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#not to mention we have our two wonderful perfect gay men in a time period when homosexuality was er...yeah a bit frowned upon

amarriageoftrueminds · 3 years

Note

Now now, we all know how Bucky's been in love with Steve (and known about his feelings) his whole life, but what about Steve? I've always swayed towards the theory 'Steve's been in love with Bucky his whole life as well, he only realised after Bucky fell from the train', but what if Steve's known he's in love with Bucky since their Brooklyn days? That would shed an entirely different light on his interactions with Miss Nazis Hirer and the whole 'right partner' talk

Going by canon, I think there must've been either: a declaration of mutual feelings, or; the first foray into a sexual relationship in their late teens, because one of Bucky's trigger words was 'seventeen', and Steve said he felt like a 16 year old again when he heard Bucky's name.

What's interesting is, at that time, and especially in that place*, there wasn't the idea that gay sex acts made you gay, because there were loads of 'straight' men around (eg. sailors.) going with other men just for sex. This was pre pill, pre sex-before-marriage for most, especially for Catholics like Steve.

So it might be that Bucky and Steve were doing the do with each other looong before either of them came to the realisation that they were also, coincidentally, in love.

I agree that Bucky, simply because he's exposed to dating women more than Steve is, has more of an opportunity to Realise before Steve. He'd have the benefit of being able to contrast his experience of feelings with Steve, with his experience of feelings for others, leading him to a lightbulb moment.

And he'd cover this up (and keep up the pretense of believing both he and Steve are really straight) by going out with girls in the meantime; in a period-appropriate gentlemanly way, not bedding them. Also to protect him and Steve from any potentially dangerous accusations.

I don't see Steve as not knowing precisely that he is in love with Bucky; I think he knew before the events of CATFA started, and it was a big part of his motivation for wanting to go to war.

But I do think it hadn't occurred to Steve that he might only be attracted to Bucky / men until after he got serum -- because, before then, his health would've been a limiting factor.

Before then, I can see him thinking 'well it's no wonder I have no libido like Bucky does around women, I'm just too unwell!' and not connecting the dots.

This would explain why he seems so panicked when sexual situations arise with women, after the serum; because he's realising 'oh shit! actually, I don't even like this when I have Perfect Health!' and hastily trying to backpedal himself out of an unwanted situation.

My HC is both of them thinking they're the only male-attracted one in the relationship and they're just engaging in sex acts together for convenience' sake but the other one's only going to keep doing it until he can get a girl.

So when Steve shows up all heterosexual-passing, looking like he can get any girl he wants, Bucky looks devastated because he thinks that signals the end of his physical (in his head unrequited romantic) relationship with Steve.

(But then between Peggy showing up and he and Steve going to the Continent together with the Howlies, Bucky mysteriously seems to perk up!)

By which point Steve, with his strong moral instincts and anti-Fascism, has come to the conclusion that if he's a physically perfect man, and he's still in love with and attracted to Bucky, then there must by definition be nothing wrong with feeling physically attracted to Bucky.

IDK if it makes it better or worse to imagine that they finally confessed to each other before the fall?

Maybe it'd be nice if they saved that for Post-WS, especially since Bucky might be then in even more doubt as to Steve's feelings for him. It's a common choice in fic for a reason!

There are two ways to read the 'right partner' talk Steve has with Peggy.

One is:

Steve's a straight man acting like an incel and attempting to pull pick-up artist tricks on Peggy which don't work, because she's not interested in him, and so doesn't take the bait (we only don't notice he's being a creep because Cevans and HA play it as benign, and because the writers, being themselves douchebags, don't realise what they've written; and probably wouldn't care even if they did.)

Two is: (particularly egregious if you flip the genders and imagine a woman saying this to a man)

Steve going out of his way to make it clear that he doesn't want to date, isn't interested in dating right now, while there's a war on, and finds women terrifying.

And yet as soon as he's fuckable, Peggy pulls a 180 and starts claiming she always liked him as he was, despite the fact that her actions directly disprove this; she didn’t ask him out when she had the chance and the encouragement.

Naturally, her arrogance leads her to the immediate assumption that if Steve is waiting for The One, then she must be the One to whom he was referring.

The fact that his wording either means he’s already found the One and is waiting for them, OR that he hasn’t met them yet, both exclude her from the running (since he’s known her a week) is... immaterial. She never asks if he has his eye on someone, does she? Would Steve being already married stop her?

(You don’t say ‘I don’t want to date because I’m waiting for the One’ to the person who IS the One, or whom you suspect may be the One. This ain’t rocket science!)

And hey, did you notice, that Peggy is just so important and special and perfect that her sudden interest in Steve means that Steve's stated wishes are now irrelevant?

The staggering hubris of waltzing up to him to go ‘hey, by the way, one day... when all this is over... I will allow you to date me.’ 😘😌

Too bad he didn’t ask!

The fact that Steve explicitly told her he isn't interested in dating and didn’t specify he’d be interested in her is invalidated by his new looks and her desire.

Sheesh. These Carter girls sure are rapey as hell.

(Also, in characteristic NOT-A-FEMINIST Peggy Style, the first thing she does upon seeing Big Steve is yank a t shirt out of the hands of a waiting nurse, because Saint Poppins is apparently so good at everything without training or experience that she can do nursing better than an actual nurse, too? (Could be she's also being characteristically territorial, pissing a circle round her chosen prey.) While simultaneously, out of nowhere, affecting a dumb ‘oh I’m so soft-and-feminine’ voice she didn’t have before?? Does that sounds like someone Steve ‘son of a nurse’ Rogers would admire? UGH.)

The irony of all this is ^ you can read Steve as 100% gay and not have to change a single piece of his characterisation or interactions with women at any point.

I've touched on this in other asks, but:

He never asks Peggy out when he has the opportunity; only when he knows it's too late and he won't be expected to follow through (due to him being dead.)

He never makes a move on any of the chorus girls or his female fans (no matter what those creeps M&M claim). Or Private Lorraine. Or Nat. He has to be nagged to make one on Sharon (while Peggy's body's barely had time to cool, and looks fine about never seeing her again lol!) But he goes out of his way to befriend Sam, and waay out of his way to get Bucky back.

Throughout all his films he's consistently assaulted by women, even friends, and never looks happy about it; he also never looks upset when he's rejected or cut off from women love interests, or when he's able to dodge flirting (by, eg. jumping out of a frickin' plane!?)

It's 'his choice', in his own words.

He seems his happiest with women in platonic situations, and only sad about them when it's a question of a shirked duty, a bereavement, or him feeling he's let them down; eg. when Nat dies, when his mother dies, when he's unable to deliver a promised dance to Peggy, etc.

(But it makes people uncomfortable to address this since many of his fans are female.)

But even marrying a woman (albeit the most OOC choice it's physically possible for a Captain America to make, not to mention that it involves abandoning our-Bucky alone in the future). It doesn't preclude Steve from being gay, since lavender marriages were hella common (doubly so for famous gay men).

He could be gay and still in a relationship with Bucky, and married to Peggy. I mean, he's guaranteed a wife who'll spend most of the time away at work, able to use her connections to squash any inconvenient press; and unable to out him or Bucky without ruining her own prestige. Perfect!

Still makes EG Steve a douchebag tho. 😒

*we know they frequented north Brooklyn, because Steve said 'I know this neighborhood!' while the Brooklyn Bridge was in sight behind him; but, they got the street angle wrong, cuz they made it look like the BKB has a street which looks right at it, when in fact the street with that famous view is of the Manhattan Bridge. The places Steve describes being beat up; a parking lot, alleyway, and diner, are also all places you'd go while you're Out, rather than where you live. So IMO Steve and Bucky lived somewhere near DUMBO, but not so far east that their view was of the Manhattan Bridge; either Brooklyn Heights or Downtown. So that puts them right in the heart of Gay Brooklyn (as in, Truman Capote had a house there, because Walt Whitman wrote a famous poem about there; that level of gay), next to the Navy Yard and Sands Street (gay cruising central) and they also frequented gay cruising mecca Coney Island (big burlesque hot spot).

#mcu meta #antipeggy #toAyourQ #hey nonny #steve meta #bucky meta #p*ggy meta #anti st*ggy #endgame steve is a skrull #antiendgame #dat's me #bucky barnes #meta #mcu #yet each man queues the thing he loves

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bazypitchandsimonsnow · 3 years

Text

Mages Don’t Meddle

Rating: M

Genre: Angst/Mild Fluff

Word count: 16091

Summary: In a world where magic users must fear each other, Baz Pitch, a British born hex hiding in the 19th century American southwest, is just trying to stay alive. But when he meets a fellow British hex, his world is turned upside down in the most awful, amazing ways possible. PLEASE READ FIRST AUTHOR'S NOTE!!!!

Read on AO3

AN: Alright some of you may know that my favourite book series of all time is The Hexslinger Series by Gemma Files. It’s a gory but brilliant horror/dark fantasy weird western trilogy about gay cowboy wizards fighting Aztec gods. (It's also where my AO3 username comes from). I've been writing this AU on and off for like two years now lol. So when I saw this event, I saw it as motivation to finally finish it. And I did! Idk how many people are gonna like this, considering the obscurity of the books. The mythos is a bit complicated so here are the basic rules of the Hexslinger world:

1. Magic users exist, called "hexes" or "hexslingers” by most English speakers. They’re commonly known of and feared by some humans because of their immense, usually unstable power. Their magic is usually called "hexation" and a common descriptor for anything to do with them is "hexacious." Being a hex can either be passed down from parent to child or appears randomly. Most are children of a hex man and a human woman as pregnancy for a hex woman can be very risky to mother and child, but it's still possible.

2. Hexes aren’t usually born having magic. Their powers manifest at some point later in their lives except in very rare circumstances. For women it usually appears after their first period, while for men it’s usually after some sort of grievous bodily harm, e.g getting hanged or beaten. Before manifestation, some hexes show no sign of magic at all, while others have hints like perfect aim or weirdly good luck. It depends on the person and their power level.

3. Hex magic varies between people based on personality, culture, family history, and power level/type. For example, an experienced Chinese born hex with refined power will have a very different kind of magic than a newly manifested American born hex with more chaotic power. (That’s literally just from the original books lol.) Even hexes similar in multiple aspects can be completely different in the way their magic is expressed.

4. The only universal trait between hexes is that they all have the urge to feed off each other’s magic. They’re like magic vampires (wink wink). If they get too close to each other, they have the immediate urge to absorb the other's power and kill them. It’s completely instinctual and very hard to resist. Hence why hexes can’t be around each other. Or, to use the common phrase from the universe, “mages don’t meddle.”Okay that's the basics. There's A LOT of other stuff but I think that's all you need to know for this fic imo.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: So there's some period typical racism scattered around due Baz being brown in the 19th century American south. It's not too harsh imo but I still want to warn people. I hope I handled it alright, considering I'm a white af Canadian Irish-Jew, but if I didn't I'm very sorry. There's also a bit of period typical homophobia at the start. The closest I get to slurs is the use of "red" and "Indian" in reference to Indigenous people, "queer" in a negative context, references to sand because Baz says he's Egyptian, and Baz being called "darker folk." I felt it would be disingenuous to not include bigotry of the past and pretend things would be all okay for a queer POC like Baz. Especially since Hexslinger itself has major themes of homophobia, racism, and not being accepted in the majority of society. A few mentions of suicide, self harm, and torture too in relation to hex powers emerging too, which is also major in Hexslinger. The series itself is pretty brutal and dirty with lots of bigotry, blood, guts, and death. So those elements have gotten in here. There is some flesh burning stuff but I don't think it's that graphic, feels pretty typical for Carry On imo. Hopefully this all works well/makes sense.

As always, big thanks to Raegan of @carryonmylovelies Now with that all out of the way, enjoy!

———————————————

I gingerly take a sip of my whiskey. It's a horrible rotgut shite, but there’s worse stuff out in the wild west. This Slipfoot Joe’s seems to be okay by my now very, very low standards for this area.

“Well well, if it ain’t a pretty red boy,” the man behind me croons. His voice makes evey inch of my skin crawl.

I let out a deep sigh. I’ve been expecting this, but I’m still not pleased. “Piss off, arsehole.”

“Oh! Didn’t know Indians could sound English!”

“I’m British Egyptian, you twit.”

The man leans on the bar, smiling wide. It’s easier to count the few teeth he has than guess how many he’s lost. “What brings your sandy ass to our great country?”

The Call. The unending Call that signals all of us to come here.

I take another long sip. “Your gorgeous face, obviously. How much do you charge? I’ve heard American men are cheaper here than in England.”

The man reels back scowling. “You think I’m some queer?!”

“Well, I assumed so. Considering you were just flirting with me, a man.”

He snarls, whipping out his pathetic little pistol. The barrel shakes nonstop. “You got some nerve, boy!”

I finish the whiskey and delicately place the glass rim first on the filthy bar. “And you’re a racist bastard. You don’t see me getting all pissy.”

The gunshot happens in slow motion for me. I don’t even need to turn. I simply hold one hand in front of me and let my magic pour from me like a dragon’s breath. It curls out in front of me, a circle of blacks and charcoal greys and burning scarlets. Every hex’s magic is different. Mine is like a constant roaring fire, always threatening to consume me.

The bullet hits the shield with a tinny clink. Racist Man is frozen with wide, terrified eyes. I turn to him, orange and red reflecting in my grey eyes.

“You- You’re... a hex?!” He splutters.

“Thought that was pretty bloody obvious. Now go, before I drink your blood.”

Racist Man and his buddy scamper out of the tavern. I let the force field dissipate, crackling and popping in the air like a dying campfire. Joe, the bartender and eponymous Slipfoot, sighs as he cleans another glass.

“You know,” Joe says, “I’ve met other hexes. They’re stupid reckless assholes but they ain’t ever drank blood. Just suck each other’s magic.”

I chuckle. “Well they don’t know that, do they?”

“No, lucky for you. What’s a Brit like you even doin’ here anyway?”

My mouth presses into a thin line. I envy him. He can't hear The Call from that damned Hex City. I heard it all the way in Washington, and before I knew it I was on a train southeast. The only reason I haven’t actually gone to the horrid place is sheer stubbornness.

“I’m a hex. Where else would I be going?”

Joe freezes. He stares at me with more concern than fear. “I’d be careful, son. Those hexes I met? One of them was Reverend Rook himself. He’s beyond bad news, ‘specially with that heathen goddess by his side.”

“I know.” I trace my finger on the old wood, trying to focus on that instead of the ringing in my head. “But what choice do I have?”

———————————————

1867, two years after America’s bloody civil war, and it seems they’re about to be plunged into a new one. Except it won’t be slavery versus abolition this time, but humans versus magic.

The news has spread like wildfire. In the final days of the war, a confederate soldier and unofficial chaplain named “Reverend” Asher Rook was sentenced to hang for abandoning his regiment. But he survived, and the suffering of the ordeal caused his hex powers to emerge. Rumour has it one Bible verse from his lips can level an entire town. Rook decided to use his new powers to steal and murder his way through the west, aided by his ruthless gunslinging lieutenant (and rumoured lover) Chess Pargeter.

He should’ve been just another hex outlaw for those American Pinkertons to take down. But somehow, a mere month ago, Rook made a pact with an Aztec goddess. And together they’ve created New Azteclan, or Hex City to the common man. According to the magical homing signal I hear, that every hex hears, it’s a place where hexes can lose their insatiable urge to feed off each other’s magic. We’ll no longer have to be loners by nature, picked off one by one by humanity. We could be together. We could be safe.

But at what cost? Nothing in life comes without a cost. I know that too well. My magic cost me my home, my family, and a good part of my sanity. I’d do anything to not be a danger to others anymore. And the possibility is right there. All I need to do is go further south and cross the border into Mexico to reach Hex City. But once I do that, there’s no going back. The temptation of the Call will be too strong. And whatever price The Reverend wants, he’ll get it from me.

I sit at the fire, chewing on some absolutely horrific jerky. I’m trying to focus on the flames instead of the voice in my head. I’m not sure whose it is. Maybe Rook’s, maybe his witch goddess’. It doesn’t have a discernible tone, just sort of an indistinct everyman sound, or a thousand voices speaking the same thing. Either way, it’s very annoying.

Come, it whispers. Come seek out Ixchel, the Mother of Hanged Men. Come stand before Her priest-king, to offer up your service. Come to build the First City of the Sixth World- the world of wonder, the world of power. Come, and join New Azteclan.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” I shout into emptiness, slamming the side of my head with my fist.

“I haven’t said anything yet,” someone replies weakly.

I bolt up. My magic roars to life inside me, a fireball forming in the palm of my hand. “Who said that?!”

The man slowly steps out of the darkness. He must be no older than myself, with his young, round freckled face. He has curly bronze hair, capped by an old second hand cowboy hat. His brown leather coat, plaid shirt, riding boots, and jeans are all filthy with desert dirt. A horse with saddle bags stands behind him. His blue eyes are wide and nervous. I notice a smell on him. Like green fire and smoke, with a strong scent of something brown and sweet. He smells like something I would gladly eat.

He’s a hex.

“Don’t you dare come any closer, you prick,” I say between gritted teeth. “I won’t hesitate to burn you to a crisp.”

The other boy shakes his head. “I’m not here to drain you. I...I just wanted to ask for some help.” He sounds British like me, but more rough and nervous, stumbling over his words.

“Yeah, right. Do I look that gullible? ‘Mages don’t meddle.’ We’d all drain each other dry if we were given the chance.”

He sighs heavily. “Well, of course I want to by instinct, but I’m not going to. I was just wondering if you had any food. All of mine got stolen by some angry humans.”

I consider just turning him away, or draining his magic and leaving his dried out corpse for the vultures. But he looks so desperate. How long has this young man been out here alone? My aunt had always warned me to be wary of all other hexes. We’re a bloodthirsty species, Basil. Never trust another hex, ever. Not even me. But I’m not my aunt.

I sit down again. “Fine. You can have some jerky. Just don’t come too close alright? I’d like to keep my magic and soul where they are, please.”

The man smiles (he has a nice smile) and sits opposite me at the fire. I throw a bag of jerky, and he catches in one hand. He shoves it in his mouth like a ravenous animal.

“So,” I say, “what’s your name?”

“Simon Snow,” he rep;ies, mouth still half full. “Your’s?”

“Baz Pitch.” Simon chuckles a bit, and I frown. “What’s so funny?

“Well, Baz Pitch is a pretty ridiculous name.”

“No more ridiculous than Simon Snow,” I snap. “What, were you named by circus performers?”

“Maybe. Not sure, actually.” Snow looks at the fire, but it feels like he’s looking right through it, his gaze very far away.

“Why’s that?”

Simon shakes his head. “Hey, are you going to Hex City?”

I huff, blowing some loose, dirty hair out of my eyes. I’m too tired to stop him from changing the subject. “I don’t know. Are you?

He shrugs. “Maybe. So far I am. The stories and Call do make it sound so wonderful.”

I scoff loudly. “Of course they do. Rook wants people to come. Then we’ll get there and be sacrificed to his bloodthirsty goddess. That’s probably what happened to Pargeter. No one’s heard from him lately, according to the locals.”

“But we’ll lose the hunger! What if the Reverend just wants us to be safe? Y’know, as a kindness to his own people.”

“No one does anything out of kindness, Snow. Least of all hexes.”

“You gave me food out of kindness, didn’t you?”

I glare at him over the flames. He shrugs with a faint smile. Fuck. He has a really nice smile.

“I’m going to sleep,” I mutter. “But I’m putting a shield around me. Touch it and you’ll be burned alive. So don’t get any ideas about taking my magic.”

Simon throws his hands up in innocence. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

I lay down on my pallet, throwing up my force field. The crackle and hiss of magic around me distracts from the beautiful mage no more than seven feet from me. Whom I’m not sure I want to kiss or kill. Maybe both.

———————————————

I wake when the sun's centre in the sky. I’m breathing, so this Simon Snow hasn’t drained me dry. That’s good, I guess.

I sit up bleary eyed. Snow is passed out on his own cot, drooling profusely with his mouth wide open (mouth breather). He’s put up his own shield, of course, (at least he’s somewhat sensible). It sort of looks like an electrical explosion, white bolts constantly combusting around him in bubble form. He smells so powerful. It’s taking all of my willpower to not hurt him. To not submit to my basic hex desires.

I take my sweet time to pack my things and douse the fire pit, secretly hoping Simon will wake up before I run out of excuses. Luckily, with a very loud snort, Snow bolts upwards. There’s terror in his eyes, and his breath is uneven and shallow. I know that look. I’m no stranger to nightmares myself.

“A good morning to you, Snow,” I say.

Simon lets out a long breath, waving a hand to dissolve his shield. “You didn’t kill me.”

“And you didn’t kill me. What a miracle.”

“I’ll say. Are you leaving?”

“Obviously.”

“Where to?”

I sigh heavily. “Well, my map says, there’s a town southeast from here. I haven’t been there before but it probably isn’t too bad. I was going to hide there for at least a bit.”

Simon picks at his nail beds, even though they’re already ragged and bloody. “Can I...can I come with you? I haven’t been around anyone in so long, y’know. It’d be nice to have someone to talk to”

I look at him with the most neutral gaze I can muster. “Are you going to kill me?”

He shrugs. “Haven’t killed you yet, have I?”

“There’s still time.”

Simon stands up, brushing the dust off his pants. “Alright, then I’ll make myself very clear. Baz, I’m not going to kill you. I’m not going to fight you at all, alright?”

I must admit that I’ve been lonely these few months in the desert. Hell, I’ve been lonely for the past few years. I’ve actually missed the company of others. But it’s not like humans or hexes want to be around me. Except for this one, it seems. Maybe this wouldn’t be too bad. If we don’t kill each other first that is.

“Alright, fine. Just don’t try anything or I’ll burn you from the inside out.”

Simon keeps smiling. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

We mount our horses and ride off. I try to keep my eyes ahead instead of on Snow.

———————————————

“I can’t believe the food here,” Snow says. “It’s so much more spicy than in the North.”

“We are closer to Mexico, Snow,” I reply. I’m trying to figure out our route, while also listening to Snow when he’s more than six feet away. The hunger is manageable from this distance. Mostly.

“Well, yeah, but it’s so insane! Why can’t the north people get some spice from here? It would make their chicken more tolerable. London street food was awful but at least it had some flavour!”

That makes me snort out a laugh no matter how much I try not to. Snow grins at me, and his face is literal sunshine. Why must he be so perfect? It’s not fair. “London street food? You mean fish and chips? Those aren’t half bad, if I’m remembering correctly.”

Snow’s tawny face gets a little pink. He rubs the back of his slightly sunburnt neck. “Y-Yeah, they weren’t too bad. Just...other stuff was terrible...”

“Like what?” It’s not late at night now. I’m less inclined to let his dodging go. Call me crazy, but I’d like to know about the man I’m travelling with.

“Um...” He looks down at his horse’s neck. “I-I lived on the London streets, literally, until I was old enough to work for room and board. Finding anyone who would house a hex though, that was a challenge.”

His laugh is tinny and hollow. My heart, or what dark horrible mass we hexes have in place of one, twists at the words. I wish I was surprised. His story is all too familiar.

“You don’t need to be ashamed,” I say firmly. “We all have our own rough pasts. It’s practically required for hexes, in my eyes.”

Snow doesn’t look up, but his (pretty) plain blue eyes flick over to me. “Really?”

I nod. “Yes, of course. Hexes are usually shunned and harmed. Finding one who hasn’t been in a dire situation is more rare.”

“Have you met a lot of hexes?”

“Some. Mostly, I’ve heard stories. Far too many are like your’s.”

“Is your’s?”

My grip on the reins is so tight my knuckles are going pale. Memories rush through my head no matter how much I want to stop them. The darkness, the pain, the fire, then the stench of burnt human flesh, all capped off by years of trying to survive on my own.

“Unfortunately, ye-”

“What the fuck?!”

Simon’s screech is ungodly in volume and tone. His horse lets out a similarly panicked bray. She bucks up, but can’t get very high with the red vines tangled around her legs.

“Oh fuck,” I hiss. I try to pull back my own horse, but his legs are similarly wrapped up. The vines circle up and around us. I kick and stamp them with all my might. The blood red flowers look like the gaping mouths of monsters.

“What the fuck are these things?!” Snow bellows. He tries to rear his horse back, but nearly throws himself backwards off his saddle instead. “Fucking shite!”

“Don’t do that, Snow, it won’t help!”

“Then what should I do?!”

“Just stay still!”

Thankfully, Snow does as I say. Not thankfully, I’m not sure what to do. I know that human blood gets rid of the Weeds, but even if I count as human in this regard, you need a relatively large amount of it. So unless I want to pass out, I’ll need to think of something else. But what else can curb evil bloodthirsty Aztec plants?

“Baz!” Snow’s horse pancis the more the weeds wrap around her, which makes Snow panic in turn. He looks at me with desperate wide eyes. “Baz, do something!”

Oh, fuck it. I’ll solve this the way I solve my other problems.

I reach deep within myself, down to the flames that burn in what’s hopefully my soul, or at least what hexes have instead. I grab that power and let it out through my arm. Fire roars to life in the palm of my hand, and I unleash the full force of it on the Weeds. A tidal wave of blackened-red flames engulf the plants.

“Jesus Christ!” Simon shouts. The plants don’t burn per se, I’m not sure they even can. But they still shrink away from us. I keep pushing more magic out until they Weeds a good distance away.

“Run,” I say, “now!”

Snow and I both wrench our horses 180 degrees and run like the wind. We ride fast and far with no destination, but we keep each other in sight. Only when my pulse is no longer hammering in my ears do I start to slow down. Snow follows, and eventually we stop near a large tree. All four of us are breathing hard.

“Bloody hell,” Snow says. “W-What the fuck were those?”

“Red Plague Weeds,” I reply, dismounting my horse. “They’ve been popping up all around here. No one knows where they come from, but we’re all pretty sure they have something to do with Rook and his witch goddess. Just like every other bizarre thing nowadays.”

“How come I haven’t seen them before in the towns?”

“Because the way to get rid of the Weeds permanently is blood, Snow.”

Snow’s eyes go wide with horror. “Blood? Any blood?”

I sadly shake my head. “No, only fresh human blood. I’ve heard a bowl full collected from the townsfolk is good enough. I don’t even know if hex blood counts. No one’s ever tried, as far as I know. We’re extremely lucky we got away.”

“So I gathered,” Snow sighs. “Now what? We’ve gone a good way backwards now, if I had to guess.”

“Agreed. We’ll have to try and move around the Weeds. If we’re lucky, the town will still be reachable.”

“No one has ever called hexes lucky.”

We both laugh a little. Sometimes laughter is the only way to deal with our horrible existences. I pull the waterskin out of my bag and take a deep, long drink. “Let’s stay here for a moment, though. That blast took a lot out of me.”

“Y-Yeah, that makes sense. Um, I’ll just...”

He turns his horse to the side, trotting away from me. My stomach drops out. Where’s he going? Am I going to be alone again? I’ve only been with Snow for one day. That’s nothing compared to the last two years I’ve been on my own. But now I can’t imagine going back to that crushing, never ending loneliness.

“Heading out, Snow?” I keep my tone neutral, holding back the desperate tremor that threatens to bleed out. “Suppose I’ll see you around, then.”

Snow whips his head around. If I were a more hopeful person, I’d say he looks even more panicked than when we were tangled in the Weeds. “W-What? No, I was just gonna go a little further away...”

“Do I smell that bad?” I probably do. Hygiene is not a priority in these parts.

“No! The opposite, actually...” Snow looks to the side, a little red on his face. “You used a lot of magic before. I can still smell some of it. I, uh, want to keep my promise...”

Oh. Right. I should count myself lucky that he didn’t drain me the minute we stopped. “Yes, yes, of course, makes perfect sense.”

“Unless...you want me to go...”

I gulp down the massive lump in my throat. “Do you want to go, Snow?”

Snow scratches his neck. He points his thumb to the side. “I’ll be waiting over there, until we’ve both cooled down. Alright?”

I would never admit how much relief that brings me. “Alright. We’ll set off again in an hour or so.”

“Okay.” Snow trots over to a good distance away. His brown, sweet smell still lingers in the air, but it fades just enough for me to rest properly. I sit back against the tree, drinking a good portion of my waterskin. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Snow doing the same. I try to not watch him. But it’s very, very hard.

———————————————

Nightfall hits before we reach the town. Snow can’t ride very fast, and I’m still more than a bit drained. So once again, I have to sit opposite the man who will most likely kill me soon.

He fidgets endlessly, picking at his nails and sleeve. It’s infuriating. He gnaws on the jerky like a crazed cat or something. I huff and shake my head. Snow looks up at me.

“What?” he says through a bite.

“Do you ever stop moving? We’ve been sitting here for over an hour and there hasn’t been a single moment of stillness from you.”

Snow snorts. “I don’t see how that affects you.”

“It’s annoying.”

He snorts again, but there’s a small smile now too. “Maybe this is the real reason hexes don’t interact. We're all arseholes.”

“That is hardly a hex thing, Snow. I’ve known humans and hexes alike that I can’t tolerate.”

“Am I one of them?

I hope my face doesn’t flush too hard. “You’re still here, aren’t you?”

He chuckles quietly and goes back to eating his jerky, with far less fidgeting this time thankfully. We sit in silence for a while. I keep sneaking looks at him, then tearing my gaze away every time. The firelight makes Snow’s tawny skin almost glow and his bronze hair sparkle gold. He’s a constellation of moles and freckles. He’s a gorgeous mess. Just looking at him, I can almost forget that we’re supposed to be enemies.

“What part of England are you from anyway?” Snow asks through a mouthful of dried out meat.

“Hampshire. Though if you asked the people here, they’d say I’m from Buckingham bloody Palace.”

Snow throws his head back laughing. It’s a ridiculous, wonderful sound. “Damn true! I’ve lived on the streets of London for the past ten years and an American asked me if I’m related to the bloody queen! They have no idea about accent differences. They think every Brit is royalty.”

I freeze. Snow’s laughs slowly subside. He must notice the utter panic in my eyes. “You lived on the streets of London for a decade? That long?”

He pulls in, curling his thin body in on itself. This Simon is a hex like me, a terrifying being filled with unimaginable power, yet right now, he looks so...small. “Well, not the whole time. It’s been on and off. I found some places to live for a bit but they never lasted. Thank God for magic. Or thank the Devil, if the humans are right about us.”

He chuckles nervously. I shift uncomfortably in my spot, trying to hide the way his laugh makes me face heat up even more. “I guess so. It’s taken care of me since-”

There’s a crack. It’s small, far off, almost indistinguishable from the regular sounds of the desert, but it’s there. My aunt always said I have the ears of a bat. I swing my head around.

“What is it?” Snow says.

“Hush! I think I heard something.”

Slowly, I stand up, crouched over with my fists clenched. My magic sizzles and sparks inside me, begging to be used. I see Snow stand too at the edge of my vision.

“Die hex scum!”

The man launches himself out of the darkness, jagged knife in hand. He knocks me flat down to the ground. All the breath is forced out of me as my back hits the sand.

“Fuck!” I wheeze.

I push at him with both arms, thankfully keeping my pretty face out of his slashing range. He writhes and struggles like a rabid wolf. His dirty crazed smile, missing most of his teeth, looms over me. I recognise him.

“You,” I growl. “Did you really follow me all the way here from Slipfoot’s, you pig?!”

“Die!” He says that like it means absolutely anything, like I haven’t heard it a hundred times before.

Racist Man has no technique. He just screeches and flails with his knife. Aunt Fiona’s words come to my mind immediately. “Every self respecting hex needs to know how to defend himself, Basil.” She said just before pinning me to the ground in one move. I hook my leg around his and flip him onto his back. He gasps and lets out a rattling cough. I hover over him, knee on his chest, pinning his knife hand to the ground.

“You don’t deserve to live, you sand demon.” He spits at me, splashing against my cheek. I flick it off with ease.

“Such an original opinion.” I feel the fire blazing in my gut, threatening to consume myself and everything around me. “I should scorch off all your skin.”

“Course you would. All you hexes, just filthy murderers. No wonder y’all are fleeing to Rook’s heathen paradise. Your kind don’t belong around civilized folks.”

I growl again. First he despises my skin colour, then he thinks he knows anything about hexation. This bastard, so stupid and ignorant. We’re only monsters because we have to be. Because men like him come at us with knives and guns and nooses. There’s no holding the fire back. My hand heats up around his wrist. He screeches as his skin sizzles under my fingers. He drops the knife, but I don't stop. All my rage pushes out through my hand and onto his increasingly scorched skin.

“Get off me!”

I turn to see Simon, struggling against another man. His fingers spark and sputter uselessly as he pounds against the guy with a hand around his throat.

“Better save your man over there,” Racist Man hisses.

I give him one last good death stare. I see him shiver just slightly. At least he has some good sense. “Run fast and far. If you come near us again, so help me God I’ll melt through your entire brain.”

The look of terror in his eyes is enough of an answer. I jump off him and run towards Snow.

“Oi! Off him, now!” I roar.

The other man turns to look at me. He has the same crazed look as his friend. “Or what, you piece of devil shit?!”

“Or this.”

I turn to the fire. With only one hand outstretched, my magic wraps around it, and pushes my power into the very core. The flames shoot nine feet upwards, illuminating the vast dark in blinding light. I turn back to the terrified human. With one swing of my arm, the pillar slams into him. He’s sent flying in a shower of flames and skids on the ground, tossing up a cloud of dustin his wake. I start to march towards him. But Snow throws up his arm to stop me.

“Let me,” he growls.

The tone of his voice stops me in my tracks. Simon stomps towards him, his entire hand now covered in tiny sparks like fireworks. His assaulter sits up, panting heavily.

“You better run now,” Snow says.

He sneers. “Don’t tell me-”

“GO!”

Snow’s magic explodes like a fucking bomb. It’s a bolt of violent and powerful energy that hits the assailant square in the chest. He flies back even farther. I stumble from the sheer force of it. The magic disperses as quickly as it appeared. Snow is panting, bronze curls still staticy with stray sparks. The human scrambles and runs away into the darkness.

We’re left there, breathing hard in the darkness, the embers of the now dead fire our only light. Simon tries to pull out the crackling electricity still clinging to his hair. It curls around his fingers and won’t dissipate no matter how much he shakes his hand out. Finally, I find my voice again.

“That was...”

“Awful?” Snow mumbles. “Yeah, I know. Half the time my magic doesn’t work, the other half it explodes. Pretty fucking annoying.”

I turn to look at him properly, still trying to dust off the little sparks. “No, it was incredible. I’ve never seen magic that powerful, or beautiful.”

Oh fuck, why did I say that? I’m going to explode myself any second. Simon freezes, then turns to me. His lovely plain eyes are soft. Half of his mouth pulls up into a smile. My pulse is pounding in my ears. “N-No one’s ever called it beautiful before. And...no one’s tried to save me either.”

He starts to reach out to me with his spark kissed digits. I see the little bolts pulling towards me like I’m a magnet. My own magic flares to surface, reaching back towards him. Tiny flames from my fingers curl around the lightning. And a part of me, that horrible instinctual part, desperately wants to grab his hand and add his beautiful, terrifying energy to my own until his body is nothing but an empty husk.

I take a large step away, hands behind my back. Simon does the same. His eyes are wide with terror now. We both know how close we came to giving into temptation.

“We should go to bed,” I mutter.

Snow nods furiously. I speed walk to my side of the dead fire. We both lay down and pull the blankets to our reddening ears. The only sound for ages is the desert wind whistling through the cacti. Until Snow decides to speak up again, God help me.

“Baz?”

“What, Snow?” I snap. I can’t talk to him anymore, it’s too damn painful.

“Have...Have you ever actually fully drained anyone?”

Oh. I wasn’t expecting that. The question hits me in my heart. All that comes to mind is my aunt’s face as I saw her for the first time in weeks. Her happiness turned to utter horror in seconds. The memory still aches deep inside me. I can almost feel that horrible hunger when I first manifested. I squeeze my eyes shut and take a deep breath. “No. But I’ve come close. You?”

Snow pauses too. I can hear his shaky breathing clearly. “I had a hex friend back in London. Penelope. She was really good at magic, like you, so she tried to help me. We could only see each other for an hour a day for safety’s sake, and it worked for awhile. But one time, my magic got so out of control that I came this close to draining her.” He makes a loud sniffing noise. I hate imagining the tears I know are rolling down his face. “She told me it wasn’t my fault but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to hurt her. Next day I got on a boat to America. That was almost a year ago. I’ve been alone ever since, and it’s awful.”

“Is that why you want to go to Hex City?”

“Yeah. I mean, I just want to be able to have some choice, you know? Not make choices because of this power I never asked for. Don’t you feel like that?”

I think about my mother, who lost her life because of what we are. Or my six weeks of torture by that madman. Or how I had to run away from my family in fear of what I’d accidentally do to them.

“Yes,” I whisper, closing my eyes, “all the damn time.”

———————————————

We ride leisurely under the blistering sun. The desert has melted into more of a hot, grassy plain. Surprisingly, the climate and terrain actually gets less tortuous the further south you go in this awful state. I’ve only gone this far south once before. The Call somehow gets even stronger here. It threatens to fill every nook and cranny of my brain, but I beat it back. No disgraced Confederate chaplain or Aztec witch woman gets to decide what I do.

Snow is mumbling to himself about it being too hot. My head is whirring with a terrible, awful idea, but it won’t go away. My eyes keep drifting towards his beautiful face, and my mind keeps thinking of his beautiful magic. I got only a taste of the endless, consuming feeling of it, and it was exhilarating. If only he could control it.

I groan. “Snow, stop your horse.”

He looks at me confused, but does as I say. “What is it?”

“Get off. I’m going to help you with your magic.”

His eyes bug out of his skull. “What?! Why?”

“Because as incredible as your magic can be, I’d rather not have you explode when you sleep ten feet away from me.”

It’s a convincing lie. Honestly, I want him to be able to protect himself. I don’t know exactly how long it will take to get to the south, or what could happen before then. Simon might’ve been killed if I wasn’t there. And I don’t know how long I will be with him.

I swing off my horse and Snow follows. We walk out into the empty plateau. He shuffles his feet nervously, chewing at his nails.

“Stay here,” I say.

I walk out and place my old empty flask on a cactus (it’s rusting anyway). Snow looks at it confused. I gesture to the metal bottle, then put my hands behind my back. “Hit that with a blast but avoid the cactus.

“O-Okay...” I watch his throat as he gulps. God, I want to touch that throat, I want to touch everywhere. But I’ll kill him if I do. It makes me hate my magic even more.

Simon raises his hand and takes aim. Small sparks dance between his fingers. One by one, they begin to increase. A small ball of lightning collects in his palm. Snow curls his fingers in, but they seem to be struggling. The ball starts to grow larger and Snow clenches harder. With little to no warning, a lightning bolt shoots out and hits the side of the flask. A blackened mark is left in its wake, but that’s nothing compared to the cactus. A massive chunk has been blown out of the top. It’s charred remains lay strewn on the gras.

“Fuck,” he groans. “Sorry, I was losing control, I had to let it go. Would’ve been much worse if I didn’t.”

“That’s alright, Snow. You technically did hit the flask.”

Snow scoffs, running a hand through his beautiful, sweaty hair. “Sure, I guess...”

I pluck the flask from the half destroyed desert fauna. Another horrible idea is coming to my mind, and I just might be mad enough to do it. “Maybe you need a greater motivator for staying in control.”

“Huh?”

I place the flask on my hand and hold my arm out to the side. “Hit the flask, but not me.”

Snow goes wide eyed again and inhales sharply like he’s been kicked. “A-Are you serious?! You just saw what I did to that cactus, right?”

“Well, you’re going to have to be accurate, unless you want me to end up like said cactus”

He pulls at his curls anxiously. The tiniest of parks fly off the ends. “I don’t know, Baz. I don’t want to hurt you...”

I try to ignore my rapidly beating heart. It’s been so annoying this past week, trying to get what it can’t have. I just flash a smirk at him. “Well, I believe that you won’t. Care to prove me right?”

A red colour spreads across his face. Part of me hopes that’s not just the sun affecting his pale, freckled complexion. “Alright, I’ll try.”

He rubs his hands together. His skin simmers with magic once again. It smells intoxicatingly good. Snow holds his right hand out, palm flat. The electricity builds on the surface. He keeps his hand clenched, but the energy threatens to spill over his fingers. I resist the urge to run in as fast as I can. I didn’t lie, I do trust him. But living on my own for almost three years has given me quite the self preservation instinct.

Sweat prickles Snow’s brow. He uses his opposite arm to keep the other one steady. “C’mon, Simon,” I whisper. “You can do it.”

The jagged white bolt shoots from his skin, far less formless than the last one. It zigs and zags, but in the end hits the flask straight on. The bottle explodes in a shower of jagged metal. I throw up a makeshift shield just in time. When I look at Snow, he’s flat on his ass, panting hard.

“Holy shit,” he says.

“‘Holy shit’ is right,” I respond with a chuckle.

He looks at me with a wide grin. It shines brighter than the midday sun. “I did it! That’s the most controlled my magic has ever been! Thank you, Baz.”

I nod. “You’re welcome, Snow. My aunt always said danger is a great motivator to learn. Especially when it comes to magic.”

Snow lays down on the grass, panting hard. It seems he’s not going to get up any time soon. “Your aunt, was she the one that taught you about magic?”

I kick at a piece of rusted shrapnel, my back to the resting Snow. “Yes, before it manifested, obviously. She wanted me to be prepared just in case. Her whole side of the family has a history of magic. It only appears every few generations or so. We both drew the short ends of the bloodline straw I guess.”

“You’re lucky with that, y’know. I never had anyone to teach me properly. Penny tried, but we never got far enough to make a difference. When I first got magic, this guy called the Mage offered to help. But it turned out he just wanted to drain me. I killed him by accident when he tried. I really didn’t mean to hurt hum, but he wouldn’t stop...”

I turn to him. There’s far too much pain in his eyes. “You had every right to defend yourself. Don’t feel bad.”

He lifts his head up. His smile is sort of sad, but it’s still gorgeous. “Thanks, Baz.”

I smile back as best I can. “You’re most welcome, Snow.” I place my hands in my pockets, desperately clenching my fists in hopes to keep my emotions at bay. “Unfortunately, I’m out of flasks. But we do have an oversupply of fauna. Want to try and not destroy a cactus this time?”

“Okay.” Snow nods, breathing steadily. “Okay, I’ll try.”

Snow takes his stance across from another unfortunate cactus. I watch him and give advice, but slowly have to back away as Snow’s sweet scent permeates the air. I try not to imagine being close to Snow, not having to fear him, him not having to fear me. Oh, what a life that could be.

———————————————

After another week of dodging the Red Weed, we finally get to somewhere. Covent Gardens, a town I suppose is named after the London borough. It’s sizable enough to have a slightly good inn; as in none of the panels are falling off and the sign is missing only a single letter. That’s practically a palace in these parts. I walk in with gusto, making the shutters rattle, Simon following behind me with his head.

Everyone looks at us. I’m not sure how obvious our hexation is, but I suppose we look enough like trouble. Plus my skin tone isn’t an asset here. Or anywhere, honestly. So I sneer and most turned away.

“They’re afraid of us,” Simon mumbles.

“As they should be,” I reply deadpan. I go straight to the barkeep, a bulky white man with truly horrific mutton chops. “I need two rooms.”

The man crosses his unnaturally large arms. “We don’t serve... people like you.”

I grip the bar lip, nails digging into the half rotted wood. “Like me how? Hexes or brown people?”

He sneers at me. “Neither.”

The fire blazes in my eyes. Wood blackens under my skin. “Now listen here, you stupid bastard, you better rent us a room or-”

“Now, now, Basilton,” a familiar voice says, “no need to be so rude. I’m sure we can come to an agreement.”

“Hello, Nicodemus.”

Nico moves to stand next to me. His suit is cheap, the stitches fraying at the seams. He’s still got that sort of menacing look, but he looks tired too.

“Fancy seeing you here, Pitch. How’s your aunt?” He smiles, showing off his missing eye teeth. It makes me want to punch him in his stupid face.

“Why would you care, Petty? You’re the one who left her after everything she did for you.”

He hangs his head back with a groan. “Still defending your family’s honour, I see. Ain’t my fault I wanted to realise my full potential.”

“What, by getting your teeth pulled out so you could get magic? Even when my aunt warned you what a curse being a hex was? You’re still an arrogant idiot then.”

Nicodemus growls and grabs my wrist. His magic reaches out to clash with my own. It’s slick like oil, wrapping around my fire like a snake. But there’s a roughness to it. A sort of mangy, wild energy that I remember all too well from the hex duel with my aunt. Now, I can smell the acrid tang of it too. It leaves a sour taste in the back of my throat. I’m not surprised his magic is as disgusting as he is.

“Looks like you went through some shit too, Basilton,” he hisses. “You’ve got the same fire as dear old Fi. What, the guilt of letting your mum die finally get to you? Try to end it all? Too bad, you just became the monster she never wanted you to be instead.”

His power gnashes at mine, trying to rip it apart and eat it. But Nicodemus has made a fatal assumption; that he’s more powerful than me. I push back against him hard. The fire rushes through my every vein. I revel in the way Nico’s eyes go wide. My hand shoots up to his throat and I shove him down so hard his back bends against the wooden bar.

“You bastard,” I growl. “After all these years you still don’t know how to keep your bloody mouth shut.” I hold his throat even tighter. His eyes bug out of his skull. “Maybe I should shut it permanently.”

I open the gates within, and his magic begins to pour into me. It’s the world’s greatest adrenaline rush. I’m invincible, powerful, a bloody god. Nico gasps and tries to push me away. But I’m still stronger. He could never stop me.

“Baz!” Snow shouts. “Stop it!”

I turn to him with burning eyes. Everything I see is cloudy, like a smoke screen or rippling water. “Why?!”

“Because,” his voice is desperate, and maybe even caring, “we shouldn’t be the monsters they think we are. Just look at them, Baz!”

I still have enough sense to hear what he says. The patrons cower in fear, eyes wide with terror as they look at me. It’s not an expression anyone wants to be subjected to, or cause. And though I hate him, Nicodemus is right. My mother never wanted me to be this. Another terrible, murderous, evil hex.

With all my strength and good sense, I find the will to let Nicodemus’ neck go. His power rushes back into him with a sputtering gasp. I glare at him as I pull away, fingers still trailing with flames.

“Leave,” I say flatly. “Now.”

Nicodemus runs faster than I’ve ever seen a man run before. I take a few deep breaths. It takes a moment for my magic to balance out. It still yearns for Nicodemus’ power, but I beat it back into submission. I won’t let the hunger control me. Then I walk towards the now terrified barkeep.

“Rooms still not available?” He shakes his head frantically. “Good.” I slap down some American money. “Two rooms, please. Also throw in some whiskey. I need a drink after all that.”

The man picks two keys out of a box, then a bottle and glasses from the shelf. He shoves them both forward on the bar and takes two large steps back. I snatch them up with a tip of my ridiculous cowboy hat.

“Cheers, mate.”

Snow and I take a table in a corner. No one dares to look at us. I pour drinks for both of us and shove his glass to the other side of the table. We’re as far apart as we can be but it’s still risky. My power is still hungry. And Simon still smells delicious. But I won’t hurt him. I can’t.

“So,” Simon says, vowel drawn out, “who was that?”

I throw back the whiskey. It’s sour and burns my throat, but it's better than Slipfoot’s at least. “His name is Nicodemus Petty. He and my aunt Fiona were friends growing up. They bonded over their mutual family history of hexation. But when my aunt and his sister, Ebb, manifested magic as teenagers, Nico was jealous. Fiona and Ebb both tried to tell him that hex magic was far more of a curse than a blessing, but he never listened. He wanted the power. When I was about nine, he finally succeeded in activating his own latent magic.”

“By having two of his teeth ripped out...”

“Mhm. First thing he did was stumble all bloody mouthed to my aunt’s flat.” I clench the glass so hard I nearly break it. “The bastard attacked her by surprise, and tried to steal her magic. He almost killed her, but Fiona got a lucky shot and threw him out the window.” I take a deep breath, trying to stay calm. “As you can guess, I was there. It wasn’t pretty.”

“I can imagine.” He pulls in, picking at his nails nervously. “Um, if you don’t mind me asking...w-what was he talking about? With your mum?”

I pour myself another helpful shot of whiskey. I want to drown my brain in the stuff, honestly. I’ve never talked about my mum, it’s too painful, like ripping out a fingernail. But Snow has shown so much of himself to me. It seems unfair to hide. “My aunt and I aren’t the only hexes in our family.”

His eyes go wide as the revelation hits him, “Your mum is a hex too?”

I nod slowly, then drink the alcohol in one gulp. The warmth tingles in my veins and loosens my tongue. I stare at the glass, watching the light refract through it’s bends. “She was, but my father is human. They loved each other enough to not be scared, I guess. They never meant to have children. I was an accident, but my mother wanted me in spite of the risks. My father said she cried with happiness when she saw I was a boy. She thought if she kept me safe, I’d never become a full hex.” I flick a paint chip off the table with more force than necessary. “Then she died protecting me, doing what she promised.”

“How? Was it another hex?”

“Even worse, scared humans.”

Snow’s face falls even more. He takes a long sip from his own drink. “So they tried to kill her?”

“They tried to kill all of us. Someone heard of my mother’s hexation, and they rallied a group together to fight our family. It wasn’t a real fight though. The cowards snuck in and tried to stab us. My mother killed almost all of them quickly” My fists clench so tight it hurts. “The last one nearly got me, but my mother stepped in front. He burned to ash just after he stabbed her through the throat.”

“Oh. Not even a hex could come back from that kind of wound...”

“I know,” I say between gritted teeth. “I know that very well, Snow.” I delicately place the glass down with a strained hand. “I...I tried to stop the bleeding but there was nothing I could do. I had no magic then. Even so, I doubt my powers could’ve helped.” A little flame pops up in my hand with barely a thought. Making fire is more natural than breathing for me, after all. I watch the scarlet snake dance between my fingers. “My family’s abilities have always been better at destruction.”

Simon takes another long sip, polishing off his drink. “I don’t know what my family’s like, but I hope they’re not like me. This power...it’s too much for anyone to have. I’d give it up in a heartbeat.”

“We all would, Snow. That’s what the humans don’t get. Most hexes are just as scared of themselves as humans are.” I pour my third drink. It’s been awhile since I’ve drank so much in one sitting, but if I’m going to get sozzled, tonight is a good time. “But that’s not up to us. We’re born like this. Nothing we can do but try to survive.”

“Believe me, I know that. All I’ve ever done is survive. In the orphanage, on the streets, here in America.” He lets out a small, sad laugh. “Hexation is how I ended up on the street, actually.” Snow looks directly down at the table. “When I was 11, I, uh, had a dream that I was exploding. When I woke up, the entire orphanage had been blown to pieces. Luckily no one was hurt, but the matron couldn’t very well keep a hex among other children.”

“So she thought sending you to roam among other humans was safer?”

He shrugs. “I don’t think she cared as long as I was far away from her.”

I scoff, swinging the glass between two fingers. “Sounds about usual for humans. What made you manifest? A particularly bad paddling from the matron?”

Snow chews on his bottom lip. His fingers drum the wood slowly. “I, uh, actually didn’t have to suffer. I’m one of those rare cases of sudden manifestation, apparently. That’s what Penny called it anyway. She said it was rare but possible.”

My grip on the glass gets even tighter. A sudden jealous rage consumes my mind. So Snow just exploded one day at eleven. That’s awful, of course, I’ll never deny that. But all I can think of is the coffin. The endless night of being trapped in that box, waiting for a relief that wouldn’t come, until I finally broke and became the last thing I ever wanted to be. I went through absolute hell. Of course I assumed Snow had to, like all other male hexes. But he didn’t. He’s never had the acute kind of torture I did. It’s not fair.

“Excuse me,” I say more harshly than I mean to, “I’m tired. I think I’ll turn in.”

Snow’s pretty plain eyes go wide. “O-Oh...okay. Good night, then.”

“Night.” I snatch the bottle up and leave the key for his room. Then I stomp up the stairs with irrational anger still burning me up. I know it’s stupid, but I can’t get past it. Male hexes get their magic through suffering. It’s a well known fact. How could Snow be like me without the same kind of pain? How could he ever fully understand me the way I thought he could?

The second my room door is closed, I drink down the last of the whiskey bottle. I’ve tried to avoid alcohol over the past few years. It would be far too easy for me to drink away the pain, the memories, the horrible guilt. Eventually, I’d drown myself in a bottle. That’s not a way I want to go. But one night of indulgence will be fine.

I wobble towards my bed, shedding my outer layers as I go. I collapse face first onto the old mattress. Whiskey clouds my mind. And when I finally pass out, all I see is empty darkness. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than the nightmares.

———————————————

“...safe?”

“Out cold...”

The voices stay patchy as I slip in and out of consciousness. I try to force my eyes fully open, but the pounding in my head is too much. Indistinguishable figures move on the edges of my blurry vision. There’s little to no light. It must still be night, maybe only a couple hours since I passed out.

“Is..right thing?”

“Hex...Rook and Pargeter...dangerous...we...safe.”

“Fine.”

Something grabs both my wrists and my ankles. I try to struggle but I must still be too drunk. I can’t get my limbs to move save for some squirming. I try to summon my magic, but my mind can’t concentrate. It’s no use. Bloody hell, I’m trapped.

“Night night, hex,” a horrible voice says. Something soft is pressed hard against my face. I can’t take in air, I can’t breathe, I can’t fucking breathe. It’s like the coffin. No, I can’t do this again. I try to thrash harder and scream but it’s still no use.

Oh Lord, I’m going to die here. I wonder if I’ll see my mother on the other side. I wonder if I even have a soul to go to the other side. And I wonder how if Snow is okay. Christ, my last conversation with him ended in anger. If I had known, I would’ve said everything I’ve wanted to say this past week. But the first thing would be ‘I’m sorry.’

I’m sorry, Snow, for everything I said and thought. And I’m sorry for leaving you alone.

“Hey! Get off him, you bastards!” That voice is familiar even in my half drunken state. Thank whatever gods are listening that he’s okay.

“It’s the other one!” one of my assailants shouts. “Wasn’t Garth supposed to take care of him?!”

“That damn idjit fucked up!”

I hear the telltale signs of punches and kicks thrown about. One of the hands on me pulls off. All this excitement has thankfully sobered me up some. I kick some stupid bastard right in the stomach.

“Fuck!” they wheeze. The other humans are wise and let go of my wrist. I’m on my feet in a second.

“Bloody humans,” I growl out, still slurring slightly. “You can’t even let me fucking sleep?!”

The burly barkeep scowls at me. My would be murder weapon is still in his hand. “Eat shit, you demon.”

I scowl right back at him. “Oh, you want a demon? I’ll give you a fucking demon, love.”

The fire blazes up in me, all shining black and scarlet, and I make little effort to contain it. I let the flames fly out and encase the man almost completely. He screeches as his skin bubbles and burns under my powers.

“Stop it!” a woman yells. She comes at me with a knife raised. A whip of fire forms in my hand instantly. With one crack, it wraps around her wrist. She screams in the exact same way and lets her weapon clatter on the floor. She goes to her knees, clutching her blackened, blistered skin.

“You bastard,” she cries. “How could you?!”

“How could I!?” Even more fire plays over my hands. “I could ask you the same thing, human.”

“We’re trying to protect ourselves, monster!”

In that moment, in her eyes, I see every human who’s hurt me. The people who mocked me, who killed my mother, who turned me into this. All sense leaves my mind in an instant. “I’m a monster only because of you!”

With one wave of my hand, she’s thrown against the wall hard enough to make it shake. I spin around to see a man trying to crack Snow’s skull open with a butcher’s cleaver. One well aimed blast sends him flying as well. Another casts two aside. They don’t move much afterwards, but I find myself caring little. Let them die like my mother did.

“Baz, stop it!” Snow shouts. I ignore him as I send the last assailant against the wall, listening to their screams as I burn their chest. “Baz!”

“Fuck off, Snow!” I roar. “I- Ack!”

Pain rips through my shoulder. I clutch it and my hand becomes wet with what I assume must be blood. I fall forward. My nose cracks against the floor. I scream in pain and flames roar out of me in a massive plume They hit everything, including my shooter and the walls of the room. I can feel the whole space burning around us.

“Baz!” Snow’s voice is beyond panicked. I hear his footsteps rush toward me. His hands hover over me but won’t touch. He can’t touch me.

“Get out, Simon,” I rasp , turning my head to the side to look at him. He’s covered in bruises and ash. Yet he’s still so beautiful. “Run before more of them come.”

“Shut up, arsehole! I haven’t turned my back on you yet, and I’m not going to start now!”

If the world weren’t literally on fire right now, I’d find that touching. I close my eyes. At least my dying image will be of him. “Don’t be an idiot, Snow.” Surprisingly, the bastard fucking laughs. My eyes snap open again. The bloody back of his hand is pressed against his mouth as he giggles. “What the fuck is funny about this?”

“You,” he laughs, “called me Simon before.”

My face heats up, and it’s not from the fire. “No I didn’t.”

“We’re fucking dying and you can’t admit you used my first name?”

“I’m dying. You’re being an idiot and not running away like you should!”

“You’re too stubborn to die, Baz, and we both know it.” He jumps to his feet. “Get up, we’re getting out of here.”

“Snow-”

“Or are you too much of a yellow belly to get up and try?”

Oh, this bastard. In only two weeks, he’s learned me too well. I scowl at his stupid pretty face as I push myself up on my good arm. At the same time, thundering footsteps can be heard from the stairwell.

“That route is out of the question,” I say. “Where are we to go, Snow?”

“This way.” He holds his hand and in a mere two seconds, the opposite wall is blown to pieces in a rain of spark. “Now let’s go!”

“We’re on the bloody second floor!”

Snow runs towards the gaping hole and throws himself out. I rush to the edge, blood pounding in my ear. No, Snow cannot die, I can’t let him die. But to my utter shock and awe, Snow is floating his way down to the ground. He stops and starts and still hits the ground in an uncoordinated roll, but he’s okay.

“Oh, Snow, you brilliant moron,” I whisper.

“They’re probably still in there!” someone shouts from the hallway. I take a few steps back, breathe deep, and run off the splintered edge just as the humans burst through the door.

Instead of sending my fire outwards like usual, I keep it within me. I will my body to rise high like flames from a candle. My legs move slowly like I’m running in the air. Fuck, this is actually working. Slowly, I let my flame flick and die down, lowering myself along with it. I reach the ground with my own thud but stay on my feet. Snow grins at me. In all this horror, that is the greatest thing to see.

“Let’s get the horses and get out of here, Snow.”

“Agreed, Pitch.”

We sprint to the stables and thankfully find our steeds unharmed. I count ourselves lucky that our attackers didn’t consider them demonic too. Mounting is difficult with my left arm fucked up, but let it never be said that a human bullet could stop Basilton Pitch. I hold the reins with one hand as I spur him into a dash.

The wind whistles in my ears. Snow and I run even faster than we did from the Red Weed. Our kind is always good at running. It’s our natural state.

———————————————

Snow and I ride until it’s nearly dawn. The sky turns purple then crimson with the rising sun in front of us. When I see orange, my horse finally starts to tire out. Snow’s does the same. We slow down then stop.

“Think we’re far enough away?” Snow asks, breath short and strained.

“Yeah,” I reply, sounding the same. “I think they would’ve caught us by now if they were still after us.”

“Good point, good point.” Snow leans forward, putting his forehead on his horse’s neck. “God, I’m fucking knackered. I barely slept.”

“Me too. We should both sleep.”

“What if someone comes after us?”

“Point. Sleep in shifts?”

Snow nods. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

“Good.” I slowly dismount my horse, but get my footing wrong and start to fall. I grab the reins with my left arm and practically scream in pain.

“Baz!” Snow rushes towards me, but stops when I raise my good arm.

“Don’t...” I pant, “don’t come any closer. I’m injured, Snow, and my self control is severely weakened. So unless you wish for death now after just barely escaping it, back away.”

“Oh, yeah, right...” Snow backs far away just as he should, but my heart still aches. “What are we going to do about your shoulder?”

“I can fix it, but I’m going to need your belt”

Snow’s brows shot upwards. “My belt? What for?”

“Just throw it to me, Snow, for Christ’s sake.”

Thank God he doesn’t ask another stupid question. He just unbuckles the belt and does what I ask. I try to not let my hands shake as I fold the belt in half. The last time I did this was three years ago, when I sat in a London alleyway after a drunkard broke my leg, a mere four days after fleeing my home for good.

“Baz, what are you-”

“Snow,” I say firmly, “I need you to do me a favour.”

“Okay...?”

I sit on the ground, belt held tightly in my hand. “I need you to stay right there no matter what. Don’t move, don’t try to help. The best way you can help is to stay fucking still.”

“What the fuck is-”

“Promise me you won’t move, Simon.” I look him right in his blue eyes, my mouth a thin, serious line. “Promise me.”

Snow gives me a once over, then thankfully nods. “Okay, I promise.”

“Good.” I put the belt between my teeth. When I check on Snow, he looks beyond panicked. “If it makes it easier,” I say clumsily between the leather, “you don’t have to watch.”

“Baz-”

I slap my right hand over my left shoulder, and it feels like I’m burning from the inside out. My magic scorches my body as it wraps around my injury. The buck shot is pulled through my muscles and skin, ripping and tearing as they go, and I can feel every bit of it. I can also feel as my tissue and bone stretches to knit back together piece by agonizing piece. It’s an indescribable kind of pain. It’s what I imagine hell must feel like. I scream, I can’t help it, but luckily the belt is muffling as well preventing me from biting off a chunk of my tongue. Snow gasps in horror but he doesn’t move. He keeps his promises. I knew he would. He’s a far better man than me.

The burning fades as the skin finally seals shut. I cautiously move my hand, shaking off the shrapnel and gooey viscera that trails between my fingers. God, it's a nasty scab, mangled and uneven and horrifically inflamed. I can only hope the scar won’t be too bad. The one on my calf has faded overtime.

“Are you-”

“Not yet,” I say, cutting off a frightened looking Simon. “This one won’t take as long though.”

I touch my nose, feeling for where the breaks are. I squeeze my eyes shut, and with a horribly painful crack, I move it mostly back into place. I let out a short yell, but just pant and seethe as the bone and cartilage knit back together. I try to wipe the bloody snot from my hand but it's no use. Disgusting, but better than a broken nose. I feel around to make sure things are okay. Well, the tip is a bit crooked, but I can live with that. Right now, I’m thankful to be alive at all.

“Okay,” I sigh, finally taking the teeth mark covered belt out of my mouth, “now I’m done.”

“What the fuck was that?” Snow’s voice is somewhere between fascination and absolute horror. In short, a proper reaction.

“Something my aunt taught me. Hexes are essentially manipulators of energy and matter. And what are bodies but living energy and matter? With practice, you can fix any part of yourself.”

“But isn’t it painful?”

“Was that not obvious?” I snap. But Snow’s genuinely worried face softens my demeanor. “Yes, it’s excruciating. Hence why I try not to use the technique as much as I can.” I massage my still aching shoulder. “Today it was unavoidable, unfortunately.”

Simon runs a nervous hand through his dirty hair. “Fuck...”

I cough out a small laugh. “Yes, that sums it up pretty well.”

He laughs too, just as shaky and sad. “Sums up the whole night.”

The two of us keep chuckling softly in the wee hours of the morning. The ascending sun hurts my tired eyes. Using so much magic has taken everything out of me. I let out a long, deep yawn.

“You sleep first,” Snow says. “I’ll keep watch.”

“No, no, I can-”

“Baz.” He sounds firm, but also tired, and maybe even a little fond. I’m probably imagining that last one though. “Go to bed. I’ll wake you up in about eight hours.”

If I weren’t sleep deprived, magically drained, and recovering from grievous injuries, I would protest more. But Snow is damn lucky today. I simply sigh and stand up to get my cot from my saddlebags. I count our lucky stars we didn’t bring in too many of our supplies to the inn. Maybe God hasn’t completely abandoned us heathen monsters.

“I don’t have the energy to put up my shield,” I say, hoping my tone conveys enough.

“Okay,” Snow replies, “I’ll stay away, don’t worry. I keep my promises.”

My pulse flutters involuntarily. A smile creeps across my face no matter how hard I try to stop it. “I know you do, Simon.”

Snow gifts me one of his sunshine smiles. That’s the last thing I see before turning over and letting myself rest.

———————————————

Snow lets me sleep longer than eight hours. I’d be more mad if I wasn’t so exhausted. In return, I let him oversleep too. We’re both passed out by the time it’s dark again. Even hexes with all our inhumanity need to rest sometimes. Snow and I are lucky we get the chance this time.

In the morning, I reluctantly go to the next closest town. We did leave some of our things behind sadly, including most of our clothes. I’m damn well not going to keep roaming around the south of Texas in my bloody socks, and neither will Snow. I get us some new jackets, boots, and hats, ignoring the strange looks I get from the lily white shopkeeper.

I grab us some more of that disgusting jerky too. If only good food could keep in these horrific conditions. When I reach the counter, the shopkeeper frowns at the things I lay out.

“You can pay for all this?” she asks. I scowl deeply. I’m too tired for this shit.

“Are people like me not allowed to have money here?” I snap.

“Ya can now, but in my experience, y’all darker folk are better at stealing my stock than paying.”

Bloody hell, I’m too tired for this racist shite. I slam two bills on the counter. “There. Hope I didn’t dirty these up too much for you.”

She glares at me hard. As she reaches for the money, I deliberately brush my finger on hers, and she yelps loudly. The edge of her index is red and inflamed. An undeniable burn mark, but far too small for anyone to believe it came from an evil, bloodthirsty hexslinger.

“Oh dear,” I say deadpan. “Your register must have gotten in the sun. Do be more careful.” I shovel the supplies in my bag as she looks at me wide eyed. “Have a nice day, ma’am.”

I can feel her scared eyes on my back as I leave. I get on my horse and ride out fast. No reason to stay in this shithole any longer. And I need to get back to Snow, where I belong.

———————————————

“Everything okay in town?” Snow asks.

I toss the bundle of clothes at him, along with a bag of jerky. “No one attacked me, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t get made for a hex. But I did get some flack for my skin tone.”

Snow’s face falls a bit. There’s something far too close to pity in his eyes. “Oh. I’m sorry-”

“Don’t, Snow. You’re in no place to apologize for some racist American bastards, it’s not your responsibility. Sorry from you means nothing.”

“But-”

“Would you accept an apology from me on behalf of all the rich men who have treated you like trash before?” Snow’s gaping mouth slowly closes. “Exactly. Now get those on. They’re slightly less dirty than our current garments.”

Snow nods and does what I say. I unbutton off my bloodstained shirt and wince as the tacky fabric peels off my skin. The scab has gotten a little better. That’s something I suppose. My eyes slowly move over to Snow without realising it. I steal a glimpse of his broad, bare back, golden like the rest of him. There are some jagged pink scars but they take nothing away how brightly he shines. I look away before I’m too tempted by what I can’t have.

“Much better,” Snow sighs as he slips on the new boots. “I’m surprised my feet haven’t been ripped to shreds yet.”

“Me too. I’m glad though, I didn’t want to do any more healing.”

“I don’t want you to either, fuck.” I hate how his concern makes me feel so good inside. “I’ll start setting up the fire. It’s going to get dark again soon.”

“By all means, Snow, do all the work. I won’t stop you.”

Snow snorts out a laugh, giving me a cheeky smile I can still see at this distance. Christ, I’m on fire, and for once it’s not from my magic. It’s so much better. I have to look away again before I do something ridiculous and deadly.

By the time the sun is down, Snow has made a wonderful small fire for the two of us. We both warm our hands from opposite sides. I don’t need to do it too much. My magic has almost fully replenished, for better or worse. And I’m so hungry that I actually enjoy the extremely salty bison jerky. Bloody hell, I’m turning into an American.

“Where are we going to go next?” Snow asks, mouth still full. “I’m guessing we should avoid any more towns.”

“Agreed. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not jump out of another building.”

“We certainly agree there. Christ, I was worried I was going to die.”

“Me too, Snow, me too.” I nervously fiddle with the string on my cloth bag. The words are coming out, and I can’t stop them. “I’m sorry, Snow.”

His brow adorably furrows. “Sorry for what?”

“Sorry for the way I acted that night, before I went to bed. I was very rude to you and I deeply apologize.”

“Oh...okay. Thanks.” He looks down, rubbing the back of his neck. “I-I was confused. Did I do something bad?”

“No, Snow,” I sigh, “you did nothing wrong. It was all me being stupid.”

“Okay...”

I sigh again. God, I can’t dance around it anymore. I have to tell him. After putting up with me for this long, he deserves to know.

“I was angry and...somewhat jealous of you.”

His eyes get very big. “Jealous? Of me?!”

“Yes, in a way. Because...you didn’t have to go through the same kind of suffering I did when I manifested. Which isn’t fair, because you lived on the streets while I grew up in a bloody mansion. It’s just not the same suffering I had, and I was angry I had to go through it when you didn't. Which is absolutely ridiculous, and I’m sorry I pushed that on you.”

“If you don’t mind me asking...what happened?”

I stare at him for a long moment over the fire. He holds my gaze, eyes round with worry and care. It hurts me in the most exquisite way. “It’s not a pretty story, Snow.”

His mouth pulls into a sad, slight smile. “Weren’t you the one who said that all hexes live through hardship, and we have nothing to be ashamed of?”

I chuckle and shake my head. “Using my words against me, a tactic of a true devious hex.”

He shrugs, still wearing that little smile. “What can I say? I can live up to our reputation sometimes.” Snow’s face falls again. “So what happened?”

With a deep sigh, rubbing my forehead, I start the horrid tale.

“My family always knew there was a chance I could be a hex,” I say. “But since my aunt couldn’t sense any magic on me pre manifestation, we assumed that I wasn’t too powerful, and manifestation could be avoided if we were careful. So I lived in the aforementioned secluded mansion all my life and I was never allowed to leave the grounds. All my time was spent reading, doing school work, or learning about hexation from my aunt, just in case. Everything in my life revolved around my mere potential to be a hex. I could never do or see anything. I felt like a prisoner. And when I was 18, I had enough.

“One evening, I snuck out of my room and went into the nearby town. I just wanted to see what was outside my home. But I was a naive sheltered kid. Of course I got lost on my way there and went into an area I never should have. Someone had knocked me out cold, and next thing I knew, I was in a cramped, dark box.”

“A box? What do you mean a box?”

I clench my fists tight until the shaking stops, then slowly let go. “It was a coffin, Snow. I had been trapped inside a coffin.”

I can almost feel the way Snow’s stomach must drop out at those words. I know, mine did the same when I realised where I was that night. “W-Why?!”

“It was hard to hear him through said coffin, but I got the main idea. He came from some old witch hunter family but had never caught an actual hex, until me. He’d heard the stories about my mother and had been secretly spying on me for months. When I escaped, he took his chance to kidnap me.”

“So he took you just to taunt you from outside a coffin?”

“I wish that was all he did,” I grumble. “He told me that the coffin was a test. There was a chance the hexation had skipped me over. If I was a hex, being stuck in the coffin would make me manifest, then he could kill me in good conscience. If I wasn’t and didn’t manifest, well, as he put it; ‘there are always casualties in the war for righteousness, boy.’”

Snow’s jaw drops to the grassy ground. “So even if you were human, he would’ve killed you anyway?”

“Mhm, mad bastard.”

“How long did he keep you there before you escaped? A few days?”

I take long, steady breaths, beating back the old fear that creeps up my throat like bile. I can almost still smell that unique rotten scent from the coffin. I’ll never forget it. I never can.

“Snow,” I say slowly, “I was in that coffin for six weeks.”

And I thought he looked horrified before. Snow drops his jerky bag, hands shaking. I want to grab them, hold them still, comfort him in whatever way I can. The urge is almost stronger than the Call.

“S-Six weeks?! How are you still alive?”

“Thank the witch hunter,” I grumble. “He drilled very small air holes in the lid, and gave me enough food and water to keep me alive but starving. I think, hex or not, he wanted me to suffer because I was my mother’s son. A hex’s child was just as guilty of sin in his eyes.” I rub the bridge of my nose. It aches with the pain of my past. “At the time, I had no idea how long I was in there. It was just one endless night of torture. I begged and pleaded with the hunter to let me go, but he only laughed and called me pathetic hex scum. After six weeks, well, he finally got what he wanted.”

“You manifested.”

“Almost as violently as you did.” I trace the lines of my hand, the skin rough from my fire. I remember my mother’s hands being the same. “The details are blurry, but I remember enough. It started as just a tingling in my gut, but soon it became a burn. And then it spread as quickly as a forest fire.”

“Is it always fire with you?” The corner of Snow’s lip quirks up. The bit of teasing lilt in his voice makes me feel a bit lighter. I can't help but smile back a little.

“Usually, yes. It's always run very strong in my family.” I bounce a flame between my fingers. The movement is strangely calming to me. “I quickly learned I was no different. Before I knew it, I let out a massive ring of fire in every direction. It blew the coffin apart, of course, and turned my captor into a charcoal husk.”

Snow scoffs, a surprisingly vicious expression on his face. “Better than he deserved.”

“Agreed. I have no idea what happened to his body. I left almost immediately, though I wasn’t fully conscious. Six weeks in the coffin had deprived me of most of my mental faculties. Luckily, he kept me not far from home, and I could wander back on pure muscle memory. But going home turned out to be a terrible idea.” I grab the small fire and snuff it out in one go. But my fist stays clenched. “My aunt had been staying there while everyone searched for me. The second I walked through the front door, I could easily smell her. She was overjoyed to see me, until she smelled me too. And as I said, most of my mental faculties were gone.”

“So you attacked her on instinct.”

I chuckle sadly. “Quick study there, Snow. I didn’t even know what I was doing. I was just so bloody hungry all of sudden. I can’t even describe it.”

“You don't need to describe it to me, Baz.” He brings his knees under his chin. “I’ve felt hex hunger too. It’s...awful when you’re in the middle of it.”

“And when you’re not, you try to drown it out or distract yourself. But deep down, you know one day you’ll give up and listen. Then it will take over.”

Snow nods, looking at me in the eye. I’ve seen so much profound sadness in a person’s face. “And you’ll hurt someone, no matter how much you’ll regret it later.”

If I have a soul, it’s aching horribly. How could fate be so cruel as to give me Snow? So wonderfully brave and kind to a fault, and who actually understands what my life is like. The perfect man. And someday soon, he’s going to kill me. There’s no doubt I’ll be the one to die. I won’t kill him, not ever. I’d let him take everything from me before I’d kill him.

“Did you hurt your aunt?”

Thankfully, I can shake my head to that. “No, not at all. She was an experienced magic user, while I was a starving, half crazed newly minted hex. She took me down in seconds. When I woke up again, I was cleaned up and in my room. It took a second to regain my bearings, but I soon remembered what had happened...what I had become. There wasn’t any debate in my mind. Within an hour, I had packed my most practical clothes along with any small valuables I could pawn. Then I ran away and never looked back.”

“Which is how you ended up in America.”

“What better way to protect my family from me than by putting an ocean between us? At first, I stayed in an empty little corner of the American frontier. I just wanted to live out my lonely hex existence as long as possible. I didn’t expect the Call or this looming hex war.”

“No one did,” Simon sighs. “Hexes working together has never been possible before. Who could’ve imagined some American preacher would team up with an Aztec goddess to do just that?”

“Fair point. But now he’s made our existences much harder in a way. Look what those humans tried to do to us at the inn. They were even more scared because of Rook”

“Yeah...”

I groan, pushing my face into my hands, rubbing it up and down. “I never asked to be like this. I tried my hardest to avoid being like this. Then that choice was ripped away from me by some madman. Now I’m trapped between murderous humans or a bloodthirsty witch goddess. Why am I here? Why do I have to be here?!”

“Baz-”

“I don’t want this,” I choke out through my building sobs. “I want to see my family again. I just want to go home!”

I breathe hard and fast, holding back tears with all my strength. No, I refuse to cry. I swore to never cry again after the coffin, because I wasn't sure I could survive falling apart again. Yet here I am. I thought I had shed every tear I have there. I’m so pathetic.

“It’s okay,” Simon says. His voice is far louder than before. “Whatever you’re feeling is okay. It’s...it’s okay if you’re not.”

Slowly, cautiously, I lower my hands, blinking away the tears that had collected. I inhale sharply. Snow is less than two feet away from me. I can count the moles on his face, see the golden highlights in his bronze. But worse, his unbelievably delicious scent fills every cavity of my nose.

“You really shouldn’t sit so close, Snow,” I whisper. My eyes fall down and become completely fixed on Simon’s plush lips.

“I know,” he says under his breath, “but I don’t care.”

He touches my hand, and I feel his magic run through me. That explosive sensation pulses through my veins so hard it almost makes me gasp. The instinctual part of my brain goes fucking mad. It wants me to grab his throat and drain every drop of his magic, his essence, his very soul. My breathing gets shallow and laboured.

“Simon...” I say.

And then he kisses me.

It’s cautious and shy. His lips barely brush against mine, but I feel it everywhere else, especially in the way our powers rise to meet each other. The magic collides, but doesn’t clash. They meld and twist together at our points of contact, desperately needing to connect.

Snow opens his mouth, turning the kiss into one of pure heat and hunger. I gladly do the same. He grabs either side of my face and shoves his tongue down my throat. I grip his collar and push back against him. My entire body is filled with endless energy. I’m a star going supernova. And I want to explode with Simon. My nails scratch viciously across his neck. He clenches his fist in my hair, pressing our faces closer. I shudder as Simon bites hard on my bottom lip. I’m wrapped in cold heat, wrapped up in him. I feel so alive. It feels so right. But it’s wrong.

With all the strength I have, I shove Snow off me. We both fall back on the ground, breaking our closed circuit of feeding on each other simultaneously. Simon scrambles further away panting. I’m similarly out of breath. Both our lips trail white smoke, like they’ve been singed by ice. My magic readjusts after being sucked away and added to all at the same time. A bit of Snow’s explosive energy still sits in me, swirling around like a miniature star. We just stare at each other wide eyed for a long time.

“Shit,” Simon whispers.

I sigh heavily, running a shaky hand through my hair. “Well said.”

“We nearly killed each other.”

“Mages don’t meddle, Snow. We both know that.”

Simon groans, clutching his hair in his fists. “I know, I know. I almost killed Penny last time and I swore it would never happen again. But look at me now. Of course I fuck up.” I can see tears forming under his eyes. “What’s the point of being an all powerful hex if it means being alone forever?! I can blow up a building with my mind but I can’t even bloody kiss you! It’s not fair!”

I pick at my shirt sleeve with shaking fingers. “Maybe God is punishing us.”

“We didn’t ask to be like this, Baz!”

“That doesn’t change what we are, Simon! We’re freaks of nature, cannibalistic monsters!” I nearly rip through the fabric of my shirt. I'm so angry and so fucking tired. “Maybe we truly are devil spawn or something, like all the humans say. Maybe they’re right to be scared of all of us...”

I turn away from him, just staring at the fire. The sting of the smoke keeps me from sinking too low into my self loathing. Snow moves in my peripheral. We sit side by side. My skin prickles as he hovers his hand over mine. It takes every bit of my will to not try and drain him again.

“There’s somewhere we can go where we aren’t 'Devil spawn,'” he says.

I tense up. “Simon, that’s risky. It could all be a farce.”

“I don’t care if you think it’s just a farce, Baz! It’s still a chance. For you and me, for us.” He lightly brushes one of my fingers. I have to rip my hand away before I hurt him again. His pretty eyes are filled with pain. “See? Wouldn’t you like to stop doing that? Isn’t it worth the risk?”

I’ve been running for most of my life. I ran from my mother's legacy for as long as I could. I ran from my family when I feared my own hunger. And I could run now, from Simon and the fear of killing him. But I’d also be abandoning the chance for some sort of happy life. It may not be perfect, but it would be far more than my ancestors ever had before. Can I sacrifice that for fear?

“I’m tired, Snow,” I say weakly. “We should both get some rest.”

“But Baz-”

“Let me sleep on it, alright? Please?”

Snow takes in a deep breath, and lets out a long sigh. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

“Okay.”

I want to kiss him so badly right now. Just grab his gorgeous, sunshine face and kiss him goodnight. Since I can’t, I smile as genuinely as I can at him. It’s not easy for me, but I mean it with him. “Goodnight, Simon.”

Snow stares at me for a long moment. But slowly, a smile creeps across his face too. The fondness threatens to melt me, “Goodnight, Baz.”

We keep our eyes locked for as long as we can. When I finally lay down, putting my crackling shield around me, the image of Snow’s wonderful face relaxes me into sleep.

———————————————

I bang my fists against the wood over and over, ignoring my already numerous splinters.

“Help!” I yell. “Someone help me! Please, get me out of here!”

All my pleas fall on deaf ears, as usual. No matter what I do, no matter how loud I scream. I’m stuck in this damned coffin. I scratch at it until my fingernails tear from their beds. Blood drips into my mouth, leaving an iron taste in the back of my scream sore throat.

“I’m not a fucking hex! I just want to go home!” I sob so hard I nearly choke on my own breath. “Just let me go home.”

My aching arms finally fall. I curl in on myself as much as I can within my confines. I close my eyes, but there’s little to no difference in the endless pitch black. Tears run hot down my face. They leave small trails in the dirt that’s accumulated over...however long I’ve been here. I don’t know anymore. Time is meaningless where there’s no sunrise or sunset. Life is meaningless in here.

“Baz?”

His voice is far away, but it still rings clear. My eyes slide open. “Simon?”

“Oh lord. Hang on, Baz! I'll get you out!”

I can only hear as Snow desperately tugs at the coffin lid. It should be impossible, the thing is nailed shut, but somehow Snow rips it open. The light is dim yet still hurts my eyes. I can't help but hiss at the pain.

“It’s okay, Baz,” he says in that unbelievably soft tone.

His hand reaches to me through the blinding light. Slowly, I reach back. And when I hold it, I know I’m supposed to be in pain, but I’m not. Instead, I’m just calm, happy, safe. Snow slowly pulls me out. His arms snake around my back, holding me up. He looks me over, taking in my decrepit, decayed state from ages in that damn box. And miraculously, he smiles. Even like this, he looks at me with such care.

“You’re alright now, Baz. I’m here.” He cups my face. “I’m here for you.”

Emotions clog up my throat and tears run down my cheek, but this time they’re for a good reason. I put my own shaking hand on his golden face. He’s so warm. “Yes, you are. And I’m here for you too, Simon.”

He’s still grinning as I lean forward, pressing my lips to his. But this time there’s no fear I’ll kill him. There’s just the utter joy of being with the one who understands me best, the one I want the most.

Oh, how I want this.

———————————————

I blink awake slowly. The morning sun is just rising over the horizon, turning the grassy landscape violet. I sit up and see the now familiar body on the other side of the fire. Snow sleeps in a knot, arms and legs pulled in. The furrow in his brow says he’s in the middle of a nightmare too. Though mine wasn’t one by the end. Not when he was there.

My mind is made up.

Once again, I’m packing my things lowly, waiting for Snow to wake. Luckily, he stirs while I’m only halfway through tying up the cot. He rubs the sleep from his eyes in such a terribly adorable way.

“Morning,” I say.

“Morning,” he yawns. “Are we going now? Or...are you?”

My heart seizes, but only for a moment. He’s right to be concerned. The fact that we’ve travelled together for two weeks without killing each other is a miracle among hexes. After last night’s close call, a sensible man would leave and never return. I was once a sensible human man. But I’m a deranged, bloodthirsty hex now. Why not act like one?

“You should get up and start packing, Snow. If we’re going to make it to the Mexican border before nightfall, we’ll have to ride fast.”

His eyes go rounder than a full moon. “You mean...”

I pull the pack tie tight. “We’re going to Hex City.”

“What changed your mind?

I sigh heavily, then walk over to him. I stay at a safe distance of course but Snow’s magic pulls me to him, my body begging me to take it. Instead, I simply hold out my hand to him. Snow stares for a moment but does catch on. He offers his own to me. Once again, our magics reach out to each other, wisps of fire and lightning twining together. It sends a faint whisper of that explosive adrenaline through my veins. So incredible and so wrong.

I snap my hand away, fists clenched hard. “Because of that. If I were a more selfless person, I would simply leave, but unfortunately I’m not. Are you?” Snow looks me over. His eyes pierce me in a way no one’s ever has before. He slowly shakes his head. “Exactly. I may be scared of Rook and his goddess, but I’m more scared of hurting you. There’s only one place where I won't.”

“Hex City.” He chews on the corner of his bottom lip. “What if you’re right though, and Rook’s price is too high?”

“Then at least we’ll pay it knowing we tried to have a real life, instead of running like we’ve always had to.” I stand straight with my head held high. No matter the fear, I’m sure of this. “I think we’ve both suffered long enough, Simon.”

The way Snow’s face relaxes means the world to me. I love seeing that, seeing what he looks like without the heavy burden of hexation on his shoulders. Maybe I’ll be able to see that more in Hex City.

“It’ll probably be nice there,” he says. “I mean, a city made for hexes by hexes is going to be weird, but I bet it’ll look amazing in it’s own way.”

I chuckle and nod. “Agreed. Buildings and roads made by magic will certainly be interesting.”

“Penny would probably want to study them.” He sighs, but there’s a lightness to. “Maybe Penny will come one day, and I could see her again.”

“Maybe. I would love to meet her. I might be able to see my aunt again one day, too. I could introduce you to her.”

He beams so bright at me I fear I’ll get sunburnt. “I’d like that a lot.”

“Me too, Snow. So let’s get going.”

We finish packing very quickly. Snow gets on his horse as clumsy as he usually does. I snort at the way his American cowboy hat nearly falls off his head. The death glare he gives me has little impact, what with the way he’s grinning. He hasn’t stopped grinning almost since he woke up. I can’t blame him. I have trouble controlling my smile either.

“Ready?” he asks. As if he even has to. I’ve made my choice, and I’m sticking to it.

“Ready,” I say. “Let’s go.”

Snow and I both send our horses into gallops. We soar across the grassy plain, the Texas sun illuminating our way. The impending hex war still looms over us. But I will fight until my last breath to keep any happiness Simon and I can find.

I can almost see our future. Soon, we’ll reach the terrifying and wonderful Hex City. Rook will ask for his price, and we’ll pay, because it’ll mean a freedom we've never known before. We’ll be able to hold hands, kiss whenever we want, sleep in the same bed, simply be around each other with no fear of our hexacious hunger. It’s more than I could have ever dreamed of even a few months ago.

For once, I’m going to run towards something good, instead of away from the darkness inside me. I cannot wait.

———————————————

AN: And that's all folks! I hope people enjoyed that, even if y'all have never read Hexslinger. If you wanna read the books, I highly recommend them, tho be warned they require trigger warnings for all the stuff here and more. Almost anything that usually needs a trigger warning is in those books. I'm okay with reading it, but I also completely understand others not liking that shit.

In the positives, it's an extremely interesting and complex series dealing with survival, discrimination, identity, the pain that can come with love, and the unlikely bonds formed between people. The world building is amazing and the magic system is super cool. What I love the most are the characters, who are all very interesting and complex. No one is 100% good or evil, they're just people trying to find ways to achieve their goals or simply live. What actions they take are up for moral debate, but a lot of the time they're at least understandable. There's a lot of period typical bigotry, and it's much more vicious than what I wrote here, but what I love is that there a lot of diverse characters who say "fuck that" and fight back against the shit they get. You've got queer, Indigenous, black, latinx, Chinese, and Jewish main characters in a wild west story who are all well rounded and interesting. That's pretty awesome imo.

Okay enough gushing about Hexslinger lol. Hope this story was good. No guarantee when my next fic will be out. Work and school are killer. Until then, see you later!

#carry on #snowbaz #simon snow #baz pitch #hexslinger #hexslinger au #period typical homophobia #period typical racism #blood tw #mild body horror tw #canon typical vioence #mysnowbazfic #carry on through the ages #cotta 2020

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orchidbreezefc · 4 years

Text

OKAY COOL I WAS ON THE FENCE ABOUT POSTING MY OWN EXPERIENCES IN THE KFAM DISCORD BECAUSE A POST ABOUT People Being Mean To Sage Specifically SEEMED KIND OF MASTURBATORY OR SELF-PITYING OR WHATEVER BUT IF WE REALLY ARE GOING TO STILL BE OUT HERE PUSHING THE This Server Is A Lovely Familial Community And Dissenters Are The Problem NARRATIVE EVEN NOW? HELL NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT.

obviously this is hard to be objective about. this stuff is a lot less concrete than my first post, a lot more based on vibes i got, which, yknow, is why it’s not in my first post. but if anyone identifies with this, if anyone sees their own experiences in this discord reflected in mine, then it’s going to be worth the worry i’m reading too much into things, or others thinking the same of me. if i can help anyone who felt like THEY were mistreated there and weren’t sure if they were reading too much into things, then. it’s worth it. especially since the M.O. in there was ‘everything’s fine and if not we’re going to MAKE IT FINE by silencing anyone who disagrees’.

a lot of talk has been done about the censorship (word used loosely, first amendment protects from the government not from the mods etc, definitely a specific suppression of dissenting ideas though) the mods have been doing--once more i suggest @kfam-tea for receipts and screenshots. not something i feel great about, but not something i have personal experience with, so i won't speak to it. see also my first post about my interactions with the creators. it touches on the dogpiling, which i'll go into more depth on in this post. you can find it [link: here].

so. the first thing in the official discord that tipped me off about the hivemind samethink phenomenon is that the whole place is distinctly frosty on the subject of samben. that’s a post all its own, one that follows through to numbers on ao3 and whatever, but i’m not here to make a ship manifesto. suffice it to say i got attached to the ship upon listening, inhaled the (suspiciously small) ao3 tag, and was stopped in my tracks at the discord server where any implication of such ship inclinations were met with silence and pointed changes of subject.

distinctly weird. distinctly unusual fandom behavior, that i couldnt even hint around shipping the two men whose incredibly profound relationship is literally the crux of the show, who have exchanged ‘i love you’s, one of whom is confirmed gay--all other romantic entanglements aside, because when have those stopped shippers? that was weird. i realize that's maybe a bit tinfoil hat of me. it could have been the goldfish-bowl big-brother-is-watching vibe from having creators in there, except, as i said, it carries to other sites.

anyway, much more concrete was when i spoke out about my thoughts on ben’s actions in ep68. again, enough there for another post, so tl;dr: he was doing his best, he’s a good guy and a good friend, but his actions DIRECTLY outed sammy to the WHOLE town, without allowing sammy to say the words himself. it was an accident, yes, but it had tangible, harmful consequences, and even accidental harm warrants apology. it should at least be... acknowledged. at some point. by the show OR the fandom. it's a disservice to ben himself to never get the chance to own up to it.

this was an unacceptable take. i tried breaching this topic and making my case twice, and got THOROUGHLY dogpiled both times. a dozen fans crawled out of the woodwork to argue heatedly, sometimes getting quite aggressive, sometimes toeing the line of outright hostility toward me personally. definitely some downright rude messages. not once did anybody speak up to defend my right to put forward my dissenting opinion, let alone SUPPORT my argument, god forbid. ben’s were the actions of a good friend, i was told. outing someone to their whole town without giving them the chance to say it on their own terms didn't qualify as harm at all, i was told, on account of ben's heart being in the right place.

still, the opinions being argued matter less than the attitudes and behaviors. people don't have to agree with me about that ep, i don't care. i do care about being given the right to, as a single person on my own, have space to make an argument without being shouted down by a dozen people. i do care about how it fit into a greater pattern of forbidding any criticism of the show, and ben in particular, who is a good friend and therefore all of his actions are good and harmless, who is our resident heterosexual unassailable paragon of purity. which might explain the samben problem--sammy/ron[/jack] was perfectly fine, even popular, but there was never a whisper of shipping ben with anyone but emily. they're Official. theyre The Perfect Couple. don't you dare challenge that (and for the most part, i didn’t dare. i quickly learned not to).

my [link: previous post] details kyle's response to these fun events, where he specifically went out of the way to follow me being shouted into silence (a result of me being driven to literal tears and shutting down rather than invite more argument) with a warm congratulations to everybody for their conduct in this discussion. because that's the kind of conversation kyle wants to specifically and explicitly praise and encourage, i guess.

anyway. this contributed to the growing sense over my time in the discord that people held a certain distaste for me but didn’t want to say anything direct. instead they talked around me, ignored me, immediately changed the subject from my messages, the whole while bestowing constant glowing compliments on each other and endlessly repeating saccharine sentiments about what a nice family type community they were, how grateful they were for the discord being such a positive space. i suppose that’s an easy impression to get when negativity is ruthlessly suppressed (and apparently outright censored nowadays) and instead of insults or, god forbid, communication with people with whom folks might take issue, they just (more or less) silently stonewall and cold shoulder them.

again, i could be misreading cues, being egocentric or tinfoil hat by reading this pattern into how i in particular was treated. either way, the fact that i was given the fandom friday shout out the week after KFAM live was definitely... strange. fishy, even. i was already mostly out the door at that point, had been for weeks--it was actually in my last few days speaking there period. i felt strangely guilty that they would dedicate a day to me when i didn’t like being there much and hardly spoke any longer. one thing’s for sure: my congratulations were fewer and more impersonal, perfunctory, and/or generic than other fans got (i kept a screenshot). i still have no idea what to make of that one, but there you have it.

p.s.: since vagues are in vogue now apparently, i might as well mention the person who's been accused of being A Problem In The Discord For A While Now, among nastier things, which definitely is not an effort to justify kyle's passive aggressive response to their untagged post which used the phrase 'death of the author', or kyle subsequently crying on twitter about death threats because apparently he couldn't be bothered to google a basic literary analysis term and thought if he was vague enough nobody would look into what was actually said. i guess he was right, if the hundreds of asspats and outcries against The Evils Of Podcast Fan Meanies were any indication.

i digress. i just wanted to testify that the fan in question was one of maybe three or four people on the server who consistently treated me nicely and acted like they liked me. and that another fan who claimed to be uncomfortable around death-of-the-author-person was the person who came the closest to being outright nasty to me when i expressed a critical opinion. make of that what you will i guess!

p.p.s.: if i never say anything more about this whole thing or the creators’ part in it, i do want to say for the record: noah james is fully exempt from all of this and remains absolutely wonderful and a whole treasure. like dont pedestalize male creators and assume them incapable of wrongdoing etc etc but i had an hour long midnight denny’s breakfast sitting across from him and he was nothing short of an angel the whole time. sweetest guy i’ve ever met. he hasn’t breathed a word about any of this drama. he may not even know it’s going on because he’s too busy being the most beautiful and talented man in america or something. i love you noah

#sage speaks #sage original post #kfam #king falls am #kfam drama #kfam critical #kfam negative #kfam hate #long post #kfam tea #ok to reblog

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itsdaggerandsheath · 4 years

Text

An Introduction to Sex (Part 2)

To be quite honest with you, I don’t know when Fanfiction first really became popular or mainstream, nor do I know if it’s still those things. What I do know though was that it was a huge influence on my knowledge of sexuality as I was growing up. A good chunk of my education on sex as an… ”activity”, rather than solely a means of reproduction, came from Fanfiction.

It’s occurring to me that perhaps some people reading this may not know what Fanfiction is, so I suppose I should attempt to explain it before I really get on with the story.

Have you ever watched a TV show and really wished that your two favorite characters would just fall in love already?! With Fanfiction, you can write your own perfect story on how you picture that special moment happening, then publish it online for other people to read. Have you ever had a massive celebrity crush that you just wish would notice you? You can write a Fanfiction all about said celebrity falling for a character based on you! Anything goes with Fanfiction, really. Do you think the singer of your favorite band is into BDSM? Write a fic about them tying you up and ass-fucking you (or a character that you come up with) until the ropes make your wrists bleed. What about a disturbingly specific and detailed fic about your favorite band members squirting milk up the bottom’s asshole to clean out for anal sex (with more emphasis on the milk than the sex itself)? Yup, that exists. What about a fic involving your favorite YouTubers in which a live hamster is shoved up the sub’s asshole and the dom fills an entire hat with semen? Yes, it’s out there. (Bonus points to anyone who knows which fics I’m referring to).

While some Fanfictions are wonderfully crafted love stories full of heart and passion, others…aren’t. And hey, smut is fine, I’ve read *cough* and written *cough* plenty of it myself. But surely, you would think, that the more explicit Fanfictions wouldn’t be accessible to those under the age in which it would be appropriate to read them, right?

Wrong.

I was eleven years old.

I’d first come to discover Fanfiction through my favorite Disney television show at the time, Austin and Ally. Yes, that show that Ross Lynch was on. It was my favorite show in my tweens, and I wanted the two main characters – Austin and Ally, obviously – to end up becoming a couple so badly. My original goal was to see if maybe the writers of the show had hinted at the possibility of the two characters becoming a couple in an interview or something. So, I pulled out my phone – because my parents thought it was smart to let an eleven year old have a cellphone with full Internet access – and simply typed in, “When will Austin and Ally get together?”

I did not find an interview with the show’s writers – instead, I found chatrooms, wiki forums, and YouTube videos from young people like myself who all had the same opinions on the subject as myself. I then clicked on a link that I thought was just going to be a post on some website from someone talking about how they wanted these characters to end up together like I did, but it was actually a link to a story on Fanfiction.net that I read and finished in the same day. From then on, I was hooked.

Now, right away, I noticed that these stories had a rating system. I’m not sure if the rating system for Fanfiction.net has changed at all since it’s been years since I’ve been on there, but at the time, it was something like rated G, PG, T, and M (there might have been a T+ in between T and M, but I don’t remember). As I was eleven at the time, I stuck to the G and PG stories. Who would write rated M stories about a Disney show anyway? Oh, how naïve I was.

One day, I read the summary for a new story that sounded exciting, so I opened it up without looking at the rating or the word count. All I saw was how many people at commented, so I figured it was a popular story that a lot of people liked! Turns out, it was a 300-word one-shot (meaning, it was a single chapter) consisting of Ally naked on her knees saying “please” over and over again while Austin rubs one out and eventually comes all over her face.

I would like to issue a formal apology to Ross Lynch and Laura Marano.

Seeing as I was eleven, I was traumatized, and was extra careful from then on (for a while, at least) to always check if the story was rated M.

I was just so confused. I’d grown up being told that touching yourself was wrong, so why was there a one-shot about it on Fanfiction. And why did he do it on her face?! Such a concept had been unheard of to me at the time (because I was eleven). I was disgusted. I felt sick. I felt dirty. I felt wrong.

I felt curious.

But I was so afraid that I’d read something else strange or that I’d never known people to do sexually, I was afraid of what I’d learn, that despite my curiosity, I didn’t intentionally click on a rated M fic again until I was twelve. By this time, I’d had my first period and a few more, so I’d officially began puberty and became even more curious about sexuality. So, I began to search specifically for rated M Fanfictions because I wanted to know more about what sex was like and I was too scared to watch porn (we’ll get to that in Part 3).

What I experienced while I read these sex scenes was something new, exciting. Why did I feel a throbbing sensation in my vulva? Why was I getting a tingling sensation like I had to pee? Why was my underwear getting wet? As I continued to read more and more of this erotic Fanfiction, I read about the female characters feeling similar sensations when they were feeling “aroused” or “horny”, which were new words for me. Why did I have to learn this through Fanfiction rather than in school?

I then showed my new discovery to all my friends (of course). I remember when my entire cheerleading team had a sleepover, I’d told two of my closest friends on the team that I’d found Fanfiction with sex in it. Later that night, as the three of us lay in our sleeping bags with me in the middle, we huddled together to read the erotica on my phone. I remember them asking me things like, “How do girls come?”, “What does *insert word here* mean?” and “How does *insert sexual act here* work?”. I remember I loved telling them what I knew, like I had some fantastic, secret knowledge, and that it was my duty to share it with everyone I knew my age. So, I did. Soon all my friends were reading smutty Fanfictions.

While still in my Disney phase, I ventured into the world of gay and lesbian fics as well. I didn’t know how sexual encounters worked between those of the same sex worked, so I read them more so out of curiosity rather than in search for arousal. However, I found that they aroused me anyway. I remember the first time I read a lesbian Fanfiction wishing I was in the characters’ shoes (I hadn’t realized I was bisexual yet, but that was a decent indicator), and then I read a fic with a threesome between two men and a woman and wondered why I hadn’t read it sooner.

Why hadn’t I learned how same-sex couples have sex at all in school? Why didn’t I learn that males having sex with other males should still use condoms? Or that females having sex with other females should use dental dams? Why did I have to learn about these through Fanfiction of all things?

By age fourteen, I had graduated from Austin and Ally and Fanfiction.net, and I eventually moved into my emo phase where I ventured into the world of band fics on Wattpad (I would also like to issue a formal apology to Chris Motionless and all of Motionless in White). It was here that I learned about BDSM – and Tumblr, but we’ll talk about that in Part 3. I was reading Wattpad stories about my favorite band, Motionless in White, and I’m pretty sure in every sex scene I ever read involving a girl and one of the band members (I mostly stuck to the ones about Chris because I adore him to this day) had mentions of spanking or some other form of impact play, and bondage was also seen very often, and occasionally a ball gag here and there. A common fantasy, it would seem, among young girls from all over the world who were probably far too young to be writing out such fantasies about men in their thirties. Oh yeah, sexual Fanfiction is plenty toxic too. I was fourteen reading brutal sex scenes about men who were way older than me, and a lot of the rougher/BDSM-esque fics were written in a way that made it seem like the sub was actually being raped as opposed to consenting to what was going on.

Luckily, I saw this pretty quickly and knew that it was wrong, and I made sure to stop reading a Fanfiction if it seemed to be portraying rape in a romantic light. It’s likely that the person who wrote the Fanfiction didn’t intentionally mean to make the “sex” scene look like rape (although, having a girl scream “No, I don’t want to!” but then all of the sudden enjoying it once the guy forces himself inside of her should very obviously be seen was wrong), and they were just uneducated.

And then, by age 16, I began reading exclusively gay Fanfiction about my favorite YouTubers, Dan Howell and Phil Lester – who I will not be issuing a formal apology to because they have stated that they whole-heartedly support Fanfiction, and have even gone as far as to read Fanfiction about themselves in videos, write Fanfiction about themselves for their book, and perform a parody of a Fanfiction about them live on stage in front of thousands of people. So. Anyway. I learned a lot about butt sex. Do you think they teach you about lube in school? Nah. But I learned about it from gay YouTuber Fanfiction.

In Part 3 (which will be the last part of this series) I’ll discuss how websites like Tumblr and YouTube shaped my views on sexuality before I actually started having sex, and both the positive and negative impacts they had on me. In the meantime, have you ever read an extremely sexual Fanfiction that lowkey traumatized you? Did you get the most of your sex education from a probably-not-reliable-source like I did? Tell me your stories in the comments, or feel free to message me on Instagram @daggerandsheath

I love you all and thank you so much for reading!

- Dagger and Sheath

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night-filled-mountain · 5 years

Note

For the Hozier ask thing: No Plan, Be, Talk

- No Plan - Do you believe in a pre-determined purpose in life?

No, but I think it can be helpful–for some people!–to think and act like you have a pre-determined purpose, as long as you’re not too rigid about it. Sometimes the random twists and turns of life just get overwhelming, you know? And you need to weave them into some sort of pattern–“A, B, and C all happened in order to lead me to D,” or “Despite X obstacle, I know I’m meant to accomplish Y.” Humans are pattern-finding creatures–that’s why we like stories so much. I can’t imagine getting through life without periodically making it into a story, whether you actually believe in some divine Plan and Author or not. (This is reminding me once again of that Brian W. Foster lyric I’ve become obsessed with: “And if it wasn’t designed, then I’ll be damned if I ever know why.”)

Though honestly, for me? The opposite is true. I’ve faced, and continue to face, so many mental-health barriers to having the kind of life I’d like to have, and I’ve fought (and continue to fight!) such a harrowing, hard-scrabble fight to make that life happen anyway. It’s a massive struggle, it’s ongoing, it’s every day. It’s exhausting and humiliating and entirely without dignity. So the thing that I like to tell myself about the life I want? Is that I wasn’t meant to have it. Some particularly nasty gods have played a trick on me since birth, crafting a person for whom friends/romance/productive work/artistic fulfillment/Happiness are impossible–and day after day, I’m fighting them, trying to prove them wrong. Clawing and biting at them with everything I have in me. Forcing my way out of their boxes, grasping at what I want, and spitting in their eye for good measure.

I’m sure my preference for this narrative says something about me as a person, but I leave that up to you, anon!

- Be - Have you changed much as a person in the last year?

…I literally don’t know where to start.

In August 2018, I wasn’t married yet. I lived in a small town in New Jersey with my parents and sister, and was desperately terrified of moving (permanently) anywhere else. I had completed two master’s degrees just a few months before, but I’d never had a full-time job, and I was 250% convinced (for the aforementioned mental-health reasons, and a chronic physical illness to boot!) that I could never, ever have one. Oh, and I’d just gotten back from a visit to my former roommate (which remains the last time I saw her, not counting Skype), and I was suffering constant agony over the intense, passionate, mutually pining, emotionally needy, co-dependent mess that was that relationship.

And now?

I’m married. I live in Boston, in an apartment where I’ve paid 100% of the rent for the past six months (though that will soon be changing!). I have a full-time job that has challenged and transformed me in ways that I could not possibly have imagined six months ago. Like…literally could not have fathomed. Outside the scope of my brainpower. Beyond my wildest dreams.

I’m the head of my department…because I’m the entire department. I do heavy-duty customer service. I interact with dozens of strangers every day–children, teens, and adults–and I usually do it without a whisper of social anxiety. I pick up my desk phone when it rings. I make phone calls when I have to. I send and receive dozens of e-mails a week. I manage a budget! I place orders! I schedule programs! I answer reference questions! I operate and troubleshoot various forms of technology constantly, and teach others how to use them. I reason with, joke with, assist, educate, entertain, chastise, and discipline 20+ rowdy teenagers ON A DAILY BASIS. There have been many days, and once an entire week, when I was literally in charge of my entire workplace and everyone in it. And it was all still functioning when my boss got back.

…And it’s actually really timely that I should write about all this now, because I’m smack-dab in the middle of an extremely daunting work task, one that’s causing my ADD to kick my ass to hell and back. And I’ve spent the past few days wondering just how fucking desperate this place must have been to hire someone who’s been wretchedly sobbing over her utter lack of focus and organizational skills for almost 30 years. So it’s…quite the morale-booster to look at these paragraphs about just how goddamn far I’ve come in a year.

…Also, Ex-Roommate and I have gone no-contact, and most days, I don’t think about her. And if I do, it doesn’t hurt so much.

- Talk - What’s your best friend like?

I have three (3) best friends, and they are MY WORLD, so get ready for this.

(1.) My husband. We’ll call him Kit, which is, in fact, a name he often goes by. He is a Gemini, which I mention only because he’s a very classic Gemini: bursting with curiosity, interested in everything, with a dizzying array of hobbies and interests that seem to change and shift by the moment. He teaches science, and used to teach history. He loves camping, sea shanties, Lawrence of Arabia, board games, and tabletop RPGs. Being a teacher, he’s had the summer off, and he’s spent it being a house-husband: cleaning our apartment, buying all the groceries, doing my laundry an embarrassing number of times, and cooking me dinner every single night. He loves being useful to people and making people happy. He’s terrific at long-term planning, but has no sense of time, and he’d be late to everything without my intervention. We have separate bedrooms, and mine is obsessively neat, and his is…not. He was once bitten by a squirrel that he was hand-feeding on the Boston Common. A few days later, he received a serious electric shock from a string of Christmas lights, and the bandage he’d placed over the squirrel bite was burned black instead of his hand. This perfect balance of cursed and blessed is, in a way, all you really need to know about Kit.

We love to watch movies and TV shows together and discuss/analyze them obsessively. We love to have looong philosophical discussions and/or debates. We take walks, we get Italian food and/or ice cream far too often, we go on jolly road-trip adventures, and we read out loud to each other. He’s currently reading me Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, which I have read before (twice) and he has not, because I love it so intensely, and I know that he will too. He’s the best person on earth to discuss virtually anything with, to be honest. He’s my DM in the best D&D campaign I’ve ever been part of. I’ve just made a new D&D character, although I don’t have a campaign for her yet, and Kit cannot stop lavishing praise on her and getting excited about her…even though she’s a hobgoblin, and he spent a significant portion of a recent car ride passionately arguing with me about the viability of hobgoblins as player characters.

He is absolutely extraordinary at admitting when he’s wrong, owning it fully, changing his opinions, pursuing personal growth, and just becoming a better and better person all the time. And I’m so damn honored that I get to be here for it.

(2.) We’ll call my second best friend Unicorn, which is a multilayered inside joke.

I met Unicorn during my freshman year of college. We lived on the same floor. I was the odd woman out among my suitemates because I had crippling social anxiety; he was the odd man out among his because he was gay. Somehow we started watching movies and TV shows together, and it became our Thing; I think our current marathon record is six or seven movies in a row. We’re both from New Jersey, and he still lives there, and there are few places in the world I feel safer than on his giant couch, in front of his giant TV, with snacks and glasses of Limeade close at hand, and his neurotic little dog nosing about. He has a pool, a massive movie collection, and an encyclopedic knowledge of state politics, because he works as a full-time environmental canvasser. His hours are absolutely terrifying, as are the physical and social demands of his job, but he still finds time to run a D&D campaign for his coworkers, and to visit the rest of us in Boston at every possible opportunity.

Unicorn is barely a month older than I am (a fellow Leo, though I think it suits him a hell of a lot better than it suits me), and he understands me in specific ways that the other two members of our little quartet just can’t. We get each other’s humor, we have similar tastes in men, we both love to swim. When the four members of our found family are all together, he is invariably the only person who notices all my little puns and innuendos, and laughs every time. He listens to me, and asks me questions, in a way that no one else in the world quite seems to do. He made a speech at my wedding that reduced me to a blubbering mess. And, most importantly of all: He started inviting me to our college’s LGBT group when we were juniors (right after Kit and I started dating), which was how I met my third best friend, and how we all became a family.

(3.) I’m going to refer to Best Friend #3 as “Dragon,” because…he loves dragons, and because he was Unicorn’s roommate when I first met him, and it keeps the mythological-creature theme going. …And once again, I don’t know where to start, so I’m going to go dig up an old post I made about Dragon, copy and paste it below, and then figure out how to elaborate on someone who both my husband and I have identified as the best human being we have ever met.

This is a friend who invites the whole gang of us to his apartment for entire long weekends, and cooks for us, repeatedly. Who hosts “fake Christmas” every year, complete with a tree decorated with blue and silver ornaments because he is Jewish, and made all of us hand-stitched, personalized stockings, and fills them with gifts and sweets purchased specially for each of us. Who once baked me a cake just because I was coming to visit him. Who organized and directed my entire move from New Jersey to Boston because his Tetris-like car-packing skills and his utter laidback unshakable calm in the face of any task are absolutely unparalleled. Who is a goddamn wizard at literally everything, from cooking and baking and sewing to Photoshop and graphic design to painting D&D miniatures to putting together elaborate cosplays to theater tech to writing and research to courageous and tireless activism to law (did I mention he’s a lawyer?).

…That was my old paragraph, so let me add a few things. I can’t emphasize enough how much he carries that aura of calm and kindness and competence about him at all times. Never in my life had I had a cooking/baking experience that didn’t stress me out until Dragon let me help him make an entire dinner and various desserts for our friend group, and it was just…so chill. So well-organized and perfectly timed, but without ever feeling like those things took any effort whatsoever. He was so kind and patient with me, demonstrating each task step by step, then being entirely confident in my ability to perform said tasks, and never trying to nitpick at the way I did them or take them over himself. Part of his job involves teaching, and I know he must be fantastic at it, because no one else has ever been such a soothing balm and a stimulant (both at once, somehow!) to my poor, tormented ADD brain. Someday (maybe soonish!), our whole found family is going to live together, and the thought of being around Dragon all the time just makes me weep with joy. And did I mention his sweet, child-like enthusiasm for holiday celebrations and ghost tours and spooky TV shows and musicals and fantasy novels and text RP and all other Best Things? (Ok, he also loves dogs and Marvel movies, and I love neither, but I forgive him for this.)

Oh, he also officiated my wedding. And he also had top surgery today, and I have maybe never been this happy about anything ever, what an auspicious day to finish this post!

#asks from the askbox #personal #long post #she's just about to close up the library!#dungeons & dragons #d&d #dnd #this got RIDICULOUSLY long holy moly #i have a lot of feelings about my job and my friends guys

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janiedean · 6 years

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on jon connington, elia martell and his character faults

for @asoiafpridefest defest, day one: favorite lgbta+ character.

premise: it’s not a mystery that my favorite lgbta+ character in asoiaf is good old jon connington. goes unsaid that I’ve read a lot of opinions on the subject of his perceived racism when it comes to his treatment of elia martell and while I agree that it’s hardly stellar, I would like to present you a piece of meta in which I argue that it’s not because he’s racist, it’s because he’s jealous, which makes the entire thing kind of different, and also that he actually (imo) doesn’t hate elia that much all things considered.

what I’d like to argue: jon c’s issue is that jealousy is a bad character trait and doesn’t make him any favors and he is indeed jealous of elia, but that doesn’t mean he’s automatically racist, because he doesn’t have a problem with elia for who she is, he has a problem with elia for what she represents (ie what he can’t have) and he wants to be in her place and he resents her for it, but he’s not having issues with her because she’s dornish.

now, let’s start with the actual quotes in which he thinks about her/talks about her in his chapters:

Griff had heard enough of the captain-general’s cowardice. “We will not be alone. Dorne will join us, must join us. Prince Aegon is Elia’s son as well as Rhaegar’s.”

“Waiting.” He frowned. “For what?” Without Daenerys and her dragons, Dorne was central to their hopes. “Write Sunspear. Doran Martell must know that his sister’s son is still alive and has come home to claim his father’s throne.”

Does he know? Griff wondered. How much did Myles tell him?Varys had been adamant about the need for secrecy. The plans that he and Illyrio had made with Blackheart had been known to them alone. The rest of the company had been left ignorant. What they did not know they could not let slip.

That time was done, though. “No man could have asked for a worthier son,” Griff said, “but the lad is not of my blood, and his name is not Griff. My lords, I give you Aegon Targaryen, firstborn son of Rhaegar, Prince of Dragonstone, by Princess Elia of Dorne … soon, with your help, to be Aegon, the Sixth of His Name, King of Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, and Lord of the Seven Kingdoms.”

these are the least relevant quotes to our argument, but still: he calls her by her rightful name as aegon’s mother after specifying aegon is not his. I don’t think there’s much to go over here since it’s what anyone would have said by presenting him, but still, he spoke giving her the rightful title never mind what his feelings for her are. the other times, he reminds people that he’s also elia’s son and not R’s only, obviously also for politics reasons, but still, he does that.

second occasion, slightly more relevant:

Last night he’d dreamt of Stoney Sept again. Alone, with sword in hand, he ran from house to house, smashing down doors, racing up stairs, leaping from roof to roof, as his ears rang to the sound of distant bells. Deep bronze booms and silver chiming pounded through his skull, a maddening cacophony of noise that grew ever louder until it seemed as if his head would explode.

Seventeen years had come and gone since the Battle of the Bells, yet the sound of bells ringing still tied a knot in his guts. Others might claim that the realm was lost when Prince Rhaegar fell to Robert’s warhammer on the Trident, but the Battle of the Trident would never have been fought if the griffin had only slain the stag there in Stoney Sept. The bells tolled for all of us that day. For Aerys and his queen, for Elia of Dorne and her little daughter, for every true man and honest woman in the Seven Kingdoms. And for my silver prince.

now, this is way more interesting and I rarely see this part brought up, but imoit’s clear as rain that this guy has spents eventeen years blaming himself for the rebellion’s outcome and guess what, he’s listing the specific people who died for it in increasing order of importance, and elia is third just after rhaenys and RHAEGAR, as in, his silver prince, from which it’s blatantly obvious that he’s still in love with him as if the rest of the narration hadn’t made that clear. but like, if he hated her as a person, deep down, would he be sorry she was dead? would he be sorry rhaenys died? wouldn’t he say something less flattering? I doubt cersei lannister would have had thought about it twice.

that said, let’s go over to the one quote in question that gives him his admittedly bad rep when it comes to elia:

“My lord does have one prize to offer,” Haldon Halfmaester pointed out. “Prince Aegon’s hand. A marriage alliance, to bring some great House to our banners.”

A bride for our bright prince. Jon Connington remembered Prince Rhaegar’s wedding all too well. Elia was never worthy of him. She was frail and sickly from the first, and childbirth only left her weaker. After the birth of Princess Rhaenys, her mother had been bedridden for half a year, and Prince Aegon’s birth had almost been the death of her. She would bear no more children, the maesters told Prince Rhaegar afterward.

at this point, I would like to point out that he doesn’t think of elia at once.

it says he remembered rhaegar’s wedding.

now, let’s do a bit of math: rhaegar was born in 259 AC. jonc was born in 260 or 261 according to asoiafwiki, which means that he was one year or two younger. rhaegar got engaged to elia in 279 and married her in 280, so he was 20/21 when that happened and jonc in between 18-20 when that happened. now why would I be doing all this math?

spoiler: because jonc doesn’t ever mention looking at anyone else in his life bar maybe miles toyne who was his commander in the golden company and if we want to interpret it like that, it was a friends with benefits thing, not a love thing, and he met R when he was squiring. people in general become squires when they’re like, 10-13 roughly, which means that this guy has pined after rhaegar throughout his teenage years knowing fully well that a) he didn’t have a chance with him, b) that rhaegar most likely was not into men or he’d have known, c) that he could never act on that attraction nor actually tell him because I highly doubt that the only heir to a fairly important house in westeros goes around telling people he’s openly gay, or I mean, doesn’t seem to me like loras and renly were parading it around. which means that he’s never actually gotten over R and he had to be around the man he loved without being able to act on it.

now, if the person you were in love with your whole life married someone else and you had to attend the wedding, would you enjoy it? most probably not and neither did he, because *he remembers the wedding*, but it’s not like he could tell anyone or find himself another guy to forget R with, because you don’t exactly do that in westeros and it’s the middle ages, unless I miss the point where gay marriage was approved.

and here we are at the main point, as in: whoever rhaegar married, jon would have disliked/hated/found a reason to dislike because the point wasn’t the person specifically, was that the person was in a position he could never actually dream of having. if it had been cersei he’d have thought that she was too proud or too much of an asshole for someone as nice and kind and generous as rhaegar, if it had been lyanna he’d have thought she was too ugly and wild for him, if it had been catelyn he’d have thought she was too demure, I don’t know, but the entire point is that he would have hated them or disliked them because they would have had a chance with R in the first place and HE couldn’t, and not like cersei because a rival passed in front of him when she was sure she’d get to marry him. no, he wouldn’t have had a chance with him period.

now, age discourse as above: if this guy spent his teenage years pining after R and R got married just after they were finished, it’s kind of obvious that he’s jealous of her the way you’re jealous of your crush’s partner when you’re fifteen and the fact that she was frail and couldn’t give him children is the perfect excuse he gives himself for thinking she wasn’t worthy of him. and he’s telling that to himself to make himself feel better about how much he probably wanted to stab himself in the gut during the wedding. but the problem isn’t elia. that everyone else hates elia for actual political/racial/discrimination reasons is a point, but he hates her because she was R’s wife, not because he hates her as a person, and actually guess what he feels guilty as hell about her death, so much that she’s up in the top three people he feels most guilty about along with R and rhaenys. I’d argue that it’s not so much about elia rather than what she represents.

and like, point is: jealousy is an ugly thing. jealousy is a bad thing. I don’t see the point in it. I think it makes your life a worse place.

but, it’s one of jon’s character faults. because in these books, people have faults, and this guy’s is that he can’t see past the fact that it’s not elia’s responsibility to give R children or to be worthy of him, but the point is also that he sees R with absolute rose-tinted glasses and in his point of view he could do no wrong ever, because he was in love with him and still is or he wouldn’t have accepted to pretend he died in poverty and disgrace to raise…rhaegar and elia’s son, so like, as much as he tells himself she wasn’t worthy of him he still doesn’t seem to have any problem raising the kid. a kid his long-lost love had with someone else (for the sake of this argument let’s not go into the whether aegon is real or not debate because he thinks he is, so it doesn’t really matter).

the point is that if he behaved more maturely about it he would realize that thinking that of elia is the kind of thing you do at fifteen and you outgrow, except that he hasn’t outgrown that (fully at least). it’s a character fault. does not make him racist.

and other than that, jon doesn’t exactly a) speak ill of the dornish, b) speak ill of essosi and whatever else, c) show any specific prejudice towards the dornish/the essosi/whoever else (hell, he lived in essos half of his life..), so I really doubt that he has a problem with people who aren’t white or westerosi. no, he has a problem with the fact thatsomeone married R and that she was dornish is incidental.

imo, when it comes to elia he dislikes her for reasons that are more his problem than hers and the whole ‘she’s too frail for him’ thing is the justification he gives himself for hating her…. when he’s still kicking himself for her death, too, and rhaenys’s, and about everyone else’s on top of rhaegar’s seventeen years later and when for how much he might dislike what she stood for he still raised her son like his own and doesn’t go around not reminding people of both sides of his heritage and still refers to her properly at least when he’s talking about her to other people.

and for that matter, I would like to compare the infamous unworthy of R. quote with what cersei thinks of elia (which is instead without a doubt fairly racist at least imo). we have:

cersei: It had to have been the madness that led Aerys to refuse Lord Tywin’s daughter and take his son instead, whilst marrying his own son to a feeble Dornish princess with black eyes and a flat chest.

vs:

jonc, again: Elia was never worthy of him. She was frail and sickly from the first, and childbirth only left her weaker.

jon says elia wasn’t worthy of rhaegarand that she was frail and sickly, so he’s latching to the most obvious excuse he could find to see a reason why she wasn’t worthy of R same as no other woman would have been because she wasn’t him, but while he’s not repressed in the sense that he doesn’t deny himself that he loves rhaegar, he doesn’t go and say and I wish I could have been in her place because he knows he couldn’t be. he’s a man. he couldn’t. but no one else was worthy of the guy he loved.

cersei instead latches to actual specific physical attributes that elia had ie the black eyes and a flat chest which are actually fairly discriminatory in their essence because she’s judging her on her physical features - ie dornish - so she’s comparing herself as tywin’s beautiful and worthy daughter and thinking, how could he have married that other woman beneath me when he could have had someone so much better?, so actually cersei’s discourse is fairly discriminatory if not straight-up racist and on top of that she actually insult’s elia’s intelligence (because she’s so much better, right?) and calls her feeble which is not exactly a compliment, which is a thing that jonc doesn’t do at any point ever. he never insults elia’s intelligence or her appearance. mostly because he doesn’t even notice her appearance being into men, but nevermind that.

the point is that if you look at those statements, cersei’s born out of genuine hatred for elia who she loathes because she’s dornish and whose appearance and intelligence she insults because she got married to R instead of her (otherwise she probably wouldn’t have even noticed her) and she didn’t and she doesn’t even use her name period, so that’s actually pretty damn racist, jonc’s is born out of resentment for the fact that elia married R and he didn’t have a chance to be with him never mind marrying him but he has nothing horrid to say about her as a person or about the dornish as a people and the only thing he can come up with to speak ill of her is the fact that she couldn’t give rhaegar the children that according to westerosi society spouses should (translation: are obligated to and are seen as faulty if they don’t) give their husbands. and he does use her full name and title at least. and he still feels guilty about her death.

of course, coming to a conclusion to this rant: irrationally disliking the woman the person you love married is not a good character trait, but jonc being in love with R explains fully his dislike for elia because if she hadn’t married him he most likely wouldn’t have had a problem with her, period. but still, that makes him flawed and unnecessarily jealous, not racist or more misogynist than the westeros average.

and that was my two cents, thanks for coming to my ted talk.

#jon connington #asoiaf meta #janie writes meta #asoiafpridefest #racism cw #ch: jon connington #ch: elia martell #ch: cersei lannister

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britesparc · 3 years

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Weekend Top Ten #462

Top Ten Things That Hopefully Will Actually Happen in 2021

I mean, it’s got to be better than last year, hasn’t it? Just on law of averages. I know it’s not really the greatest start. Everything’s shut again but it’s colder now. We’ve not got a handle on this thing. The idiots are still in charge. But I still feel cautiously optimistic. There is a vaccine now, at least. Trump is gone, barring some cataclysmic last-minute kerfuffle. A new lockdown is required, so hopefully however painful it is right now it’ll be the death throws of this wretched virus. Will 2021 look like 2019? No, not a chance. But maybe by summer, by autumn, we’ll be well over the hill. 2022, hopefully, will be great.

Not that I’m writing off the new year altogether! No siree. I think this is the year we turn the corner and see the road before us. I think this year can be good, and I think that – outside of pandemic and politics – there is quite a lot to look forward to.

I’m not right now talking about personal ambitions or wider, geopolitical hopes and dreams. This is all about stuff that I want to see or play or whatever. Things that don’t really have any bearing on if the world keeps spinning or we all make it through another tumultuous twelvemonth relatively unscathed. Just, y’know, stuff that’d be nice.

Cinematic Superheroes: 2020 was a bonkers year, and one of the things that was bonkers as it unfolded was how all these huge movies kept getting pushed back. As a result, there were precisely no Marvel Cinematic Universe productions released. Like, at all. Thankfully – hopefully – that will change in 2021. As well as some Disney+ stuff (see below) there’ll also be the belated release of Wonder Woman 1984, which came out around Christmas but which I’ll probably stream this month; and, lockdown permitting, we should finally see the likes of Black Widow, The Eternals, and things that were already scheduled for ’21 such as DC’s The Batman and The Suicide Squad. And y’know what? I’m even looking forward to Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Yeah, maybe some more will slip, but I’m just glad that we’re finally getting some men in tights back in our lives.

Plus all these Great Shows: just before Christmas Disney outlined its slate of upcoming releases and by Crikey it was mega. And the best part is, so many of these shows and films are imminent! In a couple of weeks WandaVision will hit Disney+, and later this year we’ll also see (I do believe) The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, maybe Loki, The Book of Boba Fett, and maaaaaybe if we’re lucky Obi-Wan Kenobi. Even outside of the other movies and things that they announced, and even if we don’t look as far ahead as 2022, Disney+ has a hell of a lineup for this year, and even if lockdown closes the cinemas, we can still enjoy a nice good stream.

Starred Up: the arrival of Star, the “grown-up” channel on Disney+, was confirmed (and confirmed to be included in the existing sub, which was nice), and recently it was announced that it will go live on February 23rd. For some reason I was expecting it later, so that’s nice. It’ll be good to see some of the smuttier Marvel movies make their return (especially Fox’s X-masterpiece, Logan), but I’m more looking forward to having all the Die Hards and Aliens in one place. Even the crap ones.

Finally, Halo Infinite: I really like Halo; it’s pretty much the reason I ever bought a console in the first place. So I was incredibly excited for Halo Infinite, and – I must confess – a bit disappointed by its reveal. A delay is fine; take your time, do a good job, try to avoid crunch. I’ve got more than enough to play. But with my pretty new Series X installed next to my shiny new 4K TV, I’d love to get into a proper new Master Chief adventure once again. And finally it’ll happen! My Big Christmas Game for 2021 is sorted.

Return of the (Lego) Jedi: speaking of Big Games for 2021… I love the Lego games from Traveller’s Tales, and it all started with Lego Star Wars. With the release of The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, I kind of assumed they’d be making a new one, and they are: The Skywalker Saga. Much delayed (I think it was meant to come out last summer originally?), but finally making its debut at some point in 2021, it promises to be a more expansive effort than any previous Lego game, and also offers a fresh look at every film in the increasingly-inaccurately-named trilogy. My youngest is really getting into Star Wars and she loves the Lego games, so this is something we can really enjoy together.

2020’s Greatest Hits: yeah, lots of great things coming out in 2021, but I gotta say one thing I’m really looking forward to is catching up on all of the things that were supposed to come out in 2020. I’ve already mentioned the likes of Black Widow, but there’s Coming 2 America (on Prime Video in March), Dune (potentially still hitting cinemas), No Time to Die (God knows), Spielberg’s West Side Story (delayed a whole year!)… even smaller-scale things like the cool-looking Freaky have been pushed right back. And whilst I’m not exactly looking forward to it, pity poor Peter Rabbit 2, knocked from an early Easter slot when the first lockdown hit, only to have its February half-term run destroyed by Lockdown III. Maybe next year, eh, Peter?

Matrix of Leadership: The Matrix turns 22 this year, shockingly enough, and last time I watched it was still absolutely brilliant in one of those hardly-ever-happens ways. The sequels I could live without, although I’ll warrant they’re still stylish with nice action, but they were a huge disappointment (moreso for me than the often-lambasted Star Wars prequels). However, I am super excited for Lana Wachowski returning to direct a fourth Matrix movie. I don’t know why, but I just think it’ll be great; there’s twenty years’ worth of “internet stuff” and “games stuff” and “comics stuff” she can use as reference or in-joke, and let’s face it, Keanu Reeves has never kicked as much ass in his life as he does in the John Wick movies, so we don’t need to worry about that. What the hell will it be about? How can you make a sequel to what felt like a pretty definitive ending? I mean, half the characters died (spoiler!). But I don’t care about that, I just want to see it (hopefully at a cinema).

One (Other) Ring to Rule Them All: I ended up spending quite a bit of time in Middle-Earth in 2020, including reading The Hobbit to my girls, Unfinished Tales, and Ian Nathan’s book about the making of Peter Jackson’s trilogy, Anything You Can Imagine. So I am, shall we say, primed for Amazon’s new TV adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s opus. The Lord of the Rings series – as I think it might still be called? – will be set a lot earlier than the more famous stories, and although there are a lot of potential hiccups and hurdles in the way, I hope the less-familiar period and setting will offer scope for a series to make its own unexpected journey, showing even those that have read The Silmarillion something they’ve not seen before. I hope they don’t try to make it into Game of Thrones, and I hope they don’t try to shoehorn in too many aspects of The Lord of the Rings (I mean, hobbits shouldn’t really feature too much into it, surely?), but the pedigree is strong and I’m very excited.

Sinful: Russell T. Davies’ last show, Years and Years, was a fascinating combination of terrifying apocalyptic sci-fi and domestic soap opera, and one of the best things that happened in 2019. His next show, It’s a Sin, is about something altogether more real but still apocalyptic: the AIDS crisis in the gay community of the 1980s. I imagine he’ll still be expertly combining soapy drama with casual gaggery and moments of utter heartbreak. Apparently this is a story very close to his heart that he’s been wanting to tell for – yes – years and years, so it’s sure to be one of the TV highlights of 2021.

The Unconfirmed: one of the great things at the start of the year is, you don’t know what you’re going to get. Sometimes you get, well, 2020. But sometimes you don’t! Sometimes you get a year in film like 1984 (Terminator! Ghostbusters! Gremlins!) or 1999 (Matrix! Fight Club! American Beauty!); sometimes you get a year in gaming like 1998 (Half-Life! Zelda! Grim Fandango!) or 2007 (Halo! BioShock! Crackdown!). What’s coming this year? Well, with the new consoles out, we’re going to finally start seeing some new games that wrestle with the hardware; not just the cross-generational likes of Halo or Horizon but some new games, some unannounced games. We’ll also, no doubt, see proper footage and trailers for stuff we do know – Hellblade, Fable, hopefully Perfect Dark. Taika Waititi’s got at least two films on the go; that’ll be good. Spielberg doesn’t usually rest on his laurels; he’s finished West Side Story, so what’s next? Bond will come out, somewhere, somehow; will we get the announcement of a new Bond? Speaking of recasting, is Jodie Whittaker really leaving Doctor Who? I’ve not been too fussed with the show the last couple of years, but I’m always rooting for her and will be sad to see her go; but does that mean we’re in for another New Doctor palaver later this year too? Will we see or hear anything of Rian Johnson’s Star Wars films or, even better, a Knives Out sequel? The new Stranger Things has got to be this year, hasn’t it? What about Star Trek – Picard season 2 and Discovery season 4 should be happening, but will we also see the Pike and Georgiou-focussed spin-offs? God knows! It’s all up in the air! And these are only the things that we know or can speculate a little bit about! But that’s what makes it so exciting.

Well, that’s it for now. As I write this, what can only be called a mob of white supremacist terrorists – idiot insurrectionists, if you will – have stormed the US Capitol. Truly terrifying scenes, given the added worry of the Twat in Chief using the crisis as some phony excuse to cling on to power. I have faith that it’ll be resolved, short-term, and that democracy – capital-D Democracy – will endure, for now. But it just goes to show how volatile everything is. The kids are being homeschooled again. London’s hospitals are teetering on the brink. There’s gunfire in the Senate. But the first Black Senator just got elected in Georgia. My wife’s playing Ooblets. Somewhere it’s sunny, somewhere else a kid’s catching snowflakes, and somewhere else again some lucky sod is getting to watch Nine to Five for the first time ever. Things are scary and often crap but on the whole I think the arc of the universe tilts ever so slightly towards Being Generally Okay.

Take care of yourselves, wear a bloody mask, and here’s to 2021 Being Generally Okay.

#top ten #films #tv #games #halo #xbox #star wars #marvel #mcu #dc #batman

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woozapooza · 7 years

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Black Sails 1x01

Here we go!!! A new show!!! What a good pilot episode. So much happened, I can’t believe it’s only been one episode.

I was apprehensive about starting Black Sails because I’d been anticipating it for months and had built it up in my head. It’s the same apprehension I had starting Wynonna Earp. But once again, I have correctly judged from a tiny bit of information that a show is an excellent match for me. I’m not nearly as good as I’d like to be at following and remembering the events of shows, so after I finished the episode, I recounted as much of the plot as I could remember to myself. While doing that, I realized one thing that made it such a good way to start a show: it’s brimming with the theme of gambling, of making dangerous choices that may pay off hugely down the line or may end in disaster. Combine that with the numerous interesting characters, not to mention the fact that it’s a period drama about pirates I mean come on what’s better than that, and you’ve got the perfect recipe to make me keep watching. I hope everything in the following lil recap/review is factually correct but eh who knows.

Let’s start with Flint. The trope of angsty morally dubious loner captain dude, while cool in theory, does not always go over well for me (see Jack Harkness and Mal Reynolds, neither of whom is as questionable as Flint). But I think in Flint this trope (which probably has a name, or at least is an amalgam of a few tropes that have names) may finally work for me, and I’m not just saying that out of ginger solidarity, nor just because aesthetically Flint is #goals. Flint has been “gambling” for months before the show even starts: he’s been going after ships that don’t seem like good targets because he thinks they’ll lead him to the jackpot, the Urca de Lima. The result of him keeping his plan secret from the crew is low morale and the threat of mutiny. Flint has to walk the line between keeping the crew satisfied and pursuing a goal that will more than make up for the toll its pursuit takes. He fails to walk this line, but Singleton’s mutiny gives Flint the opportunity to change tactics while still very much gambling: by accusing Singleton of stealing the Urca’s schedule, he gets to fight and kill Singleton (he also had to bet on Singleton choosing a duel over a trial, but I’m assuming he knew Singleton well enough that it wasn’t a risky bet) and pretend to recover the schedule from Singleton’s corpse. Until he produced the blank sheet of paper, I really couldn’t guess whether he actually suspected Singleton or he was just looking for an excuse to put down the mutiny. I didn’t expect the trick with the blank paper. Flint may be the main character but you can’t always see into his head, so I expect he’ll be a lot of fun to watch. I enjoy his cleverness, his ruthlessness, and his moments of vulnerability. I’m still unsure whether he meant it at all when he apologized to the crew for keeping secrets from them. I’d like to think it wasn’t a complete lie, even though it was also a ploy to get them to like him again, but it’s not like he’s stopped lying to them. He has his crew’s loyalty back—fortunately he was right to gamble that Billy would play along and pretend Singleton really did have the schedule—but it will only last so long before they realize he doesn’t have it. He also has to hide the fact that Guthrie, who was key to getting the ship, is a) under arrest and b) so far, unwilling to help. Will Flint get the schedule for realsies before the crew figures out that he lied to them again?

Lying now and hoping he’ll have the means to make up for it later is not the worst thing Flint does in this episode. It’s the killing of Singleton that really shows that he’s not a straightforward hero. I wouldn’t say mutiny justifies murder, but then again I’m not a pirate. I also wouldn’t say theft merits the death penalty, but that’s how pirates do. What I’m getting at is, Flint may do questionable things (like, in addition to the very fact of piracy), but he’s not the only one. I guess pirates have their own morality and just because Flint does things I wouldn’t do doesn’t mean he doesn’t have some kind of code. He even acknowledges, speaking to Billy, that pirates have a way of life that makes sense to them but not to mainstream people (I know I’m making pirates sound like hipsters but it was the first phrasing that came to mind): “men who keep what is theirs and fear no one.”

Speaking of Billy the boatswain, I really like him as well, and not just because he’s played by Tom Hopper. His type of gambling has to do with how much of his faith and loyalty he’s going to put into Flint. He pretends that Flint was correct to accuse Singleton of theft, but he’s by no means a sycophant. When Flint is brutally interrogating Richard Guthrie and tells Billy to point the gun at Guthrie, Billy has no problem pointing it at Flint instead. So if Billy is playing along with Flint’s scheme, he must have weighed the options and decided this was best. Billy, like Flint, thinks, speaks, and acts for himself. Also, he looks like Tom Hopper.

Silver is a bit of a weird character because he’s to some extent our point-of-view character, but he’s also absent for large parts of the episode. Regarding his role as the audience stand-in, it was cool to show him discovering all the information about the Urca de Lima at the same time that Flint’s voiceover was explaining the same information. Regarding Silver’s personality, I really enjoy his unapologetic selfishness and self-preservation. Everyone on the show has their ways of looking out for themselves, and for Silver, that happens to mean hiding below deck, killing the cook (in self-defense, to be fair), stealing the Urca’s schedule because he knows it’s valuable even though he doesn’t know why, and pretending he’s a cook so he gets to join the crew of the Walrus (I’m looking forward to find out whether he actually can cook). But when Flint kills Singleton, do I dare see in Silver’s face a hint of remorse that his actions might have gotten someone killed, or do I need to be more cynical? Anyway, his main gamble is to hold on to the schedule rather than hand it over to Flint. He also has to make the gamble to trust Max.

Max, who is pretty mysterious so far but very alluring, likewise has to gamble to trust Silver. I like their dynamic—good teamwork from two blatantly self-interested people. Her acquisition of the schedule parallels how Silver got it: he could tell the cook really wanted to hold onto it, she could tell he really wanted to hold onto it. Both of them are clearly good at identifying where profit lies and getting there. Silver says that when he sees an opportunity for gain, he can’t help but take it; when given the chance to back out of a partnership with him, Max isn’t tempted, which suggests that she is much the same. As for another of Max’s relationships, as I have said, one of the reasons I wanted to watch this show was that I knew it had quality gay/bi content and WOW it turns out they hit you with it right in the first episode! I ship her and Eleanor by default (and because of the line “Max is your harbor,” I’ve decided my ship tag will be “all I want is to be your harbor”) but their interaction was mostly sex, so I hope we get to see more depth to their relationship soon. However, one of the episode’s few tender moments was Max’s concern when she saw the bruise Vane left on Eleanor’s face, so that bodes well for her and for the two of them.

I think Eleanor might be my favorite character so far, largely because Hannah New is very attractive when she’s swearing. And in general. She gambles by funding Gates’ efforts at bribery (making their interaction also a gamble for Gates) and oops she almost won that gamble but not quite. She also has to choose between loyalty to Vane and loyalty to Flint. She chooses Flint. We’ll see how that turns out. She is undoubtedly and unapologetically self-interested, but without crossing the line into immorality. (I mean immorality relative to the show’s baseline morality.) Same goes for most of these characters, now that I think about it, including Max. In addition to their similarities, these ladies balance each other: Eleanor is gruffer but more emotional, while Max is more subtle and more sanguine. Ship ship ship.

While watching The 100 I often wondered if Roan was just a boring character or if there was an innate boringness to Zach McGowan. Now I can declare that Roan is just a boring character. Vane is not boring. He’s pretty frightening, really. Maybe ZM should just only ever play villains? I don’t know. Anyway, despite being set up as the antagonist, I’m not yet convinced that Vane is really much worse than Flint. We shall see. He’s got a plan of his own, though it doesn’t really fit the gambling theme: he tried to engineer the victory of Singleton’s mutiny so that, once the crew of the Walrus realized they no longer had a competent captain, they’d defect to Vane’s crew. That didn’t pan out since Flint took down Singleton and made up with his crew, but Vane didn’t really lose anything, at least not as far as we’ve seen. For that reason, he’s probably the character who came out of the pilot looking the least vulnerable.

Gates, like Flint, feels like a character type I have seen before: the practical, long-suffering but loyal second-in-command to the headstrong, risk-taking team leader. The only other example I can think of is Bennet Drake from Ripper Street, but I think I’ve seen it elsewhere as well. Gates is the one who puts into words the theme I’ve been talking about: he tells Eleanor that if she loans him money to ensure Flint retains the captaincy, it will be an “investment in the future.” I’m looking forward to seeing whose investments pay off and whose future wins out.

There’s a lot of conflict already, but there’s a lot of overlap of characters’ traits, I guess because they all know this piratey world quite well and what kind of person you have to be to survive and to thrive. Basically, the first episode sets up a rough world where everyone is looking out for themselves and making difficult choices that they think are for their own good but that might have explosive consequences down the line. We get a glimpse of what these characters want and what they’re willing to do to get it. Also there are pirates. What’s not to love?

WHO DOES RACKHAM REMIND ME OF? I looked up Toby Schmitz’s filmography and I don’t think I’ve see him in anything else but I swear he reminds me of someone!

Best dialogue of the episode:

Gates, to Billy: You’re a highly regarded member of this crew. The captain regards your input more than you know.

Gates, to Flint: Billy’s going with you.

Flint: Who’s Billy?

#x #Black Sails #black sails 1x01 #black sails review #review #this is mainly for my benefit but hey if anyone wants to Engage you're welcome to do so #Anna watches tv #Anna watches Black Sails #I have many thoughts

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pixiealtaira · 7 years

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Favorite Historical Figures

Pairing: Ends up Kadam, brief mention of Kurt/Blaine...more slice of lifey

The assignment was to ‘recreate one of your favorite historical figure’s iconical outfits in a manner that could be used on stage and then demonstrate the costume yourself’. The details were what Kurt was beginning to think was the norm for costume design…materials that wouldn’t bankrupt a company, details that were able to be viewed from the audience more important than ones that were more noticeable up-close, and remember you don’t want your actor to faint on stage due to heat exhaustion because of what you clothed them in. The teacher wanted the costumes to be able to be sung in, danced in, and acted in, after all they were attending a school for the performing arts and half the students were in the musical theater track. Kurt Hummel was never one to back away from a challenge. His favorite historical figure was Queen Elizabeth I and even if demonstrate it yourself meant wear it yourself; he was going to stick to the assignment (extra credit was given for cross gender costume that didn’t look silly, which did help make his decision easier.).

He finally decided on the red brocade overdress over the white with gold brocade dress from the painting of Elizabeth as a Princess. Due to the headdress he wouldn’t even have to form a wig, he didn’t think. He reinforced the pearls over the shoulders to actually support holding up the dress so the sleeves could be attached in a manner to allow greater arm motion, plus used large pearl beads so they could be seen. The flat bodice made it so his lack of breasts wasn’t very noticeable at all and due to some decent support in the structure of the under skirts, he managed to keep the skirts from wrapping around his legs as he walked and danced, and the weight distributed so it wasn’t too heavy to wear for a good scene or two (thank god modern materials could be used in construction…he found a cream lightweight crushed velvet which he’d had a acquaintance from the diner do huge machine embroidered paisleys on with gold threads which had been perfect for the underskirt and undersleeves). He noted in other dresses from the same time period they generally weren’t to the floor, so he made sure the skirts floated two inches off the ground, which also helped with the ability to move in the dress. He used black buckled shoes which he’d bought as a lark for wear with a revolutionary war period getup he’d planned on making. They were easier to dance in than his GaGa heels. Due to the fact he was a guy, the flat bodice also didn’t restrict his ability to breathe and sing much. He recreated the headdress, complete with a stuffed snood so it looked like he had hair done up in the back, and the jewelry. He was very proud of the costume when he had finished. The details were clear, yet large enough to show on stage. It was true to period and style yet constructed in such a way not to hinder movement and breathing. He was certain he would be able to sing and dance and act in it.

The first time Kurt Hummel wore his costume and design project he was still living in the loft with Rachel and Blaine, Sam and Artie were over. He wanted others opinions on whether the pearls were large enough on the necklace and headpiece and if the jeweled belt could be seen. He had expected to be teased…for making the costume for a female instead of a male, and for wearing it. He had not expected the fall out that he was subjected to though. He had not expected harassment.

“You’re willing to wear a dress for your grade?” Artie had shouted. “You’ll cross dress for a grade but you refused to do so to win us nationals!”

“We won without me crossdressing guys.” Kurt said. “Besides, a grand total of maybe 40 people will see me wear this for Costume and Design, and all those are theater majors of some sort who would probably all cross-dress if needed for their art, as compared to thousands who would have at nationals, most who would have found the practice morally repugnant. Not to mention this is a classy costume and what was handed to me at the point in time was tasteless and nasty.”

“So. It’s the principle of it. I can’t believe how selfish you are.” Rachel lit into him.

“Rachel, IF I had agreed to that ploy…I would have had the spotlight, you know. YOU wouldn’t have gotten your second chance. YOU wouldn’t be here at all.” Kurt snapped.

“You don’t know that!” Rachel hissed.

“I do. IF I had agreed to that deceitful mockery I would have only done so IF I had the individual solo and the spotlight and solos for the group songs. There would have been no other option and there would have been no point to dressing me up like that in the first place unless I was who was showcased.”

“How dare you!” Rachel snarled and then stomped off into her room.

Kurt snorted.

“Anyway…do the pearls around the shoulders and neck need to be larger or can they be seen and can you see the chain belt?” Kurt asked.

Sam shifted uncomfortably but was the only one to answer. “They are fine. The belt shows up because you used that black chain. Are those real earnings?”

Kurt chuckled. “No, they are modified ear cuffs so there are no holes required.”

Sam nodded.

“I still can’t believe you are willing to dress in a dress for a class.” Artie grumbled.

“Do you think more might have been at play than just dressing in women’s clothing, Artie?” Kurt snapped. “I mean, think about it for a few moments. I dressed for a week in a silver GaGa outfit that wasn’t far off from a dress for Tina and dealt with the harassment from that from not only the jerks in the school but several of the New Directions as well. I wore a kilt to prom and I have never regretted it. I often wore other things that were along those lines. Now, think to the times I did NOT!”

Artie shrugged.

Kurt sighed.

“I am male. I don’t see myself as a female. I don’t want to be a female. I am a gay man. Rocky Horror I refused because of the assumption that I had to be aching for that part just because I am gay. And that all gay men want to dress in women’s lingerie. But that national’s competition was a whole other issue. If I had faked being transgender, if I had gone out there in that dress and faked it all pretty much to spite those whose identity that represented, I would have been a destructive force in an all too real fight. I would have been mocking people who I respect and whose struggle I should be helping with. Everything I have always tried to be would have been destroyed. Also, have you any idea how hurtful it was to just assume I’d do it because I am gay? I wasn’t the only gay one in that room but you all never even thought of asking anyone else.” Kurt turned and swept back into his room to change out of the costume.

The skirts swished perfectly. He could at least storm off stage if it was called for.

Sam and Artie were gone when Kurt returned to the living room area.

Blaine was sitting on the chair with his arms crossed over his chest, glaring.

“Yes?” Kurt asked as he sat on the couch.

“You will not be wearing that.” Blaine stated.

“Yes I will, it is my costume for design class.” Kurt said.

“Kurt, you are going to ruin me! If you wear that my whole reputation will be shot! Everyone will look at us funny and gossip about us behind our backs, and not in the good way.” Blaine whined.

Kurt rolled his eyes. “Now you’re being ridiculous. No one is going to say anything unless it is so poorly put together that it falls apart when I go to dance. Then I will be made fun off. No one is going to think anything about you.”

“God, sometimes you are so stupid. People talk about us all the time, I am certain of it. I just know I have been fighting against your brief time as an Apple and that is why I haven’t been asked to do anything huge like a showcase.” Blaine explained.

“IF my time as an Apple had any effect, it would have it on me. As much as Rachel always thought what I did affected her, it never did. It doesn’t for you either. Your actions and behavior are what affects you. Not mine. I can guarantee that your demand I not wear my costume and design project because you don’t want me to would have a much larger effect on you than my wearing it.” Kurt said.

Blaine snorted. “If you wear that, I’m not having sex with you for at least a month.”

“Really?” Kurt asked.

Blaine glared and marched out of the loft. “I knew you really didn’t care about me and my reputation here. All you care about is yourself. Rachel is right, Kurt, you are selfish. You don’t care about how anyone else feels. I thought we had dealt with this and you had realized you needed to focus on how I felt about things, but I was obviously wrong.”

Blaine stomped out and slammed the door to the loft shut.

Kurt rubbed his forehead and wished Dani and Elliot were in town for the umpteenth time over the last few months. After being bashed in the head and dealing with Blaine’s melt down over attention paid to him and Rachel’s decent into insanity, Kurt had about had it. He constantly considered cutting his losses and dumping Blaine (and Rachel and Artie and Sam and Santana and Britany and sometimes even Mercedes). But then everyone would point out how wonderful Blaine was and how lucky he was to have Blaine. And most of the time Kurt would focus on that, but that night after trying on his costume, he couldn’t.

Costuming was just going to have to go onto the list of ‘things Kurt did not talk about’, except with people who needed to know. It now contained: vocal performances at NYADA other than those directly related to class which Rachel and Blaine therefore knew about and the midnight madness win, friends outside the Lima group, participation in any sort of senior’s projects, anything dealing with combat class, anything dealing with any of the Apples, anything like Yoga classes or extra dance classes, anything dealing with Vogue that isn’t chasing about, and now costuming outside of work at Vogue.

Kurt sighed.

The second time he wore his costume and design project he wore it for the class. Out of the 15 men in the class he was one of six who was dressed as a woman. Six of the 12 women in the class were dressed as men. The assignment was your favorite historical person, so no one was fazed. The only talk about the class that Kurt heard throughout NYADA was that the class was double length and on the stage so stagecraft had to work around the costume and design students and that when Eliza Johansson, a senior who’s main focus was dance, went on stage to show she had full range of motion and could sing in her costume, the costume fell apart and she was left in just panties, stockings and slippers. Turns out she glued things together.

After his turn on stage, where the costume received great praise and he received the highest marks for the class, Kurt put the whole thing in a garment bag and tucked it into his closet. No one asked about it. No one spoke about it. Blaine never even brought it up again (which also meant Blaine never heard anything about it and probably assumed Kurt never wore it since Blaine told him not to). Much later, after his relationship with Blaine exploded in flames and Rachel crashed and burned, in Lima trying to patch everything and everyone, but himself, up, Sam once brought the costume up. They’d been drinking and Rachel had hold of a microphone and was off in her own world ignoring everyone she’d dragged with her to the bar they were at. Kurt had told her no and she was drowning her sorrows before Kurt went back to New York. He thought about her suggestion of staying and helping recreate the glee club, but then she spent an afternoon bossing him around and micro managing everything and he realized how little he missed that. Watching Blaine with Dave…and without Dave around while at the bar flirting with anyone who walked by…had reminded Kurt what he’d been avoiding remembering, as did listening to Blaine complain about things, little tiny things that didn’t matter. It eased his mind about it all. As did his dad’s reminder that he didn’t even need to be thinking of dating just a few months after a major break-up if he didn’t want to yet.

“Kurt, what did you get on that costume project?” Sam asked.

“Huh?”

“You know…the dress?” Sam said.

“Oh, yeah. Queen Elizabeth’s dress. I got the highest score of the class.” Kurt said.

“And you wore it?” Sam asked.

“Of course, I sang in it, acted a scene, and danced.” Kurt said.

“And no one said anything?” Sam asked.

“Sam, it was NYADA. I was one of six men in a dress that day. Mark’s favorite historical figure was Cleopatra and he went with a very diaphanous linen to make her costume, and went nude under it. The only commentary I got was that I had talent working the heels. You modeled long enough, was everything always strict gender norms?”

“No. That’s why I didn’t really say anything. That and you looked good and you didn’t look like male in a dress, you know. It looked….right.”

“That is the cut of the bodice. That type of bodice doesn’t show cleavage so much, so you don’t’ look ‘odd’ without it. Also the sleeves are full and so arms are covered. Those parts that we see showing strong men or women aren’t displayed so there is no visual marker to count on.”

Sam made a thinking sound and Kurt went back to nursing his drink and watching Rachel nearly fall as swayed while she sang.

Kurt didn’t wear the costume again until the end of his senior year at NYADA. The school was hosting a Ball, with the theme Gender Swapped Historical Figures. Ever since he had returned to the school for his third year, Kurt joined in. He participated in the activities the school offered. He joined clubs. He tried out for the plays and other performances. He worked stage crew. He joined study groups. Basically, he did everything Rachel told him not to do because it would make him unpopular.

He made friends, in the other students and staff alike. Kurt started the band up again when Elliot came back from his retreat, fully trained to teach Yoga and as a masseuse. They replaced their drummer and added a guitar player and another singer after Dani decided she couldn’t be in it any longer. However Dani wouldn’t let them waltz out of her life either, so both Kurt and Elliot spent time with her as she rose the ranks in her derby skating.

Elliot was dating one of the guys in Vocal Workshop with Kurt, so they decided to go all together to the ball. Axel, as he liked to be called, still made Kurt laugh after two years. He reminded Kurt of Mike Chang, except he was a bit taller and had a much greater habit of swearing in Chinese whenever someone annoyed him.

Elliot and Axel were going as Ching Shih and Rachel Wall, female pirates extraordinaire, as Axel put it.

“You went for historical figures who dressed more like men?” Kurt asked when they announced their choices.

“But, Pirates!” Axel said.

“Are you announcing your outfit anytime soon?” Elliot asked.

Kurt shook his head. Mostly because he hadn’t decided yet. He considered making a new costume, something less…just less. In the end, Elizabeth was his favorite and he was quite proud of the outfit. The echoes of voices from the past kept him from getting dressed at home. Instead he brought it with him to the school and dressed in one of the empty practice rooms.

As he dressed, situating straps and chains and headpieces, he banished echoes one by one until all that was left was eagerness to join his friends and enjoy the party. The only thought surrounding the costume from before was ‘What would Sam think of a whole auditorium filled with crossdressing people?”

The third time Kurt wore his costume and design project he was prepared for teasing, after all Elliot was aware his middle name was Elizabeth. He did not expect the reaction he received though.

“Kurt? Oh My God, you are gorgeous.” Elliot said. “That dress is exquisite. Where did you get it?”

Kurt beamed. “I made it for my costume and design class.”

“The one you were taking right before I went to the retreat?” Elliot asked. “Please tell me you got top marks.”

Kurt preened. “Of course I did.”

Axel prowled around him, instructing him to lift his arms and tugging on the dress here and there.

“The construction is extraordinary and I love the fabric choices. I wish I had thought about the crushed velvet option. I went with normal velvet and it was very heavy and hot under the lights. I love the use of the large pearl beads. I bet they show up better from afar.”

Kurt beamed. He hadn’t even entered the ball and he was already receiving the type of comments he had hoped for way back when.

Kurt commented on Elliot and Axel’s outfits as well, admiring the silks that went into Axel’s and Elliot’s choices all together. Moments like these…where their art was focused on as they went about the fun was what he’d realized NYADA should be all about. As they moved towards the auditorium where the ball was taking place, which at first struck Kurt as bizarre until he finally entered the huge auditorium that NYADA staged its main performances on…not the one the Apples practiced in or that the drama classes used for class or that stagecraft worked its basic construction training on, and realize how much space was on the main stage, especially with all the curtains pulled back and up and both side stage areas opened and the orchestra pit covered and the stage extended front as far as possible, they met with others and the whole costume construction and explanation game was played through each time.

Kurt laughed as they entered the auditorium. Props and stage pieces from various shows were put into use as decorations. Tables lined the back wall with desserts and drinks, while sections of seating were blocked by displays of historic artifacts purloined for the prop department but which were actual antiques…limiting the seating to the chosen areas. There were well over a hundred people in attendance already, including several staff members. Music filled the room and lights flashed and danced. Kurt smiled and bounced with excitement. He dragged Elliot and Axel into the mass of people already down at the stage dancing.

An hour later Kurt had wondered up to the dessert tables and was contemplating between the doughnut holes or mini tarts when he heard his name called from the table over.

Mr. Hampton, call me Eric, taught the higher level drama courses. Kurt loved him. He honestly was so entranced by his class when he first took it during his second year that he hunted down workshops and lectures the man taught so he could learn from him at every single opportunity available.

“Kurt, come over and meet the man who will be taking over half the Drama First year courses starting next spring. He also has landed himself a Shakespeare in the Park role…or two. He graduated from here a few years ago. “ Mr. Hampton tugged the suit jacket sleeve of the man standing next to him to have him turn Kurt’s direction, going on to address the rest of the comments to the man in the suit. “Kurt is probably one of the most well rounded students at NYADA right now, even though he is focused on Musical Theater. He simply shines in all his classes and gives his full commitment to whatever task he is set. I swear he could work anywhere in the theater community.”

Kurt moved over towards Mr. Hampton as his friend turned around.

“Adam.”

“Kurt. You look …breathtaking.”

Kurt blushed and smiled.

“You look wonderful yourself, however, I think you are inappropriately dressed, sir.” Kurt responded.

Adam chuckled. “I missed the memo telling me it was the themes ball. Are you here with someone?”

Kurt shook his head. “Not really. My friend and his boyfriend have disappeared somewhere. I was going to walk around to try to find them after I found a snack and a drink.”

“If Eric doesn’t mind, I wouldn’t mind joining you.”

“That would be nice. We could catch up.”

Mr. Hampton smiled and waved as he walked off, even though he wasn’t sure Adam noticed.

Kurt and Adam wandered the ball, dancing a few times as they talked and looked for Elliot and Axel, who they walked by more than once without realizing it. Elliot finally had to stand in front of Kurt so he couldn’t pass by to be introduced and to tell Kurt he and Axel were heading out as the clock had struck midnight ages ago. Kurt waved as they left, and then he and Adam went and sat at the far back of one of the designated seating areas to talk some more. Kurt and Adam didn’t leave until the clean-up crew had finished and wanted to turn off the lights. Then they relocated to an all-night diner not far away, Kurt changing before leaving the school so not to get his gown dirty.

At the party Elliot threw Kurt for landing his first major Broadway role, most people in attendance commented in confusion at one of the photos gracing the wall. Instead of answering when people asked why there was a photo of Adam and some women at some sort of dance, at a party for Kurt of all places, even if they were engaged, Elliot would laugh and Kurt would just smirk.

The dress ended up in the costume department of NYADA and saw stage time at least once a year for decades.

#glee fanfic #kadam #kurt hummel #not Blaine friendly

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ajw720 · 7 years

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hi it's the same anon who asked you abt darren/why people believe in CC. anyway i was just wondering (out of pure curiousity) what would it take for you to be like "oh shit i was wrong" about CC? i mentioned 1d/larry last time i sent you a question because i myself think larry is together, but i definitely have my limits and know what it would take for me to recognize i was wrong.

Good Question. And just to be clear while I think Larry and CC are incredibly similar. They are completely distinct as well. As much as we get thrown at us, I do not envy you. It is way worse being a Larry. Admittedly I only know what little I have been told. But 1D is a worldwide phenomenon strictly sold to the tween/teen market.

With CC, simply, they are not as famous. And they are not a boy band.

Next, Chris is out and proud and well established as a children’s book author and an incredibly talented actor.

It is possible the truth may have hurt Darren more significantly during Glee. However, I am not 100% sold on this- if done right CC would have been a gold mind. It was only after they allowed things to spiral out of control that I think he would have been affected, especially once the PR story started to be pounded down our throats and the whole Listen Up teen heartthrob strategy was pursued, where he was also sold to the tween/teen market.

But thankfully now, Darren is growing in leaps and bounds as an actor and is taking much more mature, adult roles. And roles that don’t require him to be a straight teenage dream. And as he grows, his audience will grow as well.

And I think this is where the huge distinction between CC and Larry lies. And should be considered when responding to the question.

Back to the question. I don’t want to sound too self assured, but I honestly cannot think of anything that would cause me to say I was wrong. There is no question in my mind that CC is on. I am not saying it is a perfect relationship. I cannot guarantee they have never broken up. I am confident they have had rough patches. And I cannot guarantee they will last forever. But there literally is nothing that would cause me to doubt that there two men are very much in love.

Quite simply, there is too much out there. And a lot of it over the past two years after Glee has ended and after they have publicly ignored each other for this period.

IF I am wrong, then two men have gone out of their way to continue to deceive a really small group of fans (trust me i have been to a ton of events, the overwhelming majority believes the PR story) which post-Glee would have little to no benefit to them.

Certainly during Glee, I could have made a solid case for the value of the reverse PR. But not post Glee. At this point, it would be a waste of time and energy. And quite frankly if I found it to be true, it would directly contradict what I think about these two as human beings. Further, if it were reverse PR, there would be no reason for them to avoid each other publicly. The reverse PR would work much better if they interacted and kept up the illusion of a friendship.

And Post Glee, Chris has gone out of his way to continue to talk. I constantly call him the captain of our ship. It is everywhere, as I said in my response to your original ask, his IG is a treasure trove, both what he directly posts and the posts he likes. Darren is all over his books and is the inspiration for multiple characters.

And Darren has done everything he is legally able to scream the truth without saying the words or tattoo it on his head. I was just saying to a friend that he must be incredibly frustrated as his fans continue to ignore the evidence he himself provides, including saying “I am gay” during a live feed being broadcast to the internet and recorded for posterity, admitting to the world that the man suspected to be his public gf’s boyfriend does in fact live with them (because a 30 something established musician cannot afford his own home), wearing a “God Made Me Perfect” sticker during the pride parade,wearing a shirt saying “God Save the Queer,” dropping the Col-Fur joke. And on and on and on.

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oscopelabs · 7 years

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Personality Crisis: The Radical Fluidity of Todd Haynes’ ‘Velvet Goldmine’ by Judy Berman

[This month, Musings pays homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s and ‘80s. In the days before the Internet, young cinephiles like myself relied on reference books and anthologies to lead us to film we might not have discovered otherwise. Released in 1990, Produced and Abandoned was a foundational piece of work, introducing me to such wonders as Cutter’s Way, Lost in America, High Tide, Choose Me, Housekeeping, and Fat City. (You can find the full list of entries here.) Over the next four weeks, Musings will offer its own selection of tarnished gems, in the hope they’ll get a second look. Or, more likely, a first. —Scott Tobias, editor.]

Like the glam rockers it gazes upon through the smoke-clouded lens of memory, Velvet Goldmine is most beautiful when it descends into chaos.

Stolen, the way great artists do, from Citizen Kane, the skeleton of Todd Haynes’ 1998 film is a chain of interlocking reminiscences of Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a David Bowie-like glam rocker who fakes his own onstage death in the mid-’70s. A decade later—in that most dystopic of years, 1984—his ex-wife Mandy (Toni Collette) and former manager Cecil (Michael Feast) relate their bitter tales of betrayal to a journalist (Christian Bale) whose assignment has him reluctantly reliving his own teenage sexual awakening under the influence of Brian’s music. Between the interviews, musical numbers, and onscreen epigrams, there’s also a mysterious female narrator who sometimes surfaces, like a teacher reading a subversive storybook, with dreamy exposition that reaches back a century to invoke glam’s patron saint, Oscar Wilde.

The film climaxes with a propulsive sequence of scenes that are exhilarating precisely because they merge all of these points of view, subjective and omniscient, into one collective fantasy. Brian and his new conquest, the Iggy Pop/Lou Reed composite Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), ride mini spaceships at a carnival to Reed’s “Satellite of Love.” Two random schoolgirls, their faces obscured, act out a love scene between a Curt doll and a Brian doll. In a posh hotel lobby, Brian’s entourage, styled like Old Hollywood starlets on the Weimar Germany set of a fin-de-siècle period film, recites pilfered sound bites about art. Then Brian and Curt are kissing on a circus stage, surrounded by old men in suits. They play Brian Eno’s “Baby’s on Fire” as Haynes cuts between the performance, an orgy in their hotel suite, and Bale’s hapless, young Arthur Stuart masturbating over a newspaper photo of Brian fellating Curt’s guitar. Stripped of narration—not to mention narrative—the film seems to be running on its own amorous fumes, its story fragmenting into a heap of glittering images as it hurtles from set piece to set piece.

Visual pleasure aside, it’s a perfect way of translating into cinematic language the argument that underlies Haynes’ script—that glam’s revelations about the radical fluidity of human identity go far beyond sex and gender. As the apotheosis of teen pop audiences’ thirst for outsize personae, fictional characters like Ziggy Stardust (who Velvet Goldmine further fictionalizes as Slade’s alter ego, Maxwell Demon) melded the symbiotic identities of artist and fan into a single, tantalizing vision of hedonism and transgression. Kids imitated idols they didn’t quite recognize as pure manifestations of their own inchoate desires. Musician and fan became each other’s mirror, and both could become entirely new people simply by changing costumes or names.

But it’s pretty much impossible to imagine Velvet Goldmine’s distributor and co-producer, Harvey Weinstein, appreciating this as he watched the film for the first time—or seeing anything in it, really, besides an expensive mess.

Haynes and his loyal producing partner, Killer Films head Christine Vachon, had already been through hell with Velvet Goldmine by the time they delivered a cut to Miramax. Bowie had refused Haynes’ repeated requests for permission to use six Ziggy-era songs in the film, claiming that he had a glam movie of his own in the works. And in a production diary that appears in her book Shooting to Kill, Vachon points out one unique challenge of making a film about queer male sexuality: “The MPAA seems to have a number of double standards. Naked females get R ratings, but pickle shots tend to get NC-17s. Our Miramax contract obligates us to an R.” She also mentions that an investor pulled $1 million of funding just weeks before filming.

The shoot was even more harrowing than the two veteran indie filmmakers could’ve predicted. As they fell behind schedule, a production executive started nagging Vachon to make cuts. “Todd is miserable,” she wrote in her diary the night before they wrapped. “He says that making movies this way is awful and he doesn’t want to do it.” In an interview that accompanies the published screenplay for Velvet Goldmine, Oren Moverman asks Haynes, “Was the making of the film joyful for you?” “I’m afraid not,” he replies. “We were trying very hard to cut scenes while shooting, knowing that we were behind and we didn’t have the money for the overloaded schedule. But there was hardly a scene we could cut without losing essential narrative information.” It’s remarkable that he managed to capture 123 usable minutes’ worth of meticulously art-directed ‘70s excess (and ‘80s bleakness) in just nine weeks, under so much external pressure, on a budget of $7 million.

When the film finally reached Harvey Scissorhands, after months of editing, Weinstein told Haynes it was too long and the structure didn’t work. “He made suggestions that I didn’t follow, and then he just buried it,” the director told Down and Dirty Pictures author Peter Biskind. What happened next comes straight from the Weinstein playbook: “Even afterward,” Haynes remembered, “they threw out a DVD, they didn’t ask for a director commentary, my name wasn’t on the cover of it, it was buried in the minuscule billing block. He can’t even do the really small things that don’t cost anything—he never shows any respect.” (That Haynes never found a distributor he preferred to Weinstein, with whom he reunited for I’m Not There and Carol, speaks volumes about the way Hollywood treats ambitious filmmakers.)

After it failed to blow audiences away at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, Miramax effectively dumped Velvet Goldmine. It debuted on just 85 screens that November, ultimately grossing about $1 million stateside. Its ridiculous theatrical trailer might well be a glimpse at the movie Weinstein was expecting: a “magical trip back to the ‘70s” with 100% more murder mystery and 100% less gay sex.

Critics were just as ambivalent about the film as festival audiences. While forward-thinking reviewers wanted to love it for its visual beauty and openly queer aesthetic, many lamented that its plot was slight and its characters hollow. David Ansen of Newsweek complained that “Haynes is unwilling to get too close to his characters. Slade, in particular, is a blank”—failing to see that Brian is a cypher by design. Like the Barbie-doll Karen Carpenter of Haynes’ debut feature, Superstar, and the fragments of Bob Dylan diffused across I’m Not There, Velvet Goldmine’s Bowie is less a portrait of the real person than a screen on which fans project their own fantasies about him.

At The Nation, Stuart Klawans rightly identified Arthur, not Brian, as the film’s protagonist. But he also wondered why he grows up to be such an unhappy adult. “Why is Haynes so tough on Arthur?” Klawans wanted to know. “Why, through the character, is he so tough on himself? It’s apparent everywhere in Velvet Goldmine that Haynes, like Arthur, loves Glitter Rock. He, too, fell for a mass-marketed product, which was no more likely than Mr. Clean to carry out a world-transforming promise. But instead of honoring the truth of his enthusiasm, so that he might look back on its object with a smile and a sigh…Haynes does penance for being a sap.”

Others found the film’s collage of ideas and allusions cumbersome. “Velvet Goldmine is weighed down with self-important messages, but it’s also splashily opulent,” Stephanie Zacharek wrote at Salon. “It’s as if Todd Haynes had plunged his hand into a pile of clothes at a jumble sale and come out with a handful that was half velvet finery, half polyester rejectables.”

All of these reactions make sense, coming from adult critics who had probably seen the film just once, after reading months’ worth of reports about its troubled birth, in the sterile environment of a press screening. But what’s clear from a distance of nearly two decades, during which Velvet Goldmine has become a low-key cult classic, is that few films are so poorly suited to be judged on the basis of a single dispassionate viewing. If you’re looking for tight plotting and complex characters, you’re not going to find them in this mixtape of music videos, aphorisms, and waking dream sequences. There is no actual murder mystery, and Arthur’s investigation into Slade’s disappearance isn’t a source of suspense so much as an excuse to keep contrasting an incandescent past with a dull, gray present.

I’m lucky enough to have first encountered Velvet Goldmine under what turned out to be ideal circumstances: at age 15, on premium cable, late enough at night that it easily bypassed my rational mind en route to my adolescent subconscious. I had no idea how many details it cribbed from the biographies of Bowie and his contemporaries, or how much of the dialogue was quoted from their (and their heroes’) most memorable utterances. I bought the soundtrack without realizing that it put ‘70s originals side-by-side with contemporary covers and new songs by younger bands like Pulp and Shudder to Think in yet another glam pastiche. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to find the 1984 scenes unsatisfying because I got so instantly immersed in the ‘70s spectacles that they barely existed for me.

Not that the film only works on an emotional level. Haynes’ ideas about fandom, politics, sexuality, and identity become even more profound once you can see the organizing principle behind what might initially seem like a jumble of indulgent images. Like the death hoax Brian Slade uses to escape a fantasy life that’s grown too real for comfort, Velvet Goldmine’s loose plot is classic misdirection, obscuring a tight and purposeful structure that delays the resolution of the ‘80s storyline until it’s primed you to feel the loss of the liberated ‘70s viscerally. But you’ll never get that far into dissecting the film if you don’t fall in love with it at first viewing. And that’s easiest to do when you’re as impressionable as young Arthur, who watches Brian Slade flaunt his queerness in a televised press conference and imagines himself shouting to his parents, “That is me!”

Revisit it as you grow older, though, and you might discover that the disillusioned 30-something characters now feel as rich as their idealistic former selves. Velvet Goldmine is often called a gay film, but that obscures the universal resonance of its queer coming-of-age narrative. Better to think of it as a bisexual film that uses non-binary sexuality as a metaphor for the boundless possibilities of youth—the promise of a future constrained only by the limits of one’s own ambitions and appetites. Its characters can’t achieve permanent liberation by “coming out”; to maintain lifestyles that match their desires, they would have to reject the monogamy that defines adulthood for most people. Particularly amid the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, which haunts the film’s dreary present on a purely subtextual level, it’s obvious why they (like the real glam rockers they’re modeled after) retreat from the liberated lives they staked out for themselves.

But you don’t need to buy in to the incendiary claim Brian makes at his press conference, that everyone is bisexual, to see how this storyline reflects the many kinds of disappointments that await most starry-eyed fans in adulthood. Klawans’ objection to Haynes’ treatment of Arthur feels naive because it assumes people should be able to peacefully coexist with their shattered dreams. Why shouldn’t he feel bitter about having joined a sexual revolution that didn’t, finally, set him free? “It gets better” for Arthur when he leaves his homophobic family to move in with a latter-day glam act in London, but sometime after he hooks up with an unmoored Curt Wild at a tribute concert called the Death of Glitter, “it” just gets boring as the world gets worse.

And the world really does sometimes get worse, though audiences in the relatively peaceful, prosperous late ‘90s might have forgotten about that. Watching Velvet Goldmine for perhaps the 25th time, two weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration, at the end of an era that has brought unprecedented freedom of sexual and gender expression, I was struck by how vividly Haynes captures a culture’s flight from progress, and how rare it is to see that kind of transition depicted on film. His argument about fluidity turns out to be even more potent when applied to societies than individuals (or, at least, it seems that way in 2017). Our capacity for transformation may be infinite, but that doesn’t mean those changes are always for the best.

#todd haynes #velvet goldmine #ewan mcgregor #christian bale #jonathan rhys meyers #toni collette #michael feast #citizen kane #produced and abandoned #David Bowie #lou reed #oscar wilde #killer films #christine vachon #Musings #Oscilloscope Laboratories

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cbk1000 · 7 years

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Part two of BTS of Why Is Jenn the Way She Is What Happened In Her Childhood to Produce This??

This series began and ended with Klaroline, but more importantly, it began and ended with Caroline. Even before TO really got off its feet and horrified us all with its first wobbly preggo steps, I knew it was unlikely that Caroline would play a large role in the show. So that was my goal in the beginning: simply to transplant Caroline into TO, to explore her burgeoning relationship with Klaus, but especially to explore Caroline as the wonderfully flawed and flawless character she is. She was a perfect foil to Klaus: not just romantically, but as a way to explore immortality from a new perspective, to line them up side by side, to show that evolution in its various stages, and at its most extreme ends. Caroline was at the perfect jumping off point for a writer with a boner for tackling all the most difficult questions of immortality: young, poised between humanity and vampirism, with one foot in her old insecurities and the other in her revelations about humanity and relationships. She was fun, she was heartbreaking, she was the very bitchslap Klaus needed when he was in the midst of an unchecked tantrum. She will forever be one of the best characters I've ever had the pleasure of trying to do justice to, and I think her character arc was immense, and thank god for my unrelenting obsession with her, because I never would have found the necessary satisfaction in canon. Canon degraded, regressed, and threw her aside; I wanted to do the exact opposite. I wanted her to climb out of the tiny box of Mystic Falls; I wanted her to realize how shitty and unfulfilling and damaging her time there was; I wanted her to understand that she didn't deserve it. I wanted her to be young and confused and a little lost, but, Jesus, that's ok, you know? She has so long to grow into herself. And I had three years to follow and document that growth, and frankly, I'm sad it's over, but I'm also proud of where she's at as a character now. As challenging as Klaus was, Caroline was equally difficult. People underestimate Caroline; she's the easy one. She's not the thousand-year-old murderous manbaby who somehow must be shaped into an actual relatable character that human readers can sympathize with.

She's not the easy one; she has so much depth and love in her. The writers underestimated her potential and trapped her in a shitty podunk town with Lieutenant Colonel of the Shitheel Fuckboy Brigade (I cannot emphasize enough how much I hate Stefan), and I could never let that fucking stand, so in reality, even if TO had realized all our most fantastic headcanons, I'd have still shit out a War and Peace-sized brick about why Caroline Forbes is objectively The Best and if you disagree you are wrong.

But most of all, this series was about the Originals and my obviously unhealthy and persistent obsession with them. This is what the goddamn show was supposed to be about: one thousand years of disturbing murder angst. They had the opportunity to examine these characters from various different historical perspectives, to really dig down into the deranged but seemingly unbreakable bonds between some fucked-up but fascinating individuals, and, well, you know what we all got instead. And I was so salty about it that I wrote over half a million words of weird murder fic. And it was challenging and time-consuming and really, really exhausting sometimes trying to balance all these various different perspectives, to write Rebekah as a terrible bitch who is still somehow heartbreaking, and Klaus as a nearly irredeemable shithead, and Kol my little creepy murder Peter Pan. I spent weeks and often months researching the flashbacks. Random lines and scenes would wake me up in the middle of the night. I neglected Mr. Jenn. (Ask him about how I shut myself up in our bedroom like a hobo and issue strict orders that I am to be disturbed only if the house is on fire, and even then he better have tried everything to put that fucker out before jarring me out of a writing trance.) I poured everything I knew, every skill I had into trying to bring them to life, to understand them, to sympathize with them, to explore their relationships with each other, with history, with humanity in general.

And speaking of relationships...

We come to the other elephant in the room. That cardinal sin, the realm of aqua-haired Mary Sues, the dreaded OC. Poor Tim, precious murder child to some, unsympathetic narrative usurper to others. Tim was never intended to be anything more than a recurring background character who would emphasize just how fucking old these people are. Here's an acquaintance from literally a hundred years ago, just chilling in the same pink-cheeked pretty boy face he had in 1915, because has anyone mentioned how old all these fuckers are? And then I thought, you know what, I wanna' see Klaus turn and mentor someone. I want to see him manipulate and corrupt someone for the sheer joy of it. I want to show what Caroline is really getting into; I want to show all the darkest bits of him. I want everyone to know that this guy doesn't always have a plan; it's not always a scheme. Sometimes, he's just bored and he wants to ruin someone.

And then I sort of started feeling sorry for the poor bastard, because really, he seemed like a nice enough kid, polite, sexually confused in a time period when exploring that confusion would literally get you jailed. Not a slick British guy with dimples and a pun for all seasons; someone painfully awkward, someone with a deep and abiding kindness, no matter what. And then, well, he and Kol started banging, only I made the mistake of developing a friendship first, and there was this oooooohhhh noooooo falling sensation and I realized for better or worse this ship was sailing, and that I had better develop him as an individual outside of their relationship, so here we are, two years later, tap dancing and weird porn and all. He was supposed to be killed off, first before I bothered to delve into him, and later when he was bitten by the werewolves. But I didn't want to write in a shock death, I didn't want to kill him just because I knew some readers really liked him, and I kept coming back to something my sister said to me, which was that gay guys never get the happy ending. And that's true. I've watched a fair amount of LGBT films, and in almost all of them, someone leaves or dies or contracts AIDS, and we all learn a valuable lesson about the dangers of Being Gay. Happy endings are for heteros. That bothered me. A lot. Kol was always going to leave--that was always going to be his ending. But I was much hazier so far as Tim was concerned. I kept coming back to what she said, over and over again. Like, you know what, yeah--yeah. Men aren't supposed to end up together. That's what every movie has taught me. We can maybe excuse women for it, but that's not what Manly Men do. They need to be punished for even trying. So I threw them into the sunset and screamed, "Run, you fuckers!!" and now they're somewhere on a beach, doing it.

This is already too long (story of my life), so I'll just wind it up with this: I'm not a popular writer, and I've wrestled with that over years of posting fanfiction, and I wrestled with it while posting this series, especially as the shows began to jettison their audiences and that began to be reflected in review numbers. You wonder, if it's you, if it's the show. You wonder if anyone is listening. So for everyone who followed this series from the very beginning, who joined up later, for everyone who is still inexplicably here, for even those of you who aren't: thank you. Thank you to those who messaged me, who reviewed, thank you to those who followed silently along, lurking bashfully in my hit numbers. Thank you to everyone who encouraged me, thank you to everyone who talked me through some rough scenes, and some rough feelings. I never really had any faith that I would finish this in a way that satisfied myself or my readers; it was too big a project, too ambitious, too far beyond my abilities. And yet here we are, and you know what? I feel pretty good about it. (Gross but-what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life-now??? sobbing aside.)

#writing #au originals series

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autismandhyperreality-blog · 5 years

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Autism. A person centred analysis.

Autism. What are we? Studies on chimps have shown that if they exist in groups of over 100 members then social cohesion breaks down and the individuals lose their identity within the group. The human mind isn't as clever as it seems. The introduction of T.V and the internet has tricked the brain into believing that we exist in a group of billions of individuals. It has a knock on effect on other psychological conditions. If you look at T.V and everyone is beautiful your brain, subconsciously, makes that standard the norm. That's partly why there has been a spike in "mental health" conditions globally over the last 50 years, as our perceived reality isn't our actual reality. An autistic brain is designed to be autonomous. The brain is the mirror reflection of the universe. It is designed that way to interface with our environment. Like 1 paper cup fitting inside another. If one cup is flattened it will not fit. Autistic people are attempting to unflatten the cup and make sense of their perceived environment. The human population has expanded to the point where it has upset nature's balance. For humanity to survive and function in such large numbers, nature can use natural selection to allow the advancement of neuroAtypical individuals whom are better suited to large population densities. The brain itself may also adapt spontaneously to cope by altering the way it functions. I see in hyper reality and have alexithymia, so i am more or less immune to peer pressure and i do not draw my identity from a social structure. To act autonomously the brain may alter hormone levels related to social bonding and emotions as these serve no purpose in large groups. That in turn will affect reproduction and reduce population size. Many people with an A.S.D have issues such as polycystic ovaries in women or epididymitis in men. Studies on gay men revealed that not all of them have a hormone imbalance but some do. What if those gay people were also on the spectrum as sexuality, for the reason i mentioned, is linked to autism. Is it all connected? Human beings must begin to live in a more natural way. They are interrupting the pattern*( see explanation of pattern below) of life and autism is nature's response. I'm trying to determine if hormone manipulation can correct autistic symptoms in more severe cases such as myself. I consider myself a victim of evolution.

Autism is probably more prevalent in males as the female gender is nature's base setting and "male" has to be "added" so it is easier for nature to intervene at that point. Women also have other skills to promote bonding, for example, better linguistic abilities, that are not hormone driven. This may explain why women present better than men and often go “undiagnosed.” What i mean is that the brain is designed as the perfect jigsaw piece to fit the universe and we construct reality based on that. The universe, through perception, is created individually but usually has a common theme amongst individual people. If we perceive it in a different way to which nature intended, then it breaks part of the jigsaw piece so they do not fit together. This means the perceived and actual realities cannot exist in symbiosis. The brain adapts by altering its regulation in an attempt to compensate for the unnatural pattern created by humanity existing outside of the natural order. We are just an animal after all.

When you are autistic it is like a zoo. I live in the penguin enclosure. The problem is that i'm not a penguin im a camel. No matter how many adaptations are made, that environment will never suit me. I need to create a world with sand and palm trees not ice and water. Do not underestimate the rôle played by hormones. They are the very thing which creates humanity. They are the essence of our “soul.”

Basically, an autistic gene is nature's safeguard to prevent population explosion and maintain balance. The gene is like an actuator in electronics. Switching the fridge light off when you close the door.

I do not have the ability to connect with other people or society. A computer without a modem can’t access the internet. I don’t know how to access collective human consciousness in the same way, so, what am I?

The human brain is more than a biological organ. To understand its workings, to understand what makes us “human,” we must look at it from a microscopic level. The brain and body are designed to exist in perfect balance, but what if that balance is thrown off? Could even subtle changes have a major impact on who we are? Researchers have noted that there is a colocalization of the UBE3A gene, generally attributed to autism and the AVP gene, attributed to the regulation of the hormone vasopressin.

Interestingly, the rôle of vasopressin appears to be extensive within the human body.

“Autism” is an extremely varied condition and has many possible root causes. I have used myself as a case study in an attempt to find answers and improve my condition.

I’m a forty year old white male of British descent. I have been labelled as “Autistic.”

I have a mild form of craniosynostosis which is abnormal bone development/growth. I noticed during my research that vasopressin has a rôle in bone development and wondered if hormone changes due to an issue in my pituitary gland had caused this. On looking further, there was also a correlation between vasopressin and sleep. It regulates R.E.M sleep on a 24 hour cycle. I have no discernable sleep pattern and often do not sleep for long periods of time (I have been awake for two days as I write this.)

Researchers have noticed a high frequency of autistic individuals also have type 2 diabetes. Vasopressin is a pituitary hormone which acts to promote the retention of water by the kidneys and increase blood pressure. My mouth is often dry and I have suffered migraines since childhood. Could irregularities in the production of this hormone cause fluctuations and increase vascular swelling,impacting my nerve endings and, therefore, contribute to the processing issues I’m experiencing?

It has also been noted that there may be differentials in vasopressin V2 receptors between sexes. There are differences in the way Autistic symptoms affect males and females and I’m wondering if this is why men and women whom are affected present in a different way. As it is a hormone it may also have an impact on regulation of androgens and oxytocin. It has also been noted that there is a higher frequency of polycystic ovaries and epididymitis in female and male Autistic subjects respectively. Is there a connection?

I have had instances of epididymitis and cysts in my scrotal area and subsequent investigation (sti checks and ultrasound) have identified no root cause. Is there an anomaly on a genetic level affecting my production of vasopressin, oxytocin etc?

It has also been noted that vasopressin (AVP) induced motor effects when introduced into the cerebral ventricles. Could an issue with this hormone then account for a high rate of Apraxia amongst Autistic individuals?

I also identify as a gay male. The correlation between sexuality/sexual orientation and autism is well documented and I’m wondering if this is also connected to hormone related issues? (From a microbiological perspective not an ABA therapy one!!)

I have a processing disorder. As these hormones help maintain synaptic integrity, I’m wondering if irregularities in their production/functionality are affecting the degradation and creation of old and new pathways respectively.

Hormones are also attributed to social bonding and interpersonal relationships. Many people on the spectrum, including myself, struggle with these. I have Alexithymia and lack the ability to recognise emotions in myself and others.

I believe my condition and other forms of “Autism” warrant further investigation from a genetic and hormonal perspective.

I do not recognise “Autism” as a diagnosis for any individual. It is a mere blanket term to describe a collection of conditions and is often confused with neurodiversity or neuroAtypicality. There are millions of people suffering through Autistic symptoms globally and i believe we need answers not a label. The medical community must approach each case individually and make any medical intervention person centred.

We deserve answers, not a label. A label of Autism is putting a bandaid on a cut to stop the bleeding, when the cut requires a suture to close it permanently. Treat the cause, not the symptom.

Pattern- Balance. It is a fundamental aspect of nature and our perceived reality. Philosophers and mathematicians have long argued over the meaning of life. Buddha understood balance and its purpose within our universe. Einstein understood relatively. We need to meet in the middle. One of the problems faced in theoretical physics is the unification of gravity with the other forces. It doesn't seem to fit. How can scientists then begin to fathom a unifying field theory if they cannot reconcile this? The answer is simple. So simple, people overlook it. Balance. Gravity, expressed through the deterministic approach of general relativity, exists in macroscopic terms, unlike quantum theory, which deals with microscopic forces. Gravity isn't a force, it is the opposite. Gravity is the result of balance within the universe itself. That's why, theoretically, it can exist multi-dimensionally. Gravity is the result of a perfectly aligned and designed universe, it is what allows matter to have form and is an expression of the other forces. Do not view the universe in terms of objects but in terms of balance. Gravity is the answer, not part of the question. (The Higgs boson is the particle which allows the construct of matter and form, gravity allows its realisation in a physical universe.)

#autism #neuroscience #biology #endocrinologist #neurodiversity #actuallyautistic

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