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a380flightdeck · 6 years

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FOR A WHOLE HOST OF REASONS, airports are often bewildering, maddening places. There is much to be found in the modern-day terminal to enrage, confuse, or vex the traveler. Where to begin?

The following list was inspired by a layover I spent not long ago at Incheon International Airport (ICN), serving Seoul, Korea. Not to take away from perennial survey-toppers like Amsterdam’s Schiphol or Singapore’s Changi Airport (amenities at Changi include a movie theater, a swimming pool and a butterfly garden), but Incheon stands as the most functional, attractive, and overall flyer-friendly airport I’ve ever visited. It’s cavernous and immaculate, with a cathedral-like calm throughout. Security and immigration are a breeze; international transit is effortless. The staff at the multilingual information desks are disarmingly helpful. Amenities include free internet, free showers, luggage storage, cellphone rental desks, a post office and massage facilities. Relaxation areas, with sofas and easy chairs, are set away from the main thoroughfares. There’s a cultural center, a museum, and a full-service hotel inside the secure zone, allowing those with extended layovers to rent a room without the need to clear immigration. Or, if you’re feeling energetic, a tour desk arranges free excursions to Incheon city. If you’re headed into Seoul, the airport’s high-speed rail connection will have you downtown in under an hour. Why can’t every airport be like this?

FIFTEEN THINGS NO TERMINAL SHOULD BE WITHOUT:

1. A fast, low-cost public transportation link to downtown.

In a way, choosing a favorite airport is like choosing a favorite hospital: amenities aside, nobody really wants to be there in the first place, and the easier and faster you can get the hell out, the better. To that end, every terminal should have a public transport links similar to those across Asia and Europe. The examples of Portland, Oregon and Washington-Reagan notwithstanding, rail links in the United States aren’t nearly as convenient – when the exist at all. Or how about JFK, where for hundreds of millions dollars they finally got the AirTrain completed — an inter-terminal rail loop that connects only as far as the Queens subway. It can take 45 minutes, up and down a Rube Goldberg assembly of escalators, elevators and passageways, just to get from one terminal to another, let alone all the way to Manhattan.

2. In-transit capabilities

It’s a shame that American airports cannot, for whatever reasons, recognize the “in transit” concept. In the United States, all passengers arriving from other countries, even if they’re merely passing through on the way to a third country, are forced to clear customs and immigration, collect and re-check their luggage, and pass through security screening. It’s an enormous hassle, unheard of in most of the world. And it costs our airlines millions of annual customers. Why change planes in the US, where you’ll have to stand in three different lines, be photographed and fingerprinted, re-check your bags and face the TSA gauntlet, when instead you can transfer seamlessly in Frankfurt or Dubai? Indeed this is part of what has made carriers like Emirates, Singapore Airlines, and others so successful.

3. Complimentary wireless internet

What do we do at airports? We kill time. And there are few better and more productive ways of killing time than logging on to the Web. Send an email to your mistress, read my blog, Skype your friend in Slovenia. Many, if not most major terminals do have Wi-Fi access, but it’s often expensive and cumbersome (few things in life are more irritating than those credit card payment pages). It should be everywhere, and it should be free.

4. Convenience stores

It appears the evolution of airport design will not be complete until the terminal and shopping mall become indistinguishable. I’m okay with Starbucks and souvenir kiosks, but it’s the saturation of high-end boutiques that always confounds me. Apparently there isn’t a traveler alive who isn’t in dying need of a hundred-dollar Mont Blanc pen, a remote-control helicopter or a thousand-dollar massage chair. And what’s with all the luggage stores? Who on earth buys a suitcase after they get to the airport? What we really need are the same sorts of things we buy at CVS or the corner convenience store: basic groceries and dry goods, stationery, and personal care items. Brussels and Amsterdam are two that do this right, with in-terminal food marts and pharmacies.

5. Power ports

I didn’t realize that passengers have a right—nay, a duty—to mooch electricity from their carrier of choice, but at this point it’s a lost cause to argue. I hope your battery isn’t dying, because good luck finding an outlet that isn’t hooked up already to somebody’s iPhone or computer. Airlines should throw in the towel and build more charging stations.

6. Showers and a short-stay hotel

Another amenity that is common overseas but sorely lacking in North America. No serious international terminal should be without a place to wash up or crash for a few hours. Passengers arriving from overseas can shower and change before their next connection. Those with longer waits can grab a nap in one of those pay-by-the-hour sleeping pods.

7. Play areas for children

Truth be told, airport play areas encourage toddlers to shriek and yell even more than they already do, but at least they’re doing it in a localized area that’s easy for the rest of us to avoid. Ideally, this spot should be in a soundproofed bubble six miles from the airport, but a space at the far end of the concourse is a reasonable alternative. The Delta terminal in Boston has a pretty cool kidport, but nothing tops the “Kids’ Forest” at Amsterdam-Schiphol. I’d play there myself if nobody was watching.

8. Better dining options — i.e. fewer chain restaurants

Chick-fil-A, Burger King, Sbarro’s. Airport cuisine isn’t a whole lot different from the shopping mall food court. We need more independent restaurants serving actual food, ideally with a local bent.

The next time you’re at LaGuardia, check out the Yankee Clipper restaurant over at the Marine Air Terminal. That’s the circular building at the far southwest corner of the airport, with the art deco doors and flying fish relief along its rooftop. Yankee Clipper is a cafeteria-style place on the left-hand side of the rotunda. It’s good greasy spoon food with absolutely no corporate affiliation. The Marine Air Terminal was the launching point of the first-ever transatlantic and around-the-world flights, and the restaurant’s walls are decorated with historic photographs. You can eat in, or take your sandwich out to one of the wooden benches beneath the famous James Brooks “Flight” mural. Commissioned in 1952, Brooks’ expansive, 360-degree painting traces the history of aviation from mythical to (then) modern, Icarus to Pan Am Clipper. Its style is a less than shy nod at Socialist realism, and at the height of ’50’s McCarthyism, in a controversy not unlike that surrounding Diego Rivera’s famous mural at Rockefeller Center, it was declared propaganda and obliterated under gray paint. Not until 1977 was it restored.

9. An information kiosk

Where is the Yankee Clipper restaurant? Where is the nearest ATM? Where is the nonexistent subway link to the city? Every arrivals hall ought to have personnel who can give directions, hand out maps and make change.

10. A bookstore

Reading on planes is a natural, am I right? Why then is it so hard to find a proper bookstore at an airport? (Not all of us pre-load our reading material on a Kindle.) Not long ago, every major airport had a proper bookseller. Nowadays they are harder and harder to find, and usually what passes as a bookstore is really just a newsstand hawking a thin selection of business books, thrillers and pop-culture trash. Believe it or not, travelers’ tastes extend beyond Sudoku, Suze Orman, and the latest CEO autobiography.

11. Sufficient gate-side seating

If the plane at the gate holds 250 people, there ought to be a minimum of 250 chairs in the boarding lounge. There is something uncivilized about having to sit on the floor while waiting to board. Do we sit on the floor when waiting for a table in a restaurant, or at the doctor’s office? When Changi was built in Singapore, the gates were outfitted with no fewer than 420 chairs, matching the number on the average 747.

12. Escalator etiquette

Americans haven’t figured out how to behave on an escalator. If you’re not in a hurry, stand on the right and enjoy the ride, allowing those of us with a flight to catch to walk on the left. Instead we stand in the middle, hogging up both sides. Ditto for moving sidewalks. The point of the moving sidewalk is to expedite your passage, not to indulge your laziness. You’re not supposed to stand on it, you’re supposed to walk on it. And to take yet another page from the Europeans and Asians, what prevents us from fitting escalators and sidewalks with a light-beam trigger that shuts off the motor when nobody is on them? Ours run constantly, riders or no riders, wasting huge amounts of energy.

13. A view

Why are so many architects intent on hiding the fact that airports are actually airports? Gateside seating always faces away from the windows, and the windows themselves are sometimes intentionally opaqued or obstructed by barriers. Why? Penty of people would enjoy the opportunity to sit and watch the planes go by. You needn’t be an airplane buff to find this relaxing, or even a little exciting. As a bonus, more windows mean more natural light — always welcome over harsh fluorescents.

14. Bring back the airstairs!

Have you ever taken a good look at a jet bridge (or Jetway to use the proprietary term), that strange umbilicus connecting terminal to fuselage? One thing to notice is how ridiculously overbuilt they are. Do we really need all of that metal and cable and wire and hydraulics for what is, at heart, a simple gangway?

Of course, I am opposed to jet bridges on principle. I prefer the classic, drive-up airstairs. Some of the international stations I fly to still employ those old-timey stairs, and I always get a thrill from them. There’s something dramatic about stepping onto a plane that way: the ground-level approach along the tarmac followed by the slow ascent. The effect is like the opening credits of a film — a brief, formal introduction to the journey. By contrast, the jet bridge makes the airplane almost irrelevant; you’re merely in transit from one annoying interior space (terminal) to another (cabin).

Save your emails. This is just me being romantic. The benefits to the jet bridge are obvious — inclement weather, disabled passengers, etc. – and I realize there’s no going back.

15. Last but not least, some aesthetic flair

If an airport has one aesthetic obligation, it’s to impart a sense of place: you are here and nowhere else. On this front, Europe and Asia again set the standard. I think of Lyon and its magnificent hall by Santiago Calatrava, or Kuala Lumpur with its indoor rainforest, and a dozen places between, where terminal design is a point of expressive pride — where it makes a statement, be it quietly stylish or architecturally stupendous.

Take the magnificent Suvarnabhumi airport (pronounced “Su-wanna-poom”) in Bangkok, Thailand. Its central terminal is the most visually spectacular airport building I have ever seen. At night, as you approach by highway from the city, it looms out of the darkness like a goliath space station — a vision of glass and light and steel, its immense transoms bathed in blue spotlight. Or for sheer character, try the little airport in Timbuktu, Mali. Here you’ll find a handsome, Sudanese-style building emulating the mud-built mosques ubiquitous in that country.

With scattered exceptions (Denver, San Francisco, Washington, Vancouver), there is nothing comparable in America. To the contrary, some of our most expensive airport renovations have been terrible disappointments. JetBlue’s wildly overrated home at JFK, for example. Terminal 5 – or “T5” as the carrier likes to call it — is a $743 million, 72-acre structure that opened in 2008 to considerable promotion and fanfare. Inside, the atrium food court and rows of shops conspire to make yet another airport feel like yet another mall. The Wi-Fi is free, and so is the noise and claustrophobia at the overcrowded gates. But it’s the exterior that’s the real tragedy. Although the street-side facade is at worst cheerless, the tarmac-side is truly abominable — a wide, low-slung, industrial-brutalist expanse of concrete and gray. Once again it looks like a shopping mall. Or, to be more specific, it looks like the back of a shopping mall. All that’s missing are some pallets and dumpsters. The facility’s only visual statement is one of not caring, a presentation of architectural nothingness, absolutely empty of inspiration — precisely what an airport terminal should not be. Is this the best we can do?

It’s ironic that Eero Saarinen’s landmark TWA “Flight Center” sits directly in front of T5, itself part of the JetBlue complex. The TWA building is supposed to serve as an entryway lobby and ticketing plaza for T5, though for now it remains semi-derelict and only partly renovated. I wish they’d finish the thing so that more people could appreciate what is arguably the most architecturally significant airport terminal ever constructed. Regarded as a modernist masterpiece, the Flight Center opened in 1962 and was the first major terminal built expressly for jet airliners. Saarinen, a Finn whose other projects included the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the terminal at Washington-Dulles, described his TWA as “all one thing.” The lobby is a fluid, unified sculpture of a space, at once futuristic and organic. It’s a kind of Gaudi inversion, a carved-out atrium reminiscent of the caves of Turkish Cappadocia, overhung by a pair of cantilevered ceilings that rise from a central spine like huge wings.

And just to the north of T5 used to be the National Airlines Sundrome, designed by I. M. Pei. It opened in 1970 and was named in honor of National’s yellow and orange sunburst logo and its popular routes between the Northeast and Florida. After National was folded into Pan Am, the terminal was taken over by TWA. Later it was used by jetBlue, then abandoned and torn down. Pei and Saarinen, a half-minute walk from each other. Our airports ain’t what they used to be.

Am I making too much of this? While terminal design and passenger friendliness are important, isn’t it the operational aspects of an airport—the state of its runways, taxiways, and logistical infrastructure—that ultimately matter most? Indeed, but here too the situation is worrying, as any American who travels globally can attest. Once again, it’s a funding issue. Our airports are failing, and nobody wants to pay for them.

“Other parts of the world are more enlightened in their aviation policies than we are,” said Greg Principato, North American president of the Airports Council International, speaking at a conference in 2012. He added that members of the U.S. Congress have a poor understanding of how the upkeep and renovation of U.S. airports needs to be funded. “They have a sense that airports are economically important,” he explained, “but don’t really understand why.” Principato warns that the declining state of its airport infrastructure puts the United States “at risk of being turned into a feeder system for the global aviation network.”

But let’s change gears for a minute, and move from what airports lack to something they have too much of. To me, the single most annoying thing about airports is how noisy they are. I’m not talking about the noise from jet engines. I’m talking about the in-terminal noise. I’m talking about the sounds of humanity on the move, with our shrieking kids, and our beeping electric carts, our laughing and our shouting and our cellphone chatter. All of it amplified by the sadistic acoustics of the typical terminal.

And what makes this a distinctly American problem is our peculiar infatuation with public address announcements. As we’ve already seen, there are plenty of good ideas that American airports can borrow from their counterparts in Europe and Asia, but perhaps none would be more appreciated than realizing that passengers need not be assailed by a continuous loop of useless and redundant PAs: security alerts, boarding calls, traffic and parking directives, promotional and welcome messages. You’ll often hear two or more announcements playing simultaneously. I’ve heard up to four of them blaring at once, rendering all of them unintelligible in a hurricane of noise.

Intensifying this bombardment are those infernal gate-side television monitors blaring CNN Airport Network. These yammering hellboxes are everywhere, and they cannot be turned off. There is no volume control, no power cord, no escape. Every gate has one, and they run twenty-four hours a day. Not even the employees know how to shut them up (believe me, I’ve asked).

All of this sonic pollution does not make passengers more attentive or keep them better informed. What it does is make an already stressful and nerve-wracking experience that much worse.

On a lighter note, am I the only one struck by the phenomenon of teenage girls carrying big fluffy pillows onto airplanes? I’m uncertain when this trend got started, but take a look around in any terminal, anywhere in the world, and you’ll see girls clutching big fluffy pillows.

What’s wrong with this? Nothing. It’s a great idea, especially now that carriers no longer dispense even tiny, non-fluffy pillows on all but the longest flights. In a window seat, putting a pillow between your body and the sidewall creates a comfy sleeping surface. I only bring it up because, on behalf of guys everywhere, I feel excluded. It’s unfair. Grown men like me can’t walk through airports with big fluffy pillows unless we’re willing to get laughed at. We’re stuck with those neck pillow things.

But this isn’t right. To hell with dignity, I say. It’s time to rise up and break the pillow barrier. Who will be first? I’m thinking we should organize a march — a line of men strutting through the concourse, pillows proudly in hand.

“We’re men, we’re strong, this is true, Fluffy pillows aren’t just for you! Downy soft, pastel blues, Come on girls, let us snooze!”

Later, in the parking lot, we can high-five and toss a few of those neck braces into a bonfire. And I smell a gold here mine for airport merchants. Instead of luggage and massage chairs, why not a pillow shop right there in the terminal? No need to lug one from home when you can pick one up gate-side for just a few bucks. You’d have a choice of foam or feather, and a selection of pillowcases to pick from. To entice the guys, cases could be emblazoned with camo patterns and beer logos.

#Airbus A380 #a380flightdeck

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freerealestateon · 2 years

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The Divine Feminine Legacy Challenge -- BASE GAME VERSION

Welcome to the Divine Feminine Legacy Challenge -- BASE GAME VERSION! This is base game compatible. For the original version, check out my other post or my tiktok freerealestate_on.

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Overview / Rules:

13 Generations : 12 Zodiacs / Ends in Divine Feminine

Must complete indicated career, aspiration, skills, and any other goals listed

Each generation has an associated color palette to integrate into their look and home

No money cheats allowed

Use any mods / cc as you wish to customize your gameplay

How to determine the next generation:

Strict Matriarchy: The Founder must be a woman. Only women are eligible to be named heir. Men cannot, under any circumstance, ever be the heir to the next generation. Matriarchy is key!

Bloodline: To be eligible to be named heir, a child must be able to trace an unbroken ancestry back to the founder

Heir Law: I will personally be using Democracy (aka asking followers/friends to chose the next heir); however, if this is not possible you are welcome to chose another method like first-born or the child with the highest relationship to the prior founder

**Any similarities between other TS4 challenges are purely coincidental – as of June 2022, this has not been fully played through so if you find any issues please let me know!**

Enjoy your journey to the Divine Feminine!

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Generation: Aries (Red)

Plot: Typical Aries – doing what you want, when you want, and how you want it. Even as a kid, you were always taking risks and moving to the beat of your own drum, much to the turmoil of your household. While this has given your life a lot of…adventure, you often have a hard time making friends because of your fiery personality and sharp tongue. Your family has cut ties because their hearts couldn’t take one more screaming match. But a new “family” came along in time who knows exactly where you can fit in (specifically small bank vaults).

Traits: Hot-Headed, Kleptomaniac, Self-Assured

Aspiration: Public Enemy

Career: Criminal Career

Skills: Mischief, Fitness, Handiness

Other: Have 3 friends only and 3+ enemies / Marry a coworker as no one else understands your line of work

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Generation: Taurus (Pink)

Plot: While you definitely inherited your stubbornness from your Aries mother, there’s not much else that relates you two. Growing up in such a tumultuous, loud environment, you become increasingly risk-averse and prefer the company of your quiet garden over mom’s crime ring buddies. Being so set in your ways, you like routine and have worked hard at creating an oasis of calm and beauty.

Traits: Neat, Loves Outdoors, Vegetarian

Aspiration: Freelance Botanist

Career: Freelance Writer

Skills: Gardening, Cooking, Violin

Other: Maintain a thriving garden of 10+ plants including a cowplant / Go to the gym every Sunday with your mom to try to instill calm into her life

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Generation: Gemini (Yellow)

Plot: You spent a lot of time on the internet researching for her mother – ‘how to create hybrid plants’ or ‘what to do if your cowplant eats you’. What was once a chore for mom, became an outlet for you. A world beyond the garden where people had thoughts, opinions, and could joke or argue behind the anonymity of a screen. Oh, you are GOOD at this! Finally real people to talk to aside from the queen of routine. Hopefully you won’t word-vomit all over your laptop.

Traits: Outgoing, Cheerful, Goofball

Aspiration: Friend of the World

Career: Style Influencer

Skills: Charisma, Comedy, Photography

Other: Photograph all of your friends and maintain a gallery wall space / Marry another goofball

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Generation: Cancer (Silver/Gray)

Plot: Your first memory is when you set up a “free hugs” booth at your elementary school and was promptly teased for being too sensitive. Mom says you’re an empath, but that memory was the first lesson in hiding her pain in the hopes of not burdening anyone else. You found art as a teen and slowly healed from the bullying you experienced as a child with art therapy. You finally realized that being an empath is a gift and should be spread to all.

Traits: Gloomy, Good, Art-Lover

Aspiration: Painter

Career: Painter

Skills: Painting, Cooking, Logic

Other: Have two failed relationships due to your wanting to ‘fix’ this person / Adopt at least two children

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Generation: Leo (Orange)

Plot: While your mom’s life ambitions were incredibly altruistic, yours are a bit more glam. You want to be heard and seen. Spending your childhood watching Mom try to fix everyone was exhausting and you fully believe in self-care over anyone.

Traits: Ambitious, Outgoing, Jealous

Aspiration: Party Animal

Career: Entertainer

Skills: Charisma, Mixology, Guitar

Other: Go out on the town every weekend / Lose your entertainer career after a public breakdown

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Generation: Virgo (Green)

Plot: After your mom’s incredibly public breakdown, you were left to pick up the pieces as a teen – a task you are of course completely ready to handle. The first item to check off your never-ending list was to get them out of the media frenzy. The next, to start over in a new town. And once the list was done, it was time for another – 1) go to business school, 2) open your own consulting firm, 3) clean up everyone else’s messes. A perfect task for a perfectionist, including your side hobbies of cooking and piano– more tasks that need perfect precision.

Traits: Perfectionist, Neat, Genius

Aspiration: Successful Lineage

Career: Business

Skills: Piano, Writing, Cooking

Other: Move neighborhoods as a teen and support parents until their death / Help your children with homework every night to ensure they grow up perfect like you

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Generation: Libra (Lavender)

Plot: You were perfectly happy following your mom’s expectations. It was actually nice for a while as making your own decisions is incredibly difficult. Like what to eat, what to say, where to live, what to study, who to date…it gets to a point where you are juggling multiple relationships because you don’t want to deal with a breakup. You throw yourself into a career as a food critic to avoid all that stress, but get fired as you give everyone five stars to not hurt their feelings.

Traits: Romantic, Foodie, Childish

Aspiration: Serial Romantic

Career: Culinary

Skills: Cooking, Gourmet Cooking, Mixology

Other: Make family dinner every night, whether for family or friends if single/no kids yet / Once married, maintain two secret relationships

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Generation: Scorpio (Black)

Plot: You’ve always had a knack for getting to know what truly lies under someone’s skin. You figured it out from a pretty young age when waiting tables at your mom’s restaurant and being able to convince someone that they actually adore their meal, rather than send it back. When you interview at the bureau of secret agents, the interviewer actually wept as you managed to uncover their traumas that they kept hidden deep in their subconscious. In short, you are the top dog for your uncanny ability to uncover the truth. Your only outlets are video gaming and fishing as they don’t require too much thought.

Traits: Loner, Bookworm, Ambitious

Aspiration: Neighborhood Confidante

Career: Teen > Barista / Secret Agent

Skills: Video gaming, Charisma, Fishing

Other: Never take a vacation day / Get divorced due to your one true love – work

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Generation: Sagittarius (Navy)

Plot: While you feel your agent mom is too attached to her job, you hop around like no one’s business. You want to see the world, try new things, and always be a better version of you. It started with a love of space but you got lonely without a library of books and how-to manuals around, so you switched over to the technology field. Now there’s where the research is – but perhaps too dull? Maybe being a scientist would work out well, or an athlete would be pretty cool. Your mind moves so fast it’s hard to keep you up with even yourself sometimes!

Traits: Non-Committal, Active, Bro

Aspiration: Renaissance Sim

Career: Astronaut > Tech Guru > Athlete

Skills: Programming, Rocket Science, Handiness

Other: Elope at a young age, separate, then find your way back together / Build a rocket ship

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Generation: Capricorn (Brown)

Plot: Your mom’s energy has always been way too much for you. You thrive on stability and cater to your own agenda. You’ve been a full fledged adult since the age of 3, and you don’t understand why everyone isn’t this way. Watching your mom go from career to career is genuinely painful to you. You’d much rather pour your energy into getting high marks on everything you set out to do and thrive on that little ‘good job’ you get from your boss every so often.

Traits: Creative, Mean, Snob

Aspiration: Mansion Baron

Career: Business

Skills: Logic, Violin, Gardening

Other: Complete a collection / Marry someone in business career as you appreciate their structure and regime

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Generation: Aquarius (Light Blue)

Plot: To you, intelligence is sexy. So why not learn as much as you can! You are obviously mentally gifted. You share your knowledge at every chance you get, and adore arguing for the sake of arguing and convincing everyone of your incredibly niche views. Sometimes you wonder why no one wants to hang out, but at least you have your debate buddies.

Traits: Geek, Bookworm, Clumsy

Aspiration: Nerd Brain

Career: Freelance Programmer

Skills: Programming, Guitar, Mischief

Other: Accept every invite you get so you have more opportunities to debate with other / marry an enemy

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Generation: Pisces (Green, Gray)

Plot: You’ve always felt intimidated by your very smart family. For them, hosting lively dinner debates on alien sightings was FUN. You’d rather melt away and be boundless on the Earth’s planes, being one with all realities. As soon as you can, you leave that suffocating family home and live simply on the land to further your dreamscape.

Traits: Lazy, Loves Outdoors, Good

Aspiration: Angling Ace

Career: Painter

Skills: Photography, Fishing, Piano

Other: Live on an off-grid lot during adulthood / Have a bad relationship with any siblings -- you find them too intense

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Generation: Divine Feminine (White)

Plot: You are wise beyond your years – people describe you as intuitive, compassionate, creative, kind, and sensual. You live life to the fullest and are constantly present. You care deeply for your family, friends, animals and Mother Earth.

Traits: Family-Oriented, Music Lover, Creative

Aspiration: The Curator

Career: Self-employed / player's choice

Skills: Charisma, Gardening, Fitness

Other: Travel to all secret worlds / Be in a healthy relationship with your childhood best friend

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“She is so bright and glorious that you cannot look at her face or her garments for the splendor with which she shines. For she is terrible with the terror of the avenging lightning, and gentle with the goodness of the bright sun; and both her terror and her gentleness are incomprehensible to humans…. But she is with everyone and in everyone, and so beautiful is her secret that no person can know the sweetness with which she sustains people, and spares them in inscrutable mercy.” ― Hildegard von Bingen

#ts4divinefeminine #ts4 #thesims4 #legacychallenge #zodiac #divinefeminine #spiritualgrowth #basegame

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j-ngjaehy-n · 6 years

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Summary Ellie is nothing like her on screen character, neither is Pete Dunne.

Word Count 2594

ekayyla, tumblr.com

Ellie was nothing like her on screen persona, her character was the nicest, sweetest character Ellie had ever seen on the WWE and Ellie wasn't. Ask her friend and she'd describe her as an arsehole, Ellie just liked to think she was closed off. She didn't like people and if she didn't have to talk to them, she wouldn't - simple as that, not hard to understand really.

She hadn't come to the WWE to make friends, she hadn't started wrestling to make friends - she wrestled because she had terrible anger management and her therapist told her to. That's what she told people anyway, truth was she absolutely admired Lita growing up. All she ever wanted in life was to be as badass as her and not take anyones shit. Growing up in an countless foster homes, she was meek and quiet and never spoke unless spoken to, until she realized she didn't have to.

She talked back, she argued and if they still didn't see her point, she fought harder. She fought for everything other kids had handed to them, she fought to be respected. And who else was a highly respected but still badass woman? Lita.

She'd met her once when a particularly nice foster carer had noticed how much she liked to watch wrestling and bought meet and greet tickets. Ellie cried when the mother told her, she cried and she bawled. She was so happy.

So she met Lita, told her how she grew up in foster homes loving her and Lita smiled, hugged the tiny nine year old and signed her shirt with a stay strong, ellie scribbled on the front. She loved that shirt like she loved her foster mom, until the Alabama bush fires took her shirt and her foster mom. Ellie didn't smile for a year afterwards.

Abusive foster parents and a rough childhood left Ellie hostile to the world, she fought when she could, girls and boys behind the school, behind the diner on the corner near her house, anywhere.

It wasn't until she was fifteen that the school therapist suggest she find an outlet for all her anger, she tried soccer, football, hell, she even tried dancing. Nothing worked until the therapist told her about the new wrestling school opening up on the better side of town.

Ellie hadn't watched wrestling since she lost her foster mom and she spiraled out of control, standing on the steps of the wrestling studio had her heart hammering in her chest and hands shaking like a leaf. It wasn't until another girl near her saw how nervous she looked, took her by the hand and gently guided her into the gym.

Maria had been a few years older than her and already wrestling for a few years until her parents had relocated to Ellie's small town. Whenever her panic attacks would flare up or Ellie needed a hand with moves, Maria was there with a guiding hand and a calm voice. Whenever Maria had boy problems or girls were harrasing her, Ellie was at her back or standing by to give out hugs, something she didn't particularly like doing but it was Maria and she deserved her hugs.

So on Ellie's 16th birthday. Maria and her parents surprised her with a party and a certificate of adoption. She cried, hugged Maria and her parents, hugged the few people that came from the wrestling gym and cried again.

Eight years later, Maria and Ellie debuted on NXT and not two months later, Maria was the new NXT Womens Champion and Ellie had yet to be pinned. She'd had plenty of count-outs and disqualifications but she still hadn't been pinned until she'd aligned herself with British Strong Style.

Trent Seven, Tyler Bate and Pete Dunne were absolutely lethal in the ring and out. Seven and Bate were two of the most welcoming people she'd met in the company, her personality just clicked with theirs right from the start.

Pete Dunne was nothing like his on screen persona, yeah he's an arse, but hes never standoff-ish like his character. Ellie would rather describe him as sweet, since she'd met him he'd done nothing but try to get her to open up to him. He'd bring her coffee in the mornings and drop her home when Maria couldn't, it had taken her three weeks of being an arse for Maria to slap her around the head and tell Ellie not to be so rude.

She tried not to from then on, she thanked Pete for the coffee, invite him inside for a cup of tea after he'd drop her home and eventually it evolved into more. On free days, she'd invite him over to watch a movie and they'd cuddle on the lounge.

Pete started to ask her over for dinner, her and Maria were invited to nights out with the boys, gym sessions were mandatory and afterwards the boys would share their vegan pizza.

Ellie couldn't help herself, she started to fall for the Bruiserweight with a heart of gold. It killed her to watch him dance with girls when they went out, but she did, she turned around with a smile because all she wanted was for him to be happy. If it wasn't with her, fair enough it wasn't with her - but he was happy and that made her happy.

"C'mon love," Trent's voice echoed through Maria and Ellie's apartment, "If you don't hurry up we'll miss our booking!"

"Bowling lanes don't wait for wrestlers!" Ellie snorted when Tyler yelled out, he'd taken the joke baby of the group literally - It was a rare sight not to see him joking around.

"I'm coming! Don't get your knickers in a twist." Nora bounced down the stairs and waved her arms extravagantly when she hit the bottom, "Ta-da!"

"It took you that long to get dressed..." Trent hesitated, "...into that?"

Nora glanced down at her shirt and jeans with a frown, "I think I look fine."

"Pete likes it when you dress up." Tyler, the non stop voice of wisdom, spoke from where he was slouched on her coach.

"We're going bowling," Nora said plainly, Trent flicked any eyebrow up with out a word, "Fine, fine! I'll get changed."

She walked down five minutes later with the same shirt on, only tucked into a leather skirt, "Happy?"

Trent nodded with a smile, "Let's get out of here."

"Finally!" Trent sighed, rolling off the couch and hobbling out the door like a old man.

"You're nineteen, you bloody drama queen!" Trent snorted and followed him out the door.

It doesn't take them long to get the address Pete texted through and when they find their lane, Pete and Maria have cold beers waiting for them. Tyler downs half of his in one go and throws himself into a chair, Ellie rolls her eyes and slips into the chair next to Pete.

"Thanks guys, how was the meet and greet?" Ellie asks as she sips her drink.

"It was great," Pete's eyes flick up from Ellie's leg, "The fans were amazing as always."

"Oh, El -" Maria jumps in her seat and starts to dig through her bag and Pete gets up to start the game, "- there was this one little girl that wanted me to give you this."

She hands over a tiny bead bracelet with ELLIE ROCKS spelt out on it. Its bright yellow and doesn't match her outfit at all, but she slips it over her wrist anyway because her fan made her this. They poured their heart into it, she snaps a photo to upload twitter later so she can find the parent and send her a shirt.

"Your turn love!" Pete hollers from the point screen and gesture at the lane.

"Don't laugh at me, guys," she says as she slips her bowling shoes on, "I haven't bowled in years."

"You'll do fine, " Pete says as she grips the ball uncertainly, he see the uncertainty on her face and smiles softly, "Here, I'll give you a hand."

His large hand comes to rest on her elbow and straightens it while the other one sits on her lower back, a glance back at the group shows none of them paying attention but when she look back at Pete his face is inches from hers. Her breath catches when his eyes flicker own to her lips but then he steps away and she's left reeling.

"All you gotta do now is throw the ball down the lane." Pete tells her, his voice low, and then turns to sit with their friends.

She turns her back to them and stares a the lane, what the fucking fuck? She shakes her head and swings her arm, closes her eyes and just hopes for the best. The ball slams into the wood with a loud crack and not a second later sinks into the gutter, her second go is not much better and she turns back to the group with a shy smile.

"Told you I was no good -" she stops and eyes her friends, they're obviously trying to hide their laughter and Pete's face is bright red, "...what are you laughing at?"

"Nothing, hun." Maria stands up to take her go and whisper into Ellie's ear as she passes, "Pete was a bit too interested in watching you bowl."

She dumbfounded for a moment before she realizes that Pete was sitting directly behind her, he had a perfect eyeful of her being over. She stifles a giggle at his slowly fading red cheeks and pats his hand, "Get a good look, Dunne?"

He frowns as Seven and Bate laugh loudly, ignoring her in favor of his beer. Ellie watches as Maria bowls a strike and lays her head on Pete's shoulder, "Sorry for teasing."

Pete shifts and drops his shoulder for her to lean on more comfortably, "All good, love."

"Were you really staring at my are?" Ellie asks as she traces pattern on Pete's bare arm that's resting softly on her thigh.

"...yeah."

"Pete!" She laughs and nudges his arm off of her, but he catches her hand and bring it up to his lips.

He brushes a soft kiss against her knuckles and stares evenly into her eyes, "Its a very nice arse, love."

"Pete!" Trent hollers, "You're up, mate."

Pete drops her hand into her lap and moves to take his turn, Ellie watches him walk away until Maria plops into the open seat. "What was all that?"

"C'mon," Ellie pulls maria our of her seat and towards the bar, "I need another drink."

"Wait, what happened?" Maria stumbles behind her and watches as Ellie's head slumps into her hands at the bar.

"I have it so, so bad for Pete." Ellie groans from behind her hands.

"Well, duh."

Ellie glances up at her from between her fingers and snorts, "I shouldn't even surprised that you already know."

"Is it that obvious?" She sighs as they collect their drinks.

"Yeah, I mean-" she hesitates, "I don't know if Pete knows but he's usually pretty clued on when it come to these things. He knew Peyton and I liked each other before we did."

"El! Its your turn!"

Ellie sighs and orders another round for the boys, the waitress is quicker with these ones and they carry them back to the boys. Pete's eyes follow Ellie as she sets the drinks down and grabs her ball, she swallows nervously and glances back at him, winks slowly and bends to take her shot.

She bowls a strike and turns back to the group smugly, "Someones gonna catch up."

Tyler rolls his eyes, "She's gonna be a sore winner, isn't she?"

"Always is, kid." Trent barks a laugh when Tyler's face falls.

They keep bowling until Tyler wins, smugly throwing his arms up and parading around with a toy wrestling belt he'd smuggled in for the winner. Ellie laughs and gives him a high five because she may be a sore winner, she's not a sore loser.

They wander over to the arcade and avoid the sea of children surrounding the kids toys. Ellie laughs as her and Maria fail spectacularly at Dance, Dance, Revolution, pouts childishly when Trent's demolishes her at buck hunting-

("Its not fair, you cheated!"

"...its buck hunting, El. How am I possibly able to cheat at it?"

"I don't know but you did, anyway.")

And laughs like a hyena when she beats Tyler's record at PacMan, who vows to never leave the machine until he beats her record,

(Trent and Maria pull him away five minutes later.)

Ellie wanders around the arcade until she finds Pete lazily throwing basketballs in the back of the arcade, she's stopped for a moment when she sees his arms flex in his singlet. She leans up against the side and tries to keep her eyes from ogling his arms, it doesn't work very well but Pete hasn't complained yet.

"I bet you I can sink all of these balls." Pete wages as he stuff another token into the machine and watches the balls drop.

"What's the wager?" Ellie's asks and settles on the seat of a motorbike game next to him.

"A kiss." He says, she eyes his face and sees not one trace of humour.

"Here?" She glances around, "Pete, there's kids everywhere."

"We'll find somewhere."

He's dead serious and she figures it can't hurt, he won't sink them all. "Fine."

Oh, how wrong she was. As soon as the words left her mouth, Pete turned and sunk the first ball, followed by the second, then the third and another after that. She can't watch, she closes her eyes and listens to the swish after swish until the buzzer sounds and she's jerked out of her seat. She briefly notices the 30/30 on the machine before Pete pull her from the arcade, hurries out of the building and has her pressed against the side of the building in minutes.

His lips press against her roughly, leaving a scorching trail of heat when they brush. Their teeth knock, their lips bite and hands grab everything they can, hers are grabbing his shirt, his are sliding down to her thighs before she's lifted and pressed against the wall harder. Rough hands press under her shirt and along her ribcage, she arches into his touch and -

"You have to return those shoes! They're property of the - oh."

- flinches away as the shoe loan worker swings around the corner. Pete drops her quickly and she blushes as she fixes her shirt. The shoes are pulled off and Pete and Nora are left standing in the shadows with socks on.

"Go home, kids."

They mumble apologies and flee to Pete's car where Nora pulls their shoes out of her bulging bag, she laughs airily and leans against the hood of Pete's car. "Well, that was fun."

Pete smirks and arches an eyebrow, "Fun? I just had a heart attack!"

"Don't be a wimp." She laughs and runs her hand over his shoulder. He catches her around the waist and draws her closer to him, pressing her between him and the car.

"Do you want to stay over tonight?" He asks as he brushes his lips against hers.

"Hell, yes."

#wwe imagine #pete dunne #pete dunne imagine #bruiserwight #wwe #imagines #trent seven #tyler bate #united kingdom champion #bowling

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nonameinanytongue · 7 years

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The Flower & the Serpent: The Violent Women of Game of Thrones

“Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!”

-Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Act V, Scene I

DC’s Wonder Woman opened this summer to critical acclaim. Pop culture outlets made much of its empowered protagonist and progressive themes, lauding everything from its feminist fight scenes to Wonder Woman’s thigh jiggle. In approaching the first superhero flick of the modern big-budget tentpole era both helmed by and starring a woman with such intense and specific scrutiny, much is overlooked and more repurposed to suit a flexible, almost reactive set of ideals held by fans and critics alike. If a woman does something in art that shows her to be powerful, it is interpreted as inherently feminist no matter its context in the work of art or the world beyond.

Perhaps in a world where women, homosexuals, and transsexuals lobby vigorously for the right to serve in active combat zones a conflation of ability to do violence and the possession of feminist power is understandable. Surely there are many women who, for reasons understandable or awful, crave invincible bodies and the power and grace to crush the people who hurt them. Many more are happy to acclaim any media in which a woman emerges victorious as another mile marker driven into the roadside on the highway of equality. Especially beloved are movies, shows, comics, and novels in which such victories are portrayed as straightforwardly virtuous and good.

Think of Sansa Stark condemning her rapist and tormentor, Ramsay Bolton, to a grisly death at the jaws of his own hounds. How many fans and critics expressed unbridled joy at that, as though Sansa had won some kind of symbolic victory for all women? Her sister Arya’s rampage, which has taken her across the Narrow Sea and back again and claimed the lives of dozens, has likewise been applauded as a meaningful triumph in the way we tell women’s stories. For the record, I think both of these plots are intensely compelling and reveal volumes both about the characters themselves and the world they inhabit. Game of Thrones is a show nearly singular in its refusal to make violence joyous or cathartic, no matter the whoops and cheers of many of its fans.

Still, no matter how many times the show delivers searing anti-war images or explores the corrosive influence of violence on those who commit it, viewers remain hungry for the spectacle of women overpowering their enemies and turning back on them the weapons of their own oppression. In a culture where Redpill misogynists hold elected office and our president is a serial rapist, a desire to see women take power with a dash of fire and blood feels all too understandable, but celebrating the destruction of their personalities and lives is a reductive way to understand their stories.

In order to understand what Game of Thrones has to say about violent women, it’s necessary to set aside the thrill that seeing them materially ascendant brings and focus on the images, words, and larger context of the show’s particular examples. Where films like Wonder Woman thrive by repurposing a complex and horrifying conflict (World War I in the first film, the Cold War in the upcoming second) into a heroic battle between good and evil, Game of Thrones, rooted in a genre where conflict is often artificially cleansed of moral ambiguity through devices like entire species of evil-doers, makes no attempt to sand the edges off of its depictions of war or violence.

Nearly every woman on the show, with the possible exceptions of Gilly and Myrcella, are directly involved in war, torture, and many other forms of brutality. From Catelyn and Lysa’s ugly mess of a trial for Tyrion, an act they surely must have known would cost many smallfolk their lives once Tywin Lannister caught wind of it, to Ygritte fighting to save her people by sticking the innocent farmers in the shadow of the Wall full of arrows, the actions of women with power both physical and political are shown to bear fruit just as ugly as any their husbands, sons, and brothers can cultivate. There’s an uncomfortable truth lurking there, an admission that some modes of action and ways of being may not intersect meaningfully with many of modern feminism’s tenets.

In this essay I will dissect scenes and story to illustrate the show’s deeply antipathetic stance on violence and the ways in which it is misunderstood both by those who enjoy the show and by those who detest it or object to it.

I. ARYA

If a man is getting his eyes stabbed out by a child he intended to beat and rape, does the child’s gender matter when determining what the scene is meant to convey? Is it somehow triumphant for a girl to do that to another living person, no matter how repugnant he might be? Isn’t it possible that what the scene communicates is not that Arya’s slow transformation into a butcher with scant regard for human life is something we ought to cheer for but that the fact she couldn’t survive in Westeros or Essos as anything else, much less as a little girl, is deeply sad?

Arya’s crimes nearly always echo those of her tormentors. Think of the first person she kills, a stable boy, not so different in age or appearance from her erstwhile playmate, Mycah, who was slaughtered by the Hound a bare few months before. Or else consider Polliver, the Lannister soldier who murdered her friend Lommy and whose own mocking words she spits back at him as she plunges her sword up through his jaw. More recently, her wholesale slaughter of House Frey recalls with a visual exactitude which can be nothing but intentional the massacre of her own family and their allies at the Red Wedding. In this last instance she literally dons their murderer’s skin in order to exact her revenge, pressing Walder Frey’s face against her own in an act that feels uncomfortably more like embodiment than disguise.

Arya’s long journey through peril and terror has hardened her, but there’s little reason to rejoice in her hard-won powers of stealth and bloodletting. Who, after all, does she resemble with her obsession over old scores and her penchant for cruelly ironic punishments if not the subject of this essay’s next section.

II. CERSEI

Cersei Lannister, is distinguished from a hundred other interchangeable evil queens by the attention devoted to her own suffering. Sold by her father to a man who beat and raped her, denied the glory heaped on her twin by sole dint of her gender, humiliated and terrorized by the despicable son whose monstrosity she nurtured, and finally stripped, shaven, and marched barefoot through jeering crowds after being tortured for weeks or months in the dungeons of the church she armed and enabled, Cersei’s brutality serves only to deepen her misery and isolation.

The aforementioned tyranny of the High Sparrow she put in power, the murder of her monstrous son by her political rivals after she groomed him to be the beast he was, her conflicted and good-hearted younger son’s suicide after his mother’s revenge on the High Sparrow and the Tyrells broke his spirit; Cersei’s litany of victories reads a lot like a list of agonizing losses when you look at it sidelong. Certainly her grasping, vindictive reign has brought her no joy. It’s true that audiences are expected to see Cersei as a horrible human being, which she is, but the time the show spends on giving viewers a chance to empathize with this badly damaged person trying to throttle happiness and security out of a recalcitrant world argues for a more complex interpretation of her character. Watching her need to dominate rip her family and sanity apart, ushering all three of her children into early graves, transforms her from a straightforward villain to a troubled and tragic figure.

III. DAENERYS

Sold into slavery after a life on the run with her unstable and abusive brother and raped on her wedding night by a foreign warlord, Daenerys’s relationship to violence after her ascent to power is complex and heavily ideological. Her crusade to end slavery, motivated as much or more by strength of character and an innate sense of justice than it is by personal suffering and an impulse toward vengeance, has engendered sweeping changes throughout Essos, but at times it has taken on shades of the ostentatiously symbolic punishments for which her family name is famous. The crucifixion of the Masters is a particularly gratuitous example as Daenerys allows her desire to change the world and her need to feel good about the justice she doles out combine to produce a dreadful and inhumane outcome.

This act of performative brutality finds its echo in the rogue execution of a Son of the Harpy, imprisoned and awaiting trial, by Daenerys’s fervent supporter Mossador. Dany may claim that she is not above the law when Mossador confronts her, but when butchery without trial suited her she was quick to embrace it. Her case is uniquely complicated by her enemy: the slavers. Nothing excuses violence like a civilization of rapists and flesh-peddlers beating and maiming their human chattel onscreen, and there is powerful catharsis in seeing their corrupt works shredded and their hateful and exploitative lives snuffed out, but in making them suffer and in choosing the easy way out through orgiastic episodes of violence, Dany betrays her own unwillingness to do the hard work of reform. In many ways, her long stay in Meereen functions as the tragic story of her decision to embrace the grandiose violence her ancestors partook of so freely. We may feel good watching her triumph over evil, but we’re reminded frequently of the horrors and miseries of her reign.

IV. BRIENNE

Brienne’s pursuit of knighthood and adherence to its practices and code is no warrior-girl fantasy about a scabby-kneed tomboy learning to swordfight. Trapped in a body unsuited to courtly life, mocked by suitors and competitors alike, and yearning for the right to live by the sword as men do, Brienne finds challenging refuge in a way of life intimately associated with violent acts. From her butchery of the guards in Renly’s tent to her honor-bound execution of her one-time king’s brother in a snowy forest, Brienne’s path has frequently led her into mortal conflict.

At the climax of Wonder Woman, Diana kills a super-powered caricature of historical figure General Erich Ludendorff, a character who seems to exist solely to uncomplicate the moral landscape of World War I. A few minutes later she kills the man behind the man, her divine uncle Ares, and breaks his grasp on the people of war-torn Europe. The presentation of the act of killing as a triumph for human morality strips away much of what violent media can offer. Contrast Brienne’s desperate fight with three Stark soldiers as she attempts to spirit Jaime Lannister to safety on Catelyn’s orders. Screaming with every blow and leaving her opponents hacked to pieces, Brienne succeeds in her mission at an obvious human cost. Men, despicable men but men nonetheless, are dead. She and Catelyn are now in open rebellion against Robb’s authority.

To kill is to sever a life and give birth to a living, growing tree of consequences. To explore it instead as a tidy way to resolve problems and make the world a better place is to misrepresent its essential nature. You can’t improve the world through butchery. You can’t heal by harming. What violence in media is meant to teach us is a capacity for empathy, a reflexive understanding that all people are as fully and completely human as ourselves. Loathsome or virtuous, kind or cruel, no human suffering should be a comfortable or affirming thing to witness. (The Republican Party’s elected officials and pundit corps certainly makes a strong case for an exception to this rule).

One might charitably assume that lionization of violent women and their specific acts of violence stems from a place of vulnerability, a desire to balance the scales and erase the danger and aggression with which almost all women must live on a daily basis. I would argue that while this may hold true in part, a deeper truth is that many people have not been taught to feel pain for others in a way that allows for true emotional vulnerability or complex feelings about morally ugly and confusing actions. It’s easier to cheer when the guy we hate gets his than it is feel sorrow for the former innocent who dished out justice, or empathy for the deceased whose life must surely have held its own miseries and secret hurts.

Audiences would be well-served by taking a moment to step back from their reactions to violence in media and attempting to interpret what message the art is trying to convey. Is the violence slickly produced and bloodless, a parade of cool moments and heroic victories? Or is it focused on the humanity of victims and perpetrators and the cost of their actions? What is the camera telling us? The colors? The editing? Are we meant to agree with King Theoden’s speech about the glories of war in Return of the King when the very next cut brings us into the hellish, pointless confusion of the taking of Osgiliath? Are we meant to be happy when Sansa smiles at Ramsay’s death when the very last thing he told her was that she would carry him, his essence, with her forever?

The most transcendent joy art brings is the opportunity to reach out of your own beliefs and feelings and into someone else’s dreaming mind, to parse the language of symbols and ideas with which they have addressed the world and make in the negative space between your consciousness and theirs a new understanding. Learn to relish the complex and sometimes hideous nature of humanity over the easy thrills and cheap moral lessons of crowd-pleasers made by billionaires. Understand that art that makes you uncomfortable could be helping you grow.

A woman’s actions are not laudable just because she’s a woman, or just because she’s been wronged. In our rush to associate the violent triumph of women over the men who’ve hurt them with personal strength, healing, justice, and praiseworthiness we ignore what shows like Game of Thrones are saying in favor of what we want to hear. Violence should never be easy, and violence that assures us, or that we think assures us we’re good and rooting for the right people should always be suspect.

In labeling anything that pleases us, that satisfies our own hunger for justice and supremacy “feminist,” we forget that feminism is first and foremost an attempt to remake the world. The structure of things as they are is brutish and oppressive, and to cry tears of joy as women, even fictional women, fall prey to the allure of those same structures is to fundamentally misunderstand the point of a life-or-death struggle in which at this moment in history we are perilously engaged. As assaults on our tattered reproductive rights continue, as women struggling with addiction, illness, and homelessness are thrown into prison en masse, as our political leaders openly contemplate sentencing the most vulnerable among us to death in order to pay off the corporate elite and the Left (justifiably, in my opinion) contemplates and utilizes resistance through force on a scale unheard of in this millennium in our country’s history, learning to see violence for what it is has become more imperative than ever before.

#game of thrones #brienne of tarth #cersei lannister #arya stark #Sansa Stark #polliver #the hound #mycah #the freys #walder frey #catelyn stark

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thedeadflag · 7 years

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So I meant to post this yesterday, but honestly, I felt like hell, so I left it until I could have the energy to at least get to splitting this next wip into parts.

This is...sort of an older one? I’ve added onto it semi-recently, but it’s kind of aged. I used parts of it for inspiration in other fics I’ve published since, and I don’t feel like rewriting those parts, so there might be some familiarity.

It’s also a wip I wrote as a sort of...form of escapism? I mean, to some extent, I put bits and pieces of myself in my fics and play things out in another world, and that’s cool, but this one was more cathartic in purpose, more direct in what I projected into it and wrote it for. I’ve got a decently long history of people who were supposed to care about me ending up hurting me, and never feeling like they did anything wrong, blaming me for being hurt, continuing to hurt me, etc.

Sometimes I think about what it could be like, if someone who caused harm like that cared enough to listen, and learn, and become safer. Not just for those they harmed, but others related to that harm. A bit of escapism, a fantasy of sorts, to imagine that sort of situation, where someone who caused harm could turn things around and become better, safer for the person they harmed, to care about their wellbeing, to care about causing harm. And because I can’t help but write romance, it’s also that, and a bed-sharing fic, and a bunch of other fluff.

I touched on that theme a bit in ‘Looking for the Magic’, and that theme continues here. I started both stories around the same time, not having been sure which route I wanted to approach the theme through. Ultimately, I ended up kind of writing both, even if each has their own differences in ways. So not much in the way of new themes and ideas here, mostly this one was just used to help me emotionally process during a rough period. Still, I may as well air it out, since it served its purpose, and it’s still a WIP.

Content Warning: transmisogyny, transmisogynistic slurs, transphobia

Part 1 below (I’ll post more later today)

"You've got to be kidding me with this, Lexa!" Anya seethed, knowing she was making a bit of a scene, but there was no way she was going to let the injustice stand. "You can't pair me with her!"

Lexa reached out to hug her, or maybe rest a hand on her shoulder, but she stepped away in time to deny the effort. "You know what happened last year. We had to take more rooms and stop cramming everyone into two or three. This is how the draw played out."

"Well the draw was useless! How am I going to get any sleep?!" Anya demanded to know, looking at the details of her lodgings.

Lexa had booked her a room with a single queen-sized bed. Most of the others had two beds, but hers only had one, and that created endlessly more problems than rooming her with Clarke Griffin did on its own.

"It's a big bed. You're both eighteen. Maybe it's time to get over your grudge, Anya." Lexa asserted, only stoking the fires inside of her, even if it'd amount to nothing without someone she could take it out on.

"I do not think about Clarke Griffin. I do not care about Clarke Griffin. But I will not sleep in the same bed as her, and you know why!" She countered, bracing herself as Lexa's face contorted in frustration, her cousin taking in a deep breath.

"She's not who she used to be." Lexa insisted, setting her with a firm stare. "And Clarke's had some recent troubles of her own, so be nice. It's two nights. Just collapse onto the bed first and stop worrying about it."

If only she could.

Fact was, this convention trip was what she looked forward to the most each year, and now not only did she have to spend a large portion of it with someone she couldn't trust, but her favourite actresses had pulled out last minute due to illness, automatically making it the worst Polis Comic-Con in years.

Luckily, nothing good or important had been planned for Friday evening, so their late-ish arrival hadn't cost them much of anything opportunity-wise. "Just give me my key card, Lexa."

It didn't take long to find her room once she had the card, taking the elevator to the eighth floor and easily finding the fourteenth room. It was as small as expected, with a tiny bathroom that had more of a shower stall than a regulation bathtub, and a main room with a large bed and a dresser and not much else.

Deciding to be a little spiteful, she unpacked most of her things into the top half of the dresser, knowing that when the other vehicles arrived, Clarke would be left with the less convenient drawers. It wasn't much, but it was something of an outlet for her anger, so maybe she felt a little better.

At least until the door opened and Clarke slipped in with her luggage.

"Are we gonna have a problem?" Clarke asked, sounding halfway exhausted as she set her luggage down.

"Are you sleeping on the bed?" Anya shot back.

"Yeah. Obviously." Clarke stated, face twisting a little in confusion.

"Then yeah. I'm setting up in the bathroom." Anya asserted, taking hold of the sheets and yanking them off the bed, figuring if Clarke can have a comfy mattress, then she could at least have the sheets.

"What the f...okay, wait. You and I both know the bathroom floors here are gross and tacky to keep people from slipping. Just...come on. The bed's big." Clarke argued, but there was just no way.

Anya shook her head. "This trip's already a mess for me. Sleeping on the floor won't make it any worse."

At least, she hoped it wouldn't. Her back injury from a few months ago could certainly flare up, but Anya was willing to take that risk.

"I don't understand why you have to be such a child around me. You don't have to like me, but you don't have to sleep on the damn floor. I don't know why you don't like me, maybe I'm not as pretty and perfect as you, but I'm not a damned leper. It's not like I have some infectious disease." Clarke muttered, letting out a frustrated sigh as she blocked entrance to the bathroom, as if Clarke had the right to essentially call her a shallow, vain misogynist and then feel upset about Anya's hostility. "Put the covers back on the damn bed."

"Not happening. Now get out of the way." Anya stepped up, standing firm in Clarke's bubble of personal space, holding eye contact. She'd long since promised she wouldn't hurt Lexa's friends, but she'd promised nothing about intimidation. Even if Clarke smelled really nice, even if she hated putting on an act of fierceness, she had to put up a fight, had to show she took it seriously and was not happy to be sharing space with the girl.

Clarke's deep blue eyes shifted focus across her face, as if searching for an answer to some unspoken question. When Clarke let out a tired sigh, she took it that the girl hadn't found one. "What is wrong with you?" Clarke whispered in disbelief before giving her head a shake. "Just...wait here. I'll be back in a half hour."

Anya barely had time to blink before the door was open and Clarke was marching out.

Whatever Clarke's reasons, Anya felt pretty content with another thirty minutes of solitude. She'd take her wins where she could.

Anya had just started to feel relaxed, splayed out on the mattress, when the door to the hotel room opened again maybe forty-five minutes later. She'd hoped that maybe Clarke had found some other lodgings, but feeling a few large and light objects dropped on her legs stole that calm from her, forcing her to a seated position to defend herself.

Some of that edge fell away once she recognized what Clarke had tossed onto her, even if some of that anger was only replaced with equal parts confusion.

"Sleeping bag and a pillow. Lay down these towels, and you should be able to avoid dealing with the sticky shit." Clarke stated, tired eyes staring right at her, as if challenging her to object to or refuse the offer.

She wouldn't, but she wasn't about to kiss the girl's feet for being half-decent for once. "Fine." She noted, deciding that was all the response she needed to offer. Anya rolled off the bed and picked up the covers, quickly setting them back onto the bed and tucking them in.

"Why are you like this?" Clarke asked, flopping down onto the bed with an exhausted huff.

"Don't ask stupid questions." Anya scoffed, grabbing up the items and heading towards the bathroom.

"I'm serious. Why do you hate me?" Clarke asked, stilling Anya in place at the entrance to her new sleeping quarters for the night.

Honestly, she'd operated under the notion that Clarke was at least self-aware, but maybe that had been expecting too much. "There comes a point where you're responsible for your actions, Clarke. You're bi...you ran the school's GSA. If you can't piece together how you fucked up, then that only damns you more." She answered, feeling a slight bit of tension in her chest as Clarke's face fell, features contorted in a heavy mix of confusion and remorse. She shook her head, hoping but failing to shake off the sensation. "Goodnight, Clarke."

Anya stepped into the bathroom and locked the door behind her, needing to feel safe, needing to create distance, needing to stop making other people's issues her problem, especially when those issues were caused by hurting her. She wouldn't baby Clarke through their shared history. She wouldn't feel bad for pointing out that the other blonde had hurt her. She deserved to be angry and hostile.

Feeling a little better, Anya laid out the towels and created a narrow but decent enough sleeping space to set up her sleeping bag on. It would have been a long night either way, but maybe now it could be a little better.

Didn't mean they were anywhere close to even, but a sleeping bag was better than some thin sheets, and maybe enough to stem some of her anger. Certainly not all, but a little bit.

Anya woke to a sharp pain in her back, the searing sensation stealing any sound from her throat as she rolled onto her side and rode out the wave of agony. Despite her hopes, the minimal cushioning of the towels and sleeping bag couldn't negate the dangers of sleeping on a hard unforgiving surface; Anya waited until she could breathe steadily again before unzipping the sleeping bag and getting to her feet, deciding she had over half a day to figure out her sleeping problem.

A glance at her phone told her it was a little after six, which was less than an hour before she would have gotten up anyways, so she packed everything up again, stashed it on the towel rack, took some Tylenol, and got to washing up in prep for the day.

Freshly showered, Anya wrapped herself in a towel and quietly padded out to the main room to grab some clothes, wishing she'd been mindful enough the previous night to stash some in the bathroom. She was just pushing the top drawer shut when she heard the rustle of sheets behind her.

"Anya? What're you doin' up?" Clarke slurred sleepily, the mattress creaking underneath her as Anya imagined the girl had sat up. "It's still way early."

"Getting breakfast." She answered simply, rolling her eyes as she heard the mattress creak again, bringing her to turn around and spot Clarke trying to get out of bed. "No, you idiot. You were exhausted last night. Get some more sleep, events don't start for another three and a half hours."

"Yeah, well good job with that, dropping a bomb on me last night and all. Barely slept." Clarke grunted, slipping out of bed, staggering on her feet for a moment before she found some semblance of balance. "Besides, I'm hungry."

Anya cursed herself internally for not just staying quiet, getting what she needed, and marching out when she had the chance. "I'm not waiting for you." She shot back, heading back into the bathroom to change as quickly as she could and get a solid tuck into place for at least the first part of the day.

When she emerged from the bathroom, Clarke was there, wearing leggings, an oversized sweater, and sunglasses, hair done up in a messy topknot. How Clarke managed to look stunning while clearly tired as all hell, Anya would never know, but apparently she would have to put up with Griffin for a little while longer.

"Go to the washroom. You don't want to use the one at the diner, sometimes they don't get around to cleaning the previous day's mess before the breakfast rush." Anya spoke, slipping past Clarke and opening the door to their hotel room. She wasn't going to wait, of course she wouldn't, but it was too early in the morning for spite to motivate her into moving faster as she made her way to the elevator, not to mention the ever-present back pain shooting up her spine with each step.

By the time she reached the elevator, she could hear jogging behind her, Clarke joining her inside of it just before the doors went to close.

"So what are we having for breakfast?" Clarke asked, sounding artificially chipper, as if Anya couldn't hear how groggy the girl was.

"You should be in bed." Anya noted as they descended to the main floor, trying to figure out how to handle Griffin tagging along for breakfast, and hoping it wouldn't be as frustrating and aggravating an experience as she expected.

"What are you, my mother? Besides, you're up." Clarke countered quickly, body leaning up against the railing in a way that didn't quite hide the other blonde's exhaustion.

"I'm an early riser. You're known for sleeping in closer to noon when given the opportunity." Anya rolled her eyes at the sleepy girl, thrilled when the elevator door opened and let her out, giving even a shred of possibility that Clarke would elect to wait inside and take it back upstairs.

She had no such luck. "Okay, it's super creepy that you know that." Clarke insisted, the clap of her sandals following Anya out of the hotel.

"You go to the parties Lexa and Costia host. I wake up early, make breakfast, and help with the cleanup. I notice which people sleep in and which don't." Anya explained, rolling her eyes again at the annoyed huff from behind her. "And don't think for a second that I care or am judging you for that. I don't give a crap. I just know you should be asleep, and that you're choosing instead to intrude on my breakfast."

The diner had always been her place to eat in the mornings when Comic-Con came around. Lexa and Costia would usually just grab something at Starbucks, but she kind of liked having a real breakfast, not just a coffee and a bagel like some would get. And since it wasn't the most popular place that early in the morning, she'd more or less have her choice of seating.

Usually, she'd just grab a small table, not wanting to take up much space, but once inside the restaurant's familiar walls, she made her way to a vacant booth, having some hope that the comfier seating could entice Clarke to return to bed after the meal.

Clarke plopped down hard onto the booth seating across from her and shuffled closer to the window, resting her head against it with a sleepy frown. "You know, I'd sleep a lot easier knowing why you hate me."

"And if I have to spell it all out for you, then you wouldn't understand anyways. We don't have to have some cliché heart to heart when it's pretty clear that we're at two different levels here. We don't have to reconcile. It doesn't matter." Anya answered, slumping back into her seat, arms crossing her chest.

"It does matter." Clarke asserted, taking off her sunglasses and putting them on their table. "Does it look like I slept last night?"

"So you felt too guilty to sleep. All that tells me is you're really uncomfortable with anyone thinking you might be a bad person. Newsflash, Griffin...you and your friends made people feel like shit all the time. Sorry if I don't buy your 'woe is me' act, given you still have no clue despite me literally sitting right here." Anya argued, willing her anger to sift back beneath the surface as the waitress approached.

"Hey there, ladies. Can I get you anything to drink to start with this morning?" The waitress asked a little cautiously, handing them both a menu, eyes flitting between her and Clarke as if to gauge if there was any trouble there.

Anya turned her full focus to the waitress, sending her a smile that seemed to ease the woman's slight apprehension. "Orange juice would be lovely, thank you."

"Chocolate milk sounds amazing. I'll have that, please." Clarke added, the waitress writing down the information and heading off, leaving them alone again for the moment. Clarke of course, just couldn't let the issue stand, fixing her focus on Anya again. "That's not fair. I think I'd remember if I said or did something hurtful to Asian women, Anya."

Anya had to fight the urge to face-palm, even if she immediately found herself more frustrated than she had been in some time. "You really need to stop beating around the bush, Griffin. This isn't about race or ethnicity and you know it. Rub some brain cells together for once and think. You made valedictorian, you're capable of basic deductive reasoning." Anya let out in a harsh whisper, feeling a pit form in her stomach at the pained wince Clarke gave at her words, at the way those blue eyes started to shimmer. "Don't you fucking start crying, Clarke."

"I'm just so tired. And I don't know. I don't know. Like, two years ago, Lexa told me about something lesbophobic that I said, and I haven't said anything like that since, I worked hard to think about it differently and unlearn the bullshit I used to think, so I just...I don't know." Clarke complained, voice cracking as the girl slumped forward against the table.

Anya wasn't sure whether she wanted to just explode and leave this plane of existence, or ream Clarke out over her supreme lack of attention to detail, or just try to work out the mystery of Clarke being so oblivious that she couldn't even think back a few years.

Not wanting to make a scene, and not wanting the situation to escalate even further, knowing full well her weakness for crying people, Anya reached out and took hold of Clarke's nearest hand. She wasn't gentle, she didn't tenderly graze a thumb over Clarke's knuckles or offer any such comforting gesture. No, she knew Clarke was a sucker for physical touch, and so long as she was holding her hand, so long as the potential for affection was so near, she'd have the other girl's attention.

"Take deep breaths. Look at the menu. Find something to eat. Think about all the fun things you and your friends will get up to today. Focus on that. Worry about me later." Anya stated slowly and calmly, annoyed that she was pushed to coddle her a bit, but it'd be worth it if she could still have and enjoy her breakfast in relative peace.

Yet, there was something in Clarke's eyes that told her that maybe she didn't have a full read on the other girl's issues. So when Clarke's head ducked away, maybe she brought out the big guns and let her thumb graze across the top of Clarke's knuckles. Maybe the mix of shock and hope on Clarke's face told her more than she expected.

"Lexa had you room with me for a reason, didn't she?" She asked, a few ideas floating around in her head that she wanted confirmation on before proceeding. She'd definitely need to sit Lexa down for a talk today, but for now, she needed details.

Clarke gave a silent nod, eyes falling shut and leaving a slight ring of wetness around the edges, officially sending Anya's heart into a twisting mess. Whether it was good method acting or legitimate, she couldn't say, but her maternal instincts were already kicking in.

Anya hadn't noticed the waitress approach, so the sight and sound of her orange juice being set down in front of her had her body jolting a little. Clarke, however, didn't even respond, just looking entirely sad and exhausted.

"Are you two ladies ready to order yet, or do you need a little more time?" The waitress, Niylah, asked, concerned eyes shifting between the both of them.

Anya fixed her focus on Clarke for a moment, already knowing her order. "Clarke, do you have an idea of what you want?" She asked, watching and waiting for a response, but Clarke remained silent. The girl had told her she was hungry earlier, so she decided to take her at her word, and use her past knowledge of Clarke to her advantage. In a worst case scenario, Clarke wouldn't like it, and they could stop at the Starbucks on the way back, anyways. Anya turned her focus to the waitress. "Can we get an order of the apple crisp pancakes, the cinnamon bun pancakes, and two fresh fruit cups on the side, please?"

Their waitress offered a nod and hurried off to another table, the morning rush starting up in some form.

"I don't understand...what, are you trying to soften me up? Get me to crack? I thought you didn't want a heart to heart." Clarke murmured, her words barely audible above the din of the diner.

Anya scoffed at the assertion. "I don't. But I'm not incapacitated, Clarke...I can tell when someone's hurting. I don't have to like you to want to minimize that, and I know you indulge your sweet tooth when you're feeling down." She answered, knowing some parts were a white lie, but Clarke didn't need to know that crying turned her to putty.

"It's totally unfair that you apparently know everything about me and I know nothing about you." Clarke let out with a frustrated huff, wet eyes finally opening again, even if they didn't meet Anya's.

"I find it hard to believe you haven't picked up something over the years. We've been sharing classes and schools since grade two." Anya noted offhandedly, figuring Clarke was exaggerating out of discomfort, but the immediate degree of wary disbelief on the other girl's face unnerved her and had her wondering if Clarke really was even more oblivious than she thought possible. "You...are aware that we spent elementary together, at least?"

Clarke's eyes narrowed. "I think I would have remembered you."

Anya pulled her hand away from Clarke and leaned back, feeling her mind fall apart bit by bit. "You at least remember when I came out at the end of middle school?"

Clarke recoiled as if stung, and even if the reaction last just a moment, there was a lingering sadness in Clarke's eyes. "I...I spent half of my last year of middle school at home after my father died."

She wanted to smash her face with a waffle iron for forgetting that vital detail of Clarke's history. Usually she didn't flub that hard. "I'm sorry, it slipped my mind, my apologies." Anya offered, earning a quick nod from the other girl.

"Thanks. Anyways, yeah, I didn't catch you when you transferred in. I only saw you in high school." Clarke stated, only furthering Anya's confusion, because she hadn't transferred anywhere.

And yet, it all made a twisted sort of sense, if she considered Clarke's popularity growing up, her relative obscurity, and the potential effects of alcohol consumption. Suddenly, Anya finally had a reason for why Clarke seemed so entirely off the mark, even if it still wasn't excusable. And really, if Lexa truly wanted her to spend time with Clarke, then she begrudgingly would, but Clarke would have to owe her for her openness, and Lexa would have a serious debt to pay. "You definitely saw me before, but yeah, your first time seeing me after I came out was the start of high school. You know, as a trans girl and all."

Clarke's eyes bugged out, a deep red blush tinting her cheeks as her hand fumbled to find her glass of milk.

Anya dug around in her bag and pulled out one of the gag gifts Lexa had given her long ago, pushing the big purple swirly straw across to Clarke. "So you don't spill any." She said dismissively when Clarke shot her a curious stare. "While it's ridiculous that I can mentally recall six times you were explicitly told I was a trans girl, and that information apparently never got digested despite most of the school knowing over the years, it doesn't let you off the hook. Especially since you can probably piece together my issues, or at least some."

"So...wait, you were A..."

"Don't say my deadname. It's a deadname for a reason. But yes, we were paired together in our grade four science fair, among other things." Anya interrupted, perhaps aggressively reminding Clarke of etiquette.

Thankfully, the other blonde looked appropriately remorseful. "Sorry. But...okay, that makes a lot more sense, now that I think about it. I always wondered where you came from, and where the kid I grew up around went. I guess I just never connected the dots. Okay." Clarke noted, nodding absently as the gears of her brain clearly worked away. "It was the Spirit Week stuff I did for the student council, right?"

Anya rolled her eyes, because even if those events sucked, they weren't as hurtful. Not directly, at least. "They were transphobic, the genderbend days, at least. But not what I had in mind." She clarified before taking a long sip of her juice, a satisfied moan escaping her at the perfect balance of tang and sweetness. "Anyways, we can deal with that later. What's going on with you? It has to be something big if Lexa assigned me to you."

"Assigned? You make it sound like a mission. She just said that you usually do your own thing at cons, and that if I could tag along that it would be good for me, since your schedules don't really ever align with our usual group's plans." Clarke explained, making the whole weekend roommate situation a lot clearer.

Lexa definitely owed her for this.

"And Lexa told me you were having troubles, and asked me to be nice to you." Anya added, earning a sharp laugh from her counterpart.

"Well, you knocked that out of the park last night and this morning. Way to make me feel welcome." Clarke groused, for decently good reason, even if Anya had been fully justified in her responses.

"Lexa wasn't explicit about it to me, and I have every reason not to be kind. But if she talked to you, and rigged the room draw, then this is all on purpose. I get that now." Anya explained, wishing her cousin and best friend had been clearer about it. She probably would have been a lot angrier before arrival, but she could have at least prepared. "Let me guess, you drove up on your own. You're avoiding your friends over some recent falling-out, but still want a decent weekend because you paid for a pass and the hotel months ago."

Clarke picked up the swirly straw, unwrapped it, and stuck it in her drink. "You're mostly right. Raven's been fast-tracked through high school, so she finished last year and started at MIT one year early. I heard she and Finn broke up because of the distance, Finn told me as much by the start of the school year, and after a little while we started dating. We kept it low-key, not wanting to attract much attention or drama in our senior year...or at least, that's what I thought. Turns out, he was still dating Raven long-distance, and would spend some weekends over in Boston with her."

Anya winced, knowing that couldn't have been an easy revelation to face. "When did you find out?"

"Two weeks ago. Finn's been trying to get me alone to talk to me, but I just...I can't. I can't be the other woman, and I can't hurt Raven, so I'm just trying to get as much distance as I can and pretend Finn and I never happened." Clarke explained before taking a sip of her chocolate milk, a hint of a smile reaching her lips.

"Good call. He's even more of a jackass than I thought he was, you didn't deserve that." Anya admitted, seriously hoping the jackass wouldn't show his face around her that weekend. It'd already been one of the few times she could escape him and his friends relatively easily even when they attended, so the notion of him seeking them out was irritating to say the least.

Clarke tilted her head to the side as she took another sip, eyes twinkling with some mixture of amusement and curiosity. "I think I could get used to this softer side of you."

Anya huffed and took a gulp of her juice. Like hell if she was being soft. Clarke had no idea what soft would look like on her. "Not soft. Just honest. You'll be hearing plenty from me later, but it's neither the time nor the place for that."

Clarke sat back in her booth, hands in the air in mock surrender. "Okay, you're not being soft. Though if this isn't it, I'm seriously curious how soft and cuddly you can get."

"It's such a shame you'll never know." Anya shot back, sending a glare Clarke's way, but it didn't even faze the other blonde's growing grin.

"Well, I have an inkling. You did hold my hand..."

"That was to get your attention..."

"...and you brushed your thumb across my knuckles..."

"...which was to save this table from becoming a spectacle since you were on the verge of..."

"...and you gave me a cute little swirly straw and ordered me comfort food."

Anya rolled her eyes, taking another long gulp of her juice. It was a tragedy that Clarke's annoying nature was keeping her from truly savoring the freshly squeezed delicious drink. "That's beside the point. I was hungry, so I put an order in, and you were on edge, so I didn't want you to spill your drink."

"I'm sure." Clarke noted cheerfully, and though her clear sarcasm and exhaustion was written across her face, there was some sincere joy there too, for whatever reason.

Anya's perfectly thought out verbal barb to Clarke's smug behaviour was put on indefinite hold as their waitress returned, setting their respective orders onto the table. "And here we go, is there anything else I can get you two?"

"Can we get another orange juice for the pretty girl?" Clarke requested, her shit-eating grin holding as the waitress laughed and scribbled a quick note on her pad, and try as she might, Anya could not keep her cheeks from burning. She'd always had a weakness to compliments from other women. "Thank you so much."

Anya waited until the waitress was gone before leaning closer, ignoring her delicious pancakes to glare at the girl across from her. "Flattery will get you nowhere."

"Good thing I don't have anywhere else to be. But it will apparently get blood rushing to your cheeks. That's interesting." Clarke mused as she thankfully turned her focus to her meal. "This looks like it'll put me into a food coma."

"I did tell you that you need to sleep." Anya snarked as she cut up and forked a chunk of delicious pancake.

"You can't just get me pregnant with a food baby and expect me to sleep, Anya." Clarke insisted with a laugh. Anya would have vocally disagreed were she not enjoying her delicious pancakes. She loved a lot of their options, but the apple crisp ones were honestly to die for.

Once she was finished savouring her bite, Anya pointed her fork at Clarke's plate. "Eat up. You can tell me I'm wrong when you're done."

Clarke let out a huff, her cocked eyebrow clearing sending the signal that she wasn't going to be undone by breakfast food. Still, when Clarke took a bite of her pancakes, eyes fluttering shut and a content moan rumbling in her throat, Anya knew there was hope yet.

Or, well, at least that she'd get to finish her meal without much more trouble.

#writewritewrite #OhNoThereIsOnlyOneBedWhatDo AU #clanya fanfiction #thedeadflag #long post

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amycathryn · 7 years

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Empathy 101

Mantis is My Hero

Caveat: Long read. It's less of a blog and more of an empathy course...

Not gonna lie. Mantis is da bomb.com. She is the first superhero on the big screen to have empathy as an actual superpower. If you don't know who Mantis is, and aren't as nerdy as I am, she's a prevalent character in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. I'm genuinely excited about her character for 2 reasons:

She has all of the abilities an advanced empath would have.

Her character is an inspiration for empaths.

As someone who's been empathic as long as I can remember, it's refreshing to see this ability interpreted as a superpower more than a curse. I myself have traversed the interwebs only to find articles mostly on how to tell if you're an empath, or how to cope with it—not really any on how to harness it or increase it.

Another reason I'm writing this is because clients and friends alike keep asking me how to deal with their empathy on an overwhelming scale. So, I'll not only go into detail on what empathy is, why we have it and the signs of empathy (along with external links), but also the pros, cons and empathic hygiene. I also fully intend to come out with an Empathy 201 blog/course at a later date that goes into more detail.

Ok. So What is Empathy?

Well, from my research there are two definitions. One is used by psychologists, while the other is more prevalent amongst spiritualists.

The psychological definition of empathy defines it in regards to emotional intelligence—The ability to understand what others are feeling within their own frame of reference. It's the ability to gauge the emotions of others and "step into their shoes" so to speak.

The spiritual definition of empathy is having the ability to sense other people's energy and take on the feelings of others as their own. An empath is often times energetically influenced by people around them (even if they can't see the person). They can take on another person's dreams, emotions, physical pains and even mood swings.

The difference between the two terms is their origins. The psychological term relates to how well one person can psychologically understand another on an emotional scale (which can be a learned trait), while the spiritualist term is more energetically-based (and is an inherent gift that manifests both naturally and with discipline). In this blog we'll go into detail on the spiritualist meaning of empathy.

Signs You're an Empath

Here's a list of the traits that most empaths have in common. If you find yourself saying "that sounds like me" to a majority of items on this list—then chances are, you're an empath too!

Caveat: I'm not a psychologist, psychiatrist or doctor. Some traits may also be signs of potential psychological issues. I leave that to your best judgement—so if you feel you may need help, then please seek out a professional.

You can feel the emotions of others regardless to proximity. They can be the person in the cubicle next to you or a good friend in another state.

You always have an uncanny way of telling how others really feel, even if they put on a mask. You can know how they're feeling even if you don't see them or hear them at all. You just know.

Being highly sensitive either physically, emotionally or both. This can include foods, music and having emotions that run deep. You may bruise easily or have odd skin allergies. You may have even been called "too sensitive" because of these feelings.

You love nature. Nature energizes you and you feel at home when out in nature—whether it's camping, walking in the park or simply just being outside.

Crowds drain you. Especially after being around people for a period of time.

You're introvert or lean introvert. This one is huge amongst empaths that I've seen. Usually the stronger the empath, the more introvert they are.

You crave solitude. Being alone recharges you and helps you focus both mentally and emotionally.

Animals love you and are drawn to you (because they can sense empaths).

People say you're a great listener and find it easy to talk to you.

You are drawn to help people through teaching, counseling or healing.

It pains you or discomforts you to come into physical contact with others.

You always know how the people closest to you feel.

You can tell when someone is lying to you.

You can tell if someone likes you or has feelings for you—and maybe even how much.

You get reliable gut "feelings" about people—you know good people from bad people when you see them.

Perfect strangers walk up to you and start talking to you about their personal problems.

You get odd mood swings when you're in crowds more so than when you're at home.

You get odd physical pains (such as headaches or cramps) in crowds more so than when you're at home.

You get stressed or anxious when you have to go to the grocery store or places where large groups of people congregate.

Anxiety attacks happen primarily around groups of people (versus when you're by yourself).

You drink or use other drugs because it "numbs" you—you know it "helps" you deal with being around people for extended periods of time. Caveat: Imbibing to cope with empathy is never the best solution. Please read the empathic hygiene section on healthier ways to do so.

You loathe liars. You can not only tell a liar when you see one, but you have a very low tolerance for them.

You actively remove yourself from drama and drama queens—because they drain you. You can tell a drama queen from a mile away and they always leave you feeling drained after you've been around them for any period of time.

You have weight issues. Many empaths have weight gain or weight problems because they're subconsciously creating a physical shield against others due to their hypersensitivity.

You're a people pleaser. It's hard to say "no" when you know it will bring someone else joy—even if it hurts you.

You have an unshakable drive to help/serve others.

When you're having a conversation with someone, especially if it is emotional or deep, you have a hard time discerning where your emotions stop and the other person's emotions begin.

You can always see both sides of the argument—which can even make arguing difficult because you forget your emotional position!

You're creative and a creative thinker.

People find it easy to tell you deep, personal stuff.

You make friends VERY easily, but don't feel close to a majority of them as it tends to mostly be the friend talking and you listening.

Music, inspiring quotes, movies and other creative outlets have a tendency to provoke deep emotions within you.

When you touch someone, you can feel their emotions with a deep and almost indescribable understanding.

You dislike horror movies or movies with excessive yelling or violence.

You tend to be drawn to people who are suffering. It's not uncommon to find empaths in a toxic or enabling relationship.

You avoid being "in the way" of others or asking for help because you're afraid you will be a burden to them.

What Being an Empath is Like

It's easy to forget the energetic aspect of life when you're in "work mode" or doing daily chores—but the empathy never really stops. Even I forget that sometimes. Touching people is difficult, and sometimes even painful—so big crowds (regardless of the amount of shielding I do) can be a challenge. I usually have to mentally prepare myself before going into a grocery store.

Perhaps the biggest issue in overcoming being an empath (for me at least) is finding friends that are energizing. Those are the people you can have deep, meaningful conversations with that spark your drive (versus the people who just want to talk about their problems). There are plenty of people out there who want the empath to be their friend—but only so the empath is there to listen more so than have a mutual relationship. Discovering friends with a deep zest for life that actually listen can be an absolute treasure of a find.

On the same token, it's a privilege to see the humanity in every individual I encounter. Just about everyone feels and has some goodness in their hearts. Being able to see that is a gift and a blessing. Helping people foster this spark through empathy is also a privilege. Touching someone and allowing that deep, emotional connection to establish with them, sometimes just for a moment, is also a gift—even if it's painful sometimes. The best way I can describe it is it restores my faith in humanity—being able to feel the humanity in another. Being momentarily a part of the humanity in another.

Pros & Cons

Pros of Being an Empath:

Here's a list of the positive attributes of being an empath. Please don't abuse your gifts. Karma can (and will) be a real bitch if you use them for selfish reasons. Always ask for a sign from God to use your empathic gifts with others, and if you are going to do heavy empathic work on an individual, their verbal consent is mandatory. Always remember: just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

Automatically knowing the emotional mood of a crowd (and have the ability to sway it).

You can easily gain the trust of people .

The ability to sense the types of connections people have with the the ones they're close to (both good and bad).

You can change the emotions of another person .

You can tell when someone is lying.

The ability to see into another person's emotional memories—what their memories are (especially the emotionally charged ones).

The ability to see into another person's home.

The ability to see into another person's soul—you can see the good, the bad and the potential in their hearts.

The ability to sense other psychics, intuitives, psionics and basically anyone who knows and is aware of energy on one level or another. More advanced empaths can sense the degree in which the abilities others have, and possibly even latent abilities.

The ability to change the emotional state of a crowd.

The ability to alleviate the pain in others by taking it on as your own (but don't do this—just send it into the ground).

Cons of Being an Empath:

Here's a list of the negative attributes of being an empath. I put these out there as a sort-of caveat for those wishing to increase their empathic gifts. Be prepared to deal with these issues on a higher level if you intend to increase your spiritual gifts.

Intimacy can be difficult—touching others is something an empath may subconsciously or actively try to avoid.

Feeling drained after being in a group for a long period of time.

Getting headaches, emotions or pains out of the blue that aren't the empath's own.

Being drained around certain individuals (usually energy vampires or bad people in general)

Going weeks without being alone for an extended period of time can increase anxiety, fatigue, mood swings and even depression in some highly sensitive empaths.

Knowing things about others that you don't want to know because they touched you (i.e., that they like you, hate you, or a bad childhood memory).

Having difficulty focusing in large crowds.

You get fed up with your lower-vibrating (energy) friends. Fast. This happens a lot with people who experienced an empathic "boost" later in life. You become much less tolerant to those around you that aren't your "true" friends.

A subconscious tendency to take on the moods of others. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage, depending on the circumstances. I put it under "cons" because if you're not consciously guarding yourself empathically, you can subconsciously be emotionally swayed by others very easily.

Empathic Hygiene

Just like brushing your teeth or putting on deodorant, empathy requires hygiene too. We try to remember to use deodorant and brush our teeth every day—so should that mentality flow into taking care of our energetic selves and our empathic gifts. To not only increase your abilities, but also be a healthy empath, you must know and practice these three things: Cutting Cords, Grounding, and Shielding.

Cutting Cords

Cutting cords is probably the most important thing any empath should know regarding their gifts. This is because cords are what make up empathy. Every time you come into contact with someone on any level, you are connecting to them via an invisible energetic tether. You do this (subconsciously) with everyone you are near, touch or even make eye contact with every day (to one degree or another). You will also tend to have very strong cord connections with the people you're closest to.

Cutting these cords is necessary for the well-being of every empath—otherwise, we'll be continuously bogged down with the emotional energy of all the people we have ever come into contact with. Often times we can have both good and bad cords connected to the same person—so it's helpful to understand the difference between the types of cords before cutting them (don't throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak).

An exercise I like to do on a daily basis is what I like to call the "guillotine" method. I imagine a guillotine "slicing away" at the negative cords I have with others. Works like a charm every time. Other methods include praying for Archangel Michael to clear the energy away, the "plucking" method (where you "pluck" the cord out of you), and just plain standing with your back to a tree. Trees are amazing about taking our negative energy and grounding it.

The trick is visualization. Visualization is key to understanding and utilizing energy—and empathy.

Grounding

Grounding is necessary to stay focused and also a great way to remove toxic energy from the body. It helps us center ourselves here in the physical world. I ground all the time—especially before and after every reading I do. Many religions and even some forms of martial arts (such as qigong exercises in Tai Chi) incorporate grounding into their practices.

Grounding, in summary, is connecting to Mother Earth—putting your energy in the earth, so to speak. Grounding is an excellent way to reduce stress, anxiety and helps bring balance to your body's energy. I'll often times recommend grounding to a client that I see is unfocused, afraid or "fuzzy brained". There are a number of ways to ground, but my favorite method is what I call the "roots" method.

The roots method goes like this: You can be sitting or standing—it doesn't matter. Just begin to imagine roots growing out of your feet and into the ground. You can be 30 stories high—just imagine your feet growing roots that sink into the ground. It may take time, especially if this is your first try, but you'll feel a "shift" when you've successfully grounded your energy.

Then imagine all of the negative energy in your body just falling into the ground. The earth can take whatever energy you throw at her—and she transmutes it into good energy.

Stones can also be an excellent method for grounding. Sometimes I'll recommend darker stones to clients who need assistance with grounding. Good stones for grounding include smokey quartz, black tourmaline, hematite, nuumite, shungite and obsidian. Darker brown/black stones in general tend to be great for grounding, protection, and even transmuting negative energy into positive energy. If you're interested in using stones to assist in grounding, I would recommend going to your local metaphysical shop and picking up a few of the aforementioned stones and see what resonates with you. One of them will just "feel right" when you hold it.

And finally, another excellent way to ground is to take a salt bath. Salt baths rock and can become highly addictive! I recommend this to a majority of my empathic clients. It's excellent for extracting toxic energy and calming the mind. I do this probably about twice a month. It's a great way to "reset" the energetic body if you're feeling tired or drained. Not to mention, it helps with softening the skin and muscle aches if you use epsom salts. The only down side is you'll probably need to clean out your bathtub first.

Shielding

Shielding, simply put, is an energetic term for blocking the energy of others. It's a great way to protect yourself, much like you protect your feet by wearing shoes when you go outside. It acts as a barrier against the "raw" emotions of others.

There are probably a thousand methods to shield—ranging from simple to advanced. For the sake of this blog/course (being a "101" blog/course) I'll keep it simple. I may write on the more advanced ways to shield at a later date.

Shielding, as with other ways to harness energy (empathic or otherwise) requires "feeling" and visualization. A great method of shielding I recommend for clients is the "Glenda the Good Witch" bubble. If you've seen the Wizard of Oz, you probably remember the scene where Glenda the Good Witch in all of her splendor floated down to the good citizens of Munchkin Land in a beautiful rainbow bubble.

Well, like Glenda, imagine yourself in this beautiful rainbow bubble—filled with light and peace. Imagine it surrounding you from front to back, head to toe. Visualize it growing a thick, impermeable shell—and tell it to last all day. I recommend shielding every day–especially if you will be around other people. This shield will help keep you from establishing unnecessary or unwanted empathic cords with others and vice versa.

When you shield (and do so often) you'll notice an improvement in your energy and ability to be around others for longer periods of time without growing tired quickly.

Increasing Your Empathy

So after all that reading you still want to increase your empathy, eh?

Well, there are several methods to do so. The first being meditation. Yeah, I know. None of us really have the time for that. But we make time for the things we want, and meditation is the best way to increase your abilities overall. This is because meditation helps you become more aware of your energy and sense it better because it forces you to inflect.

Porcupines.

Yes, porcupines. I see empathy and the empathic abilities of others as porcupines. It's like a thousand tendrils spilling out of a person—with many of them connecting to the tendrils of another. Visualize your tendrils—your porcupine needles—growing. If that is difficult, inflect on your relationships with others. watch how that shifts your mentality and thought patterns. This is what empathy feels like. It's that shift because you're "honing" in on that person. You can even practice with a friend that's interested in increasing their empathy as well. Focus on connecting to each other and notice the shift. That's the energetic shift of empathy. Just be sure to always cut the cord after you're done with the exercise.

Another method is to work with a friend and guess how they're feeling without looking at their face or body language. Try standing with your back to them and feel what their emotions are. Then turn around and see. Take turns putting yourself into different emotional states (with your backs turned) and get a feel for their emotions.

In Conclusion

The key to increasing empathy isn't power or energy per se—it's discernment. It's the ability to keenly understand the energy around you, and how it works.

Just remember, with great power comes great responsibility. I strongly recommend reading my previous blog post on the ethics of being psychic.

Please use your superpowers for good. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me.

Good Luck!

#empathy #empathic #blog #spirituality #psychic #intuition #spiritual

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docholligay · 7 years

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Check and Balances

@katrani, one of my Patrons, commissioned, “Neo Queen Serenity doing her taxes” as a fic from me this month, on my Patreon. AS YOU MIGHT IMAGINE, THIS WAS A TRIP TO WRITE, and I hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much for sponsoring me and helping me out, it means so much!

She looked at the form quizzically and turned back to her book, ‘Taxes for Dummies: One World Government Edition,’ flipping through the pages. She had thought, as she had picked up the book, that any old person could do it. She’d told Ami to make the rules as simple as she could while still being fair. And yet, much to her dismay, there were still a thousand questions, some of which struck her as moral more than anything. When she visited Mako in South America, was it for diplomacy, or to try some of her new cakes? Were the medals she had designed for each of her Senshi really a necessary cost, seeing as she’d never award them to anyone else? Could the cost of letting each girl know how special she was be deducted?

These were the things that haunted a Serenity who was still more Usagi than anything, and she looked up at the girl who would one day be Neo-Mars, but, for now, was still fairly firmly Rei Hino, and posed a question.

“Do you think I can deduct the cost of Haruka’s new sword?” She stuck a pen in her mouth and drew her nose to the form. “I fink that’s a bushnish expensh.”

“Serenity, don’t talk with your mouth full.” Rei looked back at her. “Also I don’t think you can expense that much bedazzling. Since she’s a kept woman now. And Michiru was never poor to start with. And Haruka didn’t need a new sword. For any reason.”

She removed the pen. “She’s still one of my guardians.” She crossed her arms and whined piteously. “And she works hard, Rei!”

And it was true, all of them were, though it mostly seemed a diplomatic post now. Each senshi had received command of a continent, after the globe had fallen under Serenity’s hand, but Haruka had chosen to stay with Michiru instead, and live out the life she had dreamed of.

Rei who was also Mars rolled her eyes. “Your dedicated Guardian is opening up a Uranus World Chicken in the Capitol next month.”

“I know!” There was Usagi, in the pep and excitement of her voice. “I’m cutting the ribbon at the opening ceremony! She’s going to name a new mustard after me! It’s got apples in it, so it’s sweet!”

Her chicken empire had spread far and wide, and Rei sometimes wondered if it was her own nearness to Serenity that was turning her into Mars, slowly—Haruka and Michiru rarely came by the palace, and, from what she could tell, they seemed as much Haruka and Michiru as ever, maybe more than they had been during the war, Haruka having relaxed into herself with the removal of the threat, Michiru’s smiles and laughter more genuine than she had known they could be.

Even Usagi, newly minted as Serenity, had not been surprised at Haruka’s request to stay with Michiru. After the fighting had stopped, and, somehow, they had remained standing, all Haruka had wanted to do was disappear into the love of her wife. Michiru had very likely wanted the same thing, but accepted that diplomacy was very likely the one thing she could say she was truly born to, and so did not reject the call of duty, laid upon her again, as she accepted the keys to the ornate palace from her new Queen.

And Haruka was a success, it could be fairly said of her, of a thing she had built with her own two hands, and that pride had given her a sense of confidence that had calmed her.

Unless, of course, the subject was Seiya Kou, whose picture was still posted at every chicken outlet with a large x through it, denying her service worldwide. Haruka had made it a part of the training video.

“I think,” a coy voice came from the door, “you’re the benevolent dictator of a global government, and you can probably do what you want.” Mina strolled into the room and sat down at the table next to Rei. “Besides, aren’t you just…stealing from yourself?”

“I want to do this right!” She gave a little stomp that was decidedly unqueenly. “I have to follow the rules too.”

“No.” Rei and Mina said in perfect unison, then stealing a glance at each other, their eyes playful.

But she ignored them, and looked back at the book. “And it’s not FOR ME, it’s for my people. They depend on me. I have a lot of ideas for projects and stuff, you know, over the whole world! I’m actually working on one with Haruka.” She crossed her arms indignantly and stared at her two guardians. .

Mina laughed, her nose crinkling in delight. “A worldwide push for terrible wardrobe options? FINE POLYESTERS OF THE WORLD, IN PATTERNS INSPIRED BY THE HUBRIS OF MAN”

Rei leaned forward, a grin on her face. “Yelling lessons for underprivileged children?”

“Oh, that’s a good one,” Mina chuckled, “I was gonna say a PSA on how to run straight into danger.”

Serenity put her hands on her hips and scowled at them both. “Um, a thing to feed hungry teenagers, actually.” Her annoyance dissipated, and she gave a puzzled look. “You two have started talking alike lately, did you know that?”

Mina grinned. “Sexual trans—“

Rei stomped on her foot aggressively, and sputtered out some explanation. “We’re working on a program together!”

“Oh really?”Her eyes were wide with excitement. “About what?” She picked up her book. “I know there has to be something here where we can get you a break! You two are so smart, I’m sure it’ll be great work.” She clutched her book tightly, and stared at both of them. “So what’s the program?’

“Um,” Rei gestured into the air, “It’s uh, Mina, you’re the one who came up with it, you should really explain it.”

Many who knew Rei would have been tipped off at the utterly inconceivable act of her giving another human being the floor, but Usagi was trusting of everyone, to say nothing of the boundless latitude she gave Rei personally, and so this passed without a second thought.

“Gee, thanks, Reinaldo,” Mina looked up at Serenity, her mind working overtime, “It’s a... fitness program, you know how into training I always was, back when we were soldiers.”

Serenity looked over at Rei, puzzled.

Rei wanted to argue about how the application of money toward fitness instead of things like clothing and housing for the poor was an example of the rich’s desire to keep the underclass a usable commodity for labor, but that would expose the fact that their greatest project had mostly been licking champagne off of each other’s bodies last week, which sounded rather bourgeoisie as she considered it, and so she simply said:

“I mean what, fitness isn’t good??” And scowled at Serenity, hoping the effect came across as genuine.

“No,” Serenity clapped her hands together in delight, twirling around “I think it’s wonderful! You’re so generous, Rei!”

Mina leaned over toward Rei, a coy smile on her face. “If only she knew how generous you could really be, given the right--”

Rei pushed her off the chair and onto the floor.

“Oh, Mina!” Serenity moved over to her. “Are you okay?” She reached out a hand to help her off the floor.

Mina dusted herself off. “It’s fine I was just...trying a new move,” she winked to Rei, “That didn’t quite work.”

Rei crossed her arms and fumed as Serenity whirled back to her stack of forms.

“Now I have to be sure to do this right.” She smiled up at Rei and Mina. “So you can keep working on your project.”

Mina leaned forward, grinning slyly. “Good. We all know I’m into...civic engagement.”

Rei sighed heavily and rolled her eyes, looking away from Mina, trying not to smile, and losing, a touch, as a smirk touched the edge of her mouth.

Serenity sat down at her table. “I’m so proud of how much work everyone’s done since we took over.” It was an odd choice of words, took over, as if it had simply been handed to her--which, in a way, was not incorrect, but also there had not been much room for debate as the world lay flattened, Usagi and her soldiers the sole infrastructure left.

In any case, she had managed as best she could, and she trusted her Senshi to be fair, and to be kind, and from what she understood to be the relative peace and safety of the globe, it seemed as if her trust had not been mislaid.

Mina cocked her chair back. “What about the ball you’re throwing?”

“Oh, I would never deduct that!” Serenity looked shocked, but then burst into a grin. “That’s for me! There’ll be a huge band, and I told everyone to get the most beautiful gowns they could find--except Haruka,” she gestured to Rei and Mina as if they might have been surprised by this revelation, despite having known Haruka for years, “She’ll probably want to wear a suit, but she’ll look really handsome, don’t worry,” Her eyes glowed with excitement. “It feels like it’s been so long since we were all together, and I just, “her lip waggled a bit, “Miss everyone. Like we used to be.”

Everyone in formal ball attire amidst what would surely be a stunning display of small, elegantly presented cakes and a bowl of cocktail shrimp that would please a beluga whale, was not precisely how they used to be, Elegant but lacking in the warmth of games of Super Smash Brothers, Haruka accusing Mina of cheating, boxes of pizza spread out in front of them. But Rei did not feel it important to bring this up, as Serenity pored over the book.

There was a loving desperation in the way Neo Queen Serenity did it, a deep desire to give whatever she could, whether it mattered or not in a larger sense. She felt the burden of queenliness extraordinarily, even somewhat removed from the day to day happenings of her extended kingdom.

She twirled the pen in her hand thoughtfully, her eyes glazed over as she looked at the mountain of forms in front of her. It all seemed so overwhelming, and the strain of it showed in her face. Each expense had to be carefully thought of, each stream of income accounted for. How could she expect her people to respect her, if she did not respect them?

“I just want to do this right.” It could have stood for taxes, it could have stood for ruling, it could have stood for her ribbon-cutting at at Haruka’s new chicken restaurant, and all of those thoughts were laid together in that one simple statement.

The girl who would become Mars, but, for now, still worried about Usagi and called herself Rei, pulled herself up and walked over to Serenity, who she still thought of as Usagi.

“You’re doing fine.” She gestured broadly over the spread out documents. “You’re...you,” said, said, not quite able to bring herself to say the word Queen, even now, “ You could always give more money later, if you wanted.”

“And take it from whereever you wanted!” Mina piped up, in her helpful unhelpful way.

Serenity bit her bottom lip, still considering her options.

“I know!” A sudden joy came to Serenity’s face, an answer revealed before her. “I’ll ask Ami to do them! She’s so smart, and she’s always fair, she’ll know just what to do.”

Mina couldn’t help but think that The Territory of Europe would be a little light in the purse this year, and grinned

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briangroth27 · 7 years

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Arrow Season 5 Review

Full Spoilers…

This year was—despite the uncomfortable and ill-defined reveal that Oliver (Stephen Amell) liked killing—the show's return to the heights of Season 2, building on the progress Season 4 made coming back from the low point of Season 3 (which I still liked, but was definitely lacking).

Oliver Queen/Green Arrow I was a little disappointed Ollie didn’t initially use his position as mayor to affect more change in the city (particularly with the Series Sell stating he’s trying to fix the city as a mayor and a vigilante), but it made sense given his insistence on being Green Arrow first. That said, I loved the baby steps we saw Oliver taking towards his more socially conscious and liberal side from the comics! Of all superheroes, Ollie’s probably the proudest Social Justice Warrior (to the point that it’s a defining characteristic) and I’m hoping to see Arrow’s Oliver evolve in that direction too. Oliver sponsoring things like a free doctor day, holding an art fair, and fighting for low-income housing were sparks of the iconic Green Arrow that I can’t wait to see ignite in the coming season. Ollie’s flashback murder of Justin Claybourne (Garwin Sanford) was because the businessman greedily raised the price of medicine too; even if what Chase’s (Josh Segarra) father was doing wasn’t necessarily illegal, Ollie taking issue with it felt like classic Green Arrow. Season 5 also had Oliver questioning the system and its effectiveness, and I liked that he was clearly affected by a gang leader’s story of being made into a criminal because of his prison time. I hope he continues to question how things work from the top down (particularly as his Green Arrow patrols allow him to experience the city from the ground up as well) and whether or not they should continue working that way. While a mayor doesn’t have the power to change laws that, say, a governor would, I think there’s great potential for drama in Ollie’s mayoral duties in the coming year, as we saw in a few subplots this season. They can pile on roadblocks by frustrating him with companies and billionaires who don’t want to shell out money for “nothing,” who think the poor just aren’t doing enough for themselves—so why should they get handouts?—or who simply don’t want to change, forcing Ollie to fight enemies he can’t shoot. To me, Oliver’s issues with getting things done in the political realm are just as interesting as his time as Green Arrow, so I hope the writers keep mining that area of his life for all its worth.

A major turning point for Ollie’s pivot towards his comic self was in “Spectre of the Gun,” wherein the show took on the gun issue. At first, I was a little annoyed that everyone but Ollie had an opinion on the matter, but then I realized watching him forced into forming one for the first time was much better. Even if Amell's Ollie landed more moderate than comics Ollie on the gun issue (which makes sense given both his lethal vigilante past and his position as a mayor who needs to build bipartisan bridges), I love that he's finally taken a large stride in that direction. His visible discomfort with having to come to a decision in front of the press—immediately after giving a statement that was sincere yet extremely full of cliché politician talking points—was great acting on Amell's part and an excellent character turning point (as were his conversations with Quentin and Thea). I also liked that he didn’t have all the answers and argued for honest discussion, hopefully sparking one among the audience as well as the citizens of Star City. I look forward to seeing more of this type of growth next season!

There were several times over this season I worried Oliver’s tenure as mayor would be cut short, because it seems like there’s such dramatic potential with that role that would be missed if he were removed from office for being Green Arrow or his Bratva ties. He had Walter Steele (Colin Salmon) helping him run Queen Consolidated for much of the first two seasons, but this is Oliver’s first subplot that’s really given him problems that only he can solve as Oliver. While I thought Star City would be OK with Ollie if he admitted he was Green Arrow to explain his actions (that increasingly seemed like the only way out of Prometheus’ game), I was surprised and liked that it was Green Arrow who was vilified by Ollie rather than Ollie’s administration being taken down. That created some great pressure on Team Arrow as Ollie was continually forced to put a larger and larger target on his own back. It was a clever way to play his dual roles against each other, physicalizing his emotional schism from the end of Season 4 and his belief that the Hood was the outlet for the “monster” he’d become during his five years away. With the destruction of Lian Yu, I feel like these two halves of his persona will begin to converge in a healthier whole. I still think a public reveal of Oliver’s identity is looming in the near future and I’d be interested to see how that goes if the writers pull the trigger. I think it’d be kinda funny if this gruff version of Green Arrow ended up becoming something like the nearly maskless, far friendlier Silver Age version (though they probably wouldn’t go as far as this hahaha).

I loved that Ollie was so rough on his new recruits because he didn’t want them to get hurt; there are many times I’ve seen the gruff leader being ridiculously mean to trainees and being vindicated because it “made them tougher,” but this was one of the few times I really believed the leader had the team’s best interests at heart. This was certainly helped by Oliver learning how to trust his new team as well; the development wasn’t one-sided. At the same time, it was amusing that Ollie’s odd tradition of shooting his partners continued, though. Haha! One area I think the show could’ve improved Ollie’s training lessons was during the Invasion Crossover when he was handling the Justice League’s preparation to fight the Dominators. Ollie had the heroes attacking Kara (Melissa Benoist) over and over again without teaching them to adapt to her powers or look for weaknesses. It seemed like we could’ve gotten a little more training from him than just “go again.” Unfortunately, Oliver’s trust in his friends led him to make some substantial mistakes this year, like believing Anatoly (David Nykl) was still working for the greater good, but a mistake I can’t back up was his awful plan to break Diggle (David Ramsey) out of prison. It seemed like they didn’t even try to exonerate Dig legally, so it felt like an unnecessary risk. I liked Oliver’s conversation with Dig in his cell and his commitment to his friends, but Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) was totally right about the life of a fugitive being a nearly equally bad path for Dig. That episode also featured one of the few flashbacks this year I disagreed with; it seemed imply Dig should accept this and trust Ollie just because “his brother” said so. That said, Ollie was getting enough pushback from the rest of Team Arrow—and Dig himself—to cast doubt on his opinion, so it didn’t feel like the show as a whole was saying “Ollie’s right just because he’s the lead.” Ollie did end up being right about needing Diggle back (and Felicity was eventually able to exonerate him with Helix’s help) and I get that he was going with his heart rather than his head, but the way the episode played out it seemed like he didn’t think anything through.

Another major mistake Ollie made this year, killing Billy Malone (Tyler Ritter), could’ve created a lot of friction between Team Arrow but I’m glad it actually brought them together. Everyone rallying around Ollie instead of blaming him for what was obviously an accident made sense and spoke to the bond they’d built. Amell was great in those scenes (as was Rickards) and it was good to see Ollie so completely shaken. His need to find redemption through Laurel’s (Katie Cassidy) “return” in the form of Black Siren and later, talking Dinah (Juliana Harkavy) down from her vendetta, were great story beats. The destiny stuff surrounding Dinah was a little weird at first, particularly as Ollie was so literal in replacing Laurel as Canary, but the reveal of “Tina’s” real name tied it together for me. Destiny isn’t a common topic for Oliver to talk about and I’d be interested to see more of what he thinks of it versus his ability to make his own fate, because it certainly seems like he believes people can choose to change for the better. After all, he did and continues to do so; that drive for self-improvement is one of my favorite heroic qualities of Green Arrow—who can’t relate to trying to fix your mistakes and become a better person?—and I love that it’s been an ongoing struggle on this show. I’m always a fan of optimistic Ollie and I love that he's become that person more and more over the past two seasons. I also really like Ollie trying to save people’s souls and being the beacon of hope on the team, even if he thinks it’s too late for himself. Anatoly calling him a sin-eater—a member of a community in some cultures who takes the sins of others onto himself—was a neat take on that idea, as was Ollie making Green Arrow a criminal and doing insane, illegal things like breaking Diggle out of prison (and, in hindsight, his willingness to kill criminals, taking that sin on himself so others will be spared). That said, once the core trio was reunited, I loved how well they supported each other. It's a little sad that the baseline of "hope in other people and the strength found in friendship" on the CW super shows feels like a throwback to the Silver Age instead of something that's a given in modern superhero stories. I’m glad these shows remember that, no matter how dark they get.

At the beginning of the year, I didn’t have a problem with Ollie killing when absolutely necessary and not having a schism about it. My opinion was, let Barry (Grant Gustin) be the guy who won't let anyone die while Ollie tries not to, but sometimes must. I thought Ollie re-embracing killing when it was the only option would make future team-ups interesting given the heroes’ differing moral stances. It’d be an intriguing line to walk: when does he absolutely have to kill, how does he make that distinction, and what gives him the right? That seemed to be where Ollie was going at first: his talk with Diggle about growing early on was great and it seemed like his killing had settled into a last resort that wasn’t ruining Ollie, even if he thought he was stuck in that mindset. I agreed with Anatoly about Talia (Lexa Doig) being wrong about the “monster” within Ollie. Then I saw how deep Ollie’s killing problem really was. I liked that Prometheus forced Ollie to see the truth about himself—that was a great way to resolve his schism from the end of Season 4—but I didn’t like the answer we got about Oliver. My biggest difficulty with the season was the revelation that Oliver liked killing, so I was glad the writers started walking it back almost immediately with doubts and denials raised by Ollie’s friends. Stephen Amell’s performance was stellar as Chase tortured Ollie and then completely broke him, but I couldn’t get behind rooting for a superhero who enjoyed murder, at least not with that being the only information we were given. I would’ve hated it if they went with him being a vigilante as a way to scratch some psychotic itch to kill (which was my first impression), because that wasn’t the person we’d been following (not to mention, a serial killer is not a hero). Ollie was clearly shaken by the idea he’d become a monster when Talia gave him a way to sequester it, so even though Ollie thought he’d tainted his heroic crusade because of this impulse, I don’t think they came close to implying he was a serial killer or something; he certainly cared and was troubled that he liked it. Amell phrased it as "the Oliver we met in Season 1" that took a little pleasure in snapping that guy's neck, so he’s been growing away from that mindset since day one, somewhat resolving the “this is not the man we’ve been following” problem. It’s also apparent he's struggled with the ease and efficiency of killing criminals rather than letting them live over seasons 2-5 (no recovery on this show is ever easy or wrapped up in 1-3 episodes). Oliver’s comment years ago about the island “scraping away everything except who he really was” was an early hint he’d become this monster: Lian Yu did scrape away the spoiled rich brat he was to reveal a better, more selfless man, but it also revealed the monster within him.

My major problem with this reveal comes down to how undefined it is. I really wish they had explicitly told us what the “pleasure” he took in killing was. Did he just like killing, or did he like knowing that he’s permanently made the world a little safer by eliminating a criminal? If the latter, I’m willing to go with it (especially since his arc has taken him away from that sort of thinking). If it was meant to be the former, I don’t think that gels with what we’ve seen over the last five years. I believe his “monster” is the acceptance that he’d do whatever it took to stop criminals and the fact that he didn’t feel bad about getting rid of them, and it’s his horror that killing wasn’t ever off the table—since that is “not the man his father raised” and possibly because that makes him as bad as the people he kills—that made him fear it so much he needed to bury it in the Hood.

But how does this work with his growing position as the light on Team Arrow; the guy who believes people can be better? I think that belief was reignited by meeting people like Diggle and Felicity and losing people like Tommy (Colin Donnell). As he got back into the world and became more hopeful, he was able to push that killer instinct further and further into the vigilante he’d become (eventually exacerbating his schism when he killed again), while Oliver Queen started to hope that redemption really was possible. In a way, the Hood/Arrow/Green Arrow was Ollie's way of saving and bettering himself by separating from his darkness. That guilt (and if we’re being honest, denial) of what he’d allowed the Green Arrow to be fueled by is part and parcel of his being a sin-eater: he takes the blame for what he’s done and everything his loved ones do, so they don’t have to shoulder it (even though no one asked him to). He’ll gladly damn his soul by killing, so others are protected and don’t have to. Right down to the core origin of a rich spoiled brat learning to fend for himself on an island before coming home and fighting for those who can’t fend for themselves, Green Arrow has always been a character built on personal redemption, betterment, and opening one’s eyes to the needs of the people around them. On Arrow, Ollie took on that arc, but the problem is he repaired and rebuilt himself by denying the pleasure he took in killing criminals and deluding himself into thinking he could contain it instead of facing it head-on. Of course burying ten years’ worth of guilt was going to eventually make him snap, so when Chase forced the confession out of him, Oliver’s emotional destruction was inevitable.

Oliver seemed truly broken by this revelation in the episodes that followed, leading to some awful mistakes. Not only did the drug thefts he allowed Anatoly to pull endanger jobs (and once Ollie knew what was happening, they allowed the creation of a new street drug), but several cops could’ve been killed by Anatoly and the Bratva going after Chase’s protective detail in the process of trying to take him out. That was a major lapse in judgment caused by desperation and I had no idea how they were going to bring Ollie around and redeem him for that. So, thank goodness for Diggle! I was pleasantly surprised his largely standalone prison arc emotionally connected to the rest of the season and that experience with guilt allowed him to get through to Oliver. Later, Felicity was able to pick up where Diggle left off and finally get Ollie to back off of his “I liked killing” stance, and those moments showcased some excellent acting from Amell, Ramsay, and Rickards. As much as I like Oliver being the beacon of hope on Team Arrow, I’m glad that the team is there to back him up as well; Ollie leaning on his team to bring him back from the edge was great. That Anatoly said he went evil because Ollie left felt manipulative in a “don’t blame me, this is all somehow your fault” kind of way, but perhaps it was a first step to Oliver believing he’s a good influence on people instead of a curse. Ollie’s continued conflict over the correct course of action when fighting crime and how far is too far when fighting crime was great stuff (and exactly what I’d hoped for from an “Ollie still kills” arc). I absolutely don’t believe Oliver’s crusade to save his city was just an excuse to murder people or that he went out of his way to kill, so I was glad they never implied Ollie was a serial killer and—while it wasn’t clearly defined—they landed the “likes killing” idea on something close to the “Ollie’s glad to make the world safer/will do whatever it takes for the greater good” outlook I posited earlier. Amell's acting has always been great, but the scenes where he nearly killed Chase on Lian Yu and their final showdown on the boat with William (Jack Moore) were outstanding! Oliver’s agony in fighting through his killer instinct to do things a better way was intense! All of the talk about who Ollie is, what he believes in, the moral schism, his darkness, etc. made this season the final stretch of his 10-year origin story and a true close to this chapter of the show. I think (and hope) this struggle is over now that he’s put his past behind him (and it’s literally been destroyed), but I left this arc thinking it was a great inner fight for Oliver that will leave him stronger as he rebuilds himself. I'm guessing next season is going to show us a completely different Oliver Queen.

In terms of Oliver’s love life, I really liked that Ollie and Felicity found a way to be friends and to support each other in their relationships. Back when Felicity was dating Ray (Brandon Routh), I never believed Ollie was supportive of it. I did believe he supported her relationship with Billy. While I didn’t need Oliver and Susan Williams (Carly Pope) to date, their relationship left me ambivalent rather than hating it. Digging into Oliver’s past didn’t feel malicious—just like she was doing her job—so I didn’t dislike her, but I do prefer Ollie and Felicity together and agreed with a comment I saw on Twitter that he should’ve been opening up to his friend Felicity rather than Susan in an attempt to strengthen their relationship. When Ollie and Felicity were trapped in the Arrow Cave, their romantic issues being forced to the surface felt organic and cathartic. I like Ollie and Laurel together in the comics, but I’ve never needed to see them together on the show: to me it’s always felt more like something that’s expected because of comic canon than something I was really rooting for. Besides Olicity, the only relationship Ollie’s been in that I was invested in was with Sara (Caity Lotz), one of many reasons why she’s THE iconic Black Canary for me even if she never held the full title. So, I’m glad it looks like Ollie and Felicity could be getting back together (assuming she survived Lian Yu). Regardless of who he ends up with, happy Ollie is great to see and I hope we get much more of it now that his past has been settled!

Speaking of his past, I was excited to learn how Ollie became a Bratva Captain in the flashbacks and I wasn’t disappointed! Anatoly’s return was more than welcome and Dolph Lundgren was great as the intimidating final obstacle for young Ollie. Ollie’s Bratva induction and training paralleled his present-day handling of the new Team Arrow recruits well. I didn’t think they needed to reveal that the other Bratva candidates who were executed for failing to ring the bell were criminals, but I can see how young Ollie would’ve needed that reassurance. That also continued Waller’s (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) teachings about killing criminals, so it was a nice connection to his methods in Season 1, his training in Season 3, and as it turned out, the rest of Season 5. Talia pushing Ollie not only towards his vigilantism but to forming his Arrow persona was a cool subplot I didn’t see coming at all. I would’ve liked to see them on a few more adventures before the flashbacks ended, because it felt like Ollie’s Bratva adventure could end satisfactorily before the season did, but what we got was solid. Talia giving Ollie what would become his Series Sell “something else” talk was a cool moment, which made me realize we’d actually been watching three Olivers in Season 1: the “monster” he’d become after the island scraped everything else away (relegated to the Hood), the Oliver he wanted to be (when he was at home), and the fake playboy Ollie he’d been before the island. It was also cool that even in Ollie's head, the love of his friends and family brought him back to "life" five years ago, beating out the part of him that said he was awful. It was awesome to see just how narrowly Ollie got the fire lit for his rescue from Lian Yu, and his “stranded for five years” disguise—provided by Anatoly—was a nice resolution to the discrepancy between how he looked in the flashbacks and how we met him in the pilot. It was quite cool that even his exit from Lian Yu was part of his plan to save his city. The reason behind the Hood suit being character-based was a neat way for Ollie to sequester his monster so he could have a life while doing what he had to. I do wish more of the details of the Arrow persona were his idea, but since he needed the Hood, Talia’s advice didn’t feel like arbitrary instructions on how to be a hero just for the sake of getting him to his destiny. Furthermore, his struggle with the right way to do things is entirely his own. The one area I think the flashbacks could’ve correlated to the present a bit better was that Ollie’s time in the Bratva could’ve given him first-hand experience of the criminal perspective, which could’ve informed how he dealt with crime and understood criminals as mayor (and as Green Arrow).

John Diggle/Spartan For a large part of the beginning of the season, I thought Diggle’s plot was the weak link. I wanted a bigger connection from Diggle’s court martial to the rest of the show and hoped it would amount to more than just a reason for John to return to Star City. That said, General Walker’s (Gary Chalk) motive for stealing a nuke, that the world is a crazy place now—which resulted in John being framed for murder—worked for me. Walker’s reasoning was simple and understandable in its fear and opportunistic greed. I totally believed Deadshot (Michael Rowe) was alive when they revealed Diggle’s “new cellmate.” That was truly surprising and exciting, so even though he was still dead, linking Dig’s turmoil over killing his brother (Eugene Byrd) to his hatred of Deadshot was genius. It made Diggle’s subplot so much more interesting than I initially thought it would be. Diggle being the Green Arrow in the Dominator’s perfect world instead of being happy with Lyla (Audrey Marie Anderson) and John, Jr. (Keon Boateng) was an unexpected yet telling choice. I think it spoke to what he told Barry (Grant Gustin) in the Legends portion of the crossover: “the harder part is forgiving yourself.” As I saw pointed out elsewhere, it’s sad that even in a perfect world he lived this life of pain and loneliness, and I think it’s because he still believed he needed to atone for killing Andy. Since we later found out Ollie used the Arrow persona to lock away his monster, I wonder if the Dominators scanned that in Oliver’s mind and that’s why they gave Diggle the vigilante role: it took his guilt and allowed him to have a happy life outside the hood; as close to perfect as Dig’s guilt would let him get (even if he didn’t initially believe he’d killed Andy in the real world; part of the Dominator’s delusion, I assume). Though that line wasn’t drawn explicitly on the show, I think there’s a connection there. Diggle also got to fight and defeat his demon to escape the Dominator’s fantasy world in the form of one of Darhk’s (Neil McDonough) Ghost soldiers (Andy’s role in Season 4).

Despite the shortsightedness of Ollie breaking Dig out of prison, it was good to have John back in Star City and on Team Arrow. I liked that they didn’t ignore the reality of Dig being a fugitive in hiding (like they ignored Diggle and Thea (Willa Holland) admitting to a drug deal in court last year). Dig counseling Rene (Rick Gonzalez) worked well, but John’s trial was a little tedious. It felt like we’d already been through it earlier in the season and didn’t seem like it connected to anything else happening concurrently. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t feel like it was going anywhere. When his army plot tied back to Russia and the Bratva, his subplot was redeemed for me. Additionally, the theme of forgiving yourself for your past vs. torturing yourself—putting yourself in a literal or figurative prison to punish yourself—made a lot of sense with what everyone else, particularly Ollie, was going through this year. I liked those parallels and it was great to have Diggle back on the team fighting to help Ollie see the good in himself and in his actions; I just wish his prison plot had moved a little more quickly. His brotherly relationship with Oliver has always been a high point of the show for me, so it was great to see them reunited and leaning on each other to stay in the light.

John and Lyla fighting over the legality of her actions as head of ARGUS and his as a member of Team Arrow was a great note to hit and a believable source of drama. It felt like a worthy conversation to have on a superhero show: what are the legal limits for a vigilante, and how is taking the law into your own hands any different from the government taking extreme measures to protect people? I also liked that this rock-solid couple’s issues came from a source like this rather than a love triangle (which Arrow has almost always made less important than the business of saving people) or something similar. The other major challenge for their family (outside of John’s fugitive status, of course)—the Flashpoint retcon of Baby Sara becoming Baby John, Jr.—certainly got a reaction from John in the Invasion Crossover, but I would’ve liked to see more of what Lyla thought of it beyond her not trusting Barry when she appeared on Flash. Regardless, I hope Diggle and Lyla get to meet Connor Hawke (Joseph David-Jones) at some point, particularly as his potential future is much more likely now that baby Sara was written out of the timeline. I don’t want “Star City 2046” to come true completely, but I would like to see Connor/John Jr. again (and with Season 6’s theme being “family,” now would be a great time!).

Felicity Smoak/Overwatch I was shocked that the official reason for Felicity redirecting the missile from Monument Point to Havenrock really did boil down to population numbers, and that Felicity did choose to kill an entire city because it was less populated. I thought she just redirected it away from Monument Point and it happened to hit Havenrock due to the time left in the flight path…but if she had population information and consciously made that decision, then that was a major character moment that needed to be addressed more than it was. That's more interesting than Havenrock getting hit by accident from a character perspective, but it feels like it was so underplayed by everyone. While her confession to Rory (Joe Dinicol) about it seemed like it would spur more exploration of what she was going through, his understanding and forgiveness undermined the development of that plot a bit. At this point, I don’t think we’ll see much more of the effects that decision had on her, which is a shame and a massive missed opportunity. I liked that Rory and Felicity were going to watch each other’s backs to fend off their darker sides, but I wish we’d gotten to see more of that dynamic than a few meaningful conversations.

That said…I kinda like dark Felicity. While inner darkness twists Thea and blocks Ollie from becoming the hero he wants to be, Felicity seems more capable of pointing hers at a target and using it for the greater good. Gleefully hacking the NSA and blackmailing criminals were fun moments with her. Getting in deep with Helix was an interesting plot and I was definitely down to see how morally grey she’d get. Felicity walked that line between light and dark fairly consistently this season, which explains why she was able to fall to darkness right in front of everyone without anyone but Curtis (Echo Kellum) seeming to notice for so long. Helping Thea discredit Susan with lies was very wrong, so I was glad Felicity undid it and I liked Dig and Curtis’ attempts to bring her back to the light. Even still, I knew Helix would be bad news eventually and wasn’t convinced Felicity would side against them this year. In fact, I was surprised they burned her in the end.

Felicity got a lot of funny and insightful lines throughout the season and I enjoyed her sparring with Ollie over the right way to lead Team Arrow and how best to fight crime. Felicity’s increasingly ridiculous lies to Billy were a fun callback to Oliver’s ludicrous excuses to her in Season 1 (even if at least once, she could’ve just said she found evidence at the scene of one of Oliver’s events), but they began to strain his credibility as a detective. I also wish we’d gotten a stronger sense of why Felicity and Billy worked as a couple. Doing so would’ve made his loss matter more to me instead of just relying on Amell and Rickards’ truly excellent reactions to his death. Still, I’m glad she and Oliver eventually found their way back to each other, both as friends and potentially as a couple. Their conflict and bonding while trapped in the Arrow Cave made for a great episode! I’m glad the writers made use of Felicity’s paralysis when Chase trapped her and Oliver in the Arrow Cave; I had just been thinking it was like she’d never been paralyzed and then Chase came along to prove they remembered! On a side note, I’d still like more of her daily life; does she ever turn the chip off willingly? Does she ever stop for a moment to think about how that little chip is allowing her to walk? Does she fear its failure? Back to Ollie and Felicity, they seemed to get a lot out into the open in the Arrow Cave and if they hadn’t been trapped, I wouldn’t have been surprised if their argument had driven them apart for a very long time. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. The one thing I didn’t agree with was Felicity understanding why Ollie didn’t tell her about William when they were together. Yes, he made a promise to Samantha (Anna Hopkins), but he could’ve told Felicity the truth before he was forced into that position like he did Barry. Felicity didn’t have to understand every choice he made for them to patch things up; that lie was a concession he could’ve and should’ve made.

Thea Queen/Speedy Thea’s aversion to vigilante life was a smart path for her to walk after everything she’d been through with Malcolm (John Barrowman), but I did enjoy that she suited up again in the Invasion Crossover just because aliens were involved. I liked the maturity we saw from her as she became Oliver’s Chief of Staff, while she and Quentin (Paul Blackthorne) made for a surprisingly good pairing. Her dark background and his alcoholism—and their efforts to recover from both—made for strong bonding material for the two of them. After four years, their scenes were a refreshing dose of new chemistry as well! I love that Arrow deals with its characters’ trauma in realistic ways—it takes a long time for these people to really work through them and sometimes every day is a new fight—so I understood Thea’s initial decision to stay in the Dominator’s perfect world and be happy. It didn’t feel like a weak choice to me, it felt like a real chance at peace from her perspective and I liked that Ollie understood (perhaps due to a subconscious realization that staying there paralleled his Green Arrow persona’s protective nature?). With that in mind, I wish we’d seen her see the enemies surround Ollie, Dig, Sara, and Ray so we could watch her realize she was about to lose her real family. Oh well; that was a minor missed opportunity. And Thea getting to kill the fantasy Malcolm was cathartic and ironic, given he later died to save her in real life. I can imagine a lot of confusion for her over his death and her feelings about him next season!

Thea’s darkness reared its head mainly (and alarmingly) in her character assassination of Susan Williams, but I think there’s been a more subtle acknowledgement of it for at least a year now. Both Thea and Felicity made some pretty shockingly cold off the cuff jokes in Season 4 and this year that felt like far more than just deadpan gallows humor. After returning from one of her mini-hiatuses, her reactions to all the changes at City Hall felt like they were channeling audience frustrations I saw online, such as Oliver’s relationship with Susan. While her reactions were mostly funny, when looked at through her struggle with darkness they may’ve been warning signs. I like Thea a lot and I think giving Ollie a little sister was a brilliant move, so I’m genuinely worried about her embracing her inner Moira (Susanna Thompson). I didn’t like what she and Felicity did to Susan and I knew it would result in Susan suspecting Ollie of being Green Arrow even more strongly, given the timing. Sure Susan was investigating him while dating him, but Thea’s move felt more wrong. Knowing this, it was right and mature for Thea to step down from the Mayor’s office; I'm glad she's self-aware enough to see she's going down a dark path and needs to stop. Willa Holland’s short contract was definitely detrimental to Thea’s arc this year, since her struggle with her inner darkness was something we needed to see. Her fight with darkness could’ve played well against Felicity’s pull towards Helix and especially Ollie’s struggle with the idea that he liked killing, so I wish she’d been in those kinds of episodes. I liked what we got with Thea, particularly her material with Quentin and Ollie, but I feel like they missed a major opportunity to have her return and help Oliver navigate his inner darkness by sharing her battle with him. I really hope we get to see more of this struggle from Thea next year, as well as processing what Malcolm’s death means to her. I loved her confused and sad reaction to his sacrifice, so I can’t wait to dig deeper into that.

Curtis Holt/Mr. Terrific Curtis was my favorite addition to Team Arrow last year, so seeing him get to be on the team full-time was a blast! I do think they spent a little too long trying to make him a martial arts expert instead of letting him lean into his technological strengths (his extreme lack of athletic skills almost came off as a joke, particularly given he’s an Olympian), but I appreciate that he’s been trained to protect himself. It also makes sense that he couldn’t immediately be on Ollie or even Roy’s (Colton Haynes) level as a fighter in such a short time. Still, he has skills the others don’t and he should’ve been using them from the get-go; for instance, he could’ve been more useful against Cyberwoman (Erica Luttrell) than he was…though his response to Felicity’s "Nothing we can't handle," "That's everything we can't handle!" was a laugh out loud moment! Once Curtis did start leaning into his tech side, I loved it! He can contribute in ways no one else on Team Arrow can through that role. Curtis’ T-spheres are very cool and iconic, but I’d also like to see them differentiate his tech style from Ray’s and the other super-science we see on Flash and Supergirl. Since Ollie’s team is less funded than Barry’s and doesn’t have access to future technology like the Legends do or alien tech like the DEO, it’d make sense if Mr. Terrific came up with equally fantastic inventions that looked less polished and more homemade. That’s probably just me, though. Learning the backstory of the Mr. Terrific codename was cool and I loved that they are becoming so comics-accurate with his costume. I never thought they’d go with the T-mask and I’m so happy they did!

The weakest part of Curtis’ arc this year was his troubled marriage, because I don’t feel like we know Paul (Chenier Hundal) that well at all. I felt sad for him when Paul left because Curtis’ frustration over losing everything was knocked out of the park by Kellum, but otherwise I didn’t feel there was any great tragedy to Paul leaving him. Much like Billy and Felicity’s brief relationship before his death, we didn’t get to see enough of Curtis and Paul being happy together to show us what he’d lost. Despite the blow to his personal life, I really like that Curtis has taken up a role as one of the more optimistic lights on Team Arrow, free of the baggage Ollie, Dig, Thea, and even Felicity carry in their effort to maintain their goodness. Playing Holt as, essentially, Season 1 Felicity is a delight! I enjoyed his friendship with Rene a lot and I wouldn’t mind if Dinah was right and they started dating; of course that’d make things even more complicated when Paul is outted as Vigilante! Whatever happens, I’m glad they’ve got Curtis in the right role again and—if he survived Lian Yu—I can’t wait to see where he goes next year!

Rene Ramirez/Wild Dog I wasn’t sold on Wild Dog at the beginning of the season, but I did appreciate that he created conflict within the team and, eventually, he won me over. I liked that Oliver, even inadvertently and in the process of failing his own vow not to kill again by eliminating Darhk, inspired Rene to pick himself up, make more of himself, and carry on. Rene’s hatred of metahumans and aliens appeared and faded way too fast for me in the Invasion Crossover: we should’ve gotten hints of his distrust of anything paranormal from his interactions with Ragman’s rags from the first time they met. Even so, ultimately accepting Flash and Supergirl shows he has more common sense than most characters in “fear of the other” allegories do. I thought Rene really started to shine when the show started paring him up with Curtis and Quentin; he played off both men exceedingly well. I’d been low-key sensing a vibe from his and Curtis’ growing friendship, so I laughed and agreed when Dinah wondered when they’d start dating. Rene got deeper with the reveals about his tragic family life and his struggle to get his daughter (Eliza Faria) back, which rounded him out nicely. Even if his turnaround on wanting to get Zoe back felt a little fast, Rene’s reaction to seeing her again for the first time in so long made it work for me. Quentin’s own tragic family past provided a solid bulwark for Rene to rebuild his own on, creating an understanding between them that worked really well. Being kidnapped by Chase certainly put a roadblock in Rene’s way to getting custody of Zoe, so I’m interested to see how long it will take to work through what looked like his irresponsible nature. I don’t know anything about Wild Dog in the comics, so wherever they want to take Rene in Season 6, I’m down.

Evelyn Sharp/Artemis I liked Evelyn Sharp (Madison McLaughlin) in Season 4, so I was glad to see she’d be on Team Arrow this year. It seemed for a brief moment in the early episodes that she’d function as a new voice of reason among the new recruits, which made for a nice balance between Curtis’ eagerness and Rene’s angry impatience. Unfortunately, she seemed to get the short straw in terms of character development among the new recruits (and moments like Ollie’s “little girl” comment in the second episode were unhelpful and unnecessary). I would’ve loved to know how she felt about finally getting to work with Laurel’s old team. Did she feel she was living up to Lance’s legacy? Did once holding the Black Canary mantle make her doubt her (truly shocking) decision to side with Prometheus at all? In hindsight, she was one of the season’s bigger missteps, as she had both built-in tension with Oliver from Season 4 that could’ve been focused on and they could’ve done a lot more with her journey from Canary acolyte to villain. I didn’t see her turn coming and I believed it—even if at first I thought it was a trick and she was a triple agent, which would’ve reflected both Young Justice’s Artemis and Black Canary’s comic roots of pretending to be a criminal to take down criminal syndicates from within—but I would’ve liked to know more about her reasons for doing it and how she felt about working with Prometheus. We got just enough to sell it and I was left wanting more so much that I was relieved Chase only pretended to kill her when he captured Ollie; losing her would’ve been a waste. However, with her probable death in the Season 5 finale, it’s a shame they likely won’t get to explore her motives (or where she’d go now that Chase is gone) further. It also would’ve been fun to play with her as a mole on Team Arrow more, but I suppose she had to blow her cover to save Prometheus earlier than expected. Ultimately, she had the makings of a solid supporting enemy and I liked what McLaughlin did with the screentime she had. Unfortunately, she didn’t get enough time to really dig into Evelyn’s potential. I especially would’ve liked to see her played up as a dark foil for Thea; an externalization of Thea’s struggle like Chase was for Ollie.

Rory Reagan/Ragman Ragman was my least favorite of the new recruits; he just didn’t click with me on any level. His origin and introduction felt a little rushed, particularly the explanation for his ancient and magical rags. I’m more than willing to roll with the weird and I love that Arrow isn’t averse to playing in the larger DC toy box anymore in terms of superpowers, but the rags’ presence in this season felt off even to me. It didn’t help that their abilities were never really well-defined. While absorbing a nuclear blast was something only he (and Firestorm) could do, beyond that there was just a lot of bullet-catching and rags used as tentacles that weren’t really impressive in the grand scheme of Arrowverse heroes.

I did like his talk about fathers with Oliver and his connection to Havenrock and Felicity, but their agreement to keep each other’s heads above darkness never felt fully explored (though this was more due to the awkward handling of Felicity’s actions than Ragman himself). I had hoped Felicity’s confession of redirecting the missile would help drive Rory’s character more strongly and purposefully, but unfortunately it wasn’t to be. In hindsight I get the sense that maybe he was supposed to be a serene, calming influence on the team (once he got over his early vengeance quest), but if that’s the case it didn’t work for me. Curtis seemed more primed to be the optimist in the face of tragedy and Rory came off as bland in comparison to the rest of the team. I liked that he was insightful, identifying the meaning behind one of Prometheus’ attacks. It was also good Reagan was able to contribute to the Invasion Crossover by figuring out what the Dominator language was based on, but the chance to create potentially interesting conversations between Rory as a devout Jew and Curtis as an atheist—particularly when so much of this season and series has been about saving souls and becoming better people—was dropped as soon as Curtis found out Rory’s deduction was correct. Looking at self-betterment through both a religious and secular lens could’ve been an interesting addition to the show’s meditation on the struggle for self-improvement.

Ultimately Rory just seemed to be there, with hints of opportunities for him to become a more engaging character appearing sporadically, but never really capitalized on. This is nothing against Dinicol; I think the problem was that the writers introduced too many new recruits at once and advanced the others while Rory’s arc was repeatedly nullified by not fully exploring the plotlines or by low-key reactions from him. They could’ve tightened up both Team Arrow and the first half of the season by mixing Wild Dog and Ragman, by giving Rene some family in Havenrock. As much tragedy as they would’ve heaped on Rene in losing his wife to violence and his parents(?) to the nuke, it would’ve fit with his already angry crusade and probably would’ve sparked bigger fireworks when he found out Felicity was responsible. Their similar stories made Rene and Rory feel redundant at first, and since Rene had the better arc, I’d have traded Rory’s screentime for more of everyone else. Dropping Rory would’ve also allowed for more time to explore Evelyn as a traitor.

Dinah Drake/Black Canary 2 While I was ambivalent about Dinah Drake’s addition at first—if there was to be a new Black Canary, I was hoping for a Black Siren redemption arc instead—I was quickly won over. I’m still not sure giving her identical powers to the Laurels is the wisest idea, but I liked that they named her after the comics’ first Black Canary. Her past as an undercover cop was a neat shout-out to Drake’s comics M.O. of infiltrating crime rings as a criminal to take them down from within too. Dinah fit in with the rest of Team Arrow nicely and I enjoyed her bonding with Oliver over Prometheus and the effects they have on the people around them. I also liked that she found herself on the Star City police force by the end of the season and, if she survived the finale, I’d like to see her encounter the other cops’ opinions of vigilantes in town. It’d be fun to see how she maintains her identity while also working as a cop too, and how he dedication to the law by day informs her vigilantism at night. I thought Oliver’s obsessive search for a Laurel replacement was a little odd, but the moment when he found out her real name was Dinah totally sold me on it. That said, I never felt Oliver’s belief that the team absolutely needed a new Black Canary was fulfilled by Dinah. I don’t mean this as a knock on her character, because I liked what she brought to the team, but I felt like she instantly fell into the group and didn’t stand out like I’d expected someone fitting Ollie’s expectations would. Laurel certainly left a hole in the team last year in the very well-handled fallout of her death, but by the time Dinah was introduced, it didn’t feel like there was still a missing piece demanding to be replaced by this specific person. To that end, I hope to see more of what Ollie saw in her next year!

Quentin Lance After years of dealing with heartache after heartache, it was nice to see Quentin finally on the road to recovery this year. I also liked that his “reveal” as Prometheus was treated exactly as the red herring it was and that he came forward so quickly instead of making himself look guilty. Working for Ollie as Deputy Mayor was a fun inversion of their previous dynamic I hope we see more of in Season 6. I also loved how he bonded with Thea and Rene and hope both those relationships continue into the new season as well. Thea seemed to come into her own as an adult by dealing with Quentin on the same level this year (a huge turnaround from their Season 1 interactions) and I’d like to see them lean on each other to continue fighting his alcoholism and her darkness. Again, I really like that this show has never played around with how hard it can be to beat addictions of any type. I liked how invested Thea became in Quentin and how involved he was in Rene’s life in turn. Lance’s playfully antagonistic relationship with Rene was a lot of fun and reminded me a bit of early “spoiled” Oliver’s interactions with Quentin in the first season. I loved that Quentin and Rene developed a true bond over losing their daughters and Quentin’s dedication to helping Rene get Zoe back was perfect. In terms of his own daughter, Quentin got a significant moment to show he’d fully put Laurel’s death behind him by passing her mantle on to Dinah, which I liked a lot. It might be easy to write Quentin off as an expendable part of the show, given his increasingly limited presence in fight scenes and now that his daughters are dead or traveling through time, but Season 5 found a lot of new territory to mine with him by flipping relationships and discovering new connections between characters he’d barely interacted with before. That’s certainly a lesson about finding new character combinations in your writing: you never know what results will come out of different pairings. I hope he survived the finale, because I’m very excited to see how he deals with Black Siren next year as well!

Adrian Chase/Prometheus I was sure Chase was Vigilante, so I was thrown off the Prometheus trail for quite a while. I thought perhaps Prometheus was Tommy Merlyn, resurrected by Flashpoint or from Earth-2, angry about both his death and Laurel’s and using similar methods to Malcolm’s in the first season, or Robert Queen of Earth-2, who is that world’s Green Arrow and someone we know nothing about (I’d love to see him on the show regardless, BTW!). A version of either Tommy or Robert would’ve been a great way to bring the show full-circle, I thought, and would be much more emotionally satisfying than Prometheus being the son of some random guy we never knew Oliver killed. I figured out Chase was Prometheus after Oliver visited his mother Amanda (Corina Akeson)—once we met her, the story about revenge for his dead dad had to be true—and eventually I remembered Caity Lotz’ initial casting announcement had her listed as Dinah Drake, not a recast Sara Lance. I figured they were pulling the same trick here (Segarra’s casting announcement mentioned he was Vigilante in the comics), and Chase made absolute sense given Prometheus’ extensive reach into City Hall. While the reveal didn’t affect me emotionally (and it could’ve been more dramatic than him casually taking off the mask after fighting Vigilante), the insane intensity Segarra generated and the personal hell Chase put Oliver through absolutely made up for it and turned Prometheus into a strong contender for best villain of the series so far. If not my favorite enemy, Chase was certainly the most effective and damaging. He’s also a huge improvement on the comics’ Prometheus, who was imposing, but felt like another in a long series of villains billed as “anti-Batmen” as if that was some skeleton key to instant awesomeness.

I loved that Chase was miles ahead of everyone else for the whole season and his planning screwed over Team Arrow at every turn. Once he was revealed as the villain, it felt like he almost never stopped menacing Oliver until the season was over. It was clear he’d go to any lengths—even killing his own wife (Parveen Dosanjh)—to win and I couldn’t wait to see what new attack each week would bring! When he was briefly captured, they described Chase's escape plan as him wanting to be captured (or at least Dig guessed that), but I didn't think that was necessary at all; it could've easily been a backup plan in the event that he was captured. I’m just tired of the “villain wants to be captured” trope, so I’m choosing to believe Dig was wrong here. Chase’s anti-surveillance technology was cool and clever, and a smart way to tie Felicity’s Helix subplot into the main one. His father being killed by Oliver gave him a nice connection to Evelyn’s thoughts about her own parents’ murder, which was a great subtle strength to their partnership. Chase getting “justice” for his father also paralleled Oliver following his father’s List very nicely.

Styling Prometheus as yet another evil archer wasn’t stunning, but the addition of sword and throwing star skills made him a neat echo of three of Ollie’s former big bads: Malcolm, Slade (Manu Bennett), and Ra’s al Ghul (Matt Nable). Chase’s friendly demeanor before his fiendish reveal could also be an echo of Darhk’s affable nature. Bringing Robert’s List back into play was great and Prometheus killing people whose names were anagrams for criminals on it was ingenious! I also really dug the idea that Prometheus’ weapons were Oliver’s melted-down arrows; that was a cool personal touch that made Ollie’s past coming back to hurt him literal. Adrian being so calm and collected after Ollie found out who he was—even just going to work like it was nothing—was psychotic and perfect. The way he talked openly to Oliver about what he was doing with only the thinnest of veils felt very “comic book supervillain” (as did insisting Rene continue doing his City Hall job), but there was never any doubt that Chase was incredibly dangerous. Since the entire season felt like they were wrapping up threads from the last 10 years of Oliver’s life, Chase kidnapping William had me very worried he’d kill him too. Oliver didn’t need that pain (and it’d be a waste of the Ollie-as-a-dad aspect William adds to his character), so I’m glad it didn’t turn out that way. Even so, they had me truly nervous on that boat in the finale, both for William’s life and Oliver’s soul. I didn’t want Oliver to kill Chase and prove him right about who Ollie was, but he had to go and what a way to do it! The way Chase emotionally ripped into Oliver and shattered him emotionally (metaphorically stealing this “god’s” fire, you could say) was brutal, and his well-executed plan for revenge easily sent him to the top tier of Oliver’s rogues gallery. I’m glad he’s dead, because I don’t know how they could top this onslaught with repeat appearances.

Malcolm Merlyn John Barrowman’s Malcolm Merlyn has long been my favorite of the Arrow bad guys. I loved that he’s been increasingly conflicted between his lust for power and his twisted love for his children for the entirety of the show…and that Merlyn found a way to turn that conflict into a deliberate choice where he views his power grabs as best for his family, no matter who they hurt. Once he offered William up to Chase, though, I was absolutely over any remaining sympathy I had for him. I've wanted Malcolm to mastermind one last supervillain plot before dying for years now, particularly after the masterful downfall of the League of Assassins, but I was surprised by how fitting his rather low-key death was. As wishy-washy as Malcolm had become over the last two years, switching sides so often that Team Arrow didn’t even bat an eye when he was momentarily teaming up with them again, his trajectory firmed up across the Arrowverse this year and I'm satisfied with where his final arc took him. Felicity said it best: he was a bad guy and a worse father, but he did love Thea. I felt the emotion between Barrowman and Holland in their final scenes together and I can’t wait to see her deal with it. Merlyn’s appearances were always welcome and I’d be down for flashbacks—such as this year’s cool flashback to Malcolm planning the Undertaking—but I’m glad Malcolm is really, really dead. Plus, even if it wasn’t his plan, we got that final supervillain arc over on Legends of Tomorrow and it was great!

Laurel Lance-2/Black Siren I think they definitely missed a chance to have Laurel of Earth-1 working within the legal system in tandem with Ollie's team much more than she did and I would've preferred her retiring from vigilantism to focus on that to killing her. That said, Laurel’s death truly felt like it mattered and impacted everyone around her (arguably even more than she did in life) and bringing Laurel-1 back via Flashpoint, the Lazarus Pit, or time travel would’ve undermined that. So, I was really happy the show didn’t revive her and instead brought Black Siren into the fold after her introduction last year on Flash. I’m definitely down for a redemption arc for Laurel-2, which could make a potential battle with Dinah over Laurel-1’s legacy interesting. We also have no idea what she’s done on her world, so I’m absolutely eager to see where Laurel-2 has come from and what she wants now that she’s marooned here. The one thing I thought was missing from Black Siren’s appearance this season was a scene where Barry told Oliver they had Laurel-2 locked up; Flash left its titular team choosing not to say anything about her to Ollie’s crew. I would’ve liked to see when and how Barry broke the news to them and how Ollie reacted. Besides that, her introduction here was strong and she was well-utilized. The Ollie/Felicity and Laurel/Prometheus cat-and-mouse games were exciting and the question of who was the leader of each pair fleshed out their dynamics well. I had hoped she’d join the Legion of Doom over on Legends to meet Sara, so hopefully they’ll meet next year. I can’t wait to see her and Ollie try to redeem Laurel-2, even if there ends up not being anything of the person they loved within her. It’d also be cool to bring back Alex Kingston as Dinah Lance of Earth-2, who could’ve passed her villainous legacy on to her daughter Laurel in a twisted version of the comics’ Black Canary history. Siren’s origin echoes another part of Canary history, wherein Dinah Drake crossed from Earth-2 to E-1 to join the Justice League in the Silver Age. No matter what they do with her, Black Siren is probably Arrow’s best female villain, Katie Cassidy seems to have a blast playing her, and I can’t wait to see what they do with her next!

Allies It was great to see and/or hear about Robert (Jamey Sheridan) and Moira Queen, Shado (Celina Jade), and Yao Fei (Byron Mann) again as Arrow wrapped up its first five years! Susanna Thompson’s return in particular was very touching, as we finally got to see the moment where Oliver told Moira he was alive in the season finale. Both Amell and Thompson were fantastic in that scene! The only other returns I would’ve liked were Tommy and especially Roy, but both got shout-outs in the 100th episode. Lyla going full-Waller as the head of ARGUS was interesting and I wonder if she and John’s marriage will hold up if this continues. She made good points about Team Arrow breaking the law, but I also think Ollie’s people have an argument about the government overstepping its bounds and the need for vigilantes to step in. I like that neither side is purely right or wrong. I do think it’s too easy for Team Arrow to get away with things like sabotaging prisoner transports just because Lyla runs ARGUS, so I wonder if she’ll continue down this path and that support system will no longer be at Ollie’s disposal. I kinda hope so; Ollie and company facing real consequences to their actions would make things harder on them and require them to act smarter (or at least stealthier).

I am a huge fan of Nyssa (Katrina Law), so I’ll take any and all appearances from her I can get! I liked that they included the bit from Legends about Ras telling Nyssa to go to Lian Yu to rescue Sara in the first place. Nyssa bickering with Malcolm was so much fun, as was the banter between all the villains on Ollie’s last-ditch team! I hope she and Talia lived to fight another day, because I definitely think there’s more to explore there. I would absolutely be down for Nyssa appearing on Legends to reunite with Sara as well! Getting Slade back after so long was a huge win for the show (and a surprise, given all the apparent bad blood behind the scenes) and I’m excited to see his quest to find his son next year. Older, wiser, saner Slade was an unexpected and inspired choice for Ollie’s finale team. I never liked that Shado was fridged to make Slade insane (even though Slade was a fantastic villain), but his appearance here leads credence to the theory that it was really the Mirakuru amping up his anger and driving his madness all along. It was so good to see him and Ollie patch things up and come to an understanding, moving beyond their problems instead of falling into an endless cycle of violence and hatred. I think Ollie could’ve called Roy for help in the finale, but I can also see him not wanting to drag him back into the life or put him in danger. He could’ve called Barry, but Flash had a lot on his plate around finale time too.

I was never really sure where I stood with Susan Williams. I didn’t hate her and she definitely didn’t turn out how I thought she would, but I don’t think she ever gelled with the rest of the show for me. She was fine for the role she had. I thought for sure Oliver’s Russian past would come back to bite him via her search into his ties there, so I was surprised she never brought them to light. On the other hand, I was worried they’d ruin his mayoral stint, so I’m glad she didn’t. I didn’t think she needed to be dating Ollie and their relationship seemed like it was meant to engineer more drama when she was kidnapped than if she were just an ally. I do believe she really fell for Ollie, regardless of whether she started dating him just to get closer to the target of her investigation or not, and I believed he had feelings for her, but not anything as strong as what he’s felt for Felicity, Sara, or Laurel. I was definitely on her side when Thea and Felicity got her fired for plagiarizing articles, especially since they made those accusations up. That was simply wrong on their part and I’m glad Thea owned up to how badly she’d screwed up.

Christopher Chance (Wil Traval) was a cool, low-key addition of a little-known DC superhero and I liked his use both in the present and the past. It was especially cool that, while doubling Oliver when his life was in danger, he managed to continue Oliver’s socially conscious policies. I’m very glad Captain Pike (Adrian Holmes) has been such a solid, continuing part of this show. I think he’s got to know Oliver is Green Arrow by this point and I’m interested to see what he’ll do with that information if he does. The split-second Captain Singh (Patrick Sabongui) and Flash “cameo” was an excellent, perfectly-executed use of the shows’ shared universe and of Green Arrow and Flash’s friendship. Little connections like that are so much fun! Billy was bland at the start and never evolved into a character I cared about. His career as a cop didn’t bring many complications to Oliver’s life until he died, I didn’t see the spark between him and Felicity, and I think we needed to know him much better before Oliver accidentally killed him. As such, I didn’t care that he’d died. The same goes for Paul leaving Curtis; I feel like the overwhelming majority of their scenes were brief appearances by Paul, mainly focused on him chastising Curtis for not telling him where he went or for putting himself in danger. If Paul appears in Season 6, I want to know why Curtis fell for him so we can get a sense of what he’s lost.

Enemies I loved Talia (Lexa Doig) and the tack they took with her! Making her Yao Fei's mentor was an awesome way to bring the flashbacks full-circle while also incorporating her backstory from Legends of Tomorrow. It was cool to have her generate Ollie’s vigilante style and even inspire the Series Sell, which was another smart tie to the beginning of the flashbacks and the series itself. Her reason for turning on Ollie to help Chase was a great use of the show’s history and a twist so simple and logical in hindsight I’m surprised I didn’t see it coming. Doig’s Talia is definitely up there with Batman the Animated Series’ version as my favorite, so I definitely hope we get to see more of her in the present. I’d also love to see more of her relationship with Nyssa, so hopefully they both survived the destruction of Lian Yu.

Thomas Church (Chad L. Coleman) was a good opponent to start the season with and a smart herald of the “back to basics” tone of the year. He earned his badass status by casually ignoring his thugs getting shot and being so intimidating, so I quickly grew to really like him. Despite one moment where Wild Dog had a chance to kill him and inexplicably didn’t take the shot, Church felt suitably untouchable. Even so, his death felt like a natural end for his character. I expected him to have a bigger hand in the season’s events, but what we got felt just right. Even with only a handful of appearances, Dolph Lundgren’s Konstantin Kovar was an excellent final flashback foe. He seemed to pick up the baton from Church as a villain on a similar level, which was a nice subtle bit of continuity while Prometheus operated on a whole other plane. I liked Kovar’s turnip story (a popular Russian fable) about unity and I hadn’t been expecting all the Bratva infighting, but dropping Ollie into the middle of it worked really well. At first I didn’t think Kovar needed to survive his initial major fight with Ollie—he was imposing enough after just two appearances—but popping up again to nearly prevent Oliver’s “escape” from Lian Yu was a nice final battle for the flashback timeline.

It was awesome to see Anatoly so much this season, in both the flashbacks and the present! He’s one of my favorite Arrow characters, so it was great that he got such a big role here and could return in the future. I loved that the flashbacks seemed to imply he was still doing evil for the greater good (and certainly convinced Ollie of this), only to twist things so that he really was the bad guy. He caused Ollie to screw up massively, and I really liked that their former friendship held that sort of sway over Oliver. Helix was a fun development and I liked that it encouraged the return of Felicity’s dark side from her college days (coupled with what she’d done to Havenrock). Helix proved to be a sufficiently powerful force, so Oliver going up against a network of hackers is going to be a fun new challenge for him. I can see them being the big bads for the show next year (especially if Michael Emerson is playing their mysterious leader, Cayden James), at least for the first half. Like Flash and Supergirl, I wouldn’t hate it if Arrow found a way to split the season up between two main antagonists.

Vigilante (??) may not be the most inventive name for a vigilante, but he certainly proved formidable! I loved the tricks built into his costume, like a flash grenade to stave off revealing his identity. His method of killing criminals without a second thought seems like he’s been set up to be a dark reflection of Oliver next year, so I’m looking forward to playing out that presumed Punisher vs. Daredevil interaction in Season 6. I absolutely fell for the casting announcement—saying that Chase was Vigilante in the comics—so I just assumed that he was Chase for most of the season. So, who is he? I ran down my theories in an earlier blog, but essentially I think it boils down to two suspects: Captain Pike and Paul Holt. I don’t think we’ve seen Pike and Vigilante together and the mystery man vanished completely after Pike was nearly fatally wounded. It’d also be interesting to pay off Pike’s long tenure on the show with him becoming a vigilante himself, and a public official moonlighting as a vigilante can parallel both Ollie and Dinah. But my money’s on Paul; maybe he thinks he can clean up the streets so Curtis will stop going out, and we’ve already seen Vigilante get Curtis in a position to easily kill him, but he didn’t. He could have literally any motive, since we barely know Paul at all, and Curtis was so busy with Team Arrow that he wouldn’t notice if Paul weren’t home either. Stephen Amell also mentioned that Vigilante will be one of several people who are villains for each specific member of Team Arrow (if they were to team up, would that make them a Green Arrow Injustice Gang?), so perhaps he’s Curtis’ opposite number. I also considered that—whether he’s one of these two or not—Vigilante could be an operative of Helix, since their overall goals seem similar and he’s gotta get his tech from somewhere. Whoever he turns out to be, I really like that we got a badass mystery villain in Prometheus and a second secret identity comic fans didn’t even bother to consider for the longest time. It’s so cool that this red herring gets to be his own mystery next year!

I love that these shows can pull off cameos like Anarky (Alexander Calvert), just like the comics. It makes the world feel full and the threats ever-present. I thought Cupid (Amy Gumenick), Chien Na Wei (Kelly Hu), and Liza Warner (Rutina Wesley) teaming up would be fun and it was! I kinda expected a grander scheme than just a hunt for Church’s money and some gang hits, but I definitely wouldn’t be opposed to this team returning. I also liked Warner losing her last shred of faith in justice in Star City because Quentin worked with Darhk last year. I definitely hope China White isn’t dead and that she was only shot in the shoulder (what an inauspicious way to go that would be!). Cody Runnels was a strong minor enemy as Stardust. He felt like a comic book villain, his powers played well, and Ollie's takedown was brutal. Brick’s (Vinnie Jones) mention was nice and I’d like to see him on the show again. We finally learned The Count’s (Seth Gabel) name, which was a cool bonus, and I hope that the Werner Zytle (Peter Stormare) version returns with some of his comic book reality-warping tech. I didn’t expect Captain Boomerang (Nick E. Tarabay) to betray Ollie at all, though I totally should’ve. If he’s dead (and he probably is), I’ll miss him and wish he’d been used more often. I liked him better than the Suicide Squad Boomerang and it would’ve been fun to see him clash with Barry more than once.

General Plot Notes I liked that Arrow played in a larger world in Season 3 and touched on magic in Season 4, but getting back to the street level heroics was a welcome breath of fresh air. While I definitely miss Team Arrow members like Roy, Sara, and Thea, most of the new recruits grew on me and I came out of the season liking them and their steep learning curve. Overall, they had a pretty good arc coming together as a team despite serious growing pains. It was fun to play with them not knowing Oliver’s secret identity at first; Team Arrow taking orders from Ollie on com without realizing he was in the hospital with them felt like a classic spy/comic moment. Another classic superhero moment came when Team Arrow did some bystander rescuing early in the season, even if “citizens burn cars and fire into the night” was kind of a random action scene premise.

The stunt work was fantastic throughout the season! Since the villains were more physical than Darhk and his magical powers, the stunt team seemed to have many more opportunities for show-stopping fights and they certainly delivered. Even if Alias and The Dark Knight beat the show to it, a grapple hook-plane extraction will probably always be cool. I will always love Green Arrow’s trick arrows—they’re a fun and iconic bit from the comics—and this season boasted a very cool variety of them! My favorite new ones were the bulletproof screen arrow and what the writers referred to on Twitter as the “Parrowchute.” The anti-molecular spray from early on in the season was another cool gadget.

The flashbacks—and flashbacks within flashbacks—worked really well to look back at the history of the series. Callbacks to people like Isabel Rochev (Summer Glau) and Yao Fei were great, as was a flashback that connected to Ollie’s Season 3 flashback trip to Starling City. For the first time since Season 2, I loved the flashbacks just as much as the present-day action and felt like they tied into the rest of the corresponding episodes smoothly while satisfactorily finishing the story of Oliver’s five years away. Flashbacks in both Season 3, with its promise of a change of pace from Lian Yu, and Season 4, with the introduction of magic, started well, but both also felt like they became excuses for a fight or chase scene that didn’t move the story forward significantly rather than important pieces of Oliver’s past from about midseason till the end. That wasn’t the case this year and nearly every flashback felt important. Even with the strongest and most relevant flashbacks since Season 2, I’m glad that fixture of the show is finally over. At about eight minutes an episode, so much screentime will be freed up to expand the present-day stories now. I’m hoping that if they continue to dip into the past, it’s like on Daredevil and only done as needed rather than an obligatory part of each episode. If this structure was an intentional metaphor for drawing back an arrow before firing it—showing us where Oliver came from while also showing his heroic trajectory—that’s a cool idea, but I’d rather focus on the present. I’m glad we’ve finally got the whole picture of Oliver’s origin and it’s fitting the flashbacks ended just as Ollie was forced to let go of his past and will no longer be anchored by it.

On one hand, I wish they’d made more of the Arrow segment of the Invasion crossover about the Dominators. On the other, the Arrow part was an excellent way to celebrate the 100th episode of the show: the Dominator tech provided a cool method of looking at the past and what could’ve been for our heroes while furthering the overall plot as the Dominators studied their non-metahuman brainwaves to program the metabomb. Though Smallville certainly developed the DNA for Flash and Supergirl and probably the proof-of-concept for a Green Arrow show, Arrow built all four of The CW’s current super shows, so including their anniversary in the first 4-show crossover made perfect sense. This was a great celebration of the show's legacy and I liked that the Legends part acknowledged this whole universe started with Ollie and Sara. Team Arrow’s dream world reminded me of the “Perchance to Dream” episode of Batman: The Animated Series, and if you’re going to borrow a plot, that’s a great one to use! All the callbacks to the show’s past were great and this is one of my favorite anniversary episodes ever. It was good to see Laurel and the Queens again. In a perfect world I would’ve liked to see what Ollie and Laurel were doing with their lives beyond him maybe taking over Queen Consolidated and them getting married, so that felt like a minor misstep. I assume she's running CNRI, but I wish it had been said. It's been a long time since Ollie, Sara, Thea, and Quentin were this happy and at ease, and that was awesome. I loved that they found ways to incorporate Roy, Tommy, and Andy Diggle (who was initially supposed to be the Ghost Dig fought, so I'm going to fan-canon this that it was Andy with a mask on) even though their actors were unavailable. It would've felt incomplete without at least Roy and Tommy (and the nod to Donnell's Chicago Med show was funny!). Giving everyone some catharsis by allowing them to kill their arch-enemies to break out of their fantasy world was perfect. Thea, Sara, and Ollie passing weapons to each other was an outstanding bit of fight choreography! I was glad the show played the reality of Team Arrow having no idea how to escape the Dominator ship and barely got away, while “So…this is double the number of spaceships I thought I’d ever be on” was a hilarious line from Thea!

The Crossover’s subplot about Cyberwoman felt kinda haphazard at first since we’d never met her, but in hindsight it's cool (and very comic booky) that their world has random super people running around without the need for elaborate introductions. Cyberwoman was exactly what they needed to justify Flash and Supergirl being called in and didn't need to be anything more than that. I think it would've been tighter plot-wise to send Barry and Kara against Dominators trying to secure tech that could be used against them or something, but ultimately Cyberwoman worked for me. It would’ve been cool to see a quick cutaway to Team Arrow during the final battle with the Dominators, because it felt like they (and especially Thea, who left after the Legends rescued them without explanation; that was particularly weird given how enthusiastic she was at first, but maybe the Dominator fantasy world got to her) were a little forgotten in the Legends portion. I liked Oliver getting a little overwhelmed by the sci-fi happenings, even though he’s lived in a world of magic and super-science for four years now (six if you count his experience with the supernatural on Lian Yu). “One sci-fi problem at a time” was a great way to demonstrate his limits, and benching Kara in the Legends part because he couldn’t handle how weird things were getting worked well for me, no matter how unfair or unreasonable that decision was. I liked his human reaction to the stranger bits of his world: it wasn’t irrational hatred like we saw from Wild Dog, but just a guy coming to terms with the fact that he can’t take on everything, no matter how hard he fights that fact. I also loved his support of Barry as the leader of this nascent Justice League.

Season 5 showcased one of Arrow’s finest hours and one of my absolute favorite episodes, “Spectre of the Gun.” It was not only a very good “very special” episode about the gun debate, but a huge step towards Oliver discovering his iconic liberal side from the comics. I love that they took the time to dig into current issues with the gun control debate, and it was smart to present all sides of the gun argument from nearly all the characters. Even the "let's not talk about it"/”don't make it political” point of view was brought up and shot down as unhelpful. I know that got a lot of hate online, given Felicity voiced it even though she’d been the victim of gun violence, but I’d argue that she probably has a very solid point of view on the debate, but like she said, she doesn’t think talking about it helps. It’s also good to let every character be wrong occasionally. I would love if Arrow took more inspiration from real-life issues in the coming years: not only would it fit with this being the most grounded of The CW’s super shows, but it would play perfectly with Ollie’s developing politics. Dealing with these topics at least as much as Supergirl takes on feminist issues would be a great way to revitalize and refocus the series while keeping it relevant. Marc Guggenheim told me a while back that it’s difficult to get these issues on air despite them wanting to, so I appreciate that they’re trying and I hope they can swing more episodes like this!

Particularly in the back half, Season 5 kept up a constant intensity that felt like a return to Seasons 1 and 2, when every few episodes would feel like any other show’s midseason or season finale. The pressure on Team Arrow and specifically on Green Arrow was great; a perfect use of Ollie continually making his alter ego out to be a bad guy for the greater good. I felt this worked much better than the similar plot at the end of The Dark Knight, which resulted in Bruce retiring as Batman. Here, Ollie still had to go on being Green Arrow (and his black masked nameless vigilante) to save the day, which made both his job as a mayor trying to keep order difficult because he had to hunt himself and his vigilante life increasingly harder since his cops were always after him. The fact that Green Arrow actually murdered Detective Malone (albeit accidentally) and wasn’t just framed worked really well too. I do feel like we needed a scene where it was made public that Green Arrow was no longer considered a cop killer by Ollie or the police, though; I can connect the dots and say the news reported that Chase set him up, but it feels like we missed something with it not being said onscreen. It felt like after all the pressure he’d been under, Green Arrow got cleared a little too quickly. Likewise, attacking the ARGUS transport and letting Chase go probably shouldn’t have been something Ollie just got to walk away from; he’s got friends in high places because Lyla runs ARGUS, but that was an opportunity to make things even harder for him that his connection to Lyla negated.

Oliver being kidnapped by Prometheus and tortured for an entire episode felt like a completely different sort of story for the show and it was absolutely intense. Whatever my misgivings about the revelation in that episode, Amell and Segarra’s acting was fantastic and the tension was insane. Ollie’s revelation at the end was a massive shock when we should’ve gotten release from Ollie’s torture, which played really well into the destroyed man Ollie was in the following few episodes (and my own disillusionment in him). Even free of his captor, the real villain was apparently himself. Chase trapping Oliver and Felicity in the Arrow Cave was a cool use of a bottle episode that made it stand out from the show’s usual adventures. The writers and director of that one (all women, which was cool to see!) did a great job of escalating all the threats and keeping Ollie and Felicity on even footing over who was right and wrong in each situation. Sometimes they were even both right in different ways: I knew Felicity was right about the elevator shaft being booby-trapped, but I was also 100% behind Ollie trying to climb out anyway; were I in his shoes, I wouldn’t have been able to sit and just assume it was rigged when it could easily be a way out.

Bringing everything full circle back to Lian Yu worked perfectly and I love that they wrapped things up for this chapter of Ollie's life so completely. The fights were on point like always and I really liked how seamless the cutting between the present day and flashback battles were. They also did a good job of splitting between the chaos of the final battle and giving the individual face-offs (Nyssa/Talia, Ollie/Chase, Laurel/Dinah) enough time to feel like weighty battles. Neither Chase nor Savitar over on Flash felt dragged out this year, so kudos to the writers for keeping the stakes and tension high, especially in the last segments of the season. I have no idea how anyone could survive the destruction of Lian Yu, but it seems like most people will. Rene, Dina, and Black Siren all have series regular contracts for next year, so they lived. Marc Guggenheim has said he’d never kill Thea, so she’s safe too. I can’t see them killing off Diggle or Felicity, though I wouldn’t mind Felicity’s spinal tech being damaged to the extent that it can’t be easily repaired or replaced and she has to deal with her paralysis far more than we saw in Season 4. I’d hate to see Curtis go and hope they won’t do that. I could see Quentin dying, but I feel like there’s a lot of potential with Black Siren joining the cast next year that’s worth exploring. Slade survived according to the Season 6 trailer. Talia and/or Nyssa could die, but I’d be very sad to lose either of them, especially Nyssa. Samantha is probably dead; bringing William onto the show full-time next year would let us see Ollie as a dad, which is something entirely new. I hope Malcolm is really dead; it feels like time. Even if Boomerang survived that mine (hey, Deadshot took an arrow to the eye and got better!), I doubt he’d be in a position to get to cover from the island blowing. Artemis is probably dead, since we last saw her still locked in that cage and that’s a shame; she could’ve been explored more.

Had this been the final season, it would've been great, but I'm stoked to see how Ollie can grow now that his past is truly behind him. Despite some missed opportunity for more depth in the new recruits, lack of repercussions to Felicity destroying Havenrock, and the somewhat ill-defined reveal that Ollie liked killing, I loved this season and it certainly feels like they've set up a whole new ballgame for Season 6. With callbacks all season long and a villain who challenged Ollie to face who and what he is—along with the end of a major part of the show’s format in the flashbacks—it definitely felt like they closed this chapter of his life and the series.

This has been a long ten years for Oliver and I can't wait to see where Arrow goes from here…when Oliver becomes, I assume, something else.

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The 27 Best Pizza Slices in New York City

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[Photograph: Vicky Wasik, J. Kenji López-Alt, Clay Williams, Adam Kuban. Collage: Vicky Wasik]

“What’s the best way to set New Yorkers to bickering? Ask where to find the best slice of pizza in the city. No subject starts a battle faster—not bagels or hot dogs or chopped liver, not even the primacy of the Rangers or the fastest route to J.F.K. Pizza, introduced to New York in 1905 by Gennaro Lombardi, who saw it as a way to use up the day-old bread in his Spring Street grocery store, has long been the affordable, satisfying food of choice for peripatetic New Yorkers of every age, sex, race, and class.”

I wrote that in November of 2002 in the New York Times. The title of the story said it all: “The State of the Slice.”

A few months ago, I started wondering about the state of the slice in 2018. So much has changed in the last 16 years. While we’ve certainly witnessed a revival of the New York slice, you could also argue that it’s been reinvented, all because of five perhaps inseparable factors:

The explosion of food culture over the last two decades, thanks in a major way to…

The rise of food-obsessed websites—yes, like the very one you’re reading now. Which helped inform and connect…

Exacting personalities intent on reinventing and elevating humble foods, like burgers, fried chicken, barbecue, ramen, and more. Which eventually included…

Pizza-makers, both with serious culinary backgrounds and without, who started taking deep dives into slices using carefully chosen great ingredients (taking a stance that many of the classic slice joints either never did or had abandoned). Part of that stance being…

A mastery of fermentation—the process by which yeast and bacteria break down flour, yielding complex flavors and various textures in the crust.

Take Frank Pinello, who may be one of the best examples of this convergence of most, if not all, of the points above. When he opened Best Pizza in 2010, it set the standard for what I and my like-minded pizza obsessives have come to call the “revival slice shop”—that is, an establishment that specializes in selling pizza by the slice, the old-school way, but with particular attention paid to the ingredients used and the techniques employed.

Since then, we’ve seen other revivalist spots open, such as Williamsburg Pizza, which has grown from one outlet to a mini empire based on pizzaman Nino Coniglio’s manically obsessive efforts. We’ve watched brothers Mike and Pete Bergemann, in partnership with Ivan Orkin (of Ivan Ramen fame), open Corner Slice, serving their own unique take on Sicilian pizza made from artisan flour.

And, taking it to the next level, and maybe even full circle, we now have Scarr Pimentel, who developed his pizza-making chops at Lombardi’s over 10 years, making pies at Scarr’s Pizza. Scarr’s is a studiously hole-in-the-wall slice joint on Orchard Street, a half mile away from Pimentel’s previous gig, where, get this, he makes dough partially from flour he mills himself. (The obsession with flour and dough is typical of the revivalists: Find a celebrated new-school pizza maker these days, and chances are they’re also well versed in bread-making techniques.)

We are in a fundamentally different era of slicedom from the time when I wrote that Times piece, or even when I wrote my pizza book, Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, which was first published in 2005. To fully capture this moment in the evolution of the slice, I enlisted a couple of co-conspirators, Adam Kuban and Scott Wiener, both of whom share my passion for the slice.

Adam was the founder of the seminal pizza blog SliceNY and is a former managing editor of Serious Eats. Not only does he keep his finger on the pizza pulse of this city, he’s been making terrific bar-style pizza at his periodic pop-up, Margot’s Pizza.

Scott Wiener is the founder of Scott’s Pizza Tours. No one, and I mean no one, has been to more slice joints or eaten more slices of pizza in the last 10 years. Scott estimates that he has eaten 5,000 slices of pizza in the last five years (that’s 2.75 a day).

Our original goal was to come up with a master list of all the New York slices you have to eat before you die. But after eating our way through all five boroughs, I made an executive decision and changed course. Why? Because we didn’t want to publish yet another pizza bucket list. The internet is full of them, and you deserve more from us.

New York’s slice culture seems to be making an evolutionary leap—led by the aforementioned revivalists—and we wanted to give this moment some context. So I decided to split up our list into three parts to do just that:

The Revivalists: The slice shops described above, led by the ingredient- and technique-obsessed new wave of pizza-makers.

The Classics: We’ve chosen to define “classics” as continuously operating pizzerias that date back to between the 1950s and the 1970s—old-school spots that played a not-insignificant part in the rise of the New York slice joint, and that we consider the best in class of the First Golden Age of the Slice (see “A Slice of New York Pizza History”).

The Neighborhood Favorites: These spots may fly below the radar in a citywide sense, but locals will be quick to send you there—or not, if they want to keep a good thing to themselves. They’re places that serve as community gathering spots or local touchstones.

What Is a New York Slice?

Frank Mastro, who invented the gas-fired pizza oven in 1934. [Photograph: Courtesy the Mastro family]

Before we go any further, let’s define our terms.

A New York slice (or pie) has a thin crust that’s crisp yet flexible—you can fold it without shattering it like a cracker. A red pie will typically have an uncooked tomato “sauce” (really, uncooked crushed tomatoes that have been lightly seasoned with salt); white pies forgo sauce and typically add dollops of ricotta. Depending on the pizzeria, the sauce may be seasoned with herbs (and sometimes sugar), but the key is that it’s uncooked prior to going in the oven. (The regular New York pie is not to be confused with the Sicilian or “grandma” pie, both of which have thicker crusts.)

That oven will be a deck oven cranked to around 550°F (288°C), most often gas-fueled in New York, but electric models are making inroads. (To understand why a deck oven was so important for the evolution of New York pizza, check out our history of the New York slice.)

The standard cheese is what’s known in the industry as low-moisture mozzarella (sometimes referred to as LMM), and, ideally, there shouldn’t be too much of it. The amount of cheese used should be in balance with the sauce and crust. Ed prefers “discrete areas of sauce and cheese.”

As for form, it’s always sliced into a triangle. Scott adds, “It’s served on a paper plate, but the slice is bigger than the plate.” (Sicilian and grandma slices are served in squares.)

So that’s essentially a New York slice. A good New York slice is something more.

A good slice will have a thin, crisp crust, flavorful sauce that’s well-balanced, and good-quality cheese that’s creamy and not rubbery. The crust should have good coloration—a golden-brown to dark-brown hue tells us the dough was likely fermented properly, which means good flavor.

Fermentation, where pizza dough is concerned, is the chemical breakdown of flour by yeast, which yields sugars and alcohol. The sugars that the yeast helps release end up browning the crust. Too short a fermentation yields too little sugar for browning (and not enough alcohol and by-products for flavor). You can overferment, but that’s an issue you’ll likely never encounter at most slice pizzerias, where the more common foul seems to be making and using the dough too quickly. (Max Bernstein did a great series of Breadmaking 101 posts that delve deeper into this—go read them!)

A properly fermented dough will also have a nice crumb, or good hole structure, which is produced by a well-developed network of gluten. This is easiest to see in a Sicilian slice or in the end crust of a regular slice, where the crust is obviously at its thickest.

Hole structure itself is largely a function of dough hydration, which is simply the amount of water in a pizza (or bread) dough relative to its flour content. Generally, the more hydrated a dough, the more open and “airy” the crumb is, as a wetter dough allows longer gluten strands to form.

Finally, let’s talk about reheats. You’re going to encounter this phenomenon at most slice pizzerias, because they’ll precook a number of “slice pies” for quick service. If a slice pie has been sitting long enough to cool, they’ll throw it back in the oven for a bit. Some pizzerias even under-bake their pies somewhat, so the final slice doesn’t get hammered on reheat.

One tip that veteran slice-eaters will already know—you can specify your reheat temp, from “not too hot” or “warm” to “make it hot.” Some exceptionally service-forward pizzerias will even ask, “Hot or warm?” The more you know.

The List

First, some caveats.

We researched this article over the course of six months. Each of us did some individual slice-snarfing throughout the boroughs, and then, for two incredible Saturdays, one in Brooklyn and one in Queens, we met up and hit 10-plus places each day.

The lists here are largely in alphabetical order instead of ranked, with one exception (Louie’s, in the “Neighborhood Favorites” portion of the list). Why? Because none of us really believe in ranking pizzerias. When you live and breathe and think about pizza constantly, there are just too many variations among slices and too many gray areas. And, ultimately, this body of slices represents the pizza you need to eat to comprehend the New York slice experience.

We went back and forth on whether we should include toppings—and which styles we would consider. In the end, we decided on plain slices only, but we did allow ourselves to consider any style commonly served in NYC slice joints—regular* (i.e., round, cheese-and-tomato-sauce-only pizza); Sicilian (a thick, rectangular, raised-dough pan pizza); and grandma (like Sicilian, but with dough that’s not left to rise). For regular slices, we mostly limited consideration to those made only with what’s known in the industry as low-moisture mozzarella—as in, not fresh mozzarella, but the stuff most folks probably know as plain ol’ mozzarella from the grocery store. LMM, whether it’s whole-milk, part-skim, or a blend of the two, is the standard mozzarella on regular New York slices. For square slices, we were a little looser in what cheese we’d consider, as you’ll see. Squares have always been more of a gray area.

Many of the entries in the list are a synthesis of notes by, and recorded conversations between, Ed Levine, Scott Wiener, and Adam Kuban—written up by Adam. Where they’re the work of primarily one of us, the author’s initials will be noted at the end. Make sense? Yes? Good.

* Once known as “Neapolitan,” until the great traditional-Neapolitan revival of the 2000s.

The Revivalists

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We’re leading with the revival places, the places to try out if you want to discover where slice culture is in 2018. Start your slice journey here if you’re already familiar with the classics.

Best Pizza

33 Havemeyer Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211; 718-599-2210; http://www.best.piz.za.com

[Photograph: J. Kenji López-Alt]

When it comes to the thoughtful reinvention of the classic New York slice here in the city, Frank Pinello may be Patient Zero. In retrospect, it seems inevitable. He was raised in Bensonhurst, trained at the CIA, and opened a slice shop in Williamsburg at the height of Brooklyn’s mid-aughts renaissance.

Those factors seem to have shaped the pizza he makes at Best, which is cooked in a massive brick bakery oven from the early 20th century—a setup that would have been familiar to the men who started the New York coal-oven giants Totonno’s, John’s, and Patsy’s (though Best uses wood as fuel).

At the same time, Pinello’s Culinary Institute chops reveal themselves in the attention he pays to ingredients—making, then shredding, fresh mozzarella for the cheese; pickling various vegetables for the sesame seed–crusted white “pickled veg” slice; respecting the ingredients enough to let them stand on their own, as with the nice bright sauce on the plain slice, which is made simply from good-quality crushed tomatoes.

The crust on the regular slices is thin yet pliable, with a satisfyingly crisp-springy texture and great hole structure. The grandma slice has a light and crisp crust and a punchy sauce spiked with garlic and finely chopped anchovies. You simply cannot order the wrong slice here—and that’s before we even mention the fantastic sandwiches, which we won’t, because this list is all about pizza. —AK

Corner Slice

600 11th Avenue, New York, NY 10036; 212-956-9339; https://cornerslicenyc.com

[Photograph: Clay Williams]

As Ed put it, “Corner Slice may be the single best slice of pizza in New York at the moment. Holy s***, is this pizza good, and unlike any other slice around. They’re elevating the New York pizza slice in a way that no one else has in a long time.” Ed’s called co-owner Mike Bergemann “the mad scientist of pizza” for the way he’s experimented with various cheese blends and artisan flours in crafting the square pies that lend the stand in the Gotham West food hall its name.

The Corner Slice crust is made from a blend of durum and spelt flours from Central Milling, a Utah-based mill whose premium flours are considered among the best by many bakers and pizza-makers. Mike and his brother, Pete, employ long fermentations (which enhance flavor) of their dough, which is noticeably wet (making the finished product light and airy). The crust’s flavor is excellent, and the crispness is on point, verging ever so slightly into crunchy territory. It’s bubbly and light, yet sturdy.

The tomato-topped slice, finished with a little Sicilian oregano, is a great way to get a taste for what the brothers are doing here, but pair it with another slice of whatever else calls to you. They’re all good.

L’Industrie

254 South 2nd Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211; 718-599-0002; https://www.lindustriebk.com

[Photograph: Vicky Wasik]

When L’Industrie opened in 2015 under its original French owner, the tiny Williamsburg shop was making fairly pedestrian pies that garnered little attention. But when current owner Massimo Laveglia took over in early 2017, he changed everything but the name, overhauling the pizza while steadily building a reputation for stellar pies and slices. The Florence native made the best slice of the day on our Brooklyn pizza crawl, and it’s been consistently good on subsequent visits—superb crust, char, air, texture.

“It’s the re-Italianization of pizza, and not in a way that says one way is right and one way is wrong,” says Scott. “It’s not an Italian machismo thing; it’s more like, this Italian guy making New York–style pizza, but in a way he would do naturally, so his ricotta dabs are more floral-looking—it’s just a really cool, good pie, in a tiny, 300-square-foot space.” Don’t miss the burrata slice, which is blowing up Instagram.

Mama’s Too

2750 Broadway, New York, NY 10025; 212-510-7256; http://www.mamastoo.com

[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

Mama’s Too opened on Broadway and West 105th Street in late 2017, having spun off of longtime Upper West Side pizzeria Mama’s, just around the corner. Too often, the story of decades-old mom-and-pop restaurants ends with the youngest generation “moving up” in the world and out of the business. But there’s a great counter-narrative to that, and it’s one where fresh blood pulls the business into the present while honoring the past. We’ve seen it here in NYC with Wilson Tang at Nom Wah Tea Parlor, Niki Russ Federman at Russ & Daughters, and Jason Wang of Xi’an Famous Foods.

For Mama’s Too, owner/operator Frank Tuttolomondo built on foundations established at Mama’s, where the pizza is standard slice-joint fare. “I knew I couldn’t change the pizza there, or regulars would be upset,” Frank said. “So I opened this place.”

When it’s available and fresh from the oven, the pizza at Mama’s Too is fantastic. (The small shop has trouble keeping up with demand, and the slices can suffer on reheat.) The squares are superb, with a satisfying crisp-chewy quality and a nice open crumb that still stands up to the substantial toppings. Tuttolomondo says he’s inspired by noted Roman pizza-maker Gabriele Bonci—but that he’s trying to bridge the gap between Roman-style pizza al taglio (that is, pizza “by the cut”) and New York squares. Gap bridged.

The regular slice employs some Di Fara–esque touches. Like Dom De Marco, Tuttolomondo does the whole post-oven cheese-grating-and-tons-of-basil thing. The crust is made from a 70% hydrated dough, leading to a very open, airy crumb and a light, crisp bite. As a general rule, most pizza is best eaten straight out of the oven, but we strongly recommend eating a regular slice from Mama’s Too as fresh from the oven as possible; it loses some of its ethereal qualities when you let it sit. —AK

My Pie Pizzeria Romana

690 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022; 212-317-1850; https://www.mypiepizzeria.com

[Photograph: Clay Williams]

Like Mama’s Too, My Pie Pizzeria Romana takes inspiration from revered pizza-maker Gabriele Bonci, who is behind Pizzarium in Rome. When My Pie first opened in its original spot in 2013, astute pizzaheads would have noticed a Bonci cookbook on proud display, alongside a wood pizza peel bearing the mark of Bonci. For the casual eater of pizza, we’ll stress that Bonci is an outsize figure in the world of pizza, and when a spot can claim a connection, pizza nerds sit up and listen.

It turns out that the two brothers who opened My Pie, Michael and John Ozger, learned from Bonci himself, and now turn out medium-thick, crisp, and light squares topped with good-quality organic ingredients in an unsuspecting part of Midtown. The pizzas are served al taglio out of large trays displayed behind glass, and they bear an abundance of toppings.

My Pie’s bready slices would be a fantastic find anywhere, but in its original location on Lexington and 57th, they’re a godsend. They’ve since added a second location on Amsterdam and 72nd on the Upper West Side, which also needed something like this. —AK

Scarr’s

22 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002; 212-334-3481; http://www.scarrspizza.com

[Photograph: Clay Williams]

Not many pizzerias in New York—or the world, for that matter—can claim they’re using freshly milled flour in their dough. And Scarr’s is the only one in New York selling such pizza by the slice. (Bruno, which opened in the East Village slightly before Scarr’s, offers whole pies made with house-milled flour.)

Owner/operator Scarr Pimentel, who has worked in pizzerias all over the city—Joe’s, Lombardi’s, Artichoke Basille’s—blends his own milled flour with organic heritage flour from an upstate farm. Pimentel says freshly milled flour retains more of the wheat’s nutrients and can help with digestibility, but what wins us over is the slightly nutty flavor and crisp-chewy texture that the flour blend produces in the crust.

The shop itself is a fun re-creation of a 1970s pizza shop—one that just happens to sell some of the most well-considered pizza in the city.

Sofia Pizza Shoppe

989 First Avenue, New York, NY 10022; 212-888-8816; https://sofiapizzashoppe.com

[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

Tommy DeGrezia and Matthew Porter opened Sofia in 2016 in an area of Manhattan that sorely lacked a fine slice. Tom’s last name may look familiar if you’ve already perused the “Classics” section: He’s the grandson of Vincent DeGrezia, the “V” in Bensonhurst old-school joint J&V Pizza.

The regular slices at Sofia are what you should focus on—they’re thinner than usual, always consistent, and have just the right balance of sauce and good-quality cheese. As mentioned, one of our ground rules was that we’d judge only on plain slices, and these plain slices pass. But don’t skip their signature spinach-dip slice, which sounds like a gut-busting gimmick but actually works, leaving you feeling satisfied but not regretful in the least. —AK

Williamsburg Pizza

265 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211; 718-855-8729; http://www.williamsburgpizza.com

[Photograph: J. Kenji López-Alt]

Nino Coniglio is an idiosyncratic, itinerant pizza guy who went from pizza competitions to a superb, now-defunct shop in deep Brooklyn and is now a partner and lead pizza-maker at Williamsburg Pizza. He’s also a pizza consultant, developing pizza programs at pizzerias, restaurants, and bars. Judging by his work at Williamsburg Pizza, those places are in good hands. We had a very good grandma slice here, and the regular slice has an old-school NYC crust with a crisp veneer and tender insides, and plenty of color and bubbles to boot. —EL

The Classics

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The old-school places that laid the foundations for the revivalists to build upon. These are the slices you need to eat for some basic level-setting and for overall slice cultural literacy.

Di Fara

1424 Avenue J, Brooklyn, NY 11230; 718-258-1367; http://www.difarany.com

[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

What more is there to say about Di Fara that hasn’t been covered in this epic 2009 post, “All You Need to Know About Di Fara, 2009”? Well, turns out that a lot has changed in nearly 10 years—even at a place most people might have thought was frozen in time.

Proprietor and pizza patriarch Dom De Marco still takes the pies out of the oven with his bare hands, still takes forever, but his daughter Maggie has semi-successfully made order out of chaos when it comes to ordering, writing down each order manually in a notebook with her own unique shorthand. Dom has a pizza-making assistant now, which helps some. They’re not using fresh mozzarella on the regular pie anymore, and the fistfuls of freshly grated Grana Padano were replaced by pre-grated Romano after Dom’s old counter-mounted rotary grater broke and he was unable to find a replacement.

The Sicilian, which a lot of people prefer to the regular slice, was dense and tough. We much preferred the regular, which, even with the changes, somehow still tasted like Di Fara. He may have lost a step, but so does every great athlete before they retire. Scott calls it “the pilgrimage pizzeria of NYC.”

Joe & Pat’s

1758 Victory Boulevard, Staten Island, NY 10314; 718-981-0887; https://www.joeandpatsny.com

[Photograph: Clay Williams]

A photo of a slice from Staten Island legend Joe & Pat’s is instantly recognizable: a super-thin, flat crust all the way to the edge, with discrete cubes of low-moisture mozzarella that melt into distinct blobs (rather than the full coverage that comes from using shredded cheese), against a background of very simple tomato sauce. —SW

Joe’s Pizza

7 Carmine Street, New York, NY 10014; 347-312-4955; http://www.joespizzanyc.com

[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

This is the New York–iest of New York slices. It defines classic NY slice pizza—crisp, thin crust, crushed canned tomatoes as sauce, low-moisture mozzarella for cheese. Don’t bother with the fresh-mozz slices—they’re invariably bland. Joe’s is so consistent in all its locations (a bunch of NYC shops and one in Shanghai) that I have dreams of it replacing every mediocre Famiglia in airports and malls and train stations everywhere. —EL

L&B Spumoni Gardens

2725 86th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11223; 718-449-1230; http://www.spumonigardens.com

[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

When someone talks about an “L&B–style slice,” they’re often talking about the way this legendary Gravesend pizzeria assembles its square pizzas: dough, slices of low-moisture mozzarella, then the sauce. This is followed by a dusting of grated Romano cheese all over, especially along the edges, where it bakes into the crust, creating a kind of accidental Parmesan stick—you know, like those breadsticks that have just a dusting of baked-on cheese.

But there’s more to it than that. The crust is like no other. The bottom is plenty crisp, but the interior is tender and soft—it’s airy, even though it has a tight-to-medium crumb.

Where the cheese and crust meet, the two become one. Some people find this off-putting because, when you bite in, it feels like the dough is undercooked. But, as Scott pointed out to us, this is a false “gum line”—a line in the crust where the dough is still raw, which can happen in improperly cooked pizza. What’s happening with L&B’s is that your teeth push the melted cheese into the dough, creating the impression of a gum line.

The L&B Sicilian slice really is its own thing. And let’s be clear that we’re talking only about the Sicilian here, because that is 100% the pizza they’re known for.

Louie and Ernie’s

1300 Crosby Avenue, Bronx, NY 10461; 718-829-6230; https://louieanderniespizza.com

[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

Let’s use the superb, just-thin-enough slice at Louie and Ernie’s to talk about topping distribution, because something they do there illustrates this concept perfectly: They put a little pinch of black pepper in the center of the pie, so your first bite has that zing. This is called center-loading. Another technique they’re adept at here is evenly distributing the toppings so each bite is uniform.

These are the small differences you might not notice, but they’re integral to making your favorite slice your favorite slice. There’s also a bit of cornmeal on the underside here, which offers some extra texture. It’s all topped sparingly with whole-milk mozzarella and grated cheese, and when you add up all the details, it makes for a diminutive slice of heaven in Throgs Neck in the Bronx.

New Park Pizza

156-71 Cross Bay Boulevard, Howard Beach, NY 11414; 718-641-3082; http://newparkpizza.com

[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

We struggled with including New Park because it can be inconsistent, and because you have to ask for it well-done if it’s to approach its potential greatness. But when it’s on, it’s so on. The regular slice is the thing to get, cooked in an old brick-lined oven that’s got, like, a flamethrower inside. Scott thinks it used to be a coal oven that was just repurposed. They do this thing where they throw salt on the floor of the oven every hour or two, and when you get a just-salted slice? Perfect. It’s the little quirks that make the difference here.

NY Pizza Suprema

413 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10001; 212-594-8939; http://nypizzasuprema.com

[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

After leaving the family business to work in law, Joe Riggio eventually came back and took over Suprema from his father, Sal. Located across from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, the place is always busy, so you’re all but guaranteed a fresh slice that hasn’t been sitting. It’s got a sweet sauce, but it’s one satisfying slice nonetheless. If you’re going to the Garden, this should be your pre- or post-game slice. If you get to Penn Station early, head here immediately. The regular slice is exemplary, but the upside-down Sicilian is on another level altogether. Super-fast and efficient service, and you can almost always find a seat.

Patsy’s East Harlem

2287 First Avenue, New York, NY 10035; 212-534-9783; https://www.thepatsyspizza.com

[Photograph: Clay Williams]

Patsy’s is a treasure. It’s one of only two coal-oven pizzerias selling by the slice in New York—and a plain slice goes for only $1.75. An example of minimalist perfection, the Patsy’s slice has been remarkably consistent ever since I’ve been in New York. [Editor’s note: That is, since 1973.] Sure, it’s smaller than most slices, but it’s cheaper than any other good slice in New York. In the dining room, they offer a choice of fresh or low-moisture mozzarella—the only coal-oven pizzeria to do so—but at the slice counter next door, LMM is the default. —EL

Rizzo’s Fine Pizza

30-13 Steinway Street, Astoria, NY 11103; 718-721-9862; http://www.rizzosfinepizza.com

[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

Rizzo’s serves a unique slice, which it describes as a “thin-crust Sicilian.” It’s a rectangular slice sparsely topped with sauce and cheese. As with Joe & Pat’s, its signature look is the whole discrete-areas-of-sauce-and-cheese thing. But Rizzo’s takes it to a whole new level—you can almost imagine them meticulously laying on one two- by three-inch rectangle of sliced cheese per slice. The crust is biscuit-y and dense, but it works. Nobody else is making a slice like this, unless you head to Lazzara’s in the Garment District, but that’s whole-pie-only.

The Neighborhood Favorites

[top]

Louie’s

81-34 Baxter Avenue, Elmhurst, NY 11373; 718-440-9346

[Photograph: Daniel Gritzer]

The superb grandma slice at Louie’s—light, not too thick, nice and airy and crisp—is an example of why it pays not to be too strict about categorizing and nomenclature.

For the longest time, I mistakenly believed that a grandma was simply a “thinner Sicilian,” one that typically had a lot of garlic (but sometimes not) and that often had the sauce painted on in diagonal stripes (but not always). But Scott set me straight a while ago, explaining that a grandma’s dough is pressed out into its rectangular pan, topped, and then baked immediately, while a Sicilian dough is left to rise, or “proof,” in the pan before it’s topped and baked. (At L&B, they actually top it with cheese and sauce and then let it proof.)

Per Scott’s definition, the star of the show at Louie’s Pizzeria is technically a Sicilian, since it proofs in the pan. Moreover, it’s an upside-down Sicilian, because the cheese (fresh mozzarella, in this case) goes on first, covered by an ample amount of crushed plum tomatoes seasoned with lots of garlic, basil, and Pecorino Romano.

Even if you don’t remember these details, just remember to get the grandma at Louie’s. The regular slice is perfectly fine; better than average, really, and I’d be happy to order it if it were my local and we needed round pies for some reason. But it’s just not in the same universe as the grandma there.

What’s more, Louie’s embodies the very notion of the Beloved Neighborhood Fave, which is why it’s at the top of this category and not in alphabetical order, like we’ve done elsewhere.

Even though we believe we’re in the middle of a pizza renaissance, and even though a lot of pie-makers may be turning out the most technically well-crafted pizzas we’ve seen in a generation, one thing that seems to be in short supply is a form of genuine hospitality, something that isn’t part of a self-conscious “strategy” designed to wow you. You might not notice the difference until you finally get your butt to a place like Louie’s.

From the outside, it’s an unassuming place, which, truth be told, is part of the reason I initially hadn’t bothered to check it out. It was neither knowingly hip-looking like Scarr’s, nor was it charmingly old-school like J&V. Step inside, though, and you’re greeted immediately and enthusiastically by Louie. If he doesn’t know you, he introduces himself (though he declined to disclose his last name for this story). The people cycling in and out all seem to be regulars—if they’re not, you wouldn’t know it from the way Louie chitchats with them.

The customers are a diverse lot—this is Queens, after all, on the border of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst. But more than just the racial diversity you’d expect, you’ve got people from seemingly all walks of life. There are the cops—it is very cop-heavy—picking up dinner for themselves and colleagues. There’s staff from Elmhurst Hospital across the street. There’s a bougie-looking dad and son, plus a large multigenerational family there for the non-pizza food (which I understand is also quite good).

Over the course of three consecutive evenings there, I saw several of the same faces, all of them bantering with Louie and often with one another. Louie’s is a community hub. It’s more than just a place you go to collect a photo for your Instagram feed—though, admittedly, those grandma slices translate to mega likes.

Are non-Queensers going to rush out here from other boroughs? Probably not. As fantastic as the grandma is, the place is a schlep if you don’t live in the area, and you can probably find a slice just as fulfilling, in one way or another, closer to home. But if you live nearby, you know the qualities that bring you to a place like Louie’s—or to Delmar in Brooklyn, or Nunzio’s on Staten Island, or Sal & Carmine on the Upper West Side—and you advocate loudly for your spot.

That is what we mean by Beloved Neighborhood Faves. Here are some more—in merciful brevity. —AK

Ciccio’s

207 Avenue U, Brooklyn, NY 11223; 718-372-9695

[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

Living in the shadow of L&B is Ciccio’s (just a 10-minute walk away—make it a twofer visit!). We learned about it at Slice back in the day from Gravesend local David Sheridan, who went on to open Wheated in Ditmas Park. Ciccio’s is known for its sesame seed crust, one of the few shops in New York where this is SOP. It’s got a dense edge, more cheese than many a New York slice, and nice color on the underside. The crust is like getting a bonus red-sauce sesame stick. —AK

Dani’s House of Pizza

81-28 Lefferts Boulevard, Kew Gardens, NY 11415; 718-846-2849; https://www.danishouseofpizza.com

[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

Dani’s is way the heck out in Kew Gardens, Queens, a true neighborhood spot if there ever was one, so you’d think it would be a casual, quick-grab kind of place. Nope. The few seats at the counter are never not filled, and there’s a line out the door at lunchtime, at dinnertime, at 3:30 p.m. on a weekday, at midnight on a rainy Friday when the streets are otherwise empty, and at 10 p.m. on the coldest night of the winter in 2015, when I first visited after looking at an apartment nearby.

The crust is super thin, crisp, and light, with a generous helping of sauce, though be forewarned: Their semiofficial hashtag is #sweetsauce. I’m usually not into sweet sauces, but I make an exception for a fresh, hot slice at Dani’s. And yes, I know we’re supposed to talk only about the plain slices, which are great, but they’re also kind of known for their pesto slice, which a lot of locals get with red sauce added on top. —AK

Delmar

1668 Sheepshead Bay Road, Brooklyn, NY 11235; 718-769-7766; https://www.delmarpizzabk.com

[Photograph: Clay Williams]

As noted pizza guys, all of us are often asked, “What’s the best slice in the city?” and/or “I live in [Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood], what’s the best slice near me?”

As we’ve said, none of us really rank pizzerias, so to the first question, you’re apt to get a long-winded answer filled with several options. For the second question, we’ll either have a neighborhood pick to toss out, or we’ll end up learning something new from a local (which is always a good thing).

But these questions aren’t really intended to elicit new information for the asker. They’re usually all about the asker testing for BS on our part, seeing if our answers jibe with theirs and whether they can trust our judgment.

For folks who grew up in deep Brooklyn, Delmar in Sheepshead Bay often serves as a litmus test. And rightly so. It’s a fine slice, with very even color on the crust and tight proportions of cheese and sauce. The mozzarella is good-quality—it had a nice pull to it when we visited—and there’s a good amount of Romano on it, enough to lend the slice a salty, tangy note. The Sicilian is very nice and light, too.

J&V Pizza

6322 18th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11204; 718-331-0689; http://jvpizza.com

[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

The regular slice at this authentically retro Bensonhurst mainstay is very good, with salty cheese. There’s a unique, crunchy grandma slice. But the Sicilian? Fantastic, light, and airy, with goopy cheese cascading down the sides. It’s the thing to get.

Little Luzzo’s

119 East 96th Street, New York, NY 10128; 212-369-2300

[Photograph: Clay Williams]

Little Luzzo’s, on 96th Street between Park and Lexington, is a hangout for nearby Hunter High School students, all of whom seem to opt for the special: two shockingly good Margherita slices and a soda or water for $5. It’s the best deal in the city for traditional, good New York–style pizza. The slice is kind of Joe’s-like: crisp, thin crust; dark bake; discrete areas of uncooked, crushed tomato sauce; and aged mozzarella. And there’s a bonus on each slice: a couple of nubbins of fresh basil. I guess that’s why they call their regular slices Margheritas. No grated Romano on the slice, but they have a shaker full of the salty stuff on the counter.

Luigi’s Pizza

686 5th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215; 718-499-3857; http://luigispizzabrooklyn.com

[Photograph: Adam Kuban]

Luigi’s Pizza in Park Slope is an old-school place with a serious dough-management strategy. Second-generation owner Gio Lonzo (Luigi’s son, who now runs the place) has devoted the entire next-door storefront to a series of refrigerators all set to different temperatures, which house the dough at different stages of its fermentation. (How can he afford this space? The Lonzos own the building.) It makes for a fantastic plain slice with tons of flavor. Worth seeking out not only for the pizza but for the effortless hospitality Gio and crew radiate—and for the authentic 1970s pizzeria vibe.

Ed finds the regular slice excellent, with perfect balance and seasoning, and he calls the grandma slice “snappy.” Scott’s assessment is a bit stronger: “It’s the definitive slice. It’s the truth. It’s the honest truth of New York pizza.”

Nunzio’s

2155 Hylan Boulevard, Staten Island, NY 10306; 718-667-9647

[Photograph: Clay Williams]

Despite the old admonition about judging a book by its cover, sometimes you really can look at a slice and not want any part of it. One tell is seeing a slice absolutely blanketed in cheese. That’s not the kind of slice Nunzio’s serves out in Staten Island. Here, little islands of cheese seem to float on a sea of basil-laced sauce, all atop a perfectly crisp-pliant crust.

Sac’s Place

2541 Broadway, Astoria, NY 11106; 718-204-5002; http://sacsplace.com/

[Photograph: Daniel Gritzer]

Sac’s is a large pizzeria-restaurant in Astoria that has the distinction, after Patsy’s, of serving the only other coal-oven slice in New York. They do the initial bake in the coal oven, and when you order a slice, they reheat it in a standard gas-fired deck oven. There’s not a ton of buzz around Sac’s, but it was the best slice on the Queens leg of our initial pizza crawl—thin, crisp, with a bright tomato sauce and just enough cheese. It really should get more attention than it does.

Sal & Carmine

2671 Broadway, New York, NY 10025; 212-663-7651

[Photograph: Clay Williams]

The quintessential Upper West Side slice joint, located on Broadway between 101st and 102nd Streets. When it opened in 1965, on Broadway and 95th Street, it used to be just Sal’s. It’s now being run by Sal’s grandson Luciano. The slices are slightly bready, with just a hint of crunch on the bottom, and they are very cheesy, so much so that the dreaded slice-blotters have a field day at Sal & Carmine. The sauce is barely evident. The place is so old-school, there’s still a non-functioning slice window in the front.

A Final Word

Slice from Sauce in the East Village. [Photograph: Clay Williams]

So that’s the state of the slice as we head into the final months of 2018, and we’re eager to see what 2019 brings, since it appears the pace of reinvention hasn’t slowed. For example, two revivalist slice spots just opened: the long-awaited Paulie Gee’s Slice Shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Sauce Pizzeria in the East Village, which has some impressive bona fides. (The owners worked with uber–pizza consultant Anthony Falco, who made a name for himself at Roberta’s.)

Both are putting out some promising pies, but we left them off the list proper to give their slices some time to mature. Based on what we’ve tasted, though, they seem to have internalized the best elements of the revivalist movement: They know they have to bring something new to the slice table and improve upon what’s already on offer, whether it’s from classic spots, neighborhood stalwarts, or some of the cheffier operations on the scene. Any ambitious New York slice shop opening in 2019 or beyond will have to do the same if it hopes to distinguish itself in a pack of truly superlative peers.

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