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shivunin · 1 year

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Hello! <3

For the Weird Questions for Writers…

2, 4, 7, 18 and 25!

(I'm greedy and they're all super interesting questions, of course feel free to ignore some if they aren't appealing or make you uncomfortable)

Hey! <3 Thank you for asking me!! I just answered 2, but here are the others c:

(Question list)

4. What’s a word that makes you go absolutely feral?

Ooooh so many!! I loooove fun words. Whenever I hear a new one my brain just keeps playing it over and over until I write it down somewhere. I have a whole list in my writing notebook for use as titles (that's where the title for Misericordia came from, for example---another word for mercy). I couldn't pick just one, but here:

Asperity (harshness in tone or manner): I like this bc it sounds like you are spitting it kind of? the form and function match.

Grandiloquent (pompous/extravagent in language or presentation in a manner intended to impress): Again, this one is long and fancy and it means being fancy on purpose---I just love that.

7. What is your deepest joy about writing?

This is going to be so full of metaphors---but the moment when you are profoundly and perfectly inspired to write something. It feels like a conductor raising their baton and the whole orchestra readies themselves to play. Writing in that mode is just this beautiful denouement that feels inevitable, cascades of letters building to the climax of harsher trills and then soft sweeps back to the conclusion. When I finish something and I know it sounded right, sometimes I just rest my hands on the keyboard and exhale like I would have when I performed with an instrument and finished playing a piece.

25. What is a weird, hyper-specific detail you know about one of your characters that is completely irrelevant to the story?

Elowen's Thing about her hair started when people would just start touching it growing up. It was long and soft and pretty, and others would just pick it up and run it between their fingers while they talked. She hated it, but didn't feel like she could object at the time. In most universes, when she leaves the clan for the Conclave one of the first things she does is shave both sides and trim the middle so there's less chance of people touching her. Cutting it is one of the first actual decisions she makes for herself.

18. Choose a passage from your writing. Tell me about the backstory of this moment. How you came up with it, how it changed from start to end. Spicy addition: Questioner provides the passage.

I am sticking this under the cut because it's long haha. So here is a piece of Your Fate For Mine, the first fic I posted on AO3.

“The rifts!” she said, “Didn’t any of them tell you? I was not chosen by Andraste, Cullen; it was all a horrible misunderstanding. Or worse, some kind of lie–I’m just a–just a scout, expendable enough to the clan to send me to spy on what the humans were doing.”

“No,” he said evenly, “You are–”

“The Wardens needed Stroud,” she interrupted, raising her voice, “He is the only one who spoke out against their mad plans. The only one, amongst hundreds, who stood up for the right thing. They cannot rebuild without him. You know that’s true. And Hawke has people who depend on her, who need her–”

“Do not speak to me of people who depend–” he interjected.

“–do you think I could leave her behind to be slaughtered by the largest, most horrifying demon I’ve ever seen just because Mother Giselle sang a nice song once and people liked it?”

“Sang a–” he sputtered, “That isn’t at all what–”

He had thought they could discuss this with level heads; clearly, he had been wrong. His headache beat at him, exacerbated by the way their words were ringing off the stone in the room.

“And fine, maybe it was a selfish choice!” Her voice continued to rise; she was well and truly shouting by now, “Perhaps I had no right to decide for the Inquisition who ought to be leading them, but how could I choose? How could I look at these people and decide–yes, actually, because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I think you should die here instead of me. How could I–when they have lives, and responsibilities, and people who need them, people who love them –”

“ I love you!” he roared, and she rocked back onto her heels as if struck.

“I… love you,” he said, more quietly, his pulse pounding in his ears, “I need you. Your friends need you. I should have said something before Adamant; I should have found the time. But I didn’t, and then you–I thought you were gone , Elowen. I thought you were dead!”

She didn’t say anything. He took a breath and grasped at the ragged edges of his composure.

“You put yourself in danger every day. I know that. I knew it when we decided to be–to be more than we were. To be together. I would never– never –ask you to place what we have over your duties or responsibilities, but after everything I have told you–did you not consider that it was my worst fears realized? To watch you disappear before my very eyes, to have you lost in a place I could not reach you, where I knew you would be prey for any kind of demon and Maker knows what other horrors? To watch you lose yourself, lose your own thoughts?”

Shakily, she sat down on the bed and stared at him. He hated that he’d put that expression on her face, but if he wanted honesty between them there was only one way for that to happen. He lowered his voice even more, until it was slightly quieter than he usually spoke.

“You say your life isn’t worth more than theirs? Fine. But it isn’t worth any less , either. We need you; the Inquisition needs you. I have always told myself: if something happens, we can find her and bring aid . Her friends are there with her when she walks away, and they wouldn’t let anything happen to her that she can’t manage . But Elowen–when you go, you leave me behind every time and I–I accept that. I must; it is what has to happen if we are to succeed. But this time–you chose to stay behind. You chose to be alone, where you could not be found or helped by anyone. My worst fears, Elowen, and you–did you think of me at all when you decided to stay?”

Silence.

“It wasn’t about us,” she said softly, “I couldn’t think like that. Not there.”

Okay, so this is one of the very first passages I planned for Your Fate for Mine---this fight, where Elowen tells him she isn't that important and Cullen tells her she is wrong. The argument admission of love is---ah! *chef's kiss* That is my shit. I wanted to see Cullen pushed over the edge of his patience, I wanted Elowen to have to confront the consequences of an act she thought was selfless (stranding herself in the Fade), and I wanted them to have to confront what it means to be a good partner to each other.

I had two scenes in mind when I started writing this fic: the scene where she gets herself stuck in the Fade and this scene, when they are reunited. Actually, this was originally just about the end of the story---I'd planned for them to have sex afterward and then do a little epilogue about her readjusting to life in the realm of the living. I knew I wanted it to be the emotional climax of the story, but originally there was a lot more interrupting each other in the dialogue.

Ultimately, I decided that---since Elowen feels sort of perpetually misunderstood and one of the things she appreciates about Cullen is that he listens to her---they needed to clearly lay their feelings out. Cullen needed to confront his sense of abandonment at her leaving him behind. Elowen needed to know that she specifically mattered to him and that she is loved.

I've mentioned recently how much I love writing arguments, and this is definitely no exception to the rule. I could write them arguing and then making up over and over again. If I wrote this today, there are things I would do differently, but I still absolutely love it.

#ask game response #ask response #dixeram #long post #writing #everything is music to me tbh #when you are outside and the wind is blowing just right and the hummingbird on the porch is buzzing by that is music too #and ooh when you take a sip of your first cup of coffee in the morning and it is prepared just right and you sigh that is also music #idk if this is like a universal experience but when i was a kid and i heard an interesting word #sometimes i would repeat it out loud over and over until my parents told me to knock it off #sometimes you just have to shape the words in your mouth to *get* them you know??#also re: cool words when i was taking latin there is the scene where dido dies and she uses her second name in her last words #she says something like 'pity elissa' and apparently vergil chose that version because 'elissa' sounds more like someone's dying breath #than 'dido' does #anyways that stuck with me; form and function

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septembersghost · 2 years

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Appreciate you approaching the prison idea without calling it happy or peaceful. it's hard seeing a lot of commentary only viewing it as a symbol and not a practicality that is difficult.

thank you for understanding what i've talked about and why it's a complicated topic for me.

i want to say something and i am uncertain exactly how to put it into words, and it's probably a little bit of a tangent from this message, but i've been considering it.

i think...it's very easy to dehumanize people who do the wrong things. it eases our minds, to separate ourselves as Good from those who do Bad. make them less than human and we don't have to wonder where our own darknesses lie. i mentioned earlier that i don't like ruling someone as "irredeemable" in fiction, because fiction is full of possibility, the potential at any time exists for a character to do better, to be more, to change paths, and the rejection of humanity based on the paradigm of redeemable/irredeemable is slightly too biblically judgmental to be wholly interesting or honest to me. reality requires interrogation and nuance, but of course there are things that are unforgivable, too far to ever rectify, too terrible to comprehend, but fiction gives us a space to explore those themes safely and philosophically. and yet, the ruling of a story/character being "problematic" is passed all the time as an easy way to disengage from empathy. bad is bad, don't question it. don't try to find reason in it. punish it without compassion. i don't think it's conducive to connection.

thus, if i see someone say walt is only a monster, jesse is only a useless junkie, jimmy is only a scumbag, it disturbs me. that isn't the purpose of their existences in their stories, their arcs. it is much deeper and more empathetic than that. it is MEANT to be confronted, questioned, we're meant to see where their paths took them, why their narratives unfold the ways they do.

prison is a sacrifice. jimmy may have found a sense of inner peace and a true reconciliation within himself as a whole human being, and that is profoundly moving, but it isn't easy, or simple, or happy, and it isn't...about punitive conclusions equating to morality. the punishment isn't his atonement. his atonement is his honesty. he is alive (and i'm glad! i'm grateful both he and kim are alive! battered and changed, but always with the possibility now for more healing and reconciliation, in themselves and with each other, ahead), but he has given his life. it's a less literal version of nacho's sacrifice, given wholly and unflinchingly for reclamation of his own agency and for the person he most loves. does jimmy need to pay for his sins? legally, yes. is paying for his sins the point? to my mind, no. personhood and the human heart is paramount here, and that is what i'm holding onto conclusively. that is what he found, after suppressing it or searching for it for so long. that is what kim is able to return to, one step at a time. it isn't easy, and they'll still hurt, but they found a light, and maybe it's enough. the have something entirely real, and that's a starting point.

#i'm absolutely exhausted idk what i'm saying anymore #anonymous #letterbox #bcs spoilers

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phdmama · 2 years

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18 and 30 please!

Ooo thank you anon!! xox

18. ideal weather?

For me, that's very context-dependent, mainly - do I have to go out and BE somewhere? Or can I just be chilling? For the latter, storms - rain, thunder, snow, whatever. I absolutely love that feeling of knowing I have nowhere immediate to be and the cupboards are full and we're all safe at home and the weather is doing its thing! For having to be out and about... I'm gonna go with: maybe early Fall? high 60s/low 70s, low humidity, deep blue sky with fluffy white clouds. I also love that feel of the air when you know rain is coming, or better yet, when a thunderstorm is about to hit and I feel it in my lizard brain.

True story: I live up the hill from a lake, and there's a little town beach that I used to go to a lot when my kiddos were small. I was there one day, and the lifeguards called everyone out of the water because lightning was on the radar. A lot of us were still just kind of hanging out, and I looked over to the west and you could see the storm rolling in, the leading thunderhead racing across the sky. Everyone on the beach was watching, and marveling really because it was beautiful, and I don't know that I'd ever seen anything like it before. And then, something happened - maybe a shift in the barometric pressure? - and all of a sudden we all, as one, went OH SHIT I GOTTA GET UNDERCOVER and within 5 minutes, the beach was empty.

30. places that you find sacred?

So what came to mind is that I've been to many places humans as a collective have made sacred, and then there are those places that are personally sacred.

I believe in energy and I believe that human will and faith kind of infuse a place with that energy. Notre Dame comes to mind. The Vatican. Christ Church in Montreal. Saint Anne's Shrine on Isle La Motte in northern Vermont. Yes, I am aware that these are all christian places (and many catholic, which I am absolutely not nor have ever been). I'm no longer a practicing christian, but I guess I'm very culturally christian, even if I don't have that faith. I haven't gone to sacred spaces in other traditions, but I guess I imagine they feel the same.

I also find scared spaces in history. The Parthenon in Rome. I vividly remember going to Stonehenge as a small kid, back when you could still touch the stones. (I just looked it up, and the last time you could touch the stones was 1977 so we must have been among the last to do so). I feel it in art museums. This human connection through time. It's profoundly moving to me.

There are also sacred spaces in my own life. The places I find solace and safety. My home, curled up on my couch looking at the lights we've put up. Watching my son and daughter dance. Listening to my oldest as he tells me about something cool. Every night when we get into bed, my husband and I both read, and I lie with my head on his stomach and he often rubs my shoulders. That's sacred space to me.

weird asks that say a lot

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pl-panda · 4 years

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Damienette arranged marriage: part 11

I literary wrote it right after publishing the previous part. Surprise. But you will kill me again because this time this is serious cliffhanger :)

Credits: Miraculous Ladybug team for the elements I take from MLB show. DC for their characters, @ozmav for the AU, @maribat-archive for giving me access to so many different stories to have take inspirations from, @thyladyanput for idea for Chat Damian and me for the plot.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Damienette arranged marriage: part 11

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Instead of taking the ring he closed boy's hand around it, cupping it in his own. "No son. I told you I can't do this alone. I want... I need your help. We can bring your mother back together."

"Thank you father. Your trust means the world for me."

-----------------------------------

Now

Chat Noir crashed through the window right into the room where Marinette, Damian and Chloe were having a friendly conversation. He looked different. His ears and tail were real instead of accesories and instead of bell on his neck he had only a choker with word 'Marinette' written on it.

"My Purrincess! I come to save you!" He said in almost seductive tone.

"Chat Noir? What is the meaning of this?!" Chloe jumped in front of Marinette. "Do you know how expensive this windows are?! And look at you! Ridiculous. Utterly Ridiculous! What have you done to yourself?!"

"There is no Chat Noir here. I am Chat d'amour. And I came to save my Purrincess!"

Damian growled and went to grab his sword, but before he could do anything a staff hit him in the chest and pushed him into the wall. While normally the young vigilante would shrug this kind of damage off, this cat was actually strong like a lion.

"You! You stole my purrincess!" The akumatized hero purred aggressively. He walked to the Wayne heir who was trying to get from the ground but his body was still hurting. "You corrupted her. She never skipped classes before you came. Because of you she became friends with... with... With Chloe!" He finally shouted. "She is the walking Akuma factory!"

Damian spat into cat's face. Using the momentary distraction he dashed forward, ignoring the pain he felt in all his body parts and tackled him. "Run!" He shouted to the girls. Marinette was in too much shock and confusion to react, but Chloe grabbed the bluenette and dragged her out. They were already at the doors, but they couldn't open them. Chloe locked them to ensure nobody would eavesdrop on their talk. Before she managed to open them Cat's staff locked them.

"My Purrincess! I will not let them take you away!" Chat d'amour dashed forward and grabbed Marinette, only to then jump through the window and out into the city. Neither Chloe nor Damian could react in time.

Wayne wanted to leave, to call his brother, to do anything. He switched between trying to open the anti-breakin doors, calling his family, calling police and just striding around. At the same time Chloe managed to call her father and get him to send police after chat noir and already got her social media profile and all her followers to hunt for the cat. Damian just ended another unsuccessful call to his brother.

"I swear if the reason Drake's not picking up is because he is making out with Brown I will castrate him!" He got angry and kicked in the doors. Then second time. By the third time he cursed in arabic as excruciating pain filled his leg. Chloe grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him to the bed. She then looked at him expectantly. "You can't think I will touch anywhere near your bottom leg! Ridiculous! Utterly Ridiculous!"

"I don't have time for this! She is out there! With this idiot!" Another colorful string of curses left his mouth, this time a mix between French, Arabic, English, Mandarin and surprisingly Spanish.

"You are in no condition to help her lover boy and it would be best if you didn't kill yourself just doing that. The ambulance is already coming. Now since you can't move, care to explain what was that part about you and Dupain-Cheng being married?"

Damian paled. He read files of everyone in the class. Only two people who knew Mandarin were Adrien Agreste and Marinette herself. They considered it safe language as long as the blonde boy trouble was not present.

"Yes, I know Mandarin. I kept Adrikins company when he studied and he made me learn it to practice. Now spill. I'm not letting it go."

For a moment, Damian was considering letting Chloe go from the top of the hotel. It could look like an accident. He could tell them she slipped and fell through the open window. Nobody would doubt him. And everything would perfect. But he couldn't take away Marinette's last friend. As much as he disliked her, she had cathartic effect on his wife.Funny how in twenty-four hours of knowing her more closely he already accepted this fact... FOCUS WAYNE!

"I assume it would be prudent to try and dissuade you from pursuing this?"

"Spill." was her answer.

"Fine." It took him a short moment to form a plausible lie that would keep the girl off the track. "A month ago my mother kidnapped me. I recently turned fifteen which is marriage age where I grew up. I awoke tied in front of the altar with Marinette next to me."

"What! Ridiculous! That's utterly ridiculous. What mother does that to their ..." Then Chloe suddenly shut up. Her mother didn't even know her name. Maybe it was not as surprising as it should be, but she was shocked nonetheless.

"My mother is not a good person. She threatened that either we go forth with the ceremony or she will kill her."

"The two days..." Chloe put three and seven together to make a solid ten.

"tt. Yes."

"But forced marriage is illegal. And stupid. Utterly stupid. And you are both underage."

"Mother doesn't care about this things. Right now if either of us backs from the deal there will be many deaths."

"Just who the fuck is your mother?" Chloe shouted. ------------- Marinette was trying to escape the better part of the way, but Chat held her tight and if she actually succeeded, she would fall and risked serious injury. And here there would be no miracle cure to save her since there would be no next ladybug for quite some time.

Finally, they arrived at a rooftop with a picnic blanket and basket awaiting. Chat put Marinette on the ground near the wall, very carefully. "Voila!"

"Chat Noir. What in ladybug's name is this?!" She screamed at him.

"My purrincess! This is all for you! I made it. You are safe here. They will no longer corrupt you with their toxic purrsonalities. You can be all mine now!"

"What?!" the bluenette wanted to say... something, but her mind had hard time getting the idea that Chat got himself akumatized.

"They were giving you all the wrong ideas. You are not some bully. You are beautiful, smart and kind. The two of them just want to have you all for themselves.

"And you think that by doing this you saved me?!"

"Yes! And I think I earned a reward..." Chat leaned and tried to Kiss Marinette on the lips. The only thing he didn't account for was that her hands were free.

Marinette didn't hold back. She delivered a haymaker straight into Chat's nose. There was a crunching sound and the Akumatized hero stumbled back. Stream of red was going down to his lips, making them even more red. This punch would be enough to knock any normal person or probably even hero out cold, but the mixture of akuma and black cat miraculous caused the boy to just bleed profoundly.

"They turned you against me!" He screamed and pinned her hands on both sides of her head. There was madness in his eyes, amplified by akuma. "But a true love's kiss will heal you!" He slammed his bloody red lips onto her.

Marinette felt an excruciating pain in her chest. It was like her heart burned alive. She kicked Chat Noir right below the belt. He let go of her and stumbled back, this time falling onto the blanked an holding his manhood. Marinette also fell. A green light covered the general area of her heart.

——————————————————————————————————–

Taglist (sorry if I missed you)@pheonixashtree @sassakitty @unabashedbookworm @vixen-uchiha @maggiecc12 @actualdisasterwoman @tired-butterfly @shizukiryuu @floralfi @imanerddealwith @northernbluetongue @krispydefendorpolice @toodaloo-kangaroo @dast218 @bluesoulblueheart @theatreandcomicfreak @disneyfoxuniverse @mindfulmagics @alwaysnumberonetruth @nyaabinch @jardimazul @lenamau @rosep16 @dramatic-squirrel @sonif50 @daminett4life @lulutheawkwardess @weird-pale-blonde-person @mooshoon @jeminiikrystal @mochegato @moonlightstar64 @dragonflyswing @silverwhiteraven @shamefullove @magic-miraculous @valeks-princess @heaven428 @mlbchaosqueen @winter-gardenflower @spicybelladonna @emo-elaine13 @vetilora @karukofox21 @my-name-is-michell @sturchling @lokiifriggasonn @redscarlet95 @melicmusicmagic @interobanginyourmom @the-fusionist @razzledazzle247 @miss-mysterys-blog @darkthunder1589 @i-is-mysterious @catthhay @the-one-woman-army @zestyzealot @dahjokester @write-for-your-life2 @mermaidreject @peachedpocky @sassakitty @dahjokester @crazylittlemunchkin

#maribat #maribat au #marinette x damian #guardian!marinette #maridami #miraculous lb #miraculous ladybug #mlb #mlb x dc #batman #arranged marriage au #damian al ghul #damienette #redeemed!chloe #evil!adrien #crossover #marinette dupain cheng

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richmond-rex · 4 years

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What do you think Henry VII remembers, if anything, of his other uncle Henry VI?

This is such an interesting question and something that I myself have been wondering, so thank you for providing me with the opportunity to expand my thoughts on here 🌹

We know that Henry VII only ever saw his uncle King Henry VI once during his life, when he was 13 years old. However, I’d argue King Henry must have caused quite a great impression on him, and considering Henry Tudor was old enough at that time, also a profoundly lasting one. So far young Henry Earl of Richmond had been living as a ward of his uncle Jasper’s enemies, the Herberts. By 1470 his old guardian, William Herbert, had been executed, and then, as the Earl of Warwick changed sides and brought about Henry VI’s readeption, Henry Tudor was returned to his uncle Jasper who took him to London to meet King Henry VI. That Jasper felt like acquainting his nephew with his brother denotes a special degree of closeness and advocates for his idea of family, in my opinion.

According to André, Henry VII’s court poet and self-styled regius historiographus, on 27 October 1470 Henry VI held ‘a splendid feast with the nobles and best men of the kingdom’ to commemorate his return to the throne. As the king was washing his hands, young Richmond was brought to his presence, and according to André, ‘the king prophesied that someday the boy would undertake the governance of the kingdom and would have all things under his own power.’ Polydore Vergil, a historian that began his service under Henry VII in 1506, wrote in his Three Books that in that 1470 meeting ‘the king... is reported to have said:’

“This truly, this is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield and give over the dominion.”

It seems not even Vergil lends much credence to this tale as expressed by his choice of words: reported to have said. As expected, this myth has largely been viewed as Tudor propaganda and indeed the episode has been immortalised in Shakespeare’s Henry VI part III. In the play, King Henry VI meets a toddler Henry Richmond (then escorted by Somerset), calls him ‘England’s hope’, and says Richmond was ‘Likely in time to bless a regal throne’. Given that King Henry VI had his own son Prince Edward as his heir at the time, it seems unlikely he would ever have said such a thing. However, if anything remotely close to that happened, then I agree with Leanda de Lisle in saying that it must have been King Henry VI taking Henry Tudor to be his own son Edward, who thanks to his imprisonment in the Tower he had not seen for five years (and would not ever see again). It’s absurdly sad to think King Henry VI would confound his nephew with his son but arguably also not out of the realm of possibility. We don’t know if Henry Tudor saw his uncle King Henry again, but it’s also not unlikely that he, his mother and uncle Jasper stayed at court for the feast of All Hallows’ (1 November) and All Souls’ Day (2 November).

If King Henry VI ever made such prophecy, wittingly or not, then it must have greatly impacted on Henry Tudor. Henry VII believed to have been chosen by God to, against all odds, become king of England. He once wrote about ‘the crown which it has pleased God to give us with the victory over our enemy at our first field’. Henry Tudor was reported to be very pious—he made pilgrimages to the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury every Easter, as well as frequent pilgrimages to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham and donations to the shrine of St Vincent Ferrer in Brittany. He also founded the cult of the Breton saint St Armel in England and boosted the teachings of St Francis by his patronage of the Franciscan order. He especially favoured the Observants (the Franciscans, also known as the Greyfriars), granting them annuities for the establishment of monasteries in England and abroad. It seems he also favoured staying at religious houses when travelling or going on progress around the kingdom.

Most importantly, Henry VII held a singular devotion to the Virgin Mary and his adoption of the red rose as his personal symbol—aside from dynastic reasons—had everything to do with the religious connotations of that flower. Henry VII could have associated himself with his uncle Henry VI by adopting his antelope badge, for example, but instead, he chose the five-petal flower associated with the Virgin Mary and the Passion of Christ. The Franciscans were noted for their devotion to the Passion, and Henry VII had come in contact with the Observants during his exile in Brittany. The rose had five petals like the five wounds of Christ—St Bernard of Clairvaux once stated: “As many wounds as there are on the Saviour’s body, so many roses are there! Look at His feet and His hands; do you not see roses?”

Forgive me for still going on a tangent about it, but Henry VII’s personal devotion to the Virgin Mary and the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception is exemplified in his Book of Hours, where a miniature shows a figure representing the king kneeling at a prayer desk before a vision of the Virgin as a baby held by her mother, St Anne (or, alternatively, The Virgin and the Child Jesus). His devotion to the Virgin was also highlighted in his rebuilding of the Lady Chapel (now Henry VII’s Chapel) at Westminster Abbey which I will return to in a moment.

I’m not sure but I think it was Vergil who reported Henry VII as having said that religion was his ‘continual refuge’ during exile. His piety has been largely attributed to the influence of his mother Margaret Beaufort, herself also a very pious woman. But given how many years—and formative years those were—they spent apart, I imagine that Henry must have looked up to someone closer to him at the time, namely his uncle Jasper Tudor. We know that after the death of Catherine of Valois Jasper and his brother Edmund were raised by nuns at Barking Abbey, and that then at some point they joined King Henry VI’s court. According to John Blacman, Henry VI’s biographer and chaplain writing in 1485:

[…] and like pains did [Henry VI] apply in the case of his half-brothers, the Lords Jasper and Edmund, in their boyhood and youth; providing for them most strict and safe guardianship, putting them under the care of virtuous and worthy priests, both for teaching and for right living and conversation, lest the untamed practices of youth should grow rank if they lacked any to prune them.

Blacman also claimed that the king personally protected his half-brothers from sexual temptation by keeping ‘careful watch through hidden windows of his chamber’ (yes, I know). Like his uncle King Henry VI, Henry VII would also set a court that ‘maintained the highest standards of sexual behaviour’. Indeed, Retha Warnicke made an extensive compilation of scandals during the first two Tudor reigns and not a single case of sexual misconduct was found to have taken place during Henry VII’s time, marking his court as a decidedly different one than Edward IV’s had been.

Going back to Henry VI’s supposed prophecy, his words surely must have acquired a great weight in Henry Tudor’s mind by 1483 when he made his bid to the English throne. By that time King Henry VI had become a popular saint in England and even though Edward IV had tried to have him modestly—and somewhat obscurely—buried in Chertsey Abbey, Surrey, people had started to flock to his grave. A peasant claimed that Henry VI helped him when he had a bean trapped in his ear, which only popped out after he prayed to the king. Painted images of King Henry VI began showing up in churches around the country, like this one at Barton in Norfolk:

One of King Henry VI’s most ardent devotees was Henry Tudor’s mother Margaret Beaufort (Jasper’s feelings towards the cult are unknown) who had met her kinsman when she was about nine years old. When King Henry VI allegedly offered her the option of remaining married to Suffolk’s son or be remarried to his brother Edmund, Margaret says St Nicholas came to her in a dream dressed as a bishop, telling her to choose Edmund. Again, if this story is true or not, we may never know, but Margaret told that to her confessor John (bishop, then saint) Fisher—why would a famously pious woman such as Margaret Beaufort lie to her own confessor, thus committing a sin? It might be that the events took a mystical turn in Margaret’s imagination as a young girl, but that she associated divine intervention to hers and her son’s fate, and likewise to King Henry VI’s proposal, is clear.

It seems Richard III tried to control King Henry VI’s ever-growing cult by moving Henry VI’s body from Chertsey Abbey to St George’s Chapel at Windsor, a place where visitors wouldn’t have easy access to the king. Nevertheless, when Henry VII came to the throne he wholeheartedly encouraged pilgrimages to the place. Henry VII launched an official campaign to have his uncle canonised, with several petitions to popes Innocent VIII, Alexander VI and Julius II. Henry also ordered the compilation of a book of miracles worked by his uncle, and a biography of Henry VI was published in 1500 claiming that Henry VI had been ever pious and chaste during his life, towards his queen never behaving ‘unseemly ... but with all conjugal honesty and gravity’. Henry VII planned to have the body of King Henry VI re-interred at the heart of the new Lady Chapel he was planning at Westminster Abbey.

However much Henry VII enjoyed good relations with the papacy, especially Pope Innocent VIII, his campaign to have his uncle King Henry VI canonised never came into fruition. Henry VII decided for him and his wife to be buried at his new Lady Chapel instead, next to the tomb of his grandmother Queen Catherine of Valois. In his will, he stated his wish for his body to be buried:

“in the Chapell where our said graunt Dame laye buried, the which Chapell we have begoune to buylde of newe, in the honour of our blessed Lady.”

That doesn’t mean Henry VII set aside the memory of his uncle King Henry VI. He employed the same man that was overseeing the construction of the Lady Chapel at Westminster, Reginald Bray, to continue the rebuilding of St George’s Chapel at Windsor set in motion by his predecessor Edward IV (it came to be informally known as the Bray Chapel). The modest thirteenth-century chapel of Edward the Confessor was expanded into a vast cathedral-like chapel where, importantly, Henry VI’s body was placed alongside a famous relic, the fragment of the True Cross (a reliquary known as the Cross of Gneth) and the bones of John Schorne (revered for curing gout and toothache).

We may argue that Henry VII’s campaign to have King Henry VI’s canonised was fundamentally political (much like Richard II’s campaign for Edward II) as many historians have done. King Henry VI as a saint, combined with his supposed prophecy, would successfully contribute to the image of Henry VII’s reign as one chosen by God. When we put Henry VII’s religious devotion into perspective, though, his efforts to have ‘the glorious King Henry’ canonised take another dimension—in fact, there’s no doubt that in Henry VII’s eyes God had intervened in his favour. Henry VII’s will also stated his wish for an image of himself to be placed in St Edward’s chapel at Westminster, depicting him returning to God and the Virgin Mary the circlet with which he had been crowned at the Battle of Bosworth.

This is me purely speculating, but I think that even though Henry VII only came in contact with King Henry VI once in his life, his half-uncle might have exercised a great influence on him through his uncle Jasper. Jasper seemed to have been genuinely attached to his brother Henry on a personal level as well as devoted to his political cause. If Henry VI’s saintly qualities had been enough to impress Margaret Beaufort, it is very likely that they might have impressed young Henry of Richmond as well.

#ask #nuingiliath #henry vii #henry vi #sorry for going on a tangent

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ineffable-endearments · 4 years

Text

Interwoven

A 2300-word musing that starts out sounding like a headcanon and ends up being an obscenely sweet, gooey short fluff story.

Pairing: Aziraphale/Crowley

Rating: T

Warnings: Naked cuddling. The characters have no genitalia but they are very naked.

Read here on AO3, if you would like!

Crowley and Aziraphale have a fraught history with touch.

For Crowley, physical touch used to be a threat, or a challenge, or at the very least a gesture of disrespect. Hell is crowded, demons bumping into each other every which way. At the same time, none of them would admit to wanting any sort of touch anyway because Hell has told them, rather violently, that they’re not supposed to. It would be a funny world if demons went around leaning on each other and holding hands, wouldn’t it? (It might give them ideas.)

On the other hand, corporal punishment is highly favored among management. Demons get torn apart just for someone else’s fun on a regular basis. Many of them have learned to enjoy watching it happen to other people, too, given that it’s one of the few perverse expressions of humor that aren’t punished.

For Aziraphale, physical touch used to be a tool of manipulation. Although Heaven considers it acceptable to take pleasure in the occasional friendly expression, like a handshake, touching and hugging and holding are still seen as largely “beneath” angels, gross things humans do during their short, vulgar lives. Touches are therefore kept brief. For Aziraphale, they usually involve Gabriel clapping a hand on his shoulder to forcefully end the conversation.

There is a little reminder in there: I am stronger than you, and I am choosing to be nice because I am also a better angel than you. But you don’t have real choices when you talk to me.

During the past six thousand years, for both Crowley and Aziraphale, seeking touch on purpose has been an impermissible demonstration of vulnerability. And yet, they’ve been examples to each other, too.

Crowley’s touch, Aziraphale finds, is nothing like an Archangel’s. There is an exceptional sincerity to it. Whatever Aziraphale might have told himself must be true of demons, he has never felt remotely manipulated in the moments when Crowley made physical contact with him. Crowley keeps a respectful distance most of the time, offering only the occasional tap or nudge, perhaps a handshake. And yet, these rare touches are always imbued with genuine affection, a “You are fascinating” that is entirely novel to Aziraphale. Aziraphale has puzzled over how something as quick as a mere tap on the shoulder could convey all this, but it’s unmistakable.

Aziraphale had let himself touch Crowley, skin-to-skin, in 1941. He’d been so taken by the care Crowley had shown when he handed over the briefcase that Aziraphale had lightly caressed his hand, overcome with an all-consuming thrill of gratitude that sloughed off every single one of his tiresome defenses for a few moments. The whole incident had changed him, but the touch had left him wanting more.

Alright, well, perhaps there had been a moment when Crowley wasn’t so gentle. He had shoved Aziraphale a bit roughly against that wall in the convent, after all. But there was something in it - something so profoundly different from how it felt being shoved by Uriel. Crowley had been practically oozing desperation, care; Uriel had been steeped in a self-righteous contempt, which is far colder and more dangerous. Aziraphale had wanted Uriel to go away, but part of him had rather wanted to lean into Crowley.

Aziraphale’s touch, Crowley finds, is nothing like anything the demons inflict on each other. It’s almost absurdly gentle, attentive, and cautious. Whatever presumptuous hot air Aziraphale fills his words with, it does not translate into his touch. Aziraphale rarely makes physical contact with Crowley, but when he does, it brings with it a type of openness, Aziraphale’s full attention. In doing so, he makes himself vulnerable. Aziraphale’s touches always seem to say, “You are fascinating,” even when putting such a sentiment into words would be inadvisable.

It had been like that in 1941, when Aziraphale slid his fingers over Crowley’s for just a couple of seconds as he accepted the briefcase. Crowley had never been treated like the center of the world before, but there Aziraphale was, practically spinning around him, so wondrously charged was that touch. It was intense, overwhelming, but Crowley goes back to that moment often.

...Hmm. Perhaps there had been a moment when Aziraphale had touched Crowley with a bit of condescension: the horrid argument on the bandstand. He’d just barely brushed Crowley’s finger, pointing at him, but it had felt like being slammed against a wall for all the desperate, scrabbling frustration in it. Still, that tiniest of touches from Aziraphale had shut Crowley up, because it sent him reeling with how badly he wanted things to be different and, even more staggeringly, how badly Aziraphale also wanted things to be different.

MAY 2019

Now, things are different.

They had been close to each other, had held each other, on the night of Armageddon. But they’d both been overwhelmed and dissociating at the time, and it had felt like maybe things were supposed to go back to “normal” afterward. They hadn't touched so much since. In any case, Crowley really, really, really wants to hold Aziraphale. Now and all the time.

Individual angels are supposed to devote themselves wholly to Heaven, which they think means the Greater Good. Individual demons are supposed to fight for Hell, which basically means fighting to keep their own arses safe. In Heaven and Hell, there are friendships of a sort, people who prefer each other’s company to others, but no overarching support for committed intimate partnerships between just a tiny number of people. Heaven and Hell, in their demands for groveling loyalty, would both hate that idea. Aziraphale and Crowley are pioneers in this way.

It’s all a bit confusing, and Crowley is going to start just by getting very close to Aziraphale.

Currently, they’re at a hotel, and Aziraphale has opted to read on the bed next to Crowley instead of in the chair that also came with the room. Every one of his ridiculous layers is still on except for his shoes; in contrast, Crowley is in silk pajamas. Crowley puts his hand down, just casually letting it lie there, and closes his eyes, as if to doze off. Only a few minutes pass before Aziraphale takes it.

Crowley tilts his hand up to actively hold Aziraphale’s and spends the next ten minutes gathering the courage to look over. When he does, Aziraphale notices and gives him a quick, nervous smile. “Alright?” Aziraphale asks.

“Good,” Crowley breathes. “Yeah. Yeah, good.”

Aziraphale puts the book on the nightstand, turning to Crowley, and lies on his side. He adds his other hand to their hold, so he’s cradling the one Crowley had offered earlier.

“I’ve thought for some time that I would like to embrace you again,” he says. “Would you mind trying it?”

Crowley shakes his head. “No. I mean yes. No, I wouldn’t mind.”

They shuffle over to each other for a moment of indecision, not sure where to put their limbs at first. But Aziraphale moves faster this time, to Crowley’s surprise, pulling him into an embrace like he’s been waiting for this for months (and maybe he has). Crouching Angel, Hidden...Snuggler? Anyway, they shift about so that they’re more or less on their sides, lying nose-to-nose. After the rush of tension wears off, Crowley is swept up in the closeness, the heat that pours off Aziraphale, his cologne, the tenderness of his arms and thoughtfulness in his eyes. They’re blue, but an obscure sort of blue. An Earthly blue.

Aziraphale studies Crowley’s face, too. “What do you think?” he asks.

Crowley opts for something other than words and holds tighter to Aziraphale. Aziraphale seems to take a cue from this, squeezing Crowley close as well, curling toward him, in fact, and it feels only natural for Crowley to bring his hand up to ruffle Aziraphale’s hair as he practically nestles into Crowley’s chest.

“My dear,” Aziraphale sighs in utter contentment.

For a long time, they lie like this. This gentle, gentle touch. Crowley has never been “cradled” in anything - even in the Beginning, he never had that sense of security, hadn’t known he was missing anything. He has it now, his angel at once holding him and seeking the comfort Crowley has always longed to give. Crowley finds he wants more - wants to feel Aziraphale bearing his entire self, wants to bear his own self in return.

“I’m going to make a suggestion,” says Crowley, “and if you don’t want to go along with it, we’ll pretend I didn’t say anything.”

Aziraphale chuffs. “What is it?”

“See, what if we just ditched our clothes?”

“Oh, but I’ve had these for--”

“Not permanently. Just...take them off. So they’re not, er, a distraction.”

Aziraphale seems to mull the idea over in his head.

Okay. If he argues again, Crowley will let it go. “Thought it might be sort of nice to do this without them,” he adds. “Just as an experiment. But like I said, we don’t have to do anything you don’t want.”

“Oh, I didn’t say I didn’t want to do it. I was just thinking about how.”

Crowley nods. “Right. Right, then.”

“How do you want to do this?” Aziraphale prompts.

“Miracles,” Crowley answers. “I really don’t want to move right now.”

Aziraphale pauses, almost as if he’s getting ready to scold Crowley for being lazy, and then...he snaps his fingers. Their clothes disappear, presumably folded up on the dresser (not that Crowley cares).

Crowley and Aziraphale are in each other’s arms, still, but naked now, gloriously skin-to-skin. The pleasant shock of warmth jolts Crowley in the best way. Aziraphale makes a little gasping sound, and he feels Crowley's chest and arms and back as if to ascertain that he's still here. He plants a kiss in the notch of Crowley's neck.

Never has Crowley known such completion.

“Lovely, but a little cold on my back,” Aziraphale complains eventually.

Crowley glances toward the foot of the bed, where a deep maroon blanket is all folded up, and uses his foot to heft it up toward the two of them.

Someday, Aziraphale thinks vaguely, he would be curious about making the effort to manifest genitalia. It would be a very Earthly thing to explore, after all. But today is not that day, and they are entirely without sexual parts, instead somewhat smooth and rounded between the legs.

Crowley’s lanky limbs are perfect for wrapping around Aziraphale, an armor of affection, and Aziraphale would like to believe his own round softness is perfect for relieving the pressure on Crowley’s pointy edges. Today is a day for skin on skin, each angel’s soothing body heat enveloping the other under this cover of Earth-made materials, not a thread of firmament in sight. Good.

Crowley is wearing a mild but fashionable cologne that plays nicely with his natural smokiness. He’s like a hearth-fire, or the smoke from a birthday candle. He is the absolute essence of sanctuary, the lantern that lights everything inside and the candle by which Aziraphale reads.

Aziraphale finds himself pressed against Crowley’s chest, talking to his heart. This is as good a time as he will find, Aziraphale suspects, to get them both on the same page.

“I have no intention of making you uncomfortable, but I do believe there are things which should be stated plainly,” he begins. Suppose Crowley doesn’t want to talk about feelings? He’s never particularly been a fan.

“Right.” Crowley swallows. Aziraphale watches his throat, bobbing like he’s gulped his anxiety down. “It’s fine. Say what you need.”

Aziraphale does not rush. He does find, however, that it’s easier to say this when they’re embracing so closely. Perhaps the symbolism of removing clothes in literature has rubbed off on him; it feels as if his defenses are already about as far down as they could be, and Crowley is still here with him. Surely he won’t be chased away now. “Ah. Alright then. I wanted to say...you must know that I love you dearly, Crowley. You knew, didn’t you?”

A breath, as if of...relief? “I think I knew.” Crowley squeezes, caressing Aziraphale’s hair. “I knew.”

“I don’t expect--”

“I have something to say, too,” Crowley interrupts, then hesitates.

“Oh?”

“Well.” He clears his throat. “Everything’s always been all topsy-turvy since the Fall, good is bad, bad is good. Makes it harder to say the truth, you know? Since the Beginning.” He sighs and waits; hoping to soothe him, Aziraphale strokes Crowley’s back, where his wings would join his body if he had them out. “Somewhere deep down, I think I always knew. But Armageddon made me admit it. I love you, angel. Wasn’t made for it. But here I am.”

Aziraphale sneaks a glance up at Crowley’s face. He’s peering back, watching for Aziraphale’s reaction. And indeed, there are still things in this world they don’t see eye-to-eye on. He doesn’t want to mess this up, accidentally hurt Crowley or come across the wrong way.

“I think,” Aziraphale says carefully, “you’re fantastically good at it.”

A huge smile breaks across Crowley’s face. Never has Aziraphale known such completion. He squeezes again, hoping that Crowley can feel exactly how cherished he is. Meanwhile, Crowley returns the favor, pressing a kiss to the top of Aziraphale’s head.

Unlike the fraught impositions of Heaven and Hell, the touch that Crowley and Aziraphale share contains the thrill of mutual consent. Theirs is the adoring deep-touch of full-body skin on skin, of scarlet sunrays coming to rest on evening clouds, of roots in the soil. And it is the hold of two clasped hands, of braids winding together, of the nautilus curling into its shell. Each holds and is held. They wind around each other, naked and happy, as interwoven as the Earthly fabric that surrounds them, as interwoven as the fabric of the universe itself.

#good omens #ineffable husbands #ineffable partners #ineffable spouses

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pikapeppa · 5 years

Text

Fenris/f!Hawke pirate smut: Hands

Chapter 23 of @schoute‘s and my beloved pirate AU Where The Winds Of Fortune Take Me is up on AO3! Read it here. It was actually up on Friday but I went away and didn’t have time to post it and I just got home and CAN I STAY HOME FROM WORK TOMORROW PLEASE I’m so fucking tired~

In which... well, the title is relatively self-explanatory. And because I’m still sobbing over it, some beautiful gift art for the previous chapter from the insanely talented @lethendralis-paints!

!- FENRIS -

Fenris lay on his bed gazing up at the ceiling in a happy daze. His entire body still felt like it was buzzing from his and Hawke’s long meandering conversation on the forecastle deck this afternoon.

They’d shared little bittersweet stories of their childhoods, and Fenris marveled at the strangeness of being able to share those stories at all, now that Hawke knew his past. She flirted outrageously with him, which he was able to finally enjoy without reservation, and when Fenris flirted back, her delighted laughter was the most thrilling reward. She prodded him to talk about his favourite places that he’d travelled with Piper, and her questions were incessant as always. But for the first time since they’d met, he was able to fully answer them.

He could look at her beautiful face and he could openly admire her bright and brilliant smile, because he had nothing left to hide. Hawke had seen the worst of his past, and she wanted to be with him anyway.

Somehow, despite his attempts to push her away and his undeserved coldness, Hawke loved him. And Fenris wanted nothing more than to be wrapped in her arms again.

Unfortunately, Anders had returned to the ship with an armful of new medical tomes and had called Hawke away to look at some blasted thing or another. Fenris forced himself to let her go, and he’d busied himself as best he could by cleaning and sharpening the Lady Luck’s store of weapons. But the afternoon had gradually melted into evening, and it had been hours now since Anders had pulled Hawke away…

Fenris pushed aside his frustration. He was too thrilled about the turn this day had taken to be truly annoyed. He settled his head more comfortably on his pillow and closed his eyes.

The weight of Hawke’s slender body resting over his hips and her affectionate arms around his shoulders… he couldn’t decide whether he preferred that breathtaking embrace, or the careful stroke of her fingers over his scarred and spoiled skin. For weeks he’d imagined the feeling of her hands on his skin, but the fantasies were always tainted by shame at the thought of being seen. Ah yes, shame: that vicious but well-earned byproduct of the disgust in the mineworkers’ eyes when he was forced to punish them.

But Hawke never looked at him with disgust. From the first time they’d spoken in the market in Kirkwall, the look in her eyes had been nothing short of enthusiastic. No, even before that: that time when they’d spotted each other while she was standing on the steps of Lowtown, before they ever even spoke. Her smile was mischief and heat and openness, and never even a hint of disgust.

He wanted her to look at him that way again. Kaffas, he wanted her to touch him again with tenderness like she had this afternoon. No, not just with tenderness, but with urgency like she had when he’d pinned her to the floor and kissed her, right here in his cabin…

A wriggle of warmth twisted in his belly. He shifted restlessly on his bed, then rolled onto his unwounded side.

He wanted to see her. Surely she was finished studying with Anders by now. And even if she wasn’t, it wouldn’t be strange for him to go and find out what she was up to. He’d interrupted their sessions before, after all.

But the thought of going to her… Even after everything that had been said, even with everything laid bare between them, there was still a small and visceral part of his heart that balked at the thought of making his feelings so plain, and for the second time in one day. Perhaps these nerves were to be expected after spending the past few years so profoundly alone, but it didn’t make it any less frustrating.

Fenris rolled onto his back again and stared at the ceiling for a minute longer. Then he pushed himself upright and slid off of the bed. But before he could pull on his tunic, there was a knock at the door.

Hawke? His heart lodged itself in his throat. He hoped it was Hawke. She was the only person he wanted to see right now.

He strode over to the door and cracked it open, then threw it wide. Hawke was standing at the threshold, and as soon as she laid eyes on him, her face lit up with a grin.

“Well well, what’s this?” she purred. Her gaze slid slowly over his bandaged chest. “Were you waiting all lovely and half-naked just for me?”

“Perhaps I was,” he said. He stepped back to let her in.

To his amusement, she blushed. She laughed and fanned herself playfully as she stepped into his room. “Well, that’s a treat I won’t turn down,” she said.

Fenris gave her a half-smile. She was moving around his room in a slow and aimless manner, and when she paused near his rumpled bed, his heart flipped with excitement.

And perhaps a little anxiety.

She nibbled her lower lip, and Fenris swallowed as the silence between them started to grow heavy. Then she turned to face him.

His breath stopped for a moment. Her clear coppery eyes were hot with intent, but her next words were very innocuous.

“Are you hungry? Did you eat anything?” she asked.

Slightly nonplussed, he shook his head. “Are you?”

She shook her head as well. “I had something with Anders. But I’ll come to the galley with you if you want–”

“I’m not hungry,” he assured her. The buzzing feeling deep in his abdomen was definitely not hunger, at least not of the kind she meant.

She nodded and nibbled her lip, and Fenris returned her stare in silence. She was standing near his bed, and he was standing near the door, and the gap between them seemed so incredibly enormous, and he wanted nothing more than to cross it. But he felt somehow frozen in place, paralyzed by the terrifying and delicious want that was humming through his limbs more strongly with every beat of his heart…

He took a step toward her. Then another. Then he was standing in front of her, and her chin was tilted up and her palms were resting lightly on his bandaged abdomen, and her lush raspberry lips were parting–

“Fenris, I don’t think we should, um, make love tonight,” she blurted.

He blinked, and her pinkened cheeks flamed red. “If that’s even what you were thinking, I mean,” she babbled. “That is, I hope you were thinking the same thing as me. I swear half the time when I think about you it’s to think about ripping your clothes off, but I don’t think we should tonight because you’re wounded and I don’t want to hurt you by accident…”

A little squiggle of disappointment and relief made its way through his belly. Perhaps she was right. It would be moving a little fast if they had sex tonight. Even if it would mean bringing his fondest and most intimidating fantasies to life.

He took a reluctant step away from her. “A wise thought,” he said softly. “There’s no need to rush.”

She blew out a breath. “Speak for yourself. I’ve been wanting to throw myself at you since I set foot on this ship.”

Fenris huffed out a quiet laugh. “Would you believe it if I said I felt the same?”

Her eyes and her smile widened. “No, actually,” she said. “I’d believe you if you said you wanted to throw me off the ship the second I set foot on it.”

He winced. She was joking, but her words still struck a little too true.

He ran a hand through his hair. “Hawke, I… I’m sorry. I have not been kind–”

She grabbed his hand in both of hers. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding! Maker’s balls, I’m just…” She squeezed his hand and beamed at him. “Honestly, I’m just so happy that you like me. I still feel like I should be pinching myself in case this is a dream.”

Fenris swallowed hard. It felt paltry to say he simply liked her. He meant it when he said he felt the same as Hawke. She claimed never to have felt this way about anyone else; Fenris too had never known anyone who made him feel such a deep and giddy fondness, not even in the occasional dalliances of his youth.

He loved Hawke. It might only have been just over a month that they’d been on the ship together, but he loved her just the same. But he’d also never confessed those words to anyone before: certainly not to any lover, and not to his mother nor to Varania, not that he could recall.

But he wanted to tell Hawke. He wanted to return the words she’d said to him, those words that meant so much. But in that guarded and cowardly part of his heart, he was still too afraid.

He twined his fingers with hers and admired the contrast of her pale golden skin with his darker complexion. When he lifted his eyes to her face again, she was smiling hopefully.

“Can we lie on your bed?” she asked. “Or is that too bold to ask?”

He nodded, and Hawke smiled more broadly before releasing his hand and crawling onto his bed.

Fenris slowly sat on the edge of the bed, then laid on his back with his hands resting on his belly just as he usually did. Beside him, Hawke rolled onto her side to face him and tucked one arm beneath her head.

His heart started to thrum a joyful beat in his chest, laced with just a hint of nerves. He’d never shared a bed with anyone before. When he first became the master-at-arms and moved into this cabin, even having a bed that was large enough for two felt like a needless luxury. To think he now had someone who wanted him, someone who loved him and wanted to share this bed with him…

He swallowed the lump in his throat. Then Hawke spoke in a soft voice. “Fenris, can I ask you something?”

He turned his head to look at her, and was surprised to find her looking quite serious. “What is it?” he said quietly.

“How did you leave Minrathous?” she asked. “Varania escaped by winning over a merchant. How did you escape?”

He released a slow sigh and looked up at the ceiling once more. “I didn’t escape right away,” he admitted. “I remained under Danarius’s thumb for nearly a year after Varania left.”

“Why?” she asked softly.

“It didn’t occur to me to leave,” he said. “I… had forgotten what it meant to be free.” He sighed again, then looked at her. “You have not been a slave, Hawke. A slave does not dream of freedom or wonder at possibilities. I thought only of keeping Danarius happy in order to keep my sister safe.”

Her expression was serious and sympathetic, but somehow her sympathy didn’t grate at him the way it did before. Then she reached for his wrist.

He glanced down. Her hand was sliding over his, and her fingers were twining between his own. Then she shifted a little closer to him and pulled his hand toward her, tucking it close against her chest.

He swallowed hard at the tenderness of her gesture, then continued to tell his tale. “After Varania left, I was… I felt more hopeless than before. It did not occur to me to run away until I saw some other slaves fighting for their freedom.”

Her eyes widened. “You saw a rebellion?”

“Yes,” he said. “At the lyrium mines. It happened when I was there one day with Danarius. The slaves rose up and fought back. They used their own shackles and their mining tools as weapons. They even managed to kill a few of the slavers.”

“Wow,” Hawke breathed.

He nodded. “Danarius made me protect him, but… to see that slaves could fight? That they were willing to die for a chance to be free? It… it forced me to think. And I did think, for months.” He turned his head to face the ceiling again. “Then, one morning when Danarius approached to shackle me as he did every day, I killed him.”

“Just like that?” she said in surprise.

He shot her a sharp look. “It was not easy,” he said. “I had spent most of my life doing what he told me to do. But the disbelief in his face when I crushed the breath from his miserable throat…” He curled his lip. “He never expected such agency from me. He thought I was but a pet that he had tamed. His tamed little wolf.” He scowled at the memory. “An ignominious death was the justice he deserved.”

Hawke was silent for a moment. She stroked his knuckles with her thumb, soothing away his momentary agitation.

“What happened then?” she asked.

“I ran,” he said quietly. “I was pursued by the city guard and wounded, but I killed them and escaped. I stowed away on a Seheronese fishing trawler, but they eventually found me; it was a small ship, after all. And…” He exhaled slowly and shrugged. “Well, you have heard the rest.”

She shuffled closer to him. “You liked being on the fishing boat, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “I did. They were kind and quiet. They taught me to sail, as I told you. I knew them only a few months, but in that time, I felt as if I truly lived.” He shook his head slowly. “It made it all the harder to tolerate the return to slavery when the pirates came.” He took a deep breath and looked away from her. “By the time Piper and Varric raided the slaver ship, I… I had almost given up.”

Hawke was quiet for a moment as she ran her thumb gently along the side of his hand. “I don’t believe that,” she said eventually.

He looked at her. “You don’t believe what?”

“That you would give up. You’re too strong for that.”

He frowned slightly. “You didn’t know me before. I was… cowed. Hopeless.”

“If you were really hopeless, why did you join Piper’s crew?” she asked. “Piper told me she gave you the option to go to the colonies with the other slaves. But you didn’t leave. You stayed on the Lady Luck.”

He shrugged a little irritably. One again, Hawke was giving him more credit than he was due. “I was angry,” he said. “I wanted the slavers to suffer. Being on this ship gave me the option to fight back.”

Hawke shrugged and continued to stroke his hand with her thumb. “That sounds like a strong choice to me. A fighter’s choice.”

He shot her a flat look, but his irritation was short-lived. Her expression was confident and affectionate and perfectly lovely.

He carefully rolled onto his unwounded right side so he was facing her. “Ever the optimist, Hawke,” he murmured.

She smiled. “That’s me. Rynne Hawke, the insufferable optimist.”

He gazed adoringly at the cheeky twist of her smile and the warmth in her coppery eyes. “You are not insufferable,” he told her. Then he smirked. “I would gladly suffer your company whenever you deign to give it.”

She laughed brightly, then shifted closer to him. “Was that supposed to be a smooth line? Because it was not so smooth.”

He smiled more broadly, but his heart had just kicked into an excited rhythm. Hawke was very close now, close enough that their slightly-bent knees were touching and her nose was a mere few inches from his.

He wanted to find a clever response, but he couldn’t. Hawke was so near, near enough that he could smell her warm sandalwood scent. She was still holding his hand, but he wanted to hold more than just her hand; he wanted to hold her, to have her body pressed tightly to his the way it had been earlier when she embraced him on the forecastle deck–

And she was moving closer. No, that wasn’t true; he was moving closer, shuffling nearer to her on the bed so that he could hear the gentle sound of her breath as she inhaled through her parted lips–

And he kissed her. After weeks of waiting and wanting and agonizing, Fenris was kissing Hawke for the second time. But this time couldn’t be more different than the last.

The last time he’d kissed her, his mind was a turmoil of lust and anger and uncertainty. That kiss was a moment more bitter than sweet, burned into his memory as a perfect example of passion that he both regretted and idolized, but this…

This was completely different. There was no regret here. There was no anger and no angst. Instead, there was the longing that had been living in his heart for weeks, which Hawke was finally able to fulfill with the sweetness of her mouth. There was the love that she’d proclaimed to him this afternoon in the deck, and he could only pray she was feeling its return in the impassioned press of his lips to hers.

Her parted lips were soft beneath his own, and her waist was a smooth dip beneath his roaming hand. She was perfect, and this kiss was perfect, and it became even more so when she cradled his neck in her palm and shifted closer still.

He encouraged her closeness, pulling her body flush to his with his arm around her waist, and when their hips pressed together, she broke away with a gasp.

Fenris pulled back slightly and opened his eyes. Her eyes were still closed. “Are you all right?” he whispered.

She nodded and slid her fingers into his hair. “Kiss me again, you handsome fool.”

He smirked, but he was more than happy to comply with her cheeky demand. He coaxed her lips open by gently nipping her plump lower lip, and when he gently lapped at her tongue, she whimpered and pressed against his groin.

He exhaled shakily against her mouth. Her lithe body was pressed firmly to his, and the skin of her back was soft and temptingly warm where his errant palm had slid beneath her tunic. Despite her words and the wisdom of taking things slow, he wanted… fasta vass, Fenris wanted her, and he could openly admit that he wanted her, and that alone – the simple and joyful ability to confess that he wanted Hawke: it just made him want her all the more desperately.

He propped himself up on his right elbow and abruptly pulled her closer before kissing her again. She was practically beneath him now, and her fingers were clutching his shoulder in a firm grip, and–

And then her fingers left his shoulder. She was grabbing his hand firmly and pulling it away from the soft warm skin of her back. She slid his greedy fingers up over her waist and then over her ribs–

Then Hawke arched her spine and pressed his hand to her breast, and he gasped into her mouth. He could feel her nipple beneath his palm, so firm that it was budding through her loose tunic…

Her tunic. He could feel her nipple through her tunic.

She wasn’t wearing a breastband or a bustier.

He broke away from her lips. “Festis bei umo canavarum,” he groaned.

She pressed his hand more firmly to her breast. “What does that mean?” she breathed. “Something nice, I hope?”

He gazed at her with a mixture of adoration and total exasperation. “It means ‘you will be the death of me’,” he said. He reached down and inched his fingers beneath the hem of her tunic.

She burst out a little laugh, but seconds later she was panting fitfully, a rapid desperate staccato of breath as his hand moved higher over her ribs. “I’m sorry,” she whimpered. “I just, I – I don’t want to interfere with your wound…”

He cupped her bare breast in his palm. She gasped and arched toward him, and he kissed her parted lips once more before pulling away. “Don’t apologize,” he murmured. “Perhaps I can do something that won’t affect my wound.”

“Like what?” she panted. Then she grinned. “Fenris, are you going to teach me something?”

He smiled back at her and stroked her nipple with his thumb. He was hardly an expert in this arena; it had been years since he’d been with anyone. But hopefully Hawke wouldn’t be able to tell.

“I could,” he said. “Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” she said loudly. “Maker’s balls, yes. I…” She broke off, then clumsily started pulling her tunic up, and Fenris gaped at her stupidly as she pulled the garment off and threw it to the floor.

Hawke was half-naked, bare to him from the waist up, and she was… venhedis, she was beautiful. Small breasts and tight budded nipples and skin that would be a burnished gold if it saw more of the sun, and the delicate lines of her collarbones rising and falling as she panted for breath, and as Fenris shamelessly admired her, he couldn’t quite believe his fortune. She was here, in his bed with his hand roaming from her slender neck over the crux of her collarbones and down, and as he happily lowered his mouth to her breast, he couldn’t help but marvel at the difference a single day could make.

In the space of a single day, he now found himself curled on his bed with Hawke’s willing body stretching beneath him as he tasted the delicate tip of her breast. Her hands were pulling gently at his hair and her pleading voice was floating through his ears, and… fasta vass, this was everything he’d barely dared to want, and now that she was here, he could admit that he hadn’t really thought this would happen, not truly.

Having Hawke here… it had been a hope. A very dear hope that was too close to his guarded heart, and despite his vague intention to tell her how he felt in Afsaana, Fenris hadn’t really trusted that this could all come true.

But Hawke had brought his hopes to life. She was his hopes brought to life, a lucid dream given colour and form and sound, and as his hand slid down her ribs and over the planes of her belly, he marvelled at how very tangible she was.

Her breath was sharp in his ears as he unbuttoned her breeches, and the movements of her hands were impatient and rough as she shoved her breeches down, and the glossy sheen between her legs was the most enticing indication of how strongly this foray was wanted by them both.

She grabbed his hand. “Teach me,” she begged.

He smiled. Only Hawke would make that particular request of him with this particular degree of nakedness. And only Hawke had ever tempted him to want to fulfill such a request.

He pulled his hand from her grip and stroked his fingers between her legs.

She arched her whole body and spread her legs wider. “Fenris,” she mewled.

He captured her gasping lips in a kiss. He smoothed his fingers slowly through her slippery warmth, but she was bucking her hips desperately fast, and Fenris eventually peeled away from her lips to whisper against her ear.

“Move with me, Hawke,” he told her. “It is not a race.”

She slowed down with a groan of frustration. “But I want you so much…”

“I’m right here,” he whispered.

“I know,” she whined. “I know. But I really…” She broke off with a gasp as he stroked the swollen bud between her legs.

“Focus your attention here,” he said quietly. “Tell me if you want more or less.”

She strained against his hand. “A little less,” she panted.

He lessened the pressure of his fingers. A moment later, she twisted on the sheets and spread her legs wider still. “Oh Maker, yes...”

Her voice was high and strained, and it sent a hot rush of lust burning down his throat. He inhaled slowly and kept his fingers light between her legs, and soon she was rolling her hips in a slow rhythm that matched the gentle slide of his finger around her precious tiny bud.

Her cheeks were pink and her raspberry lips were parted with pleasure, and Fenris watched her lovely face with an attentive sort of hunger until she threw her head back in the pillow with a rapturous cry.

She shuddered and pressed her hips insistently toward his hand. “P-please,” she gasped.

He slid his fingers low to stroke her cleft, and she lifted her hips right off the bed. “Fenris, please!” she sobbed.

He stared at her. She was so beautiful and so shameless, begging him with her pleading words and her twisting golden body, and her lack of inhibitions was… well, it was Hawke. This was who Hawke was. She was uninhibited and open, asking him questions and telling him about her life without any reservations at all, offering herself to him and asking him to love her in return, and he’d been too scared to meet her halfway.

But he didn’t want to be scared. He wanted to be open like she was, to give her all the affection she deserved and all the heated press of emotion that he’d kept too close to his chest. And this was how he would start. Here and now, with Hawke’s arching body under his hands, he would start to give her everything.

“What do you want, Hawke?” he asked.

She opened her eyes, and Fenris breathlessly returned her heated stare. Her ribs were rising and falling with the rapid cadence of her breaths, but she didn’t speak.

He lightly petted her glorious heat. “Tell me, and it is done,” he murmured. “Do you want me to do that again?”

“I… I want more,” she panted. “I need… I feel like…” She broke off with a whimper and thrust her hips toward his hand, and Fenris knew what she meant.

He hovered his fingers over her entrance. “Can I–”

“Can you fuck me? Please?” she blurted.

Her drew back slightly in surprise – and undeniable excitement. He was going to suggest sliding his fingers inside of her, but if she wanted him…

She reached for the laces of his breeches, but he gently caught her hands. “I thought you were worried about my wound,” he said. Frankly, he didn’t care about his wounded side; if it started to bleed again, Hawke could simply patch it up. The shining possibility of giving himself to her was overriding any other impulse that he had right now.

She sighed sharply. “I… fuck. You’re right,” she admitted. She pulled her hands from his and pressed her legs together in frustration. “Fuck,” she whined. “I just… Fenris, I really…”

He traced the line of her jaw, then turned her face so she was looking him in the eye. “If you want me, I am yours,” he said softly.

Her frustrated expression melted into an almost disbelieving look of joy, and Fenris’s heart squeezed at the hope in her face. Then she smiled and gently pinched his chin. “Such a smooth talker,” she murmured.

He gave her a little half-smile. Then, without moving his steady gaze from her face, he slid his hand over her knee to pull her legs apart.

Her breathing was growing short and sharp again, and even more so when he ran two fingers through her slippery folds. Then, slowly and carefully, he slid one finger inside of her.

She keened with pleasure and arched beneath him. Venhedis, she was so slick and hot, and the smoothness of her flesh pressing around his finger kicked his rising desperation even higher.

He forced himself to breathe through a fresh and dizzying rush of desire. “Do you want this?” he asked. He curled his finger slightly, and she jerked.

“Yes!” she cried. “Fenris, please!”

He curled his finger again, and she clawed at the bed and sobbed. “I want you so much, it’s not fair…”

He carefully withdrew his finger from her heat, then stroked her cheek with his knuckles. “Then let me do this,” he urged. “I want to be with you.”

She looked at him worriedly. “But what if I hit you in the side with my knee or something clumsy like that? I don’t want to hurt you…”

“It is worth the risk,” he said. “Being with you is worth the risk.” As soon as he said the words, he realized it wasn’t just the sex that he was talking about, not anymore.

Fenris didn’t like taking risks. For as long as he could remember, he avoided taking chances when the potential losses were more than he could afford. But not being with Hawke – not taking that risk to let her in all those weeks ago when she’d first offered herself to him: he’d regretted that choice ever since, and he wasn’t going to make that same mistake again.

He ran his thumb along her cheekbone. “It is my risk to take, Hawke. I want this.”

A slow and brilliant grin lit her face, and she eagerly nodded. “All right. Yes. Yes, let’s–”

He cut her off with a kiss. Her tongue stroked his own, and her fingers were tugging at the laces of his breeches once more and loosening the knots and–

And she was touching him. Her impatient fingers had burrowed into his half-loosened breeches, and she was stroking his cock.

“Hawke,” he moaned.

She tried to wrap her fingers around him, but his breeches weren’t loose enough. “Please,” she mewled.

“W-wait a moment,” he panted. He pulled her hand out of his breeches and pushed the garment down with his left hand, ignoring the ache in his side as he twisted to free himself. But before his breeches were fully down to his knees, Hawke was pulling impatiently on his hips.

And her impatience was feeding his own. His breathing was just as harsh and hurried as Hawke’s, and it grew harsher still as she pushed herself up on one hand and kissed his neck.

Her tongue on the side of his throat, and now her teeth in a gentle nip, fasta vass... Fenris gasped for breath and shoved desperately at his breeches. At long last, he finally kicked them away and settled between her legs, and when he was poised and ready, he looked her in the face.

Her eyes were wide and her breaths were sharp, and her fingers were clenching against his arms. As Fenris stared at her, he was seized by a ringing sense of unreality. He’d imagined this so many times – what it would be like to have Hawke beneath him, and to have her treasured hands on his marked skin and her treasured body sharing his bed. He’d imagined this and wished for this and rued the thought that he might never have it, and now that she was here…

Venhedis, he was nervous. It had been so long since he’d done this, and just as long since anyone other than those vile Tevinter doctors had seen his body bare. And no one had ever mattered so much before. Hawke was so important, and this was her first time, and Fenris needed to make it right.

She stroked his cheek. “Are you all right?” she asked.

He snapped his attention back to her. “Yes,” he said. “Everything is fine.”

She studied him for a moment, then smiled. “It’s all right, Fenris. I’m nervous too.”

He sighed and bowed his head. “I’m sorry,” he lamented. “It’s… it has been some time.” He shook his head dismissively. “But it doesn’t matter now. You have never–”

She stroked his hair. “How long?”

“Six years, give or take,” he said.

Her fingers went still in his hair. “Why so long?”

He took a deep breath. “I received the tattoos six years ago,” he told her. “The way those doctors looked at me and… handled me. I did not want to be touched after that.” He remembered it all too clearly: the humiliation of their cold eyes on his naked skin and their clinical hands prodding and cutting his unwilling body, and the months of agony as the lyrium scars healed.

Strange hands on his skin and strange eyes on his naked body. He shoved the memory away and looked into Hawke’s wide whiskey-coloured eyes. “I did not want to be touched,” he told her. “I barely wanted to be looked at. But it is different now,” he assured her. “With you, it is different.”

“Are you sure?” she breathed. She looked quite stricken now. “I don’t mean to…” She covered her mouth with one hand. “I’m so stupid, Fenris,” she mumbled. “I didn’t even think about all of that. I mean, I knew you didn’t want the tattoos, but I didn’t… I just thought you wanted me to keep my greedy pervy hands to myself.”

He shook his head. “You’re mistaken. Yours are the only hands I have wanted.”

She swallowed hard, then dropped her gaze and bit her lip, and Fenris watched her with a fresh and heart-wrenching surge of affection.

He tipped her chin up until she met his gaze. Her eyes were wet, and Fenris studied her fondly for a moment before speaking.

“Hawke,” he said softly. “I never needed anyone, or wanted anyone. Until now.”

A tear escaped the corner of her eye, and she beamed at him. “Keep up that smooth talk, you handsome fool,” she said. “It’ll get you everywhere with me.”

He grinned, then flexed his hips and slid his cock against her.

Her smile melted into a look of pleasure and surprise, and Fenris continued to rock himself between her legs until they were both panting fitfully. She was so very slick and warm, and his cock was pulsing with want, and any remaining nerves he had were chased away by the temptation between her legs.

He pressed his forehead to hers. “Are you ready?” he breathed.

She stroked his face. “Yes,” she panted. “I’m ready.”

He nodded tightly, then reached down with his left hand and positioned himself at her entrance. Then, very slowly, he began to fill her up.

A breathy moan escaped her lips, and Fenris caught it with his lips and fed his own pleasured moan back to her. Her fingers were tightening on his biceps with every slow shift of his hips, and by the time he was fully sheathed, her nails were biting into his skin.

He broke away from her kiss and pressed his lips to her ear. “Are you all right?” he breathed.

“Yes,” she whimpered. “I… I feel so fucking full.” She burst out a breathless little laugh.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“No, no,” she said hastily. “No, it’s… I...” She shifted her hips experimentally, taking him just a little bit deeper.

Fenris jerked with pleasure, and she gasped and tilted her hips, and he dropped his lips to her neck. “V-venhedis...” he groaned, and he nipped her damp neck.

She let out another little sob of pleasure and tilted her hips toward him. “I hope that means something nice?” she moaned.

He couldn’t reply. She felt so good and she tasted like sweetness and salt, and he couldn’t find the words to respond.

He kissed her hard and flexed his hips, and her cry of pleasure echoed into his mouth. They fell into a slow and rolling rhythm, hips meeting and moving apart in a smooth and steady grind, and a dull pang of pain pulled at his wounded left side with every thrust. But Hawke’s fingers were twisting in his hair and stroking his neck, and the slick pleasure of her body and her tender hands on his skin was more than enough to drown the pain away.

They moved together in tandem, and Fenris inhaled her scent and her breath and her eager little cries, and with every stroke of her hands and every glorious thrust, his sense of giddy wellbeing continued to grow: Hawke was here, sweat-laced and panting with pleasure and pushing him toward his peak with her every ecstatic cry, and before he knew it, before he meant for it to happen, he was shuddering and releasing his rapture as a guttural groan against her throat.

She tilted her head back with a gasp, and Fenris nipped her neck, leaving a delirious trail of tiny bites along the margins of her throat until his climax left him boneless.

He sighed and relaxed into Hawke’s supine form. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, and as their sweat dissipated into the relative cool of his cabin, her hands began to move.

He sighed leisurely into her collarbone. Her slender hands were drifting over his back, trailing slowly over the raised scars that traversed his skin. There was something so soothing about the feel of her hands, the firm stroke of her uncallused fingers and the care they left in their wake, and Fenris wished there was some way to capture this moment perfectly in his memory, like a carefully rendered oil painting. With every gentle pass of her hands across his back, it was like she was wiping the old memories away, pushing away the pain and the hurt and clearing space for her own caring caresses instead.

More than the sex, more than the pleasure he’d stroked from Hawke’s twisting body or the rapture she’d pulled from him with the rolling of her hips, this moment of afterglow stood out: this feeling of her hands on his body – her hands and all the love and pleasure and care that she gave to him by smoothing them across his scarred and knotted skin.

“Do they hurt?” she murmured. “The scars?”

He drew in a deep, relaxed breath. “Not anymore, no.”

She hummed in acknowledgement, then traced the tip of his ear delicately with her fingers. “Well, if they do ever hurt, I’ve been told that massage is very good for painful scars.”

He huffed in amusement. “Is that so?”

“It is,” she said pertly.

He lifted himself on his elbows to look down at her. “Are you any good at massage?” he asked.

She smiled cheekily. “Well, we’ll never know unless I try.”

He chuckled, and her smile broadened before turning soft and sweet. She reached up and brushed a lock of hair from his eyes. “You look happy,” she said softly.

He regarded her with some surprise. “I am happy,” he said. Then he realized how significant this was.

He was happy. Fenris was happy. And it was a deeper happiness than the momentary amusement of bantering with Piper and Varric. It was a richer sense of wellbeing than the fleeting peace he derived from meditating at the bow of the ship. For the first time in years, Fenris felt peaceful and good all the way down to his muscles and the core of his belly.

“Are you happy?” he asked her.

She grinned at him. “Are you kidding? This is exactly what I wanted. I’ve never been more happy.”

He stroked her cheek. “Neither have I,” he murmured.

Her grin softened into something so heart-poundingly sweet, and Fenris gazed at her in total adoration. That soft smile on her face: this was the smile that had drawn him unerringly since the day they’d met, and which he’d fled for fear of what he might lose.

But now, in the warmth of Hawke’s arms and the heat of her gentle smile, there was no fear. There were no reservations. There was the desire that they’d finally sated, and there was the love he had yet to speak.

And most of all, there was happiness.

#fenris #fenris fic #fenris smut #where the winds of fortune take me #pirate au #fenhawke #fenris/hawke #fenris x hawke #fenris/f!hawke #fenris x f!hawke #fenris/femhawke #fenris x femhawke #fenrynne #pikapeppa writes #pikascout #lethendralis draws

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queentaylormademedoit · 5 years

Text

How Scott Borchetta’s Statement ‘Exposing’ Taylor Swift Actually Proves Her Point Completely

First, here is Taylor Swift’s open letter:

https://taylorswift.tumblr.com/post/185958366550/for-years-i-asked-pleaded-for-a-chance-to-own-my (if the link is being weird you can find it on her tumblr)

And here is the link to Scott Borchetta’s responding statement:

https://t.co/OqGI4GoN3P

(If the link is being weird you can find it on his twitter)

Think he just revealed shocking information that Swift is an evil, crazy, lying woman who just wants to make ~drama~ for no reason? Think again. Let’s break down his statement piece by piece from the beginning.

To refute Borchetta’s misleading opening statements, Taylor Swift’s father was NOT on the shareholders phone calls because NDAs would not have allowed him to communicate any information to his daughter. Instead 13 Management Lawyer Jay Shaudies and Big Machine LLC Shareholder Frank Bell were on the call to represent her side. The hilarious thing is that Borchetta tries to call into question Taylor’s statement that she “woke up to the news (of the sale to Scooter Braun) with the rest of the world” by saying he thinks it is “possible” that they “didn’t say anything to Taylor over the prior 5 days” and “possible” that she “might not have seen” his text, but that he “truly doubts she woke up to the news when everyone else did”. During the time between June 25 to June 27th, the possible deal in SCOTT BORCHETTA’s OWN WORDS, was a “PROPOSED TRANSACTION”. Meaning, the deal was still in discussion, a vote had not occurred yet and Taylor was hoping that the majority of shareholders would not vote in Braun’s favor. On Friday, June 28th Borchetta says 3 of the 5 shareholders voted yes on the proposal.

Scott then says “I personally texted Taylor at 9:06 on Saturday, June 29th to inform her prior to the story breaking on the morning of June 30th so she could hear it directly from me”. That’s right. He said “so she could hear it directly from me” meaning that he knew he would be the first person to contact her with this information, my guess being that for “courtesy” as he puts it (aka image), he wanted it to come from him. Now, he suggests that Taylor must have seen this text message but here’s a couple things: #1: 9:06pm Nashville time IS nighttime and I imagine when you’re Taylor Swift you’re probably doing something or exhausted and sleeping, #2: MORE IMPORTANTLY it is extremely unlikely that Taylor was in Nashville. many believe that she was in London at this time (where she has a residence with her sweet British man), in which case it would have been 3AM for her. Even if she was in New York it would have been 10pm and she’s TAYLOR SWIFT she probably gets a million messages to go through a day, not to mention probably tries to have some semblance of a personal life. So yes, she did in fact “wake up to the news” that this deal was officially made, with the rest of the world. This is such a stupid detail that Taylor has absolutely no reason to lie about but Scott Borchetta tried to call her character into question with it so there ya go, it’s been addressed.

Moving on.

Her 13 Management team attorney is Donald S. Passman (also known as ‘the author of music law’-Roy Trakin, Grammy.com) who went over the initial “offer” (if you can even call it that) which Scott Borchetta made to Taylor. As Passman has explicitly said in public statements, “Scott Borchetta never gave Taylor Swift an opportunity to purchase her masters, or the label, outright with a check in the way he is now apparently doing for others”. This “offer” was NOT for such a purchase.

Taylor Swift had expressed to Scott Borchetta multiple times that she wanted a chance to bid outright for control of her masters, but was always denied. Considering how much her body of work of the last 13 years means to her (6 record-breaking, award winning albums with songs she penned from the heart), Taylor was reluctant to walk away, because she knew Borchetta would likely sell, and she’d never own her masters. So, her team discussed the possibilities of what control she could get over her works if she stayed for 7 years, but Scott Borchetta “offered” back that she stay on for 10 more years and could essentially earn these rights in trade for new materials created with the label. That is basically trapping her into a continuous cycle.

Scott is aware that this was not a good deal, as he defends himself in his statement saying, “We are an independent record company. We do not have tens of thousands of artists and recordings. My offer to Taylor, for the size of our company, was extraordinary. But it was also all I could offer as I am responsible for over 120 executives and their families”. While he tries to tug the heartstrings of readers to make him look so caring, the fact of the matter is this: Taylor Swift was the ONLY massive superstar that Scott Borchetta was ever able to get onto his label (not to mention she was his first client and the label was literally created because he found her and convinced a 15 year old girl and her family that in signing a 12 year contract he would remain loyal and supportive because ‘music has value’). Without Taylor’s works on the label, no big deal executive would likely want to buy it and certainly wouldn’t be worth $300 million. If Scott Borchetta really cared about the fact that he is “responsible for over 120 executives and their families” and believed that “music has value” he could have been open to the possibility of Taylor staying on for 7 more years and having greater ownership of the art she creates.

So, when Scott Borchetta stated that “Taylor Swift had every chance in the world to own not just her master recordings, but every video, photograph, everything associated with her career” he really means that she had the chance to very slowly gain these things back over the period of 10 YEARS in exchange for new music (which many have compared to a scare tactic, because he knew losing her would make his label next to worthless). That is not an opportunity for a purchase. Borchetta says Taylor chose to leave, and that is true: she made the excruciating decision to leave because she realized that if she stayed with Big Machine she would never be treated with the respect she deserved to own all that she creates. Also, I imagine being the only pop superstar on a small country artists label likely had its downsides. So, she sacrificed the rights to her past in exchange for a freer future. A painful choice, knowing that Scott Borchetta would likely sell one day, but she never imagined that he would be so disrespectful as to sell to Scooter Braun.

Now, let’s get into that part where Scott Borchetta gets EXCEPTIONALLY DESPICABLE :)

He says that he “certainly never experienced” Taylor “‘being in tears or close to it’ anytime Scooter Braun’s name was brought up”. That’s pretty much her word against his, but regardless of wether or not he knew she was about to cry in such moments, he knew that there was conflict. Borchetta writes, “Was I aware of some prior issues between Taylor and Justin Bieber? Yes,”. Those “issues” as absolutely everyone knows, DIRECTLY INVOLVED Scooter Braun, as was evident when Justin Bieber posted that photo to Instagram of himself FaceTiming Kanye, Scooter Braun, and another man I have yet to identify, captioned “Taylor Swift what up”.

That post showed that these men were publicly laughing at what a lot of people thought would be Taylor Swift’s downfall. At that time, Kim Kardashian (Kanye’s wife) had released snippets of an orchestrated phone call between Kanye and Taylor which was recorded without Taylor’s knowledge. In that “scathing phone call” Kim shared with the world, Taylor agreed for Kanye to include the line “I think me and Taylor might still have sex”, in his new song, which she said was provacative but fine. In that phone call Kanye said he would have her listen to the full song later, but this never happened. He then went on to release the song and music video in which he used the line “I made that bitch famous” (supposedly referencing when he grabbed the microphone out of her hand during her VMA speech when she was 19 years old, to say he thought Beyoncé should have won, much to the disdain of Beyoncé), implying that he was the reason for her (actually hard-earned success), and showed her naked likeness in a hyperrealistic wax figure lain next to him in a bed. He also showed other celebrities nude in this same way, which I personally found equally disturbing. The figures were so realistic that articles immediately came out with headlines like “Was Anyone Real In Kanye West’s Famous Video?”. I agree with Taylor Swift’s statement that this was a form of revenge porn. He visually stripped her naked without her consent in front of the entire world because instead of taking accountability for his own actions (HE is the one who ran onstage and grabbed that mic in 2009 and made himself look like a huge jerk), he decided it was in some twisted awful way her fault that he did that. It tarnished his image, and he dreaded having to publicly apologize to her afterwards even though Taylor was very accepting and actually thought they’d started fresh and new, happily sharing this news publicly.

So yes, I agree with Taylor Swift that those actions should be classified as a form of revenge porn. And I think that anyone who dares to say that her suffering isn’t ‘bad enough’ to call it that, I say you don’t get to determine how profoundly damaging someone else’s level of pain from an experience that you did not have is.

There no possible way that Scott Borchetta was not aware of the extremely difficult position Taylor Swift was in at that time, because the ENTIRE WORLD was aware of it. And Scooter Braun’s implications as manager of Kanye West were without a doubt, known to Scott Borchetta.

In his post, Borchetta continues, claiming, “there were also times when Taylor knew that I was close to Scooter and that Scooter was a very good source of information for upcoming album releases, tours, etc, and I’d reach out to him for information on our behalf. Scooter was never anything just positive about Taylor,”. Taylor being fine with Borchetta communicating with Braun to get information about things like upcoming albums/tours hardly means a thing. If Borchetta had a business source he could ask for information without Taylor’s direct involvement, of course she wouldn’t care. And of course Scooter Braun would not be dumb enough to say bad things about Taylor Swift directly to the owner of Taylor Swift’s label. Obviously, it doesn’t mean that he didn’t share such thoughts to others (go check out Todrick Hall’s recent tweets).

Now, here is where Borchetta goes for a REALLY LOW BLOW:

Borchetta writes, “He [Scooter Braun] called me directly about Manchester to see if Taylor would participate (she declined). He called me directly to see if Taylor wanted to participate in the Parkland March (she declined),”. In this disgusting last-ditch attempt to suggest that Taylor didn’t care about the victims of Manchester or Parkland, Borchetta is actually making it clear that TAYLOR SWIFT REFUSED TO ACCEPT AN INVITATION FROM A MANIPULATIVE MAN WHO SHE KNEW HATED HER. Meaning, Scott Borchetta was FULLY AWARE that Swift did not want to work with Braun. Everyone reacts to tragedy differently. Taylor Swift went on to show her love for the victims of those terrible incidents and her opposition to hatred that caused them. Taylor immediately expressed her sympathies on Twitter and honored the Manchester bombing victims on her Reputation stadium tour, on the night when she performed in Manchester. With Scooter Braun being the manager of Ariana Grande, the artist who was performing the night of the Manchester attacks, it makes sense that Taylor wouldn’t have felt entirely comfortable with the situation. She publicly announced her support for the March for Our Lives movement (started by the students of Parkland High School), and made a generous donation to the cause. Furthermore, Swift has gone on to discuss her personal fear of such attacks (many people have stalked her/broken into her home/tried to get onstage etc), her belief that in the importance of preventing such tragedies and the extra preventative efforts she now goes to in order to keep her fans safe in various interviews. Borchetta’s attempt to suggest that Swift has anything but the deepest sympathies for those tragedies is absolutely revolting.

Finally, Borchetta closes his list of lies with the text message he received from Taylor when she told him of her news to leave Big Machine. In this message, she is kind, heartfelt and respectful of the past that they built together. Borchetta tried to take advantage of this kindness by placing it there as if her politeness and choice to go means she had no interest in a better deal with Big Machine at all.

I’ll include this message in its entirety below, so you can read it for yourself:

Scott,

I hope this finds you well. Since communication ran dry on our negotiations, I’ve done what I told you I would do and gone out exploring other options. Owning my masters was very important to me, but I’ve since realized that there are things that mean even more to me in the bigger picture. I had a choice whether to bet on my past or to bet on the future and I think knowing me, you can guess which one I chose. I also saw a rare opportunity to effect positive change for a lot of other artists with the leverage I have right now. I know you believe in the same things I do and I’d like to think you would be proud of what I’ve negotiated for in my deal. I wanted to tell you first that I’ll be signing with Lucian. I honestly truly cherish everything you and I have built together and I plan on saying so in my announcement of the new deal. What we accomplished together will be a lasting legacy and a case study on excellent partnerships, and may it continue. I still view you as a partner and friend and I hope you feel the same. Sending you a hug and my most sincere gratitude.

And SO much love,

Taylor

I think she makes it very clear that although she was disappointed, she weighed her options and decided to “bet on” her future instead of her past. Meaning, when Borchetta refused to offer her the ownership she wanted, she had to respect her own capability enough to make the difficult choice to walk away. She closes with the statement, “I hope you feel the same. Sending you a hug and my most sincere gratitude, and SO much love,” which shows that she hoped he would continue to regard her and her work with the same care and respect she showed him, even when disappointed.

Scott also includes the email he sent Taylor letting her know about the decision to sell to Scooter Braun:

Dear Taylor,

Hope all is well and congratulations on the success of your first two singles from “Lover”!

I can’t wait to hear the entire album…

I wanted to pass along to you the same courtesy that you passed along to me in regard to my future.

Tomorrow morning (Sunday, June 30th) at 10a central, the Wall Street Journal will announce that I am entering into a merger/acquisition with Scooter Braun and Ithaca Holdings. This move will give us more pop culture super-power than ever before and I’m so excited about the future.

I want you to know that I will continue to be the proud custodian of your previous works and will continue to keep you and your team abreast of all future plans for releases of you work.

Nothing but the best,

Scott

The letter is polite and to the point, because he has no need to say something nasty. His actions speak loud enough. He was greedy. Taylor knew Borchetta would sell to someone, but that fact that Borchetta went through with selling the life’s work of a talented woman he knew since she was fourteen years old to one of her greatest public intimidators is the ultimate betrayal.

For everyone saying, “well, that’s just business”, I have some news for you. There are good, loyal people out there in business. There doesn’t seem to be many of them, but they exist, and Scott Borchetta pretended to be one of them. This is a matter of moral principle. Of loyalty. Of ‘valuing music’. Taylor Swift isn’t ‘playing the victim’ and she didn’t ‘send people to attack a good man’. She wasn’t ‘bitching’. She isn’t ‘feuding’. She’s speaking her mind. She’s speaking the truth. She’s warning other artists to look out for themselves and she’s holding people accountable for their actions.

I am so, so proud of her.

Forever a Swiftie,

Grace

@taylorswift @taylornation

#we stand with taylor #yes i write essays about taylor swift in my free time #swifties #taylor swift #taylor nation #taylurking #swiftie blog #Lover #Big Reputation #taylor swift blog #share with people who dont understand whats going on please #artists deserve better #artists deserve to own their own work #give taylor her music back #give taylor her masters

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cosmiciaria · 5 years

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Radiata Stories review! (spoiler free - long post!)

I am SPEECHLESS. I can't believe I spent so many years without knowing about this game. My friend thoroughly recommended it to me but with my ps4 and many other pc games, I just wasn't in the mood for a ps2 oldie. But here I am, and I want to spread the word: play Radiata Stories.

In the world of Radiata, the land is divided into regions that belong to different races: elves, dwarves, orcs, humans (and ronsos – no, sorry, wrong game – but you can't fool me there's a lion guy who looks like Kimahri from FFX). These species have been at odds since time immemorial, and thus the dragons – Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Silver and Gold – have guarded their beings from above.

We follow Jack Russell, a 16-year-old who dreams of becoming a knight. We accompany him to the entrance exams, only to see him fail miserably against a girl, Ridley Silverlake. Despite his clumsiness and obvious embarrassment for having been defeated, he's allowed to join the Radiata Knights, alongside Ridley, only because he's the son of an important late knight. They form a new brigade called Rose Cochon, under Captain Ganz Rothschild's leadership.

This trio will be sent into action in no time. Their dynamics are fun and there's a bit of rivalry between the two new knights, but they get things done. Ganz is proud to finally be able to be captain of his own brigade, and regards his two pupils with care and wisdom. This seems to be the flow the story is going to follow.

An important quest arrives: Rose Cochon brigade must reach the Elf Region and ask the Light Elves leader for a favor. However, things get tough in their journey there: a blood orc attacks the Dark Elves village, and the brigade plunges in to fight and defend.

In the battle, Ridley gets mortally wounded. Jack gets all frantic and desperate, and the brigade asks for the Elves' help. Lord Nogueira, the Dark Elf leader, decides to do the unthinkable for non-humans: the only way to save Ridley is to perform the transpiritation ritual, a spell only available for elves that allows them to take the soul of a dying fellow and use it to heal another one who might still live.

The ritual is successful, and Ridley's soul is fused with that of a small elf who'd died in the battle. Everything seems to settle down for a bit, with Jack and Ganz returning to Radiata City filled with good hopes for Ridley.

The next day, you're fired from the Knights.

This is where the game opens up for you!

From now on, it's just you, Jack, in the middle of a big city, paving his way to the top of the Vancoor Theater guild, the guild of warriors. Since the only thing you can do is fight, better to put it to good use and earn some money in the process!

The game offers a variety of things to do. You can start recruiting people as party members. You know, like, in Dragon Age, you can recruit characters into your team? Or, in any other rpg, that you have a team of five or six characters, maybe some more? Yes? Ok, here in RS you can recruit (listen to me) over 170 characters. Yep, you read right. Mind you, you can't recruit them (catch 'em all) in your first playthrough, but just so you know, yes, this game is that big.

Some people will ask you for a favor before they're added to the 'friend list', but others will join your right off the bat. Once you have a respectable team of four party members that you choose, you can begin doing solo missions, which are the guild's assignments to you and will redound in money and goodies. You get to know the other guild's members, you get to fight alongside them, you get to know and care for the civilians in the city. With a night-day system, if this game is anything, is alive.

NPC's have their own schedule: following the clock in the top left corner, they do and say different stuff depending of the moment of the day you approach them. They're walking around the city, performing random things, making them seem alive. Some events are only available at night, some others only during day. Some people will be nice, others not so much. Some parts of the city will shine, others will look depressing and dirty. Birds chirp, trees are swept by the wind's fine breeze, mosquitoes swarm around – this game breathes life into its pixels in every corner.

Now that we're on the aesthetic aspect, I must admit, this game looks gorgeous. With a very prominent anime artstyle, still it aged pretty well for today's standards: sometimes the lighting was too real, the sunlight pouring from the mountain's side, the character's long shadow stretching onto the road. The animations are good as well, as are the physics: I am beyond amazed by how well clothes and hairs move as flawlessly as if they were real. Each of the recruitable characters have a different victory pose and they have different lines for everything. Some particle effects are really nice, since I didn't think there existed the technology for it back then. The main city is huge, and when I say huge, I mean, every door you see, you can enter, and inside you'll find at least a two-floor building with objects to interact with and people to talk to. And don't even get me started on how BIG the Vareth Institute is in itself – and all that stuff is optional! The world is also vast and filled with brimming elements, although don't be fooled by the illusion of 3D: this game is, mostly, a 2D experience when you want to go from point A to point B.

You'll spend a good chunk of your game doing tasks for the guild. In the meantime, Ganz is somewhere playing the bandit and Ridley is hearing voices in her head. In this 'middle' part of the game, the story seemed to drag on forever for a bit: I wanted to go on with the main plot, and, while you can actually do that (just hit the sleep option over and over until a cutscene appears), the game tends to make you go through long and tedious solo missions to get that Grind™ you need. Dungeons are not long or too big in reality, but the number of encounters (which are forced on you since you can't avoid enemies by circling around most of the times for the 2D aspect) turns what should've been a walk in the park into a dragging hell. This portion of the game, I'm not going to lie, seemed a bit too long for me. And since the gameplay mostly consists in pressing the circle button and hearing Jack yell "Ha! Haiiyaah! Ha! Haiiyaah!" for ten hours straight, yeah, it can get boring.

But I guess the game was trying to make you feel at ease, comfortable around these walls. You're training your fave party members, you go with them everywhere to play the warrior and earn some money, you get occasional messages from Ridley telling you everything's fine – until the plot makes a halt and suddenly you must choose.

I'll keep this spoiler free, but this game is almost fifteen years old, so these are no news: there will come a point where the plot branches into two possible paths, the Human side, and the Non-Human side. I can't tell you which one is right, for there seems to be pros and cons in both, so I'll let your heart decide. For what we care now, I chose the Non-Human side, completely convinced with my decision, only to see myself doubt in many instances.

At this point, your plot shakes. Your comfort zone breaks. Suddenly, things are changing: your team is not there anymore, Ridley acts weird, where the hell is Ganz, what's going on with the dragons? Who am I supposed to trust in this world full of people who just want to exterminate each other?

I won't spoil it. I'll just say, that whatever you choose, please stand firm by your decision. You'll need that conviction, because the game is going to make your ground tremble a few times. And with those endings that await you – man, I don't know if I want to finish either path.

So, to avoid spoilers, I'll talk about the characters a bit!

Jack is your main protagonist, as you could've guessed. He's your average shonen main guy, at least in the beginning hours. He's clumsy, he wants to be a hero, and he even mocks shonen protagonists by saying that he'll awaken to a dormant power and save the world with his friends. But life hits him hard, accuses him of things he hasn't done, and so Jack evolves across the story. His character development is subtle, but it's there: he starts off as a brat who wants to fight, ends on a mature note, with some quite insightful thoughts and reactions I haven't expected from him. Normally, the shonen guy remains a shonen guy; this doesn't happen here. Jack ends up being an adorkable character, worthy of respect, sympathy, and a force to be reckoned with.

Ridley remains a calm force during the game. She's collected, she's well-educated, and she knows her way around. At the beginning, she can't stand Jack much, but as days go by, she starts to consider him as an equal and true friend. In the Non-Human path, her romantic feelings towards him are crystal clear: there's a small spark between them, that flickers every now and then when the plot allows them a moment's respite. Only them and a handful of other characters know the truth behind the transpiritation event, and as such there's a profoundly deep connection that keeps them together, although they're separated most of the story.

Ganz is ma fave boi and he must be protected at all costs. A young and promising man, Ganz was created to be likeable. You can't help but sympathize with his funny appearance: chubby, huge armor, huge sword, and funny moustache. But he's also a man of wisdom, with a golden heart. He's righteous and wants to do good. And he deserves all the love in the world.

Other notable characters are Genius, a scientist who's obsessed with the transpiritation thing that went down, and may know more about the plot than it seems at first glance; Natalie, a guarding woman who works as Ridley's not-so-secret bodyguard; Larks¸ the leader of the Knights and whose motivations remain a mystery to me even to this day – I can't read into this character at all!; Lord Zane, the leader of the Light Elves, who laughs maniacally when no one is watching and I can't bring myself to like him; Gawain, Ganz's father, who disappeared 16 years ago since his best friend died; and Cross, Ridley's fiancé, who just wants to be the best hunter and paves his way to the top of the knight ranks by any means necessary. I hate this guy so much, his only trait is 'I am a bad person' and that's it, he's so cartoonishly evil it makes me want to punch the screen. Probably you see more of him in the Human path, but unless he has a very tragic backstory to redeem him, he's not likeable at all. I mean, you can say that he has ambition and he gets s*it done, but still, damn him, and his voice actor, UGH.

Despite some minor thingies, the relationship between the characters is gold. Jack and Ridley are cute and make me wanna draw the meme of NOW KISS every two seconds. Jack and Ganz are companion goals. Ganz and his father – I loved that they kept their interactions personal and off screen. Idk why, but this story is about Jack, and yes, I care for Ganz as well, but his trouble with his father was his own, not Jack's, so I guess this is a director's decision which I'm 100% behind.

The plot can get predictable at times, but there's also a healthy amount of plot twists that made my jaw drop in a few occasions. I mean, I guessed who the bad guy was since the beginning, but let's face it, it's pretty obvious and the game doesn't hide it. There are other things that made the plot unfold worth my time, like trying to recruit that awesome character, or like what is the deal with Jack's late father, or what the hell is going on with Ganz, and what will happen to the city now that I'm on the Non-Human side? And the game answers them all (I read that the manga answers even more questions, so treat yourself).

All in all, RS is a vast jrpg experience, with high replay value and tons of things to explore. The world seems small, but it isn't. There's always a reward for those who wander off. For a ps2 title, this game is giant. And in the good sense. I thought I had seen the pinnacle of the ps2 era with Final Fantasy XII, but I'm highly considering changing my view on that one.

The endings are bittersweet in both paths. There's not a complete happy ending, I warn you. Things get darker towards the end, and the story knows how to subvert expectations in the good way. Remember Jack saying he wanted to be the hero like in a shonen anime? Well, not happening in this game guys. At the end of the day, this isn't a shonen story: this is a Radiata Story (roll credits), and like in every country's history, sometimes blood must be shed for events to take place and situations to unfold.

I am beyond pleased with this game. I'm considering playing through the Human side now – but first I need to recover myself from this Non-Human ending. I'm not ready to face more tragedy yet.

Go play it. Just do it. You won't regret it.

And pray that Tri-Ace develops ONE DAY a decent sequel.

#radiata stories #tri ace #jack russell #ganz rothschild #ridley silverlake #square enix #videogame #videogame review #review #ps2 #valkyrie profile

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calamity-bean · 5 years

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I just need some reassurance that Mad Sweeney will be revived, what are your thoughts? I mean, SURELY Laura will use her potion to bring him back... it would kind of parallel how he put the coin back in her in season 1. But him being in a new tv series is giving me doubts :(

I know how you feel, anon. I’m trying not to fret too much while waiting for 2.08, but it’s a scary time. And though I always want to be happy for the actors I like when they get work, I too felt a stab of worry when I saw that announcement about Pablo joining Defending Jacob. But I’m not giving up yet! Actors can and do manage to be in multiple projects simultaneously, and the way I see it, the show has given us solid reason to hope.

Major spoilers for 2.07 and some minor details from the novel below the cut (which for some reason isn’t working on my blog page, sorry, but should still function in reblogs and on the dashboard).

1. The potion is, narratively speaking, a Chekhov’s gun ready to be fired as soon as Laura finds that blood. Personally, I can’t imagine that Laura’s actually going to get resurrected. Being dead is a pretty integral part of her character, and it’s just difficult for me to imagine that that’s going to change, especially this relatively early in the overall story. And who else would she use the potion on? I think it unlikely she’s gonna keep carrying it around long enough for someone else she cares about to die — it seems like the sort of gun that ought to go off within this season, or in early season 3 — so Sweeney’s the obvious choice.

2. In terms of whose blood she might need… There are options. I’d originally wondered if Laura might use her own blood, but then it occurred to me that they drained all that when they embalmed her, so. (Also, although I think she’s drawn to Sweeney, at this point I don’t think she loves him.) But Sweeney’s own blood is, perhaps, a possibility? Or perhaps help might come from an unexpected quarter; at any rate, I’m sure that somehow that blood can be found.

3. We know Laura has arrived in Cairo by the end of 2.07, meaning that she (and her potion, and Sweeney’s lucky coin) should be arriving at Jacquel & Ibis’s place in 2.08. This shot is from one of the promos released before the season:

It’s clearly Laura carrying Sweeney… somewhere. For some reason. I don’t know where she’s taking him or why, but getting him out of the funeral parlor (which is where Jacquel, Ibis, and Shadow hold Sweeney’s wake in the novel, in which he does not come back from the dead) and into the arms of someone who cares about him / feels a connection with him seems like a good start to me.

4. Death definitely does not have to be permanent for gods, and there has been much discussion on that subject this season. Media died and was reborn in a form that’s distinct from the old Media, yet can still feel the old form inside herself. According to both Czernobog and Sweeney, Zorya Vechhernyaya will not come back to life because she has no believers left. Thor/Donar can never come back because he committed suicide. Although the latter is arguably the case for Sweeney in the novel, it’s not the case in the show, and I don’t think the world is completely bereft of belief in him, either. Laura claims (in 2.03) that the belief Ibis senses inside her is belief in Shadow… but as Mama-Ji points out in 2.07, the power inside of her was given to her by Sweeney; it’s not truly Shadow whose power sustains her and gives her strength. Given how intimately their relationship has evolved this season, perhaps by 2.08 she will realize that she believes in Sweeney too.

5. And then there’s 2.07 itself, which gives us the story of Sweeney’s life, yes — but also a story of all his pseudo-deaths. It’s true that he was prophesied to be undone and abandoned west of the sunrise, his fate sealed by a dead woman’s bauble, and to die by the spear. That’s happened now, as foreseen. And yet… he was also prophesied to die at Magh Rath, which is not to the west and involved no baubles from dead women. And some legends say that he later died at the hand of St. Moling, or the swineherd, or the cook. And wasn’t he supposed to have died, in the first place, when Balor drowned all his grandchildren in the lake? And yet, as Ibis said… “You survived. Like you always do.” The legends about Sweeney, the various forms he’s taken over the millennia, from sun god to pagan king to mad bird to fairy to leprechaun, are sometimes mutually contradictory and yet all simultaneously true, and a common theme in his long life seems to be that death never quite keeps its hold on him or gets him the way it’s supposed to.

6. As for the dead woman’s bauble that seals his fate… Sealing one’s fate doesn’t necessarily have to mean death, or permanent death. It just means a big, profound impact is made.

I tend to be cautious about getting my hopes up these days, and I can’t guarantee anything. I think the cast and creators all love Pablo/Sweeney, and I think they know that the fans love him too, but popularity and affection do not necessarily outweigh the needs of the narrative. And I won’t lie: if not for the Madwife subplot, 2.07 would feel like a very appropriate place to say goodbye to Sweeney for good. It wraps up his backstory and gives him the redeeming battle he’s been looking for all series; a tragic yet triumphant end.

But the way they’ve built up Laura and Sweeney’s relationship feels like… Something that got off to a really intriguing start in s1, and has been deliberately built up in really intriguing ways in s2, but has not yet reached its conclusion or even its climax (though I hope Laura and Sweeney both did in 2.05 lmao). Knowing that Sweeney’s body ends up in Laura’s possession in 2.08 gives me hope that this show is not done with Laura/Sweeney or with Sweeney in general. I don’t know where it might go from here, what the consequences of resurrection might be, or how profoundly changed Sweeney might be if/when he comes back, but I feel like the show has given itself the ability to keep him around and reasons to do so.

#asks #op #ag spoilers #ag 207 spoilers #ag 207 #mad sweeney #american gods #my meta #ag meta #Anonymous

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agameofme · 5 years

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Hiraeth

There’s writing that you have to do--as in, you’re obligated to do it--and then there’s writing that you need to do, as in, it’s just sitting there inside you, weighing you down, gnawing at the inner walls of your mind, needing to be expunged so you can do the writing that you have to do.

This is writing that I need to do so that I can get back to the writing that I have to do.

On a recent afternoon I got off BART at the stop near my home and there were Girl Scouts outside at a little table, selling cookies. In an instant an entire scenario played out in my head. I walked up to them, smiling, expressing enthusiasm about getting to buy some cookies, maybe making a comment about how much we all love Thin Mints, though I bet they hear that all the time. I bought a few boxes, wished them well, and went on my way. But none of this actually happened. Instead I just turned away and started walking toward my apartment. Reason being that I figured if I did, in actuality, approach them with the intent of buying cookies, the fact of my obvious transness might, perchance, have made one of the girls noticeably uncomfortable, or perhaps a parent of one of the girls, and I would pick up on this and then I would feel uncomfortable for having made them uncomfortable, and then the whole exchange would be tinged with awkwardness, and I’d just want to end it as quickly as possible to relieve their discomfort at me and my discomfort at their discomfort, and I’d walk away regretting that I’d put any of us through that. Of course I realize that there’s a chance that these particular young people and their present parents are perfectly comfortable around trans people, that there’d be no fleeting “How do I explain this to my daughter later?” flicker across a mother’s face, no girl hesitating awkwardly, caught in a moment of uncertainty about how to address me. But I can’t know for sure, and so even if I tried to approach the situation with the casual, carefree attitude that I wanted to, the fear of the possibility of things becoming awkward would be rattling around in me so loudly that I couldn’t hide it, and my fear of potential awkwardness would awkwardly poison the whole interaction regardless.

This happens all the time. This is how I live my life.

Last month, Bruno Ganz died. I love Wings of Desire, and his performance in it. Like his angel, Damiel, I sometimes feel like I’m observing life, but not really participating in it. I exist at a remove, wondering what real closeness and connection and participation in life are like. I know they can be wonderful.

“I wish I could see your face, just look into your eyes and tell you how good it is to be here...to smoke, have coffee, and if you do it together, it’s fantastic.”

The film punctures the lie that time heals all wounds. For many of us, the waiting and waiting and waiting is the wound.

Bruno Ganz was only a few years older than I am now when he made Wings of Desire. I don’t know why thoughts like that so often occur to me, but they do. I think maybe it’s because I’m so aware of time slipping away from me, time that I never get back, and I really want to start living before I die.

Today, and yesterday, and the day before that, I woke up starving for touch. Often the first thing I’m aware of when consciousness comes to me is a kind of ache in the body, like my skin is the frozen surface of a lake, and there’s warm water far, far below that could bring such relief, but it needs a warm touch on the surface to bring it floating up through the cold, to infuse my skin with life once again. This is one of the ways I am wounded by time.

Anyway, I want to tell you a story.

(Bionic Commando, NES)

It’s actually not about the person I met when I was young, though I wish it was. I’d have only very kind things to say about them, but to write about them would not be a kindness. And so, like so many stories that purport to be about someone else, this is actually a story about the person telling it, and the effect that the other person had on me.

Was I young many years ago, when this story I’m about to tell you happened? I don’t know. I mean, yes, I was, and I am. I’m very young. Young like Yorkie in San Junipero. Her body may be 60 or so, but she’s not really 60, because she’s experienced so little. In the virtual world of San Junipero, she has the freedom to be herself, a young woman looking to form connections and find love for the first time. Even there, her complete lack of experience surprises the woman she clicks with, but still, with Kelly she finds acceptance. She can let her walls down and be honest about who she is, what she’s missed out on her whole life, and what she needs now.

Now I’m physically 42 but really I’m no older than Yorkie. I go on dating sites like Bumble and I can’t help but be extremely aware that I’m very different from most of the queer women on there, not just because I’m trans, and visibly so (though that certainly significantly limits the pool of people who might want to even meet me for coffee), but because I’m so inexperienced, and so guarded, and so aware that it takes a special kind of person to make me feel safe, and able to be honest and real.

Of course, I have had long, close relationships before, but that was before I transitioned, and despite all my efforts to pretend otherwise, there was always a barrier between me and my partners, because those relationships were all predicated on a fiction, the role I tried so hard to play while gender dysphoria carved up my insides. I was profoundly uncomfortable with my body, and didn’t really inhabit it throughout all those years. It was as if my soul was hiding away, trying to make itself as small and as removed as possible from the anguish of reality, possibly curled up into a tight little ball in my left pinky toe, barely present in the real world, always seeking escape into books and songs and movies and video games.

Now I’m uncomfortable with my body for an entirely different reason: it seems to prevent people from seeing me for who I really am. I’m definitely in less pain having transitioned, and there’s a relief in living with the integrity of being honest with the world about who I am, but still, the world can’t see me clearly. I’m misgendered constantly, and because I know I’m not clearly seen by the world, fear factors into every decision I make. I’m never free of it. Do I dress the way I dress because this is how I want to dress, or do I dress the way I dress because I’m trying to make myself invisible, because I’m afraid of drawing potentially hostile attention to myself? I don’t know, and as long as fear remains present, I can’t know.

Whether or not it’s true, I feel as if I exist entirely outside the marketplace of desire as a queer woman, and that the only times people want me are when they see me as something I’m not. One woman I dated briefly repeatedly misgendered me and even admitted to me once that she fantasized about me being a man. One woman made a pass at me by saying that she saw me not as a woman or a man but just as a person. How can I be present in a relationship if I know that I’m being seen and desired expressly as things I feel like I’m not, and not as who I am?

Loneliness is hallmarked by an intense desire to bring the experience to a close; something which cannot be achieved by sheer willpower, or by simply getting out more, but only by developing intimate connections. This is far easier said than done, especially for people whose loneliness arises from a state of loss or exile or prejudice, who have reason to fear or mistrust as well as long for the society of others.

--Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

So. Let’s talk about Alex.

I’ve written about Alex before. I don’t know if i’ll write about Alex again. Some writers are fond of saying that all of us who write essentially write the same story again and again and again, but I’d like to have a new story to tell. I know Alex wants that for me too.

It was several years ago now that I met them. I was in a weird place at the time, having just gone through an intense defrost cycle on my heart. After focusing on transition and not giving much thought to relationships for many years, I’d had an encounter that made me painfully aware that finding love, closeness, and connection was supremely important to me.

There’s a great deal I can’t tell you about Alex that I wish I could tell you. What I can say is that they just had a particular kind of sincerity about them that put me at ease. Very few people can do that. I didn’t feel the anxiety around them that I feel around so many people. I didn’t mind just existing in silence with them. Time with most people drains my batteries. Time with Alex recharged them.

Alex did and still does things that I admire greatly, and I find them fascinating as a person, and I wanted more than anything to engage in the endless process of getting to know them. In the 1990 Hal Hartley movie Trust, a character asserts that respect, admiration and trust equal love. I don’t know if it’s as simple as that, but I do know that all those ingredients were there.

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I could tell that Alex knew what suffering was in their own way, and that they struggled sometimes, which is essential if I’m going to be able to relate to someone, but Alex wasn’t wounded in the same ways or the same places that I was wounded, which is also essential. If you put me next to someone who’s like me, there’s just a chasm between us. All we can do is spin our wheels. Alex was someone I could relate to and understand, and also learn from.

Anyway, it eventually came to pass that Alex knew how I felt, just as I knew that Alex would never see me the way I wanted them to see me. The circumstances of this dual revelation would make for a more symbolically fraught movie scene about the anguish of a lifetime spent feeling invisible than anything I could concoct in a work of fiction, but I won’t go into the particulars. Suffice it to say that the next night, Alex and I met, I guess in the hopes of clearing the air. We sat on Alex’s couch, and Alex put their arm around me.

I suppose that’s the sort of thing you might do if you grow up in a somewhat healthy family that teaches you that your love has value.

The effect it had on me was the feeling of years and years and years of ice melting away, warm water rushing to the surface, my skin and my soul awakened in a way they never had been before. I simultaneously wanted to kiss Alex and to fall asleep in their arms. I wanted to sit there talking and laughing quietly while letting phrases like “I love you” slip out of my mouth, and I wanted to cry, to let loose all the grief that I’d carried around with me for so long and had never been able to share with anyone. I actually did laugh at the sheer wild luck of it all, of finding myself in that moment, and I laughed, too, at the wonderful surprise of discovering, after spending all my life in moments that I couldn’t fully inhabit, that really being there, right there with Alex, was the easiest thing in the world.

If I died tomorrow, and it turned out that, like in Hirokazu Koreeda’s film After Life, I had to choose just one memory to take with me, that would be it, the time I spent in Alex’s arms that night.

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When I left, it felt as if the whole world was vibrating. That’s not an exaggeration or some kind of metaphor. I mean that it felt to me as if everything was humming, as if all of existence had become charged with life, or perhaps as if all of existence were always charged with life, and for the first time I could see and feel it, because for the first time I was part of it.

Maybe this is what Sam meant in Gone Home when she said she felt like a shook-up can of soda. Maybe almost everyone experiences something like this when they’re young, and they learn that they can be loved. But I still haven’t learned that. I’m still waiting for my first mutual experience of it. I don’t expect love to mean undergoing a massive spiritual experience every time the person I love touches me. Not at all. I want to get to a point where being held by someone I really like doesn’t feel like winning the goddamn lottery. But when you’ve waited for it for as long as I have, it’s powerful, when it finally happens. I don’t expect love to be grandiose. For the most part, my time with Alex wasn’t grandiose. It was low-key friendly get-togethers, conversations over drinks at bars, playing games together, or just working quietly on our own things in the same place at the same time. That was all it had to be.

Of course, I knew even as I was sitting there with Alex, being brought to life by their warmth and their presence and their touch, that they didn’t mean for it to affect me so profoundly. They were just trying to comfort me, their friend, in the hopes that it might be easier for me to let go, to move on, to just be friends. The next day they texted me and asked me if I was feeling better. What could I say? That the night before had changed my life, that it was the most incredible thing I’d ever experienced and that I was, if anything, more full of yearning than ever before, that all I wanted was to hold them and be held by them?

I said that yes, I was feeling better, and left it at that. That was years ago now, and in all the time since, I haven’t met anyone else yet who has felt like a chance to me the way Alex did.

Sometimes some of my friends say that monogamy is bullshit. The people who say this around me, though, are always attractive people for whom love and affection and touch are widely available around the city in or the planet on which they live. When people ask me if I’m poly (as they occasionally do, I suppose because I’m a queer-identified woman living in the San Francisco Bay Area), all I can do is laugh. I can’t even find one person I like and who likes me who I want to know deeply, with whom I feel safe, with whom I can be vulnerable, with whom I can take my time to form a bond of closeness and trust. If my life were completely different, if the world taught me to move with confidence rather than fear, if the world taught me that I was seen rather than invisible, would I be poly then? I can never know the answer to that. We are all shaped by our experiences within the world, the messages the world sends us about ourselves, and if the world sent me different messages about myself, I’d be a different person. But I do resent the attitude among some that polyamory is inherently more enlightened or radical than monogamy. I think that in this world, where people so often use other people and then dispose of them, there’s something radical about ordinary devotion to one person, between two people who know each other deeply, trust each other completely, have seen each other at their worst, and still support and rely on each other.

The other question I get, I guess because of my lack of experience, is whether I might be asexual. But I’m not. When things are firing on all cylinders, I’m definitely sexual. But I really need to feel safe and seen with someone, seen and desired as the woman I am, and the world doesn’t make me feel that way, so it takes time for me to feel that way with an individual. Over and over again on the dance floors of life, I see people seeing each other, desiring each other and being desired, and I feel invisible, and I’m still dancing on my own.

Alex felt like home. I’m still looking for home. Not the exact same kind of home that Alex felt like. Everyone’s love makes a different kind of home. Just a home, one where I feel safe and seen, with someone I trust and respect and admire and can learn from and have fun with and be myself with, a home where I’m inclined to let down the walls that I have spent so long building up. In a world where everything about my life is complicated, feeling the way I did about Alex was the simplest, easiest thing. I know it doesn’t stay that way, but it seems to me like a good place to start.

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dat-town · 6 years

Text

Mirror, mirror on the wall

Characters: Seokjin & You

Setting: fantasy, snow white au (part of my fairytale collection)

Genre: after a fluffy beginning it turns out quite angsty (sorry)

Summary: You should have know better than to fall in love, yet here you are lying among broken pieces of a mirror.

Warnings: character death, violence, blood

Words: 4.4k

Network Bangtan Bingo ▶ square: free choice - witchcraft

Snow White, this precious endearing term of affection was given to you by Jin. He said he had a vision of you lying down in the fresh virgin snow, ebony dark hair spread around you like a halo, like the compass’ rose and lips as red as cherry and strawberry in the summer. What he didn’t told you is that no matter how ethereally beautiful you were in his dream, it terrified him. Because there, amidst the snowflakes falling down and decorating your soft black lashes and the blue veins of your pale wrist, carmine blood stained your dress’ lacy ruffles and a wooden arrow found its grave in your chest, its metal head piercing right through your non-beating heart.

Even before he met you, before he knew you, before he was brought to the castle, he had seen your future and his heart ached for the stranger, withering away in the cold like summer blossoms when the first frost came. Then, when his Queen married your father and you first ran into him, that huge, gilded mirror he liked to spend his time in, he knew it was you. The wavy black locks, the fine skin and the innocence in you gave room for a good guess.

“Ouch,” you muttered massaging your sore forehead before looking up. Merely ten years old, so naive and kind you widened your eyes as you saw him.

“Who are you?” you asked in awe, curiosity running in your veins and pressed a palm against the cold surface of transparent glass. Not the kind of reaction most people had when they noticed a man in the mirror instead of their usual reflection.

He smiled at you, but his smile carried sadness unknown to you.

“My name is Seokjin but you can call me Jin. We can be friends,” he replied as he crouched down, his figure coming closer to the edge between the realm of mirrors and your reality.

“Are you a magician?” you blinked again, bright and innocent, tongue poking out from between your lips as you traced his lines through the mirror.

“Kind of yes. I have a few tricks,” he told you determined to earn your trust, to stop his vision from coming true. He flashed one last smile before the mirror around him filled with fog and clouds, then it suddenly showed a forest, a bright spring day with a river flowing, birds chirping and rainbow in the background. Your eyes glimmered, stars adorning your orbs as you clapped your tiny hands together in excitement, pressing closer to the glass and this magical world on the other side. However, a few minutes later the picture became clouded again, until it disappeared into nothing, the same old usual mirror reflecting your pumped up state.

“Ah,” you sighed in disappointment, taking a step back, looking around searching for the magician. Jin looked at you with a soft heart, at this little girl too pure in this evil world.

“Here, Snow White, I’m here,” he waved from the mirror next to the two-winged door and he couldn’t help but smile when you ran to him with the biggest toothy grin of a child.

He has loved you since then. He has always loved you as he has watched you grow up. A girl so delicate, sweet and soft. He was there beside you, a friend in hard times when you lost your father and had to suffer from your stepmother’s rough treatment. He was always there when you needed him... and even when you didn’t.

“Seokjin!” you cried out in horror when you saw his face in your suite’s mirror while dressing. It was just a fading moment though, it went as quickly as it came and later he apologized profoundly.

“You only told me not to come to the bathroom because you dress there. You had never banned me out of your bedroom before,” he was explaining himself hastily as soon as you found him in the reflection of the duchess table of the hallways.

You knew he was right so you just waved it off nonchalantly and you'd rather forget it ever happened. You didn't need to know how many times Seokjin accidently caught a glimpse of your half-naked state while putting on a corset. You fanned yourself with the hand mirror you just grabbed from your room and you knew that Jin will follow, travelling through mirrors until he ended up in yours.

You bowed and smiled at the guards you met on your way to the palace garden. They didn’t protest nor tried to stop you from going alone. They knew you had the habit of wandering alone. Little did they know you were never alone, not really because even in the slightest reflecting surface there was Seokjin following you, always with you. Growing up, locked into this gorgeous palace he was your only connection to the outside world as he showed you the sea, the snow and other magical sights you otherwise didn’t have the chance to marvel at. Sometimes you wondered, fingers itching to act, legs ready to go how it would be to run away but you wouldn’t have gone all by yourself. Sheepishly but you asked the cursed man if he could ever leave the palace and its mirrors and he replied without hesitation: yes, he could go wherever he wanted.

"Why don't you go then? Far away so she can't find you?” you asked unable to understand why anybody so powerful like him would ever bow to your heartless stepmother who treated him like dirt.

Seokjin flashed you a sad smile, one that was soothing like fingers threading in your hair or hands stroking your back to calm you down.

"I wouldn't live for long without her magic. It bounds us together. She keeps me alive but caged," he said and you didn’t ask more, nor you told him about your runaway plan. You locked that secret in your heart and throw the keys away because without him, you realised, you didn’t wanted to go.

But oh how you wished both of you could!

“Happy 18th birthday, princess!” Jin exclaimed clapping joyfully after you had blown the candle’s flickering flame out. Hearing his cheering, you set the colourful cupcake the palace’s chef made just for you in front of you with a satisfied smile.

You spent your birthday on a picnic with a small mirror and the most handsome man you knew in it. You wouldn’t have had it any other way because you didn’t need grand gestures and celebrations across the seven kingdoms. You were as happy as you could be because you could spend the day with Jin and didn’t have to worry about horse riding or politics classes. The Queen didn’t want to have a big celebration for your day and blamed it on the failure of crop that she forbid her men to do the same as well but it didn’t stop your teachers from giving you a day-off as a gift.

“Did you wish for anything?” Seokjin asked as he curiously settled close to the gilded frame. If you squirted hard enough you could imagine it being merely a glass of a window that separated you and him with the mirror in-between, the threshold of two dimensions.

“I wished for you to be free,” you admitted bashfully, playing with your fingers in your lap.

He has told you his story a few times, how his ability to see things that others didn’t made the Queen curious in him and how she cursed him to be locked in mirrors for fifty years. For a witch like her aging slowly it wasn’t even that much, so it could have been worse, Seokjin said and he liked to joke that this way, at least he stayed as handsome as ever.

He has told you already before, but it looked like he could never tell you enough or you would never give up.

“Oh, dear, you shouldn't have wasted your wish on me. I have served the Queen for a long long time now, I can take a few more years,” he shrugged and it sounded like he was convincing both you and himself. Will his serving time ever be over? Will your stepmother ever let him go?

“But I can’t!” you snapped out of the blue but Seokjin remained just as kind and patient as he ever was when he raised an elegant brow in question.

“Why is that, princess?”

Because I love you, you wanted to shout to the sky but you didn’t. It was too embarrassing. Too mundane and pitiful to think of such facts that you will age and lose your beauty by the time he gets out of his prison that keeps him ageless and immortal.

And last but not least, it was selfish so you shrugged like the spoiled princess you were.

“Just because,” you said teeth sinking into the delicious flesh of peach, breaking its skin just to avert your thoughts about this topic. Yet, Seokjin’s laugh was way too fond for your liking and it rang in your ears for too long.

That evil witch had some kind of twisted way and power to summon Jin whenever the hell she wanted and even though the magic-bearer hated it - his vulnerability and being kept on a too short leash -, he was grateful because this granted him the knowledge of what the Queen was planning. She made him foresee the future’s mysteries before she made all the important steps so she could make sure everything went according to the plan. But sometimes, the scenario he predicted ran into a dead end as the future constantly changed.

Now that you turned eighteen and came of age, the kingdom’s subjects rebelled because they didn’t want the Queen to rule anymore. They wanted the princess, you. So you were a threat to your stepmother’s throne and power, she realized quite quickly, throwing a tantrum in her suite.

There was only one thing left to question.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, tell me who is the fairest of them all?” she asked because to her, Seokjin wasn’t more than a genie trapped in a bottle, a psychic locked into a crystal ball. She made sure to have him as a partner in crime whether he liked it or not because he learned the hard way he couldn’t lie to her. He could choose to remain silent but he had to tell her the truth behind his visions and insights.

“If I might be honest with you, your Majesty, your step daughter came to be a beautiful young woman,” he answered slowly, carefully wording the sentence. He didn’t want to upset the Queen but it had been a long time since you had caught his eye and not only his, but the whole kingdom admired you. No wonder why the Queen hid you between four walls.

“That stupid girl, she ruins everything. She would be better off dead,” the woman screamed and swept everything off her table out of anger.

Then she stilled for a moment, pondering over an idea that seemed to take her liking and her mouth curled into the cruellest smile of all. It had him trembling in fear and he disappeared from the huge, overall mirror on the Queen’s wall right into the one on your night table.

You looked so peaceful and innocent as you lied there in your bed lost in dreamland that his heart soured. He remembered his vision way too vividly. How could anybody want to hurt you?

“Snow White!” he shouted at you wishing he could grab and shake you awake. But no, he was doomed to stuck in mirrors from where despite all his magical powers, he couldn’t help you. “Princess, wake up! You have to go!”

It was his frantic voice that stirred you awake and you blinked at him drowsily.

“What? Jin... I don't understand,” you squinted at the man’s panicked expression in your hand mirror, your voice still rough with sleep. He had never woken you up before, especially not so desperate, so you couldn’t even imagine what happened. Refusing to fall back asleep, you sat up in your baldachin bed. Your grown fell off one of your shoulders but you couldn’t care about being bashful.

“Just trust me. Take a mirror and run,” or you will be dead by the morning, the witch said and hearing the fear in his voice you didn’t have to think twice. You have never grabbed your horse riding trousers and travel coat so fast before. Without washing your face or brushing your hair, you took a bag full of your needed supplies and with your makeup mirror in hand, you complied.

Seokjin guided you through secret passages and hidden hallways you have never ever been to. The palace became a labyrinth in a second and there was nothing else left but the dark and the witch’s gentle voice telling you where to turn. The cold air hit you hard as soon as you stepped out of the place you had known as your home all your life. Still, you didn’t think twice to leave it behind just because Jin said so.

“Come on, find a place you can stay and I will tell you everything,” he promised and you pulled the hood onto your head.

Luckily you had a place in mind right away. The hunting house of your once beloved father stood vacant deep in the forest. So you took a horse from the royal stall and made a run for it.

You were too confused to cry about leaving your life behind as you rode farther and farther away from the palace. You knew Jin only wanted the best for you so it never eve occurred to you to doubt him. You trusted him with your life but since you knew his obligations to the Queen, you hid the mirror in your coat’s dark pocket. When you got off the horse a mile away from the small house, you patted its back to send him forward alone out of precaution. You knew the men after you would follow hooves’ traces but the Queen never cared about your father enough to escort him to his hunts, she probably didn’t even know about this little house. On the other hand, you loved watching your father get immersed in his hobby even if you despised the thought of innocent animals falling as prays. The paradox of love, right?

When you settled down in the house, lit up the fireplace and cherished the thought of being safe, you could almost feel your father’s loving presence around you.

“Don’t!” Seokjin warned you when you wanted to take the mirror out of your pocket, so you dropped it back carefully. “It’s better if I don’t know where you are.”

“What’s going on, Jin?” you asked but didn’t question his methods, you had no reason to.

“The Queen. She decided to get rid of you,” he told you and for some reason, you weren’t surprised. You had already guessed she would marry you off abroad because she had never cared about you… but killing you? Did she really care for power so much?

“And what now?” you asked curiously but didn’t get an answer. “Jin?”

Alarmed, you opened the makeup mirror but just when you least wanted to be alone, you couldn’t find him there, merely your own, scared reflection.

The Queen was furious when she found out you ran away. She ordered Seokjin back into the palace and demanded him to tell her where you were. Since he asked you to never tell or show him where you were, thankfully, he could tell her honestly that he didn't know. Your stepmother failed to ask if he knew anything about situation and the witch was glad that she didn't ask the right question. She never did.

“Call the huntsman!” she yelled at her guards who got startled and hurried to fulfil her order out of dread.

It didn’t take long for the kingdom-wide famous hunter to show up at her door, black hair too long, getting into his eyes.

“You!” The Queen shouted at him out of control. “I want you to find and kill the princess discreetly and bring her heart to me. Understood?”

The huntsman didn’t even bat an eyelash while Seokjin’s breath stuck in his throat.

“Yeah,” the man shrugged and left the room as quickly and quietly as he came. Jin followed him in the hallways from one mirror to another.

“What had the princess ever done to her? That crazy bitch,” the hunter muttered under his breath and the witch had to suppress the urge to smirk. At least, he wasn’t the only one who thought this way.

A night and half a day later, Min Yoongi returned, carrying a bag of bloody organs, face impassive as always and took the gold the Queen threw at him. Nobody but him and the prying Seokjin knew of the dead doe buried six feet under the oak tree next to the palace walls.

However, it was definitely too early to celebrate because the Queen might have been evil but she wasn’t stupid. Before she announced the sad, sad news she turned to her mirror with a devilish smile.

“Am I finally the fairest of them all now?”

Her question got Seokjin off guard and he widened his eyes, letting his mouth fall agape. Maybe he should have made up some half-truth, some excuse, anything to make the Queen believe this earlier theatrical act. But it was too late anyway, the Queen caught onto his strange behaviour quickly.

“What? Is she still alive? Did that stupid huntsman lie to me?” Her eyes burned red, nails scratching the surface of her throne. “Then I go myself and burn down the forest if I have to.”

Even though you felt bad for your people, Seokjin suggested that running away would be the best solution. Out of the kingdom, so your stepmother couldn’t find you. A rule like hers, founded on fear and intimidation, wouldn’t last long, he reasoned but you couldn’t leave. First, because you had a feeling you would betray your father and the country and second, because of Jin. You would have never told him this, because as selfless as he was, he wouldn’t let you stay behind for him. You knew he couldn’t get hurt in that parallel universe of his but still, the possibility of never seeing him again scared the hell out of you.

Just like his arrival a few days after your breakout of the castle.

“She's coming,” he warned you, a faded cry from your tiny mirror with its reflecting side on the table and you hurried to turn it over. As soon as the witch’s eyes scanned the room, he left his current position and reappeared in the tall mirror beside the dining table.

“You have nowhere to run. She has her men everywhere. Lock the door and hi...” he advised quickly but time wasn’t in your favour as the front door slammed open with a loud thud echoing in the wooden house.

“Hello-hello, Snow White. So this is where you have been hiding?” the Queen asked in a faux worrying voice as she stepped in all her evil glory.

“Just leave me alone!” you retreated into the back of the room, shoving the makeup mirror into your pocket and clenching a butter knife you just grabbed from the kitchen counter in your hand. However, against all that black magic your stepmother had, it was useless.

“Oh but how could I? Those peasants want you as their queen, they are threatening me so I just have to tell them that you, poor thing, got killed in the woods while wandering off like the stupid girl you are,” she laughed shutting all the windows and the backdoor behind you with a simple flick of her wrist. Her eyes were dark like blackberries or poisoned, fake love. “Don’t you think it’s perfect? The kingdom will grieve and dress in black, I can’t wait!”

You wanted to gag looking at this woman and remembering how much your father loved her. It wasn’t the first time you believed she used a love potion to persuade him for marriage.

“Had you ever loved father or was it true what they said? That you just wanted to be a queen?” you asked just to prolong the moment and gain a little more time to find a mouse hole to run away. It was your first instinct because you were never taught to fight back but you realized you couldn’t run forever, your stepmother would always find you wherever you go.

“You are so naive. I wanted power no matter what I have to do to get it,” she shrugged and levitated the knife easily out of your hand to hers leaving you defenceless and alone.

Or so you thought.

“The fireplace!” Seokjin reminded you and concentrated all his energy on the weapon in the Queen’s hand. She resisted his magic too easily like it was nothing more than a child trick.

“You will pay for it, traitor,” she spit at him but this moment lack of her attention was enough for you to run to the pile of wood in the fireplace and grab a handful of them. The burn didn’t hurt at first. Not until adrenaline boiled high in your blood as you threw the burning wooden pieces at the rug that caught fire immediately. The smell of coal and smoke filled the air and it made you cough, the lack of oxygen scratching your throat, suffocating you.

“Stupid girl,” the Queen clicked her tongue picking up a fire iron near the fireplace and aimed its burning tip towards your heart.

“No!” Jin shouted, banging on the mirror’s surface in vain.

“Wait for your turn, loverboy. You are on next.”

By then, you have almost fainted because of the pain in your burnt skin of your hands. But before darkness took over, you put your hands into your pockets and broke the hand mirror to pieces. You felt warm blood running down your palm as you clenched onto the biggest, sharpest piece and lodged it into the Queen’s chest when she was ready to strike down with the fire iron. Using her loss of balance and moments of weakness to your advantage, you ran to the door, yanking it open and ran out, right into the arms of a man.

You started screaming and fell onto your bottom, afraid of the huntsman who however, didn’t pay attention to you at all. He pulled the string of his bow back and aimed at the entrance of the hunting house. You watched stunned when your stepmother stepped out of there angered and bleeding and the hunter shot an arrow right into her cold, black heart.

Rattling she fell onto the ground and her death wasn’t any graceful as she withered away, leaving only bones and blood behind.

“Are you okay, Princess?” the huntsman croaked out offering a hand but you were too caught up in what happened to answer. All the emotions bottling up, overshadowed by adrenaline were ready to break out.

“Jin… Jin!” you screamed as struggled to your feet and crawled back to the wooden house. But you couldn’t even step inside because fire broke out of the open door.

“Careful, Princess,” the stranger pulled you back into safety but you didn’t care, tears kept rolling on your cheeks and Seokjin’s name sounded like a mantra on your tongue.

As your last ray of hope, you took out the bloody pieces of mirror from your pocket but all of them were blank, only showing your broken reflections.

“Are you looking for me?” an ever so gentle voice asked, one that you would have recognized anywhere, anytime. You gaped at the unharmed, tall, wide shouldered man walking to you on his two feet realer than ever in your dimension.

“Seokjin,” you cried out running straight into his embrace. He welcomed you like a home never known and enveloped into his arms like you always belonged there.

“Shh… you have to be more careful from now, Snow White,” he scolded you endeared as he put his warm hand onto your wounded, hurt ones and a moment later they were scatheless, healed by the magic he often told you about. Powers like theirs could be used for lots of purposes not only selfish, immoral ones like your stepmother has done.

“But how?” you blinked up at him almost not believing your eyes. Maybe you really fainted and daydreamed about him coming back to you but his touch was too real, even if a bit too fading just like light reflected on a broken mirror… “Wait… No! Please tell me that’s now happening.”

Could it be? Could fate really be this cruel? Giving you one sweet memory just to take him away from you once for all?

“Would you love a liar?” he cupped your cheek, his touch ever so light and you leaned into him, bathing in his warmth.

“It’s not fair,” you sobbed, grabbing his collar, not ready to let go. Seokjin wiped your away gently and loving but they kept on falling. He told you, didn’t he? It was the Queen’s magic that kept him caged but also alive.

“But it is, dear, it is. At least I can finally touch you and do what I wanted for a long long time.”

“What is it?” it piqued your interest as you relished in the witch’s closeness.

When he answered, Seokjin was uncharacteristically embarrassed, his ears turning red.

“A kiss, Princess… Can I have it?”

“You can have everything,” you stepped onto your tiptoes yearning for his touch, afraid of losing him any moment. When he pressed his lips to yours, you wanted to believe in the miracle of true love’s kiss so badly, to hope it would make everything better.

But some fairytales are really just legends whispered by stupid humans who know nothing. Sometimes magic will leave you like an empty shell crying because your love is torn out of your arms, dissolving into thin air leaving nothing but shattered mirror pieces behind. And maybe a broken heart, too.

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squeeprojectsllc · 6 years

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On participating in creator/fan relationships in real time: Joe Bob Briggs Last Drive-In Marathon.

Long time beloved late night genre movie host, Joe Bob Briggs returned to streaming TV via Shudder for the first time in 17 years.

I’m an OG fan of his earlier shows Drive-In Theater and Monstervision as well as his books Joe Bob Goes to the Drive In and Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive In and Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies that Changed History They are all wonderful but parts of Profoundly Disturbing stick with me to this day and whenever I stay at a hotel which is fairly regular with my comic con schedule, I change the Do Not Disturb signs with a sharpie as an homage to his work.

When I heard the news that he’d return for a 24 hour+ one time streaming marathon screening of 13 horror films I went into full on #FangirlFlail mode. I could see on twitter other fans were beyond excited, too.

There were awesome new shirts from Fright Rags and I bought one immediately. It got here the day of the NiteHawk event he was hosting so like the dork I am, I wore it to meet him. That’’s the thing about fandom, sometimes you can’t keep your cool. You just need to fully embrace your passion even when you feel embarrassed by it. #fangirlshame #fighttheshame

We'd made casual arrangements for me to interview him. Although I didn't get the opportunity for the interview, I did get to hang out with him and the Shudder team for a snack and to discuss the upcoming marathon, the industry and horror films with them. I won't lie, that was freaking amazing.

The Shudder team was super excited about the opportunity to bring Joe Bob back to TV. I interviewed Shudder Curator, Sam Zimmerman about the upcoming event.

That video can be seen at https://youtu.be/tz_JKuyi2Bg

As the fans geared up for the marathon we shared our squee on social media platforms; and made plans to collectively gather on twitter, facebook, slack channel. (which I will never figure out), twitch and other platforms. Many of us posted videos and photos of how we’d be watching.

I made a vlog post about how I’d be watching https://www.instagram.com/p/BlMSxr_HxhZ/?taken-by=squeefilmmaker

Joe Bob had written n his regular column in TakiMag about what he called “The Loneliness of the Cord Cutter” Published a few days before the event.

“What we do there is we experience the movie as a group and then we discuss the movie as equals because we’ve all had the same emotional experience. I suppose, if we asked Camille Paglia or some other academic, they would tell us it’s some form of pagan worship.No one ever talks about this. If you ask the specialty theater managers, they’ll tell you about the brilliance of the 35-millimeter film image (true), the awesomeness of the sound system (true), or the various ways the film has been reconstructed, preserved, enhanced, or changed by the director. None of these things matter. What’s essential is the crowd—and it doesn’t matter whether it’s five people or five thousand. What matters is the agreement that “We will tell each other stories and we will feel that rush of knowing who we are and where we are and why we are here.”

Please read the full article here so the writers get paid fairly. They deserve it.

http://takimag.com/article/the_loneliness_of_the_cord_cutter_joe_bob_briggs/print#ixzz5LqJZV9kW

Then the internet failed us. Most of us couldn't access the stream on any of our devices. Fans posted various responses on social media. We were frustrated but we were here for Joe Bob and Shudder was doing their best to try to make it work. Fans posted funny tweets abut it. Fans rooted for Joe Bob and Shudder. We weren't going anywhere.

Fans started joking that Joe Bob Briggs broke the internet. We were kind of thrilled. The hashtag started trending. Now from a fan’s perspective this was wonderful. We weren't happy that we were missing the event we’d been longing for since #Monstervision got cancelled but there was tribal joy spreading.

I think that we felt that we were alone in our passion for Joe Bob and his work.

Then we discovered we were legion. Yes, we are the weirdos, mister. The Drive-in Mutants, the Monster Kids, the horror geeks. This was one of the best examples of a community of fans who didn't even know we existed coming together that I’ve ever experienced. And I’m multi-fandemic, participating in dozens of fandoms and this response was outstanding,

One of my twitter friends got access to it somewhere in the midst of Sleepaway Camp and offered to share it via Skype with me. Another fan got it going and shared the stream on Twitch with many fans. He was given a 24 hour ban from Twitch but became a hero to the other fans.

“One fan, known only as Cthlhu on Twitter, saw fit to help out the horror community as best he could by broadcasting the highly sought-out special on his Twitch stream. As a result, many fans were able to see the broadcast they’d been waiting for since the year 2000. Twitch, however, didn’t find the solution particularly heartwarming, as they suspended the user for 24 hours. Cthlhu didn’t seem to mind. (Please read the full article below so the writers get paid fairly)

https://www.inquisitr.com/4986333/horror-icon-joe-bob-briggs-comes-to-defense-of-fan-on-twitter-after-overwhelming-shudder-premiere/

I finally got the stream up on my laptop around 1 am and watched till about 5 am and it was everything I’d hoped for. By the time I got up the next day, Shudder had posted all the films that had aired up that point on their site separately so we could all catch up.

Then the man himself posted in his column

“You don’t write, perform, shoot, edit and broadcast a 24-hour show and then feel good about nobody being able to see it. You start out with a fear of disappointing the audience—I have the greatest fans in the universe, and I love them, and they’ve saved my ass a thousand times, and so preventing them from seeing the opening title card is sort of my ultimate nightmare.” Please read the full article so the writer gets paid fairly by using the link below. http://takimag.com/article/breaking_the_internet_joe_bob_briggs/print#ixzz5LqLVQ1hh

“But, Joe Bob, people will eventually see it, the important thing is that you broke the Internet.”

“If that’s the important thing, it shouldn’t be the important thing. Not everyone can hang around for two days monitoring their devices. The casually interested observer, who might have been barely intrigued enough to sample the show, was gone after 15 minutes and never came back. “Breaking the Internet” is not a happy thing for those of us who believe communication is better than gossip.”

Please read the full article by using the link so the writer gets paid fairly

http://takimag.com/article/breaking_the_internet_joe_bob_briggs/print#ixzz5LqL7ZT3Q

I absolutely understand Joe Bob’s disappointment. Any creator wants their hard work to be enjoyed, appreciated and successful. As a filmmaker and someone who’s worked in media for over 20 years, I get it. It was rough. On a much much smaller scale of course I’ve had panic attacks as I watched the tech person struggle to get my film screening during a panel. It’s an awful feeling.

But as a professional fan, it was an absolutely amazing experience. Now I know dozens of other weirdos that are just like me and I bet if Joe Bob wants to return to do any kind of short or long term hosting, we’ll all be there with him.

Update: Announced only moments after I posted this!

Now recite The Drive-In Oath along with the rest of us Mutants.

youtube

#fandom #joe bob briggs #shudder #nitehawk #squee #troubledgirl #drive in #fan studies #community #monstervision #acafandom

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ozcarpin · 6 years

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An Ozpin Rant

Hey guys, so lately I’ve seen a lot of posts that subscribe to a realm of thought that Ozpin is untrustworthy/ evil/ immoral/ secretive, anything along those lines and I feel that it just doesn’t do him justice so here I am. Now, the focus of this rant is going to be around this quote:

because I feel that this quote encompasses more about Ozpin’s character than anything else.

Lets start from the beginning.

Now, there’s a bunch of fan theories about Ozpin’s original self being the old King of Remnant and while they’re pretty cool and have their merits, I’m going to try and stick to what we know as stated in the canon, just for brevity’s sake. What we do know is, When Salem and her forces rose, and Ozpin went against her, he failed and was then cursed to a life of conscious reincarnation via parasitic relations with ‘like-minded’ souls.

Here alone I could make the point that purely judging from the fact that from what we’ve seen Ozpin is ‘like-minded’’ to the fluffiest people on the planet (the floofiest farm boy and the fluffiest kitten of a man ever) coupled with the fact that the series ‘root of all evil’ by name swore him as her nemesis, we can probably assume that he’s not inherently evil, but that’s not good enough for me. I don’t just want to prove that he’s not evil, I want to prove that he’s both a relatable character and an incredibly good one at that. Thus we continue.

Let’s talk about the story of the seasons, wherein we learn about how Ozpin (who has been confirmed to be the old man) was at some point left in such a state of depression that he holed himself away from the world and seemed to have just given up completely on succeeding in his task. This makes sense, I mean according to Ozpin he’s been stuck like this for thousands of years, it’d be pretty silly to think that at no point he may have lost faith in his ability to actually succeed in anything especially when he’d been going in at it alone.

The maidens, however much of the original story was true, gave him hope. They restored his faith that all was not yet lost and there were still reasons for him to fight, to get back up and rejoin the world he felt he’d failed. They effected him so deeply, so profoundly in fact that he wanted nothing more than for them to be able to bring this hope to the entire world, to the point that he gave up a massive amount of his finite magic in order for them to be able to.

Now, its impossible for us to know if Ozpin knew what would happen from this: maybe he’d assumed that the original maiden’s would have become immortal, maybe he knew that the power would be similar to him in nature as it had come from him, we don’t know. What we can guess, is that he may have not been in the most reasonable state of mind at the time (having just come out from a massive depressive episode) and while his intentions were undoubtedly good, the creations of the maidens themselves was probably a mistake, though a well-meaning and understandable one.

Fast forward to the birbs.

I’d like to preface this with the fact that I’m hoping we do get more information on what exactly went down for this to be a thing, but gauging from what we know, I don’t see where people can call Oz a bad person for it. To start off, the ability itself doesn’t seem to have any drawbacks that we’ve heard of. Raven didn’t actually have anything negative to say about it other than the fact that Ozpin did it, and seeing as she has a track record of shirking responsibilities in the favor of selfish gain (hi Yang) the simple fact that she ditched on Oz and Qrow can’t be construed as evidence for much of anything at this point. Also, according to Qrow, this was a consensual, undertaking. If anything, I’d say the biggest mistake that Oz made here was in trusting Raven to begin with when, at least from what we’ve seen, there were probably some warning signs he should have taken into consideration before essentially wasting his finite magic once again on someone that doesn’t ultimately want to help his cause (that being defeating the source of all evil).

The Fall of Beacon.

Hoo boy, there is a lot to unpack here.

First of all, lets talk about team RWBY’s search and destroy mission, mainly just because I love the little interaction of it. I loved that, in the face of the old trope of the main character having information that the authority figures would like, Ruby decides to place her trust in Ozpin and tell him about the secret base because in 98% of all shows, she wouldn’t have and good on Rooster Teeth for it. I loved that, in turn, Ozpin decides to trust her and her team and allow them to go on that very mission, even knowing that it may have been the smarter choice to send higher level huntsmen, he puts his trust in their abilities. While this may or may not have been a mistake (depending on who you look at how it went/ how it might have went otherwise) the fact of the matter is that Oz put faith in his students where they had placed faith in him and I am 100% in love with that interaction and never see it mentioned.

Next up: Ironwood. Trust was a huge theme in the Ironwood-Ozpin relationship in this volume. What it came down to was: James wanted Ozpin to trust him, and pretty much forced him to do so (via the council stuff, bringing his own little army ect.) while at the same time not placing that same amount of trust in him (as we can tell seeing as it was revealed Oz didn’t know about Penny). As we all know, this backfired majorly. James’ robotic army turned against them all, and due to Ozpin not knowing there was anything to be worried about with the Pyrrha / Penny fight it went on and we all know how that went.

Alright, its time, we’ve finally come to the Pyrrha in the room. First off, the maiden business. While I will definitely admit that their bandage-ripping tactic of explaining the situation wasn’t the best way to go about it, I think that given the circumstances Oz’s choice of nominating Pyrrha to be the fall maiden was probably the best he could have made. Pyrrha was intelligent, incredibly strong and mature for her age, and seeing as they were under a massive time constraint with Amber’s uncertain health and the looming threat at Beacon, I think its understandable that they felt the need to impress upon her the importance of the decision at hand. I would also like to remind everyone that this was a decision for her to make, and the details of it were given to her to the full extent of their knowledge on it, including how uncomfortable it made them feel as well. They didn’t sugar-coat this, they didn’t lie, they gave her the facts: that they were all in a shitty situation and yes, she could make a difference on it. While I do agree that this would undoubtedly put pressures on Pyrrha to say yes considering it was the obvious moral answer when they hadn’t given her many options, they also didn’t have many options here. It was just an overall shitty situation and when it came down to it, Ozpin was repeatedly asking her if she was sure about this decision, Ozpin hated having to put this on her.

There’s another part of this that I wanted to bring up though, because I never see it mentioned, ever. This is the fact that Jaune indirectly caused the deaths of Pyrrha, Ozpin and Amber.

Yup. We’re going there.

While Ozpin and Pyrrha were having their little moral dilemma over the soul conversion, Jaune was set the task of acting as look out and protector. Now, lets imagine what might have happened if Jaune had actually done this job. He would have spotted Cinder as she came into the vault and been able to provide a warning. Ozpin, who was shown to nearly hold his own against Cinder at full maiden status more than likely would have been able to engage on her and protect Amber. Pyrrha could have also joined this fight and the two (three if you count Jaune) of them could have more than likely beaten her sparky ass and prevented literally everything that was to follow. Instead, Jaune is too busy focusing on Pyrrha, which is understandable, but it doesn’t take away the fact that Ozpin trusted him to do a job, a simple one at that, and he not only failed him, but lead to his eventual death. And you know what? Even with that, even while Ozpin is the only person besides Jaune who knows this, he still expressed nothing but positivity to Jaune’s presence the next time he sees him, while in Oscar.

What I’m trying to say is, Ozpin makes mistakes. Ozpin makes a shit ton of mistakes, but they’re human mistakes. They’re well-meaning mistakes, and even while a large amount of the fandom and the characters in the show seem to think that he’s overly secretive and all that, I’d actually make the claim that the opposite is true, that he’s almost too trusting considering all that its done to him. At the end of the day, Oz is just so genuinely hopeful, so willing to believe in the best of people, and while he may make bad decisions, that doesn’t make him a bad person, it just makes him human.

#mun #rant #Ozpin #theory #best headmaster

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