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mithrilwren · 3 years

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Fanfic ask game for procrastinating on writing, which as of this week is actually accurate, since I’m finally writing again! (or, more specifically, editing what I wrote two months ago so I can get back to writing.)

Tagged by @essektheylyss! Thank you, this is exactly the kind of activity my brain needed tonight.

1) How many works do you have on AO3?

72! I was hovering at 69 for quite a while, sad to break the streak haha

2) What’s your total AO3 word count?

~550K, which is somehow both more and less than what I expected

3) How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Many, lmao. According to my Ao3 (omitting any blanket tags) I’ve got 22 there, plus at least two more over on ff.net from back in the day, and probably a couple more just on Tumblr. Most of them I’ve only written one fic for, though. I think the only fandoms where I’ve written more than one are Critical Role (35), Supernatural (15), Haikyuu!! (3), The Exorcist (2), Dimension 20 (2), and Yu-Gi-Oh! (2)

4) What are your top five fics by kudos?

Pick a Number, Any Number

Surprisingly, my number one is NOT a Critical Role fic, nor is it even one of my longer multi-chapters! It’s actually a one-shot I wrote for Haikyuu!! back in the day that took off far beyond what I expected. I wrote it for DaiSuga week, which was a ship I (to be completely honest) wasn’t even terribly invested in, but I had a fun idea and people seemed to like it! (It’s also much fluffier than what I usually write, which might be part of its broader appeal ;))

A Winter’s Ball

Unsurprisingly, the next four are all CR ;). This one was a M9 x VM crossover that I primarily wrote between the hours of 3-8am over the course of two insomnia-wracked nights and honestly, I think it shows in its uncharacteristically unstructured format (compared to my typical style, which tends to favour shorter scenes with very intentionally-placed breaks between, as opposed to scenes that flow into each other without pause). That’s not to say I think it’s a bad thing! The story, which follows Beau as she drifts through a party in Whitestone and observes the interactions between the various guests, actually flows better without that kind of interruption. This was also my first Beaujester piece. I started writing it right before Beau’s confession aired, and published it the week after, which definitely pushed me to make what had been only subtextual in the first half of my draft into the emotional lynchpin of the story.

Only the Nightingale Sings

I’m really glad this one still ranks as high as it does, because this story is absolutely my pride and joy. At one time (though I’m not sure that’s true anymore) it was the longest gen fic in the fandom, which is pretty cool! Plot-heavy, twist-heavy, angst-heavy, with seven points of view to follow and multiple interwoven storylines, it was a beast of a thing to write, and took almost exactly a year to finish, but the long process was oh-so worth it. Literally nothing makes me happier today than seeing a new comment or kudos on this story.

Closer Still

One of my earliest shadowgast fics, this one asks the question “how can you make the ‘stuck in an elevator trope’ fantasy?” The answer is, as always, demiplanes. This fic, perhaps more than any of my other shadowgast fics, is interesting to revisit, because it was written before the ep 97 reveal, but literally everything Essek does in it would suggest otherwise. It reads like I already knew he was a spy working with Trent, and yet I was firmly in the “Essek is NOT the spy” camp at the time. Gotta chalk that up to Matt telegraphing his growing guilt into the preceding episodes - even if I couldn’t see it, it was clearly there.

your dust from mine

My other novel-length CR multichapter, this fic brought me so much joy in the otherwise bleak summer of 2020. Most of my best memories of those four months come from working on this story. A Fjorclay adaption of The Goose Girl (my favourite fairytale) this story is about healing, growth, and figuring out what happiness means to you. While I know most people don’t read stories for this pairing anymore, for obvious reasons, I still cherish your dust from mine for how much of my heart I poured into it, and I look back on it with a huge amount of fondness.

5) Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I do my absolute best to respond to every comment someone leaves on a story of mine, even if it occasionally takes a month or two. Replying to comments is one of my favourite parts of the fic-writing process - it gives me a chance to revisit peoples’ kind words and (often, incredibly insightful) observations, and I hope it also shows how appreciative I am of each and every one.

6) What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Though I write a lot of angst, I honestly tend more towards bittersweet endings than straight-up sadness. The only one I can really think of is What You Own - mind the tags if you follow the link, this is definitely one of the gnarlier things I’ve written for CR - whose ending is, admittedly, bleak. But this story so far removed from canon that I don’t think it’s the kind of angsty ending that lingers with you, as much as it packs a punch and then lets you go on your way.

7) Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I tend to enjoy thinking about crossovers moreso than actually writing them. I’ve brainstormed a few, but none have ever made it much farther than the first page.

8) Have you ever received hate on a fic?

A few times! Not often, thankfully. Only one time in particular really sticks out to me, mostly for how it rocked my confidence in a way that I don’t think any comment could now, since I’ve had a few more years to build up faith in my own writing.

9) Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Very, very occasionally.

10) Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I hope not!

11) Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope!

12) Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Oh man, back in the Glee days... yeah. Yeah, I have. Nothing that ever got published, though ;)

13) What’s your all time favourite ship?

Not sure I have one! Ships come and go with the seasons, and sometimes they’re best left in the era you found them.

14) What’s a WIP you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

The Shadowgast figure skating AU. It’s never going to happen, but I wish it had.

15) What are your writing strengths?

I would say probably structure, in terms of constructing narrative arcs and through-lines. I’m organized with my writing in a way that I am in few other areas of my life, haha. I’d also say my sense of place - I think I’m pretty good at constructing living, breathing settings and exploring how my characters interact affect/are affected by them.

16) What are your writing weaknesses?

I have a tendency to be wordy (which you might surmise from the length of this post, lol) and repeat myself, usually by going over emotional beats that don’t need the extra reinforcement. On the other hand, I tend to underexplain certain elements (particularly, important plot details in fic, and character motivation in original writing), which can lead to confusion.

A couple years ago I would have said dialogue, but I’ve put a lot of practice into it and I honestly think I’ve improved a lot, which is pretty cool!

17) What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I’ve never done it myself, and it’s not generally my favourite thing to read (like @essektheylyss said, it makes me hyper-aware that I’m reading words on a page, especially if I have to follow a footnote somewhere). That said, I’ve definitely also seen it used effectively, so I think it’s more down to whether it suits the particular story!

18) What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Yu-Gi-Oh!

19) What’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

As mentioned above, Only the Nightingale Sings.

#tag meme #this took me about an hour and i dont regret a minute of it #personal

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gertruderobinsonscat · 4 years

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Thoughts

I keep thinking about Martin asking Jon about if he had known that his death would free the other assistants would he have done things differently. I see a lot of people reading negative intent in that question and giving him hell for adding to Jon’s survivor’s guilt, but it hit very differently for me. Granted, I think it was a thoughtless and tactless question to ask, and goes along with the theme of Martin not registering Jon’s emotional state, whether willful blindness or whatever.

Sorry if this is incoherent, I’m still trying to put my thoughts in order.

I know the answer to us seems pretty obvious--of course Jonathan “hold my rib while I throw myself in an eldritch coffin” Sims would sacrifice himself to save his friends. Of course Jonathan “It was my fault that a grown ass man who bullied a literal child got eaten by an eldritch spider” Sims doesn’t value is own life. But I don’t think it’s obvious to Martin. I remember his conversation with Daisy in season four, how he didn’t *get* why Jon kept throwing himself into danger, why he couldn’t “stay safe for five minutes”. As mentioned, he currently seems to have trouble grasping just how much guilt and self-loathing Jon is dealing with. In his eyes Jon is a victim who deserves “to get his murder on” and seek revenge from the creatures that have hurt him. We know from the trailer he has been trying to convince Jon it wasn’t his fault.

I’m not sure how much Martin knows or understands about why Jon chose to come back. I’m not sure how much Jon knows. He says it was because he was afraid to die, and while I’m sure that’s true he hasn’t let that stop him from repeatedly risking his life if he thought he could save someone else. Part of this is just my own headcanon, but I do think a huge motivation for coming back was because Martin begged him to, and if he had known how he would’ve done it right then. I know part of it is the format and a way to have a trailer for the upcoming season, but it is still significant that the only times the tape recorders turned on/started manifesting while Jon was comatose was when Elias came to do his evil monologue, Martin saying that he needed Jon and begged him to come back, and Oliver spelled out what he needed to do and sacrifice if he wanted to live.

Tying into their current situation. Martin isn’t stupid, he’s good at intuiting how the Fears work, I’m sure it’s occurred to him--with all the talk of Jon being the lynchpin that brought the fears into the world and now this conveniently timed info that Jon’s death had the power to free the others--that the key to saving the world might involve sacrificing Jon. And that’s not an option for Martin. He was working with Peter in season 4 not out of a heroic urge to save the world or even save the others, but because he was hoping to get killed. He then admits that Jon coming back was the thing that changed that, gave him a reason to keep going. I think if the Big Bad told Martin that it’s Jon or the world he would choose Jon over the world.

And it’s not because he’s selfish or callous or doesn’t care about other people. He’s shown over and over to be kind and caring of people even when he has no reason to be or when it ultimately does no good. If he had to make the opposite choice--if someone said he could save Jon and himself and live happily forever free from pain but had to destroy the world to do it--I don’t think he could pull a Jonah Magnus and go that route either. I have some messy, confused thoughts about how he and Jon are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Gertrude’s ruthless pragmatism of “willing to sacrifice a few to save the many”.

So I took Martin’s question to be not “would you have sacrificed yourself” guilt trip but rather a fearful “If you had known you could save the others would have given up? Would you have left me?” and even if it hasn’t fully taken shape in his mind yet a testing of the waters. “If the solution to our ‘doomed quest’ involves you sacrificing yourself, will you leave me?”

#tma #jonmartin #meta i guess

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ollieofthebeholder · 4 years

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and some say love is holding on (and some say letting go): a The Magnus Archives fanfic

Also on AO3. Takes place immediately after Episode 159: The Last. Title and song lyrics from Perhaps Love by John Denver, which is going to end up being the lynchpin of an eventual JonMartin playlist.

Perhaps love is like a resting place, a shelter from the storm It exists to bring you comfort, it is there to keep you warm And in those times of trouble when you are most alone The memory of love will bring you home...

~*~*~*~*~*~

The exhaustion hits the second they cross the threshold from the Lonely’s domain to the real world. Jon is shaking from head to toe, worse than the last time he went more than a couple days without a statement, and the confidence and energy with which he brought them out seems to leave him in a rush, like water swirling down a bathtub drain. He could easily sleep for a week.

At his side, Martin’s knees buckle, and he’s trembling so hard it seems like he might actually fly to pieces. Jon tries to support him, but he’s a head shorter and a good deal skinnier than Martin and it would be an effort under the best of circumstances, which these are decidedly not. He intends to guide Martin gently to sit down on the floor, but it ends up being an ungraceful, barely-controlled mutual collapse.

“Let’s just rest here for a minute,” Jon murmurs, trying to catch his breath.

“Do we really have time?” Martin asks, also gasping for air like they had to work a lot harder to get out than they did.

They probably don’t, actually. Trevor and Julia are up there somewhere, cutting a swath through the Institute’s staff, or trying to anyway. The thing that took Sasha’s place is on the loose, too, abandoning all pretense at humanity. Daisy has given herself back over to the Hunt—Jon knew that was what she was going to do without even having to use his abilities—and even if she did it to save them, to save him, she did it knowing she won’t be coming back from it this time. God, if there is an actual God, only knows where Elias—Jonah—has gone or what he’s up to, what he’s plotting now. There may not be a new entity coming into being or a ritual they need to interrupt, but there are still a lot of very dangerous things out there and most of them very much want to kill them. Or at least Jon.

But they’re both exhausted. Jon’s never used his abilities against another avatar before, or such a reluctant subject, and it’s taken a lot out of him. And Martin—God, Martin. Martin stood up to Peter Lukas, to the avatar of the Lonely. He fought his way back from the brink of being claimed. There’s no way he’s not completely worn out. Whatever might be happening on the surface, Martin needs to rest and Jon is going to give him that.

“I think we’ll have to make it,” he says. “The time, I mean. Whatever’s going on...we won’t be of much use like this.”

Martin gives a soft hum, maybe of agreement, maybe just of acknowledgment. They sit there for a few moments, leaning against one of the smooth stone walls, arms still wrapped around each other’s shoulders. There is no sound in that vast, empty room but their harsh and ragged breathing. Jon concentrates on Martin’s heartbeat, close to his ear because of his height and the way they’re sitting. The steady, even thudding comforts him, reminding him that Martin is alive and safe and there. He’s not okay. Neither of them are by a long shot. They haven’t been for a long time, probably since they started working at the Institute. But they’re together and they’re alive, and that goes a pretty long way.

After a bit, Martin says quietly, “The...thing. Not-Sasha. Peter set it loose, Jon.”

“I know,” Jon admits. “It came after us. After me. Trouble is, Trevor and Julia are up there too.”

“The...? I thought they were in America!”

“They were. Followed me here. Finally figured out I’d taken Gerry’s page from that damned book.” Jon sighs heavily. “Daisy fought them off once before, but they came back. They were cutting their way through the Institute. We—Basira and Daisy and I—we were going to try and fight them off, but then the thing that took Sasha’s place came out. Decided Trevor and Julia were a better target than me, I guess? Basira told me to go and I don’t have any real idea what happened after that.”

Martin gives a short laugh that somehow sounds amused, tired, and slightly bitter all at once. “There’s something I never thought I’d hear you say again.”

“Yes, well, I do have to concentrate most of the time to read minds,” Jon says, trying and failing to smile. “And I had something rather more important worrying me.” He pauses, then adds, “What...happened? I know this is the Panopticon. I know Elias is Jonah Magnus body-hopping, and I know Peter Lukas took you into the Lonely, but...what happened?”

“A lot,” Martin says. “Or maybe it just...felt like a lot. I don’t know if I can...” He looks around, then gestures with his free hand off to Jon’s left. “Should be on there.”

Jon turns to look and sees one of those damned tape recorders. Honestly, he should be used to them turning up everywhere these days, and he mostly is, but he’s got to admit he’s surprised to see it here. “Did Jonah bring that?”

“No, I did. Or, well, it came with me.” Martin shrugs. “Didn’t turn it on consciously or anything, so I’ve no idea what’s on there, but I can guess. Tends to turn itself on when something important is going to happen.”

Jon considers the recorder for a minute. It sits innocuously enough, and it doesn’t seem to be running at the moment, so whatever is on its tape is a past recording. It’s just out of reach from his present position, but there is a black nylon strap trailing off one side. He stretches his leg out as far as he can go and kicks ineffectually for a bit before he finally manages to land his heel in the center of the loop. Slowly and carefully, he drags the recorder towards him until it’s close enough that he can reach out and snag it with his free hand.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier just to get up and grab it?” Martin says. “Or wait until you were up to moving that far?”

Jon doesn’t even give the idea of bantering back a second’s thought, nor does he consider putting a gloss on his reasoning. If anyone deserves the immediate, instinctive, and above all honest answer, it’s Martin. “I’d have had to let go of you to do that,” he says as he hits the rewind button. “And I’m honestly afraid if I do, something else will try to take you away again.”

For a moment, there’s no sound in the room but the whir of the tape spooling backwards. Finally, Martin says, “I know, you put a lot of effort into dragging me out of there once already. Shame for that to go to waste.”

A knot forms in Jon’s chest. God, what the hell did Peter Lukas do to Martin? Or...has he always thought like this? “You honestly think I’d have done that for anyone else?”

There’s another beat before Martin answers. “I mean...yes?”

“Martin...”

“You already did it with Daisy—”

Jon is shaking his head before Martin gets all the words out. “That wasn’t the same thing at all.”

“She was trapped in the domain of another...power. You went plunging in, found her, and brought her back out again, alive and well. Seems like the same thing to me.”

“It’s not,” Jon insists, looking up into Martin’s face. “For one thing, the reasoning was completely different. I went to find Daisy because I felt guilty.”

“Guilty,” Martin says flatly.

“I’m the one that brought her into that mess,” Jon says softly. “I’m the one that didn’t prepare properly for what would happen in the Unknowing and got her mixed up in it. And I just...we lost Tim. I lost Tim. I couldn’t bring him home. I could bring Daisy home safe. I went after her because I thought it would help my guilt if I could see her alive, and with Basira again.”

“Did it?”

“Sort of? I still...” The tape pops as it hits the beginning of the reel, but Jon ignores it for the moment. “I still feel guilty about Tim. I think I always will. Not just him getting killed, but...all of it. I couldn’t fix that, and no matter what I do for anyone else, I never can make it up to him. I’m not sure if I could have even if he’d survived. I don’t know if he would have let me. But at least Daisy was out of there, and I knew I’d done what I could for her. And she’s been doing all right, more or less. Or was, until today. Even if she did join the Institute to get away from the nightmares. Basira’s still inclined to beat up on me a bit, but Daisy doesn’t seem like she blames me, which helps.”

Martin sighs and slumps back against the wall. “Think that tape’s ready.”

Jon knows a dodge when he hears one, but he decides not to call Martin out on it just yet. Instead, he presses the play button and lets the tape go.

It is the one Martin had with him, starting with him and Peter Lukas first coming into the tunnels. Jon’s stomach lurches every time Lukas talks, the buttery-smooth words eroding Martin’s self-confidence and serving to isolate him further. It’s no wonder Martin tried to make Jon leave him in the Lonely, if this is how the bastard talked to him every time they interacted. His heart twists violently at Martin’s voice—the way it shifts from nervousness to trepidation to fear to outright panic—and then Elias’s voice comes through and his heart nearly stops dead. He listens to both of them taunting, toying with Martin, both of them for some reason urging him to kill Elias—to kill Jonah...

And then Martin refuses.

Jon’s lips part, but no sound comes out. He stares speechlessly at the tape recorder as Martin’s voice spills out, telling Lukas what he was thinking, why he did what he did, how he figured out that Lukas was lying to him for some reason. He stands up to Peter Lukas, the avatar of the Lonely, to his face, and refuses to kill a man who richly deserves it, a man nobody would blame him for destroying. Jon can picture him, shoulders squared and head held high, a defiant glint in his eye as he stares down not one, but two fears trying to claim him, and remains, solely and unequivocally, Martin.

He’s never been prouder.

His heart stutters again when Martin starts to ask a question and then vanishes. There’s a loud squeal of static, and Jon can almost hear voices in it, but it’s too much effort to try and force knowledge out of a magnetic tape right then, so he leaves it. And then he hears his own voice, piecing together the little bit he was able to glean from the surface of Elias’s—Jonah’s—mind, replaying the conversation leading up to him opening his mind, finding the path to the Lonely, and going off after Martin.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Martin says softly when the tape ends with a final-sounding click.

“What, you wanted me to leave you there?”

“Yes! I mean...I can’t say I’d like being there, but...damn it, Jon, the whole point was to keep you safe,” Martin blurts out. “Weren’t you listening? Did you not listen to a single thing I said? All right, I know I didn’t give you all the information, but I couldn’t, not and risk Peter starting to toy with you. As long as he thought I was really staying away from you, you were safe, from him at least. And I thought with Elias locked up, you’d be safe from him, and I knew—Elias told me you listened to all the tapes, so I knew once the recorders started popping up again you’d hear them eventually. I tried everything I could to keep you safe, and you just—walked into the Lonely like it was nothing!”

“No!” Jon says forcefully, and he grips Martin’s shirt tightly, forcing his attention onto him, forcing him to listen. “It wasn’t nothing, Martin, and you know that. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Ever. I had no idea if I was going to be able to get out again, if we were going to be able to get out again. When I went into that coffin to find Daisy, I left a rib as an anchor by the door, so I’d know where the way out was. I had a plan, as...ill-advised as it was, but I did have one. I didn’t have that when I came after you, and I knew there was a chance this was a one-way trip. But it would have been worth it, do you hear me? I don’t care if I’d been trapped in there forever, because if I hadn’t gone in there, you would have been alone, and I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t, Martin.” He closes his eyes, trying to stop the sudden rush of tears he can feel threatening to spill over. “All this time...I trusted you. I did. I knew you knew what you were doing. I trusted you to have a plan and to be all right. And you did, and I am so very, very proud of you and what you did. But you...I didn’t just need you to know what you were doing. I needed you to be all right. And when I found that tape you left me, and I realized where you’d gone, I...I panicked. A lot. Nobody would help me, and I was so damn desperate I tried to force Helen to take me to the center, take me to you. I was never afraid for myself, Martin. Not throughout any of this. I was afraid for you. I needed you to be safe, and I was so afraid that I’d be too late.” He draws in a deep, shuddering breath. “I thought I was.”

He looks up and sees Martin staring at him, his eyes wide and wet behind his glasses and lips parted slightly. His expression is hard to read—Jon’s leaning towards disbelief, but there might be a little bit of fear there, too. He could probably know if he wanted to, but in the first place, he is very tired and that’s a lot of effort, and in the second place...well. He’s never pried into Martin’s mind, even accidentally, except once to know where he was because he needed to see him so badly. He’s not about to start now—not here, not in the aftermath of what’s probably the most terrifying thing they’ve faced down since Jon took over as Archivist, which is saying rather a lot.

“Martin,” he whispers again, and it’s halfway a prayer and halfway a question.

Martin shakes his head slightly, although it doesn’t seem like it’s in answer to the unspoken question. “Don’t do this, Jon,” he says, his voice breaking. “Don’t...don’t just tell me what I want to hear. I know you know...I know you listen to the tapes. I know you know how I—don’t play with me. Please.”

“I’m not playing, Martin,” Jon says, his heart breaking all over again. “I meant what I said. Just now. In the Lonely. What I’ve been...I should have told you so long ago. I need you, very much. I care about you. I—” His voice hitches. He hasn’t said it to anyone, in so many years—maybe not ever—has he ever said it? Has he ever meant it?

Well, he means it now. With his entire heart, with whatever he has that still passes for a soul, with everything that is within him. All the twisting paths his mind has taken these last two years, since the first time he really looked at Martin as he sat opposite the tape recorder and insisted on giving his statement, coalesce and unfold into a single, beautiful truth. But it sticks in his damned throat, and he can’t seem to manage to actually just say it.

“He was wrong, you know,” Martin says softly. “Elias. Jonah. Whatever. He was wrong.”

“About what?” Jon asks, a little taken aback by the twist of the conversation. Has he misjudged? He was so sure...

“What he said when he caught me burning those statements. My distraction. So Melanie could get those tapes.” Martin blinks hard. “You listened to that tape, right? He said...that’s when he told me you listened to all of them.” Again that short laugh layered with emotion. “Like that was going to change anything I said.”

“I, ah—no, not that one,” Jon confesses. “Not yet. I...Melanie told me your plan worked. I was...more focused on the statements. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to relive that day. I almost did, the other day, after I told you about...how to quit, but I—I just haven’t yet. What did he tell you?”

Martin swallows hard. “He said...he assumed you’d told me to burn the statements while he was gone. Said I’d do anything you told me to. It’s not that. I’d do anything for you. You know that, right?”

Jon nods. He’s known that for a while now, ever since Martin was “out sick” for two weeks and then came tumbling back into the Archives with the news that Jane Prentiss had been holding him hostage in his own apartment, without his phone. At first he thought, if only to himself, that Martin’s insistence on investigating so deeply was out of some inane need to prove himself, but somewhere around midnight, lying awake in his bed and finding himself wondering if the other man was comfortable and—most importantly—safe in the Archives after all, he came to the sudden realization that it wasn’t that at all. Martin knew, even before Jon did, how badly he needed to know all the details of the statements, and he went looking in the hopes that it would make Jon happy. It hasn’t escaped Jon’s attention that Martin is the only one on the team who’s recorded more than one or two statements, either. He shouldered the burden without question or complaint, for no other reason than to help Jon out. Martin has become the only person in the Institute Jon trusts completely and without question, because if anyone has earned that trust, it’s Martin.

“I just...I figured you knew how I felt,” Martin mumbles. “Even aside from the tapes. I know you just...know things sometimes, too. And, let’s face it, I’m not exactly subtle. Tim—” His voice hitches slightly on their friend’s name. “Tim used to love taking the piss out of me for it. So even if you weren’t psychic—”

“I’m not—all right, fine, I’m psychic. But I’ve never read your mind,” Jon tells him. “I—I try very hard not to invade people’s privacy, especially the people I care about, even accidentally. And I’m—I can be somewhat oblivious at times,” he adds with a self-deprecating laugh. “I suppose...I suppose I didn’t see it because I thought there was no possible way I could be so lucky.”

“Lucky?” Martin repeats, sounding faintly surprised.

Jon reaches up with one trembling hand and cups Martin’s cheek. “To have you feel the same way about me that I do about you.”

He tries not to voice his thoughts aloud, tries not to think about what Martin said the first time, when they were still trapped in Peter Lukas’s hellscape. I loved you. Not present tense, past tense. Loved. Jon knows, with a certainty that has nothing to do with the Eye, that he’s not going to stop feeling this way any time in his life. And if it’s now as one-sided as he always assumed it was, well, he’s lived with it this long. It won’t bother him too much.

Both the Eye and his own, actual brain chime in to inform him that he’s only kidding himself. It will bother him; it will hurt deeply to know that he could have had a chance at happiness, at maybe a little bit of peace, and he missed out on it forever because he couldn’t get his head out of his arse long enough to tell Martin why he agreed so readily to leave him behind before traipsing off to blow up a circus. He hopes like hell that Martin’s words were just an effect of the Lonely, that the world they were in warped his mind and made all his thoughts and feelings in the real world seem distant and unreal, because as terrifying as that thought is, the idea that Martin might have really stopped loving him is worse.

Of course, he thinks bitterly, see previous statement regarding there being no possible way I could be so lucky.

There seems to be an eternity in the heartbeat between Jon’s statement and the small, broken sound that escapes Martin’s lips. He turns his head slightly and brushes his lips against the palm of Jon’s hand, just for a second, then leans into the hand and wraps his arms around Jon, tight and secure. Jon can’t help the gasp of relief as he returns the embrace as fiercely as he dares, silently offering up a prayer of thanks to whatever higher power has decided to give him a damned break for once in his life.

“I—” Jon tries again, but the words stick in his throat just as hard. He wants to say it. Needs to say it. Needs Martin to understand. But they just won’t come.

“I know,” Martin whispers, his voice thick with tears. “Me, too, Jon.”

There are no words, in any language, to describe the emotions that flood over Jon with that. Or maybe there are, but Jon can’t think of them. All he can think is thank you thank you thank you as he presses his face into the space between Martin’s neck and shoulder. He doesn’t deserve this. He’s never deserved Martin, his loyalty and quiet devotion, everything that’s served as a touchstone, a way to ground Jon to reality, the one thing keeping him from losing himself completely. It’s been hard, keeping his distance from Martin since he woke up from his coma, but he realizes it hasn’t exactly been a picnic for Martin either. Jon at least had Basira and Melanie and Daisy, even if at least one of them wanted to kill him at any given time, and even though none of them are Martin, none of them could ever understand him the way Martin has from the very start. Martin had no one, and even if it was his choice—or he was pretending it was, anyway—it had to hurt. All those months in close, near-constant proximity to Peter Lukas, the avatar of Isolation, would destroy a weaker man than Martin Blackwood. Jon knows, with utter certainty, that he would never have been able to survive that. He would have given in. He would have broken. But Martin stayed the course and survived.

And then Jon almost lost him anyway.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, the sound muffled by Martin’s shirt. “I’m so sorry. If I’d...”

“Don’t,” Martin chokes. “’S not your fault. You didn’t—this isn’t on you.” He lets out another short laugh, but there’s no bitterness in it this time and it makes Jon’s heart lighten a little. “You saved me.”

“You saved me first. We’re even.” Jon tries to laugh. “Actually, I think you’re still well ahead.”

Martin huffs, but doesn’t argue. Jon senses it’s less because he agrees and more because he doesn’t have the energy. “Don’t suppose you know the way out of this maze.”

“That...no. I don’t,” Jon admits. He shifts back enough to look up at Martin’s face, but he doesn’t let go. He doesn’t know if he can right now. Maybe not ever. “I only got down here because—Jonah called me. I’d like to think I’d have been able to find you, but these paths are...”

“Distorted?”

“Yes, that’s probably the best word for them. I doubt I could have retraced your steps and made it.”

Martin’s lips twitch in a smile. “Maybe it’s like leaving the Lonely. Maybe you just have to pick a direction and keep moving that way.”

“No, that wasn’t it,” Jon corrects him. “It wasn’t that I knew where the exit was, either. I didn’t...not exactly.”

“You said you—” Martin stops. “No. You said you knew the way out. That’s it, isn’t it? The only way out of the Lonely was together.”

Jon brushes his knuckles against Martin’s cheek fondly. “I knew you were still part of the Archives.”

Martin blushes. He takes Jon’s hand in his and kisses the back of it gently. “Well, then, maybe we can find our way out of here together, too. If you’re ready.”

Jon can feel his own cheeks heating up. He nods. “I think I’m about as ready as I’ll be able to be down here. You?”

“Same. Feel like I could sleep for a week, though.”

It’s on the tip of Jon’s tongue to suggest they collapse in the back room of the Archives, where Martin stayed when they were worried about Jane Prentiss, but he holds off. First of all, he suspects neither one of them wants to relive those days, especially as Prentiss was closer than they’d suspected. Even now, Jon’s heart lurches and stutters when he remembers those worms working their way through the walls, how close they came to getting to Martin when he was alone and vulnerable, and he doubts Martin has forgotten that either. Second, and more importantly, Jon is fairly certain the Institute is going to be crawling with police, between the thing that isn’t Sasha getting loose and Travis and Julia outright murdering people. The Archives are almost certainly a crime scene, and there’s no way they’ll be able to stay there, even if they want to.

“We might be able to get some sleep down here first,” he says instead.

“Not sure how much sleep I’d actually be able to get with...” Martin trails off, glancing over to where Jonah Magnus’s body lies. “And what if he comes back?”

“Both excellent points. Upwards, then. And let’s hope there’s nothing worse waiting for us than Basira.”

They manage to get to their feet. Jon isn’t sure who assists whom, but they struggle up together. Before they start to move, though, Jon tugs Martin around and hugs him again. He’s not sure he’s quite ready to head through the tunnels, through the Spiral’s domain, and up to the undoubted chaos awaiting them in the Institute. He just wants another moment of quiet. And more than that...he just needs to reassure himself, again, that Martin is here, solidly present and warm and safe, or at least as safe as they can be in the world they inhabit.

Martin hugs him back, just as tightly. Jon can feel the same emotions roiling through him as he does, relief and love and the lingering remnants of fear. He tries to shut them out, tries to do Martin the courtesy of not prying into his brain, until he realizes that it’s not his abilities as the Archivist, it’s simply that Martin’s feeling those emotions so strongly that anyone who knew him could pick up on them. It may also have to do with the fact that he’s shaking slightly.

“Has anyone touched you since you...came back?” Martin asks in his ear. He sounds a little sad.

It takes Jon a moment to realize what Martin means. “I did get a hug from Melanie right before she...resigned. Other than that, nothing very pleasant.” He looks up at Martin, whose eyes radiate so much sympathy it almost hurts. “You?”

“That’s on me. And I don’t...you need that, Jon. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. I could have...asked someone.” It’s ridiculous, and Jon knows it, and he knows Martin knows it. Basira is prickly and stoic and very much not the touchy-feely type, and Melanie was angry with him for so long, partly because of the bullet in her leg and partly because Jon was a convenient target for her feeling of being trapped. And while he and Daisy have come to an accord, she’s got her own traumas and neuroses to deal with and Jon’s never been sure where the line between his needs and hers might lie. Once upon a time he might have been able to count on Georgie for at least a few friendly touches, but, well, that bridge was well and truly burnt. But he won’t let Martin blame himself for this. “Let’s just agree that we both need to agree to stop ignoring our needs in favor of protecting the people around us and practice being a little kinder to ourselves, hmm?”

Martin’s lips twitch in a smile. “I promise to ask next time before I assume I know what the best thing to do to protect you is.”

Warmth flows through Jon, and he returns the smile. “And I promise to do the same.”

Martin bends over and presses his forehead against Jon’s. Jon closes his eyes, feeling calm soak through him. It’s probably a ridiculous thing to feel, as the likelihood that things are going to be all right even for a little while is slim to none, but he’ll take it while he can.

Whatever is coming, Jon is sure it’s nothing they can’t face together.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Perhaps love is like the ocean, full of conflict, full of pain Like a fire when it's cold outside or thunder when it rains If I should live forever and all my dreams come true My memories of love will be of you...

#the magnus archives #tma #jonmartin #ollie writes fanfic

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amazildoessomethingstupid · 3 years

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Chapter 103: It’s all in the mind

BAM! Don’t call it a comeback! I’ve been here for years, damn it and we coming in hot. You thought I was gone didn’t you? You thought it was safe, well not anymore! I’ll be honest, I did actually read this chapter beforehand but for one reason or another I just didn’t make a rant for it as planned. Mainly because it was such a scattered mess of a chapter. But now that it’s been...

HOLY SHIT A WHOLE FUCKING YEAR AND A HALF. DISGUSTING, ABSOLUTELY REVOLTING! I can feel my honor fading. But, now that the time has passed, I’ve been able to get my bearings straight, and forget what I read in this chapter for the most part. So we can try this again fresh and new!

To start, we have Mike and Lucy praciticng Tae Kwon Do. Which is kind of surprising given…y’know…the whole….

Damn, not only did she recover from that with no lasting damage to her motor skills or body, but she’s managed to maintain a FUCKING BLACK BELT! I mean she’s so powerful and graceful she managed to break the wooden plank cleanly in half!

Just chopped through it like butter while Mike can only watch nervously.

Not that we have much time to spend on that, because we’re immediately thrown outside the dojo, to Mike and Lucy’s moms talking to each other.

And it’s pretty nice. We get some good dialogue and a peek into Lucy’s home life, and it’s pretty refreshing to see the adults’ perspective on the drama between our two protagonists. Honestly, I like this is a great set up for a chapter. Finally we get to see how the family feels, and what they think, or plan to do. I’m hyped!

Orrrrr Lucy’s mom can be swept aside, because who wants to hear about that stuff right? Oh man I thought we were going somewhere for a second there. Ya got me, Taeshi! Did I mention that this is the first three pages? Because it is. What is the premise of this chapter?

HEY DON’T YOU WALK AWAY FROM ME, WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING WITH THIS?

So Lucy walks away from that actually interesting scene premise and bumps into…

THE MEME AMAYA! LET’S GOOOOOO!

youtube

I DON’T EVEN CARE THAT IT’S A BLATANT SONIC REFERENCE, AND THAT’S CRINGE! It’s Sue hanging out with Amaya and there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.

This joke on the other hand…

Oh that’s a paddlin’.

Can I just say, I kinda hate these Lucy nicknames. Like, it just seems weird. Just call her Lucy for fuck’s sake! At least she didn’t say Luce. That’s like far too close to a lewd insult for my taste…and yes, I still maintain that Jasmine is a narrative cocksleeve. Nonetheless, this page is just a nice little aside, with Lucy interacting with Amaya and Sue.

And hilarity ensues. Ho ho ho, excuse me for not laughing when last chapter left me feeling

…hollow.

Still this is pretty nice. The girls hanging out, and having fun. Talking about stuff, it kind of reminds me of what I was looking for from Lucy’s return initially (I would’ve liked to have it be more of Sue learning about Lucy, rather than Lucy learning about everyone else. But ehhh it is what it is, I can’t complain too much.)

It doesn’t take long though for the tone to get serious, and now we finally get into what this chapter’s about!

Yessssss! We get to dig into Susan’s perspective, and we can start to get a better understanding of how the drama has drained and affected other people. And maybe we can see some insight from Lucy, now that she’s forced to see that her lack of communication, and inaction has brought consequence to other people. I mean, remember Paulo?

Maybe this chapter we can see Lucy start to understand and get closer with her previous friends. Maybe open up a bit more, and try to talk about her situation, and…

OR WE COULD JUST NOT TALK ABOUT IT! THAT’S FINE TOO, I GUESS! JUST…BRUSH IT ASIDE! THAT’S COOL!

Still, this is a good scene. Finally getting more insight to Sue’s plight and mentality, all very good stuff.

And Lucy shows a bit of heart, consoling her old friend. It’s nice. It’s all very nice.

So why is she making that face…

Oh, don’t do that… Don’t make this fake character development. Please, give Lucy a heart.

Well I mean this is nice…but…

It’s all undercut by the fact that it’s a blatant deflection, and Lucy not telling the truth about herself.

YES YES WE GET IT. WE GOT THE SONIC MEME WITH THE COOL OWL AND THE SKATEBOARD AND THE HOWDY DOODIE FELLOW KIDS.

But anyway,

Susan tries to talk Lucy into joining the table, but she’s not receptive about it and-

Wut?

WHAT THE FUCK? What the fuck is he doing here? I thought this chapter was gonna be about Lucy bonding with Susan, or something nice. What the heck?

What the hell is going on in this chapter? So Mike was just choosing to stalk Lucy again after being told of by her before. And Why the fuck is Susan being the massive cunt in this situation? She’s trying to be Lucy’s bodyguard and it just comes off being an absolute bitch. Why is she doing this?

And WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?!

No seriously, what the fuck is Daisy doing in this scene? What the hell is she going to contribute to this conversation? Wait…what is this conversation? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS CHAPTER ABOUT?

Haha, funny joke. Lucy’s a bitch, haha never gets old. SERIOUSLY WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?

Well now I get to start hating Lucy AND Susan’s characterizations! It’s a twofer! But at least we’re getting some insight to Daisy’s thoughts on Abbey now.

She wants everything to be alright, and cares about everyone getting along. But- HEY WAIT A SECOND!

WHY THE FUCK ARE WE EVEN TALKING ABOUT THIS?! WE’RE ONLY 13 PAGES INTO THIS CHAPTER AND WE’VE BEEN GIVEN HALF-LIP SERVICE TO THREE DIFFERENT TALKING POINTS! WE STARTED AT THE DOJO, WITH THE PARENTS TALKING ABOUT MIKE AND LUCY’S RELATIONSHIP, AND THEN WE BUMPED INTO SUSAN AND GOT TO TALKING ABOUT HER THOUGHTS ABOUT MIKE AND LUCY’S RELATIONSHIP, THEN MIKE COMES IN OUT OF NOWHERE, AND NOW DAISY’S EXPOUSING ABOUT HER FEELINGS ON ABBEY! MEANWHILE, ALL I CAN THINK OF IS WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING HERE? WHAT IS THIS CHAPTER SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT? WHAT IS THE CENTER OF THIS? WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THIS?!

Oh…

Oh you motherfucker.

THAT’S WHAT THIS WHOLE FUCKING CHAPTER WAS ABOUT?! THAT’S THE CENTRAL FUCKING TALKING POINT OF THIS CHAPTER? ARE YOU FUCKING F’REAL SHAKES RIGHT NOW?! SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT…

You started with Mike and Lucy going to Tae Kwon Do so she could walk away from Mike and her family to go home…

So that she could be outside and randomly bump into Susan…

So that she can point out the FUCKING MIKE YOU PULLED OUT OF YOUR ASS…

So that you could then bring in the even more ham-fistedly forced Daisy into this scene...

ALL SO THAT YOU CAN HAVE LUCY NONCHALANTLY TELL EVERYONE THAT AUGUSTUS IS STAYING WITH HER?! IS THAT WHAT YOU’RE FUCKING TELLING ME?! THAT HAS GOT TO BE THE MOST CONTRIVED BULLSHIT I HAVE EVER SEEN YOU PULL OUT OF YOUR ASS, AND THAT IS SAYING A LOT!

What the fuck is this conversation? Why the fuck are they talking like this?

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS CHAPTER?!

This is a very serious conversation. About a very serious topic, that can have nuance and give a deeper understanding to these characters’ feelings,

But it’s undercut by stupid jokes that just paint Daisy as a fucking idiot, who doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

It’s abundantly clear which side we’re supposed to be on here, but as I said before it undercuts Daisy’s character. It makes her seem like the attention-whore that she was made out to be in the earlier chapters.

Like, look at this. She’s full envious bitch-mode right now! She was stalking Mike a minute ago, and it all just undercuts what could be a very serious character moment for Daisy, and you know what?

I just realized why it took me so long to do this rant. At the time where I was initially going to write this rant, I noticed that we were about to hit a crossroad.

Because this was right at the time when False Idol was having the Augustus talk between Daisy and Lucy (and before you mention it, I would like to note that this scene was planned far ahead of time and it was not influenced by the canon chapter) but if you’ll allow me to pride myself, I wanted to mention what False Idol did right about this talk. And why I have such a problem with how the Canon has portrayed this scenario. So let’s take a moment to talk about False Idol, because this scene in particular is one of those scenes that I put a lot of thought and effort into, to do it right.

First of all, it doesn’t start with Lucy just flatly saying that she’s been seeing Augustus. It’s Daisy taking the initiative and talking with Lucy to get information on Agustus.

And much like in the canon, Lucy is very apprehensive (and rightly so) about Daisy pining over Augustus. But unlike in this chapter, Lucy isn’t being judgmental and controlling, telling Daisy that she’s an idiot for wanting Augustus. She’s bewildered, because why the fuck WOULD Daisy want augustus? He almost raped her in the comic…but there’s a twist…

We as readers (or at least those of us who had gotten a sneak peek at the BCI exclusive Another Chance when it was published) know, Augustus actually wasn’t going to rape Daisy. This was the twist and lynchpin for this entire scene in False Idol. And how, Daisy’s pining for Augustus isn’t that outrageous.

The truth is, Daisy didn’t really know what Augustus was going to do. She may assume that he was going to have sex with her, and of course Abbey would reinforce that Augustus was trying to rape her. But now that she’s away from Abbey, and able to think for herself she may look at the situation in a different light. She starts questioning what really happened at the carnival and thinking it may not have been that bad.

But even though she doubts that it was what it was, she still recognizes that it’s not a good idea, and thus looks to confirm it with Lucy who is the only other person who has been around Augustus.

But just like in the canon, Lucy is still very against Daisy going after Augustus. Even if he’s not a rapist, he’s not a good person.

The difference being that Daisy’s argument shows us she’s not stupid and gives a better understanding about her feelings, and what exactly makes Augustus special to her. He made her feel like no one else did, not even Mike.

It’s clear that Daisy’s want of Augustus isn’t just surface level attention-seeking. She wants to feel special. She wants to feel more than loved, she wants to feel confident, and the truth is there was only really one person in her life that made her feel free.

But it’s still reinforced that going after Augustus is a bad choice, much like how it is in the canon. However, there’s a part of this argument that the canon completely misses out on.

Slut Daisy, is a Free Daisy. Everyone has looked down on her as a child who needs to be protected, Abbey coddled her, Paulo wouldn’t touch her, Mike doesn’t want her like that, and she’s forced to watch everyone else have their own relationships and drama, get to make their own choices and mistakes while she gets to watch on the sidelines.

Daisy’s argument isn’t just about wanting to go after Augustus because he makes her feel good, or because she wants the attention that he provides. It’s about her wanting the freedom, the confidence, and the ability to act for herself. Because the alternative is being left wondering what could’ve been when it’s too late. A lesson that Lucy knows, all too well.

Daisy can be a very complex and interesting character. Yes, she is an attention whore, she’s needy, she’s naïve, but she’s smart. And to downplay or just push those traits aside and label them as just blatantly bad and not something that can be built upon, or used to grow this character into something more. Something stronger, better, but still DaIsy. The problem here though is, that that’s not what the canon is interested in. The canon doesn’t want Daisy to evolve to slut Daisy the free Daisy, or if so it wants it to be a clear black and white bad thing. But I digress, because that’s not what this argument in the canon is about.

No this isn’t about Daisy…

No… this is about Lucy.

Oh my god, she finally showed some emotion! This is what we’re gonna talk about. We’re gonna have her open up and talk about her feelings, and…

Say nothing…

Alright, I’m not heartless. I understand what’s going on, and what the implication is. About Lucy equating her abuse to Daisy’s and not wanting her to go through the same things that she did. It’s understandable, and I feel sorry for the character. The problem is, the way this is structured by having Lucy just go back to controlling Daisy after Lucy’s outburst and go back to being cold, and composing herself in one page makes this statement feel…wrong. It feels too cold, almost like the outburst was only used to forward the point Lucy was trying to make. It feels…emotionally manipulative. Not just on the part of Lucy, but on the part of Taeshi as a writer. She can’t be wrong, because Lucy’s a victim. There’s no argument for Daisy to go after Augustus, because Lucy knows more about it. There’s no growth, we just get a peek at the inner turmoil and damage that trauma has caused Lucy, and the conversation is ground to a complete halt.

There’s nothing to say, there’s nothing changed.

And the last three pages are spent just watching these characters we ham-fisted into this scene just to watch them leave.

Oh and Sandy’s not talking to Mike. There we go.

But that’s the end of this chapter. It’s All in the Mind, and my god… It’s hard to talk about this chapter because it brings up Lucy’s trauma to the forefront again, which is always a difficult topic. But let’s not forget that this is a fucking convoluted chapter. We spent the whole first half of this chapter so that we could force characters into place, and yell at them for a two page outburst. There’s a number of interesting conversations that it brings up, but it doesn’t spend any time working through them, and the one talking point that it does bring up is just a one-sided “my problems outweigh yours” argument, and that’s all that is accomplished. You could’ve done so much more with the characters, I mean for fuck’s sake Mike LITERALLY DIDN’T NEED TO BE HERE! The only reason he’s in this scene, is so that Lucy can tell Mike he’s worse than Augustus! It’s just dicking us around, and then punching you in the gut out of nowhere so that this chapter can seem like it has a point.

But it doesn’t.

We as readers are quite aware of how Lucy’s trauma is affecting her, especially given how that was literally right before this chapter. It’s just catching the rest of the gang up on that, in fact…

Didn’t we start this chapter with the adults catching up on what’s been going on?

And then the whole conversation with Susan catching Lucy up on what’s been going on?

Not to mention, we earlier had the jab to point out old traits like Lucy’s deaf ear.

And Daisy’s old attention-whore ways

AND WE LITERALLY STARTED OFF WITH THE KIDS PRACTICING TAE KWON DO, RECAPPING AN OLD PLOT POINT THAT PEOPLE DIDN’T REMEMBER.

4/10 It brings up a lot, but it doesn’t seem to do anything with it.

#rant #Bittersweet Candy Bowl

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darkmindsthinktwistedthoughts · 4 years

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Devil’s Trust pt6

Warnings: Strong language, Moblord styling warlords.

Masterlist

—

Chapter 6

“Someone want to tell me why we’re all here again?” Ieyasu grumbled as he joined the rest of the men in the meeting room. There were no papers or anything on the large glass table to hint as to why they were all to gather again and yet they were all here because they all received the same summons.

Since the unification of the companies the chairs around this table hardly ever seemed empty. The brightness of the room felt dull even with the contrast of the fresh flowers against the white walls that usually felt strangely warming in the otherwise blank space.

“We’re here to discuss what we are going to do next.” Nobunaga replied. He was already sitting in his seat when they arrived which only served to make this all feel more unusual.

“Do we have to do anything right now? I mean aren’t we in kind of a stalemate over this whole thing?” Yukimura asked as he took his place between Shingen and Sasuke. Mitsuhide noted that Kenshin drifted to his own chair like a frosty breeze, the look on his face seemed to be a mask of disinterest. Well, it does seem that Peace isn’t favourable to all in the realm.

“It will be better to at least put countermeasures in place even if we cannot find a direct target that lynchpins this whole fiasco.” Nobunaga countered the enquiry bluntly. Shutting down further questions on the subject easily. “Mitsuhide did you find anything further?”

“So, you decided to send your dog out after all? This shouldn’t take long to see what he dug up.” Shingen scoffed and sat up in his chair to his full height. He was one of the tallest at the table and there was no doubt his postulating was imposing but it failed to hit its mark. Well now isn’t that cute? The Tiger is wanting to play games.

“I find I’m inclined to agree. After all it would appear that a certain cat did manage to drag home most of the information on the topic at hand.” Mitsuhide held Shingen’s gaze across the table. The infuriating taunting smirk never leaving him as he watched the facial muscles twitch on the other man.

“What did you call him!?” Ever the one to jump to the defence of Shingen, Yuki moved to get up from the chair he had only just begun to occupy and found his arm locked in a firm grip by Shingen himself.

“It’s no worse than his reference to me. I was simply returning the curtesy.” Mitsuhide goaded the smile on his face never leaving his eyes remaining locked on the black eyes that flashed in controlled anger back at him across the table. Well, would you look at that. To think I’d be graced with witnessing the legendary Trading Tiger’s quiet rage.

“Why you—” Yukimura moved against the grip on him.

“Hush Yuki. You said “most of the information”. What could you have possibly found that my network couldn’t?” Whatever anger he felt over the banter-like name-calling was being painted over with his own curiosity to find out what he might have missed. He had crossed Azuchi before and come up wanting. If this was to be a case of his own network being the issue he wanted to know where the broken links were.

“It seems your old as the hills stock and trade isn’t without its flaws after all.” Nobunaga chuckled. He had not missed the hungry looks from Shingen as he feasted on what was happening. The fact that the tables were turned now gave him back the feeling of superiority he had been missing. “What did you find?”

“There is a higher power moving under the table in the boardroom of Esshu. I looked into the situation myself after seeing the information Shingen provided had certain, discrepancies.” Mitsuhide made sure to emphasise the last word as he produced a flash drive and placed it with a click on the table as if it were a chess piece.

“Discrepancies? You think I would provide information that was tampered with?” Shingen’s quiet rage was seeping into his words despite his best efforts to keep them masked. Of all the men sitting at the table, it seemed that it wasn’t just Mitsuhide and Nobu to be gaining some entertainment from this. Kenshin’s ice-cold disposition of boredom in peacetime was showing palpable flashes of interest like dry ice hitting moisture. Your fingers are twitching, God of war.

“Not at all, I have every confidence that you did, in fact, provide all the information you were given but that did not mean that it was complete. You can after all only provide what you know.” Mitsuhide smiled and changed the angle of the digital device. He continued in the style of lecturer giving a lesson after taking a second to pause and be sure that what he had just said hit its mark. “Well now. It would seem that the reason there seemed to be minor failures in the deception Esshu were providing was because what we are seeing is only what they are willing to show.”

“Sounds familiar.” The words slipped out of Sasuke’s mouth before he realised, he had inadvertently voiced what should have been an inner thought. Shingen tensed and Nobu turned a heated look towards the young tech expert after the unusual display of tactlessness. Sasuke coughed and adjusted his glasses in a way that practically screamed how apologetic he felt and that he wouldn’t do it again.

“Mitsuhide what are we looking at?” Nobu turned again to his left hand seemingly happy enough that the outburst would not occur again.

“Currently I’m still asking around but it does look like there is still someone governing the company, even if the orders are being split up around the table. The links between the two are severed after they have made contact so there seems to be no trail back. I’m hopeful that a pattern should eventually present itself so a move can be made.” Mitsuhide lay the USB flat on the tabletop as if to say he is presentation was no done.

“Very well. I trust you won’t return empty-handed.” Nobu allowed his words to linger as a silent threat that he knew the man next to him wouldn’t miss. “Now we need to think about how we are going to—.”

“Excuse me but aren’t we missing one? Where is Masa?” Mitsunari interrupted after receiving a rather firm nudge from Hideyoshi to remind him of the meeting they were all in. Violet eyes blinked as he put his reading glasses safely in his breast pocket on his blazer.

The girls in the office had some choice names for a lot of the men at the table, but the way they swoon and call Nari the model professor was one that tended to stick. He was always happy to help, giving with explanations and he smiled no matter who approached him. To top that off with the stylish yet comfortable academic look to his wardrobe just increased that appeal. A gift that seemed wasted on one so oblivious.

“He sent a text saying he was going to be late.” Hideyoshi replied rather tiredly. It was nothing new to have the errant head of the Date family turn up late to meetings and usually he had the good grace to message beforehand but it was rather frustrating when the man tended to appear almost on time despite the communication.

– Crash –

As if waiting for the perfectly timed wrong moment to appear, the doors to the room were thrown open and a rather flushed out of breath Masa appeared. He made it over to his chair and clung on to it as he tried to regain some oxygen.

“Guys you need to hear—”

“I was in the middle of talking Masa.” Nobu interjected before Masa could continue with little of his usual success in shutting down the interruption.

“Yeah? Well, sorry ‘bout that but Esshu is on the news.” Masa reached over to the sideboard and plucked the remote control for the projector screen which lowered from the ceiling over the end of the table. An image becoming revealed inch by inch of a what looked like a press conference outside a building made of mostly glass.

“They what?” Nobunaga got up out of his chair, snatched the controller form Masa’s hand and hit the volume. All attention in the room had shifted to the screen waiting for whatever was about to happen.

“… So, it is with the future in mind that we would like to announce our company’s official interest in moving towards the International Trade market. We feel it to be the only choice in providing our shareholders and investors with a more stable turnabout. It will also provide more jobs and secure futures for the many people employed as part of our company.”

“You say this will provide a more secure future for the company and employees but what of the benefits to the people of the city?”

“Thank you for your interest. We would like to make a quote from our sadly departed former CEO - Lack of diversity breeds stagnation. Basically, we are hoping that by moving into this area we will also open up the field for competitive prices and trading. Naturally, this will provide the people of this city with more choice and better opportunities to find what they desire which we hope to give an overall positive effect for both the commercial sectors but also private ones respectively.”

– Click –

“What the hell was that?” Yukimura’s voice broke the spell that had been cast in the room. All eyes that had been firmly locked on the screen unable to look away. Every detail of what was being said seeping into them all leaving a feeling that chilled and burnt like glacial ice.

“A direct declaration of war.” Shingen and Nobunaga answered in perfect synchronisation. The mixture of shock and dread that rolled around the room had changed into something a lot more interesting.

“Good I was thinking things were getting boring around here.” Kenshin smiled and brought his hand to his side. The feel of the cold moulded metal sending a shiver of anticipation through him. Oh yes, Peace is not favourable to all.

---

Final requests… Confessions on a death bed… The last hopes and dreams of hundreds of people… His head was filled with them. How many had he been witness to? How many more would he see before the end? After all, everything comes to an end, even if it doesn’t seem to.

The café was a quaint little family-run establishment. Somehow in the wave of franchises and brand label takeovers it had managed to survive and he was thankful for that. Not only was it a prime position to view the trade building but it had a large selection of teas that they managed to brew perfectly. He raised his cup to his mouth and took a sip. The subtle flavour of jasmine-infused with the matcha caused him to smile. Green tea was hardly his usual preference but when in Rome. He took out a fob watch from his waistcoat and glanced at the enamel face as fine golden pieces moved silently under the glass. Almost time.

---

“Well thank you very much for making time for us today Mr Date, not to mention the food you’ve supplied for the staff is phenomenal.” A well turned out professional woman smiled politely at the man they called the one-eyed dragon. They were standing in the flagship location for his restaurants waiting on the other members of her reporting staff to finish setting up for their interview.

“Not at all always happy to make time for my favourite reporter. And what did I tell you about calling me that?” Masa slipped a little closer to her side. It was just enough to feel slightly scandalous given the public place they were standing in and the number of people present. After everything that was happening and the way that dry meeting from earlier had concluded, he was itching as much as the God of war for some action. What kind of action didn’t matter to him, a quick fumble or a gunfight was neither here nor there. What he really wanted was to let off some steam.

“I’m working right now Mr Da—Masa.” She moved creating a little space between them and tried to suppress a laugh at the boyish actions of the terrible flirt she had come to know over the years of covering his career and food.

“Fair enough kitten, have it your way.” Masa shrugged and moved to pick up one of the caramelised onion-and-roast beef vol au vents.

– Crash, Bang, Clatter –

The relaxed atmosphere was shattered like the window and door to the restaurant as what looked like an army descended. They were all dressed in the typical black standard-issue gear that the police gave to their special ops teams. Printed in foot-high lettering on the back of the bulletproof vests was the word S.W.A.T.

“Freeze. Everyone hands where we can see them and don’t move.” One of the first to burst into the building was slightly crouched holding his weapon and scanning the room. The rest of his team were fanning out and making sure to secure the area blocking off exits.

“What the hell?” A camera guy had to drag his gear quickly out of the way to avoid it being crushed under heavy boots.

“Is this a raid?” The make-up girl squealed.

“Why is there a Swat team here?” A crewman who was standing next to her helped shield her from a couple of the armed police as they pushed past.

“Omg, they brought dogs too!” The make-up girl squealed again as one of the dogs put a cold wet nose on her leg making her jump.

The news staff were thrown into confusion and panic as they made moves to group together in clusters avoiding the intruders. They were too scared to even imagine what would happen if they looked too long at any of the officials holding guns.

“Where is Masamune Date?” The leader spoke again and the news staff automatically looked at the Chef that was still holding his food.

“Right here, Guys. I realise it’s a rather long waitlist for a table but this is taking it a little far don’t ya think?” Masa popped the vol au vent in his mouth in one motion and smiled. The female reporter next to him gave an audible gasp as she watched the complete lack of worry or concern, he was displaying. He was the head of a respectable dining empire and he was also surrounded by members of his own staff and hers. Yet here he was displaying an almost sociopathic response to an otherwise shocking situation.

“Shut up and cuff him.” One of the team wrapped a pair of metal cuffs around his wrists and tightened them. The brush of unforgiving cold steel on his bare skin just made his smile grow. Someone was playing a dangerous game here and he was interested to find out where it was going.

“Masa?” Finding her voice, the reporter called out as the staff were being sent through to another location in the restaurant for questioning so the dogs could do their thing.

“Sorry kitten looks like we’ll have to do a rain check on the interview.”

---

Sitting in his office Ieyasu was looking over the latest figures from the last round of testing for their newest drugs. The figures were improving and that was promising. Clearly, it had been the right move to change the quantities they had used in the last test. It did look like it might still be days before they could make an announcement about the new medicine. He sighed as he looked out of the window and frowned.

A cluster of vans had pulled up to the security gates for the building. They were unmarked but he knew they were a favourite for the police. His office phone started to ring the id displaying that the front gate was trying to contact him. This isn’t going to be good.

---

It was the end of the day finally and [Name] slipped her arms back inside her jacket as she picked up her bag and made for the doors. It had been a boring uneventful day if you didn’t include the lunch date with her friend. She smiled as he left the building as part of the small crowd of straggling staff that had stayed a little later in the building than the rest.

The fresh air was turning a little crisp which had the benefit of clearing her head from the stuffy feeling of being in a grey cube most of the day. As she crossed the street to head to the underground for a train, a well-dressed man stepped out from a small café she sometimes frequented and gave her the most disarming smile as he removed his hat.

“Miss [Name]? I was wondering if you could spare a moment?” Something about the man felt familiar and instantly had her guard up. Still interacting in such a public place shouldn’t have been nearly as much of an issue as it might have been had they been in a deserted side street.

She nodded and his smile grew wider until the edges of his eyes crinkled with delight. He motioned to the café doors and held them open for her as she stepped in. There was a chair by the window that already seemed to have a man’s coat draped over it. The gentleman moved like smoke past it and pulled out the chair on the opposite side for her. Waiting until she was comfortably arranged before gently pushing it under her.

“Thank you.”

“Not at all. I should be thanking you in fact. I had wondered if I had missed you but you saved me some time by appearing just as I was about to give up hope.” He motioned to the young girl behind the counter who nodded and went to pick up a notepad and pen.

“You said you wanted to speak to me. Can I ask about what?” [Name] didn’t remove eyes from the man before her. Something was telling her that if she did it might be the last thing she would do. He was pleasant and well-mannered but she also knew all too well how those sorts of things could easily be faked.

“Your father.”

---

A fresh arrangement of Snapdragons had been placed in a vase. The long-stemmed perennials held a variety of hues that seemed rather shocking in this otherwise dead space. The phone next to them on the table vibrated as a new text arrived.

“Awaiting the opponent’s counterplay.”

---

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theawkwardterrier · 5 years

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Perfect Targets

Steggy Week 2k19, day 1 Prompt: Endgame

Summary: Steve and Peggy are accustomed to being interrupted.

AO3 link here.

It takes a strangely long time before a certain group of Hydra agents realizes that Margaret Carter provides too much of a stabilizing influence, that she is the lynchpin for so much, and that a neat "accident" would be very helpful.

(Perhaps the semi-anarchic "two more shall take its place" model is helpful in making the organizational spread hard to control or catalog, but it doesn't exactly lead to good collaboration, and it hasn’t gotten easier since Zola was found out and imprisoned before appointing a successor or passing on much of the organizing information.)

Once Carter has been identified as a prime target, an opening domino to continue in their efforts, things do move a little more quickly. It's decided that she isn't a particularly good candidate for an outright assassination: she spends too much time in heavily guarded SHIELD headquarters and even if a friendly agent could be found it would be apparent, too obviously revealing of Hydra’s underground efforts. (And finding a friendly agent would be very difficult. Somehow recruitment is getting harder and harder - is the current generation simply not as eager to join the cause? Obviously the Zola thing was bad publicity, but doesn’t it speak well that they still have their roots sunk deeply enough into society that they can continue onward, causing discord until they are in control?)

Without much of a social life - she seems to like staying in with her husband, so no standing engagement with a lover, no bowling league - the obvious place to eliminate Carter would be in her home. There is the small matter of said husband: surveillance shows him to be a well-built man, though it's nothing a sedative and a well-trained operative like Damian Ford can't handle. According to the tail they have on the husband, he spends a lot of his time chatting to old biddies as he walks them across the street, running volunteer art classes at the local community center, and helping to reach things down from high shelves at the grocery, so Ford figures he'll be a soft target. Nice people always spend too much time begging, or having faith that things will just turn out for the best.

Carter’s a busy woman and her schedule varies from night to night and she even goes into the office on weekends sometimes, but she’s always home for Sunday dinner. Ford arrives at the cute little house at ten past six. Twenty minutes is plenty of time to do away with the husband and fix up any mess before Carter pulls up. By all accounts she’s canny, and it’s always easier when you can get the drop on people. He'll take out the husband, wait for her, then pose the bodies and burn down the place, make it look like a house fire. A practically foolproof plan.

The neighborhood’s tightly packed, but Ford hops a few fences and is in the Carter backyard with no one the wiser. He congratulates himself as he goes over to the back door and jimmies the lock. It clicks, and there’s a little rush, that little bit of thrilling control that always reminds him of why he got into this business in the first place. People think they’re safe, that life has rules that they understand, but he’s there in the background, steering things in ways that most people wouldn’t understand.

He imagines the man inside, cooking the pot roast he can smell even through the still-closed door, listening to some radio program. He probably thinks that he has a say in his own fate, that he’s protected by playing housekeeper for his little wife. There will be just enough time for the realization that everything he ever believed was wrong before Ford strikes the final blow. Ford allows himself a bit of a smile as he begins to turn the doorknob.

“You’re finally coming in? I thought the potatoes were going to burn before you actually did something.”

Ford has never actually heard the man’s voice before. He has only a moment to register it, though, before a fist is swinging directly into his face.

"I'm home." Peggy closes the door, delighting in the solid sound of the lock clicking that signifies that her alone time with her husband has begun. She slips off her shoes and leaves them by the door, puts her case on the console table, and unbuttons her suit jacket. Her hair is sweaty, stuck to the back of her neck. She lifts it up and twists to offer herself a bit of circulation as she walks through to the kitchen. "I know that you've said that we're meant to have air conditioning in cars soon, but soon isn't soon enough."

Dinner is clearly ready - meat, potatoes, beans, salad, and rolls resting in serving dishes on the counter, the table set for two - but Steve isn't there when she arrives. She raises her voice a bit and asks, "Steve?"

"Basement," he calls, his voice distant.

She hadn't even wanted a cellar - too prone to flooding, too musty and damp to really store anything well - but they'd fallen in love with the house regardless. She hadn't thought about the other reasons she wouldn't enjoy it, but now she dreads even opening the door.

"Oh, bloody bollocking hell," she says as she comes far enough down the stairs to see. "I mean—good gracious, we’re back to this again?" They both know that children aren't in the cards for now - it's too dangerous at the moment, and they’ve been taking as thorough care as possible to avoid such an issue - but they've agreed to both try to clean up their language in preparation.

Steve, reading a book on the bottom step, snorts and stands, tucking the paperback into his rear pocket. "At least this one brought drugs. Some of them just show up thinking that they had all it would take—it's a little insulting, honestly."

"Yes, how dare they underestimate your muscles. But I'm sure the sedative will be very helpful." She eyes the man tied up on the chair they've essentially set aside for this purpose. "Not very polite of him to take the backyard route considering the way Mr. Lansing has deduced that his garden has been repeatedly crushed only since we moved here, but I appreciate him not making a mess - it would have been difficult to clean up considering how you broke the broom on the last one's face."

"He interrupted me while I was sweeping," Steve says unrepentantly. "I improvised."

"Hmm, you think they'd learn at least something about you, but I suppose communication and adaptation aren't strong points of theirs." She starts to button her jacket again, but then changes her mind. It’s too damn hot and she’s in her own home. "I should call in to request another transport, but I think we can eat while we wait - I'm absolutely famished, and the transportation team is practically part of the family now."

"I did make some chicken soup for John's mother - I know the treatment is really taking it out of her, and she gave us that great jam a few months ago." She starts up the stairs ahead of him.

"Perhaps I should start scheduling another night for them to be certain I'll be home? It would be nice to have a peaceful Sunday evening every once in a while."

"No one showed up last week. Or the week before," Steve reminds her, though he doesn't have to. She vividly recalls just how they'd celebrated both the lack of interruption for once, and also the apparent disorganization and dissolution of Hydra. "Besides, you wouldn't want to ruin a tradition, would you?"

She turns at the top of the staircase, facing him where he still stands on the step below her. "It doesn't bother you that these are our traditions, that this is what you came back for?"

He holds her face in his hands, fingertips smoothing over her cheekbones. If she blinked, her eyelashes would brush against them. "This is exactly what I came back for. I wouldn't have it any other way."

She thinks about the other men she might have been with instead, men who would have warned her off this type of charade, told her not to worry, that they would take care of rooting out Hydra from inside her agency and the others, men who would have come up with more grandiose plans for massive, public arrests and ignored her words about the way Hydra was a virus. She thinks about what could have been, and how lucky she has been with what is.

She kisses him. "I suppose I wouldn't either," she says, and goes to call the retrieval team.

#steggyweek2k19 #Steggy #Steggy fic #Steve Rogers #Peggy Carter #the summary makes it sound like a sex thing but I'm here to swerve #start of another great Steggy Week - let's do the darn thing!

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jhaernyl · 4 years

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Big Damn Table challenge

Character: OC - Vincent Conner Bolton [original story]

Prompt #30 - Death

Age did not sneak up on her. It did not come around while she was unsuspecting or distracted and then suddenly made her hair pale from blonde into grey and white, it did not take her by surprise.

She didn't wake up one morning and look herself in the mirror and thought Damnit, I look old.

She wasn't fooled by the youth of her witch husband, witches live up to three hundred years when they take care of themselves and that's without any attempts at cheating Khage out of her dues, or that of her shifter husbands, shifters live up to two hundred years as long as they don't do something idiotic and get themselves killed earlier than that.

She never forgot that she wasn't ageing at the same pace as them, that as a human she'd get a little bit more than a hundred years if she was stubborn enough and followed Roman's regimes well enough, both things she was definitely going to do, and it did not surprise her that she ended up being the older and more responsible one of the four of them, five counting Anatoly and Anatoly ought never to be counted because Anatoly decided he was her mom friend about thirty seconds into meeting her and hasn't budged from that role since, no matter how much more mature she grew up to be.

It's all down to developmental differences, because of different lifespans leading to different ageing processes and that extends all the way to brain chemistry and energy levels and how that affects how young or old someone is liable to both be and feel on any given day.

She is younger than Roman, and Anatoly, by five years, two years younger then Dominic and the same age as Hugo but by now they are the young ones and she is far older than they will get to be for a very long time yet. They are in their prime, as far as their ageing is concerned, all of them in their sixties and their sixties meaning to them not at all what her sixties mean to Vincent.

Childhood, teens, young adulthood, adulthood, late adulthood, elderly.

The six ages of life and the common divide accepted for races, as watched over by the Goddess and Ianna both, the Goddess because all of creation is hers to look after and Ianna because she was a witch healer that Ascended, became the goddess who watches over the domain of preserving life and easing the effects of the natural passing of time.

(Rome prays to Ianna plenty, on Vincent's behalf, because Vincent will look after herself but she won't pray, has never prayed since the child she had once been was lost and Vincent herself was born of the violent, murky Wild that was left in her stead.)

Physically, the gods have deemed it just and fair that they all age the same in their early years, hitting physical landmarks at around the same times until they get to eighteen, at which point the ageing rate slows down for shifters and witches, at different degrees, and stays the same for humans.

Childhood for humans lasts from their birth to their twelve years of age but a shifter is considered a child until they are fourteen and for witches it depends from bloodline to bloodline though it is generally agreed not to last more than eleven years old.

Human teens are so from their twelve birthday to their nineteenth and then they enter their young adult years and stay in them until they hit their thirtieth year. They are adults from their thirtieth year to their fiftieth and that's when they enter the late adulthood phase of their life, dovetailing into the elderly category on their seventieth birthday.

Witches are considered teens, again with some leeway depending on bloodline, from their eleventh birthday to their nineteenth, because witches are born knowing the Truth Of The World and that ages them differently, just as their magic does develop differently than a shifter's abilities do. Once they mature out of their teens, however, that's when witches ages start to stretch out exponentially. A witch is considered a young adult from their nineteenth birthday to their ninetieth and an adult from that one to their two hundredths. They count as late adults from two hundred to two hundred and seventy years of age and then from that one until their death they are considered to be elderly. Most of them get to elderly easily, witches being very good at keeping their lifespan intact.

Rome in their sixties is still a young adult, his brain chemistry still in the same phase Vincent's was when she was in her twenties. Vincent in her sixties is in the place Rome will be when they get past two hundred by a couple of decades.

(She wishes she could be around to see it, to share it with all of them, with her husband Roman and her best friend Roma and with her equal best friend Rome, but not so much that she would do anything that would require her to give up her humanity for it. She is, and always has been, human, technical definitions and unasked for interventions be fucking damned. It has always been her choice. It will always be her choice.)

Shifters are somewhat more even than witches when it comes to their lives. They consider their own to be teens from their fourteenth year to their twenty-fifth, young adults from their twenty-fifth to their seventieth birthday, adults from the age of seventy to the age of one twenty, late adults from then to their one hundred and seventy birthday and elderly for the last thirty years of their life.

It seems to be a theme, to leave elderly age for the last three decades of one's life. It is at least treated about the same in all three races.

(It is another reason why empty quarters are considered to be practically humans, along with the fact that they do have none of the physical gifts actual shifters are born with to go with all of the instincts they are supposed to be born with. Empty quarters age as humans do whereas quarter blood age as shifters do and have the gifts to go with the instincts.

It's one of the ways Vincent has been able to grind her humanity in the face of any shifter who tried to deny her the truth of her choice.

If she'd been one of them, as they insisted if she'd been as good as she was because she was part of a superior breed as most of the ones from the Lands believes themselves to be, she'd have the ageing and the natural abilities wouldn't she? She doesn't and she's not and she's all the better as she is. She's fucking damn perfect as she is and they can choke on it and on her still bench pressing Hugo and still outshooting any of those who tried to show her up, even in her sixties and needing glasses to read things up close.

Fuck the lot of them and their assumptions that she'd have to be anything more than human to be who she is and as good as she is. Collective fucking represents, assholes.)

Vincent is a late adult to her husband's young adults and while they all met in their twenties and they've been together since and their ages are all close chronologically, by now she's basically cradle robbing if you went by comparative ages and developmental levels.

Those two factors are why there are so many shifters who don't settle down until they hit their late eighties and why so many inter-races romances have what look like heavy age differentials that are actually inexistent from a developmental level. A shifter in their one hundred and fifties would be around the same mental age Vincent is now and that's why most of them settle down and marry old with chronologically much younger humans. Witches who decide to settle down are pretty much the same, choosing partners with huge age differentials that actually mean very little when it comes to maturity levels.

She doesn't mind and she certainly won't give up any of her husbands, nor would they let her give them up either, but it does mean that she is older than the lot of them and that she worries for how they'll react to her inevitable decline and death. They are all far too invested in each other and they have all refused to let Vincent be anything but the lynchpin of their worlds.

Once Khage takes her away, they will fall apart and it pisses Vincent off that she won't be able to prevent it, that she won't be there for them, that she'll be trapped in Khage's hands and kept from them, able to witness their grief through the waters of the Fields but unable to do shit all about it. It has always pissed her off, will never stop pissing her off.

It's why she signs off on the funding and the secrecy qualification for Mar's Great Equalizer project, when it was brought up to her attention.

She won't give up her humanity.

That does not mean that she'll let Khage take her away without a bloody fucking fight.

#Jhae's original material #words words words #February 9th 2020 #Big Damn Table for Vincent #my writing #my original writing #my ocs #Vincent Bolton #Here's To Us 'Verse

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weekendwarriorblog · 5 years

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WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND March 15, 2019 - WONDER PARK, CAPTIVE STATE, FIVE FEET APART

Since I’m writing quite a bit about the wide releases over at my regular gig at The Beat, I’m not sure what more I can say here. Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel is clearly going to be the victor here, but I’ve only seen one of the new wide releases.

Probably the strongest of the new offerings is Paramount’s WONDER PARK, an animated family film featuring the voices of Jennifer Garner, Mila Kunis, Kenan Thompson, Ken Jeong, Matthew Broderick, John Oliver and many more. It’s also the only animated movie ever to be made without a director – at least, there is none credited, which is never a good sign for a movie, as it generally means problems in production. Generally, kids won’t care about that and it looks like a fun premise with a lot of talking animals that I personally will never ever see.

The young adult romantic drama FIVE FEET APART, the latest from CBS Films, stars Cole Sprouse from Riverdale and Disney Channel’s The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, and Haley Lu Richardson from Split and awesome movies like Support the Girls, The Edge of Seventeen and Operation Finale. This is a teen drama in the vein of Josh Boone’s The Fault In Her Stars to the point where I feel it might be a direct rip-off of it, but since I haven’t actually seen it, I’m going to assume that this is a romance between two young people who need to remain five feet apart, and I’m not sure you can even get to first base at that distance.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt returns with the sci-fi thriller CAPTIVE STATE (Focus Features), is the one movie of the weekend I did see, and that’s an interesting look at an alien incursion nine years after they’ve arrived. It takes place in Chicago and has an interesting cast that includes John Goodman, Vera Farmiga, Ashton Sanders and many more, and it’s a much slower cerebral affair than the typical alien invasion movie, one more dealing with an underground human rebellion wanting to take it to the aliens and their human government allies.

You can also read my interview with Wyatt over at The Beat.

Mini-Review: I was definitely intrigued by the premise for this sci-fi thriller since I’ve always found Rupert Wyatt to be a thoughtful and intelligent filmmaker, and this was something he conceived with his wife and co-writer Erica Beeney.

It starts with an alien invasion that’s shown in a rather quizzical way where we don’t exactly know what’s happening, but over the opening title credits, we get a lot of information about the alien incursion and how it affected the people of earth. The story is focused on Chicago nine years after the invasion with part of the city declared a Closed Area which the aliens have taken over as their own.

John Goodman plays a police detective who is trying to track down the mysterious “Phoenix” who is leading the rebellion against the aliens, while Ashton Sanders is a young man whose parents were killed by the alien invaders with his older brother missing. How these two will be brought together is part of what keeps the movie compelling, but Wyatt doesn’t go out of his way to make clear exactly what is happening or how the aliens affected those in the city. That’s stuff you learn as the film goes along, and it makes Captive State more of a challenging sci-fi films rather than the typical action movie in which the humans fight against CG aliens (ala Starship Troopers and Battle L.A.)

The casting is particularly interesting since it’s been a long time since we’ve seen John Goodman in anything close to a leading role, even though he used to do plenty of them in the ‘80s and ‘90s. (Who could forget Arachnophobia?) I also thought Ashton Sanders was much better in this than he was in Moonlight, where I thought his segment really suffered. It’s clear that he’s improved greatly as an actor, and he does decently as the film’s lynchpin to which audiences can relate. Personally, I love Vera Farmiga, and I wish there was more of her in the movie, but her role is one of the film’s bigger twists, so it makes sense that she doesn’t appear more.

It’s pretty obvious that (despite the way it’s being marketed) Captive State is not meant as science fiction film for the masses, but rather, one meant for dedicated sci-fi fans who read novels and want to be challenged intellectually. It may take a good hour before you can get into what Wyatt was trying to do, but he’s created a strong movie about revolting against oppression during a time when many are being oppressed on a daily basis, so in that regards, it’s fairly timely. Rating: 7/10

Lionsgate’s LatinX subsidiary Pantelion Films will release NO MANCHES FRIDA 2, the sequel to the 2016 comedy hit, which grossed about $11.5 million without ever being in more than 500 theaters. I never saw the original so I’ll probably never see this one, and we might as well just go straight to the…

LIMITED RELEASES

There are a few decent movies in select cities this weekend including Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s directorial debut THE MUSTANG (Focus Features), starring Matthias Schoenaerts as Roman, a convict in a Nevada prison with anger issues who tries to escape his violent past by joining the prison’s horse-training program. Led by Bruce Dern and bonding with a fellow inmate played by Jason Mitchell, Roman quickly takes to his horse and uses the bonding experience. This was a really wonderful movie, and it’s a shame that it didn’t come out last year with the other wonderful horse movies, Chloe Zhao’s The Rider and Lean on Pete, as it would have fit right in. But this also has the element of redemption and growth that I appreciate from modern-day prison movies, and this joins Shot Caller and O.G.as some of the better prison-related character dramas. Exec. produced by Robert Redford, the movie will open in New York and L.A. this weekend and hopefully it will expand later. Good news! I just learned that Focus plans on expanding the movie nationwide (probably a couple hundred theaters) on March 29!

Another movie I quite enjoyed for reasons I’ll explain is the historical drama THE AFTERMATH (Fox Searchlight), directed by James Kent (Testament of Youth) and starring Jason Clarke and Keira Knightley as Col. Lewis and Rachel Morgan, a British officer and his wife who have moved into a luxurious mansion in Hamburg, Germany following WWII. The mansion is owned by a German widower, played by Alexander Skarsgard, who they allow to remain there with his daughter. As Lewis is pulled further and further into his work to uncover Nazi rebels, Rachel gets closer to the owner of the house. So yes, this is a fairly typical WWII drama similar to ohers Knigthley has done before, but I was particularly interested in it, since my father was born in Hamburg, and I had gone back there to see his childhood home, which had been rebuilt after being bombed in the British air raids. So I had this connection, but then I generally love Knightley and like Skarsgard anyway, and they were quite good in the film, which deals with the personal lives of these people while also dealing with the bigger story of the Germans and British trying to recover after a brutal war that left many dead. In other words, this is totally my kind of movie, and if it’s something that sounds interesting, it will open in select cities on Friday.

My Interview with James Kent

Fresh off his “Saturday Night Live” debut, Idris Elba makes his directorial debut with YARDIE (Rialto Pictures), a movie set in ‘70s Kingston Jamaica and 19802 Hackney (a Jamaican community in London)that’s based on the novel by Victor Headley. It centers around the world of Jamaican narcotics syndicates and a courier named D (Aml Ameen from The Maze Runner) who wants revenge for his brother’s murder.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-Ke, but oddly, I really liked his new movie ASH IS PUREST WHITE (Cohen Media) when it played at the New York Film Festival last year. It’s more of a crime film ala the work of Johnny To looking at the jianghu gangs within a small mining town and the relationship between a mob boss and his wife, played by Lao Fin and Zhao Tao. It’s a really good film from China that’s especially memorable for the transformative performance by Zhao Tao as the film covers many decades in her life. The movie will open in New York, L.A. and San Francisco this weekend.

Opening at the Film Forum Wednesday is REZO, a wonderful Russian animated doc by Leo Gabriadze about his father, filmmaker and puppeteer Rezo Gabriadze, that’s exec. producer by Russia’ Michael Bay, Timur Bekmambetov. In the film, Rezo talks about his interesting life after WWII when the family takes in a German POW, much to the ire of his father, but the stories are told in entertaining ways with quirky animation to illustrate them, and I ended up enjoying this more than I thought I would. The film is being shown with the Russian animated short Tale of Tales by Yuri Norstein, which is definitely a strange one, having been made in 1979 but not really appearing on the film festival circuit until 2002, as Norstein was caught behind the Wall of Communism and unable to travel to receive the awards the film received.

An odd release by Warner Bros is the sort-of-sequel Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, which normally would be straight to home entertainment but is actually getting a substantial theatrical release. Unlike the 2007 Nancy Drew, which starred a young(er) Emma Roberts in the title role, this one stars Sophia Lillis (Beverly from 2017’s Itmovie) and is directed by ‘80s and ‘90s genre filmmaker Katt Shea (Poison Ivy), so it should be an interesting bit of counter-programming for younger girls. Again, I have no idea how many theaters this will be in, as I’ve heard NADA about this from my Warner Bros. contacts, but hey, if you’re a fan of the character it’s another option.

I’m really interested in the Western Never Grow Old (Lionsgate/Saban Films), starring Emile Hirsch and John Cusack, mainly because I loved director Ivan Kavanagh’s earlier horror film The Canal. The film takes place in the frontier town of Garlow when a vicious Dutch outlaw (Cusack) arrives with his gang, and the local undertaker (Hirsch) has to decide whether to keep taking the blood money from burying their victims or do something about it. I expect this will get the usual Saban limited release but mainly be seen on VOD.

Hey, look! Alexander Skarsgard is in ANOTHER movie this weekend! The Hummingbird Project (The Orchard) from Canadian director Kim Nguyen (War Witch) stars Skarsgard and Jesse Eisenberg as New York cousins playing the high-stakes game of High-Frequency Trading who want to build a fire optic line between Kansas and New Jersey. It also stars Salma Hayek as their old boss who wants to stop the duo from making millions. Again, select cities and VOD.

Daredevil and Ghost Rider director Mark Steven Johnson returns with Finding Steve McQueen (not to be confused with the recent digital release Chasing Bullitt), starring Travis Fimmel, Rachael Taylor, William Fichtner, Lily Rabe and Forest Whitaker. It’s about a gang of thieves looking to steal $30 million in illegal campaign contributions to President Richard Nixon who become the subjects of an FBI manhunt. It opens in select theaters as well as On Demand.

Netflix is giving The Blind Side director John Lee Hancock’s Highwaymen, starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson as the Texas Rangers who brought down Bonnie and Clyde, a release into select theaters on Friday before its streaming debut on March 29. Like last week’s Triple Frontier, I haven’t seen the movie yet, though I hope to see it before its streaming release. We’ll see if that happens.

Marc Cousins’ doc The Eyes of Orson Welles will open at the IFC Center on Friday, as Cousins was given unprecedented access to some of Welles’ sketches, paintings and drawings to help learn more about the enigmatic filmmaker’s inner life.

Opening at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklynthis Friday and at the Landmark Nuartin L.A. on Friday 22 is Yann Gonzalez’s trashy sexploitation movie Knife + Heart, which premiered at Fantastic Fest last September. The former Mrs. Johnny Depp Vanessa Paradis plays Ann, a woman whose relationship with her editor (Kate Moran) is over just as someone is going around killing the actors in her low-budget gay porn production company. So she puts the murders into her new film “Homo-cide.”

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

This Friday, the Metrograph will open a restoration of the late Nietzchka Keene’s 1990 directorial debut The Juniper Tree (Arbelos Films), starring pop superstar Bjork while she was 21 and still a part of the Icelandic group The Sugarcubes. She plays a young woman on the run with her sister from persecutors who killed their mother as a witch. This week’s Late Nites at Metrographoffering is Catherine Breillat’s 2001 film Fat Girl, a fantastic drama worth seeing. Playtime: Family Matineesis going with Ishiro Honda’s 1954 monster movie classic… go-go-Godzilla! That will play on Saturday and Sunday at 11AM, and I will definitely be at one of those shows. (I guess the Metrograph are also showing The Last Unicornone more time since it did so well last weekend.

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

Tarantino’s repertory theater has another amazing and varied week beginning with Joan Crawford’sMildred Pierce (1945) on Wednesday, then double features of Cliff Robertson’s J.W. Coop (1971) and Patrick Murphy’s 1972 thriller Riding Tall on Weds. and Thursday, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1975) and Carl Reiner’s 1982 comedy Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, starring Steve Martin, on Friday and Saturday, and then Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959) and John Wayne’s The Quiet Man (1952) on Sunday and Monday. This weekend’s midnight offerings are Tarantino’s own Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2004) on Friday night and the 1976 comedyTunnel Vision, starring Chevy Chase, John Candy, Larraine Newman and more on Saturday night. The weekend’s Kiddee Matinee is George Miller’s 1982 filmThe Man from Snowy River, starring Kirk Douglas, while the 1999 survival thriller Ravenous will screen on Monday. Tuesday night’s Grindhouse double feature is The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) and Sorority House Massacre (1986).

FILM FORUM (NYC):

Bob & Wray: A Hollywood Love Story starts this Friday and running through April 2, looking at the films of married couple, screenwriter Rob Riskin and actor Fay Wray. It kicks off Friday with a double feature of Frank Capra’s 1934 film It Happened One Night, written by Riskin, and It Happened in Hollywood starring Wray. Friday will be a screening of The Wedding March (1928) introduced by Victoria Riskin (with live piano accompaniment). Saturday sees a double feature of King Kong with It Happened One Night, and then Sunday and Monday sees a double feature of Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Platinum Blonde (1931), which I might go see. This weekend’s Film Forum Jr. is Frank Capra’s 1937 film Lost Horizon, which was also adapted by Riskin. (In theory, one could do a Frank Capra TRIPLE feature on Sunday.)

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

The American Cinematique’s rep theater is screening Norman Jewison’s Oscar-winning 1967 film In the Heat of the Night, starring Sidney Poitier, as part of the Greg Proops Film Club Podcast. The theater is also kicking off an Alex Cox retrospective (with Cox in person) including double features of Highway Patrolman (1991) and Walker (1987) on Friday, and my personal favorite Repo Man (1984) with Cox’s new film Tombstone Rashomon on Saturday. On Sunday, the theater will present the St. Patrick Swayze Day double featureRoad House (1989) and Point Break (1991).

AERO (LA):

Meanwhile, at the American Cinematique’s other theater, they’re doing a series of 3-D Favorites, including Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954) and The Glass Web (1953) on Thursday, Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), starring the late Julie Adams (with her son introducing the film) on Saturday. Also, Jean-Luc Godard’s 2014 film Goodbye to Languagewill screen Saturday, and then Sunday will be a special presentation of Walt Disney Animation Studios: Immersive Storytelling through 3-D Cinematography. Wrapping up the Hitchcock, Truffaut and Jones series with Kent Jones’s doc Hitchcock/Truffaut (see? I was right!!!) and Hitchcock’s 1942 movie Saboteur.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

The Quad is finishing up its Amour or Less: A Blier Buffet series in time for the new restoration of Blier’s 1978 film Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (Cohen Film), as well as showing Blier’s 1983 rom-com My Best Friend’s Girl on Thursday and Friday nights.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

This weekends offerings are: Waverly Midnights: The Feds presents Mike Newell’s 1997 crime-comedy Donnie Brasco, starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. Weekend Classics: Early Godard takes another weekend off but the weekend’s Late Night Favorites is Bruce Willis’ Die Hard, as well as David Lynch’s Eraserhead and once again... Ridley Scott’s Alien.

MOMA (NYC):

This week’s Modern Matinees: B is for Bacallofferings are 1948’s Key Largoon Weds, Young Man with a Horn (1950) on Thursday and Sidney Lumet’s 1974 Murder on the Orient Expresson Friday. (I might actually go see the latter, so if you go, come over and say “Hi!”) William Fox Presents More Restorations and Rediscoveries from the Fox Film Corporation continues with John Ford’s 1926 movie 3 Bad Men and 1931’s Quick MIllions on Wednesday, While New York Sleeps (1920) and John Ford’s Riley the Cop (1928) on Thursday and much more running through the weekend.

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

On Saturday, MOMI is showing Creature of the Black Lagoon with a post-screening conversation with Mallory O’Meara who wrote The Lady from the Black Lagoonand my pal Grady Hendrix. Saturday also begins a Tribute to Bruno Ganz, the late Swiss actor with screenings of Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977) on Saturday and Sunday, as well as Wnders’ Wings of Desire(1987) on Sunday.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):

This Friday’s midnight offering is Sam Raimi’s 1987 horror classic Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, starring Bruce Campbell.

STREAMING AND CABLE

I still haven’t seen J.C. Chandor’s TRIPLE FRONTIER (thanks a lot, Netflix!), but the heist thriller, written by Oscar winner Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker), stars Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Garrett Hedlund and Charlie Hunnam as a group of special ops soldiers planning a heist, and it’s already on the streaming network. I’ve actually seen TV commercials for it, but it looks like I’ll have to watch this on my tiny television rather than in theater, which is a bummer since it looks like a good big screen movie. (Maybe Spielberg is right?) This Friday, the streaming network will also be debuting the fifth and final season of Arrested Development … but does anyone even care anymore? Netflix will also premiere the first season of Turn Up Charlie starring Idris Elba (he’s just everywhere!) as a struggling DJ.

I haven’t had a chance to watch Alex Gibney’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley yet, but it will premiere on HBO on Monday, and on Sunday, Showtime will present the new season of Billions, another show that I haven’t watched yet, but they shot some stuff for the new season on my block!

Next week’s big new release is Jordan Peele’s horror film Us, starring Lupita Nyong’o, which will hope to continue the success the filmmaker had with 2017’s Get Out.

#WhatToWatchThisWeekend WonderPark CaptiveState FiveFeetApart Reviews

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kabane52 · 5 years

Text

The Pleroma of the Nations

[For those unaware, “pleroma” means “fullness.”]

Ephesians 1 describes the coming of the Word through whom all things were made gathering up all things in Himself- He “chose us in Him” and “in love predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus the Messiah.” The allusions are to Deuteronomy 7 describing Israel’s election, and the “us-you” distinction made in Ephesians should be understood in reference to the Jewish remnant which believed first and then the Gentiles who were gathered together with the Jews and sanctified through them. This naturally unfolds into explicit discussion of the Jew-Gentile issue in 2:11-15. The chapter concludes by naming Christ as “head of the church, which is His body, the fullness [pleroma] of Him who fills all in all.” This word is also used in Ephesians 3:19 concerning the church: “that you might be filled with all the fullness of God.” The Word is eternal God through whom all things are made and who gathers up all things into Himself, filling the world with the presence of God through the church, glorified in union with Him.

This brings additional illumination to the two uses of the word “pleroma” in Romans 11. Note the similar theological contexts: both Ephesians 1-3 and Romans 9-11 discuss the unity of the church in light of the relationship between Jews and Gentiles and the lynchpin of that unity in Jesus the Messiah. Romans 11 states that Israel’s election to be the light of the world has been fulfilled both through the remnant who has believed and through the “rest” who rebelled. The remnant is the “root” onto which the Gentile “branches” are grafted. The same dynamic lies under the surface in Ephesians 1. This is the concrete link between Israel and the nations gathered into her. The Jewish people blessed the nations by proclaiming the gospel to them. Second, the “rest” have brought “riches to the nations” because of their “trespass.” This word was used in reference to Adam’s fall in Romans 5- which then says that Torah came to “increase the trespass.” Read in its biblical context, in light of Isaiah 6 and Jesus’ use of that text, we see that the proclamation of the Torah served to intensify the presence of sin in Israel, whose blindness was maximized in Jesus’ own day and produced His crucifixion.

[The grand story of the Book of Genesis foreshadows this exact narrative in striking ways that I won’t get into now- simply note Joseph’s “you meant this for evil, but God for good”- the text ends with Joseph as New Adam ruling over a kingdom based in a garden-like land (Gen. 13:10) and gathering all nations to the word of truth- Joseph has become wise and learned to “discern good from evil” unlike Adam who seized the gift early.]

The rejection of Jesus as Messiah and the consequent crucifixion has brought “riches to the nations” as has the Jewish persecution of the church- the “great persecution” arising in Jerusalem in Acts 8 scatters the Jewish Christians among the Gentiles where they attest to the lordship of Jesus. Revelation 11 shows the church in the form of “two witnesses” whose singular “body” lays in Jerusalem for three and a half days, after which Gentiles glorify the “God of Heaven”, the Gentile name for God in the OT. The “three and a half days” refers to the latter half of Daniel’s seventieth week, whose content is unexplained by Daniel but revealed in the Apocalypse. Each intensification of Jewish rejection in Acts brings more Gentiles into the family.

And yet, Paul states that Israel in the flesh did not “stumble so that they might fall” declaring, significantly, that the “fullness” of Israel will bring a magnification of blessing for the nations. That word- pleroma- is then used in 11:25 to describe “the fullness of the nations” coming in. And 11:26- “in this way all Israel shall be saved.” This “all Israel”, as I have argued elsewhere, is the church, constituted by Jews and Gentiles alike. This is actually an expansion of Romans 10:9, where Paul says “all who call on the Name of the Lord shall be saved.” 11:26 simply interprets “who call on the Name of the Lord” as “Israel.” Yet, this does not mean that Israel in the flesh is without hope or relevance in this text. On the contrary, the text presupposes the final ingathering of Israel in the flesh into the family. This is typologically foreshadowed in Genesis where Joseph (whose dream is echoed in the messianic text of Gen. 49:8-12, making him a type of the Messiah in the textual strategy of Genesis itself) first blesses the nations and then is discovered by his brothers, having been hidden and thought dead for many years.

We saw also in Ephesians 1 how Jesus is described as the “fullness of Him who fills all in all” in the context of HIs headship over the church. This reminds us of the text in 1 Corinthians 15 where the end-point of the Lord’s purpose is God being “all in all.” 1 Corinthians 15 describes the shape of history: first, the Messiah is resurrected from the dead and enthroned as a “firstfruits.” His family is resurrected with Him bodily at the time of His final appearing. In between this period, He conquers every “rule and authority and power” (15:24). The description of HIs superiority over these rulers, authorities, and powers, closely parallels Ephesians 1 as well: we can see the apostle working in the same thought-world, as it were.

This corresponds to Jesus’ parable of the leaven. The kingdom of God is like a little leaven which, in its development, leavens the entirety of the lump. Likewise, the kingdom of God is compared to a mustard seed, which eventually develops into a great tree in which all nations find rest. The world is seeded by the death and resurrection of Jesus and the small apostolic church, to whom Jesus entrusts the task of “teaching” and “baptizing” all nations, a task for which the Spirit Himself is given. The whole lump must be leavened, the task successfully fulfilled, all enemies subjected, and only then will the Lord defeat the final enemy in the resurrection of the dead.

Let’s roll this together. The conclusion of history is God’s presence being, through Christ and the Church, “all in all.” This presence is described in terms of its “fullness” belonging to Christ through whom it is given to the church and world. That fullness, existing in principle in the person of the Eternal Word, is actualized in creation as all nations are gathered up into an eschatological unity in the Messiah’s body. That is the context in which Paul speaks of a “fullness” of Jewish people and a “fullness” of the nations- the leavening of the entire lump of the human family. So even as I think (and I have become more and more convinced of this over time) that the “Israel” of Romans 11:26 refers to the church, not the Jewish people alone, this does not mean that the text does not describe the ultimate healing of the Jewish nation in the Messiah. Rather, the Jewish nation is an integral part of that corporate human leavening which precedes the fullness of the kingdom of God under the rule of our common Heavenly Father. And while this is often interpreted in terms of a singular “mass conversion” occurring at the very end of history, I am more inclined to see it in terms of something which happens simultaneously with the ingathering of the nations throughout the history of the church, over time- with special periods within that history as is true of the Gentiles, but not simply as a single event in the end of the age.

One might analogize the church’s relationship with Israel in the flesh like this: the church, having “Christian” as its name, takes on the name of Christ in virtue of its unity with Him. And yet, this does not eliminate the irreducibility of Christ as a single hypostasis. We do not participate in the hypostasis itself, but in the activities proper to nature as they are expressed in an irreducibly unique, hypostatic way. The same can be said of corporate distinctions within the one human family. Because God is at the same time One and Three, and because the oneness and threeness of God are equally ultimate and mutually establishing, so also is unity and diversity an intrinsic part of the creation’s maturation in glory. [I spend a lot of time developing this concept below in its own right- if you are only interested in the significance of this for the corporate identity of Israel in the flesh, you can skip much of it]

At Babel, we are told that they had “one language and one lip.” “Lip” is a term in the Bible which refers to the god one confesses, often in a ritual context. It is associated with “calling upon the Name of the Lord”- a technical phrase echoed throughout the Tanakh. The phrase is used of Pentecost in Joel 2, and Zephaniah 3, which is a prophecy of Pentecost, uses the same phrase in the context of the nations having a “pure lip.” Isaiah 19 likewise uses the word “lip” to describe the blessed nations who worship God together with Israel at the time of her redemption. The “language” and “lip” correspond with the “city” and “tower” the latter of which is designed to be a ladder to heaven. The word “Babel” means “gate of God” (the etymology of “confusion” is a pun), and this is echoed later in Genesis when Jacob sees a vision of a ladder to heaven built from the top down rather than bottom up and names it the “gate of heaven.” This vision begins a journey which concludes with the reconciliation of Jacob and Esau- which is described in the prophets as a type of the mutual ingathering of Israel and the nations.

The “one language” of Babel signifies the unity of culture and peoplehood that belonged to the family of Adam. The “one lip” signified their common (idolatrous) cult and religious tradition. God scatters both of them but only reunifies one. It is providential that there are many forms of conflicting idolatry, so that the pagans might not unite in war against the children of God, but fight among themselves. Zephaniah 3 describes the unification of the nations under the true altar of Israel’s God, as does Joel 2, Isaiah 19, and Zechariah 2. At Pentecost, the true Name of the Lord- Jesus Christ- was proclaimed in many languages. In Revelation 21, the nations do not cease to be distinct nations as they bring their glory into the church.

Genesis 1-11 not only functions as a story of humanity’s descent into evil, but also tells an extended creation story. The seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman always develop together, and at distinct periods of this development the false seed is destroyed and the true seed exalted. When the flood ends, it is not merely a matter of starting over. The development of the human family has progressed. Noah has a greater degree of exaltation than does Adam. He is able to drink wine, the sabbatical sign. He plants a vineyard, then drinks it as he “rests” in his tent, and then later pronounces a blessing on Shem and Japheth and a curse on Canaan the son of Ham. These are all things which God did in Genesis 2-3: planting a garden, resting sabbatically, pronouncing a curse of death. Noah, now having been given the authority to exercise the death penalty, pronounces that same curse on Canaan. The human family has grown up. The same is true of Genesis 10-11. The Babel-project is judged, but the human family also grows up. Because of the mutual inherence of unity and diversity in Himself, God wishes for the human family to be a family of many nations, not an undifferentiated monad.

This is an integral part of the growth of the image of God into His mature likeness. The “image” of Genesis 1 refers to the entire human family considered as a corporate entity. We see this in Genesis 5:2, where it says “When God created man, He made him in the likeness of God: male and female He created them...and called THEM ‘Man.’” Genesis 1 thus says: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” This is the only place in Genesis 1 where God says “Let US make...” The human family as a plural unity of male and female reflects the plural unity of the God who created Man in His image. This concept also appears in Genesis 11. The founders of the Babel project use the first-person plural to describe what they are doing “Come, let US make bricks” (Genesis 11:3). The leaders of this project are attempting to establish a wayward form of the human family’s corporate existence. This first-person plural is matched in 11:7 where God says “Come, let US go down and confuse their language.”

Just as the plural unity of God is reflected in the plural unity of the one image through its maleness and femaleness, so also God continues His work of creation here, developing that one image as a plural unity through its multiplication into many national families. The work of God in Genesis 11 innerbiblically interprets the work of creation in Genesis 1, where God tells His image, precisely in its plural unity, to “be fruitful and multiply.” The language of fruitfulness and multiplication is itself a textual echo of the third day of creation, which describes fruit trees fruitbearing fruit as well as plants which contain seed. This connection is the basis for the symbolism of people as trees and plants. Genesis 3 describes the “seed” of the woman. Judges describes competitors for the crown as trees. David in Psalm 1 describes righteous people as trees near rivers, bearing fruit in season.

The original division of the human family into national families gave birth to seventy nations. Because of the above, we see seventy palm trees in Exodus 15 watered by twelve springs, obviously symbolizing the twelve tribes of Israel. The one family of Adam, redeemed in Jesus Christ, is a family of many nations. This is part of the fractal structure of creation. The concept of a fractal (a mathematical structure- manifested in many ways in the concrete and abstract realm- where one structure contains within itself many miniaturized forms, which contain many even more miniaturized forms, and so on) is very significant in the creation. This is because of the divine nature. God in His glory has an infinite number of natural processions (we call these the divine energies) which are irreducibly distinct from each other even as they fill each other and contextualize each other. God’s love cannot be merely reduced to God’s mercy, even as the two interpenetrate. Already we see the highest level of the divine fractal: there is one inseparably united divine energy- each particular energy implies each other particular energy. And yet, there are an infinite range of divine energies. But this structure replicates all the way down. One of God’s energies is His love. And yet, there are an infinite range of irreducibly distinct yet inseparable divine loves. So also for each particular love.

So we see in the shape of the one human family. The human family is a family of civilizations. It has three branches- the families of Shem, the families of Japheth, and the families of Ham. At one level down, there are civilizational sets associated with each branch. In the branch of Japeth, for example, there is a sub-branch called European civilization. This civilization has a set of corporate characteristics. This sub-branch also has sub-branches. There is the family of Slavic peoples, and there is the family of West European peoples. These sub-branches also have sub-branches. In the West European family, there is a branch of Anglos and a branch of continentals. And it continues to expand and multiply all the way down- within each national family there is a closely related set of regional cultures. Then there are particular family names in each of these (our individualism has lost the concept, by and large, of a corporate continuity among families- the question “where do you see your family in a century” is meaningless for most in the modern West), going all the way down to particular nuclear families, which then go down to the particular persons in each nuclear family.

What we have established here is that even at the level of particular distinction, there are many levels of distinction and corporate identity, each of which signifies the simultaneous oneness and many-ness inhering in God. And how does unity and diversity, when properly actualized, relate? The Gospel of John teaches us. God, from all eternity, is one God in three divine persons. The Father, as font of the divine nature, produces the persons of the Son and the Spirit. The oneness of God is qualitatively unique in that His divine nature necessarily entails the particularity of the hypostases in which the nature subsists. This is not true of the human family, where the glorification of the human family is compatible with many different possible “sets” of persons. Human nature, in order to be actualized fully, does not necessitate that you or I specifically exist. But God’s nature necessitates His tripersonal subsistence. This is because nature is made actual in activities (energies), and activities only exist in interpersonal relations. God, in virtue of His being God, is fully actual, having no potentials which could possibly make Him “more divine.” Since actualities are intrinsically relational, God’s being God necessitates an intrinsic relationality. I have dealt with why this entails the specific tripersonality of God elsewhere.

Since the trinitarian persons are necessitated in virtue of the intrinsic relationality of those divine energies which exist from eternity, their mode of relationality (distinguished but not separated from their mode of hypostatic origin- unoriginate, generation, and procession) is according to divine energy. The energetic relationship of the three divine persons has a particular structure and is the relationship described as perichoretic- mutual indwelling. The Father loves the Son through the Spirit and the Son receives and reciprocates that love by the same Spirit. This love is that by which Father and Son dwell wholly in each other. Love is an actualization of divine nature (i.e. an energy) and thus exists on account of the divine nature. But each energy only exists according to a distinct hypostatic mode of existence. The Father loves in a paternal way, the Son in a filial way, and the Spirit in a pneumatic way. The eternal relation of love existing among the Three brings each divine person into a relation of mutual indwelling, since each of them is receptive of the love manifested according to the unique character of each hypostasis.

This is the theological context for understanding the teaching of John’s Gospel. In John 10, Jesus declares that “I and the Father are one.” In John 17, Jesus prays that His disciples be one “as you and I are one.” The unity of God finds its subsistence in the three persons who eternally manifest that unity in the perichoretic embrace. This is the paradigm of unity for the family of God. One of the major themes of John is the theme of the home. It begins with the apostles asking “where are you dwelling, rabbi?” As the story unfolds, we see that the place of dwelling is in the Father, and the disciples come to dwell in the Father through the Son. Thus we hear in John 1:18 that the Only-Begotten was eternally “at the breast of the Father” and later that the Beloved Disciple dwelt “at the breast” of Jesus- the only two uses of the word in John’s Gospel. The Beloved Disciple symbolizes the whole Church as the people of whom it is said: “Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.” And in John 19, the Beloved Disciple is told of the Blessed Virgin: “Behold your Mother” after which he “took her into his home”, linking back to the theme of the home in John. In context, then, when Jesus declares that “in my Father’s home there are many dwellings” He is speaking of the unity-in-diversity of the family of God. There is one house of the Father into which we are all gathered. In that one house, there are “many dwellings” symbolizing each particular believer. The mutual indwelling of Father and Son through the Spirit is extended to the human family by the incarnation, and that extension entails that the human family in its own internal ordering will be glorified in a relationship of mutual indwelling. This is why the oneness of divine nature is manifested in the oneness of human nature according to the catholic tradition of the Church: Christ is “consubstantial” both with God and us.

Let’s work back to the question of Israel according to the flesh and its relation to Israel according to the Spirit, the former being the Jewish people and the latter being the church which of course overlap to a greater or lesser degree. We have seen how the unity of the human family entails that the one family is a family of many nations whose distinctness is important. We have seen how this relationship is an expression of the eternal trinitarian order which exists perichoretically. We have seen how the peoples of the church, as leavened portion of the human family, exists in perichoretic relation to both God and each other, and how this relationship exists through the energies existing as actualizations of nature.

What we need to see now is how this relates to the concept of a “Name.” This is another important theme in John. In John 17, the Lord says to the Father that He has “manifested your Name.” In the Gospel, there are seven “I am” statements and also seven “I am the” statements beginning with “I am the Bread of Life” and ending with “I am the true Vine.” This is of course eucharistic- we proceed from Bread to Wine. When the Name is revealed to Moses, this means that Moses is given the knowledge of God’s energies, His acts. Exodus 34, which is echoed in the Prologue of John in a description of Jesus’ incarnation as “full of grace and truth” describes the visible manifestation of God’s glory as His “compassion” and “justice” are described at once. This is in the context of clarifying God’s relationship to His people. A “name” is something which signifies an activity. Why do we say that God is love? Because He acts in love. Why is Jacob given a new name? Because his activities are such that his person is captured with a new name. Each new name of God in covenant history denotes a particular work He does in that period. He is called “I am who I am” as He who causes Israel to be.

The people of God themselves receive new names according to new events in the history of the covenant. In the days of the patriarchs, they are called the “Hebrews.” From the exodus to the exile, they are called “Israel.” From the exile to the time of Jesus, they are called “the Judahites.” And from the time of Jesus onwards, they are called “Christians.” While this is of course not a hard and fast rule, it is clear that each name has a particular pattern of usage, even as all of them properly apply to the people of God in all ages. We see how names signify activities, with distinct persons or corporate entities within one humanity having unique names. This is because activities are always manifested hypostatically.

Because of the mode of union being one of mutual indwelling, functioning through energies according to which names are named, the unity that exists among persons and peoples is one which brings an interrelation of names. The bride who enters into the perichoretic embrace of the bridegroom is named after his name while being irreducibly distinct. We are named “Christian” because of our being joined perichoretically with the one hypostasis of Christ. This union is not an undifferentiated union, but preserves the distinctness of Christ and the Church. We can think of the name “Israel” in the same way. Christ is not a man in such a way that is disconnected from the whole structure of human history and the ordering of the human family. He has a people according to the flesh. He has a hometown- being called “Jesus of Nazareth.” According to human nature Jesus is consubstantial with the whole family, but the particular natural expression of that humanity entails that He also exists joined with other particular corporate entities within the human family. Jesus has a household and a family identity. His mother is Mary the Virgin, and He is of the household of Joseph. This places Him in a distinctive relation with other families, and the relatives of Jesus’ household played a leading role in the apostolic church, continuing to be significant into the second century. He corporately exists as part of the family of David. He exists in collective relation to the Tribe of Judah, together with His fellow Nazarenes, and with His people Israel as a whole.

Think about how this is incorporated into the life of the church and the language of scripture. Jesus is the Messiah, the Anointed, and so the church is Christian. Jesus is a Judahite, and the apostle Paul uses this term for Jesus-believers from the nations in Romans 2:25-29- the circumcised in heart have “praise” (the meaning of the name Judah) from God. Jesus is of the family of David, and so Isaiah 55 describes, after the work of the Servant whose inheritance is then expanded in Isaiah 54 to the collective “Servants” of the Lord, the covenant with David fulfilled in the life of the whole people. And Jesus exists in relation to His nation, the people Israel, so the church is called the “Israel of God.” Jesus is from Nazareth, and according to Acts, one of the names for the early church was “the Nazarenes.” Being joined with the hypostasis of Christ according to His acts, the church collectively bears these names. And yet, that naming relation does not obliterate the genuine corporate identity and life of each of these groups. That we are called “Israel” in the Messiah does not stop Paul from using the phrase “Israel according to the flesh” of the Jewish people. That we are called brothers of Jesus does not obliterate the corporate existence of the “Brothers of the Lord” in the apostolic church. We are joined to the nation Israel through the Messiah who is from Israel and who embodies Israel, but that does not obliterate the corporate existence of Israel as the Jewish people.

This helps undergird Paul’s teaching in Romans 11. Why is it that God has not “cast off His people” in Romans 11:2? Because there is a concrete link between the church as the people of God and the family of Abraham through the “remnant according to the election of grace.” The church is the “whole lump” sanctified by the “dough offered as firstfruits” as the remnant of Israel. It is altogether natural that Paul would use this language given Jesus’ parable describing the human family as a lump leavened over time. Consider it like this: the human family is an unleavened lump, whose maturation into glory occurs as the fire of the Spirit, through the “little leaven” which is the remnant of Israel in the apostolic period, causes the one humanity to rise into fullness. The presence of the Holy Spirit thus spreads throughout the whole family, leading to the “fullness” (11:12) of the Jews and the “fullness” (11:25) of the nations. The internal ordering of the one people of God is perichoretic. We see this also in Romans 11.

The manifestation of God’s glory-presence constitutes the nature of “blessing”, as we see in the Aaronic blessing: “The Lord bless you and keep you...the Lord make His presence to shine upon you and give you peace.” The Messiah blesses mankind, and each person in the Messiah and remade after His image is called to “bless and not curse.” That mutual blessing structuring the God-world relation and the man-man relation appears in Romans 11 in view of the Jew-Gentile relation. Israel’s election is an election as light of the world. That election is fulfilled in Israel’s Messiah who lightens the nations. Because the nations are incorporated into Israel’s Messiah, they participate in Israel’s election as light of the world. That the work of Jesus as Messiah has fulfilled the promise to and through Israel is the entire purpose of Romans 11, and that Israel’s election is fulfilled is seen in the remnant of Israel sanctifying the nations in the unity of the church. Paul’s point is that the heart-circumcised Gentiles who have been sanctified by the remnant of Israel now stand in the same relation to Israel in the flesh. They are incorporated into Israel’s covenant and election, and now must lighten the Jews as the Jews lightened them.

They are warned not to “boast against the branches.” This is the same word that describes the “boast” of Israel in the flesh in Romans 2. The Gentile who thinks his non-Jewishness establishes him before God is as foolish as the Jew who thinks his Jewishness so establishes him. Each is called and elected in relation to the other, so that they exist eschatologically as one people of God standing in a perichoretic embrace of mutual blessing, a concept ultimately rooted in Genesis 12: “I will bless those who bless you...and through you shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” The families of Abraham and the nations bless one another. That is the ultimate implication of Romans 11: the fullness of Him who fills all in all is realized in the plural unity of all the families of the earth, Jews and Gentiles alike, existing with their distinctness fulfilled and complemented by oneness modeled after the oneness of Father and Son.

Fin.

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pod7 · 7 years

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Spring Anime* 2017 Lightning Review

*just the shows that I watched of course

For the first time ever, I’m leaving out shows that I dropped, so if you remember me talking about a show but it’s not listed here, I was either bored by it or just didn’t enjoy it anymore after a certain point, and that’s really all there is to say~!

Shows Included: Alice to Zouroku Watch, Boku no Hero Academia S2, Busou Shoujo Machiavellianism, Cinderella Girls Gekijou, Clockwork Planet, DanMachi Gaiden: Sword Oratoria, Frame Arms Girl, Hinako Note, Kabuki-bu!, Little Witch Academia, Nobunaga no Shinobi: Ise Kanegasaki-hen, Pokemon Sun & Moon, Quanzhi Gaoshou, Renai Boukun, Rokudenashi Majutsu Koushi to Akashic Records, Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata ♭, Seikaisuru Kado, Shuumatsu Nani Shitemasu ka? Isogashii desu ka? Sukutte Moratte Ii desu ka?, Tiger Mask W, Tsugumomo, Twin Angel Break, Zero kara Hajimeru Mahou no Sho

Reminder that there are spoilers in the reviews below

Alice to Zouroku Watch I feel like this was a great concept to begin with, but after the initial six or so episodes, it really seemed like the writer/s were like “okay, what do we do now?” It would have been much better as a six episode mini-series. To focus the last six episodes on new characters, rather than developing a new scenario around characters that have already been introduced, is a huge waste of everyone’s time. It was also quite disappointing that they built up this relationship between the two titular characters, and then they share hardly any screen time in the second half at all, and considering their dynamic was the backbone of the story, it really just fell flat for me. That being said, it was a nice light-hearted affair that was half supernatural and half science fiction. I would love to see a spinoff about the special agent with the Dream of Alice to basically have any weapon. 7/10

Boku no Hero Academia S2 I actually had a few problems with this season. The previous season ended with “This is the story of how I became the greatest hero of them all” or something to that effect, but it didn’t really feel like they did much to further that this season. Instead we got LOTS of development for other characters, especially Todoroki, who, if you had asked me what his name was after the first season, I wouldn’t have had the slightest clue. I loved the Uravity vs Bakugo fight, it really showed that Uraraka has potential for greatness and wasn’t so one note as her powers had seemed previously (in my opinion.) My biggest gripe of the season was the final fight, and how pointless it was. If the point was to frustrate Bakugo with what he felt like was an unearned victory, they should have had Deku and Todoroki be disqualified for (unintentionally) bringing too much danger to the audience, or something along those lines, making Bakugo the de facto winner. Instead they made a big deal about Deku and Todoroki’s fiery collision causing a thermal shockwave/explosion which could have hurt people, only to then have Bakugo basically do it to himself, over and over, while escaping Todoroki’s ice, without any indication of harm whatsoever. It was stupid, is what I’m saying. Also Deku’s lack of a definitive victory of any kind has worn beyond thin. Still a great show, just thought there were some hiccups this season. 8/10

Busou Shoujo Machiavellianism As harem-y as this was, it was still a really great “trials of the swordsman” story, and the influences were very prominent with each new challenger. Aomu is an incredible character, and while I felt they were wasting her by not having her around much of the season, it just made that much more impact when she showed up in the final three episodes. I can’t see this idea stretching much farther than where it left off, so if the manga/LN continues from that point I don’t think it’d be very interesting, but if you like swordsmanship type shows (like Chivalry of a Failed Knight) then this should be up your alley. 8.5/10

Cinderella Girls Gekijou I’m not heavily invested in CG, but I enjoyed most of this. It was a bit tough remembering who some of the characters were at times, and then also not knowing some of the characters because I haven’t read the manga or played any games or any of the side content was kind of frustrating, but all in all, a short, cute gag show. 8/10

Clockwork Planet Besides the horrific facial design for pretty much every major character, this turned out to be a quirky, fun action show. It was nice to see the male and female leads be in a dynamic that was not romantic, but still loving, in a way, as they eventually adopted a parental role for Anchor. I think it got a little full of itself with some high tier philosophy that wasn’t necessary, but most people who have watched a lot of anime are probably used to that by now, so it may not be a detractor for you. If you’re looking for something different that’s not too involved but fun, this is the show for you. 8/10

DanMachi Gaiden: Sword Oratoria I was pretty game for this, as it felt like there was a lot left on the table deliberately for Ais in the first season. Lefiya was an interesting character, and one that reminds me of a character I have in mind for a series that I’ve been daydreaming of for a decade, in that she’s kind of the protagonist, but Ais is definitely the protagonist. Kind of like in the movie DREDD where Judge Dredd is the star, but the movie follows or at least we experience most of the movie with Cassandra. It feels like the type of series that every season could have a different cast of characters and as long as it still fit in the time frame and world as the others, it would be enjoyable. That is my subtle way of asking for a Season Three that deals with the Hephaestus familia. 9/10

Frame Arms Girl This was actually one of my favorite shows of the season because of how silly it was. There was action at some points, but the best parts of the show were the girls just interacting with each other and the human world, fully knowing they are toys of some kind. Not much to really say about it other than that; it’s brought to you by Kotobukiya, so if you love their statues you will appreciated the design of the characters. 9/10

Hinako Note I had really strong Wakaba Girl and Lucky Star vibes from this show, but also ANNE HAPPY mixed in a bit as well. I think it would have been more appealing if this had been a story about Hinako moving away for college, because then the fan servicey stuff (which was really out of place, reminiscent of Bakuon!) wouldn’t have been so awkward and unnecessary. I think they should have fleshed out the landlady character more, she just kind of felt like a background character most of the time despite being somewhat the lynchpin of the show. They also didn’t really seem to do much theater stuff, which hurt it in my opinion in a season where it’s standing next to Kabukibu. Decent, cute, and moe~blob. 8/10

Kabuki-bu! SPEAKING of, WOW, what a great show. I loved the hell out of this show, so much that it’s my show of the season. If you missed out on this show, you should really give it a chance. It has several classic storytelling items; underdog story, forming a team, bending the rules to find success. Several character archetypes I enjoy a lot as well; princely girl that the girls swoon over, cocky guy who is kind of dumb but is reliable when it counts, girl who cares a lot about everything she’s into and couldn’t care less about things she’s not. There is a lot going on in this show and to cover it all here would A) take too long and B) spoil a great show, but suffice to say, if you don’t know anything about Kabuki, this show will teach you the basic stuff, and it doesn’t beat you over the head about it (like some sports anime do.) 10/10 highest recommendation

Little Witch Academia I love this show, but the ending was a bit too... dramatic, for me. I didn’t really understand Croix’s goal; she wanted to prove that she could be on Chariot’s level and didn’t need to be chosen (though she wanted to be) by the triskelion to achieve it’s power, but then what? She built up all of this power on negative emotions, but she wanted to reshape the world into a better place? It was weird, but I liked Croix’s dialogue and VA. I also think it was kind of lame that Chariot didn’t get to tell Akko who she was on her own terms, like it would have been enough for Akko to arrive and see Chariot confronting Croix without having seen her transform, find out her hero may have stolen her dreams, and then have Akko save the world and have Chariot reveal herself, asking for forgiveness. The idea of regaining hope after being disillusioned with your all time hero is enough without having had to also pile on the betrayal of her teacher/mentor, in my opinion. It felt like it was overwritten, like they really, REALLY wanted to make an impact, but it didn’t because we’ve known since the OVA who Ursula was, so it was more just feeling bad for Akko that she didn’t put two and two together fast enough, honestly. Was really happy about the minor cast getting their own time to shine, especially Amanda and Constanze. 9/10

Nobunaga no Shinobi: Ise Kanegasaki-hen This show is continuing, but I just wanted to say if you’re looking for a short breather type anime in between more dramatic or high action shows, it doesn’t get much better than this for currently airing stuff! Continues

Pokemon Sun & Moon It’s the best, most palatable Pokemon anime in ages. I’m still watching it week to week, so that should be proof enough. The intro theme is so damn catchy, one of the rare few that I listen to it all the way through every episode. Team Rocket is fucking incredible this season, by the way. Continues

Quanzhi Gaoshou I wasn’t sure what to think about this at first, but it became one of my favorite shows of the season. The protag is so unabashedly a wish fulfillment fantasy that it’s kind of charming in a way. And the way that the things he does in the game, there is like 0% chance of being able to do it in the real actual game is what makes it so fun. It’s in Cantonese (I believe, please let me know if otherwise), but after the first couple episodes I didn’t really notice. I feel like this season set up the atmosphere of the game’s community within the game more than the community outside of the game, so hopefully there is a second season that actually explores the characters themselves a bit more (especially the boss at the cafe, vastly underutilized.) 9/10

Renai Boukun A literal harem anime, though obviously it was a bit of a parody on the side. The way Guri was changed was kind of abrupt and not really that convincing, so it was weird that they played it so seriously. The writing of Yuri could have just used more everything positive, but for a wlw character, even one in love with her half-sister, she was OK, considering how bad it could have been (she was portrayed as fairly pure and innocent outside of the stalker habits, when she could have just been a raging lust demon like lesbian/bi girls tend to be portrayed.) I liked this show’s version of god though, it was pretty funny. Not especially memorable but enjoyable. 7/10

Rokudenashi Majutsu Koushi to Akashic Records It actually took me a good minute to remember what this show was about, but then I remembered Re=L is a character’s name in it, and how ridiculous that was, so I remembered all of it. It was very much the otaku teacher show from last year but with magic in it. The 100% slutty school uniforms for these middle school girls was really gross, as someone who generally enjoyed outfits like Ryuko and Satsuki’s in KLK, these were just overly sexual for no reason or purpose. I would have liked more scenes with Celica in them, because it felt like she had way more going on behind the scenes, similar to Ais in DanMachi, than we will likely ever see. Honestly I’d give this show a pass, there’s not much redeeming value here unless you’re into the “guy who is OP but pretends to be lazy and carefree because of the trauma he’s accrued” trope (that only Gin-chan can pull off.) 6/10

Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata ♭ Didn’t enjoy this season. It felt like this season was far too busy trying to troll otakus to tell a good story. I didn’t get the feeling, at the end of the finale, that Tomoya would actually continue making doujin games, it felt more like he was ready to just continue hanging out with his girlfriend sidekick and going through the motions. Not every show has to have a happy ending, but I feel like most of them should have a satisfying ending, and this just didn’t have that, in my opinion. The thought of a show centered around Utaha and Eriri making their first AAA game together has merit though. 5/10

Seikaisuru Kado This show kind of shit the bed at the end. If the yaShunina’s goal was to bring a human to the anisotropic, and he thought Shindo was ready, why didn’t he just have him walk through the box that he used to transport him places into the anisotropic? He was willing to KILL HIM for refusing, so why give him the option to begin with? It was very odd. And the reveal of the woman negotiator being an anisotropic being as well was surprising, but the idea that she was ultimately there to make a baby, even a god baby, doesn’t sit well with me somehow. There was something off in the way the CG character models were presented as well that I just was never able to look past, and I couldn’t help but think in some moments where we’re meant to be awed by the imagery and effects how much better other studios would have done with traditional animation. The first 8 or so episodes are good sci-fi, the rest, your mileage may vary. 6/10

SukaSuka To be honest, I started skimming through episodes once her hair started turning red. It reminded me of Gokukoku no Brynhildr in a bad way. Obviously, being the big softie that I am, I wanted to see just a show about a soldier becoming a father figure to an orphanage, eventually falling for the woman caretaker while fighting off the advances of some of the younger girls (that part wasn’t necessary, but it is anime so it’s expected at this point, right?) Instead there was some kind of attempt at psychological horror and shattered memories type stuff that probably was meant to be deep but just felt like an imitation of everything that has tried it before. Not worth checking out really, one of those shows I will forget about by the end of next season. 6/10

Tiger Mask W As an anime fan and a wrestling fan, I enjoyed this show quite a bit. I actually knew all of the real wrestlers included in the show, so that was pretty fun seeing who all would show up. They did a weird thing where like... Ririko and Naoto were dating, but then she left at the request of Daisuke (the man Naoto is avenging) to help his son and then she fell in love with him instead while Haruna (Naoto’s manager) decides she loves Naoto, and all of this was revealed in like five minutes of one episode near the end of the show. it felt like the writers just kind of forgot that Ririko was dating Naoto and then had to cover their ass more than anything. The wrestling part of the show could be pretty up and down at times. Some episodes, Tiger would be absolutely covered in blood and dropped on his head and cut open and all kinds of other horrible things that don’t actually occur in real life pro wrestling shows, and then the next episode we’re lead to believe that a clothesline could end a man’s career. It was more noticeable in the first half of the season though. All in all a great love letter to an old franchise that also advertises some of the better wrestlers in the current New Japan Pro Wrestling roster. 8/10

Tsugumomo I actually read the manga for this series beforehand, and it has a pretty interesting concept, except it is actually pretty raunchy. Like, really raunchy. To the point of being vile in many cases (the characters teasing the protag about getting an erection around them in their younger forms was something they could have left out of the show, for real.) I ended up watching all the way through mostly to see the build-up to the first big fight of the series against Sunao, which end up being animated very well, I was quite happy with it. It’s hard to tell if this will get a second season, but i could definitely see it having several OVA, since things are... less restricted when it comes to those. 7/10

Twin Angel Break This would be a good entry-level magical girl show, at least for people who are familiar with the concept without actually having watched any. It felt kind of goofy most of the time, similar to Cinderella Girls in that it felt like anime characters acting in another show. Mary was great, and I wish there had been more moments of her in her down time, like when she blends up the medals and drinks them while thinking to herself. Of course the main thing I want to talk about is that there is a trans character who except for the first minute or so she appears on screen, is treated completely normally, even when she falls in love (and a villain falls for her), it’s initially played for comedy, but it ends up having a positive outcome on the plot, so I think it’s okay. There is also a girl who is sleepy, where’s a sheep mascot hoodie, is constantly tripping, and ends all of her sentences with “da baa”. She’s really cute and I was really expecting her to be end up being a mole or something but nope she’s just cute. 8.5/10

Zero kara Hajimeru Mahou no Sho Kabukibu was just so strong, that even this show couldn’t top it, and it was really really good. It was a bit like Spice & Wolf and Junketsu no Maria mixed together with the supernatural elements dialed up to 11. Zero is a great female lead, and it’s unfortunate that this looks like a one season show, because she feels like the kind of character you could write around for YEARS. Mercenary has a wonderful voice, and was believable all the way through, but especially when he stayed consistent at the end, waving off Zero’s advances, despite his growing affection for her. Watch Kabukibu, then this. 10/10

#spring anime 2017 #anime review #lightning review

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aion-rsa · 7 years

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Cable: The Contentious Conundrum of His Creation

When “Deadpool” arrived in theaters last year, there was some discussion about the origins of the character. The Merc With a Mouth was listed in the film as co-created by Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza, with Liefeld ensuring the writer was properly credited However, Liefeld also noted he designed the character and had a basic understanding of who Deadpool was before he brought Nicieza into the process (as Nicieza was the co-plotter and scripter of Deadpool’s debut in “New Mutants” #98). It’s an interesting question of what “creation” means when it comes to comic book characters. And if people thought Deadpool’s creation was confusing, it has nothing on Cable, the co-star of “Deadpool 2.” Let’s try to make some sense of it all.

RELATED: Deadpool 2: Josh Brolin Cast as Cable

Often, people simply accept that the creator is whoever first wrote and drew a character in a comic. However, we know that’s not always the case, as Chris Claremont and John Byrne, for instance, had nothing to do with the creation of Dazzler, yet “The Uncanny X-Men” #130 (which the two wrote and drew) was the first printed appearance of the character.

So if you discount the default “whoever first wrote and drew the character in a comic is the creator” (and we think that’s the better way to look at it), then things obviously get a lot trickier.

Ross Andru is generally credited as one of the creators of The Punisher, along with Gerry Conway and John Romita Sr., because he drew the character’s first appearance in “The Amazing Spider-Man” #129.

However, Conway was the one who came up with the idea for the character (basing him on Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan, the Executioner), and suggested the iconic skull symbol on his chest. Romita then designed the costume based on that idea.

So if Conway came up with the idea behind the character and Romita designed how he looks, does being the first guy to draw The Punisher in a comic book qualify Andru as a co-creator? We’re not saying it doesn’t, but it again brings up the issue of how difficult it can be to define the “creator” of a character.

RELATED: Cable: Making His Comic Book History As Simple as Possible

That brings us to the creation of Cable.

Before he was hired as the artist on “New Mutants,” Liefeld was a bit of a hot commodity coming off of DC Comics’ hit “Hawk and Dove” miniseries. He had a chance to be the artist on “Alpha Flight,” but when he was told that Marvel wasn’t willing to reboot the title with a new #1, Liefeld felt it made more sense to do a mutant title, as those were more popular. So he signed on for “New Mutants.” In either event, Liefeld already had sketchbooks overflowing with idea for new characters, including a cyborg character he saw as a cross between the Terminator and John McClane (Bruce Willis’ role from “Die Hard”).

These designs predated his work on “New Mutants.” Liefeld considered using that character (who was without a name at the time) in “Alpha Flight” had he taken over that title instead, likely as a soldier character who had some connection to Wolverine (as, really, what’s the point of introducing a cool new member of Alpha Flight if they don’t have a connection to the most famous Canadian superhero ever?).

Bob Harras, editor of “New Mutants,” decided the team needed a new leader who was drastically different from Professor X, as he wanted to really shake up the book. Louise Simonson had been writing “New Mutants” for a few years, and she automatically thought about a military guy as the perfect counter approach in leadership to Xavier’s famously peaceful outlook.

At the same time, however, Harras went to Liefeld, who was announced as the new artist on the new series well ahead of his actual first issue, so he had time to formulate whatever he would add to the series. Liefeld, of course, thought of that Terminator-like character he had already designed. That guy seemed like a perfect fit for what Harras was looking for. Liefeld thought the character would be from the future, like the Terminator. Simonson was also thinking about the character being a time traveler (this was a mutant title in the late 1980s/early 1990s, where every third character was a time traveler).

Harras approved Liefeld’s sketches, and the character was to be added to the book.

Various names were discussed for the new character: Harras suggested either Quinn or Quentin (most likely the former, but the latter has been reported as well); Liefeld initially had the name “Cyber” on the sketches, and Simonson, while writing the scripts for his first appearance, referred to him as Commander-X. Simonson later pointed out she was using the name “Commander-X” merely as a placeholder until an official name was chosen; Liefeld did not know this, though, so when he read the script, he thought Simonson planned on using the name. Liefeld eventually suggested calling the character Cable.

(Isn’t it kind of rude to call them “muties” on the cover?)

Liefeld came up with the character’s name, design and general backstory, but Simonson also had devised a similar backstory, which makes sense, as Harras gave a direction for the new character that would lead most people to think “military guy” (and the time-traveler thing was just a common trope, period). When Cable debuted in “New Mutants” #87, the story was written by Simonson and drawn by Liefeld.

RELATED: Why Cable May Be the Lynchpin to Fox’s Revamped X-Men Filmverse

So does that make Simonson the co-creator of Cable, because she was the first person to write the character in a comic? She, too, was thinking of a militaristic leader for the X-Men, but she wasn’t working with Liefeld on the concept. She also was thinking about a time traveler, an important part of the character’s backstory, but so was Liefeld.

With the way that these things are generally determined nowadays, we’d likely consider Harras, Liefeld and Simonson as official “co-creators,” but it’s up to interpretation of whether you would give Liefeld extra creator credit.

One person we can discount as the creator of Cable is someone who still often receives credit: Chris Claremont. Claremont, you see, created the idea of baby Nathan Christopher Summers, son of Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor, who made his debut in “Uncanny X-Men” #201 …

That the baby was sent into the future years later and then ultimately revealed to grow up to be Cable does not retroactively make Claremont Cable’s co-creator. That’s just silly.

We are sure that you all have strong views of your own as to who is Cable’s creator, so feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section!

The post Cable: The Contentious Conundrum of His Creation appeared first on CBR.

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