeeming qualities to them. Quentin, the focus of the story, seems to follow along with his friend’s manic or devastatingly poor life choices with nothing more than a shrug of his shoulders and a can-do attitude. Sometimes even this reaction is hard-won. Our protagonist stumbles to stay afloat. With every opportunity he has to make himself happy or make things work he turns back and drowns himself. Alice seems to exist as one of the few shining rays of light in a generally dark cast of characters. Despite being both a brilliant magician and a steadfast companion for Quentin, she manages to destroy her own happiness and have her happiness destroyed by again and again hitching herself to the same group of people she knows will disappoint her. Penny tries and fails to get in with the main group, and is constantly met with disdain and hostility from the others. Even when he literally hands everyone the penultimate dream of going to another world – in this case a grown up and far more twisted version of Narnia – he is greeted with mocking and unkind words that somehow do nothing to discourage his wholehearted enthusiasm. His impulsive actions center on his desperate need to be accepted in any form by Quentin and his friends. Eliot and Janet manage to push Quentin toward disaster while shouting out advice as he stands on the cliff’s edge of total ruin. Their sometimes humorous and always snarky and self-serving attitudes manage to bring building events to a head on more than one occasion. Josh and Richard seemed to appear in the story to serve singular purposes: Josh to provide comic relief in his one-liners and accidental procurement of black holes, and Richard to insert dry theology and reason into an already untheological and unreasonable group of people.

Ultimately, I think that Grossman manages to insert an altogether human element into an otherwise fantastical world. He creates a golden boy - smart, good looking, well-off, and gives him his dreams on a silver platter. The main character and his friends do what countless readers have dreamed of doing; escaped from an admittedly already fantastical world and delved into an entire realm of magic and have physically crossed over into the Other. But because this is Quentin - grumpy, lost, overtly depressed Quentin - the dreams he received on that platter will surely be tarnished either by his own unachievable expectations or by his own faulty decision making. In his writing Grossman manages to capture the depth of his character’s feelings of displacement that other books of the genre sometimes miss. When Quentin returns home to his mundane parents, for example, he finds it to be gray and maddeningly unbearable. When he graduates from his magical education and is thrust into adulthood, the reader is left with the feeling that Quentin and his friends exist in the same state as a bunch of balloons whose strings have just been unexpectedly cut. The narration expertly inserts the reader into the story, where they feel the manic high of happiness and the depressive lows of dissatisfaction in equal measure right alongside the characters. Their drunkenness, joys, and terrors become your own. The magic feels complex in a way where the reader is made to understand that to be an accomplished magician is to work hard for it. The skill is not always so much about birth as it is about skill and hard work with an immense amount of study and language mastery. However, the promising premise and detailed world Grossman crafts is dulled by characters that can’t help but destroy everything they touch and never seem to learn from any mistakes they make throughout the story. All of the learning and buildup to the final and brief magical battle left the story feeling flat and unsatisfying. The ending itself brought the reader full circle, leaving Quentin in the seemingly inescapable emotional ditch where he began and left me feeling disappointed and unenthused about the next chapter in the series.

#the magicians #book #book review #young adult #young adult books #lev grossman #100 ya year #ya book review #ya book #book recommendations #reading #reading challenge #currently reading #quentin coldwater

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philipbrideaux · 7 years

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The Carboniferous Counties: The Brideauxs in Wales, Part One

Francis Philip Brideaux (son of Francois Brideaux and Mary Hamon, grandson of Thomas Brideaux and Ester Lempriere) married Mabel Guillou in St. Helier, Jersey, not long after the turn of the 1900s. At the time, they could not have imagined that their union would result in an enormous family dynasty centered in the Rhymney Valley of South Wales.

Francis Philip’s family were living at 4 Belmont Gardens, in St. Helier, when the Germans invaded Jersey and began their five-year occupation in World War Two. The family did not seem especially content with that, because two of the Brideaux sons, Dennis and Ronald, were imprisoned on different occasions for not playing along. Ronald was given five days in prison in October 1943 for “failing to appear at work without sufficient grounds.” In March, 1944, Dennis was imprisoned for three months by the occupiers for “offering resistance.”

One member of the family, however, had left the island by the time of the Occupation. Francis Philip’s son, Frank (1912-1966), settled abroad, in Wales, where he worked in the coal mining industry. There, he met and married Adele Matilda Meyrick (1914-1999). Together they had five sons and four daughters, all of whom went on to have families of their own, who in turn now have families of their own. Many of the clan have stayed in the Rhymney Valley, settling mainly in and near the towns of Maesycwmmer and Caerphilly, in some cases within a few doors of each other.

Most of the valley falls within the historic counties of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire (now largely Caerphilly County Borough). The Rhymney Valley itself is part of The Valleys, a series of valleys in South Wales fanning from Carmarthen in the west to modern Monmouthshire in the east, and from just below the Brecon Beacons in the north to the coastal plains of the Bristol Channel and Severn Estuary in the south. The Heads of the Valleys Road —the A465 — joins the northern ends of the South Wales Valleys, running westwards below the Brecon Beacons before curving down southwest towards Neath, near Swansea (where more Brideauxs live).

The Valleys are the heart of mining and mining heritage in Wales. They are a part of the great South Wales Coalfield, which was extensively developed from the late 1800s. The population rapidly increased as collieries spread throughout the valleys, with settlements terracing up their sides. Coal went back down the valleys by train to the shipping ports at Cardiff, Newport, Swansea and others. The waste rock from which the coal was extracted went mostly to the hilltops to form coal tips (spoil tips). As my Arriva train from Cardiff Central Station winds its way up the Rhymney Valley, I can see the remains of the tips on the tops of some hills. The valley is dramatic, curvy, and lush, and the line follows the west side of the valley.

My rail stop is Hengoed, on the west side of the Rhymney River. On the east side is my destination, Maesycwmmer, where Frank Brideaux first settled. The Hengoed rail station lies in the shadow of an impressively tall, stone railway viaduct named (depending on which side of the river you live) the Maesycwmmer Viaduct. I can’t help but notice it as we pull into the station. Built over 150 years ago, the viaduct once supported a coal-ferrying railway, but is now part of a regional cycling path network.

I disembark from the train to be greeted by Frank Brideaux’s third daughter, Janet, who is married to Owen. Janet has been my main contact since discovering the Welsh Brideauxs and, like me, is researching the Brideaux ancestral history. Their home is on the eastern side of the valley with a beautiful view south, back in the direction of Llanbradach and Caerphilly.

Janet has taken the time and trouble to round up most of the clan, who are all waiting in the Maesycwmmer Inn for me to meet. When we enter, it takes me a few moments to realize that every single table in the pub, except for one, is packed with Brideauxs. There are children running about, and infants being held in laps. All the adults have a pint. My short term memory is quickly overwhelmed as I’m introduced to Brideaux after Brideaux. Somewhere in the handshakes, I am introduced to Philip Brideaux, and for the first time in my life, I realize that I am not, in fact, the only Philip Brideaux alive. Not surprisingly, this leads to a photo of the two of us together, and I’m amazed to compare us: a bespectacled writer from Calgary, Canada, next to a hard-working coal miner from Maesycwmmer, Wales.

One of the few open chairs I can find puts me in front of Maurice “Banjo” Brideaux. Maurice is one of the family’s elders, born in 1947 in Maesycwmmer, where he has lived most of his life.

As we talk, I have to concentrate hard over the noise of the pub to understand his Welsh accent, particularly with Welsh place names. I can only guess how “American” my Western Canadian accent must sound by comparison.

“I got eight grandchildren, and two great granddaughters, they’re the two little ‘uns running around by you now,” he says. “When I first left school I started as a grocery boy for the cooperative, riding a push-bike delivering groceries. And then working on the buildings. From there then I went to work in steelworks. And then my cousin got me a job on the Gas Board. I stayed there then for twenty-two years. And I retired then when I was just over 45.”

Maurice’s retirement reminds me of Charles Brideaux’s in Sault Ste. Marie, who bought a pool with his retirement pension. “I had a lump sum then. Bought myself a car, passed my test, and never looked back,” says Maurice. “And I got a static caravan up in Tenby, where we go every year like. So we spend most of the time up there like, back and forth like.”

One of Maurice’s best memories is attending the Rolling Stones’ first concert ever in Cardiff, on September 11, 1964 at the Sophia Gardens Pavilion (which no longer exists). “We got down there, and they didn’t come on ‘til late. They was late comin on. So we missed the last train home. And we had to walk home from Cardiff then.” According to Google, this is apparently about a four-and-a-half hour walk. (“Oh aye, it was to the top of the mountain. Fair old way.”)

Maurice also had a penchant for dressing up as different characters, particularly around Christmas. “I’d dress up as somebody or other, dressed up as Boy George, or quite a few different people like, you know. One year I was dressed up as Wonder Woman. Well, I dress up as her, with a pair of shorts on, a little boob top, I had a pair of wellingtons, I painted them red, all glitter over them. And then, when I walked in, I had this tiara on and a wig. I walked in, and my son was playing a disco tune, he put Wonder Women on, and when that come on, I jumped out. And what I had done, I had a pair of rubber gloves, I’d blow them out and I had the fingers sticking out over the top.”

Sitting next to Maurice is one of his younger brothers, Peter Brideaux. As we introduce each other, Peter slips a small gift into my hand. It’s a lapel pin, depicting two crossed flags, that of Canada and of Wales. I think it’s a wonderful gift and immediately pin it to my coat. As Peter explains, it’s symbolic of the meeting of Brideauxs from either side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Peter is married to Helen, with a son, and a daughter and three grandsons. Like Maurice, Peter has lived in the valley all his life. When Frank Brideaux passed away, Peter was only 14. Out of economic necessity, he finished his schooling shortly afterward at the local secondary modern school and went straight into the building industry, based on experience he’d built up through a family friend driving construction vehicles. “I was basically told that I had to finish education as soon as I can, to come out and get a job and earn money, fetch money into the house, and that’s the way it was then, you know?” Without his father’s income, the family needed his help.

“I did have a job set up right there for me before I left school, so it wasn’t a big disappointment, I mean, but I really wanted to stay in school and do my exams, to come out there with some sort of qualification. But as it was, I left school at 15, and without any qualifications whatsoever, but 50 years later I managed to make a living for myself, and I’ve built a family, so I wouldn’t change anything now.”

Until he was 16, he could only drive the construction vehicles on building sites, and be ferried between sites by other crew members. When he was 16, he was able to drive himself and bought a motor scooter.

“I drive all types of machines, both wheeled machines and tracked machines. JCBs, Caterpillars, Komatsus, Kubotas, there’s all different makes. Hitachi machines, there’s loads and loads of them but they’re all basically the same to drive. It’s like jumping into different cars. It’s just a matter of sorting out where the controls are, you know. Different buttons and switches but all the controls are exactly the same on everything so if you can drive one, you can drive them all.” Dozers, graders, backhoes, crawlers… “Yeah, I can drive most things. I learned to drive them all basically, over the years. I’ve had 50 years driving them so there’s not a lot that I’ve come across that I can’t drive.”

Peter worked for his first company for over 12 years before layoffs sent him to another company for another year. His third job was driving machines around on the surface of the coal pits. “I’d be picking up coal with a machine and putting it on the conveyer belt, and feeding it into the washery. And the coal would go into a washery where it was washed and all the muck removed from it. Then the washed coal was loaded into a railway wagon and sent down to the local coal fired power station, which is still operating at the moment in Aberthaw, not far from Cardiff Airport. So, eight-and-a-half years there with that company, and then five-and-a-half years, with a local company from Caerphilly. And that was just going around to all the local building sites then, driving a JCB backhoe. But the company I’m with now, might’ve been 22 years.”

Being a licensed machine operator came in handy beyond the day job. In the early 1970s, Peter lived in Tirphil, further north up the valley, shortly after getting married. Early one morning, vandals jumped on a large 360 track machine, in a construction site across the street, and managed to start it up and put it in gear. Then they bailed out and fled, letting the machine run out of control.

“They were building a school opposite us. So, even in bed, me and the wife, we could hear this machine starting up, and I could hear this crashing going on. It smashed through the scaffolding, and out onto the road, and it was headed to our block of flats. So I jumped out of bed — I only had a pair of boxer shorts on — ran down the stairs, across the road, and into the machine. I stopped it just as it was comin’ out onto the road. If it was anybody else it would’ve come into the flats because there was nobody to stop it. The police come there, obviously. So the next morning, I had to phone work and tell them that I couldn’t get to work, because the police are coming to my flat to interview me, and the boss wasn’t very happy because I took the day off.”

* * *

In the morning, Janet and Owen take me out on a tour of the region, starting with an attempt to find a route to a coal tip I’ve spotted across the valley. We don’t manage to find a route up and in, but it’s still a great opportunity to get a sense of the valley and its terraced coal mining villages, including a stop at the Welsh National Mining Memorial and Universal Colliery Memorial Garden in Senghenydd. Young students from the local primary schools in the Aber Valley helped make countless ceramic name tiles making up the memorial. They are the names of men and boys who lost their lives in the many accidents and disasters in the collieries. Senghenydd is also the site of Britain’s worst coal mining accident, in which an explosion underground at the Universal Colliery killed well over 400 miners on October 14, 1913.

The coal tip I want to see is one of many in the valleys. The towering piles of black waste rock have extended the summits of hills, giving the grassy mounts dark, rocky peaks. Some of the older tips are a dirty olive from being grassed over. Over the years, many of the tips have been slowly, methodically removed, truckload by truckload, but swaths of the landscape of the South Wales Valleys has nonetheless been irrevocably shaped and transformed by coal mining. One of the more stunning examples of this is the view across the valley at the Big Pit National Coal Museum at Blaenavon, where Janet and Owen next take me.

The area around Blaenavon, including Big Pit, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and Big Pit has remained open and accessible as a museum. Janet stays behind while Owen and I put on miner’s helmets with lamps and batteries, as well as emergency rebreathers around our waists, before being taken down into the mine from by a tour guide — who once worked Big Pit himself before its closure in as an operational mine in 1980.

We start by riding 300 feet down the mineshaft from the pit head in a large elevator. The air cools as we descend, and we emerge into a dark tunnel with old, thick, heavy wooden beams holding it up. Our helmet lamps provide light to see the way, bouncing and reflecting off wet stone walls with crystallized mineral stalactites. Water burbles in the dank silence through gutters running on either side of the tunnel. There are very few sources of electricity down here. Gas seepage from lower rock strata, deep below, and its possible buildup in mines (especially disused mines), has always been a serious threat to miners: the silent poison of carbon monoxide, the devastating volatility of methane and hydrogen (known as firedamp), or even the ability of coaldust to ignite explosively. Anything that contains a battery, or that could spark, must be taken off and turned over to pit head staff for safekeeping: watches, cellphones, penlights, matches, lighters, and so on. Tour guides carry gas monitors, and there are telephone stations at various positions.

In fact, it was firedamp and an electrical spark from signalling equipment that possibly caused the Universal Colliery explosion at Senghenydd. Any coal dust present (which was the cause of a previous explosion in the very same mine) would have exacerbated the explosion. Of the hundreds of miners who survived the initial explosion but were trapped, many or most died from asphyxiation by afterdamp, the mixture of poisonous gases remaining after all the oxygen is consumed by a firedamp explosion. Resulting fires blocked rescuers from reaching whomever might be still alive, and days passed before a recovery operation could begin.

The tunnel runs at a downward angle, turning back on itself in the opposite direction and going deeper. For large stretches we must stoop low as we walk to avoid banging our headlamps against the roof. In one passage, we turn off our headlamps to get a sense firsthand of absolute darkness. Miners trapped underground in an accident might have to await rescue in this absolute darkness for days.

Our guide shows us a series of empty stables, made of whitewashed stone and brick, where the mine’s pit ponies (or colliery horses) were housed in the 1800s through to the mid 1900s. The ponies spent most of the year underground in the dark tunnels, ferrying coal to the pit head, but were brought up once a year into the sunlight on “holidays.”

Pit ponies were eventually replaced with rail cars and conveyer belts. Our guide shows us the trestles for the conveyer belt at Big Pit, explaining how the quicker way out of the mine at the end of the day was to lie down on the conveyer instead of walking for hundreds of metres. This, of course, was not at all safe or sanctioned, and not only just because a miner had to know when to roll off the conveyer to avoid being entrapped in machinery.

Once back at the surface we rejoin Janet, and we tour the pithead baths building which has been converted to a cafeteria. The baths building was built around 1939 after growing social activism in coal mining communities was successful in convincing mining companies to provide facilities for miners to clean up at the end of the shift. That’s because coal dust and the underground environment left miners dirty beyond dirty. And combined with damp clothing, it caused health problems, including pneumonia and lung disease.

“Before the baths, the miners would go home to their families black with coal dust,” explains Janet. “In the villages, the wives would pull large tubs of hot water into the middle of the kitchen and get the bath ready for their husband before he came home every working day. The water would be black when he was done washing.” The pit baths relieved the burden on families and helped control coal dust in their homes.

From the Big Pit site, Janet and Owen take me to a beautiful lookout along B4246 above the Usk Valley, where Torfaen County meets Monmouthsire.

We then turn westward onto the Heads of the Valleys Road before taking the A470 north into the Brecon Beacons. Brecon Beacons National Park is large, and we only have time to drive through its centre. I’ve wanted to see the Beacons for a long time. The Beacons are very old, and most of the formations are a more visible example of a great swath of ancient sedimentary deposits, mostly red sandstone, found across the North Atlantic, that date back over 400 million years. The Beacons look like mountains, but they are, in part, large chunks of these red sandstone sedimentary deposits. These are sediments which came from the erosion of the mountains of the Caledonian Orogeny, during an impossibly ancient time in Earth’s history when life on land was only just beginning to flourish with any significance. The remains of the Caledonian mountain chains can be seen from the Northeastern United States, to Scotland and Norway, among other Nordic regions. The Beacons took their present shape when rivers, ice sheets and erosion from several cycles of glaciation cut through and carved them out over the past 2 million years.

About 100 million years or more after the rise of the Caledonian mountains, the region around South Wales was part of a different continent, and even at a different latitude much further south. What would become the Brecon Beacons was beginning to build from the outwash of the eroding Caledonian Mountains to the north. What are now the South Wales Valleys were then part of a shallow sea, which eventually filled with eroded sediment from the newer, eroding Variscan mountain chains to the south, and resulted in tropical swampland. The swampland became part of a vast band of tropical swamps and forests cutting across this ancient continent sitting astride the Earth’s equatorial region. The continent was Laurussia, and the period was the Carboniferous. Across the millennia and countless dry-wet cycles of the Carboniferous Period, the remnants of successive swamps and forests were lain down over the previous, until the crushing layers of sediment and peat baked and carbonified, forming vast pockets, or seams, of coal. Several hundred million more years passed as Laurussia became part of the Pangaean supercontinent. The region drifted into the northern hemisphere as Pangaea broke apart in all directions. At the dawn of the Anthropocene Epoch, humans discovered the surviving network of coal seams that had once been tropical swampland — the South Wales Coalfield.

* * *

The need for change in the pits of not only Wales, but all of Great Britain, spurred Prime Minister Clement Atlee’s Labour government to nationalize the coal mining industry following the Second World War. The National Coal Board was formed in 1947 to run the industry. By the early 1980s, the National Coal Board’s subsidies could not keep up with operating losses, the coal industry was in retraction, and cheaper coal from Europe was undercutting the board’s prices. Shifting government policy and pressures on the National Coal Board led to pit closures and layoffs.

The National Union of Mineworkers increasingly faced off against Margaret Thatcher’s neoconservative government. The union had staged a major strike in 1972 and again in 1974 in response to Edward Heath’s policies on miners’ wages. In 1984 the union’s leader, Arthur Scargill, decided that a major industrial action was again necessary in response to Thatcher’s pit closures and subsidy reductions.

In the middle of the resulting industrial action was Philip Albert Brideaux...

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god-hunter · 7 years

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Secret Empire #0

This was the big one folks. A giant sized 0 issue, which apparently wasn’t even the first one you were supposed to read.

There are 3 other prelude issues to this, which I won’t bother collecting. One from U.S Avengers, where it seems Captain America shook things up with Roberto DaCosta. Another in the Thunderbolts book, I think. And finally his own Captain America: Steve Rogers book, where he finally revealed his outward villainy, apparently.

...Before I go any further, I should mention to anyone not in the know, that since the Pleasant Hill event ended and Steve Rogers triumphantly returned with his youth, Nick Spencer left us with a nasty cliff-hanger. And that was the fact that, Kobik (the cosmic diety that brought him back) was being manipulated by Red Skull.

This only spelled bad news for Cap, as Spencer spent an entire year setting up the idea that Steve was never a genuine American Hero, but really a Secret Hydra Agent, deep deep undercover for years. [Come on, man. Really!?]

Now.. this is old news. People hated Captain America: Steve Rogers #1 the world over. Then others saw through the whole ploy when they stayed on for Steve Rogers #2. Since then, I think Marvel audiences have been split between hating on this entire plot thread, and others finding it downright brilliant.

I... have avoided it like the plague. Brian Bendis had the chance during Civil War II to hint at us that Cap wasn’t being genuine, or secretly harboring evil thoughts or whatever, and he didn't. He left Spencer to his devices, who handled a pretty well written Epilogue to Civil War II.

That very same epilogue hinted at what’s to come right here in Secret Empire. Steve Rogers and Sharon Carter were in power once again. And this time, as Top Cop, he was going to make sure he was going to follow through with his “true” mission.

[Give me a break man. He’s obviously gonna break out of this. But in the meantime, Marvel audiences are beyond frustrated at the straight up blasphemy and downright betrayal that Spencer has created for the Captain America fanbase.] And I think that’s a fair Pre-Assessment.

As for this issue. It was really well written. It’s very dense. There’s a lot going on. And some of it is a bit much. And I was definitely left feeling bummed out by the end of it. Steve Rogers is definitely breaking my heart a little bit, here. But I’d also like to think I understand where Spencer is going with this. And I can only hope that he’s going to deliver a major redeeming factor somewhere down the line, towards the end of all this.

In the mean time. Let the Secret Empire begin.

[SPOILERS]

Warning. This was a very long issue, and I don’t want to leave a single detail out. So the rest of this review may be tl;dr. I’ll do my best to move the points along though.

We start with a “Flashback” from 1945 in Japan where Captain America secretly reported to his Hydra boss, Kraken. [Already, I’m not in love.]

Along with Kraken is what I thought was Sir Isaac Newton from the Sorcerers Supreme book, but I could be wrong. Anyway, they tell him that the Allies are about to use a ‘Cosmic Cube’ to rewrite reality itself. And not to believe them when he falls into their will. {To make us believe that all those years as an Avenger, he was somehow being manipulated.}

Through some really nice visuals, we see Cap’s heroic history unfold, even though he now believes that it was in-genuine. That is to say, he believes his “true mission” is to betray them.

After that strange flashback, we’re treated to an interesting Character Page.

This book is going to host Steve Rogers & Sharon Carter at S.H.I.E.L.D. Command [obviously], both Ironheart AND Iron Man in Michigan..

The Ultimates and other cosmic favorites like Hyperion and the new Quasar, (which was kind of nice to see.) The Guardians of the Galaxy minus Drax will be around.

At New York City, we get to see the Defenders in action for the first time, which is pretty exciting. I’m no stranger to Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and Daredevil, but to see them finally get the Team Treatment and recognition since Bendis wrapped up New Avengers vol. 2, is really nice. Also with them is Spider-Woman, Doctor Strange, Cloak and Dagger. The Uncanny Avengers will also be featured in this book, which I enjoy. [Guess I’ll be collecting those tie ins.] Did I mention The Wasp is there too? Janet Van Dyne. Not the new one.

And of course this event wouldn’t be complete without some Hydra Forces such as Baron Zemo and his Army of Evil.

Now... Before I continue, I noticed a significant lack of ‘Actual’ Avengers. ...is Waid staying out of this?? Does Spencer not care about them??

What of Clint Barton? Won’t he have something to say about an evil Cap in Power?

Well. We’ll see I guess. I’m getting ahead of myself here. Apparently Captain America: Sam Wilson explained his absence from this event already. =/

Once we finally get into the issue, I’m already confused. I’ve already missed something. There are apparently 3 red dots on the trouble map, which S.H.I.E.L.D. has failed to stop for months, and now it feels like the end is nigh.

[Also, I’m completely thrown off by her old appearance in this issue, meanwhile in Infamous Iron Man, she’s totally young and fresh looking. I could’ve sworn she looked the same in CWII’s epilogue as well.]

Well, anyway, we get to see Captain Marvel, the Ultimates and other Cosmic friends take action in space against the Chitauri.

[You would think Al Ewing would set some of this up for Ultimates 2 tie-ins, but he definitely has some other pointless things going on in his pocket of the universe.]

As the Ultimates fight in space, Ironheart, and apparently Tony’s mobile armored A.I. is able to fully work alongside her. [As if Tony was never in a coma or something.. Hah!]

I have no idea what they’re doing. I wish I could say what they’re analyzing. But outside, New York is burning.

This is where we find that The Defenders are up against Nitro, who has nothing but vengeance on his mind since Pleasant Hill, which happened more than a year ago at this point. [Where was this before?]

“Know that it is their sins you die for now!”

The action is pretty awesome on the ground and in space as Sharon worries with a pensive Steve from the Helicarrier. The panels are scattered and frantic, although aligned neatly along the page.

Narrations build things up in past tense.

“This is how we were betrayed.” The mysterious story continues to unfold.

Apparently in space, the new Quasar dies, or we are lead to believe that, as a huge alien swallows her whole.

From the Helicarrier, Cap commands, “We need that shield!”

[THATS what Riri and Tony A.I are working on!!]

{I have a weird theory that Tony’s A.I. slacked on getting the shield up in time, but I have little-to-nothing to back up that theory.}

In New York, Jessica Jones definitely saves the Defenders from getting blown up by Nitro, who just suicide bombed the area.

It almost seems as if something fatal happened to her, but we find that is not the case the next time we see them.

Cutting further to the chase, Riri and Tony A.I get the shield up, but in the process Steve basically locks the Ultimates out of Earth.

The Unity Squad touches down by the Defenders, where Rogue mentions something about guessing they’re Avengers again.

[I know this team got rocked recently, but I forget why. Do they know that Steve is Hydra..? Or just don’t trust him?? I gotta read up on them again.]

For a minute it looks like they all won. [But as I said. Steve locked the Ultimates out of Earth and, he makes this betrayal apparent soon after.]

He even allowed his own Hellicarrier to be brought down by Hydra Agents who invade the place.

They all arrive before Steve and Sharon and aim their guns at her. He orders them not to shoot and to stand down, which confuses Sharon.

...This thing gets all over the place after that. With Carol and the Ultimates finding out that they’re officially screwed and left for dead as more and more Chitauri waves come for them, we’re given an interesting caption. “Stage One. Alpha Flight Space Station.”

Then we see that Zemo is outside of New York on a speedboat with Blackoutm as he holds the Darkholde book. [Ah come on man. That’s just pandering to casual S.H.I.E.L.D. TV fans...]

Zemo and/or Blackout initiate Stage Two, which is putting New York City in darkness, isolating it via a Darkforce Dimension.

We see Doctor Strange try to stop it, but it is unknown to us at this time if it did anything.

Then, we get to see our ‘Actual’ Avengers, the Champions and Spider-man move into action, as everyone starts to notice that something is up.

Tony A.I. calls “All Avengers” into action.

“If you can hear this, your services are required immediately-- We are under attack.... This is threat level red, Defcon Infinity Stuff here, people-- We need you to get to Washington D.C.!!!”

On the last page, we see Hellicarriers hover above the White House and a caption read, “Stage Three. Washington D.C. Objective: Hydra takeover. Mission: Underway.”

-To Be Continued!-

So yes. A lot is going on.

And the end was very exciting.

But what the Hell am I reading Spencer??

And why did Marvel think this was the direction we needed to take???

Now. I’m not gonna complain until I get more of a feel for what’s going on here.

So far this is definitely different.

But, I feel like Marvel is definitely throwing all of the wrenches in the cogs at this point, because they’ve promised apparently that this will be the Last Event for a while. Thank God.

[I never thought I’d say that, because I love events. It’s what got me into collecting in the first place. But at this point, it’s clear that they’re a cash grab and not a story enhancer. And not for nothing, but none of these Universe-changing events hold any weight when we know they’re just gonna get changed again in 3 months.]

So yeah. In that regard, I am looking forward to wherever this event goes.

Because if Marvel inevitably hits the Reset Button again? It’d be nice to see them stick to a plan this time... And maybe.. Stop with the damn New #1′s.

...Until Secret Empire #1!

[This issue definitely felt like a #1...]

#Secret Empire #Issue 0 #Nick Spencer #Marvel Event #Summer 2017

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