#to me its like. he loses the spiritual morality so all he has left is to turn to the worldly morality and everyone around him drinks and | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wisdomrays · 3 years

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QUESTIONS & ANSWERS: Are Muslims Guilty of Imperialism?

This charge continues to be leveled against the Muslim world. I would like to counter it by asking the following questions:

Given the existing circumstances of 1,400 years ago, how would any one living in Makka or Madina go about exploiting his own clan and tribe? If the supposedly exploited lands and people were those of the Hijaz, which were poor, unfruitful, and barren, who would have wished to invade or exploit them? It is ludicrous to level the charge of imperialist colonialism against the most noble-minded Muslims, who risked their lives to spread the message of Islam; who spent the greater part of their lives far from their children, families, homes, and native lands fighting armies ten or twenty times their size; and who felt deeply grieved when they did not die on the battlefield and join the earlier martyrs for Islam. We ask ourselves what worldly gain they obtained in return for such struggle, deprivation, and sacrifice!

Those who invaded, occupied, and exploited others with the worst intentions (and results) of imperialism are power-hungry individuals or nations. To mention a few: Alexander the "Great" and Napoleon, the Roman empire and Nazi Germany, the Mongol armies unleashed by Genghis Khan and the colonizing armies unleashed by western Europe, Russian dictatorship (whether czarist or communist) and the American empire (whether "manifest destiny" or "making the world safe for democracy"). Wherever such conquests came and went, they corrupted the morality of the conquerors and the conquered, causing chaos, conflict, tears, bloodshed, and devastation. Today their heirs, like bold thieves who bluff property owners to conceal their theft of that very property, turn to besmirching Islam, its Prophet, and his Companions.

True Muslims have never sought to exploit others. Nor have they let others do so where Muslim government had jurisdiction. At a time when Muslim armies were running from triumph to triumph, Caliph 'Umar said: "What befits me is to live at the level of the poorest Muslims," and he really did so. As he took only a few olives a day for his own sustenance, who was he exploiting?

After one battle, when a Muslim was asked to take the belongings of an enemy soldier whom he had fought and killed, he said: "I did not participate in the battle to take spoils." Pointing to his throat, he continued: "What I seek is an arrow here and to fall as a martyr." (His wish was granted.) While burning with the desire for martyrdom, who was he exploiting?

In another battle, a Muslim soldier fought and killed a leading enemy who had killed many Muslims. The Muslim commander saw him pass by his dead enemy. The commander went to the head of the dead soldier and asked who had killed him. The Muslim did not want to reply, but the commander called him back in the name of God. The Muslim felt himself obliged to do so, but concealed his face with a piece of cloth. The following conversation took place:

-Did you kill him for the sake of God?

-Yes.

-All right. But take this 1,000 dinar piece.

-But I did it for the sake of God!

-What is your name?

-What is my name to you? Perhaps you will tell this to everyone and cause me to lose the reward for this in the afterlife.

How could such people exploit others and establish colonies all over the world? To speak frankly, those who hate Islam and Muslims are blind to the historical truth of how Islam spread.

Let's look at what exploitation and imperialism are. Imperialism or colonization is a system of rule by which a rich and a powerful country controls other countries, their trade and policies, to enrich itself and gain more power at the other's expense. There are many kinds of exploitation. In today's world, they may take the following forms:

• Absolute sovereignty by dispossessing indigenous people in order to establish the invader's direct rule and sovereignty. Examples are western Europe's conquest of North and South America, as well as Australia and New Zealand, as well as the Zionists' conquest of Palestine.

• Military occupation so that the invaders can control the conquered nation's land and resources. One example is British colonial rule in India.

• Open or secret interference and intervention in a country's internal and foreign affairs, economy, and defense. Examples are those Third World countries who are manipulated and controlled by various developed countries.

• The transfer of intellectuals, which is currently the most common and dangerous type of imperialism. Young, intelligent, and gifted people of the countries to be exploited are chosen, given stipends, and educated abroad. There they are introduced to and made members of different groups. When they return to their country, they are given influential administrative and other posts so that they can influence their country's destiny. When native or foreign people linked to exploiters abroad are placed in crucial positions in the state mechanism, the country is conquered from inside. This immensely successful technique has enabled Western imperialists to achieve many of their goals smoothly and without overtly rousing the enmity of the people they wish to subjugate. Today, the Muslim world is caught in this trap and thus continues to suffer exploitation and abuse.

Whatever kind of imperialism they are subjected to, countries suffer a number of consequences:

• Various methods of assimilation alienate people from their own values, culture, and history. As a result, they suffer crises of identity and purpose, do not know their own past, and cannot freely imagine their own future.

• Any enthusiasm, effort, and zeal to support and develop their country is quenched. Industry is rendered dependent upon the (former) imperial masters, science and knowledge are not allowed to become productive and primary, and imitation is established firmly so that freedom of study and new research will gain no foothold.

• People remain in limbo, totally dependent upon foreigners. They are silenced and deluded by such empty phrases as progress, Westernization, civilization, and the like.

• All state institutions are penetrated by foreign aid, which is in reality no more than massive financial and cultural debt. Imports, exports, and development are wholly controlled by or conducted according to the exploiter's interests.

• While no effort is spared to keep the masses in poverty, the ruling classes become used to extravagant spending and luxury. The resulting communal dissatisfaction causes people to fight with each other, making them even more vulnerable to outside influence and intervention.

• Mental and spiritual activity is stifled, and so educational institutions tend to imitate foreign ways, ideas, and subjects. Industry is reduced to assembling prefabricated parts. The army tends to become a dumping ground for imperialist countries, for its purchases of expensive hardware ensure the continued well-being of the latter's industries.

We wonder if it is really rational to liken the Islamic conquest to imperialism, which brought disastrous consequences wherever it went.

The victory of Muslim armies never caused a great exodus of people from their homes and countries, nor has it prevented people from working by putting chains on their hands and feet. Muslims left the indigenous people free to follow their own way and beliefs, and protected them in exactly the same way it protected Muslims. Muslim governors and rulers were loved and respected for their justice and integrity. Equality, peace, and security were established between different communities.

If it had been otherwise, would the Christians of Damascus have gathered in their church and prayed for a Muslim victory against Christian Byzantium, which was seeking to regain control of the city? If Muslims had not been so respectful of non-Muslims' rights, could they have maintained security for centuries in a state so vast that it took more than 6 months to travel from one end to another?

One cannot help but admire those Muslim rulers and the dynamic energy that made them so, when we compare them to present-day rulers. Despite every modern means of transportation, telecommunications, and military back-up, they cannot maintain peace and security in even a small area of land.

Today, many scholars and intellectuals who realize the value of Islam's dynamics, which brought about Islam's global sovereignty and which will form the basis of our eternal existence in the Hereafter, expressly tell us that Muslims should reconsider and regain them. While conquering lands, the Muslims also were conquering their inhabitants' hearts. They were received with love, respect, and obedience. No people who accepted Islam ever complained that they were culturally prevented or ruined by the arrival of Muslims. The contrast with the reality of Christian Europe's conquests is stark and obvious.

Early Muslims evaluated the potential of knowledge and art in the conquered lands. They prepared and provided every opportunity for local scholars and scientists to pursue their work. Regardless of their religion, Muslims held the people in high regard and honored them in the community. They never did what the descendants of the British colonialists in America did to the American Indians or in Australia to the Aborigines, the French to the Algerians, or the Dutch to the Indonesians. On the contrary, they treated the conquered people as if they were from their own people and religion, as if they were brothers and sisters.

Caliph 'Umar once told a Coptic Egyptian who had been beaten by a Makkan noble to beat him just as he had been beaten. When 'Umar heard that 'Amr ibn al-'As had hurt the feelings of a native Egyptian, he rebuked him: "Human beings were born free. Why do you enslave them?" As he went to receive the keys to Masjid al-Aqsa, 'Umar visited and talked to priests in different churches in Palestine. Once he was in a church when it was time to pray. The priest repeatedly asked him to pray inside the church, but 'Umar refused, saying: "You may be harassed by other Christians later on because you let me pray in the church." He left the church's premises and prayed outside on the ground.

These are but a few examples to indicate how Muslims were sensitive, tolerant, just, and humane toward other people. Such an attitude of genuine tolerance has not been reached by any other people or society.

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softyoongiionly · 3 years

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For Whom the Bell Tolls

Just outside the boundaries of your town, deep within the trenches of the forest sits a massive tower made from smoke-stained ivory. Decrepit and ominous, it looms over your town like a warning- like a shadow...

There are opposing rumors as to what resides in the tower.

One of them, the one that just so happens to appeal to you the most, is that there is a deity living in that tower.

The one who knows.

The one who blesses and curses the deserving and offers wisdom that no mortal can.

And now, faced with the imminent demise of your family- you have no choice but to seek answers in the darkness.

What, in god’s name, will you find?

Pairing: Jimin x Reader

Genre: demi-god! au, demi-god! Jimin, mythology, slight angst, smut, fantasy

Word count: 8k (THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PWP)

Warnings: likely inaccurate representations of greek mythology lmao, unprotected sex (wrap it up plz), mentions of violence/death, slightly spooky??? allusions to corruption and murder (non-explicit), JIMIN (cause he’s always a warning), probably a messy plot cause I went feral with this one. parts are unedited oops.

A/N: i have nothing to say. this was supposed to be demon porn and now we have a completely new au. SOMEONE PLEASE STOP ME. okay anyways,,,, i love u.

Corruption.

It ran rampant through your town like the plague, devouring everything in its path. One right after another, you have seen it swallow those who you had come to respect; good town folk, who at one time, moved through the world with a moral compass stronger than the one you felt you possessed, had now fallen ill to the disease.

And you understood...to an extent. The universe was not a benevolent dealer. It randomly assigns cards to its patrons and cares not about the outcome- or the losses. You understood that sometimes people were simply without a winning hand.

But the need to win was still present.

However, your town was spoiled with a type of greed that wafted through the streets and turned everything to mold. Neighbor betraying neighbor, partner betraying partner- even mother’s betraying their children...

All to please one man...

Lord Instinctus was the ruler of your province. Born into nobility, he took over the position after his father passed away and began turning the tides in his favor. Taxes were raised, work hours following suit and, harsh punishments were administered to anyone who dared questioned the new system. He forced your town to pledge their loyalty to him on the day he took over and sent ‘enforcers’ to hide out in the town in search of any signs of rebellion.

However, his cruelty was not unique. Too many men have followed the path paved before them and suckled at the teet of avarice, until they were compelled to out do one another.

To outkill one another...

What made Lord Instinctus unique was the fact that he had never shown his face before. During his initiation into the noble court, the townspeople were given blindfolds and told to face away from their Lord and simply listen. Few people broke the rules but, the ones who did were immediately executed.

You still remember the shudder that ran through your body as you heard the sound of your townspeople hitting the pavement. From that point on, the tone was set. Insubordination means death; the terms were simple.

The lack of knowledge and the possibility of death didn’t stop speculation from blooming. In fact, the appearance of the Lord was essentially the usual topic of conversation at every pub on the main street. After the freeing of spirits, both liquid or otherwise, the rumors begin pouring into the atmosphere.

“He’s probably horribly deformed...”

“Inbreeding is common amongst the nobility; it would make sense...”

“My cousin walked by the villa the other day, he said Lord Invictus had a tail!”

“A tail you say?! So is he some sort of hybrid?!”

“Oh please, that’s preposterous- he's probably just hideous...”

You bite your bottom lip, as you wipe the whiskey from the chestnut countertop, resisting the urge to smirk. Bartending was certainly not a glamorous job but, it paid your taxes and helped put food on the table for you and your family.

Glamorous it was not but, amusing it definitely was.

“I bet you he still beds a new woman every night though...”

“A pretty face ain’t worth more than all that gold he has aye?”

“Maybe he’s cursed...”

“That wouldn’t surprise me either- I hear noble families make deals with the magic folk all the time.”

“If you all want to know so bad, why don’t you just pay the tower a visit?”

With that meager suggestion, the bustle of the pub comes to halt- all eyes now on the man who mentioned a topic that is normally banned from public spaces.

“What? You can’t tell me you haven’t wondered what was up there...”

“We know what’s up there-”

“Or rather- who's up there.”

It’s said to be the home a monster.

The tower was used as a prison for the most dastardly of criminals. For years, just before the establishment of your town, it served as a last resort for the rotten underbelly of society. Countless lives were taken, madness ensued- until the revolution came. The tower was set aflame by revolutionaries but for whatever reason, it did not crumble.

The ivory merely sizzled and turned gray and then over time, it turned black. For years it was abandoned until one day, just after sunset, light emanated from the tower once more. Onlookers who were near the building went inside to see if some vagrant had moved in.

And they never returned...

Several spiritual advisors have visited the town, including religious figures from various faiths, and they have all arrived at the same conclusion: a demon has taken residence in the tower. Despite the efforts to bless the building, the light comes on every evening.

Thus, it is assumed that the demon remains unharmed.

“What about Mrs. Jeon? She left offerings for the beast and her son was cured of the plague the next morning.”

“Or Mr. Kim- he left one as well and found gold in his backyard that very night...”

“You aren’t suggesting there is a benevolent being in that tower, are you? Should I remind you of how many disappearances have occurred?”

There are opposing rumors you suppose.

One of them, the one that just so happens to appeal to you the most, is that there is a deity living in that tower.

The one who knows.

The one who blesses and curses the deserving and offers wisdom that no mortal can.

“Hey here’s a thought- how about Jacob tests his theory eh? Why don’t you go down and find out yourself? Report back to us with your findings...”

The pub erupts with laughter now, the uneasiness slowly melting away from the room.

You elect to keep your thoughts to yourself, as you finish up counting the money you had made from that evening- making sure to leave a portion for the incoming team.

The bite of the winter wind is harsh and untamed as it scraps across your skin, causing you to hurriedly put your coat on. It feels like winter never ends in your town and if it weren’t for the fact that your family stocks up throughout the year, you would be worried where your next meal is coming from.

Walking down the street towards your home, you catch sight of the tower in the distance. The way the windows begin to glow, almost makes you feel like it’s somehow staring back at you- taunting you.

You would be lying if you said it didn’t tempt you.

It always has.

Even as a young girl, you remember being drawn to the infamy, to the danger...

Your mother always told you that being curious was a good thing, that it led the greatest minds of humankind. You kept that with you as you moved through life, trying your best to understand what your purpose was.

But times were hard...

With a malevolent lord hanging over the morale of your town, digging his fingers into the heart and soul of your people and crippling them with eternal debt, it was causing you to look for answers.

And you were beginning to look in some unorthodox places.

Dinner with your family soothes the aching curiosity in your chest as you try and remind yourself of all the things you have to be grateful for. After your meal, you wrestle your little brother into his bed before telling him his favorite bedtime story. Once his eyelids have kissed, you turn out his light and move into the main room to wish sweet dreams upon your parents.

And although the pleasantries are nice, there are a few things throughout the evening that disturbed you.

The limp in your father’s movement.

The blisters on your mother’s hands.

The bags beneath the otherwise unburden gaze of your little brother.

Exhaustion was palpable.

Living beneath the weight of a corrupt leadership will do that to you.

As your head hits the pillow, you can hear your mother murmur in desperation.

“I won’t have enough to pay him this week...what are we going to do?”

“I can work extra hours at the mill- we will figure it out.”

“How could you possibly work any longer-”

You feel your chest twist with guilt as you hear the crack in your mother's voice.

“You’re falling apart my love...if you continue pushing yourself this way, I’m afraid I will lose you and I can’t- I can’t-”

The muffled nature of her cries suggests that your father has pulled her in for a hug, trying to erase the inevitable with his affection.

“We will endure, I promise. Just hang on a little longer.”

With your father’s final words, their conversation begins to die down.

This can’t possibly go on much longer. You might be able to pick up more hours at the pub and, perhaps procure a second job but, the dues will never end.

Your family will never exist for any other reason aside from paying to the noble family.

So you make a decision. Hard work clearly isn’t the answer and revolution would only shed innocent blood. If the practical world had nothing else to offer then, you would seek answers from beyond.

Your parents retired to their rooms shortly after their conversation but, you wait until you’re sure the house has fallen silent before you make your next move. Embarking on this mission would be simple but what lies at your destination is anything but; so, you try to be prepared for the possible outcomes.

Wrapping yourself in the thickest coat you can find, you slip your dagger beneath the onyx material and slowly creep out of your bedroom.

The streets were still bustling with life; your town rarely ever rests and the pubs and shops are open well past midnight.

It might sound like the product of a vibrant town but, it’s mainly due to the ever-present demand for profit.

Limited hours mean limited sales.

Thankfully, no one really notices your presence as you traverse your way down the streets and through the alleyway. The noise echoing from the main street slowly diminishes and makes way for the sound of the wind dancing through the trees. The forest itself does not frighten you. You grew up memorizing it with your father as he taught you the fundamentals or foraging and gardening. The sound of the owls is expected as is the chill that runs up your spine with the increase of the breeze.

However, as you near the tower- fear begins to slither its way into your veins. It’s quite a sickening feeling as it seems to stop you in your tracks but, you push on anyway- determined to finish what you have started.

The wrought iron surrounding the tower is stained with rust, corroded and crackling with age, the creaking of its bars alarms you, stopping you in your tracks and forcing you to look up.

And there it is: the tower.

It stands above you like a menacing giant and although it’s presence should deter you, it doesn’t. Making an effort to be as silent as you can, you slip past the opening in the gate and begin walking up the broken cobblestone pathway.

There is nothing but dirt surrounding the perimeter of the tower and other than the moon, the only light before you is coming from the very top window. It’s glowing but the color isn’t stable- it's as if it were shifting slowly from red to green to blue and then back again. Faced with the wooden French doors, you question the idea of knocking.

If someone truly did live here, it would only be polite...right?

With a shaky hand, you knock three times as loudly as you can. For a moment there is nothing, but just as you ready your hand to knock again, the door groans and begins to slowly creak open.

The already unstable heartbeat in your chest begins to rattle without mercy as you brace yourself for whatever horrible creature might lay on the other side. Instead, however, there is no one.

The door opens entirely to reveal that instead of the simple but filthy interior you expect from an abandoned tower such as this one, there is a rather decadent home. Large marble pillars extend upwards seemingly holding nothing in place while glamorous furniture positions itself through the foray. Everything is cooled tone with greys and shades of blue, black often lining the borders of the funiture. There is no lantern, the moon lighting up the interior of the room just as it led your path up to the door.

The layout doesn’t make sense.

The tower is cylindrical and doesn’t offer enough space for such an open floor plan so, how is it that the inside looks like lavish mansion?

You swallow your fear and newfound confusion as you tentatively look around the expanse of the room.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

You take a deep breath and decide that the likelihood of someone (or something) answering that call is slim, especially given the way you were welcomed into the tower in the first place.

You place your hand inside your pocket, gripping the dagger for good measure before beginning to make your way towards the staircase. The moonlight is sufficient enough at first but for whatever reason, as you begin making your way up the stone staircase, the interior of the tower seems to slowly darken. Your grip on the dagger tightens as you stop walking, frozen in your steps, cursing yourself for embarking on a journey so reckless.

Suddenly, all of the light from the room vanishes, forcing a gasp from your throat. You manage to grip the railing to steady yourself but you have no idea what you are to do next.

And then, someone speaks.

“Well- you’re awfully far from home...aren’t you?”

The sound of the voice rushes through your senses much like the wind did. It’s too sweet for your liking but, it entrances you none the less.

“Who are you?”

As much as you try to steady your breathing, the way your voice cracks, gives you away instantly.

Laughter bounces off the stone walls, sinister and playful all at once before the voice speaks again,

“Don’t you think that’s a question I should be asking you? You are the intruder after all...”

Disembodied or not, the voice makes a valid point. You did walk in unannounced and you most certainly weren’t invited.

“I’m Y/N Y/L/N.” The strength in your voice comes back slightly as you grip the railing a bit tighter, “I came here because- “

“I know why you’re here...” The voice is much closer now, likely positioned at the top of the stairs, “Humans are so predictable; always looking for a handout.”

This offends you greatly and regardless of the amount of danger you might be in, you let the voice know anyway.

“I am not looking for a hand out. My family and I work from sunrise until sunset to make ends meet. I’m here to make an offering- not merely to take whatever miracles that you make.” Stronger and stronger, your voice rises to the occasion, preparing itself to either spar with the beast or scream for help.

“Miracles hm?” Sinister laughter slinks down the staircase, practically teasing the exposed skin of your neck, “Is that what you think I do?”

You swallow the bile that creeps up your throat, “I’ve heard many stories- but I wanted to see for myself. Some of my people claim you’ve blessed them but, the clergy said a demon lived here...”

“Oh?” It rises with inquisition, “And you came anyway? Do I have a heretic in my presence?”

Shaking your head does nothing in the darkness but it’s instinctual, “I don’t believe in demons- at least, not the kind who dwell in abandoned towers.”

“Is there a kind you do believe in then?”

There is something in you that urges you forward, captivated by the sweet sound of the voice above you, desperate to view the owner and desperate to see the moonlight again.

“Hell is nothing but a metaphor and it’s demons all the same. There is plenty of evil here, plenty of suffering- by definition, there is a demon ruling over my town- he is draining us of our resources for his own gain. I couldn’t imagine a more accurate representation.”

Suddenly, you hear the sound of boots clicking slowly and steadily down the stone stairs. You brace yourself, still feeling frozen in your place- wishing to see whoever or whatever is front of you.

“If I did make miracles,” It muses and, now you’re able to discern that it’s only a few steps in front of you, “What exactly would you be offering me in return?”

Taking a deep breath through your nose, you place all your effort into trying to make out whether or not there was an actual owner to this voice. Finally, your eyes adjust enough to see the faint shadow of a figure which appears to be sitting on the second set of stairs.

“Name your terms, I will do my best.”

“Ah ah-” The voice corrects along with a side of twinkling laughter, “That isn’t how this works...”

You’re growing frustrated with the apparent mind games but, you know it’s in your best interest to be patient; you still don’t know what you’re dealing with.

“How does it work then?”

Silence passes through the air for a moment before the voice speaks again, “You must bring me the thing you treasure the most so, that I may know your true intentions- I cannot help you until I can see you properly.”

You snort, “You’d be able to see me if you hadn’t wiped the light from this room...”

Laughter comes again but this time, it’s lower and deepened with suggestion, “I’m not referring to physical sight, human. You might not be able to see in the dark but, I can.”

For whatever reason, its response sounds salacious and riddled with an innuendo that you’re slightly afraid to comment on.

And the reaction it creates within you, only frightens you further.

“I’ve just told you that I barely have enough money to scrape by- I don’t have anything of value to give you.”

“I never asked you to bring me anything of value nor did I ask you to give it away- you’re not listening very well...I don’t know how I’m supposed to help you if you can’t follow instructions.”

It sounds irritated and fond all at once, prompting you to nod immediately, not wanting to upset your only shot at freedom.

“I’m sorry.” You breathe, “I’m just-”

“Don’t lie to me...”

Your gaze strains to try and make out the expression of the figure in front of you but, its futile- the darkness impeding your effort.

“What do you mean?”

“You were going to tell me that you’re scared.” The voice accuses, “But you’re not- even though, you most certainly should be.”

It wasn’t wrong. You should have ran when the door opened on its own, when the lights began to dim, when a voice began speaking to you...

But you didn’t.

You were undeniably intrigued.

“Are you going to hurt me?”

An insidious bought of laughter comes from the figure before it sighs, “Hmmm, maybe a little bit.”

When your lips part with something that resembles shock, the laughter comes again only slowing to a halt for the sound of the figure’s tongue tutting against its teeth.

“You are a curious girl...” It observes, “...promises of harm should not excite you and yet- excitement flows from you anyway. Why?”

It kills you to refrain from denying it but, you have no choice.

“Your voice-” A sigh leaves your lips, “it’s very intriguing.”

Maybe it’s part of the creature's abilities, you think, its voice is the main weapon to lure unsuspecting and vulnerable humans into its clutches. The only question is- what happens once it has you.

“Is it now?” The voice sounds intrigued, “Most humans don’t seem to think so. Are you sure you’re hearing me right, girl? I’ve been told my voice is the thing of nightmares.”

This perplexes you; how could anyone possibly think such a voice was frightening? Despite this creature being anything but human, it sounds very much like a man- a warm and mischievous man who seems hellbent on getting you into bed.

“What does my voice sound like to you?” It asks, a smile in its tone.

You ponder this question for a second, realizing very quickly that you can’t exactly tell this creature that it sounds like it’s trying to seduce you. But still, that does seem to be the only appropriate description.

“Sort of...like a melody.”

Laughter comes again but, this time it’s paired with the moonlight slowly fading back into the tower, covering every surface until it finally reveals the appearance of the figure.

Beautiful.

Not an it but a he...

A man with wings.

On the steps before you, he stands, leaning casually against the railing now. Atop his head is a tousled mop of sapphire hair, just below are his eyes- nearly black and hooded with the same seduction as his voice and cloaking his figure is a black linen ensemble fitted only by the same color corset. His pillowy lips and soft skin would be a masterpiece on their own but coupled with the giant pair of onyx wings protruding proudly from his back- his visuals become simply devastating.

“What do you see?” He smirks, licking over his lips.

Unable to resist, you shake your head in complete awe, all of the sensible words dying before they leave your throat, “You- are you an angel?”

The light allows you to see him now as his head tilts another round of laughter, “Try again...you’re very close.”

Perhaps the clergy was right...

“A demon then...” You resign because despite your previously-held beliefs, if this really was a demon, then you know very well you shouldn’t be dealing with him. “I should go.”

His smirk broadens, “But I thought you didn’t believe in demons?”

“I didn’t but, that’s clearly what you’re alluding to. If a winged man tells me he’s a demon, I think it’s wise that I return home.”

Through your moment of clarity, your desire for him persists- especially now that you see what he looks like. But you know better than to make a deal with a demon, even if you are desperate.

“Do you think the universe is that simple? Angels and demons? Good and evil? You don’t think that maybe- in all of his vastness, there is a chance for the inbetweeners?” He presses and now his black eyes seem to glow, his gaze slightly hypnotic.

Tightening your coat around your body, you stay staring at him for a moment before you respond, “Is that what you are? Something in between?”

He licks his lips, his eyes finally allowing themselves to wander over your figure. There isn’t much of you showing but, he still drinks you up regardless, exposing and exciting you all at once.

“I was sent by the underworld to do business for the gods...” He drops his voice to a near whisper, his gaze burning a hole in you, which now aches to be filled.

You take in a shaky breath through your nose, nodding in understanding, “Did you kill the people who disappeared here? Is that what happens when their judgment goes south?”

He arches his brow, tilting his head with his inquiry- his voice dripping with darkness, “Maybe I did...maybe I didn’t. I don’t see how that’s relevant- especially since you’ve already decided you were leaving. Which of course-” He waves his hand then, the wooden door behind you creaking open, “-you are free to do.”

There is something about him you haven’t touched on but, it’s beginning to eat you up inside. He may be an otherworldly being, possessing the tower like a beautiful virus but, he is starting to look familiar. This of course, is hard to imagine because his beauty is so striking that you don’t see how you could ever forget it. But nonetheless, you feel like you’ve seen him before.

And this is what has kept you frozen.

“Will you not give me any answers?” You border on pleading but, attempt to keep your tone firm.

He chuckles, “You didn’t come to me for answers. You came for help- which I’ve already agreed to give you.”

The supernatural discourse that has transpired, thoroughly distracted you from the reasons for seeking him out in the first place. Your situation had not changed; you were still desperate for money, desperate for justice and desperate for peace.

“You won’t hurt my family...” It’s not a question, and it leaves no room for any other response aside from the one he gives you.

“I won’t.”

Nodding, you glance behind your shoulder towards the door, “I have to go home. I don’t have the item you asked for. I can be back within the hour...”

For the first time, he looks slightly disappointed but as you complete your sentence, he shakes his head, “No. Don't come back tonight.” He insists, “If you wish to do business with me- you must return tomorrow after midnight. I will wait for you at the shoreline.”

This confuses you, “The shoreline? Why can’t we meet here? The water is dangerous after dark.”

The smirk returns to his tender lips, “I know.”

With that, he waves his hand again- causing the door to swing open and slam against the tower walls.

Jumping at the sound, your gaze shoots back behind you before returning to where the creature stood.

But he had vanished.

You have no choice but to heed his requests and rush away from the tower, the curiosity inside you almost too much to bear.

Nothing is out of the ordinary as you walk back home, at least not at first. But when you pass the massive clock tower in the center of town, you realize something strange...

The clock hadn’t moved, not even a second.

You remember very clearly reading the time as you hurried past it on your way to the tower and now, even as you’re staring at it, it stands perfectly still. Until suddenly, without warning, the hands of time begin to move again. The clicking almost startles you, your brain filling with a million questions despite your decision to turn away and return home.

Time had seemingly stood still whilst you were in the tower.

Slipping beneath the covers, you try your hardest to get to sleep despite being bombarded with images of the haunting man you had just encountered.

You know you should be terrified.

You know you should be wary.

But the familiarity of him has possessed you and, you’re determined to understand why.

The next night, with your treasured object tucked securely in your coat, you make your way back to him.

You make sure to check the clock tower before you do, logging the time away for later to see if last night had been more than just a fluke.

12:32am.

The clock tower has never lied but, you’re starting to think it might be influenced by whatever resided in the tower- magic, beast, or otherwise.

As you pass through the many trees, you begin to hear the chaotic crashing of the waves in the distance. The tower may be frightening but, few things could match the malevolent temper of the sea. In fact, you’ve always believed that nothing could. The sea was unrivaled in her cruelty, consuming the world at will, just for the fun of it- you've theorized that she likes the screams. During the day, she simmered- blue and serene, allowing boats to decorate her surface like candles on a birthday cake. At night though, her temper worsens and it’s as if she suddenly remembers all the injustice she has faced. Her waves swell to horrific heights, smashing into the seawalls built around your town, creeping over like a titan looking for vengeance.

You’ve always felt pity for her. It must be hard: being the heart and soul of humanity, being responsible for the very nature of things- only to be forgotten. Only to be mistreated...

Your boots are discarded near the last patch of grass before the sand and, your toes brace themselves icy chill of the sea breeze. You’re especially thankful for the coat now as you suspect that your teeth would have already begun chattering had it not been for the thick fabric protecting you.

The waves haven’t begun their violent dance just yet but, you can sense their temper beneath your feet. They will begin soon.

“The sea-” The voice from the tower is behind you, “it suits you.”

Breathless, you turn to face him and even though you’re more prepared for his beauty than you were last night, it still shocks you.

He’s wearing a black silk gown, that drapes effortlessly off his body, the sleeves made out of French lace and extending well past his fingertips. His wings are shuttered behind him, folded almost modestly against his back.

“Thank you.” It’s the only response you have before you reach into the fold of your coat, “I have the-”

He holds up his hand, his voice commanding but gentle, “Wait. I want you to walk with me first. I don’t like rushing through my business deals.”

Your hand slowly retreats from your coat as you warily look behind you, “You want to walk along the shoreline? I told you, it’s too dangerous- at least for me it is, I don’t exactly have an escape mechanism attached to my back.”

He smirks, his tempting gaze flourishing with fondness you cannot place, “What causes you to mistrust the sea so much? Surely she wouldn’t hurt one of her own...”

Your brow furrows, “What do you mean?”

Extending from the confines of silk, his fingers reach out to you, fluttering with invitation, “I will show you.”

And really, you’d be a fool not to accept.

Interlacing your fingers with his, you feel electricity simmer ever so slightly beneath your skin. You’re assuming it’s from the power that likely resides within him but, you don’t expect it to affect you so much.

The sound of the waves begins to softly roar in the distance but the water isn’t close enough to the shoreline to pose any immediate threat.

Not yet at least...

You begin walking alongside him as he leads you both in the opposite direction of your town border. For quite a few moments, he just gazes at the eternal stretch of sand before you, his soft mouth curved up ever so slightly. He looks pensive and serene all at once and, it confuses you.

“May I tell you a story?”

His request surprises you but, you aren’t really in a position to say no. And if you’re being honest, you really didn’t want to.

“Yes.” You murmur, feeling compelled to keep your volume at a minimum.

He smiles softly to himself, glancing towards the water briefly before beginning.

“The water has many gods...” He speaks softly, letting out a sigh, “Lir, Irish god of the sea, Tefnut, Egyptian goddess of the rain, Amimitl, Aztec god of lakes and fisherman...” His explanation already has you interested. You were taught much of the stories beyond your land but, it had always fascinated you, “The gods of the sea are known for the temperate nature, they often stay away from humans and avoid interfering with the mortal coil. Death by water is merely a request they carry out for the gods of death and destruction and thus, there is goddess who rules over the violence of the sea itself.”

Just as he finishes his sentence, the temper of the sea seems to roar to life, the swollen waves crashing aggressively, still not close enough to reach you.

Not yet at least...

“Cymopoleia, is the goddess of violent sea storms. Poseidon, her father, tasked her with overseeing the malignant waters and tending to the causalities. She was not the creator of the storms but she carried the ability.” He moves through the story as if he has told it a 100 times but he seems captivated by it nonetheless, “When it came time for her to bear a child. She conjured up a spirit from within her very core. She crafted them out of the essence of the sea and placed them inside of clamshell in her palace. She was awaiting the full moon when someone snuck into the depths of the ocean and stole them from her.”

The gasp that leaves your lips cannot be helped, you didn’t realize how engrossed you were until suddenly you recognize the port from another town nearby.

You had been walking awhile.

“Why would someone do that?” You press, shaking your head.

He sends a solemn look your way, “Many thoughtless humans believe that if they capture the essence of a god, they will become one themselves. Foolishly, he opened the clam shell and released the spirit into the world. By the time the goddess found him, it was too late- but she delegated his fate anyway. She took his life beneath the depths of a violent storm and placed a curse upon anyone who shared his bloodline. She made it so that any one of his descendants would bear the physical embodiment of his fate.”

“So, they look like they’ve died at sea?”

He can’t help but smirk, a bit of the darkness you saw at the tower, beginning to creep back. “Indeed. They are horribly disfigured and regardless of their efforts, they all meet the same fate. His lineage believes that if they send enough offerings out to sea or if they build high enough walls, that they will somehow escape their deaths. But of course, this if futile- the goddess vowed that she would continue to collect them until her spirit was returned.”

His story ends and it’s like something clicks within you. Without warning, you squeeze his hand, slowing both of you to a stop, just before the light of the upcoming pier hits you.

“Does this have something to do with my town? Is that why you’re telling me this?”

Lord Invictus certainly fit the description for a descendent of this thief and, although it bores no sense of logic- you have no choice but to believe it anyway.

It all fits together too well...

He turns towards you now, his smirk now a small smile, “It has to do with you Y/N.”

Your brow furrows, “Me? What do you mean?”

He nods to your coat, something otherworldly lingering in his eyes, “I’d like to see what you’ve brought with you now.”

Still riddled with confusion, you reach inside your coat and find that the item you had brought with you (a beaded necklace gifted to you at birth by your parents) had turned into something else.

And now, sitting in the palm of your hand- was a clamshell.

“What is this? This isn’t what I brought to you- I-” You begin to panic, confusion and fear starting to take over, “Did you do this? Did you take my necklace?”

Finally, the sinister smirk returns as his wings begin to unfurl from behind his back. Along with his shift in expression, another danger is brewing very close to you- you can feel it.

The sea is growing irritated and whipping the wind and the water up into a frenzy. As you look toward the water, you have no choice but to look on in horror as you see the beginning of something deadly.

A rogue wave.

The grip on your hand tightens as his extraordinary strength keeps you in place.

“I think it’s time I formally introduce myself-” His voice is loaded with bad intentions but it sounds sweet anyway as he burns his gaze into yours, “My name is Jimin. Son of Tartarus, the god of punishment and Nyx, the goddess of the night.”

Your eyes are wide with desperation, not fully registering what he said before he’s yanking you against his chest and turning you to face the sea. Standing behind you, he unleashes a spell of wicked laughter as his wings unfurl from behind is back to wrap around the both of you, so that the only thing you’re able to see is the wall of water coming for you.

“I have to come to send you home Y/N...your mother has been waiting for you a very long time.”

His arms are wrapped around you now, crushing you against his chest as his wings begin flapping- the wind picking up furiously around you.

“Jimin!” You scream, eyes welling up with tears, “You promised you wouldn’t hurt me! You promised! Why are you doing this to me?!”

He laughs at you, and it isn’t necessarily malevolent but merely amused, as if he in on a joke you weren’t part of.

“Shhhh, quiet down my little sea nymph...” He whispers salaciously into your ear, “...your fate will be painless.”

You’re crying now, digging your nails into his skin, attempting to break free as the massive creature that is the ocean rushes towards you without mercy. The crest of the wave arches above you proudly, the swirling darkness of the water mocking the mere audacity of your existence but, as you brace for impact- it never comes.

Only the darkness does...

And it’s the darkness that consumes you.

“Jimin!” A voice breaks into your subconscious, luring you out of what you hope was a nightmare, “You couldn’t have brought her home without scaring her? She was practically driftwood when she arrived here.”

That familiar twinkle of laughter sounds then and, it forces your eyes open.

“I’m sorry your grace- it's just in my nature.” He defends poorly, still chuckling to himself, “I can’t imagine my brothers are doing much better.”

You are somewhere extraordinary, that much is certain. Above your immediate line of sight is an ornate glass ceiling that seems to glow a cerulean blue. All around you are gold furnishings, each decorated with various moldings of sea creatures.

“She’s awake!”

Your vision, still slightly cloudy, now lands upon a being so beautiful- that you have to blink a few times to ensure you’re seeing the right thing. Draped in blue silk and decorated with gold and pearls, is a woman who looks at you with nothing but love in her eyes.

“Oh my- its really you...”

She seems tentative but, you’re suddenly overcome with joy- filled with an almost cosmic sense of peace.

“Mother!” You cry, rushing off of the bed you were laying on and into her arms.

She takes you in her arms immediately, her skin cool against yours like the tepid waters of the bay. She sniffles, tightening her grip on you,

“I knew you’d come home...I knew one day I would find you.”

And it really doesn’t make much sense does it?

How could your life swing so violently from one direction to the next?

Your life on earth seems so insignificant now...now that you’re back with her.

Cymopoleia- queen of violent sea storms and, your mother.

She explains it all to you, gently stroking your hair and fawning over you.

The spirit in the depths was you. Born into a human body, you were fated to one day meet with the demi-god of darkness, who with a bit of trickery- would return you to your rightful place in the cosmos.

Your mother assures you that your mortal family would be relieved of your memory until it was safe for you to visit them, until the gods of fate decide. In addition, Lord Invictus would be the last of the bloodline to pay for what his ancestor had done and, the fog of greed and corruption- which begin the day you were born, would soon be lifted.

The explanation is long and doesn’t leave you completely fulfilled but, your mother assures you that you have all the time in the world to understand the complexity of the universe.

Hours later, after you’ve had a decent feast, your mother instructs Jimin to escort you to your bedroom.

As he leads you down the hallway towards your chambers, you send a playful glare his way, “So- how much of what you told me was a lie?”

He merely smirks, “None of it.”

You scoff, “Even the part of about your voice? And all that nonsense about excitement and me being curious? You knew all along what was to happen- you just tricked me.”

Jimin chuckles darkly, stopping just outside your bedroom door before turning to you, “The part about my voice frightening people wasn’t a lie, Y/N. My father is the god of punishment, any mortal that hears my voice usually cowers in fear...”

“Is that why I felt so drawn to you? Because you were meant to take me home?”

His smirk broadens, “No...you feel drawn me because you want to fuck me.”

Your mouth goes completely dry at his bold statement but, you are unable to deny it- your fingers suddenly twitching at your side.

“Wh-”

“It’s not your fault really...” He murmurs, his body shifting towards you, “...it’s just the way I was made. I am used to people lusting after me- however,” Jimin reaches out then, to brush his thumb over the swell of your cheek, “-I have never known true lust until I had the pleasure of meeting you.”

“You lust for me?” You whisper, completely drawn up with desire- finally allowing your true nature, the nature of a demi-goddess pour out of your soul.

He licks his lips, his gaze upon you timid as he presses his thumb into your face, “I do.”

You turn to the side suddenly, capturing his thumb between your lips, “Show me.”

It's all it takes: that one phrase of consent being enough to unleash all the urges within him.

You’re inside your chamber seconds later, Jimin clawing at the fabric of your robe, his fingers digging into your skin as he does, his lips latching on to every part of you he can reach.

“I knew the moment you walked into my tower-” He grunts, “I knew- there was no way a mortal could be tempting, so dreadfully seductive.”

You sigh hopelessly, raking your hands through the sapphire tendrils on his head, your lips ghosting along the swell of his cheek, the tail of his brow, the shell of his ear...

“In the underworld...” He’s practically growling now, scratching his nails up the newly exposed skin of your back, “We are never taught to refuse our desires. You were my greatest challenge- it took everything in me not to devour you right there.”

You smirk now, positioning your lips at his ear, “I wouldn’t have known what to do with you though- aren't you glad you were patient?”

He grunts again, pressing his hips against yours defiantly, “Patience is for virtuous gods- “ He doesn't answer your question but, you know that he means yes. In spite of his darker nature, Jimin still believes in doing the right thing.... most of the time.

He has you on the bed moments later, his wings spreading proudly. He’s panting, his eyes completely black with lust as he nudges your legs open, determined to finally taste what he’s been craving.

For the demi-god of darkness, denying his desires for even a second is painful. He aches to fufill them over and over again...

You were certainly no exception.

But you want to keep teasing him...

Reaching down, you spread yourself open for him- feeling the visceral substance of your arousal sticking to your inner thighs.

“What are you waiting for then?” You lean up, grasping your hand behind his neck and staring directly into the abyss that is his gaze, “Defile me...”

Jimin growls, sliding into you instantly, his hands quickly bracing themselves on either side of your head. He smirks as your eyes roll back the sheer pleasure of him inside of you causing your nipples to harden.

“Oh look at that-” He chuckles, his own expression unstable with pleasure, “Are you going brain dead already hm? Is this cock that good?”

Your eyes come back into play as you stare up at him, your hands gripping either side of his face as he starts a power rhythm within you.

This wasn’t meant to last long, the carnal desire too much for either one of you to handle...

Perhaps, if your feelings permitted it- you'd make love another time.

Nodding, you moan as he increases the rhythm, pressing your forehead against his own.

“You feel so good.” You whisper, “I didn’t know it could- oh...” A whimper leaves your lips as he hits that spot inside of you, the pleasure completely ruining your ability to speak.

“Of course you didn’t- you’ve only ever let mortals play with your pretty cunt haven’t you?” He laughs, mocking you and cooing all at once, “And now that I’ve gotten ahold of it, you’re never going to want anyone else. I will ruin you ugh-” He finally breaks, his own brow furrowed with the onslaught of his release as you tighten around him, “-ugh fuck yes. I can feel how badly your cunt wants me- it's like you’re begging me to cum.”

“I want you to cum,” You whisper shakily, kissing at his mouth, “Fill me up please, I need it.”

He growls, kissing you back with just as much fervor, his hips moving so fast that the pleasure fucks with your vision.

“I’m going to make a mess of you, they will smell me on you until I can come back-” He promises, smirking ever so slightly, “and then- I'll paint the inside of you all over again won’t I? Such a masterpiece this cunt will be...and you’ll be all mine, cumming only for me.”

And he wasn’t wrong because, mere seconds later- the two of you are cumming all over one another, ruining the silk sheets with your release and clawing desperately at one another.

With the mutual utterance of your names, Jimin collapses beside you and, moments later- when you get your wits about you, he is ushering you onto his chest.

Sweaty, exhausted and satisfied, you lay together in silence for quite a while.

Until finally you speak, “I’m not quite sure what came over me.”

Jimin chuckles but this time, the sound is much warmer than you’re used to, “Immortal lust, it’s a blessing and a curse but, eternal life has to stay interesting somehow.”

You trace patterns on his chest whilst he covers your body with one of his wings, the feathers teasing at your sensitive skin.

“Did you mean it?”

And he doesn’t even bother asking, he knows exactly what you’re referring to.

“I want you.” He affirms, “If you’ll have me- I felt quite possessive of you then but, I won’t insist on anything you aren’t comfortable with.”

You smile, tracing a heart directly over the spot where his heart would beat, “It fits doesn’t it? You and I?”

If the past few days have taught you anything, it is that sometimes- it is appropriate to succumb to fate. Sometimes, believing in the simplicity of destiny works out. Being with Jimin felt right and, for now, this was enough.

“It does.” His statement is simple but his expression says it all: he is elated.

You fall back into comfortable silence once again before one more pressing question leaves your lips, “Did I hear you mention something about your brothers earlier?”

Jimin nods, his eyes half-closed as he cuddles closer to you, “You did. I have six of them.”

“Are they- like you?” You murmur, unable to stop your curiosity.

He nods again, “They are.”

You think one more question will suffice but, his answer will unfortunately bring about a thousand more, “Are they all on missions too?”

Jimin’s trademark smirk shows itself once again as he snickers, “They are-” He repeats before a great sense of pride comes over his expression...

“I was just the first one to return.”

A/N: should this be a series? asking for a friend...

#ficswithluv #bangtansorciere #jimin #park jimin #bts #bts jimin #jimin smut #jimin x reader #bts smut #bts writing #jimin writing #jimin fanfic #bts au

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oldshrewsburyian · 4 years

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if u ever wanna dump an essay about edward fairfax rochester to me...I’m here!

Ahh, you must know how dangerous such an invitation is to an enthusiast! It’s a rainy Sunday evening, I’ve poured myself a glass of wine, and I’m ready to do this. I think Charlotte Brontë is doing and exploring some really interesting things in the character of Rochester, which sometimes get flattened/left out in adaptations. To be fair to the adaptations: he’s still compelling as a Brooding Gothic Protagonist.™

Prolegomenon I: I haven’t read the scholarship on Jane Eyre since undergrad, and I haven’t read The Wide Sargasso Sea since graduate school. I make no claims to particular originality here. And of course, literature can and does hold multiple meanings, etc. etc.; this is my take on Edward Fairfax “Self-Delusion” Rochester. The subfields of Jane Eyre criticism I’m most familiar with/informed by are “Jane Eyre + feminist theory” and “Jane Eyre + ‘early 19th-century debates within Anglicanism, pretty wild, right?’” This should surprise exactly no one who follows this blog.

Prolegomenon II: when I get caught up in my Rochester Feelings in conversation, there is inevitably a point where one of my English-major or -professor friends will shout me down and say “He kept a WIFE in the ATTIC” and I know. I know. It’s inexcusable and I’m not trying to excuse it, and everyone should read Jean Rhys. What I am really interested in doing, though, is exploring Rochester as three-dimensional character, not “man whose bad behavior gets hand-waved aside because reasons.”

First off: Rochester is a man of contradictions. He is a man who is generous to his retainers and his tenants. He is a man who shoulders even social responsibilities that are not strictly his, as we see in the education of Adèle (who might otherwise have died in an uncharitable charitable institution, or become a laundress, or become a courtesan.) True, we meet him as an extremely awkward and fumbling and sometimes resentful figure in loco parentis. But he is trying. I think this is perhaps the key thing about Rochester: what we see him doing for most of the novel, almost always badly, is trying to achieve better (more just, more humane, more equitable) results within a system (patriarchal, economic, colonial) that is rotten at its core. It is not everyone who has the moral fiber of a Jane Eyre, to say “this system is rotten at its core and it is better to starve on the moors or live forever unhappy than to be complicit in it.” The second thing we see Rochester doing, almost always badly, and this is where the contradiction comes in, is trying to avoid his own pain. I’ve intentionally said pain rather than guilt. I think that gets closer to the heart of the matter.

I’m going to get back to my essay in a minute, but an interjection of sorts, before I put the rest of it under a cut: I think it is vital to the novel that Rochester genuinely changes. Justification of this argument and More Emotions below.

For contemporary readers, the concept of repentance as a process may feel unfamiliar, trite, irreversibly sullied by hypocrites. But even if we take it out of Brontë’s extremely Anglican framework, I read Rochester’s profound, unconditional acceptance of his own sin (wrong, if you prefer) against Bertha and the losses which he sees as divine punishment for it as absolutely key to his having a chance at a future with Jane. The concept of divine retribution is surely stranger to us even than that of repentance, but having Thornfield, Rochester’s inheritance, sign and symbol and engine of his patriarchal wealth, built on colonial exploitation, literally go up in flames like the wicked cities of the Old Testament, is Not Exactly Subtle. And, of course, he loses his sight: “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” His sight has been, in the most fundamental spiritual sense, diseased. He has been incapable of accurately seeing his own guilt (which is to say, seeing it in proportion to all other things, the other facts of Bertha’s madness, the duplicity of his family and that of the Masons, etc. etc.) So he loses his sight. And then he gains a much richer understanding of, well, everything. Gradually. Not all at once. I have Feelings about the psychological realism of those final chapters, but let me rewind, as it were. [N.B. I’m not arguing that Charlotte Brontë presents all this as a straightforward Divine Smiting. It matters that Bertha gets the freedom to bring all this crashing down (literally), and that she chooses her own end. But I do think that Rochester reads it as Smiting; I think we need to take that final assertion of his seriously. It’s entirely possible to read the Elm Tree Incident, and indeed that bizarre wedding morning, as Rochester waiting, waiting with pounding heart, for the bolt of lightning.]

I believe passionately in Rochester and Jane as a couple for a number of reasons (so many reasons, all the reasons), but perhaps chief among them is that they are both, bless them, raging romantics who have had very little outlet for their rich emotional life or for their unconventional, erudite, intelligent, exploratory spiritualities. OR (sorry, I forgot one) for their intellectual life, come to that! Rochester with his library full of science and his feelings about moths and Jane who becomes a teacher and genuinely loves nurturing young minds. *sobs* I love them so much. But Rochester is far too ready to manipulate others as he has been manipulated, and as others seek to manipulate him. His treatment of Blanche Ingram, for instance, I read as being several things, in shifting proportion 1) an effort to distract himself from Jane; he has few if any scruples about involving the unscrupulous and mercenary Miss Ingram in bigamy 2) an effort to distract the neighborhood and its gossip from Jane; why, after all, has he been at Thornfield so long without entertaining anyone?? very suspicious 3) an effort to find out what Jane’s feelings for him are. We see her ready to sting him into jealousy at the end too, a nice little bit of symmetry. Rochester is, yes, high-handed in the extreme. But I read the conversation under the elm tree not as a cynical test, but a genuine and painfully awkward attempt to figure out what Jane’s feelings for him really are. Yes, they’ve been having High Spiritual Communion and intellectual discussions and mutual teasing and borderline flirting for however many weeks it’s been. But also: he’s her employer. He’s at least 15 years older than she is (I forget the details on this. 15? 20? anyway, point stands.) He is not and never has been handsome, and he knows exactly how little his wealth counts for with Jane. He’s deeply weird and his house is weird and he comes with a French ward and a mysterious attic and a wife. But does she love him anyway? She does! *cries about it*

Of course, none of this excuses the inexcusable. The proposal-to-wedding sequence shows us Rochester at his moral nadir, in relation to both Bertha and Jane. It also shows him on the knife edge of losing control over his integrity in other ways, now that he has violated this one. (Remember when Jane comes back to Thornfield and says “Reader, I had feared worse; I had feared he was mad”? Yeah, there’s a reason for that.) Anyway, allow me to present excerpts from Chapter 27, which lives in paraphrase in my head at all times:

[W]hile he spoke my very conscience and reason turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly. "Oh, comply!" it said. "Think of his misery; think of his danger—look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair—soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his.

Whew! Anyway, she decides not to despite the fact that she and Rochester feel exactly the same way in this moment:

I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.

*sobs harder* I think it is vitally important to point out that Jane is not cold or even, in this moment, convinced by her own arguments. She and Rochester are, moments after this, in each other’s arms, the language of fire and flame used for them both, and Rochester releases her first because he wants her influenced by nothing but her own will; not their shared passion, and certainly not his own force.

...Where was I before I got caught up with the unbearable sexual and emotional tension? Oh yes, Rochester after Jane leaves. He embraces an extremely thorough program of self-punishment. The most obvious course of action for him -- the one that Jane, the person who knows him best in all the world, assumes he has taken -- is to run away from his pain again, to leave England. He does not do that. He does the opposite of that. He refuses to so much as leave Thornfield itself except to roam the grounds at night. I love this book so much. Then, after the fire, which happens only 2 months after Jane leaves, he goes to Ferndean. Now! The only thing we have learned about Ferndean previously is that Rochester refused to have Bertha live there because its bad climate would have (or at least might have) killed her. We learn from Jane-as-narrator that literally no one will rent it, again, because of its “ineligible and insalubrious site.” Rochester has, with heartbreaking obviousness, given up on life. He has, by his own account, been “doing nothing, expecting nothing,” in “ceaseless sorrow... [and] delirium of desire.”

...Edward Fairfax Rochester has never heard of chill. Also, as we learn, though he is worried about his disabilities because he is worried that Jane will mind, and because they make him a less eligible potential husband in his own estimation (*sniffle*), what he has been chiefly preoccupied with for the last year is worrying about where Jane is and if she’s all right. Again: the man has never heard of chill. But his impulses are generous. He is the heir to a rotten and a poisoned inheritance, and he begins by blaming this inheritance -- his external circumstances, both his privilege and the choices that he is pushed into by his father and brother -- for his own injuries and the ways in which he has injured others. But I (obviously) vigorously cling to the belief that he genuinely turns away from this, that he confronts his own sins and repents and accepts that he will not, cannot, be reunited with Jane in this life. But then he is. *cries about it* Moreover, in a key reorientation from his earlier avoidance-and-denial coping strategy, he accepts Jane’s services “without painful shame or damping humiliation.” He un-hermits himself! He and Jane travel to see friends and family! They receive visitors! These romantic-hearted science nerds proceed to be shockingly normal... for their own given value of that. I’m also convinced that they have the kinkiest sex in nineteenth-century English literature, and I support them. And part of their happiness is the happiness of others; it’s the opposite of Rochester’s globe-trotting, radically individualistic conduct in the first part of the novel. Of course it’s more than he deserves; he knows that, and he needs to know it. But it’s narratively elegant, and (I think) deeply satisfying. And I love it. And, obviously, him... again, more than he deserves.

#jane eyre #edward fairfax rochester #was recently reminded of how hard i ship jane/rochester #is a tag that i have #asks and answers #emilydickinsonapologist

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theravennest · 3 years

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Nearly all the mains in “The Blooms at Ruyi Pavillion” are bisexual. I said it, so what?

My Bisexual Agenda is in high gear, y’all.

I’m hard binging the show and I’m on ep 35 now. I know they absolutely didn’t mean it this way but the main female character, Rong, gives me major poly bi vibes and I’m losing my mind over it.

Exhibit A: She sits like this.

A whole bisexual.

Exhibit B: She likes to cross-dress.

Her fit on the left with the snowy white over layer, the silver design work, and the brilliant red under layer? Immaculate.

Exhibit C: A day at the brothel.

Was it for an information gathering mission? Yes. Was it still fruity af? Also, yes.

Exhibit D: This Choice.

After Rong marries Prince Su as his concubine/consort (notably not as his First Wife), her “rival” Princess Xihe tries to weasel her way into their home in hopes of marrying Prince Su as his First Wife instead. She tries a bunch of tricks to get Prince Su to fall for her including playing up an injury to make him stay by her bedside.

So, what does our totally-not-bi female lead do?

She decides to slot herself into all of Princess Xihe’s romance entrapment plots and perform them with her.

What is that look, Prince Su????? The OT3 potential is real, y’all...

---

Except it’s not Prince Su who stays, it’s...Rong!

Bonus shot of Prince Su listening outside while Princess Xihe has a tantrum over not sleeping with him but with his wife instead:

I swear for god, Prince Su spends this whole sequence trying to wingman his own wife into bed with another woman.

Exhibit E: This. Whole. Exchange. Like seriously wtf?!

What in the holy???? This. Was. So. Bi-conic? For no reason, like???

Also why is she me when I see a cute girl I like crushing on a cute guy that I also like?

Exhibit F: Her Primary Emotional Arc

Now, let’s set aside the 2nd ML since she’s not romantically interested in him (and he is complete murdering, manipulating trash anyway so fuck him).

Rong’s biggest emotional arc for a huge part of the show is her being torn between loyalties to her sexy prince and her equally sexy mentor.

Prince Su

A man who’s kind, disciplined, too goofy for his own good, loyal to a fault, reckless with his life cuz he has pretty extreme low self esteem after he’s been told all his life he’s a jinx that curses everyone around him with bad luck.

Madam Ruyi

A self-made businesswoman who built a wildly successful jewelry emporium that acts as the front for a covert spy / blackmail-for-hire agency. So impressive, actually. She’s so morally gray she’ll extort you with implied threats against your chronically sick son while also planning to provide all the ingredients for the kid’s cure later on.

Both are resident badasses, btw:

Turns out Rong has the same type as me: Hot and Deadly.

---

Quick aside: let’s be honest...the Rong-Ruyi relationship is mentor-mentee with some older sister/aunt energy. I get that. I do. Buuuuuut...I also get big, fat lesbian vibes from Madam Ruyi and I have a weakness for older women so I’ll die on this hill.

Anyway, Madam Ruyi wants to leave literally all of her worldly assets to Rong and made her the spiritual successor of the jewelry business and its metalwork knowledge. While Rong doesn’t know it at the time, Ruyi probably also wants to make her the successor to her spy agency. She just never got the chance to ease Rong into that side of things.

Now at the midway mark of the show, Rong has the choice to either marry Prince Su in peaceful bliss or avenge her mentor because she mistakenly believes he killed her master.

I won’t get into all of the plot of this though I do have Thoughts. IMO, it makes a kind of sense as Rong’s been resisting falling for Prince Su up to this point due to her doom-filled prophetic dreams. But it doesn’t make sense that she didn’t at least try to talk to him first after what they’ve been through and I’m mad at the writer about it but whatever I digress...

The long and short of it is Rong has to choose between her years-long love for her mentor and the newfound love building for the prince. Guess what? She chooses her mentor and tries to stab the prince on their wedding night. 😬

While this is wrong for various reasons both in the story and because of poor plotting/characterization, it opened the door for my bi ass to highkey ship Rong-Ruyi and it gave a lot of unexpected angst for the Rong-Su ship, which I also enjoy.

Let me tell y’all, I walked right on through that door into my own fantasy world where this show is 10x gayer than it is irl.

Speaking of...

Prince Su and his best friend Baiqi are FWB cuz Baiqi is also a bisexual, fight me.

What was even the point of this moment?

*yoink*

Also, there is this iconic comforting moment:

Followed by this other bit of tenderness:

Sometimes when the dad you’ve hated for so many years tries to kill you but then later decides to spare you when he blows himself up leaving you all fucked up and confused, the only solace you can find is in the arms of your best friend-boss and/or your girlfriend.

Me too, Baiqi. Me too.

#the blooms at ruyi pavilion #cdrama #liveblogging #Please understand that is me mostly just joking around but also not cuz I love them.#This is literally just me projecting my hots for all the main female and male leads.#long post #fu rong #xu jin #wu baiqi #liu ruyi

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tawakkull · 3 years

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ISLAM 101: Spirituality in Islam: Part 10

Qalb (Heart) - 1

The heart is the home of God; purify it from whatever is other than Him So that the All-Merciful may descend into His palace at night.

The word “heart” has two meanings. One denotes the body’s most vital part, which is located in the left part of the chest and resembles a pinecone. With respect to its structure and tissue, the heart is different from all other bodily parts: it has two auricles and two ventricles, is the origin of all arteries and veins, moves by itself, works like a motor, and, like a suction pump, moves blood through the system.

In Sufi terminology, “heart” signifies the biological heart’s spiritual aspect as being the center of all emotions and (intellectual and spiritual) faculties, such as perception, consciousness, sensation, reasoning, and willpower. Sufis call it the “human truth”; philosophers call it the “speaking selfhood.” An individual’s real nature is found in the heart. With respect to this intellectual and spiritual aspect of existence, one is able to know, perceive, and understand. Spirit is the essence and inner dimension of this faculty; the biological spirit or the soul is its mount.

It is one’s heart that God addresses and that undertakes responsibilities, suffers punishment or is rewarded, is elevated through true guidance or debased through deviation, and is honored or humiliated. The heart is also the “polished mirror” in which Divine knowledge is reflected.

The heart both perceives and is perceived. The believer uses it to penetrate his or her soul, corporeal existence and mind, for it is like the eye of the spirit. Insight may be regarded as its faculty of sight, reason as its spirit, and will as its inner dynamics.

The heart or spiritual intellect, if we may so call it, has an intrinsic connection with its biological counterpart. The nature of this connection has been discussed by philosophers and Muslim sages for centuries. Of whatever nature this connection may be, it is beyond doubt that there is a close connection between the biological heart and the “spiritual” one, which is a Divine faculty, the center of true humanity, and the source of all human feelings and emotions.

In the Qur'an, religious sciences, morals, literature, and Sufism, the word “heart” signifies the spiritual heart. Belief, knowledge and love of God, and spiritual delight are the objectives to be won through this Divine faculty. The heart is a luminous, precious ore with two aspects, one looking to the spiritual world and the other to the corporeal, material world. If an individual’s corporeal existence or physical body is directed by the spirit, the heart conveys to the body the spiritual effusions or gifts it receives through the world of the spirit, and causes the body to breathe with peace and tranquillity.

As stated above, God considers one’s heart. He treats men and women according to the quality of their hearts, as the heart is the stronghold of many elements vital to the believer’s spiritual life and humanity: reason, knowledge, knowledge of God, intention, belief, wisdom, and nearness to God Almighty. If the heart is alive, all of these elements and faculties are alive; if the heart is diseased, it is difficult for the elements and faculties mentioned to remain sound. The truthful and confirmed one, upon him be peace and blessings, declared: There is a fleshy part in the body. If it is healthy, then the whole of the body is healthy. If it is corrupted, then all the body is corrupted. Beware! That part is heart. This saying shows the importance of the heart for one’s [spiritual] health.

The heart has another aspect or function, one that is actually more important than those already mentioned: It has the points of reliance and seeking help ingrained in it and in human nature, by which it enables the individual to perceive God as the All-Helping and All-Maintaining. That is, it always reminds one of God in the tongues of neediness and seeking help and protection. This is vividly expressed in a narrated Prophetic Tradition, which Ibrahim Haqqi relates as follows:

God said: “Neither the heavens nor the earth can contain Me.”

He is known and recognized as a “Treasure” hidden in the heart by the heart itself.

The individual’s body is the physical dimension of his or her existence, while one’s heart constitutes its spiritual dimension. For this reason, the heart is the direct, eloquent, most articulate, splendid, and truthful tongue of the knowledge of God. Therefore, it is regarded as more valuable and honored than the Ka'ba, and accepted as the only exponent of the sublime truth expressed by the whole of creation to make God known.

The heart also is a fortress in which one can maintain sound reasoning and thinking, as well as a healthy spirit and body. As all human feelings and emotions take shelter and seek protection in this fortress, the heart must be protected and kept safe from infection. If the heart is infected, it will be very difficult to restore it; if it dies, it is almost impossible to revive it. The Qur'an, by advising us to pray: Our Lord! Do not cause our hearts to swerve after You have guided us (3:7), and our master, upon him be peace and blessings, by his supplication: O God, O Converter of hearts! Establish our hearts firmly on Your religion, remind us of the absolute need to preserve the heart.

Just as the heart can function as a bridge by which all good and blessings may reach the believer, it can also become a means by which Satanic and carnal temptations and vices can enter. When set on God and guided by Him, it resembles a projector that diffuses light even to the furthest, remotest, and darkest corners of the body. If it is commanded by the carnal (inherently evil) self, it can become a target for Satan’s poisonous arrows. The heart is the native home of belief, worship, and perfect virtue; a river gushing with inspiration and radiation arising from the relationships among God, humanity, and the universe. Unfortunately, innumerable adversaries seek to destroy this home, to block this river or divert its course: hardness of heart (losing the ability to feel and believe), unbelief, conceit, arrogance, worldly ambition, greed, excessive lust, heedlessness, selfishness, and attachment to status.

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x0401x · 4 years

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Jeweler Richard Fanbook Short Story #1

Feel free to message me about possible corrections, and please consider supporting the creators by purchasing digital copies of the official releases: Novel || Manga || Fanbook. In case anyone is feeling generous: Ko-fi | PayPal. ( ╹◡╹)っ’･*

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Cleopatra’s Pearl

Yesterday, for the first time in a while, I had a night shift in my part-time job at the TV station. I continued working there for just a little, to an extent that wouldn’t get in the way of my Saturday part-time at Jewelry Etranger.

Only the channel of the station I worked for was displayed in the muted TV of the night shift room. There was a history-type quiz show going on when I came in at six. It wasn’t a genre that I had any particular interest in, but…

“Hey, Richard, do pearls really dissolve in vinegar?”

“Cleopatra’s anecdote?”

“Whoa, as expected of a jeweler.”

“This is common knowledge.”

It was said that Cleopatra, once the queen of Ancient Egypt, had a battle with the Roman general Antonius as to which of them could arrange the richest dish. In a direct attack, Antonius showed her rows of delicacies from all over the world, but the queen used an unpredictable move. She dissolved one of the large pearls that she wore as earrings with vinegar that she had poured into a cup, drinking it up in front of Antonius. By the moment she smiled at a dumbfounded Antonius, saying that she could use the other side in case one had not been enough, their contest was already over.

As I talked about the anecdote of the unexpected trick, Richard nodded with a composed face. “That is Plinius’s description of it, right? If you look for a book called ‘Naturalis Historia’, you will find it written there.”

“So it’s true?! No, that’s impossible, isn’t it...? Vinegar can’t really dissolve pearls, right?”

“Depends on its density. If the acidity is strong enough to affect your body after you drink it, it can indeed dissolve pearls as well. But then I cannot conceive that the Queen of Egypt drank it.”

“Thought so...”

“I believe it is unreasonable to expect chemical accuracy from ancient Roman literature, but at the very least, it conveys the romance that he was attempting to tell. The worth of Cleopatra’s large pearls must be immeasurable.”

I had never seen pearls being used much in Etranger, but were there any requests from the clients, this magus-like jeweler would always stock up the necessary goods in rows. As I asked how much a pearl cost, Richard answered that it depended. When I formed a big circle with my fingers and asked, “What about this?”, the beautiful man sighed.

“A gem worn by a royal is a special good among special goods. There are no other comparable items for sale in this world. Therefore, the speculation of ‘how much this costs’ has next to no meaning.”

“So no matter how much money you pay, there’s no way you can get your hands on something that doesn’t exist.”

“Exactly.”

Antonius’s treat was food. It was not cheap, but one could manage acquiring it with money somehow or other. In contrast, Cleopatra all too abruptly dissolved something unique and drank it. I see.

“That’s Cleopatra’s value, huh. So moral of the story is that, even if it wasn’t true, Cleopatra was a step above in sagacity.”

“Right you are. Authenticity aside, it is possible to do a rough analysis from the nature of the anecdote.”

“Cleopatra loses in the end, though.”

Antonius and Cleopatra did join hands, but in the end, they lost to a different general who had come from Rome and both died. Apparently, the new general had no interest in Cleopatra’s beauty. It wasn’t like everything would go well for someone so long as they were good-looking. My break time had ended there, and right before the end credits, I received a task to guard the studio’s management counter.

I would take the night shift four days a week until I started working in this shop, and thinking back on it now, my body sure had endured it. My skin was three times bumpier than normal when I woke up after sleeping until eight o’clock in the nap room. I was by no means a peerless beauty type like Richard, so this was the kind of experience where I became self-aware that even the things we couldn’t see would wear down little by little. Speaking of which...

“Is something the matter, Seigi?”

“No... I was just thinking a bit about the relationship between beautiful people and gemstones.”

Gems lasted more than people. Richard had said before that stones nestled close to people’s lives.

“Gems are stones, so they don’t get damaged so easily and stay beautiful for about forever, right? The reason why rich people feel like collecting them might not be just for using up their fortunes.”

All human beings grew old. Someone had also told me in the past that “luxury is the same as dirt to the wind”. But I could understand why someone would want to think that, by some sort of exception, they would never age and things would always work out for them.

After all, stones – being stones – would retain their beautiful forms.

Richard exhaled curtly with a “hun”, sipping his royal milk tea. Today’s serving was a work I had confidence in.

“Seigi, do you know how pearls are made?”

“Eh? From oysters, right?”

“Precisely. In order to tell apart the way they are formed from the way that minerals form in the ground, they are called ‘carbonate minerals’. As oysters have soft bodies, they are weak to pollution and pain, and dealing with them normally requires meticulous care. It is exactly because they are sensible natural creatures that they have been loved as symbols of beautiful women since times of old. From the fact that the shellfish is nurtured for a long period and born out of the mother’s body, it is also popular as a protection charm for childbirth.”

“‘Carbonate mineral’... something like calculus?”

“You say such emotionless things. It can be considered a delicate gem, close to human flesh. If the owner can successfully manage to coexist with it, it can guarantee a graceful beauty.”

A sensible gem born from shellfish. Hence the “coexistence”. As expected of a jeweler. He said some smart things.

Had Cleopatra also tried to explain herself away to the enemy general like that? She probably had. But it’s useless when it doesn’t work.

“Would it have been useless to give the pearl that she had set aside to the attacking Roman general and say, ‘Please pardon us with this’? It wouldn’t work, huh...”

“You sure are obsessing over it. If Cleopatra had won against Rome’s Octavianus, history might have changed.”

“That’s a hindsight-based opinion, isn’t it? Beautiful people are also part of this world’s riches... Ah, just now! It’s not like I was saying this and that about you!”

“I get it, I understand. Do not shout so loudly,” Richard said, making a bitter face.

My apologies. Up until now, I had been complimenting the appearance of my beautiful boss over and over countless times, and would end up praising him too much, making his face get suspicious. Regardless of the day.

“Survival tactics sure are difficult, both now and in the past.”

“Gemstones cannot speak or hold grudges. They do not increase in numbers if left alone. While their owners change as the people in power are replaced, stones simply exist. The beauty of stones lies in their thoroughly passive charm. Even if there are interpretations for them, they cannot interpret people. That is exactly why people can accept them without any ado even if they belonged to an opponent. The same would not apply to a living person.”

“Speaking of which, it was said on TV that Cleopatra committed suicide in the end, I think.”

If she were truly an unmatched beauty, she might have had her life spared even if she had lost the war. But in that regard, I felt something like pride from a queen who had fought carrying a nation on her back. Like, “I am not the same as gemstones”. It wasn’t as if I knew what the actual course of events was, though.

“Gems also have it hard. Even if they’re cherished because they’re oh-so-pretty, they can’t pick their own fate.”

“So you say there are stones that complain about their own sorrows? How surprising. To think your knowledge of the spiritual side of things would be this deep.”

“That’s not what I’m saying...”

Richard asked, “Is that really so?” and I furrowed my brows. Eh?

“Stones also choose people.”

“You saying that for real?”

“For real. It is like a chance encounter. Just as people choose one another, stones choose people as well. It is precisely because fate ensues that they settle into a person’s hand, I believe.”

“Hearing you say ‘for real’ is kinda... nice.”

“Ha?”

“The gap is incredible, like seeing Cleopatra chug down beer from a tankard... Ah... Sorry about that.”

Richard cleared his throat in displeasure and stated, “Tea” with his usual tone. Whenever he was a bit embarrassed, he would chase me away into the small kitchen.

Today’s snack for the Etranger staff was ramune that we received from a client who had come from the Kansai region. The pastel-colored little spheres were tightly packed inside a lovely box that looked like those hat boxes from department stores. They dissolved in bubbles once we put them in our mouths. Though they were delicious and pretty, as one would expect, eating them in heaps with the clients while talking about stones could have a bit of a bad effect, and I felt like it would make me laugh, so we decided to finish them in private.

“I can even bet on it, but these are definitely tastier than a pearl dissolved in vinegar.”

“What do you intend to bet? How foolish.”

Richard and I absent-mindedly ate the sweets that most certainly neither generals from ancient Rome nor the Queen of Egypt ever got to tasting. We ate and ate but there was no end to them. While we were at it, it felt like we were binge eating pearls, which made me feel just a little sorry for Cleopatra.

As I grimaced a bit, the unrivaled beauty raised an eyebrow only slightly, looking puzzled, and then began wolfing down the ramune again.

#housekishou richard shi no nazo kantei #the case files of jeweler richard #jeweler richard #richard ranashinha de vulpian #nakata seigi #richard #tsujimura nanako #yukihiro utako #novel #my translation #jr short story collection

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calliecat93 · 3 years

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ST: TNG S6 Watchthrough Episodes 22-25

Suspicions: Crusher has been ousted as the CMO and doctor in general to the point that it sounds like she’s going to be court-martialed. Why? Well, the episode shows us as Crusher explains what happened to Guinan. She had been holding a scientific conference but during an experiment, a scientist dies. As more happens, Crusher decides to investigate on her own… which included performing an autopsy against orders when all else failed and against the family’s wishes. So… I love Crusher. She is nowhere near close to overthrowing McCoy as favorite CMO (or favorite ST character in general)… which since Pulaski is her only other competition ATM it’s not much, but still. She’s smart, determined, understanding, nurturing, a maternal figure, and while she may be shouty like her predecessor, she doens’t need to be to be an awesome doctor who will have her voice heard. Two people died under her watch and she will get to the bottom of it, knowing fully well that she’s risking her career by doing so. Seriously, McCoy would be proud! It’s a good episode that lets Crusher be plain awesome. She takes matters into her own hands, keeps investigating even after getting herself into hot water because it needs to be done, and she kicks the bad guys' ass and save herself at the end. Even Ogawa gets an awesome moment by giving Crusher access to autopsy files and endangering her own career to help her. Hell yeah, medical officer solidarity~! It’s not the most impactful episode, but if you love Dr. Crusher, this is absolutely an episode to check out~! 4/5.

Rightful Heir: Ever since Birthright, Worf’s been having a crisis of faith. He goes to reflect on this and has a vision of Kahless, a Klingon spiritual leader and he has returned. Yep, we have us a religious episode folks. Kahless causes Worf to find his faith again and view him as the savior that he is hailed as… too bad that Gowran isn’t convinced. Thos episode actually raises a lot of interesting questions to me. What happens when a spiritual figure returns? How do we explain things despite them making no logical sense? How can we be for sure that they are being truthful? And what happens when it all comes crashing down? Do you maintain the facade to keep up morale and allow the teachings to continue their intent? Or do you tellt he truth and cause who knows what kind of chaos? I can relate to Worf here. Especially in recent years, I’ve been having a major crisis of faith and in such a vulnerable state, it’s so easy to fall into something like this. Klingon episodes really like to delve into the complicated politics, huh? Also really liked the talk between Data and Worf near the end about faith. I agree with the sentiment that even if a claimed diety is proven a fraud or fake, the teachings still matter… but the fact that they ultimateley maintain the facade of Kahless kind of muddies it up. The Klingons get guidance… by a fake. Now to be fair the problems of this and what’ll happen if Kahless ever gets found out and Worf wants the truth known to the people, so at the very least it’s ackowledged. I feel like the realizations should have impacted Worf more than it did, but ah well. Overall it was fine. 3.5/5.

Second Chances: While on a mission led by Riker, the crew stumbles upon… Riker. Another one. Okay, long story short, Riker has stranded eight years ago, got rescued, but transporter hijinks created a clone who was left alone. I S2G, transporters are freakin’ horrifying. I actually thought that this was going to go down like TOS’ The Enemy Within, but they avoid that. This Riker, who we’ll call Thomas, has the memories of the Riker from eight years before. So he hasn’t undergone any of the six-season-long development that Riker has so he hasn’t done things such as reconcile with his father, become the First Officer, and he still has romantic feelings for Troi. Major praise to Johnathan Frakes here. Acting against yourself is never easy. We have gotten it a couple of times, Brent Spiner’s done it plenty at this point. But Frakes did a fantastic job as both Riker’s, the one we’ve come to know and the man that he used to be/would have become had he remained stranded. Thomas and Troi’s interactions are sweet and really give us a nice glimpse of what Riker and Troi’s past relationship had to be like… although it is kinda awkward considering the older Riker’s presence and all. What would it be like to interact with an alternate past version of yourself? Riker is much more collected and in charge than he was then but also plays it safe more, while Thomas has more of the cockiness and immaturity that he did back in the early days but is also far more daring. In the end, things don’t work out with Thomas and Troi as Thomas chooses his career just as he did in the past and Troi’s not willing to thro the life she has away to marry him. Poor Troi cannot catch a break. This was an interesting one. I feel like Thomas should have been more affected by the fact that he was alone for eight years, but I also like that we don’t go for the whole evil/insane plot either. It was really cool to see the older Riker against a version of himself who didn’t end up on the Enterprise, the mature take on Riker and Troi’s relationship and how we’ve avoided every standard pitfall they couldhave fallen into, and we even avoid killing anyone! Hooray~! 3.5/5.

Timescape: As Picard, Data, Geordi, and Troi are returning from a science conference… but find the Enterprise and a Romulan ship frozen in place. There are some weird time distortions going on and after rigging up some bands to keep themselves un-frozen, they try to get to the bottom of it. This was a fun one! It’s cool yet creepy to see Picard, Troi, and Data going through the Enterprise (Geordi’s manning the shuttle, he gets to go on the Romulan ship though) and seeing all the insanity that was going on, including Crusher being shot at point-blank range… okay that’s on the horrifying end of the scale, but still. Don’t worry, they avert her dying for realsies! Picard also loses it and his mental breakdown is just plain freaky. Troi was freakin’ awesome in this one, getting to do actual Starfleet officer things, be actively involved, and they bring back up Face of the Enemy and Troi’s experience with the Romulans and their tech prove very beneficial! Yes, let’s keep the awesome Troi train running! It was just a fun episode and for the penultimate one of the season, it serves its purpose well~! Also Riker does not get along with cats haha. 4/5.

Alright, one more for S6 to go and along with it we start S7. The beginning of the end is nearing folks. I’m so excited~!

#st watchthrough

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for-i-am-dying-of-such-love · 4 years

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that time I watched Antony + Cleopatra

I don’t even know where to start with this one. Please don’t mistake my criticism of the episode with my hating it, because I actually think there’s a lot going on here with Xena (and Gabrielle too, but I am less focused on her arc) that’s quite nuanced and compelling. I love that Xena’s role in orchestrating Marc Antony’s downfall contributes to her moral and emotional conflict. What I abhor (and refuse to accept) is the suggestion that it’s born out of her falling in *love* with him, especially when there are far more consequential things in Xena’s life, past and present, fueling her angst in this moment. I have my own reading of what’s causing Xena’s uneasiness here, but more on that in a bit.

First: I think my greatest frustration is with the show itself. Like, THE FUCKING AUDACITY to foist a Boyfriend of the Week on us with just a handful of episodes left in season five. After everything, *everything*, that Xena & Gabrielle have suffered through (actual, literal HELL), and the continued devotion they show for one another, it’s just not believable that Xena would fall in love with someone else, let alone a ROMAN GENERAL. The emphasis here is important, but patience grasshopper, I’ll get to that.

Now, here’s where we start to get into the weeds with this notion of ‘Xena falling in love’ and there’s a lot to unpack around it, but before I do, let me just finish unspooling the threads of frustration I have with the show and it’s AUDACITY. Because it’s important to note that the show’s intention *was* to frame Xena’s attraction for Marc Antony as romantic - on top of whatever else she may have initially felt (indifference, intrigue, lust) - and not just sexual. And while I’ll concede that a story where Xena is forced to sacrifice her heart for the greater good by killing the man she loves is intriguing, it’s one we’ve already seen (Immortal Beloved). More than that, it’s a story that doesn’t fit with the Xena we know now, and the show, better than anyone, should have recognized this.

I know I’m being hard on the show runners here, so allow me this small tangent to give a little contextual understanding before furthering my arguments. As much fun as it is wrestling with the internal logic of this show (a surprisingly uphill battle all the time), I understand the unfortunate truth is that character motivations don’t always drive the story in the ways you would expect. Sometimes external factors complicate the stories XWP wants to tell and the ways it’s *allowed* to tell them. I get that.

I also get that Xena: Warrior Princess - both the show and the character - was expected to be sexy (hello, an easy win because Xena & Gabrielle). And that means, from time to time, it had to tease the audience with sex and seduction and romance (I guess fighting demons in Hell for the soul of your SOULMATE is not romantic enough, but I DIGRESS). What that often translated as on screen was a parade of Boyfriends of the Week for our two favourite Gal Pals, and by this point in the show, well, frankly it had been a while since Xena had had her a boyfriend (the Ares arc in season 5 doesn’t count). Simply put: a Marc Antony type was past due.

In this case, he wasn’t just past due, he served a dual purpose - fulfilling their Boyfriend of the Week quota, but also helping to re-establish Xena’s sexuality after she’d had her baby. I happen to think the latter take is overly simplistic and misguided (because, what, pregnant women are not also capable of being sexual creatures?), but it’s something Rob Tapert has commented on. So, ok, sure, fine whatever.

To be fair, I’m not sure if the show was deliberately signalling the return of Sexualized!Xena, or if it was simply a byproduct of the chemistry between the characters, and the inherent sensuality of the story’s setting. Regardless, the end result was certainly titillating. And I get it. I get why they want Boyfriends of the Week sometimes. Sex sells, and this episode was a blockbuster.

And before I return again to being hard on the show runners about dumb boyfriends, I just want to point out that my specific problem isn’t that Xena has been given a *boy*friend. Xena is bisexual, so men are always going to be an option when she’s considering a romantic or sexual partner. My issue is that she’s considering *any* romantic partner at all! By the gods, she’s essentially married to Gabrielle at this point.

Ay, but there’s the rub. Because the same expectation that dictated XWP should be sexy, also dictated that it should be heteronormative. The show can repeatedly double down on Xena’s & Gabrielle’s emotional and spiritual fidelity but it can never be seen explicitly to be sexual too (just a reminder, I haven’t seen S6 yet). That’s the unfortunate and uncomfortable reality of television in the late 90s and early 00s.

But this is where I take umbrage: XWP may’ve been limited (by studio notes) to giving us a chalk outline of what Xena’s & Gabrielle’s relationship really looked like, but they most definitely had the ability to control how they coloured the relationships Xena & Gabrielle had with their Boyfriends of the Week. And again, in ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ the show chose to frame it as a love story, a romance, when simply playing it off as Xena’s libido run amok would have satisfied the episode’s need for sex appeal, while also honouring the fact that her heart has long been spoken for (don’t worry: taking Xena’s heart out of the equation won’t lessen her moral or emotional conflict any - I’m getting there!).

Because here’s the thing: Xena getting caught up in the heady thrill of a seduction play, especially with a man as attractive and powerful as Marc Antony is totally believable. And really, Xena taken in by *lust* makes sense, especially at this point in her life. I mean, it’s been a while since she’s had to play this seductive cat-and-mouse game (Ares doesn’t count) and maybe she’s forgotten how easy it is to slip into this character, how much fun it can be. Maybe it’s even a little liberating - this return to form from when she was wild and free - because a lot has changed since she last had to do this; she’s changed and in ways she never anticipated. She’s settled down, even if she’s still travelling the known world. Made a commitment to Gabrielle to share a life together, had a baby, and now the three of them are carving out their own little domestic sphere. And all of this is happening while she’s still reconciling the person she was before with the person she is now. Maybe she’s a little itchy.

Because this… this tension, the cadence of a feint and parry charm offensive, it’s familiar. Comfortable in a way she didn’t know she missed until she felt it again. It would be easy to see her drunk with dark delight, to momentarily lose sight of her head. It would be believable. What’s not believable is that she - a pragmatist - would ever lose sight of her heart. Because the stakes of the game are so high, for Egypt but also for her. (And for you in the back who’s clearly read ahead on the syllabus and is about to point out Xena’s checkered romantic history and her self-proclaimed soft spot for Bad Boys Who Love Like Fools - don’t worry, we’ll get there too.)

What I’m taking a generous amount of time to say is this: if they simply wanted to give us a lush and sexy episode, they could have delivered on the sexiness without attaching it to a love story! We are long past believing Xena only kisses people she’s in love with, or that she’s in love with all the people she kisses. There’s no need to pretend her sexual agency is only relevant or operational within the confines of a romantic plot line. But more than that, throwing an unbelievable romance into the mix really only serves to threaten the integrity of Xena’s motivations, because it risks reducing the entirety of her turmoil to: Xena loses another boyfriend, how le sad. And that is absolutely not the point.

Because the point is this: Rome fucking corrupts and perverts everything it touches. And Xena’s motivations are built from her (and now Gabrielle’s) tortured history with the empire and the men who run it. And if you’ll permit me, like 4,000 words, we can get into it and, hopefully, you’ll agree that shit is heavy enough on Xena’s mind without a ‘star-crossed lovers’ storyline. Remember, it was only a year ago that they both were nailed up by Romans and left to die under a cold, grey sky at the foot of Mount Amaro. That cross alone, and the long shadow it casts, is more than capable of supporting the dramatic weight of this episode, never mind the crosses that came before it.

So, I can’t overstate the importance of Xena’s past connection with Caesar and Rome. It informed so much of who Xena was to become, as a cruel and bloodthirsty warlord, and then later, as a warrior fighting for good. Even now, after Caesar’s death, that connection is still informing her. It will never stop. And, Rome will never be absolved of its sins against Xena & Gabrielle. There’s simply too much trauma in that shared past. Trauma that‘s telegraphed onto every interaction Xena has with Rome and its strongmen going forward.

And it’s exactly the reason Xena would never fall in love with Marc Antony. She might well lust after his body, but she will never pine for his devotion. Because, even in that moment under the stars when he is just a man with his chest cracked open, offering up to her his heart, beating strong and hungry in want of her affection, she can’t help but see the hardened, black veins where the love of Rome - like a creeping scourge - has left its vile mark. Of course she recognizes it, her own heart bore the same disease. A gift from Caesar. The pretty boy with his pretty words and his pretty promises, who so subtly disarmed Xena and then skillfully stripped away her defences until she had bared her heart to him. Who didn’t hesitate to flay it with a knife of her own making, it’s blade poisoned with his love for Rome.

He did not take her heart - sometimes she wished he had - but left it to rot in her chest, slow and angry. And it nearly destroyed her. Nearly drained her of every ounce of humanity she had left, as hatred and spite and cold brutality filled her up instead. He had weaponized Xena’s affection for him and used it against her and she was forever changed. In that singular moment she saw Caesar, and Rome - because Caesar was Rome and Rome was Caesar and they were one and the same - for what they truly were: insidious and unrepentant in their calculated villainy. And she hated - not just the man who betrayed her, but the monster who nursed him with poisoned milk, and all the other strongmen who nursed at the same teat. Because in that moment too, Xena learned that all the men who kneeled before Rome and lusted after her glory were the same.

But she didn’t let her hatred go unproductive. She had been careless and imprudent in her dealings with Caesar, and nearly paid for it with her life. Except she survived and then thrived, in her own insidious, unrepentant, calculated villainy. And she never forgot what Caesar had done to her, how he had done it. She turned it over and over and over again in her mind. Studied it from every angle. Studied *him*. Until she knew how he thought, how he moved, where he was weak and unsuspecting. Until she knew every single one of his plays, and how best to counter them. Where and when to lay siege. A secret weapon she cultivated, not just to destroy the man who destroyed her heart, but to lay waste to all the fools who followed in his footsteps. She wouldn’t be taken in by Rome again.

And, to be fair, the episode doesn’t try to run from this history. It just doesn’t linger in it any longer than is necessary to give a brief nod to Brutus and the crucifixion (which is a shame, because it informs so much of both Xena’s & Gabrielle’s psychology, but we’re getting there!!!). Even still, Gabrielle’s first words are loaded with its legacy, if not also quiet resignation: “Are we really going to do this?” Because: Fuck! Rome, again? They’re only willing to go another round with Rome because of Cleopatra, only willing to embrace the ghosts this will stir up because they feel they owe it to a friend.

So, of course they’re going to do this. Only, it’s no longer about vengeance, at least not the white fury that once burned hot in Xena’s veins. This is different. Xena’s ire still seethes, but she doesn’t plan to wield it like a mighty sword, rather she’ll channel it with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel poised to excise a tumour, deliberate and clinical. The plotting is easy - Xena has a library of schemes stored away in the vast reserves of her grey matter - but made easier by the fact that she knows Caesar’s playbook so intimately. The man may be dead but he lives on in Rome and the hearts of all the faithful men who love her - proud and predictable. Puppets whose strings she knows she can deftly manoeuvre. The problem is that Xena’s too comfortable in her self-assuredness. Her plan and her assumptions of how Roman strongmen operate and her ability to manage everything is founded on her understanding of Caesar. And none of these men are the next Caesar. And it’s a problem, because this was supposed to be a quick and straightforward trip up the Nile to Memphis to do a little housekeeping on behalf of a friend and it’s been complicated by the fact that her pawns are not being cooperative.

This entire endeavour is not what she was expecting, Antony is not at all what she was expecting. He’s disarmingly handsome and charming, like many of Rome’s great strongmen, and their chemistry is electric - a bonus when you’re really trying to sell your part in a seduction play - but she realizes a little too late that the game she plays with him is not the one she had planned on. It’s actually much more dangerous.

And, I get that many fans believe Xena’s sexual attraction to Marc Antony is meant to telegraph an underlying romantic attraction as well. That as their physical encounters become more intimate and intense, so too must Xena’s feelings for him. And it’s easy to read it this way because Gabrielle’s own jealousy seems to reinforce the very idea, and Xena, herself, looks increasingly unsettled after each interaction. But I think it’s too simplistic an answer. Xena’s unease about Antony is growing because her plan has been frustrated by unforeseen hurdles, none of which include her falling in love with him. And Xena is frustrated in return.

We totally see this play out in Xena’s treatment of Gabrielle. She is curt and cool and dismissive (at least until their balcony talk), especially after Gabrielle puts a spectacular halt to Xena’s picnic with Marc Antony. But Xena’s distance here is not because she’s being defensive (at Gabrielle’s continued suggestions that she’s lost the plot), or because she’s angry for the interruption (ok, I’m sure there’s a very base part of Xena that *was* disappointed), or because she’s hurt (how could Gabrielle not have faith in her?). It may come across that way, but, really, Xena’s just acting out her frustrations.

Because this whole situation with Marc Antony, if a little intriguing at first, is irritating. And Xena’s frustrated. On many levels. The most obvious, and least surprising, being that Antony’s attentions have left her itchy and it’s distracting. And not because the chemistry between them has set off a chain reaction of romantic feelings for him - Xena is not spending her free time daydreaming about the man behind the General. It’s simply because there’s a kind of fire in her veins now that she wasn’t expecting to deal with this time out and it has the tendency to keep her on edge. And it’s not that she can’t handle it - spontaneous combustion is sometimes an occupational hazard when she’s playing at desire - it’s just that this particular element was not part of her plan.

That’s the real frustration: Xena’s not used to her plans being stymied. Her opening move - rolling herself, naked and chained, out from a carpet - though, brazen, should have been the perfect lure, should have painted her Cleopatra as an easy, if not unwilling, target for Antony’s ambitions. Because all Roman strongmen are the same: pretty boys with pretty words and pretty promises and pretty predictable tastes for cunning and seduction that they weaponize for the glory of Rome; heartless but for their love of res publica.

And so, this exact play is one Xena is confident any ambitious Roman would pounce on - remember: she knows their playbook, was once herself on the near-losing end of such a gambit, back when she was still a little naive and the right words could soften her heart; before her legs and her psyche endured the full force of Rome’s wrath. Except Antony doesn’t take the bait, like she expects, and it catches Xena flat-footed, a position she rarely finds herself in and one she isn’t particularly fond of. And so now she finds herself having to regroup and change tactics on the fly, which is fine - she’s used to that too - it’s just that her forward momentum is frustrated by the fact that she can’t get a good read on Marc Antony, doesn’t quite know his angle. He’s an unknown and unpredictable variable in a plot that already has a lot of moving parts and it introduces just the tiniest element of doubt into the equation.

Which is why it doesn’t help that Gabrielle is dubious of Xena’s motivations surrounding Antony. Not that Xena blames her for her concerns. She knows they aren’t really meant to provoke - that they come from a place of genuine anxiety, born from Gabrielle’s intimate understanding of Xena’s unhappy past with both bad-boy types and the ravages of Rome. Knows that Gabrielle, whose heart has traced all the scars of that past and let her love be a salve, is steadfast in her belief in Xena, even when the wheels are falling off. But Gabrielle’s questions do provoke. They pique Xena’s frustrations. It leaves her feeling cagey - like her back is up - and she hates it because it means she’s dangerously close to being on the defensive.

And really, by the time Marc Antony invites her to meet him under the pyramids, Xena is running out of options. Her back isn’t just up, it feels dangerously close to being backed up against a wall. She’s only playing this game because she’s confident she’ll win - that’s why she led with such a shameless opening bid, presenting herself to Antony as she did - but with each round Antony’ coyishness has forced her to up the ante while she waits for him to play his hand. Once upon a time she might have enjoyed and encouraged this slow, deliberate back-and-forth - would have been willing to play it out until she was out of chips (and her clothes) - but she no longer has the patience. Not that she’s entirely immune now to the thrill of what they’re doing - Xena has always enjoyed the hunt and then playing with her food - it’s just that she needs him to reveal his hand before he can call her bluff because there aren’t anymore chips to spare and she has too much on the line to go all in.

But Xena’s emotional conflict isn’t just being driven by her frustrations with the way her plan is playing out - it’s priming the engine, to be sure - there are other feelings at work here too. And chief among them is a deep and growing unease with the roles she and Gabrielle have cast themselves in and the very real consequences that will come from their interference. It doesn’t sit well with Xena, the way they’re toying with the futures of Egypt and Rome - as if they are just prizes to be won and Brutus, Antony and Octavius are the game pieces that need to be maneuvered around the board until a winner appears. As if there aren’t millions of lives at stake. She hates it. Hates that she has been somehow cast above it all, to dabble, like some unworthy god, in the lives of so many, and yet also stuck in the thick of it, an unwitting pawn herself.

And the longer Xena’s game is in play, the murkier everything becomes. What seems like a straightforward plan on paper, is actually a mess of competing interests, each as cold and ruthless as the next. And right at the heart of it all: Xena (and Gabrielle too), judge, jury & executioner. Because despite her business-like approach when they arrived in Egypt, Xena’s ability to remain detached and objective is under pressure, especially as all the players in her game reveal themselves and their motivations resolve into finer focus.

And there’s something about Marc Antony. He’s truly unnerved Xena. Because he didn’t play by her rules, the rules she owed to Rome - and he, a Roman no less. Maybe there would have been a time in her past when this would have endeared him to her, but now it’s left her uneasy. He needles at her resolve, the confidence she has in her plan. There’s a part of her that starts to wonder if she’s mis-read him completely, and that’s the start of a slippery slope into thinking she has mis-read this entire situation. And she doesn’t have the time for back-sliding.

But the problem is this: no matter how she looks at it there’s no clear answer, only devastating consequences if she’s wrong. For herself, for the lives she’s playing with, and probably for most of the known world. Because Rome and her strongmen will stop at nothing to take it all. And that thought never leaves her. Rome is a constant drum beat in her mind: Rome Rome Rome. Xena knows what Rome is capable of, what these three men jockeying for her power are capable of, even if Xena doesn’t know *them*. It echoes in her mind every time one of them is before her - even as Marc Antony’s kisses leave behind a fever in her blood - Rome Rome Rome.

And while her mind whirls constantly, turning over strategy and tactics, she’s tried to keep her heart mostly out of this affair. Left it unburdened by the machinations of statecraft and violent political intrigue. Except for a dull ache - when she thinks about Eve downriver in Alexandria, or when her eye catches Gabrielle in an unguarded moment - Xena could almost believe the desert sun had turned her heart to dust. Almost. Except that ache is there and, like her frustration and unease, it’s been growing more persistent.

Because Xena has more than herself to consider now. Sure, she’s spent the last five years dedicated to preserving the greater good - whether fighting for her closest friends or the nameless, faceless masses - but it’s different now, she’s different, and not just because she has a daughter who needs her to come home. She has Gabrielle too. They have a little family. And even though Xena has loved Gabrielle for years, she feels fiercely protective of Gabrielle’s heart and love now, in a way she’s never felt before, with anyone. But then, maybe it’s not surprising: they did battle demons in hell for each other’s soul. That sort of thing changes everything.

And Xena can see how this is affecting Gabrielle, even if she doesn’t say it out loud. Remembers the pierce of iron through the flesh of Gabrielle’s hands as surely as she remembers it through her own. Rome has robbed them both and Xena sees the weight of it in Gabrielle’s gaze. Sees, too, the way Gabrielle traps her bottom lip in her teeth as Xena smiles seductively at Antony. Watches the flush creep across Gabrielle’s pale skin when Antony’s kisses become more emboldened. Catches the dangerous flash in Gabrielle’s green eyes. The one that hasn’t gone away since they arrived in Egypt. Xena sees and it makes her heart lurch. To watch her beloved watch her take delight in the charms of another. And to know the sight of it is a white hot grip on Gabrielle’s heart. Xena feels the burning clench around hers too.

And this is the Xena we see when she meets Marc Antony under the pyramids. Frustrated and uneasy, heart aching. Tired. Tired of this game and her role in it. Tired of Rome, but mostly tired of all the horrible things that happen by her hand because of Rome. And then there is Marc Antony waiting for her. Disarmingly handsome and charming, unnerving in his refusal to play into her hands, a Roman above all: a pretty boy with pretty words and pretty promises. And like all Romans, she expects the promises to be lies. Except, there’s something in the way he’s played his hand, the way he’s held back all this time, that tells her there might be truth in his words when he tells her he wants her love.

She can sense his confession even before the words are out. Maybe on some level she always knew, had seen the inevitability of this moment even as she refused to believe in the possibility. But his words pierce the haze that has kept her from seeing her own folly. And it’s like lightning in a bottle. The way every frayed nerve snaps and jumps and arcs all at once - the rain of sparks illuminating everything that had left her mind and heart unsettled - in an instant of sudden, total understanding. It steals her breath and slices at her heart, this clear and unbearable realization. What she’s done and what she still has to do to bring this absurd game to a close.

See, she’s made a terrible miscalculation. Because in her mind Roman brutes are heartless. Capable of loving only Rome. And her seduction of Marc Antony was only ever meant to be a power play. How could it be anything more? She had weaponized lust and sex in the past to get the things she wanted, this was to be no different. Except that it was. And her hubris - her prideful overconfidence in her infallible, little plan, coupled with her resolute belief that all Roman men are Caesar at their core - has led her to overplay her hand. Not that she won’t still find a way to win. It’s just the cost will be much higher than she could have anticipated.

Because she has unwittingly weaponized Marc Antony’s affection for her and now she is going to have to deliberately use it against him. It is devastating. To see his chest bared to her so willingly, and to know that she must flay his heart with a knife of his own making. It shakes her resolve. It brings tears to her eyes.

But of course it brings tears to her eyes. She has done the unthinkable: she herself has become Caesar. The thing she hated most. The man who won her trust and her love and then betrayed her. Cold and hard and heartless. Brutal and ruthless and willingly so. In this moment she is Caesar. And soon she will become Rome, sacrificing another man, who might yet have been good, in the name of her unrequited love.

This moment under the pyramids is so important. Everything hangs on this declaration from Marc Antony, on Xena’s tears. I know people see it as confirmation of Xena’s feelings for him - and she has feelings to be sure - but they’re not romantic. Xena’s emotional reaction, and the genuine unease she wears thereafter do not hinge on her being in love with him. Xena’s humanity is enough to soften both her heart and her regard for Antony in this moment. Her compassion and regret are not dependent on attraction or attachment. And so the story doesn’t need to frame her tears for Marc Antony as a lover’s heartbreak, because her heart was always going to break for him, as it breaks for herself and Gabrielle and the ruin left in their wake.

And there will be ruin. Xena is certain of it. Although, for a moment, she might have held a glimmer of hope for Antony. This Roman who’s willing to give up his army for love. For love. Not that she wants what he’s offering. She just wants to believe he could be different. Not for her. For Rome. But then his sword is hilt deep in the belly of one of Brutus’ men and then slicing through the throat of another. And Xena knows - even as she and Gabrielle dance around the subject hours later, bathed in moonlight and disquiet - that any hope for him is misplaced. Knows exactly what he will do with Brutus’ army and Octavius if he prevails. Is keenly aware of what awaits if he learns of her deception and is allowed to live.

Because once upon a time she was the one who trusted and loved and was betrayed and lived. And thousands paid the price at the end of her sword for Caesar’s treachery. Xena can’t even imagine what Marc Antony, favoured son of Rome, might do. Can’t risk the chance. So he must pay the price at the end of her sword too. Xena wishes it weren’t so, tries to avoid the fight that will take his life - because now that she’s seen the humanity in her enemy she wants no further part in this madness she’s helped to orchestrate - only she doesn’t have a choice now. Alea iacta est - the die is cast, and her blade and her betrayal find Antony’s heart all the same. And when the end comes, there’s Xena, soaked in blood and rain and tears, in the middle of this fucking mess, the dead and wounded scattered about her. She can’t escape the truth of it then: she did this.

And it’s this! All of this - the many layers of trauma in need of reckoning and Xena’s tangled heart, twisted further by the part she is forced to play in Egypt and the goddamn fucking senselessness of it all - that carries the emotional weight of the episode. Who needs a Boyfriend of the Week when there’s already all this angst?

And, ok, I hear you say: Pattie, you’ve made some valid points about Xena’s state of mind, but why can’t Xena’s emotional and moral conflict be born from this fraught personal history AND from the fact that she *was* falling in love with Antony? Wouldn’t that make it an EVEN MORE dramatic and powerful story? Because she was specifically falling in love with a ROMAN GENERAL, the very epitome of the thing she has spent most of her adult life hating?

I would like to agree with you, dear skeptical reader, but the simple truth is that there isn’t room for both in *this* story. The reality is this: a 44-minute-long, action-focused show like XWP just doesn’t always have a lot of extra time to linger on the emotional beats. And this episode, in particular, already so busy with all the palace and political intrigue, has even less. So much of what we’re able to read of Xena’s psychological state - and *why* it’s so deeply fraught - doesn’t even come from this episode. It relies on past emotional beats to inform our understanding of her behaviour. (And, I don’t know, perhaps this is why a casual viewer might pass off Xena’s and Marc Antony’s interplay as romantic - because most of the horrible things that have happened to Xena by Roman hands are left unsaid, and surely, if we’d been reminded of them we would never accept that Xena would fall in love with a golden boy of the empire.)

As it is, there’s barely space for any kind of meditation on how either Xena or Gabrielle are feeling about the roles they are being forced to play and the seemingly callous and ruthless tactics they increasingly use to do so, let alone a tenuous romance. And the former is what this episode should be actively engaging with: the moral ambiguity that has been driving season five and will continue on through the end of the series.

Further complicating things with a love story, doesn’t make the episode more dramatic, it just takes up emotional bandwidth that could be better served elsewhere. Because, yes, Marc Antony is the epitome of the thing Xena has spent more than a decade hating! Xena’s history with Caesar and Rome (and everything they both stand for) is richly layered and devastating. It cannot be erased or ignored. To suggest that she is capable of falling in love with Antony (and to ask us to then believe it) without also deliberately exploring the tension inherent in that act is obtuse.

Those kinds of emotional beats need room to fucking breathe. And the episode doesn’t do this because there’s just too much happening. It tries - in broad, moody strokes - to capture the tenor of Xena’s emotional landscape, and it succeeds in wrapping us up in the same angst that drapes Xena, but the source is nebulous. Her haunted looks and tears - under the sphinx and when her sword finds Antony’s belly - can only telegraph so much, especially when we have been given very little reason to feel invested in her supposed affection towards him.

And here’s where we finally touch on Xena’s checkered romantic history - and her self-proclaimed soft spot for Bad Boys Who Love Like Fools (10 points to Ravenclaw for your patience) - because I’m sure you’re about to suggest that Marc Antony’s air of a Bad Boy is itself cause enough to garner Xena’s affection. Powerful, disarmingly handsome, and charming? Check, check, check. Capable with his ‘sword’? Bonus: super check. But just because her past is littered with dysfunctional relationships and Bad Boys - though I’m sure not all were bad, and some were definitely women - doesn’t mean she’s interested in repeating her mistakes. The Xena of old is vastly different from the one we know by season five, even if there are parts of her that are very much the same.

The principal driving force in her early adult life and formative romantic relationships was lust. It ruled over every part of her. Lust for: power and for violence and for blood and for riches and for infamy, and, of course, for sexual gratification. And so, she sought out partners - themselves driven by the same hunger - who could satisfy all of her desires, not just her (very) carnal appetite. She fell hard and fast and burned white hot until something, or someone, else came along and made her feel even more incandescent. In those early days, Xena wasn’t looking for *love*, she was looking for a good time.

Now, that’s not to say Xena’s past romantic entanglements were frivolous or lacking in genuine sentiment. At the very least, I suspect many were sustained by the warm affection that comes naturally from the intimacy of sharing your life with someone, whether they’re riding into battle alongside you or just warming your bed over a long winter. Nor is it meant to be dismissive of whatever fondness she felt for her lovers. Because: not all love looks the same. There are different kinds of love and different ways to love.

For Xena, though, whose heart had been so thoroughly and devastatingly mangled by Caesar’s betrayal, love was immaterial. At best, it was the unintended, if pleasurable, byproduct of a mutually beneficial arrangement. At worst it was a weakness that her enemies could exploit. Mostly, it was just a silly notion to scoff at. And the feeling Xena would come to associate with love - whether she acknowledged it as such, or not - was informed by both the dynamics of her relationships with Bad Boys and her own dark, irrepressible designs. It was selfish, and often cruel. Grounded in hot blooded impulses and savage desire, rather than growing out of an honest and patient connection.

And it became so thoroughly ingrained in her psyche. It was her overriding view of love. Even after she came to recognize how different love could be - and look and feel - once it was no longer centred in selfishness, when it was open and giving and kind, it was a struggle for Xena to undo her conditioning, to rewrite her love language. Because: first, she had to accept that she was worthy of this new kind of love, and then she had to actually accept it once it was offered.

But, old habits die hard, even for Xena, and I’m sure there were times - when she was just beginning to reframe how she viewed love and was learning how to reopen her heart - that she slipped back into her outmoded ways of thinking. Conflating lust with something else; allowing herself to be tempted by dalliances with partners who stoked her selfish desires, instead of tempering them. And maybe if Xena had crossed paths with Marc Antony then - back at the beginning of the series when her history with Rome was still messy but not nearly as tortuous as it is by the end of season five (you know after Britannia and its fallout which was the beginning of The Rift, and the deaths of Crassus and Ephiny and Pompy and the countless others who were the collateral damage surrounding those events, and, of course, Xena’s & Gabrielle’s own death on the cross) - I’d be willing to believe that she could love him.

Because, at one time Xena might have been interested in a man like Antony, might have been able to look past the Roman tunic and pursued him, taken in by his magnetism and allure. But by this point in the series Xena just isn’t interested, and not because her duplicity has made it impossible for her to be, but because by now her entire understanding of love - of being loved and giving love and nurturing it and making room for it to grow - has fundamentally changed. It’s been re-centred in selflessness, and everything that Marc Antony represents is antithetical to this new appreciation.

And I get that there’s an argument in here somewhere, that suggests Xena’s new approach to love might have softened her heart in such a way that she’s both able and willing to see the man behind the General, and be open to loving him too. But I would argue that the very things, the very people, whose love has transformed Xena’s heart are also the very things that would stop her from ever letting her heart go there. It’s not just that her point of reference on love has changed, it’s that she’s had years now of lived experience to break that cognitive dissonance between her attitude - knowing the kind of love she wants, the kind of love that’s *good* for her - and her behaviour - choosing that reaffirming, selfless love instead of the tempestuous, selfish one. She’s not blind to her past weaknesses, she knows exactly the sort of temptation Marc Antony offers - as surely as Gabrielle does the moment she lays eyes on him - but recognizing it is not akin to considering it. Because: Xena’s already found the love she needs and wants (and knows she’s earned and deserves).

Ok, but what of Xena’s admission on the balcony, when she cops to having a soft spot for Bad Boys Who Love Like Fools? I think it’s less about admitting (to herself as much as Gabrielle) that she’s developed romantic feelings for Marc Antony, as it is about Xena acknowledging a certain sort of fondness she feels for these ‘Bad Boys’. A fondness that’s born from a mutual understanding. Because: I think Xena sees herself in these men - at least an earlier version of herself - when she was ‘bad’ and foolhardy at love, and her heart tugs at the memory of it. Some curious mix of nostalgia and empathy, that softens her regard for them.

And she certainly sees herself in Marc Antony. The parallels between her story with Caesar and the story she’s now playing out with Antony are unavoidable, and if she’s cast herself as Caesar in this shadow play then Marc Antony is her younger self. Of course she would have a soft spot for him, she knows how this story ends. Knows, specifically, what it’s like to be willing to give your trust and your love only to be betrayed in return. And, of course, it’s made only more complicated with the knowledge that she’s the one who will ultimately be his ruin.

So, finally, exhausted and exasperated and, like 7,000 words into this, I hear you ask: what does it really matter? Xena doesn’t choose Marc Antony in the end, so what does it matter if it was lust or love or guilt or a fucking mid-life crisis that was driving her in this episode? Well, dear, patient reader: it matters because Gabrielle deserves better (THIS IS A BOLD STATEMENT, I KNOW, AND IT’S NOT AN INDICTMENT ON XENA’S CHARACTER EITHER, IT’S JUST THAT I FEEL VERY PROTECTIVE OF GABRIELLE’S HEART, OK! AND THE ONE THING THIS EPISODE DOES IS GIVE GABRIELLE THOSE LITTLE BEATS WHERE WE LINGER ON HER VISIBLE REACTIONS TO XENA’S TETE A TETE WITH ANTONY AND SHE’S CLEARLY JEALOUS AND HURT AND WORRIED AND SO, LET’S NOT LOSE SIGHT OF THE FACT THAT HER EMOTIONAL STAKES ARE ALSO INCREDIBLY HIGH IN THIS EPISODE, NOT JUST BECAUSE HER LIFE PARTNER IS SEDUCING SOME DUDE, BUT ALSO BECAUSE THE LEVELS OF BRUTALITY SHE’S INCREASINGLY HAVING TO EMPLOY ARE ALARMING. AND SO, SOMEONE IN THE WRITER’S ROOM WAS THINKING ABOUT THIS WHEN THEY WERE OUTLINING THE STORY - UNDERSTANDING THAT THERE’S AN UNDERCURRENT IN XENA’S & GABRIELLE’S RELATIONSHIP THAT WOULD MAKE SEEING XENA WITH ANTONY UNCOMFORTABLE, BUT THEN NOT ALSO RECOGNIZING THAT THAT SAME UNDERCURRENT WOULD MAKE IT EQUALLY UNCOMFORTABLE FOR XENA. AND IT’S JUST LIKE: TEAM, WHY DO YOU HAVE TO DO THAT TO GABRIELLE? HER HEART MUST HAVE BEEN IN A TERRIBLE STATE. AND WHY DID YOU HAVE TO MAKE XENA COMPLICIT IN THIS?)

But, seriously, I’ve spent all this time diving deep into this episode and the ways it comes up short and why, and while I’ve alluded to it, I’ve mostly avoided the elephant in the room.

We need to talk about Gabrielle.

Because: Gabrielle is at the heart of why a romance between Xena and Marc Antony feels contrived and unconvincing. At this point in the show, it’s clear Xena & Gabrielle are fully and completely committed to each other (and, yes, I know that doesn’t necessarily preclude either of them from also seeking romantic or sexual partners elsewhere... I just don’t think they’re the sharing types, but I DIGRESS) - I mean, we *just* had ‘Kindred Spirits’ where they were nesting and talking about domestic bliss and privately teasing each other about their sex life in the most blatant way possible and failing miserably at breaking up but winning at being cute and married and adoringly in love. And I think it’s important to acknowledge the weight of Xena’s decision to very clearly have Gabrielle as her *life* partner - because implicit in the act of choosing to commit yourself to another person is a vow of fidelity, a bond that would be near-holy to Xena, whose word means everything.

But more to the point: Xena loves Gabrielle and Gabrielle loves Xena, and their love has been the beating heart of this show from the beginning. Gabrielle’s care and tenderness has been transformative - everything that Xena has come to understand about love, everything that she does to honour and protect it, is because of Gabrielle and the heart she’s so selflessly given of. And it’s this love story - and how the show has framed its slow and beautiful unravelling - that becomes the bench mark, the gold standard, for how all other love stories in this universe should be viewed, for how Xena, herself, now views love.

So, I guess what I’ve been saying all along is this: Xena can’t possibly be falling in love with Marc Antony because she’s already in love. Deeply, profoundly, bound-for-all-eternity in love. And no one, in this life (or any other, let’s be real) will ever compare. Not pretty boys with pretty words and pretty promises. Not Bad Boys Who Love Like Fools. Not even a god himself. There is only Gabrielle.

#xena #xena warrior princess #xwp #otp: for i am dying of such love #xena and gabrielle #S05E18: Antony + Cleopatra #pattie has some thoughts #the fucking audacity #i still cannot even

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fatedkings · 3 years

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i want to preface these thoughts by saying: by no way shape and form will i ever force my headcanons on my roleplay partner of the other character i have the headcanon with. These are just my thoughts and nor do I view muns of villains in a negative light, we all love characters just different types. it does not mean they, the muns, are bad people.

my ( undead ) izuru headcanons involve Gin/Aizen of course, whom both i love dearly with all my heart, and several other characters like Hisagi, Momo, Renji, and Matsumoto. I will have a read more, gore warning etc. as this WILL get lengthy ( going in depth about izuru’s state of consciousness leading up to, the possible backlash, etc. )

basically tl;dr izuru kira becomes the epitome of despair.

After a blast in the chest from Bazz-B, obliterating his abdomen tossing his arm aside, Izuru barely “alive” is taken to Mayuri Kurotsuchi to be healed. Held together by a string of will to live, heavy poles, and enhanced by the reiatsu of Izuru’s fallen seated officers now standing at a captain’s level ( as stated by Shaz Domino in their battle in “Beginning of the revive of Tomorrow”. )

much of him ponders his existence: how he is carrying the souls of the seated officers he was unable to protect, only to continue to fight for his pride as a gotei 13 member. This mindset has been the same since Gin Ichimaru left the gotei 13 with aizen in a beam of light, leaving Kira’s trust irreparable. his personality has always revolved around his comrades, his captain, the gotei 13 ( as many shinigami were indoctrinated to unquestioningly [ i.e. he made momo bow before byakuya even though it was wrong to just allow renji to be jailed horribly injured as he was. ] believe to follow the rules and motions at the time making aizens plan easier, izuru is just another sleeper in the system. )

this could be stated as a young shinigami he was impressionable, Aizen “I plan everything to a T” Sosuke stated how he chose Hinamori specifically for being his lieutenant so that he may manipulate her like a puppet for the events of the soul society arc. ( which arguably pitted them against one another and ruined their [ hinamori and izuru’s ] relationship in my opinion ) i highly suspect that Izuru was ALSO chosen through the same process that Hinamori was picked so that there were no flaws in this plan, as Gin was in with Aizen one hundred years prior.

now, I am not saying that Gin did not CARE for Izuru personally, I am saying that Gin had a mission and that was to kill aizen by any means necessary even if it meant getting others hurt. Gin played along with Aizen’s game, the manipulation, i even think he cared for Izuru to an extent before the end of their time together, but again he had a mission he had to accomplish. What I have always loved about BLEACH is how morally grey the characters are, and Gin alongside Tosen is a great example of these archtypes. Gin wanted to kill Aizen and return the shard of the Soul King back to Rangiku, what he sold his life away to for the person he loved most.

We know Izuru as a child was more free, chipper to tease and speculate over his and Hisagi’s strength only question what happened to make Kira such a gloomy person. Perhaps it is the exposure to being a soul reaper, but the drastic changes in his personality make me question what made Izuru the person we know now? it’s only later on in my current re-reading of BLEACH in Izuru’s cell scene did i get the full extent of how uncomfortable it truly was at least for me. A dilapitated cell, scratched up, broken chair, blood splatter aross the floor, Izuru in a sling self loathing:

Hinamori’s cell was not the same state being absolutely pristine, almost the same for Renji except more concrete than wooden. Kira put the loyalty to his Captain over the loyalty to his friend when it came down to the tension over Sosuke Aizen’s “death” self loathing over what he had done. All of this Damage had been done by himself, restrained for his own safety, conflicted over his own emotions:

Izuru was lead to rely and be loyal to Gin ( if not I think part of Kira on the inside was also TERRIFIED of Gin ), leading to Izuru diverting Matsumoto after the central 46 slaughter although he tells Nayura from “Beginning of the Revive of Tomorrow” Gin did not tell him to fight Matsumoto the opposite is implied in the manga as well as matsumoto’s suspicions of some sort of manipulation ( rangiku and izuru make up tho and drink so its gucci ) with a q&a of Kira’s after the soul society rebellion sounding lost, stating how he did not want ‘liars’ in his company. However, Hinamori’s q&a had a desire for life and to move on from the tragic events unlike Izuru’s prompt.

Rose might be attached to Izuru, however, Izuru does not want to latch on to Rose and for something unmistakable to happen ( unable to trust, similar to the captain amagai arc in the anime except with one personality of strenuous trepidation and the other willing. )

It’s always been his mindset to put the Gotei 13 before his friends ( who he loves very much, he worried about rangiku more than himself even though he was a human squirting ketchup bottle ), he does not have any living family, nor does he seem to have any lingering positive feelings to himself as now Kira needs to PROVE his worth. Later on in turn back the pendelum with Kisuke and Hiyori visiting maggots nest mentioning how there is no one who intentionally leaves the Gotei 13, implying that in the Gotei 13 you either die as a shinigami or are imprisoned for life. Unquestioning loyalty is the unhealthy norm among all of them, even if it may seem endearing at times for the Division eleven members, etc.

[Undead] Izuru is just what he says: a ‘different Izuru’.

although it may be known that the hole in his chest exists, the extent that the mental state has deteriorated would be unknown to most of the people in his life. Just because of the change brought on by Ichigo and his friends does not mean that Soul society has truly made progress, many of the soul reapers linger on the old ways rather than moving forward. Shinigami are still very much sheep apart of the herd and without Kira voicing his concern about the state of being Izuru is in none would be the wiser or know about the souls essentially stapled against his own. Everyone would be complacent, silent... as possibly KIra could decend into a numb void pit similar to a Gillian.

How? Only Arrancar have been stated similar to Shinigami, but the backlash to having the souls pegged onto the motherboard would create some TYPE of hazard for Izuru in the future that would jeapordize his state of being. Here i propose this theory: Gillians are made of hollows intertwined with one another, although, most do not have any sense of individuality because of this make up,

1.) izuru would eventually lose his sense of object permanence, individuality, perpetually putting his comrades in danger by his own presence that could lead to the harm or slaughter of shinigami and the people he once loved.

2.) if the process of losing spiritual pressure is painful ( i.e. how ichigo reacted in the manga when he passed out after mugetsu ) perhaps the same can be said for those who rapidly gain spiritual pressure/reiatsu over a short period of time.

( in brave souls during his attacks he sounds like hes groaning or in pain. )

3.) interacting with izuru is a lot like pulling teeth, to yank and tear, like the moon as a waning crescent his mentality is filled with the dysphoric aftermath. Unable to turn a new page, even with the war over, izuru has not sought help for the gaping cavern that lays in his chest nor does he seem to want to...

( izuru seems to be content with living alongside his companions day to day as if the days were the same before the TYBW [ in rukia’s and renji’s getting-married novel he still has the hole because yoruichi tries to unclothe him to look at it ]. Unless kira himself comes to the conclusion that he has regained some sort of status within the gotei 13, as lieutenant within division three there will be no redemption or acceptance to fill that gap. it will be there haunting him, a wound undisclosed with all expected to walk parallel never questioning his state of being, he is detached from the world around him, isolating himself for various reasons. )

4.) the arm that was blown off is mostly repaired as synthetic, izuru holds his arms and body irregularly ( i.e. how attacks with one arm only, one shoulder is lifted higher than the other. ) and can be ejected off with enough force if applied.

5.) SPECULATION**// his will to fight/kill might be affected, as we have seen through ichigo, is what drives a shinigami to gain power in their zanpakuto is their kill intent resolve. He states that he is only fighting for his pride to gain his status back in the gotei 13, though he protected others, it was to a means to an end. However, his former resolve in battle was to the point of no doubt so it would vary by situation ( i.e. “ can i protect this place? we will see... “ )

6.) no one knows about the souls basically stapled to Izuru’s body. most likely people understand he had grown stronger without a bankai but not HOW. The only people who know are Mayuri, Nemu ( who is dead), possibly Akon, and very few of those in the twelfth division but those would be sworn to silence.

7.) a type of imposter syndrome. believing that he is not the real izuru, since he did indeed die, combined with several different souls who could he be? it’s why he becomes irrationally agitated when the events of TYBW or the hole inside his body is brought up, why has he not closed it? truly he is frightened of what the answer might be and only clams up more aka linked back to #3

the reason i call him the epitome of despair is that he always had good intentions, he loves his friends endlessly, he serves his company with loyalty that would be expected of a perfect soldier, but he never had a chance from the start that he entered the academy.

he might have been able to save one girl inside of the central 46 that would go on to do big changes alongside the captain commander and nanao, but for Izuru already so much had been lost at one time significance had no meaning. his life had no meaning, all his faith in the system had been proven to be meaningless as corrupt, most of all he could not protect his comrades that were compounded to his body : how could he continue to be a shinigami in the gotei thirteen, a lieutenant no less? how could he protect others?

i don’t want to stereotype him as the “”””emo””””” type as he, at the core, is far from it even with and despite how gloomy Izuru reacts. He is, for the most part, a grounded level headed individual who is self disciplined, decisive even when it comes to battle that separates him from the rest of the lieutenants ( he has a usual indecisiveness, but it can be worked to his advantage in some situations. )

Loyal, soft spoken, the friend you would WANT to have, Izuru can still express emotion as the sheer panic and fright he had when yoruichi tried to disrobe him just to look at his hole was genuine enough. hell he even ran division three for a short time by himself, i think that is something to be recognized.

it’s not that he does not believe as the head of central 46 thinks, but that his reasoning for who he was wanes his existence. all of it is jarring, there would have to be some kind of backlash.

it would be easy to say ‘get orihime to heal him’ and ‘get it over with’ but orihime struggled to heal ichigo through ulquiorra’s cero that shot through his chest the first time because of the strong reiatsu that lingered. Bazz-B is a thousand year old quincy, in comparison the effort would most likely exhaust orihime before she even finishes because of the residual energy that imprinted. Knowing how orihime’s powers work it relies on her mental fortitude, she is human and not indespensible, Kira sees this as a burden on the ryoka and would not ask this of them after all that Ichigo and his friends have done for them.

degradation was not personality/character improvement rather the focus of the marigold on his character was specific, and I am sure there would have been more if Kubo was not rushed by deadlines and illness. I feel like im repeating points by now so i think hopefully everyone gets the picture of what I mean, if anyone has any questions let me know!

#( out. // saved. )#( [m] marigold. )#[ *// blood gore cw ]#[ *// body horror cw ]#[ *// self harm ment cw ]#{ welcome to my ted talk on how izuru kiras life is in the fucking toilet }#{ these are subject to change && i would love to discuss kira and stuff with more people especially other kiras... looks longingly }

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sw4gg1e4life · 3 years

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Yu Yu Hakusho (Reviewing 25 years later)

This anime is like a forgotten gem. It doesn’t come to mind as #1 first but when mentioned everyone goes oh yea that was like one of the best anime’s of all time. I feel like most anime’s don’t have the same level of action, adventure, comedy, drama, and growth that this show offered. Whether you watch it as a kid for action & childish humor or as an adult for the deeper drama, life lessons and adult humor, it’s great across generations and across time whether you watched it as a kid in the 90s/00s or now in 2021.

Let me simplify it because there’s so much in-depth analysis I could go into.

Ratings per Arc/Saga:

Spirit Detective - 8/10

Dark Tournament - 10/10

Chapter Black - 8/10

Three Kings - 7/10

Deeper Analysis:

Spirit Detective - Honestly this arc had amazing parts to it, introducing the main characters, slowly improving enemies, and setting up for the Dark Tournament. I love the intro and how Yusuke has to undergo his ordeal showing his relationship with Kuwabara, Keiko, his mother, Boton, Koenma and everyone else around him. We’re introduced to a brat who doesn’t really belong but slowly finds his place and purpose starting here as Spirit Detective. I loved the deeper stories with introducing Hiei and Kurama. The introduction of Genkai was amazing, it showed there’s different aspects of growing and trying to master spirit energy. I only wish that section was a bit longer, maybe just 2-3 episodes of more unique competitors. The Spirit Beasts section is what made it a tad lackluster. This is their first real mission to spirit world and the abilities of the 4 spirit beasts just felt somewhat limited to me. Especially the fire-tiger beast, his tenacity just became annoying at some point. This is what dropped the Spirit Detective Saga to an 8 for me or else I would’ve made it a 9. The final part is amazing, it brings some backstory to Hiei by introducing her sister and most importantly the Toguro brothers leading to the Dark Tournament.

All together, it’s probably one of the best intro sagas to any anime I’ve seen at least. There’s simplicity but also complexity at the same time depending on how deep you look into it. They didn’t just half ass the action like many of my other favorite action-packed anime (DBZ, Fairy Tail). There’s a lot of mystery, dark moments, and strategy for a supposed kids cartoon for the haters out there.

Dark Tournament - This has to be the best saga in any ever because of the different strategies, emotions, growth, and somehow comedy still added in. I can’t help but re-watch this saga again and again every few years. We start with a mystery question: how much did the main characters grow in strength, abilities, and strategies? Now as a teen then now adult, the masked fighter is obviously Genkai because of the height, outfit and abilities, but as a kid, she was such a mystery for me haha. Anyways we go into the tournament and the committee seems hell bent on pitting everything against Yusuke & friends. I like that though Yusuke’s team comes out on top at the end of each fight, they do lose some individual matches for multiple different reasons. Instead of mindless matches purely on the fighting, we actually learn some backstory about many enemies and our main characters. It didn’t take long either; there wasn’t a ridiculous amount of episodes spent per backstory like Naruto or Fairy Tail. Genkai showed even more wisdom but also understanding of humanity as she knows her time is ending so she passes on her power abilities and most importantly wisdom to her favorite dim-wit. And throughout the story, we get to know more about Genkai and Toguro’s backstory and how power, morals and unfortunate events can change one’s future. The part that most people forget is the final episodes of the Dark Tournament: Toguro has been and wants to continue punishing himself. He actually does care for Genkai and Yusuke. He knows Yusuke has greater potential to grow into something great but needs proper and sometimes drastic measures and guidance to do so.

This saga had an amazing start, several related series of actions in the middle and a proper explanation at the end for many questions we had. On top of all that we’re left clues to the next arc, subtle clues you don’t realize until the next arc comes around. Episode 66, was shocking, Koenma actually granted Yusuke’s wish for his mentor and friend to be revived to live until the end of her life in peace as much as possible.

Chapter Black - This saga was great. You really don’t know what it is until it’s fully explained. We all know there were stronger demons deeper in spirit world. But something deeper darker is coming and it’s crazy because after 66 episodes we realized we never wondered about a previous Spirit Detective. What happened to that one? Now we get a trio of test spiritually aware humans just to test Yusuke & Kuwabara, but the really interesting part is when Sensui and his team is brought in. A few abilities were obvious but others were so mysterious with a constant ominous presence and heartbeat music looming over. What is each unique opponent’s abilities and what is Sensui’s background and end goal? His multiple personalities each containing yet even more unique abilities with his desire for an open tunnel into the depths of Spirit World for A/S class demons is insane. It seems impossible for Yusuke to win here even with Kuwabara’s sacrifice again. But wow what a reveal that he does have a secret demon king lineage in his blood. I both love and hate this at the same time. It feels like a cop-out but also explains everything at the same time. It’s like Super Saiyan in DBZ but different because at least here it took until the 3rd Saga and several arcs to reveal it. I guess in the overall scheme of things it’s like having Dragonball before Dragonball Z. Anyways the ending is amazing as we see them fight and find out just why Sensui wanted this all along as well as his gay partner’s obsession over him.

This was a great saga with a truly ominous back story and I love it. The only reason I keep it rated at 8/10 is unfortunately it happens right after the best saga ever in the Dark Tournament. At this point, power scaling and the use of demon king lineage in Yusuke just unfortunately puts the rating here. And we already know what the next saga is about for sure. There’s nothing left to really explore.

Three Kings - Here we go, the finale of Yu Yu Hakusho. We know Yusuke is of demon king lineage so of course he’s going to go train in Demon World. Hiei and Kurama obviously would follow along. Now with everything being obvious, why is it still interesting? Somehow the writers/producers of Yu Yu Hakusho find a way to bring even more back story in appropriate timing without it becoming filler. Learning about the deep ancient history of Raizen vs Yomi vs Mukuro shows how even as demons they have a human aspect: Raizen who ended up loving a human, Yomi who had a child and history with Kurama, and Mukuro with her tragic backstory that led to an odd relationship with Hiei. The ending is great with yet another tournament. As a kid, I wished they had a full tournament arc, but decades later I realized how much sense it makes that they didn’t show us the whole tournament, just key battles and how no one in our main crew won. Yusuke, Kurama and Hiei still has much to learn and grow. Yomi and Mukuro’s time has passed. A new brighter future awaits the demon world. Yusuke finally gets his happy ending with Keiko.

This final saga unfortunately because of its timing and closure gets a rating of 7/10. For an ending it’s great and I’m not sure how to improve it. That’s why I’m not a producer/writer haha. But it is definitely amazing and I appreciate it. Yusuke went from a kid/teen to a young adult. The story we came to know and love is over and he did NOT end up obsessed like Toguro. He didn’t choose the demon life. He also didn’t choose a psychic path like Genkai. He chose his own path with his friends in the human world continuing as spirit detective but living as close to a normal life as possible. I love this ending, The ending and whole narrative makes me give this show a 10/10. Yes I know they released 2 specials in 2018 but why not that’s a small treat for us fans. They can do specials maybe every decade or so. I don’t actually want them to do a new continued series like Dragonball Super. Let the original show be what it is and be remembered in history as one of the most unique shows with catchy theme songs. Also the Eng dub is actually good haha. Listen carefully for the adult humor hidden in the show if you’re re-watching it. You likely didn’t understand every NSFW joke as a kid. I know I didn’t haha.

#YuYuKakusho Yusuke Anime AnimeReview

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chiseler · 3 years

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Stolen Faces

Cinema is an art of faces, almost a religion of faces: on screen they loom above us, vast as a mother’s face must appear to an infant. We can get lost in them. The deepest thrill the movies offer may be the opportunity to gaze at human faces longer and with more unabashed, lover-like intimacy than real life regularly allows. Most often, of course, we gaze at beautiful faces, though cinema has its share of beloved gargoyles, mugs with “character” rather than symmetry. But the uncanny power of faces onscreen also anchors films about disfigurement and facial transformations, about masks and scars and plastic surgery. These stories summon all the fears and taboos, desires and unresolved questions swirling around the human face. Do faces reveal or conceal a person’s true nature? Can changing someone’s face change their soul?

Deformity is a staple of horror films, of course, from classics such as Phantom of the Opera and The Raven (in which the hideously afflicted man played by Boris Karloff muses, “Maybe if a man looks ugly, he does ugly things”) to surgical shockers such as Eyes Without a Face. But plot twists involving faces that are damaged or corrected, masked or changed, turn up with surprising frequency in film noir as well, where they are related to themes of identity theft, amnesia, desperate attempts to shed the past or recover the past. One of the grim proverbs of noir is that you can’t escape yourself. There are no fresh starts, no second chances. But noir also demonstrates the instability of identity, the way character can be corrupted, and stories about facial transformations harbor a nebulous fear that there is in the end no fixed self. If noir is pessimistic about the possibility of change, it is at the same time haunted by fear of change—fear of looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger.

The Truth of Masks

Two films about men who literally lose their faces take the full measure of the resulting ostracism and crushing isolation—and what men will do to escape it. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (Tanin no Kao, 1966) is based on a Kobo Abe novel about a scientist named Okuyama who has been literally defaced by a chemical accident. We never see what he used to look like; he spends half the film swaddled in bandages like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, ferocious black eyes glinting through slits. Obsessed with people’s reactions to his appearance, he lashes out bitterly, insisting that all his social ties have been severed, including his conjugal ties with his wife. She tries to convince him that it’s all in his head and that her feelings haven’t changed, but her revulsion when he makes an abrupt sexual advance convinces him that she’s lying.

Okuyama believes that a life-like mask will restore his relationship with his wife and his connection to society. He has evidently not seen The Face Behind the Mask (1941), a terrific B noir in which Peter Lorre stars as Johnny Szabo, who is hideously scarred in a fire. This tragedy and the ensuing cruelty of strangers transform him from a sweet, Chaplin-esque immigrant to a bitter criminal mastermind, even after he dons a powder-white mask that gives him a sad, creepy ghost of his former face—more Lorre than Lorre. The mask is merely a flimsy patch on the horrible visage that spiritually scars Johnny, and though it enables him to marry a sweet and loving (and perhaps near-sighted) woman, it can’t reverse the corrosion of his character.

The doctor who makes a far more sophisticated mask for Okuyama does so because the project fascinates him as a psychological and philosophical experiment. He speculates about what the world would be like if everyone wore a mask: morality would not exist, he argues, since people would feel no responsibility for the actions of their alternate identities. (His theory seems to be borne out by the consequences of internet anonymity.) Unlike the one Johnny Szabo wears, here the mask bears no resemblance to Okuyama’s original looks, and the doctor believes the new face will change his patient’s personality, turning him into someone else.

When the mask is fitted, it turns out to be the face of Tatsuya Nakadai, one of the most striking and plastic pans in cinema history. With only a little help from a fake mole, dark glasses, and a bizarre fringe of beard, Nakadai succeeds in making his own features look eerily synthetic, as though they don’t belong to him. Sitting in a crowded beer hall on his first masked outing in public, he creates a palpable sense of unease, keeping his features unnaturally still as though unsure of their mobility, touching his skin gingerly to explore its alien surface. As he gradually grows more comfortable and revels in the freedom of his new face, the doctor tells him, “It’s not the beer that’s made you drunk, it’s the mask.”

Abe’s novel contains a scene in which the protagonist goes to an exhibit of Noh masks, highly stylized crystallizations of stock characters and emotions. In Noh, as in other traditional forms of theater that use masks, the actor is present on stage but vanishes into another physical being—men play women, young men play old men, gods, and ghosts. In cinema, actors impersonate other characters using their own faces—usually without even the heavy layer of makeup worn on western stages. Movie actors are pretending to be people they’re not, yet if we judge their performances good it means we believe what we see in their faces. When an actor’s real face plays the part of a mask, like Lorre’s or Nakadai’s, this strange inversion—the real impersonating the artificial—has a uniquely disconcerting effect.

At the heart of this disturbing film lurks a horror that changing the skin can indeed change the soul. Okuyama tries to hold onto his identity, insisting, “I am who I am, I can’t change,” but the doctor insists he is “a new man,” with “no records, no past.” In covering his scar tissue with a smooth, artificial skin he eradicates his own experience, and with it his humanity. The doctor turns out to be right when he predicts that the mask will have a mind of its own. Suddenly endowed with sleek good looks, Okuyama buys flashy suits and sets out to seduce his own wife. When he succeeds easily, he is outraged, only to have her reveal that she knew who he was all along. After she leaves him in disgust he descends into madness and random violence. He has become the opposite of the Invisible Man: a visible shell with nothing inside

Okuyama’s story is interwoven with a subplot about a radiation-scarred girl from Nagasaki, whose social isolation drives her to incest and suicide. Lovely from one side, repellent from the other, she looks very much like the protagonist of A Woman’s Face. Ingrid Bergman starred in the Swedish original, but Joan Crawford is ideally cast in the 1941 Hollywood remake directed by George Cukor. Half beautiful and half grotesque, half hard-boiled and half vulnerable, Anna Holm spells out what was usually inchoate in Crawford’s paradoxical presence. A childhood fire has left her with a gnarled scar on one side of her face, like a black diseased root growing across her cheek and distorting her eye and mouth. Crawford makes us feel Anna’s agonizing humiliation when people look at her, which spurs her compulsive mannerisms of turning her head aside, lifting her hand to her cheek, or pulling her hair down.

Also perfectly cast is Conrad Veidt as the elegant, sinister Torsten Baring. Veidt went from German Expressionist horror—playing the goth heartthrob Cesar in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the grotesquely disfigured yet weirdly alluring hero of The Man Who Laughs—to an unexpected late-career run as a sexy leading man in cloak-and-dagger films such as The Spy in Black and Contraband. When Anna turns her head defiantly to reveal her scar, Torsten gazes at her with a gleam of excitement, even of perverse attraction. She is confused and touched by his kindness and gallantry, helplessly trying to hide her sensitivity beneath a tough façade. Her broken-up, uncertain expressions when he gives her flowers or kisses her hand count as some of the most delicate acting Crawford ever did. Anna assumes that Torsten, the penniless scion of a rich family, must want her to do some dirty work, and she turns out to be right, but he also genuinely appreciates the proud, bitter, lonely woman who faces down her miserable lot through sheer strength of will.

People are horrible to Anna, nastily mocking her wounded vanity and her attempts to look nice. “The world was against me,” she says, “All right, I’d be against it.” She has found the perfect outlet, blackmailing pretty women who commit adultery. In one of the film’s best scenes, the spoiled and kittenish wife she is threatening retaliates by shining a lamp in Anna’s face and laughing at her. Anna leaps at the woman and starts hitting her over and over, forehand and backhand, in an ecstasy of hatred. This savagely satisfying moment is derailed by the film’s first grossly contrived plot twist, as the encounter is interrupted by the woman’s husband, who happens to be a plastic surgeon specializing in correcting facial scars. He offers to operate on Anna, and once the bandages are removed, in a scene orchestrated for maximum suspense, an absurdly flawless face is revealed.

The doctor (Melvyn Douglas) calls her both his Galatea and his Frankenstein: he views her as his creation, but isn’t sure if she’s an ideal woman or an unholy monster, “a beautiful face with no heart.” Her dilemma is ultimately which man to please, whose approval to seek: the doctor who believes her character should be corrected now that her face is, or Torsten, who wants her to kill the young nephew who stands between him and the family estate. This overwrought turn is never plausible; it is always obvious that Anna is no child murderer. What is believable is her erotic thrall to Torsten, the first man who has ever shown an interest in her. Crawford is at her most unguarded in these moments of trembling desire; Cukor remarked on how “the nearer the camera, the more tender and yielding she became.” He speculated that the camera was her true lover.

Anna undergoes months of pain and uncertainty for the chance of being beautiful for Torsten, and there is a marvelous shot of her gazing at herself in a mirror as she prepares to surprise him with her new face, brimming with hard proud joy. But he winds up lamenting the surgery that has turned her into “a mere woman, soft and warm and full of love,” he sneers. “I thought you were something different—strong, exciting, not dull, mediocre, safe.” In this same speech, Torsten reveals himself as a cartoonish fascist megalomaniac, which fits in with the film’s slide into silly, flimsily scripted melodrama, but sadly obscures the radical spark of what he’s saying. Anna’s character is shaped by the way she looks, or rather by the way she is looked at by men; the disappointingly conventional ending sides with the man who equates flawless beauty with moral goodness, and against the one man who was able to see something fine—a “hard, shining brightness,” in a woman’s damaged and imperfect face.

A Stolen Face (1952) follows a similar premise, much less effectively, and reaches the opposite conclusion. Paul Henreid plays a plastic surgeon who operates on female criminals with disfiguring scars, convinced that once they look normal they will become contented law-abiding citizens. He gets carried away, however, sculpting one patient into a dead ringer for his lost love (Lizabeth Scott plays both the original and the copy) and marrying her. His attempt to play Pygmalion backfires, since the vulgar, mean-spirited and untrustworthy ex-con is unchanged by her new appearance: she is indeed “a beautiful face without a heart.” That is a succinct definition of the femme fatale, a type Lizabeth Scott often played and one that embodies a fascination with the deceptiveness of feminine beauty. In The Big Heat (1953), it is only when Debbie (Glora Grahame) has her pretty face rearranged by a pot of scalding coffee that she abandons her cynical self-interest to become an avenging angel, fearlessly punishing the corrupt who hide their greed behind a genteel façade. She has nothing left to lose; pulling a gun from her mink coat and plugging the woman she recognizes as her evil “sister,” the disfigured Debbie asserts her freedom: “I never felt better in my life.”

Blessings in Disguise

Sometimes, people are only too happy to lose their faces. Dr. Richard Talbot (Kent Smith), the protagonist of the superb, underappreciated drama Nora Prentiss (1947), sees the bright side when his face is horribly burned in a car crash. He has already faked his own death, sending another man’s corpse over a cliff in a burning car. In a neat bit of poetic irony, by crashing his own car he has completed the process of destroying his identity, and no longer needs to fear he’ll be recognized. Losing his face is a blessing in disguise—or rather, a blessing of disguise. But the disfigurement is also a visual representation of the corruption of his character: his face changes to reflect his downward metamorphosis with almost Dorian Gray-like precision.

Car crashes are a kind of refrain in the film. The doctor’s routine existence veers off course when a taxi knocks down a nightclub singer, Nora Prentiss (Anne Sheridan), across the street from his San Francisco office. Talk about a happy accident: the nice guy trapped in an ice-cold marriage to a rigid, nagging martinet suddenly has a gorgeous, good-humored young woman stretched out on his examining table. Nora may sing for a living, but her real vocation is dishing out wisecracks (her first words on coming to are, “There must be an easier way to get a taxi.”) When the doctor mentions a paper he’s writing on “ailments of the heart,” the canary, her eyelids dropping under the weight of knowingness, quips, “A paper? I could write a book.”

It’s hard to imagine a more sympathetic pair of adulterers, but the doctor is so daunted by the prospect of asking his wife for a divorce that it seems simpler to use the convenient death of a patient in his office to stage his own demise and flee to New York with Nora. It’s soon clear, though, that some part of him did die in San Francisco. Cooped up in a New York hotel room, terrified of going out lest someone spot him, the formerly gentle man becomes an irascible, rude, nervous wreck. When the faithful and incredibly patient Nora goes back to singing for Phil Dinardo (Robert Alda), the handsome nightclub owner who loves her, Talbot becomes hysterically jealous. Unshaven and hollow-eyed, he slaps Nora and almost kills Dinardo before fleeing the police and heading into that fiery crash. He becomes, as the film’s evocative French title has it, L’Amant sans Visage, “the lover without a face.”

When his bandages are removed, he is unrecognizable, wizened and scarred, his face a creased and calloused mask. His own wife doesn’t know him, and when Nora visits him in prison his damaged face, shot through a tight wire mesh, looks like something decaying, dissolving. He’s in prison because, in an even neater bit of irony, he has been charged with his own murder. He decides to take the rap, recognizing the justice of the mistake: he did kill Richard Talbot.

This same ironic plot twist appears in Strange Impersonation (1946), albeit less convincingly. This deliriously far-fetched tale, directed at a breakneck pace by Anthony Mann, stars Brenda Marshall as Nora Goodrich, a pretty scientist whose glasses signal that she is both brainy and emotionally myopic. She is harshly punished for caring more about work than marriage: her female lab assistant, who wants to steal Nora’s fiancé, tampers with an experiment so that it explodes, burning Nora’s face to a crisp. Embittered, she retreats from the world, and when another woman, who is trying to blackmail her over a car accident, falls from the window and is mistakenly identified as Nora, she seizes the opportunity to disappear, have plastic surgery that miraculously eliminates her scars, and return posing as the blackmailer, to seek revenge. She goes to work for her former fiancé, who strangely fails to recognize her voice or her striking resemblance to his lost love.

The plot plays out as, and turns out to be, a fever dream, but this last credibility stretcher is too common to dismiss as merely the flaw of one potboiler. Plots involving impersonation and identity theft rely not only on unrealistic visions of what plastic surgery can achieve, but on the assumption that people are deeply unobservant and tone-deaf in recognizing loved ones. A film that underlines this blindness with droll irony is The Scar (a.k.a. Hollow Triumph and The Man Who Murdered Himself, 1948), a convoluted but hugely entertaining little B noir in which Paul Henreid plays dual roles as a crook on the run and a psychologist who happens to look just like him. John Muller, pursued by hit men sent by a casino owner he robbed, stumbles across his doppelganger and decides to kill him and take his place. All he needs to do is give himself a facial scar to match the doctor’s. Only as he is dumping the body does he notice that he has put the scar on the wrong cheek—the consequence of an accidentally reversed photograph. But the irony quickly doubles back: Muller decides to brazen it out, and in fact no one notices that the doctor’s scar has apparently moved from one side of his face to the other—not even his lover. (Joan Bennett glides through this awkward part in a world-weary trance, giving a dry-martini reading to the script’s most famous lines: “It’s a bitter little world, full of sad surprises.”) The assumption that people pay little attention to the way others look or sound seems directly at odds with the power that faces and voices wield on film, and the intimate specificity with which we experience them. But noir stories often turn on how easily people are deceived, and how poorly they really know one another—or even themselves.

In The Long Wait (1954), perhaps the most extreme case of confused identity, a man with amnesia searches for a woman who has had plastic surgery. Not only does he not know what she looks like now, he can’t even remember what she used to look like. Since the movie is based on a Mickey Spillane story, he proceeds methodically by grabbing every woman he sees, in hopes that something will jog his memory. The film is fun in its pulpy, trashy way, provided you enjoy watching Anthony Quinn kiss women as though his aim were to throttle the life out of them. Quinn plays a man badly injured in a car wreck that erases both his memory and his fingerprints. This is lucky when he wanders into his old town and discovers he is wanted for a bank robbery—without fingerprints, they can’t arrest him. Figuring he must be innocent, he goes in search of the girlfriend who may or may not have grabbed the money and gone under the knife. It’s an intriguing premise, but the ultimate revelation of the right woman feels arbitrary, and the implications of all this confusion of identities are left resolutely unexamined. Nonetheless, there is something in the film’s searing, inarticulate desperation that glints like a shattered mirror.

Under the Knife

The promise of plastic surgery is a new and better self, the erasure of years and the traces of life. Taken to extremes, it is the opportunity to become a different person. Probably the best known plastic surgery noir is Dark Passage (1947), in which Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, who visits a back alley doctor after escaping from San Quentin. Parry was framed for killing his wife, so the face plastered across newspapers with the label of murderer has become a false face that betrays him. A friendly cabby who spots him recommends a surgeon who is he promises is “no quack.” Houseley Stevenson’s gleeful turn as the back-alley doctor is unforgettable, as he sharpens a straight razor while philosophizing about how all human life is rooted in fear of pain and death. He can’t resist scaring Parry, chortling over what he could do to a patient he didn’t like: make him look like a bulldog, or a monkey. But he reassures Parry that he’ll make him look good: “I’ll make you look as if you’ve lived.”

During the operation, Parry’s drugged consciousness becomes a kaleidoscope of faces, all the people who have threatened or helped him swirling around. His face is being re-shaped, as his life has already been shaped by others: the bad woman who framed him and the good woman who rescues and protects him, the small-time crook who menaces him and the kind cabby who helps him. Faceless for much of the movie, mute for part of it (he spends a long time in constraining bandages), Vincent Parry is among the most passive and cipher-like of noir protagonists. When the bandages finally come off after surgery, he looks like Humphrey Bogart, and the idea that this famously beat-up, lived-in face could be the creation of plastic surgery is perhaps the film’s biggest joke. But Vincent Parry remains an oddly blank, undefined character, and he seems unchanged by his new face and name. In a sense the doctor is right: he only looks as though he’s lived.

The fullest cinematic exploration of the problems inherent in trying to make a new life through plastic surgery is Seconds (1966), John Frankenheimer’s flesh-creeping sci-fi drama about a mysterious company that offers clients second lives. For a substantial fee, they will fake your death, make you over completely—including new fingerprints, teeth, and vocal cords—and create an entirely new identity for you. There is never a moment in the movie when this seems like a good idea. The Saul Bass credits, in which human features are stretched and distorted in extreme close-up, instills a horror of plasticity, and disorienting camera-work creates an immediate feeling of unease and dislocation, a physical discomfort at being in the wrong place.

Arthur, a businessman from Scarsdale, is the personification of disappointed middle age, afflicted by profound anomie that goes beyond a dull routine and a tired marriage. When the Company finishes its work—the process is shown in gruesome detail, to the extent that Frankenheimer’s cameraman fainted while shooting a real rhinoplasty—the formerly nondescript and greying Arthur looks like Rock Hudson, and has a new life as a playboy painter in Malibu. He’s told that he is free, “alone in the world, absolved of all responsibility.” He has “what every middle-aged man in America wants: freedom.”

At first, however, his life proves as empty and meaningless in this new setting as it was in the old; even when the Frankenstein scars have healed, he remains nervous and joyless as before. After he meets and falls for a beautiful blonde neighbor, who introduces him to a very 1960s California lifestyle, he begins to revel in youth and sensual freedom. Yet something is still not right; at a cocktail party he gets drunk and starts talking about his former existence—a taboo. He discovers that his lover, indeed almost everyone he knows, is an employee of the company or a fellow “reborn,” hired to create a fake life for him, and to keep him under surveillance. His “freedom” is a construct, tightly controlled.

Arthur rebels, making a forbidden trip to visit his wife, who of course does not recognize him. Talking to her about her supposedly deceased husband, for the first time he begins to understand himself: the depth of his alienation and confusion, the fact that he never really knew what he wanted, and so wanted the things he had been told he should want. Seconds is a scathing attack on the American ideal of a successful life, a portrait of how corporations sell fantasies of youth, beauty, happiness, love; buying into these commercial dreams, no one is really free to know what they want, or even who they are. Will Geer, as the folksy, sinister founder of the Company, talks wistfully about how he simply wanted to make people happy.

There is a deep sadness in the scenes where Arthur revisits his old home and confronts the failure of his attempt at rebirth—beautifully embodied by Rock Hudson in a performance suffused with the melancholy of a man who has spent his life hiding his real identity behind a mask. Yet Arthur still imagines that if he can have another new start, a third face and identity, he will get it right. Instead, he learns the macabre secret of how the Company goes about swapping out people’s identities. Seconds contrasts the surgical precision with which faces, bodies, and the trappings of life can be remade, and the impossibility of determining or predicting how or if the inner self will be changed. For that there are no charts or diagrams, and no knife that can cut deep enough.

by Imogen Sara Smith

#Imogen Sara Smith #The Chiseler #stolen faces #joan crawford #noir #secondrock hudson #lauren bacall

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beneaththetangles · 3 years

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A Ryvius Advent

Advent, the time of year in which Christians commemorate Christmas by looking forward to it in anticipation, as well as to Christ’s return, is upon us. We hope that we can help you participate and get into the “Christmas spirit” through our blog as we do our traditional Christmas posts. Consider signing up for our newsletter as we gear up for the season, and following along here on the blog as well with posts like today’s, which kicks off the season is a most appropriate way.

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Infinite Ryvius (Mugen no Ryvius), Goro Taniguchi´s Lord of the Flies meets Lost in Space, is without doubt one of my favorite shows. Yet, I must warn you: It is not an easy one to watch. Its slow burn starts with the focus on the people-pleaser protagonist, Kouji Aiba—a guy who finds it uncool to hang out with anyone who has known him for a long time, his estranged brother Yuki, and their bossy childhood friend Aoi. But soon it expands its scope to perhaps twenty or so very interesting youngsters aboard the Liebe Delta, a starship academy for future space cadets, left without adults after a strange accident (or is it?), and through them, encompasses an entire teen society which grows, fights, suffers, and evolves with every episode, always waiting for rescue.

That is the starting point of a journey that will take its protagonists through hard decisions about survival and violence, war, lies, fears and betrayal, the collapse of social norms, emotional and mental breakdown, and repeated moral failure in what I found to be a very atypical, honest story full of quasi Eva-like angst and misfortune.

What’s worse is that you do not even have a Gendo to blame here, either for how frustratingly Kouji acts nor for anything else. There are adults and dangers outside, but they are not the focus. Instead, it’s on the kids. From the kindhearted teen hero to the bright model student, from the Vulcanian-like brainy to the loud representative, from the weak-willed fat boy to the “bad girl,” from the silent gang leader to the space princess (sort of), they are as flawed as they are relatable, and truly dangerous to each other in their own ways. And the consequences of their sins and errors are not small, not here. What follows has been aptly described as an ascent/descent into hell.

Why watch it, then? Why suffer? For one, its characters are (in my view) fascinating, and their occasional ugliness, and that of the situation, is how we gradually come to see something genuine and hopeful about them. They may start as archetypes, but they suffer, evolve, interact, struggle, and surprise me, for better and for worse. No matter how minor their roles, they all have something to say, and quite frequently they are things I hadn’t heard before from characters like these. The story does not whitewash their flaws, but neither does it give up on them when they fail (and boy, do they fail). The comparison with The Lord of the Flies may be the first thing that comes to mind, but if you go along, you will receive, one after another, signs that things may go differently here. It is not only the primal they confront, but also the supernatural; not only the evil in them, but the good. And I have come to understand enough about myself to know that I´m pretty much like Hikki Hachiman: I thirst to know the human heart, of others and mine, and I often find hope in it.

More than that, Mugen no Ryvius is a show firmly interested in what is good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust, much like Bokurano or Serial Experiments Lain. It takes its premise seriously, and it makes every effort to show us that everyone is connected. This principle is personified in the character of the Girl in Pink, the soul of the starship, an observer who wanders around learning about its inhabitants, sometimes talking with them, sometimes helping them, sometimes unveiling what is beneath the surface, she herself connected to the deeper mysteries of the ship. And, as I have loved reading about the evolution of fictional societies and regimes since I first read Plato´s terrific (in both senses of the word) Republic in Philosophy class, the self-contained nature of the community which is described, the elegant way in which everything is presented and the 26 episodes that give us plenty of time to know everything about everyone make this a very enjoyable story, even if sometimes you have to just endure it.

There is even more. Ryvius is not only a psychological thriller or a social experiment. It is a tale of discernment and heroism, but not only that either. Much as in Taniguchi´s Planetes, its themes and symbology go all the way to the philosophical and the spiritual, in this case with the salvation of all humanity literally at stake. The characters are largely unaware of this larger plot—they are busy enough as it is—except for some weird encounters they experience here and there, but we get to see it through the Girl in Pink. The story has something to say about who we are to each other, and about sacrifice, sin and delusion, and also about the meaning of hope and love in this fallen world. Thus, it connects with the themes of Advent, the time when we remember the long wait for Christ during the long ages of Israel, the longing of the human heart for Him in the reign of sin, the promises of the prophets and the difficult and specific, strange, miraculous yet discreet circumstances in which the fulfillment of that hope was prepared when the time came.

But, God being the Lord of the Living, this period is not only one of remembrance. It is also the time when we try to better dispose our hearts so that His coming here and now can touch us more deeply. It’s becoming a challenging, tiring Advent for me, both professionally and personally, so these days I am fasting a bit, trying to bring to mind the hope of Christmas and of the future and meditating on the readings of Isaiah and John the Baptist, Joseph, and Mary. Because Advent is also the time when we look to the future from the hardships of this world and renew our hope that He will come back, that rescue is coming. That there is a second, hidden story in my life too, and it encompasses and explains the one I see. It is something of a funny coincidence that the hardest part of the Ryvius story comes also at December, a December in space.

I think that is as far as I can go speaking only in general, so spoilers ahead. Ryvius is full of twists and turns, so you have been warned.

Episode 23 is probably the show at is bleakest. Just an episode or two before, the violence, the egoism, the anarchy, the malevolence, the ill will, the disorder and the laziness have reached its peak, and a friend has been scarred. The sins of the little society—unbeknownst to them, a literally chosen people, because the Ryvius is the only hope for humanity to escape the Second Solar Flare, and no crew has ever been able to make it react—are just too many, and they are punished. It is the logical consequence, and even I was hoping for it. Our heroes experience a mutual emotional breakdown, unable to comfort each other. And hurt and bitter, the courageous and kind Ikumi turns into a tyrant by threats and sheer force, threatening to destroy entire sections of the starship if he is not immediately given unconditional obedience. Like the Leviathan of Hobbes, he demands absolute power to prevent the kids to becoming wolves for each other. With Yuki and the rest of the mecha aces on his side, those aboard are forced to comply.

His first decision is to reinstate the gang of Airs Blue, that other interesting tyrant, back from prison as the police force, a role than they clearly enjoy. Shortly after, order is restored, but in such a way the ship starts to feel like an occupied country. Violence is not as overt as it was, but it is there. And maybe all that would be at least an improvement on the previous anarchy, were not that his main advisor is the ultimate schemer of the Zwei group, Heiger, who has been given free hands to engage in his social engineering projects and protect this Pax Romana until the number of violent incidents is zero.

Shortly after, people are sorted by ability and separated (well, either that, or if Heiger thinks you a subversive element, sent straight to Class F, which includes pretty much every important character who is not part of the regime). Juli Bahana, the voice of empathy and reason, is expelled from the bridge for objecting (more specifically, for objecting without providing a feasible alternative), and sent to Class F. So is her ever-jealous friend Ran, who has undermined her in every way she could. His crime is violently protesting that the little kid aboard, Pat, has been sent to Class F too (well, says Heiger, naturally, he is not useful by any objective standard). Fina S. Shinozaki, the beautiful pagan priestess/cult leader who preaches the false Gospel of making yourself a new you of your own design, is leading the course of the ship, which now points toward her planet.

When all the new residents of Class F are in their area, a new surprise comes. Unbeknownst to Ikumi, Heiger, who is losing it a bit, blocks the area and switches the lights off. They are left without food or a way out. In his reasoning, these people are not useful, the lowest of the low, and everything that is given to them is a waste. Many of them, conscious of their crimes or their lack of ability, even recognize it is only natural that they would end up at Class F. So there they are, our most pathetic characters, in the darkness. Jealous Ran, indecisive Juli, feeble and treacherous Charlie (sorry, I mean Good Turtleland the Third), femme fatale Criff, bratty Nicks, people-pleaser Kouji, messy and bossy Aoi, loud Lucson, spoiled Pat, the lazy couple who stole points, even the creepy psycho who “protects” Charlotte—all there.

When someone lights a lantern, and it turns out that Lucson was stealing food, so he decides to share it, not without boasting about his “keen foresight.” The last, the not useful, the dispossessed, the guilty thus share the little they have, and sit around the light. Somehow, a curious joy starts to permeate them, and someone asks out of the blue, “It is almost Christmas, isn’t it?”

What it is is December 13rd, the birthday of the youngest member of the crew, Pat Campbell. His father and mother figure are beside him. Lucson may be an incompetent, a liar, and a vain leader, but he has taken good care of Pat, to the point of showing that he is willing to take a beating in his place, and has tried to set example for him in his own clumsy way. Juli may be indecisive and her renouncing as captain of the ship may have played a part in the present state of things, but she has cared for the kid from the first moment. The Girl of Pink is attracted towards that light they share, not towards the bridge, and it´s no wonder. The bleakness of Ryvius disappears for a couple of minutes, and there is a warm light instead. This is the moment in which she speaks to Kouji and stops being an observer, providing hope, a way out. Literally, there is a path.

The darkness will strike twice again in this very episode and the hardest part of this journey of purification is still ahead, but we have seen a glimpse of where it leads. As viewers, we can have hope. Kouji still has to carry his own Cross, his own Gethsemane, and beyond. Aoi will share it all with him. We will still suffer before we reach the end. But for now, there is light. There is a sign of something beyond the madness the Ryvius has fallen into, something that reaches these broken sinners suffering the consequences of their own errors and makes them one, even so.

While darkness and poverty have united Class F, the powerful, the strong and the wise in the terms of the ship are not so lucky. Ikumi cannot participate in the feast. After all, he is locked in his palace—the officials bedroom—with his own thoughts, increasing his own power, worried, navigating his inner traumas, working to stop even the littlest of crimes aboard while the tyrannical system he has created causes others he does not detect. He wants his Pax Romana no matter the means, and even if he is not mistaken about what is right, he is wrong about placing all hope in his own hands, and about the darkness of his own heart. Like Herod (though younger, more desperate and driven by fear and trauma), he may resort even to murder. Neither can Kozue, who has made the conscious decision to play into Ikumi´s trauma to have someone who will provide her affection, and literally shut the door to everything and everyone else.

Neither can Yuki, our punk Pharisee, who never loses an opportunity to point how weak-willed, despicable, low and inauthentic his elder brother is, usually with a punch or two to show him. Even if he is Kouji´s younger brother, he is no doubt like the older brother of the parable, only substituting obedience to the father to doing what he pleases without external influence. He also wants acknowledgement for his achievements. Nor Heiger, who is busy with the census of his new empire, sending every member of the Ryvius community to the place where he belongs to, in his opinion, and worshiping efficiency like he always wanted to. Heiger´s terrified reaction to the unknown, in the form of the Lovecraftian/Ghiblian space beasts, shows us how self-enclosed in the works of his own hands he is at this point of the story: His own cleverness has blinded him to this hope.

But if Ikumi is traumatized, Heiger is a materialist, and Yuki is just doing what he feels vaguely good about, someone is searching for a spiritual meaning in the circumstances. And the meaning she finds is evil. That is Fina S, Shinozaki, the young cult leader/priestess of Mother Arne, a pagan deity who considers letting your past behind and rebuilding yourself from zero as the first moral imperative, adapts to every situation quickly and cleverly, considers Ikumi to be a war god, and believes the Universe will help you if you desire things strongly enough. Behind the bizarre elements of this space cult (you know, those pesky Uranians), there is a very familiar philosophy: Be the center of everything, project a perfect illusion, become powerful no matter the situation, delete from your life those people and parts of yourself you don´t like, always be determined, and get what you want.

Villainous as Fina is, I cannot but feel compassion for her, as she is farther away from hope than the rest, and suffers without it. When hurt, she tries to kill the same person whose love she longs for: she wants to prevent him from applying her own philosophy to her and letting her in his past. When heartbroken, she tries to force her smile like a mask. When her acts get her scarred, she wonders if she is not as virtuous as she should be. The philosophy of becoming your own creator not only destroy you, but also tells you that it´s your fault, for not wanting to be free and happy strongly enough. So I truly pity her, and this broken age of ours, too. In a silent alliance with the Girl in Pink, Kouji will risk everything to confront all four, like John the Baptist, and call them to repent.

So at this time of the year, we should also prepare for what is to come—the fights as well as the rescue, the present as well as the future. The joy of the feast and the time of waiting. In the midst of our daily struggles and sufferings, of the problems of the world, we may take a step back to reflect and pray, try to hear the call, think about the meaning of what is happening, share the little we have, remove the obstacles, acknowledge who we are, repent. Take perspective on the things of the world. Give others the comfort and hope they need. Be brave. And help those who are not useful for us, even those who have hurt us, for we are connected, aboard the same ship. And those far from Class F, locked anywhere, need Christmas too, and dearly: Their hearts thirst just like ours.

And miraculously, there is a path.

=====

Mugen no Ryvius can be acquired at Amazon.

#Anime #Christianity #Mugen no Ryvius #Infinite Ryvius #Christmas #Advent #Sin #Hope #Articles #Author: Gaheret

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shesey · 3 years

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Excerpts from Rachel Cusk’s “Kudos”

“A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.” “What is history other than memory without pain?” “...for the world seemed full of people living evilly without reprisal and living virtuously without reward, the temptation to abandon personal morality might arise in exactly the moment when personal morality is most significant.” “I have met people who have freed themselves from their family relationships. Yet there often seems to be a kind of emptiness in that freedom, as though in order to dispense with their relatives they have had to dispense with a part of themselves.” “You asked me earlier... whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don’t have the answer to that... but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner.” “We invent these systems with the aim of ensuring fairness, she said, and yet the human situation is so complex that it always evades our attempts to encompass it.” “They forgive so easily, it is almost as if nothing matters.” “And I wonder, she said, whether we haven’t done them a great disservice in sparing them this pain, which might somehow have brought them to life, at the same time as knowing that this couldn’t possible by true, and that it is only my own belief in the value of suffering that makes me think it. I am one of those who believes that without suffering there can be no art.” “It may be the case, she said, that it is only when it is too late to escape that we see we were free all along.” “Why should I trust your view of the world if you can’t even take care of yourself? If you were a pilot, I wouldn’t get on board - I wouldn’t trust you to take me the distance.” “You earn just enough to get by but at the end of the day there’s nothing left mentally, and so you cling to the job even harder.” “That tribe was one to which nearly all the men in this country belonged and it defined itself through a fear of women combined with an utter dependence on them.” “We live with an almost superstitious belief in our own differences, she said, and Luis has shown that those differences are not the result of some divine mystery but are merely the consequence of our lack of empathy, which if we had it would enable us to see that in face we are all the same. It is for his empathy, she said, that Luis has received such acclaim, and so I believe he should congratulate himself, rather than feeling ashamed for being praised.” “... and it is impossible not to feel that we have broken him, not out of malice but out of our own carelessness and selfishness.” “Behind every man is his mother who has made so much fuss of him he will never recover from it and will never understand why the rest of the world doesn’t make the same fuss of him, particularly the woman who has replaced his mother and who he can neither trust nor forgive for replacing her.” “... because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty - rather than ambition and desire - that bring the ultimate rewards.” “In this country, for a woman to survive the numerous attempts to crush her, he said, she has to live like a hero, always getting up again and always, ultimately, alone.” “I replied that this was something all of us had felt in our turn, as we passed into adulthood and recognized the role of outside events in shaping history and their capacity to interfere in and change our lives, which until now had remained in the hermetic state of childhood.” “Great art was very often brought to the service of this self-immolation, as great intelligence and sensitivity often characterized those who found the world an impossible place to live in.” “Could a spiritual value be attached to the mirror itself, so that by passing dispassionately though evil it proved its own virtue, its own incorruptibility?” “And that was without mentioning the moral duty of the critic to correct the tendency of culture likewise to err towards safety and mediocrity, a responsibility you couldn’t measure in dinner invitations.” “What he couldn’t tolerate above else, he went on, was the triumph of the second-rate, the dishonest, the ignorant: the fact that this triumph occurred with monotonous regularity was one of life’s mysteries.” “Yet if one looked at the work of Louise Bourgeois, one saw that it concerned the private history of the female body, its suppression and exploitation and transmogrifications, its terrible malleability as a form and its capacity to create other forms.” “It is hard to think, she said, of a better example of female invisibility than these drawings, in which the artist herself has disappeared and exists only as the benign monster of her child’s perception.” “Plenty of female practitioners of the arts, she said, have more or less ignored their femininity, and it might be argued that these women have found recognition easier to come by, perhaps because they draw a veil over subjects that male intellectuals find distasteful.” “It is understandable, she said, that a woman of talent might resent being fated to the feminine subject and might seek freedom by engaging with the world on other terms.” “I remember, she continued, as a young girl, the realization dawning on me that certain things had been decided for me before I had even begun to live, and that I had already been dealt the losing hand while my brother had been given the winning cards. It would be a mistake, I saw, to treat this injustice as thought it were normal, as all my friends seemed prepared to do.” “These boys, she said, had the most ridiculous attitudes towards women, which they were busy learning from the examples their parents had given them, and I saw the way that my female friends defended themselves against those attitudes, by making themselves as perfect and as inoffensive as they could. Yet the ones who didn’t defend themselves were just as bad, because by refusing to conform to these standards of perfection they were in a sense disqualifying themselves and distancing themselves from the whole subject. But i quickly came to see, she said, that in fact there was nothing worse to be an average white male of average talents and intelligence: even the most oppressed housewife, she said, is closer to the drama and poetry of life than he is, because as Louise Bourgeois shows us she is capable at least of holding more than one perspective. And it was true, she said, that a number of girls were achieving academic success and cultivating professional ambitions, to the extent that people had begun to feel sorry for these average boys and to worry that their feelings were being hurt. Yet if you looked only a little way ahead, she said, you could see that the girls’ ambitions led nowhere, like the roads you often find yourself on in this country, that start off new and wide and smooth and then simply stop in the middle of nowhere, because the government ran out of money to finish building them.” “I also enjoyed the attentions of men, she said, while making sure never to commit myself to any one man or to ask for commitment in return, because I understood that this was a trap and that I could still enjoy all the benefits of a relationship without falling into it.” “It did not seem like enough, she said, simply to pass the baton to the next runner, in hope that she would win the race for me.” “I have a male counterpart on the show, she said, and he is not required to look attractive, but I am not in the slightest bit interested in that example of inequality. What I am interested in is power, she said, and the power of beauty is a useful weapon that too often women disparage or misuse.” “For a while, at university, I sat as a life model for the art students, she said, partly to make money and partly to get this subject of the female body out into the open, because it almost seemed to me that even by clothing myself I was inviting the mystery to take root there under my clothes, and to weave the web of subjection in which later I might become trapped.” “In my own case, she said, I have fought to occupy a position where I can perhaps right some of these wrongs and can adjust the terms of the debate to an extent by promoting the work of women I find interesting.” “I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumptions, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world - whatever its features - was catastrophic.” “... That family was big and noisy and easy-going, and there was always room for him at the table, where huge comforting meals were served and where everything was discussed by nothing examined, so that there was no danger of passing through the mirror, as he had put it, into the state of painful self-awareness where human fictions lose their credibility.” “The truth was that he no longer wanted to go there, beacuse the same things that a year or two earlier he had found warm and consoling he know found oppressive and annoying: those mealtimes were a yoke, he now saw, by which the parents sought to bind their children to them and to perpetuate, as he saw it, the family myth...” “He recognized that in taking their comfort he had created a responsibility towards them; and this realization, I said, had caused him to consider the true nature of freedom. He understood that he had given some of his freedom away, through a desire to avoid or alleviate his own suffering, and while it didn’t seem exactly an unfair exchange, I believed he wouldn’t do it again quite so easily.” “There was a word in his language, I said, that was hard to translate but that could be summed up as a feeling of homesickness even when you are at home, in other words as a sorrow that has no cause. This feeling was perhaps what had once driven his people to roam the world, seeking the home that would cure them of it. It may be the case that to find home is to end one’s quest, I said, but it is with the feeling of displacement itself that the true intimacy develops and that constitutes, as it were, the story. Whatever kind of affliction it is, I said, its nature is that of the compass, and the owner of such a compass puts all his faith in it and goes where it tells him to go, despite appearances telling him the opposite.” “But you, he said to me, don’t belong anywhere, and so you are free to go wherever you choose.” “... these experiences do not fully belong to reality and the evidence for them is a matter of one person’s word against another’s.” “Our bodies outlive their use of them, and that is what annoys them most of all. These bodies continue to exist, getting older and uglier and telling them the truth they don’t want to hear.” “I feel so lonely, he said, and yet I have no privacy.” “You can’t tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.”

#rachel cusk #kudos #feminism

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