#you know that one homoerotic friendship you had at 14

[enihk-writes]

[you look so pretty and i love this view]

pairing: yu iseol x afab!she/her!reader

summary: you realise that you might like your senior sister more than you originally thought.

word count: 1.66k

author's note: based this on that one time i realised i was in love with my then best friend, who turned out to be super homophobic but we're going to ignore that reality. mom says my fanfic, my rules. (the story of us falling out is in the tags kurghhhh)

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laundry day was always the busiest time of the week.

well, it's not like you had anything better to do, as one of the physically weaker disciples of the sect, there was an unspoken expectation that you and the others like you would have to pull your weight around here in other ways.

you just wished more people wanted to pull their weight in the housekeeping aspect, instead of all flocking to the book-keeping jobs. it sucked that the majority of the housework was left in your hands, but what can a girl do?

sitting alone by the running stream, you worked hard at cleaning the dirt and stains off the pristine white uniforms you all wore, staying careful not to rip open tears and loose threads in the fabric. you look at the pile of clothing you had left, feeling your eye twitch when you saw the state that they were all in.

you sigh.

a long, drawn out sigh with your head thrown back. the sky above you that was once a dark shade of indigo had grown to a pale violet — the air in your lungs was cold and crisp. the water running in the stream smelt fresh, like the earth it came out from further up the mountains. you leave your hand in the stream, shivering at the icy feeling of the water running over your skin.

deciding that it was a long enough break, you shook your hands dry, digging into the unwashed clothes trying to pick out the uniform with the least defects so you could just mindlessly scrub on it without that added worry of wear and tear.

by the time you were done, the sun was hanging high up in the sky, and your back felt hot from how long you had been hunched over without ever going under the shade.

carefully, you balance the bigger laundry basket on your head while trying to rest the other on the curve of your hip.

the sound of shoes crunching on gravel comes up behind you. there wasn't a need for you to turn and look, you'd already guessed who it was by their footsteps alone.

...i'll take that.

yu iseol walks over, hands grabbing on the rounded edges of the woven basket. tugging on it lightly, having you loosen your grip a little.

you let her have it. stifling a giggle when her face was completely hidden behind the towering pile. yu iseol hugs the basket to her chest, shifting on her feet wondering when were you heading off to dry the clothes.

come on, iseol-sago.

you say softly, one hand balancing the basket on your head and the other reaching out to hold your senior sister's hand.

she lets you, quietly noting how your fingers felt against her calloused palms. hers were long, thin and rather scarred, and yours were a little smaller and..

her thumb rests over your fingers, your soft and squishy fingers. almost like a baby's. but maybe it's because your hands had been in and out of the water for the past few hours, they've become wrinkly — just like an old man's.

you hear a low scoff. looking over from the corner of your eye, you follow yu iseol's gaze to see her looking at your interlocked hands tenderly.

the back of your ears grow heated at the sight, your eyes dart back to the path in front of you, determined not to look back again and have your eyes meet hers.

what was that anyway?

what was that look she had back there?

you silently hoped the shadow cast by the basket on your head was dark enough to hide the slight steam of bashfulness that was probably escaping the pores of your skin right then.

yu iseol shut her eyes, letting you lead her to wherever, she knew you wouldn't ever lead her down a path where she could trip and fall over. well, she couldn't even if she tried since she had good reflexes.

but still, she lets her guard down around you. it wasn't that hard to do that anyway. it was nice being around you, after all.

hand-in-hand, the two of you walked under the endless rows of trees, yu iseol basked in the brief pockets of warm sunlight that hit her face, listening to the soft synchronised breathing passing between you two. the critters chattered above your heads and the red leaves of autumn crunched beneath your feet.

iseol-sago... we're here.

there was a slight shake in your voice, it wasn't really out of fear, that much she could tell. she should ask the others later, they might know the reasons why better than she did.

you were lucky that your senior sister had volunteered to help today. what would have been a job that took you almost three hours was done in one, leaving you some time to kick off your shoes and take a break while waiting for the clothes to dry out.

a while back, the sect had some money to spare. and since it was also your birthday coincidentally, the elders had asked if there was anything you wanted.

you had asked for a wooden platform to be built where you hung the laundry, and what a great request it had been. now in autumn, surrounded by a sea of oranges and reds, you lie down with your legs hanging over the edge, face turned up to the skies as your eyes made out the shapes of the clouds.

normally, yu iseol would have taken this time to train or work on her physique. but she didn't have her sword with her, nor did she want to leave you alone in the forest to go and get it. besides, the weather today was nice, and a few hours of doing nothing wouldn't hurt anyone. that guy would probably even pay her money to take a breather for a bit.

you look over, watching her shuffle a little closer to you. giggling, you link your arm with hers, pulling her to your side, shoulders bumping against each other's.

the both of you stayed like that for a long time, eyes closed, lingering between staying awake and falling asleep. it wasn't until a cold gush of air blew across the forest, causing the trees to knock branches and the leaves to fly across the ground — jostling you awake.

by then, the sun was sinking down the mountain peaks, the once vibrant blues of the afternoon sky had been painted with streaks of evening pink.

you turn over to look at the girl still asleep next to you.

her long hair had fallen over her face, covering it almost completely. your hand reaches out, trembling a little, to brush it out of her visage. you couldn't help tucking it behind her ear, though you didn't want to push your luck further by letting your fingers linger near her face.

maybe it was the lighting, maybe it was something else.

for someone who didn't care about her appearance all that much, she sure didn't look the least bit shabby. your eyes trailed over her dark plum-brown locks that shone a deep indigo under the setting sun. it wasn't just her hair, the same orange light danced across the curve of her cheek — the slight plumpness that led down to her sharp jawline, angled perfectly to frame her soft lower lip topped with a cupid's bow that strung an arrow straight to your heart. her nose was pointed and a little small, the slope of it led your gaze up to her eyes. her lashes were long with each one hand-crafted by the gods to curl perfectly around her two downturned eyes, each holding a pool of pale violet that had turned into a blooming lilac with a thin golden ring circling the dark centre of her irises.

a pair that were looking straight back into yours.

your heart jumped up to your mouth. not expecting that she had woken up while you were busy staring at her so shamelessly.

hm.

yu iseol sounds in acknowledgement. her expression still as neutral as ever. though if you hadn't been so preoccupied with the panicking, you would have noticed the rosy tint on the tips of her ears.

she reached out and grabbed your neck in place, tilting it to face her. she leans down and placed her forehead against yours. and you found your breath stuck, hitched in your throat as you dared not move or make a sound. this was all too much for you! that loud and noisy thumps of your heart rang in your ears, and you wondered for a moment if yu iseol had heard it too.

hm. you're not sick.

she states, matter-of-factly and lifts herself off the platform, walking over to the clothesline where the hanging laundry had almost been forgotten. she collects the clothes calmly, as though whatever she pulled on you just now was just any other regular day.

you remained lying on that wooden platform, mind reeling from what just transpired. you wanted to yell, to scream, to throw yourself off the cliff but you couldn't do that while she was still here. you choked back from spitting out blood in sheer agony. if your senior sister kept playing with you like this, you doubt you had any longer to live.

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chung myung wonders what deity he had disrespected in his past life to be stuck with kids like yu iseol.

when she had come to him and the other three in the middle of training with the pretext of asking for a friend, he hadn't thought so far to expect a disaster like this.

he looks up to the heavens where his sa-hyungs and friends were looking down on him and contemplates if he should just lock these two girls in a room until they sort out themselves.

i am so... fucking tired of you all...

#enihkwrites #return of the mount hua sect #return of the blossoming blade #return of mount hua #yu iseol #yoo iseol #rotmhs #rotbb #yu iseol x reader #yoo iseol x reader #return of the blossoming blade x reader #return of the mount hua sect x reader #i lifted that one detailed description of yu iseol from my diary at that time...14-year-old me was down SO bad.. what was i even on???????? #you know that one homoerotic friendship you had at 14 #that was me and this girl and i found out she was ugh cause she was saying how this one mutual acquaintance (who came out as a lesbian btw) #in a conservative all-girls christian school BTW #OKAY #SHE WAS SAYING REALLY HORRIFIC SHIT BEHIND THE GIRL'S BACK AND I WAS SO!!! I FELT ANGRY FOR THE FRIEND LIKE FIRST OF ALL!!! SHE TRUSTED US! #SECOND OF ALL!! WHAT ABT US?? WHAT ABT EVERYTHING WE DID TGT??? LIKE DID I MEAN NOTHING TO YOU GIRL??? #i left as she was saying all that bigoted bs and i never talked to her from then until now.. like i can't be friends with s/o like tht #man... my first sapphic heartbreak... that was a rough time for me and all the people around me i was going through IT #i also got on tumblr around this time so you KNOW i was hit like... REALLLLLLLLY hard with this “breakup” #it's been 8 years #this is true toxic yuri yearning

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

I know it is only anybodys guessing really, and I truly do not want to sound like 'the historian' but you would go as far as calling these relationships of napoleon 'homoerotic'? Why? Couldn't it be the case of him having just very warm attitude and be close to his friends like that?

Again nothing against it, but I needed to ask since I as well am the person to get alike towards my close friends and I don't feel it having any attraction undertones.

Thank you for the ask! As usual for me, my response got really long.

I mean correct! It’s literally anyone’s guess. Who knows? Certainly not me! Certainly no one who is alive right now!

I’m just a queer on the internet having fun who sees Napoleon and goes "ah yes, a chaotic bisexual even though the concept of modern sexual identity wasn't a thing in his time etc. etc. [insert all the other usual disclaimers required on this webbedsite]" so that's why.

[How do I know he’s a chaotic bi? Well, it’s very simple, he couldn’t sit properly in a chair, liked to sit on his secretaries’ laps, pull their ears, and tell them Fun Facts he learned that day, and wanted to make the tsar of Russia his mistress. He also dearly loved Josephine and wrote about how he liked going down on her. This is clear proof that he was a chaotic bi king and we should be so lucky to know this about him. ;)]

I'm also a writer who likes to slap a queer lens onto most things because that's how I role and I'm very unapologetic about it. Which most people who follow me know.

I’m also someone who has incredibly deep, intimate friendships with a close selection of people in my life that are not romantic/sexual or whatever in their nature—but they are incredibly intimate. They are friendships where partners of my friends have been jealous and insecure because of how close we are—which is a them problem, not an us problem.

I would go so far as to argue that friends are more likely to slot into that problematic category of “soulmate” than anyone romantic (ymmv). And from the outside, I’m sure people might read my friendships with a few people (have read them, in fact) as romantic/homoerotic and frankly I don’t care. Whatever. I know what my friendships are, why does it matter what other people read them as? More to the point, why does it matter that someone reads a dead person’s friendships as homo-something? How does that impact my friendships which may, or may not, mirror that dead person’s friendships? Who cares? One should love one’s friends however one wishes to. Fuck everything else.

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In an effort to avoid the Great Queer Napoleon Discourse War of 2013-14 I shall include a disclaimer because hot damn do people get REALLY uppity about this: I’m a writer, first and foremost in all things. I’m not a historian. As noted above, I’m a queer fag on the internet having fun. Take what I say with a grain of salt.

(Honestly, doing anything with Napoleon’s sexuality aside from He Was the Straightest Straight Who Ever Straighted, gets everyone’s hackles raised. I think that says more about those with hackles up than it does the person going: maybe he might have had a bit of a queerness about him, it’s not implausible.)

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Some general stuff on Napoleon & That Doesn’t Seem Entirely Straight, Even For the 18th and 19th Century:

From Cronin’s biography on Napoleon:

“Napoleon found that his friendships with men often began with physical attraction, and this took a curious form. ‘He told me,’ says Caulcaincourt, ‘…that for him the heart was not the organ of sentiment; that he felt emotions only where most men experience feelings of a different kind; nothing in the heart, everything in the loins and in another place, which I leave nameless.’ 

The feeling Napoleon described as ‘a sort of painful tingling, a nervous irritability…the squeaking of a saw sometimes gives me the same sensation’.”

In addition, Talleyrand speculated Napoleon and Bourienne were, uh, intimate in all senses of the word. Talleyrand, of course, well—one should treat his hot takes with some caution.

There is also the (in)famous letter Napoleon wrote to Josephine about Alexander where he said that he and Alexander were inordinately pleased with one another and if the tsar were a woman, he’d take Alexander as his mistress (Napoleon, honey, don’t write that to your wife).

I mean, do what you want with that. Take it for what it’s worth /shrug

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Of the three friendships under discussion: Lannes, Duroc, Junot—I always read Lannes and Napoleon’s friendship as just friendship. Duroc and Junot though. That’s where we start getting into arguments for a homoerotic friendship—or romantic friendship, if one prefers that term.

I’ll do a little ramble for each, because they all deserve it.

Lannes

Napoleon’s friendship with Lannes was intimate, close, and they loved each other dearly—but as said, I always read them as friends. Even if they lived today and were free/able to be whatever they wanted to be to one another, it’d still just be friendship.

People did make Achilles/Patroclus references to them—particularly around Lannes’ death—but that was the mode of how people spoke back then. It’s the 19th century version of comparing everything to LOTR or Harry Potter (read another classical epic people, jeez).

Their friendship was volatile for sure—these are two hot headed, strong minded, opinionated men who were not afraid to snap and snarl at one another—but at the end of the day I do not doubt their love for each other. But it’s what we would term a platonic love.  

Brian Martin writes this in Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-century France:

Napoleon’s grief for Marshal Lannes took on the very public character of open lamentation. Rather than grieve behind closed doors and conceal his personal vulnerabilities in order to show public strength, Napoleon’s mourning for his beloved friend became a matter of great public spectacle. Like Achilles mourning his beloved Patroclus, Napoleon wept publicly and openly expressed his affection in a way that was widely reported, discussed, and admired by the officers and soldiers in his armies.

[…]

Napoleon’s public grief at the death of Jean Lannes represented a new model for social relations between soldiers in the early nineteenth-century France. weeping over his friend’s broken body, Napoleon demonstrated how the revolution and empire had made it possible not only for an emperor to grieve openly for a fallen marshal, but for a soldier to love his comrade. This uncharacteristic expression of affection between Napoleon and Lannes was echoes in similar relationships between officers and foot soldiers in Napoleon’s armies. Military memories of the first empire bear witness to a wide range of intimate relationships among generals, colonels, and captains as well as sergeants, corporals, and grunts (grognards), the infantry soldiers who made up the majority of the imperial armies. Napoleon’s love for Lannes might thus be said to represent a broad spectrum of masculine affection and intimacy in the ranks of the Grande Armée, or what could be called Napoleonic friendship.

So yeah, I’ve not much more to say on them. Their friendship was loving, affectionate, intimate, and complex. Lannes could be frustrated with Napoleon (often was, the longer Napoleon remained in power—because Lannes loved Bonaparte not the emperor), but Lannes loved his friend and Napoleon loved Lannes. But my read on them has always been that it was what we would term platonic.

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Junot

This one is messy. Because Junot and Napoleon are messy people. I also think this one is the strongest case for “something more than friendship”. I personally believe Junot loved Napoleon in a deep, phenomenal, possibly obsessive fashion that absolutely was romantic—maybe sexual/erotic—and Napoleon for a time may have returned at least some of those feelings. Then it all went south.

I’m ripping a lot of this from a previous ask I received about Junot—since it covered a lot of the more romantic aspects of his and Napoleon’s relationship.

Junot and Napoleon were close friends when they were in their 20s. Incredibly close. Laure Junot, whose memoires one should treat cautiously, intimated that there was more than just friendship between them at this point. But if that is the case, we’ll never know for certain.

Brian Martin sums it up well (and saves me from having to dig out my copy of Laure’s memoir):

Soon after his imprisonment, Napoleon was released and exonerated, but with little money and no desire to take on a new military post in Brittany, he returned to Paris where, as Laure Junot explains, he lived with his comrade Junot and depended on his friend’s emotional and financial support … The 1794 letter from Toulon initiates a half-year period in the lives of the twenty-five-year-old Bonaparte and twenty-three-year-old Junot when … these ambitious young men relied on each other during their impecunious days in Paris. Describing how Junot “loved Bonaparte as one loves at the age” (1: 188), Laure Junot implies that the young Jean-Andoche developed an adolescent crush on Napoleon, as the two young men grew in intimacy.

[…]

Laure Junot tactfully observes many years later that it was difficult to assess the nature of these friendships [with Duroc and Junot] without offending their masculinity: “These are the very profound and abstract mysteries of the human heart. It is difficult to explain them without first wounding a man’s dignity” (11: 131).

In relegating Napoleon’s military relationships to the realm of the mysteries, Laure Junot defines Napoleonic friendship — long before “the love that dare not speak its name” was articulated by Lord Alfred Douglas in 1894 and invoked at Oscar Wilde’s trial in 1895 —as an enigmatic and unspeakable love incapable of being articulated without shaming a soldier’s manhood. Amid such ambiguity, it is unclear if such “mysteries” encompass both the emotional and the erotic. What is clearer is that Napoleon and Junot shared a degree of affection during their youth in Paris that was undeniably intimate.

As Napoleon climbed up the greasy pole, the power dynamic changed and expectations of interpersonal relationships became more formal putting a strain on his and Junot’s friendship. Junot, like many who knew Napoleon from the early days, loved Bonaparte, not the emperor. As Laure put it in her memoire: “Now let me explain the sadness and pain which afflicted Junot on learning that Napoleon was no longer his General Bonaparte of Toulon. Perhaps the affair simply followed a natural decline. But Junot … did not see it this way. He wanted reciprocity, which he craved even more as his own affectionate fantasies increased … He loved the man, not the emperor.”

In 1800, Napoleon named Junot Commandant of Paris on the condition that he marry because, it seems, there were too many rumours flying around about the two of them. (As noted above, Talleyrand was already making some “huh. Interesting closeness, there” comments about Napoleon.) Dutifully, Junot married Laure.

Junot always exhibited some signs of mental illness throughout his life and at one point he received a head wound (I forget which battle) that massively exacerbated whatever existing mental health troubles he had. (And note that this was one of many wounds - nor was it his first head wound. It’s just the one people in his own life pointed to as a moment of change.)

Junot had jealous and possessive tendencies, something that drove Napoleon a little batty, and they got worse. While Junot was in Portugal, and later Spain, he wrote Napoleon a series of desperate letters begging him to reappoint Junot as his aid-de-camp. We unfortunately don’t have these letters anymore, Napoleon was notoriously secretive and private when it came to personal correspondence and had a habit of burning lots of it. However, we do have Laure’s account of Napoleon’s reception of Junot’s pleading. Laure writes:

"Look here, Madame, what your husband writes to me!’ said the Emperor, ‘Read this and tell me if he sends you such letters."

I read these letters, and this caused me some pain: my husband sent me affectionate missives, but never in the tone of a lover; here were letters that resembled those between Julie and Saint-Preux, or those of the Portuguese nun.*

Napoleon then goes on and says:

“In admitting that Junot loves me more than anything in the world … [he demonstrates] that he does not love me more than his own ambition”

To which Laure replies:

“He loves you, Sire, more than all the honours that you can give, more than your crown, more than me perhaps, for it was pride that made me say the contrary just now, perhaps even more than his children!”

-

*Note: She’s referencing Guilleragues’s Portuguese Letters (1669) and Rousseau’s Julie or the New Héloïse (1761)

Also, as I said above, treat Laure’s accounts cautiously. As with all memoirs, she is positioning certain scenes with a purpose and some things are downplayed, or exaggerated, accordingly.

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In 1813, Napoleon dismissed Junot from military duty and sent him off to be governor of Illyria which Junot, rightly or wrongly, saw as a form of exile. During his ambassadorship he famously entered a ballroom wearing nothing but his epaulettes and his medals. [above para' edited per conversation in the notes]

Brian Martin:

While one could blame Junot’s naked diplomacy on his progressive dementia, his shocking entrance can also be seen as a kind of buff rebuff to Napoleon. After a lifetime fighting for Bonaparte, watching shrapnel rip into young men’s bodies, leading thousands of soldiers to their deaths, and suffering twenty-seven wounds* of his own, Junot offered his own ravaged body as a hideous and spectacular product of Napoleon’s violence.

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*Note: Junot says he had 17 wounds, not sure where Martin got 27 - unless there were wounds Junot wasn’t counting.

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After this incident, Junot was swiftly recalled back to France where he soon after died by suicide.

In his final letter to Napoleon he wrote:

“I who love you with the affection of a savage for the sun, I who am entirely yours. Well then: this eternal war that we must fight for you, I want no more of! I want peace! I want finally to repose my tired head, my sore limbs … to enjoy that which I earned … with my blood! The blood of an honest man, of a good Frenchman, of a true patriot. I therefore ask, at last, for that tranquillity that I earned through twenty-two years of effective service and seventeen wounds from which my blood has flowed for my country, and for your glory.” (emphasis in original)

After Junot’s death, Napoleon ordered that Junot’s personal papers be seized and destroyed as he was afraid their personal correspondence might make its way to a public forum.

So yeah, Junot’s love for Napoleon was definitely on the romantic side, I would say. Because Napoleon burned all their correspondence we don’t know what he sent in reply to Junot—especially in the early days of their relationship. I suspect it was intimate and possibly in line with what Junot continued to send him throughout their life and like hell did Napoleon want that escaping to the public.

Anyway—Junot and Napoleon, I would argue definitely had some homoerotic/romantic undertones and such to their friendship. I think it was mutual in their 20s then Napoleon’s feelings retreated to more platonic but Junot’s never changed.

It just man, gives me strong flashbacks to when I was a teenager and one of my best friends at the time  declared herself my soulmate and carved my initials into her arm and left me a million and a half messages on the home answering machine and said that I was cold like Napoleon and she loved me for it etc. etc.

When I look at Junot and Napoleon I see myself and my old friend in all that glory of the strange complexities of young, intensely emotional and intimate friendships that absolutely blur the line into romantic/erotic.

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Duroc

Ah sweet Duroc! Duroc who regularly compared himself to Junot in terms of his relationship to Napoleon.

Duroc to Laure Junot in May of 1813:  “Poor Junot! It’s that he’s like me! The Emperor’s friendship is our whole life.”

And again, this is from Laure’s memoirs:

‘Junot and some others,’ Duroc said to me, ‘misjudge me and misjudge my position as well. The Emperor would disgrace me if he made me a marshal of France. What would I do away from him? No doubt it’s a great honor; but my attachment to him, how could it not be affected by that distance? I love the Emperor as Junot loves him. And isn’t he going to choose the post of first aide-de-camp instead of that of governor of Paris? So why judge me otherwise!’

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Duroc’s a hard one to pin down because he was such an exemplary marshal of the palace, in addition he left us no diaries or memoirs so we have the word of others and what survived of his letters, little else to go on.

However, I think it telling that Duroc compared himself to regularly to Junot—who everyone was aware of how he felt about Napoleon—and that Junot was so jealous of Duroc. That Junot saw Duroc as a rival for Napoleon’s affection and love but not Lannes tells me that clearly Junot could see the similarity of what Duroc and Napoleon had to what he and Napoleon may have once had but didn’t anymore. And, that Lannes was different. It was a different relationship and one that Junot didn’t find threatening.

It's also worth nothing that Duroc was the only one of Napoleon’s officers, aside from Lannes, who was allowed to use tu with Napoleon. Las Cases writes: “I’ve heard the Emperor say that in all of his military career, Duroc alone possessed his blind confidence and received all his affection … Duroc loved the Emperor for himself; he was devoted most of all to the private man, even more than to the monarch”

Duroc’s role as marshal of the palace also put him in an interesting position as a sort of quasi-wife to Napoleon. The role he played was very much a “wife” role—Cronin summarizes Duroc’s duties thus:

"Napoleon was struck by Duroc’s sweet nature, his beautiful manners and the patience which he himself lacked. So he employed his friend as a diplomat and when he became Emperor chose him to run the household and court. […] He had his hands full ensuring that the grocer did not overcharge for the Chambertin, since Napoleon would be sure to notice, and, as Napoleon put on weight, tactfully persuading the Imperial Tailor not to make new clothes but to let out the old ones a couple of inches. He also had to make peace when Napoleon lost his temper: pushing over the table, for example, when he saw crépinettes of partridge. He did this admirably, because he was devoted to Napoleon. Many a time, when the Emperor had hurt a visitor with a sharp word, Duroc would murmur on the way out: ‘Forget it. He says what he feels, not what he thinks, and not what he’ll do tomorrow.’"

No one else of Napoleon’s intimate friends really takes on that wifely role—even after Duroc’s death. Bertrand has the same role, Marshal of the Palace, and he was damn good at his job, just as Duroc was, but there was a difference in their relationship and Bertrand doesn’t read as so close and devoted on a marital level to Napoleon. Not that Bertrand didn’t love Napoleon, he did, gods know he did, but it was more in line with Lannes than Duroc or Junot.

Napoleon describes Duroc to Las Cases:

‘Duroc,’ concluded he, ‘had lively, tender, and concealed passions, little corresponding with the coldness of his manner. It was long before I knew this, so exact and regular was his service. It was not until my day was entirely closed and finished, and I was enjoying repose, that Duroc’s work begun. Chance, or by some accident, could alone have made me acquainted with his character. He was a pure and virtuous man, utterly disinterested, and extremely generous.’

[…]

When he [Napoleon] went to see Duroc, after he had received his mortal wound, he attempted to hold out some hopes to him; but Duroc, who did not deceive himself, only replied by begging [Napoleon] to make them give him opium. …

After this recollection, the emperor, with an apparent effort, began abruptly to talk of something else.

I believe that Napoleon and Duroc were able to see each other’s interiority in a way that few others were able to and that formed the basis for their affection, love and friendship.

Duroc’s letters to Napoleon, anytime they were apart, are also more intense than usual. Plenty of Napoleon’s friends wrote about wanting to be by his side when they were sent off on diplomatic missions or what have you. But Duroc’s express a particularly intense form of devotion:

Duroc to Napoleon, May 29, 1801:

I am waiting to leave, Citizen Consul, until I receive a response to the letters that I had the honor to write you, unless the circumstances or the letters I receive from Paris let me judge that I can leave earlier. I beg you to remember that I am eight hundred leagues from you and, although I’ve been well-received here, I am never better than when I am near you. (Emphasis in the original)

Duroc to Napoleon, July 7, 1801:

I have sought to conduct myself here, Citizen Consul, in a manner that would satisfy you. I am well-regarded and thought highly of everywhere because I belong to you particularly, but I will not be happy until I’m sure that I deserve your approval. I am waiting to set my departure until I know that you’ve received the letter that I had the honor to write you and that I sent with Captain Leclerc. I very much want to find myself near you as soon as possible. (Emphasis in the original)

When Napoleon offered to have Hortense marry Duroc, Napoleon’s proposition was that Duroc would receive five hundred thousand francs and be named commandant of the 8th military division and would be stationed in Toulon (Napoleon was against having a son-in-law in the house).

When the proposition was passed on to Duroc he turned it down because he didn’t want to be sent away from Napoleon’s side and if marriage meant being apart, he didn’t want it, even though from all accounts he was quite fond of Hortense (and she was fond of him).

Later, when Napoleon was having to negotiate his name in exile he said to Barry O’Meara:

“The name of General Bonaparte was the one which I bore at Campo Formio and at Lunneville, when I dictated terms of peace with the Emperor of Austria. I bore it at Amiens when I signed the peace with England. I should be proud to bear it still, but the honour of France forbids me to acknowledge the right of the King of England to annul the acts of the French people. My intention was to take the name of Duroc.”

But he felt he had to keep Emperor Napoleon in order to Make A statement.

In another account, I forget to who, he repeated his intent to have taken on Duroc’s name in exile in order to be a little more incognito/not draw attention to himself, but because England refused to acknowledge that he had been emperor he was like “fuck that, I’m going to insist on being called emperor”. So, had England not been like “you were never emperor” it’s possible Napoleon would have taken Duroc’s surname as his own.

How very married of them.

------

Apologies for the long reply. Not sure this will really answer anything, but it's an amalgamation of my thoughts.

Junot is the clearest of the homo-something friendship between Napoleon and another man. Like, I think that's a tough one to read as anything other than a messy break up. Which is why, when we were all nattering on about queering Napoleon in film yesterday, I focused so much on Junot over the others.

But same sex intimacy, even in Just Friends, can have homo-something undertones to it. Friendships can be complex, multilayered and include some romantic and erotic aspects to them. This doesn't mean those friendships are Romantic Relationships as we think of them, but if there's a romantic tinge to it, or a strong homoerotic tinge to it, then why not explore it? See where it takes the story or the interpretation and undestanding of the person and their actions. Maybe it'll go no where useful, maybe it will. Only one way to find out.

Thank you for the ask!

#reply #anon #ask #napoleonic #napoleonic friendships #duroc #junot #lannes #napoleon bonaparte #napoleon #now I get to sit here and be stressed about possible Discourse #suicide mention

[redreadredemption]

OK ITS HERE! THE PART OF DRACULA THAT INFLUENCED MY ENTIRE PERSONALITY!

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check your email. Read Jonathan’s entry for May 16th, and then come back. I absolutely refuse to spoil it for anyone.

Spoilers ahead

Long story short, when I was 14, I read the line “yes, I too can love” and it DESTROYED me. I still thought that I was cishet at the time, so I don’t look for queer subtext the way that I do now, and I had a full on crisis because I thought that I was misinterpreting the scene. Surely it was just… male friendship? Maybe saying “I love you” to your homies was more acceptable back then?

I still have the copy of Dracula that I annotated at the time, so I have a pretty good idea of what was going through my head at the time (the yellow post it’s are from about 6 months ago when I was looking through my notes and decided to write down my reactions to my reactions. I don’t know why I did that but they’re funny sometimes so I left them. I’ve got no clue when I put the pink post it there)

So anyway, once I finished drawing Lenny faces, I looked up “Dracula LGBT” and very quickly found hundreds of thousands of articles and essays breaking down just how fucking gay this book is. And I read a lot of them. I started reading other short stories about vampires that the authors talked about and somehow took at least another 6 months to realize that I’m queer after going on more than one rant to the people in my life about Carmilla because did you know that they kiss in that one? Laura and Carmilla kiss each other in a book written in the 1870s, did you know that? Carmilla is supposed to be a villain but she’s sooooo romantic, let me read you a passage, but oh no I’m not gay I’m just really fascinated by the history. I’m straight.

If it is not flagrantly obvious, I am not cishet. The time it took me to realize this is embarrassing, especially because I’m like, 90% sure that I went on at least one of these vampire rants to the poor guy who was my boyfriend at the time.

I’ll save some other rants about why vampires are gay as fuck for later because I’m at school right now and don’t have access to a lot of my notes, but I just wanted to share this because this is why Dracula means so much to me. There’s so much wrong with this book, and I’ll be the first to tell you that, but it holds a very special place in my heart. I don’t contribute my entire queer awakening to this one scene, there was other stuff going on, but it was definitely a contributor.

Dracula also really fueled the flame for my love of critical analysis. Like I said earlier, this scene prompted me to read other short stories about vampires, and at this point, it’s a game of “how long until this gets homoerotic” whenever I pick up a new story, and when I stumble across the rare text that can’t really be analyzed through a queer lens, there’s still other themes that I can analyze the fuck out of. Seriously, vampires are a very cool metaphor because they can pass as human for the most part and only reveal their monstrous tendencies later, so authors have a tendency to apply traits that are considered morally wrong, like gambling or… gay sex.

I don’t expect this to turn everyone on tumblr into Dracula scholars, but I hope that today’s email meant something to people. Maybe not the same way that it meant something to me, but I’m already seeing a couple posts like “wait, I’m not crazy right? Is this what I think it is” and I want y’all to know that it is EXACTLY what you think it is and you are NOT crazy

#dracula #dracula daily #bram stoker #daily dracula #jonathan harker

[punk-pandame]

Excuse me a girl in your hs wrote WHAT

in reference to this post

YOU HEARD ME

(story under the cut)

okay so in high school there was this girl myself and a bunch of my actual friends were "friends" with but like, not by choice. she was just in like, most of our classes with us and did drama club with a bunch of us. and yes i know all theatre kids are crazy but she was like. waaaaaay out there. like, idk-how-she-grew-up-into-a-functional-person level of whacky. and she had like, a deep and unabaiting obsession with me since like, fuckin kindergarten man. she swore she didn't like like me but she was constantly on top of me (literally! in my lap!!) and always making innuendos when i was around and like, idk generally being a tiny terror. and it did creep me out but also it was like, i literally could not get away from her cause we were into all the same shit and hung out with all the same people so i was just like okay fine i have another weird homoerotic friendship ig (i wasn't out on any level back then) and just dealt with it.

so anyway when i got with my now-husband back in like sophomore year part of me was really worried she'd like, go full "pumped up kicks" on everybody, but she like... actually took it pretty well? she was like OMG YES I LOVE THIS FOR YOU I LOVE YOU BOTH SO MUCH MY FRIENDS ARE IN LOVE YAY and we were just like oh well that's a pleasant surprise considering most of our other friends were like, weirded out by it because i was like, the first in the group to date anyone and they didn't know what to do about it and it was like a whole thing. ANYWAY. anyway. turns out she DIDN'T take it super well cause one of our friends was hanging out with her once and she'd left wattpad open on her laptop. and they found out she was writing super out-of-character, highly exaggerated, and frankly badly written fanfics ABOUT ME AND DIOT. but that wasn't it. she wound up including all the other couples that started to form in the group too. it was like, toward the end of the school year that it was discovered and already had fuckin... 13? 14? chapters. i think it ended up being 21 by the time it all blew over. idk if she ever wrote more, she could still be writing it for all i know, but it was like. more than it ever should have been.

but yeah basically the way we all decided to deal with it was by having dramatic readings in a circle in each other's basements and laughing at each new installment as soon as it dropped. cause like... how tf else do you cope when something That Weird is going on.

best part, though, is when someone (idk who) let it slip to our funny little author what we were doing.

SHE WANTED IN ON THE CIRCLE TIME READINGS

and the actual best part?

SOMEBODY FUCKIN INVITED HER

SHE DID A READING OF HER UNPOSTED LATEST CHAPTER FOR US, LET US EDIT IT ON THE SPOT, AND POSTED IT

i haven't spoken to her in ages but i still have her on social media cause i was so curious about what kind of adult she'd turn out to be. somewhere in college she became well-adjusted enough to become a teacher and help with the productions for our old drama club so good for her akdjsghajks

#if you recognize this story no you don't shut tf up don't out me here this blog is my anonymous safe space akjlsghjkas #punky IRL #storytime #textpost #longpost #clown to clown communication #i hope this is what you wanted anon cause uh.. yeah #aksjdghasjkdhgjkasd

[romeomahbromeo]

guys i’m back on my bullshit

thoughts on rewatching the les mis movie

⁃ wow they really messed up the musical timeline

⁃ stop changing the fUCKING LYRICS

⁃ jackman is... ok, but still. valjean ought to be DILFier. buff, with white hair

⁃ javert looks like a beauxbatons reject. where’s the ponytail. where’s the sideburns. this isn’t a wolf, this is a guy who read warrior cats once and now identifies with one of them (idk i haven’t read the books since elementary school)

⁃ the seggsual tenshun between a bastard police officer, his club, and the criminal he’s hunted for 14 years with single-minded homoerotic precision...

(more below the cut duh)

⁃ anne hathaway really is a fantastic fantine, good for her

⁃ got to admit, i’m not a fan of the shaky camera, except for in the riot scenes

⁃ love the aesthetics in this movie, feel less so about the costumes

⁃ ah yes we will have fantine be the only one in pink and with her hair down to signify that she is Innocent ™️

⁃ i’ve always thought this but why didn’t fantine just say that she was a widow like it’s not like anyone could prove it

⁃ i feel like switching Lovely Ladies and I Dreamed A Dream made it more powerful but i still prefer the original order

⁃ like i said, timeline is fuckt

⁃ also some of these accents are just. hard to listen to

⁃ i wish we had a movie of the original french musical

⁃ okay i love the shot of little cosette where they recreate the original poster they did a great job at casting her

⁃ sacha and helena are great but i’m still partial to matt lucas tbh

⁃ hello baby gavroche

⁃ the santa part was not needed, it was uncomfortable for everyone involved

⁃ ok that one guy madame tried to seduce in her verse of Master Of The House is pretty damn attractive

⁃ can you imagine the actress of little eponine on set while they filmed that number

⁃ sHoW mE wHeRe yOu LiVe

⁃ “i’ll be father and mother to you” wow #girlboss AND malewife <3

⁃ no stop idc about an original song give me Grantaire’s verse in Drink With Me

⁃ ah yes #hoistthechild

⁃ glad they brought fauchelevant in, he shoulda been in the musical (besides ya know, the cart)

⁃ heehoo javert singing in a high place no foreshadowing there Oops I Hope I Don’t Fall

⁃ the transition into Paris/Look Down is great but fuckin. STOP MOVING SONGS AROUND. I NEED CHEEKY LITTLE SHIT GAVROCHE TO MAKE FUN OF JAVERT AFTER HIS BIG SERIOUS SONG. IDC IF IT MAKES MORE THEMATIC SENSE. I REALLY DON’T.

⁃ still love gav’s elephant home. and gav.

⁃ god i fuckin love gavroche.

⁃ VIVE LA FRANCE

⁃ FUCK YEAH COURFEY-PIGGYBAC

⁃ *pauses* *deep breath* *screeches* ITS MAH BOIZ

⁃ enjolras is the only blond i’ll ever find attractive

⁃ god samantha barks is just SO pretty. and SUCH a good eponine omfg she’s almost TOO pretty

⁃ joly my bby 🥺

⁃ why they got rid of enj’s classic vest idk

⁃ still mad they made it seem like marius and enjolras were actively friends are you kidding me

⁃ okay but the waterfall chords when marius and cosette make eye contact for the first time 🥺😭

⁃ why does parnasse look Like That 😬

⁃ WHY DOES JAVERT PICK GAVROCHE UP LIKE THAT BAHAHA I FORGOT GHAT HAPPENS

⁃ the thenardiers are supposed to be funny but they just make me so uncomfortable

⁃ why on earth cant i remember pontmercy’s actors name holy shit its not evan, right?? anyways he’s good but i prefer gareth gates personally </3

⁃ OOH THEM FUNKY LITTLE HORNS ITS REVOLUTION TIME

⁃ heLLOOOOO PRETTYBOY (grantaire, obvs)

⁃ literally how dare george blagden be so pretty

⁃ george, internally: “STARE AT AARON. GAY. ACT LIKE YOU’RE IN LOVE BUT NOT IN A WAY THAT HE’LL NOTICE. YOU ARE A 19TH CENTURY BISEXUAL. KEEP IT CHILL, JUST CONTINUALLY GLANCE OVER WITH ABSOLUTE ADORATION IN YOUR EXPRESSION.”

⁃ goddammit marius you slut

⁃ *insert mean girls quote here*

⁃ literally the amount of eyefucking in this scene... get a room. whether you argue or fuck, grantaire will be satisfied either way

⁃ i love the courf+gav friendship in the film but you know i’m a slut for that grantaire+gav friendship in the musical

⁃ a travesty they don’t ever let lesgles be bald </3

⁃ listen. i love amanda seyfried. what a queen. but as cosette she sounds like she swallowed a vibrator. we don’t need that much vibrato girl, it’s okay

⁃ tbh the same goes for a lot of the movie actors in this as opposed to the musical actors

⁃ i’m so sorry but i’m skipping the marisette garden shit i don’t have time for heterosexual bs right now

⁃ i fuckin adore samantha barks did i mention that already

⁃ a queen. you know all the girls in 2012 wanted to be her

⁃ jesus christ it’s been almost 10 years do you think they’ll do a reunion concert

⁃ god i can’t stop thinking about all the behind the scenes from this movie

⁃ hell yes there’s one day more

⁃ cosette “your neighbor is gnc af” marius “you’re insane”

⁃ yes queen bind those breasts. give me gender envy why don’t you

⁃ mmmm enjolras tastey

⁃ stop making javert this important figure he’s just A Guy

⁃ and in that moment, i swear, we all wanted to be Madame Houcheloup

⁃ the flags waved throughout the streets 😀 this will def end well

⁃ tbh i kinda like Do You Hear The People Sing as the start of the revolution

⁃ in 8th grade i would have this scene as a youtube video on repeat while i did my homework

⁃ ok yeah this will never not move me to pieces

⁃ fuckign yeah enj wave that flag

⁃ ooh yuh get it i guess grantaire, drive that coach

⁃ and in that moment, i swear, we were infinite

⁃ pontmercy: *doesn’t know how to hold a gun* also pontmercy: *steals a fuckin horse*

⁃ TO THE BARRICADES

⁃ gEt oFf yOuR aRsE iTs bEgUn yeah mate i was already there driving the fuckin coach i’m just that fast mynameisbarryallenandimthefastestmanalive—

⁃ ah yes the demonic pontmercy smile how i’ve missed that

⁃ WE NEED AS MOCH FORNITURE AS YEW CAN THRO DOWN

⁃ i sincerely wish i could have been there

⁃ HELL YEAH BARRICOW

⁃ AND IN THAT MOMENT, I SWEAR WE ALL WISH WE WERE MADAME HOUCHELOUP

⁃ okay so if gavroche was there to say “fleas will bite” then why didn’t he recognize.l javert right then and there

⁃ GOD THE FIRST SIGHT OF THE BARRICADE 😩👌

⁃ yes daddy enj you can shoot me with your rifle any time 😏🤤😽

⁃ enjoltaire shippers in 2012: “oMg eNjY pRoTeCtEd R fRoM jAvErT tHaT mEaNs he LoVeS HiM bACk 😍😍”

⁃ and they were absolutely right

⁃ no joke aaron tveit could beat me with a pipe and i would be grateful

⁃ “who’s there?” “french revolution!” plz tell me that wasn’t pulled directly for the brick but i feel in my heart of hearts that it was

⁃ the assthetics 😫🤌 the simbalism....

⁃ marius really is dense not only did he not notice the girl in love with him for literally uhhhh years? he also didn’t notice the fuckin rifle two inches from his face

⁃ the lines shouted at marius as he retreats from the gunpowder gambit... initially poetic cinema

⁃ no but boyponine is so gender

⁃ oh man little fall of rain

⁃ i wrote a songfic to this for miraculous ladybug back in freshman year 💀

⁃ oh to be cradled in the arms of the boy i love as i die and also look super hot as i do it

⁃ eponine deserved better but better is not marius

⁃ lol drowned rat enjolras sheds a single manly tear you can’t fool us you fuckin twink

⁃ dammit gavroche hasn’t even died yet but still. get him AWAY from that BARRICADE

⁃ i already know the final battle is gonna end me

⁃ (just like it ended les amis 🤪)

⁃ oh to have a pistol held to my head by george blagden as grantaire

⁃ he really is so pretty

⁃ lol you know valjean’s internal monologue the SECOND he spotted javert at the barricade was just. so much cursing

⁃ lmao enjolras grinning as he shoots the roof dude

⁃ who gave the child a gun dammit

⁃ russell crowe javert singing usually: 😬😐

⁃ russell crowe javert singing while tied up at the barricade with a knife held to him by his long time nemesis: 🥴🤭

⁃ *cries in Drink With Me*

⁃ these boys want to hold out hope but they know there’s no getting out of here

⁃ Where Are The Barricade Ladies

⁃ WHERE IS GRANTAIRE VERSE FOCK U TOM

⁃ *guiltily skips bring him home*

⁃ you know what i was saying earlier about certain characters singing like they have a vibrate stuck in their throat? yeah

⁃ ah that shot that pans out to show that they’re all alone

⁃ gavroche singing won’t save you from dying i fwu tho 🥺

⁃ my little brother loves singing and acting out this song complete with delicate collapsing at the end

⁃ fucking courfeyrac, always gotta make me cry over gavroche more than i mean to

⁃ i have beef with everyone involved

⁃ HADLEY

⁃ combeferre holding back and then comforting courfeyrac 😭😭😭

⁃ let others rise to take our place until the earth is free. god damn. i fuck with that quote too hard.

⁃ CANNONS *queue that one post about the tumblr re-enacting les mis and nearly killing the window cleaner guy when she dramatically opened the windows to scream cannons*

⁃ And In That Moment They Knew. They Were Fucked.

⁃ i don’t need to see any more of my boys die explicitly but i wish we could have had prouvaire’s death scene from the brick, it was really powerful

⁃ THERES MORE MEN

⁃ let them in you HEARTLESS BASTSRDS

⁃ i could do with less time looking at pontmercy’s arse and more time watching the carnage, thanks

⁃ FEUILLY BOSSUET NO

⁃ oh god oh fuck the final four

⁃ *remembers that post i saw where people calculated how long it would have taken for them to die based on bullet angles and that joly and combeferre were both medical and had to watch each other and courfeyrac die and not be able to do anything about it *

⁃ oh god oh fuck permets-tu

⁃ if there’s one instance they could have kept the line from the book it ought to have been this one

⁃ *remembers the post that says that grantaire was not only staggering of drunkenness, but also because he was tripping over the corpses of his friends*

⁃ *remembers hadley is the guard*

⁃ god fukcign. fuck. that orchestral rendition of red & black as exr martyr theirselves for a doomed cause.

⁃ their deaths in the book are so poetic— enj pinned to the wall, crucified by the 8 bullets representing les amis and the cause being worth dying for, while grantaire died at his feet with one bullet representing that enjolras is worth dying for— but something about enjolras dangling out the window, wrapped in the flag... damn

⁃ did you see them, lying side by side...

⁃ *vivid flashbacks to behind the scenes and them singing a jazzy version of On My Own*

⁃ ok that’s enough for now *skips to finale*

⁃ like i love turning and empty chairs but i don’t have the emotional capacity for that rn

⁃ HERE. COMES THE HEAVENLY BARRICADE

⁃ nope i can’t

⁃ i love it too much

⁃ this is the version of DYHTPS that i listened to on repeat during Homework Time for the first several months of quarantine last year

⁃ i have too many feelings about it to put into text

⁃ goddamn i love this show fuck

⁃ *cries*

#les mis #les miserables #les mis content on MY blog? in 2021? it’s more likely than you’d think #uhhhh #enjoltaire

[merinelsa]

Have you ever done a ranking list of your favourite episodes?

not really , the thing with me is that i never rewatch tv shows . i binge through them once and then just watch few scenes in yt , but never rewatch any of it even if it was one of my favourite show. Glee is the only exception , though i really only watch very few eps from the earlier seasons and rewatched s5-s6 twice , though i’d skipped 100, new directions and the wedding during both my rewatches. there are eps like new new york and wonderful that i watch time to time as comfort eps playing in the background . from s3, first time and big brother are the only eps i have rewatched 

i’d only watched glee for the first time last year , so like it’s not been that long to warrant a rewatch , but since i’d binged most of it in one stretch ( had taken a one month break b/w s3ep7 and ep8 because of how much i was getting tired of the shitty storylines of s3 , hence it being my least fave ) i forgot a lot of the non klaine stuff.

but i’ll try to rank the eps , just know that i’m very biased to klaine/kurt/blaine storylines . and the seasons too are ranked in the order i like them 

6 . season 3

22. i kissed a girl

21. pot o gold

20. prom-asaurus

19. yes/no

18. i am unicorn

17. mash off

16. the spanish teacher

15. asian f

14. on my way

13. props

12. choke

11. hold on to sixteen

10. saturday night gleever

9. michael

8. goodbye

7. big brother

6. nationals

5. heart

4. extraordinary merry christmas

3. dance with somebody

2. purple piano project

1. first time

5. season 1

22. the rhodes not taken

21. funk

20. showmance

19.  vitamin d

18. hairography

17. ballad

16. mashup

15. throwdown

14. the power of madonna

13. mattress

12. acafellas

11. dream on

10. home

9. pilot

8.  hell-o

7. sectionals

6. preggers

5. bad reputation

4. wheels

3. journey to regionals

2. theatricality

1. laryngitis

4. season 4 

22. britney 2.0

21. sweet dreams

20. lights out

19. shooting star

18. all or nothing

17. feud

16. thanksgiving

15. the role you were born to play

14. glease

13. swan song

12. sadie hawkins

11. naked

10. makeover

9. girls and boys on film

8. diva

7. glee,actually

6. i do

5. dynamic duets

4. the new rachel

3.  break up

2. guilty pleasure

1. wonderful

3. season 2

22. britney/brittany

21. the substitute

20. comeback

19. special education

18. a very glee christmas

17. the sue sylvester shuffle

16. night of neglect

15. new york

14. funeral

13. never been kissed ( except for the klaine part, the whole ep is a mess)

12. rocky horror glee show

11. rumours

10. audition

9. sexy

8. grilled cheesus

7. blame it on the alcohol

6. prom queen

5. born this way

4. silly love songs

3. duets

2. furt 

1. original song

2. season 6

13. the rise and fall of sue sylvester

12. hurt locker part 1

11. child star

10. homecoming

9. we built this glee club

8. what the world needs now

7. hurt locker part 2

6. a wedding

5.  dreams come true

4. 2009

3. jagged little tapestry

2. transitioning

1. loser like me

1. season 5 ( i’m not going to rank the quaterback )

19. opening night

18. 100

17. tina in the sky with diamonds

16. city of angels

15. bash

14. a katy or gaga

13. new direction

12. end of twerk

11. previously unaired christmas

10. trio

9. movin out

8. the back up plan

7. puppet master

6. love love love

5. old dogs new trick

4. untitled rachel berry project

3. frenemies

2. tested

1. new new york

now top five glee episodes over all

5. original song : don’t ask me what happened besides klaine in this because i truly don’t remember . but the klaine parts are pure heavenly. s2 klaine is something i missed a lot and didn’t appreciate enough during my first watch but rewatching some klaine centric eps has made me appreciate their friendship a lot more. even the stuff leading upto the kiss is fantastic , it’s also an ep that shows how rachel and blaine can get similar but how they react to criticisms and how blaine tries to include everyone when pointed out unlike making a fit out of it with rachel is where they diverge and makes these incredibly different personalities .and the kiss was just to good and sparks were flying everywhere and it is something that glee could never recreate with any other couple. and “ reminds you of your mom’s funeral doesn’t it “” the casket was bigger but yes “ just proves that they are equally dumbasses that fit each other so well

4. wonder-ful : this is just pure comfort ep. it’s so bright and upbeat in the middle of the previous dark eps. so much kurt and klaine . a bit more focus on kurt’s mental health issues, which will later be forgotten but it’s good over here. supportive blaine as always just highlighting how much they understand each other. a lot of burt which is always a plus . a very good mercedes plotline which should’ve been given more time but still is one of the better ones she gets.just seeing how light and loving kurt turns once burt is finally in the safe zone. and ‘you get kinda cute when you get nervous’ and ‘with you in it a wondeful life’ and whatever homoerotic stuff that is going on b/w rachel and cassie

3. Loser like me : the pure angst . i love storylines where they hit the rock bottom from such a happy place and have to find their way to the top by leaning in on each other and supporting each other. great klaine scenes, s5b we where pushed to believe that kurt had it all together, but we finally got to see kurt being an absolute mess and realizing how he contributed to their relationship not working out instead of pitting it all on s4 cheating . confident got help all by himself in a better position blaine , rachel finally getting a storyline that’s interesting and makes her one to root for . This ep always gives me the chills and makes me excited for the rest of the season

2. Tested : It’s genuinely one of the funniest eps ever. amazing rachcedes moment . the guys presenting one of my fave family dynamics in the show. great samcedes and klaine plotline . and i love the way liab is shot , such a well choreographed performance and it really looks like chris and darren had so much fun doing it.

1. New new york : this ep is the perfect mixture of fluff , comedy and angst. And on top of that we get never tried before combination of dynamics like rachel and artie as well as our favourite dynamics like klaine, blam, kelliot . also , out of all the klaine plotlines, this feels to me the most realistic one and really shows how much they want to work out their highschool relationship into an adult setting but they’re still young clueless inexperienced couple who doesn’t really know what they’re doing but still trying to work it out the way they think is the best one to protect their relationship , showing how much they care for each other as we enter into the crazy hard parts of their relationship. also , to see these whole set of highschool friends trying to navigate their way into this busy adult life is so fun to watch .  

#mer answers #1908jmd #thanks a lot for the ask #i'm really sorry for responding late #this has been in the works for the past two days working out each seasons one by one lol #also i've not been the best mentally and physically #i've got this terrible cold that i'm trying to contain before i have to travel #and i'm just emotionally drained for absolutely no reason #but yeah this was fun to do and think about #but i'm pretty sure all of this ranking will change once i get to rewatching the show maybe several years later

[gerrydelano]

i saw you talking shanties and got mad excited!! one half of my family are scots gaelic speaking and old working songs and shanties are a Huge part of my connection with that side of my history. waulking songs have a special place in my heart. waulking the cloth creates this rhythmic drumming and it's really something else

oh my G-D that is so awesome? hello???? g-d i love that, i had to look up waulking songs and found this and i’m???? so enchanted hello HELP. this one is GORGEOUS and i’m going to die!

fuck. g-d. okay please bear with me because you are also tapping directly into the fact that i was a step dancer for years & have a BIG place in my heart for gaelic music jhbkjnlm my childhood is unfolding

time for me to infodump about irish step, riverdance, and the beauty of human connection apparently because i CANNOT be stopped. there’s also a bit of talk about a slaughter/end concept i have using irish step that i’m VERY excited for.

please do take a chance on some of these links, if only trading taps!

yeah it’s only SEMI related but might as well say it now: i have a slaughter/end idea for something i’ll be writing later that hinges on irish step, sort of like this particular riverdance finale.

i grew up on the 1995 show but this one has a nice crisp vibe to it, fucking. when they start going at 0:15, and then the faster pace at 1:36, BRO. that one moment at 2:06 is like fucking machine gunfire from their shoes.

fucking. take the 1995 version of that, too, because 2:40, my dude. fucking help me. the conversation he’s having with the drums. i’ve wanted to make a post about this forever but jrhfgbrjn infodumping disease y’know. but BRO. 3:18 when they all march down the steps and then they do that quick thing at 3:52, i’m so.

also PLEASE take this version of reel around the sun from 2002 because if that opening bit with the trickle down stomping isn’t enough to get your heart racing i don’t know WHAT to tell you. this is honestly the one that hits me the most besides countess cathleen and i’m going to have SO much fun taking this beautiful concept here and making the slaughter use it because g-d this whole show is about life and living and moving on and growing and preserving/sharing culture and surviving (listen to all the narration between numbers in the whole show if you look into it) and slaughter just... is none of those things. 

but it is that stomping. it IS the arms pinned at your sides and the straight back and the stone face and the drumming it’s the footsteps as percussion it’s the Passion it puts into your chest when you hear it but instead of letting it grow into something beautiful it wrenches it sideways and i wanna explore THAT.

and let’s never forget distant thunder. fucking hello. the footwork.

REALLY unrelated but one of my absolute favourites too is this one number from the 1996 show, trading taps, like. around 3:14 is when it gets super homoerotic (it never actually stops being that) but it’s about these black tap dancers and the step dancers who have QUITE the dance off in the middle of the street at night and they make fun of each other’s styles but they gradually adopt little bits and pieces of each other’s stuff and end up just creating something new and so special and they have so much fun doing it! 

it’s so genuinely uplifting and impressive and the FOOTWORK! IS AMAZING! and the sheer JOY on all their faces the RESPECT they have for each other and the things they do and the FRIENDSHIP and the LOVE like there’s genuine love in exchanging music and dance and heritage and the things you’re passionate for this is one of the most HUMAN performances and i absolutely DIE over it

like, it gives me the same feeling that shanties give me and the concept of work songs and the fact that it comes back down to human connection and trying to have fun and making everyday things uplifting somehow and just

FUCK!!!!!!!!

i am never not madly in love!

here’s the full 1995 riverdance show, too, if anyone wants it! a lot of people might consider it sort of an old lady thing (miriam sims 100% dragged jon to fucking riverdance do NOT tell me she didn’t this is her JAM) but it’s Genuinely so beautiful and has really, for some reason, shaped a lot of my life/how i interact with art? even my writing, man. my writing and my music do pull in weird ways from this very thing and i haven’t found another time to share it.

SORRY FOR THE TANGENT i just!!!! you hit me right in that spot and i don’t know when else this would ever be even vaguely relevant to bring up again LMAO thank you for introducing me to waulking songs, i found this song through them and looped it all night long, g-d, the DRUMS. the DRUMS.

#shanty tag #step dance going in there too time for me to reveal myself i had thighs of fucking steel #anon #asks #ronologues

[tvdversefanfiction]

Since i have done this 30day challenge on two of my other pages it was about time I did it for this page, starting firstly with The Vampire Diaries, The Originals and Legacies will soon follow I promise.

So if you do not already no I have zero chill and zero patience so instead of 30 days I just do it all in one go 😂 feel free to sound off in the comments with your opinions, open to reading others' opinions and share in the love for this fandom 💖

1 - Klaus Mikaelson 💖 my king, my heart, the unrequited love of my life (fictional ofcourse)

2 - (in order) Caroline Forbes 👑 Rebekah Mikaelson 👑 Katherine Pierce 👑

3 - Klaroline, always and forever 😍

4 - Bamon or Stexi 🤔 although Stexi was definitely a more loyal friendship and I didnt want them together as a couple like I did Bamon

5 - Claire Holt, Love her to pieces, love her interviews and her post and pre TVD and TO work as an actress.

6 - Joseph Morgan, my husband in my fantasies only 💖 fantastic actor who I cannot wait to see what he does next 😍

7 - Daniel Gillies and Paul Wesley, their bromance is both adorable, authentic and slightly homoerotic 🙊😈

8 - Bamon or Elenijah, Bamon id have legit loved to see as endgame over Delena anyday and Elenijah I'd have love to have seen explored at least.

9 - Although neither the originals or Katherine were in every episode they were far from secondary in my mind, so in terms of secondary I'd say Lexi for sure.

10 - 2 and/or 3, most of the originals arc and Katherine stuff was peak TVD for me.

11 - The 100th episode for so many reasons, the nostalgic lookback at previous characters, Klaroline finally getting it on, a Mebekah reunion and lots of Katherine 👑

12 - He is your first love, I intend to be your last 💖 Klaroline was all kinds of epic and how poetic is it that she wound up being his last love💔

13 - Caroline singing at her mothers funeral 💔

14 - Elena, I know she went through alot but who didn't in the TVDverse, she was the victim and stayed within that role from beginning to end and god was she depressing to watch. She was also largely hypocritical with her judgements over things she too was guilty off 🙄 the fact I loathe her and love Katherine shows the incredible acting range of Nina Dobrev though 💖

15 - Stefan, he is like Angel with the Angelus edge, id say the male elena but that would be harsh as he didnt piss me off nearly as much 😂 he was alright I suppose I just didnt care for him that much, if he died early I'd have been like meh! I couldnt buy evil stefan either instead it made me cringe which is weird because Paul Wesley plays unhinged so well in Tell me a story...oh and also Stefan killed Enzo, not once but twice and he can only blame the humanity switch for one of those kills 😡

16 - i did ship Delena till they got together and lost all their magic, i never shipped Stelena but they did suit each other better than Delena or the very ill advised Steroline which should have stayed a friendship! Bonnie and Jeremy made absolute no sense and had zero chemistry so on those grounds id say those two or Steroline, Steroline itches me up the wrong way the most tbf.

17 - Elena and Caroline, Caroline was the better friend hands down for both Bonnie and Elena but Elena always seemed harsher to Caroline and yet couldnt handle it when Caroline gave her tough love back especially over Delena which tbh Caroline was right....IMO anyways.

18 - I cannot say Candice, Nina, Kat or Claire are anything but amazing actresses so I would never say any of them...maybe the actress who played Liv Parker, she was always kind of one note to me although not terrible but nowhere near as good as the others....I could probably later think of someone else but for now I'll go with her.

19 - Zach Roerig, a typical answer from fans I've noticed but he was just so blah for 8 full seasons I totally get why Im not alone here...also so far him and Steven McQueen are the only ones from TVD to appear in Legacies...Jeremy's cameo i didnt mind, Matts however...like when is he going to die and stay dead already? Sorry matt fans 😂

20 - A good chunk of episodes in season 7, didnt like Elena but didn't like TVD without Elena...would've loved the actress to stay on and either play another role or make Katherine come back preferably 🤩

21 - Most of them I started liking then hating, or hating to liking then back to hating 😂 I dont think I hated anyone from beginning then loved them by the end so ill just give a love to hate, Alaric...I liked him in early seasons but thought he came to a natural end when he died...from 6 onwards after he came back he lost any appeal and felt like he was just there to have another dead ex, then to cockblock Steroline which tbf was a good deed but still didnt revive him 🤣 and I full out despise him in Legacies but I'll dig deeper into that come a Legacies themed version of this challenge 😂

22 - Damon wins hands down here, loved him in the pilot, love turned to like as the show went on and then Delena happened and completely destroyed his chracter, Bamon gave him a much needed revival but Elena soon dragged him down once more...his live for her was obsessive to me, unhealthy and toxic and he couldnt cope without it. BAMON would've fixed all this IMO

23 - Okay stick with me here as this one has multiple answers for me...I'd have rathered Caroline or Bonnie as the main character alongside the salvatores than Elena so thats answer one. Answer two would be I'd have loved Katherine to have been the mainstay doppelganger instead of Elena. Answer three would be more flashbacks of Lexi and her life away from the Salvatores would have been interesting. Last answer, Rebekah should have been in more episodes both on this and TO but I'll probs get more into that when I do TO.

24 - The romances, the vampires, the villains and the aesthetic of Mystic Falls 😍 if you follow my other pages you know obsessed im obsessed with the supernatural genre 🥰

25 - Too much time centred around Delena and Stelena, which I know was the main story of this show their love triangle but it didnt have to be...

26 - Elena daggering Rebekah, my heart broke for Rebekah and hardened towards Elena...her biggest hypocritical move of many too!

27 - Heres one so this post isnt all bashing poor Elena 🤣 i love when Elena and Stefan wind up drinking in that bar together having a good time as friends...honestly wouldnt habe minded more scenes centered on this friendship.

28 - Klaroline getting together in the woods and/or the Klaroline moment in the last episode where he donates money to the boarding school...tbh any Klaroline moment 💖

29 - Liz's death and funeral, my heart breaks for Caroline everytime and Damon too, loved Liz and Damon's friendship 💔

30 - Almost all Lily Salvatore scenes, the worst mother alongside Esther Mikaelson....their deaths make me so happy every single time and I will never apologise for that 🤣

#thevampirediaries #vampirediaries #tvd #tvdfandom #tvdverse #tvd30daychallenge #thevampirediariesopinions

[bthump]

Hi! What are your top 10 ships (any fandom)?

Hi, ty for asking! This is really hard to narrow down lol, but I tried.

In no particular order:

Guts/Griffith - Berserk

The current otp ofc. What can I say that I haven’t already said all over this blog?

Will/Hannibal - NBC Hannibal

This is my ideal ship. It’s stupid how perfect it is. It’s basically my ideal slowburn longfic but yk as a 3 season gorgeously shot and acted tv show.

Doctor/Master (especially Three/Delgado Master, and excluding het combinations lol) - Doctor Who

This ship is fantastic because it’s so versatile. You want childhood friends to lovers (to enemies)? Gallifrey era. You want bitter exes or frenemies with benefits? Three/Delgado. Five/Ainley was never my thing but if you want creepy villain/plucky hero there you go. You want former enemies who now live together in weird domestic bliss? Shalka. You want pathetic desperate protag willing to throw his ideals along with the rest of the world under a bus to get laid? Ten/Simm. It’s even got its own rairpairs, like cross era combinations or  Two/Warchief. This ship can run the gamut from fluff to angst to serious darkfic and never be ooc. It’s a delight.

Harry/Draco - Harry Potter

I mean I loved it when I was 14 and even though I couldn’t care less about Harry Potter now it’s still there for me. Like, if I want to read something gay and can’t find anything that strikes my fancy? I turn to drarry man, there’s so much genuinely fantastic novel length fic out there, you’ll never run out.

Xena/Gabrielle - Xena: Warrior Princess

Xena/Gab is an odd ship for me because they’re not really my type lol. Friends to lovers is something I’ve always been a little meh about, and while they have their tense and interesting and complex moments their appeal is mainly the soulmate thing. But this ship makes the list for two reasons: 1. they are immensely fun to watch together, like what they lack in an interesting dynamic they make up for in chemistry, and it’s a delight to watch the show and soak in all the ott subtext, and 2. Conqueror AUs. There’s a subgenre of Xena fic where Xena never turned good and met Gabrielle while she’s ruling the known world with an evil iron fist, and some of that has the good dynamics.

Fraser/Ray Vecchio - Due South

Honestly the main reason I ship them is because I love Ray and Ray loves Fraser, and Ray is one of those very rare faves that I actually want to be happy lol. But they do have a really interesting, and somewhat unique for me dynamic - Fraser prioritizes the abstract concept of duty over everything else, to really destructive lengths at times, while Ray prioritizes Fraser over everything else, also to really destructive lengths at times, and this leads to an unbalanced but v interesting relationship. Especially because like, this isn’t just a result of the show prioritizing Fraser lol, the narrative is very aware of this dynamic and explores it in interesting ways.

Eve/Villanelle - Killing Eve

I was into it from the start, and completely sold when Eve stabbed Villanelle. They’ve got the interesting shifting power dynamics, the disparate morals edging towards meeting in the middle, the violence, the chemistry, even the cute little domestic moments here and there. tbh I am a little.. nervous about where this show is going with them, because I am concerned they’re playing the Villanelle as a psychopath who can’t ~genuinely love~ thing straight, which could not be less interesting to me, but still, so far I’ve gotten more than enough material to keep me happy and hopeful.

D/Leon - Pet Shop of Horrors

In general they’re just a ridiculously fun dynamic, like come on. You’ve got the odd couple thing, you’ve got Leon switching between criminally investigating D and basically coparenting his brother with him, they all go on vacation together at one point, they have like, a dragon kid together, and who doesn’t love the married couple bickering? Also the ending [vague spoilers] is exactly the kind of sad romance I love. They both realize they’re in love, and D chooses to run the fuck away because he doesn’t know how to love a human, while Leon chooses to run the fuck after him for the rest of his life if that’s what it takes. This is technically subtext, but only barely.

Troy/Abed - Community

They had me at the Somewhere Out There duet. I stopped caring about the show after season 3 and I’ve only seen a few episodes since, but man when Community was good it was great and Troy and Abed were the mvps and clear otp of the show. Tragic that Harmon couldn’t commit beyond gay jokes tbh, but at least we’ll always have the romantic zombie episode.

Starsky/Hutch - Starsky and Hutch

This is a bit of a weird choice because I was never super into the fandom, like I haven’t read much fic, and I watched the show back in like my first year of university but not really since because like, it’s a 70s cop show lol, there’s not a whole lot that’s worth watching about it. But man, Starsky and Hutch are the damn kings of the extremely emotionally intense homoerotic friendship. Their off the charts chemistry and constant hurt/comfort plots were next level, and fully engaging and super fun to watch despite everything else.

(Also the 4th season is terrible, but shockingly good and ridiculously coherent if you watch it with the understanding that in between season 3+4 they had sex or made out or something and Starsky freaked out and Hutch is alternately depressed and pissed off at Starsky for his avoidance. Like that reading legit ties everything together lol, from their suddenly strained relationship to random jokes(?) like Hutch encouraging Starsky to try free word association, giving him the word “closet” to start, and Starsky getting mad about it for no reason. And in the 4th to last episode (production order) they clearly finally get together for real, in the coda to Starsky vs Hutch. I mean come on they fight while dating the same woman and then make up off screen and the final scene is the two of them meeting her in a bar and telling her she gets both together or neither, then walking away with their arms around each other when she turns them down.

I may have just wanted to ramble about this lol.)

#Anonymous #ask #b #not berserk

[blackkudos]

James Baldwin

James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an African-American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnameable tensions. Some Baldwin essays are book-length, for instance The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the StreJames Baldwinet (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976).

Baldwin's novels and plays fictionalize fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration not only of blacks, but also of gay and bisexual men, while depicting some internalized obstacles to such individuals' quests for acceptance. Such dynamics are prominent in Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, written in 1956 well before gay rights were widely espoused in America.

Early life

Baldwin was born after his mother, Emma Berdis Jones, left his biological father because of his drug abuse and moved to Harlem, New York City. There, she married a preacher, David Baldwin. The family was very poor.

Baldwin spent much time caring for his several younger brothers and sisters. At the age of 10, he was teased and abused by two New York police officers, an instance of racist harassment by the NYPD that he would experience again as a teenager and document in his essays. His adoptive father, whom Baldwin in essays called simply his father, appears to have treated him — by comparison with his siblings — with great harshness.

His stepfather died of tuberculosis in summer of 1943 just before Baldwin turned 19. The day of the funeral was Baldwin's 19th birthday, the day his father's last child was born, and the day of the Harlem Riot of 1943, which was portrayed at the beginning of his essay "Notes of a Native Son". The quest to answer or explain family and social rejection—and attain a sense of selfhood, both coherent and benevolent—became a leitmotiv in Baldwin's writing.

Education

James attended P.S. 24 on 128th Street between Fifth and Madison in Harlem where he wrote the school song, which was used until the school closed down. His middle school years were spent at Frederick Douglass Junior High where he was influenced by poet Countee Cullen, a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and was encouraged by his math teacher to serve as editor of the school newspaper, The Douglass Pilot. He then went on to DeWitt Clinton High School, in the Bronx's Bedford Park section. There, along with Richard Avedon, he worked on the school magazine as literary editor but disliked school because of the constant racial slurs.

Religion

The difficulties of his life, including his stepfather's abuse, led Baldwin to seek solace in religion. At the age of 14 he attended meetings of the Pentecostal Church and, during a euphoric prayer meeting, he converted and became a junior Minister. Before long, at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly, he was drawing larger crowds than his stepfather had done in his day. At 17, however, Baldwin came to view Christianity as based on false premises and later regarded his time in the pulpit as a way of overcoming his personal crises.

Baldwin once visited Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, who inquired about Baldwin's religious beliefs. He answered, "I left the church 20 years ago and haven't joined anything since." Elijah asked, "And what are you now?" Baldwin explained, "Now? Nothing. I'm a writer. I like doing things alone." Still, his church experience significantly shaped his worldview and writing. Baldwin reflected that "being in the pulpit was like working in the theater; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked."

Baldwin accused Christianity of reinforcing the system of American slavery by palliating the pangs of oppression and delaying salvation until a promised afterlife. Baldwin praised religion, however, for inspiring some American blacks to defy oppression. He once wrote, "If the concept of God has any use, it is to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God can't do that, it's time we got rid of him". Baldwin publicly described himself as not religious. However, at his funeral, an a cappella recording of Baldwin singing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" was played.

Greenwich Village

When Baldwin was 15, his high-school running buddy, Emile Capouya, skipped school one day and, in Greenwich Village, met Beauford Delaney, a painter. Capouya gave Baldwin Delaney's address and suggested paying him a visit. Baldwin, who was at the time working after school in a sweatshop on nearby Canal Street, visited Beauford at 181 Greene Street. Beauford became a mentor to Baldwin; it was under Beauford's influence that he came to believe a black person could be an artist.

While working odd jobs, Baldwin wrote short stories, essays, and book reviews, some of them collected in the volume Notes of a Native Son (1955). He befriended the actor Marlon Brando in 1944 and the two were roommates for a time. They would remain friends for more than 20 years.

Expatriation

During his teenage years in Harlem and Greenwich Village, Baldwin started to realize that he was gay. In 1948, he walked into a restaurant where he knew he would not be served. When the waitress explained that black people were not served at the establishment, Baldwin threw a glass of water at her, shattering the mirror behind the bar. As a result of being disillusioned by American prejudice against blacks and gays, he left the United States at the age of 24 and settled in Paris, France. His flight was not just a desire to distance himself from American prejudice, but to see himself and his writing beyond an African-American context. Baldwin did not want to be read as "merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer". Also, he left the United States desiring to come to terms with his sexual ambivalence and flee the hopelessness that many young African-American men like himself succumbed to in New York.

In Paris, Baldwin was soon involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank. His work started to be published in literary anthologies, notably Zero, which was edited by his friend Themistocles Hoetis and which had already published essays by Richard Wright.

He would live in France for most of his later life. He would also spend some time in Switzerland and Turkey. During his life and after it, Baldwin would be seen not only as an influential African-American writer but also as an influential exile writer, particularly because of his numerous experiences outside the United States and the impact of these experiences on Baldwin's life and his writing.

Saint-Paul-de-Vence

Baldwin settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France in 1970, in an old Provençal house beneath the ramparts of the famous village. His house was always open to his friends, who frequently visited him while on trips to the French Riviera. American painter Beauford Delaney made Baldwin's house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence his second home, often setting up his easel in the garden. Delaney painted several colourful portraits of Baldwin. Actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were also regular house guests.

Many of Baldwin's musician friends dropped in during the Nice and Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festivals: Nina Simone, Josephine Baker (whose sister lived in Nice), Miles Davis, and Ray Charles, for whom he wrote several songs. In his autobiography, Miles Davis wrote:

I'd read his books and I liked and respected what he had to say. When I got to know him better, Jimmy and I opened up to each other. We became great friends. Every time I was in the South of France, in Antibes, I would spend a day or two at his villa in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. We'd get comfy in that beautiful, big house and he would tell us all sorts of stories...He was a great man.

Baldwin learned to speak French fluently and developed friendships with French actor Yves Montand and French writer Marguerite Yourcenar, who translated Baldwin's play The Amen Corner.

His years in Saint-Paul-de-Vence were also years of work. Sitting in front of his sturdy typewriter, his days were devoted to writing and to answering the huge amount of mail he received from all over the world. He wrote several of his last works in his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, including Just Above My Head in 1979 and Evidence of Things Not Seen in 1985. It was also in his Saint-Paul-de-Vence house that Baldwin wrote his famous "Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis" in November 1970.

Literary career

In 1953, Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, was published. His first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son appeared two years later. He continued to experiment with literary forms throughout his career, publishing poetry and plays as well as the fiction and essays for which he was known.

Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, caused great controversy when it was first published in 1956 due to its explicit homoerotic content. Baldwin was again resisting labels with the publication of this work: despite the reading public's expectations that he would publish works dealing with the African-American experience, Giovanni's Room is predominantly about white characters. Baldwin's next two novels, Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, are sprawling, experimental works dealing with black and white characters and with heterosexual, gay, and bisexual characters. These novels struggle to contain the turbulence of the late 1950s and the early 1960s: they are saturated with a sense of violent unrest and outrage.

Baldwin's lengthy essay "Down at the Cross" (frequently called The Fire Next Time after the title of the book in which it was published) similarly showed the seething discontent of the 1960s in novel form. The essay was originally published in two oversized issues of The New Yorker and landed Baldwin on the cover of Time magazine in 1963 while Baldwin was touring the South speaking about the restive Civil Rights movement. Around the time of publication of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin became a known spokesperson for civil rights and a celebrity noted for championing the cause of black Americans. He frequently appeared on television and delivered speeches on college campuses. The essay talked about the uneasy relationship between Christianity and the burgeoning Black Muslim movement. After publication, several black nationalists criticized Baldwin for his conciliatory attitude. They questioned whether his message of love and understanding would do much to change race relations in America. The book was eagerly consumed by whites looking for answers to the question: What do blacks really want? Baldwin's essays never stopped articulating the anger and frustration felt by real-life black Americans with more clarity and style than any other writer of his generation. Baldwin's next book-length essay, No Name in the Street, also discussed his own experience in the context of the later 1960s, specifically the assassinations of three of his personal friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Baldwin's writings of the 1970s and 1980s have been largely overlooked by critics, though even these texts are beginning to receive attention. Several of his essays and interviews of the 1980s discuss homosexuality and homophobia with fervor and forthrightness. Eldridge Cleaver's harsh criticism of Baldwin in Soul on Ice and elsewhere and Baldwin's return to southern France contributed to the sense that he was not in touch with his readership. Always true to his own convictions rather than to the tastes of others, Baldwin continued to write what he wanted to write. As he had been the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, he became an inspirational figure for the emerging gay rights movement. His two novels written in the 1970s, If Beale Street Could Talk and Just Above My Head, placed a strong emphasis on the importance of black families, and he concluded his career by publishing a volume of poetry, Jimmy's Blues, as well as another book-length essay, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, which was an extended meditation inspired by the Atlanta Child Murders of the early 1980s.

Social and political activism

Baldwin returned to the United States in the summer of 1957 while the Civil Rights Act of that year was being debated in Congress. He had been powerfully moved by the image of a young girl braving a mob in an attempt to desegregate schools in Charlotte, N.C., andPartisan Review editor Philip Rahv had suggested he report on what was happening in the American south. Baldwin was nervous about the trip but he made it, interviewing people in Charlotte (where he met Martin Luther King), and Montgomery, Alabama. The result was two essays, one published in Harper's magazine ("The Hard Kind of Courage"), the other in Partisan Review ("Nobody Knows My Name"). Subsequent Baldwin articles on the movement appeared in Mademoiselle, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, where in 1962 he published the essay that he called "Down at the Cross" and the New Yorker called "Letter from a Region of My Mind". Along with a shorter essay from The Progressive, the essay became The Fire Next Time.

While he wrote about the movement, Baldwin aligned himself with the ideals of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1963 he conducted a lecture tour of the South for CORE, traveling to locations like Durham and Greensboro, North Carolina and New Orleans, Louisiana. During the tour, he lectured to students, white liberals, and anyone else listening about his racial ideology, an ideological position between the "muscular approach" of Malcolm X and the nonviolent program of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Baldwin expressed the hope that Socialism would take root in the United States.

By the spring of 1963, Baldwin had become so much a spokesman for the Civil Rights Movement that for its May 17 issue on the turmoil in Birmingham, Alabama, Time magazine put James Baldwin on the cover. "There is not another writer," said Time, "who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South." In a cable Baldwin sent to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the crisis, Baldwin blamed the violence in Birmingham on the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, Mississippi Senator James Eastland, and President Kennedy for failing to use "the great prestige of his office as the moral forum which it can be." Attorney General Kennedy invited Baldwin to meet with him over breakfast, and that meeting was followed up with a second, when Kennedy met with Baldwin and others Baldwin had invited to Kennedy's Manhattan apartment (see Baldwin–Kennedy meeting). This meeting is discussed in Howard Simon's 1999 play, "James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire" The delegation included Kenneth B. Clark, a psychologist who had played a key role in the Brown v. Board of Education decision; actor Harry Belafonte, singer Lena Horne, writer Lorraine Hansberry, and activists from civil rights organizations. Although most of the attendees of this meeting left feeling "devastated," the meeting was an important one in voicing the concerns of the civil rights movement and it provided exposure of the civil rights issue not just as a political issue but also as a moral issue.

James Baldwin’s FBI file contains 1,884 pages of documents, collected from 1960 until the early 1970s. During that era of illegal surveillance of American writers, the FBI accumulated 276 pages on Richard Wright, 110 pages on Truman Capote, and just nine pages on Henry Miller.

Baldwin also made a prominent appearance at the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963, with Belafonte and long-time friends Sidney Poitier and Marlon Brando. The civil rights movement was hostile to homosexuals. The only known gay men in the movement were James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin. Rustin and King were very close, as Rustin received credit for the success of the March on Washington. Many were bothered by Rustin's sexual orientation. King himself spoke on the topic of sexual orientation in a school editorial column during his college years, and in reply to a letter during the 1950s, where he treated it as a mental illness which an individual could overcome (the common view of the time). The pressure later resulted in King distancing himself from both men. At the time, Baldwin was neither in the closet nor open to the public about his sexual orientation. Later on, Baldwin was conspicuously uninvited to speak at the end of the March on Washington. After a bomb exploded in a Birmingham church not long after the March on Washington, Baldwin called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience in response to this "terrifying crisis." He traveled to Selma, Alabama, where SNCC had organized a voter registration drive; he watched mothers with babies and elderly men and women standing in long lines for hours, as armed deputies and state troopers stood by—or intervened to smash a reporter's camera or use cattle prods on SNCC workers. After his day of watching, he spoke in a crowded church, blaming Washington—"the good white people on the hill." Returning to Washington, he told a New York Post reporter the federal government could protect Negroes—it could send federal troops into the South. He blamed the Kennedys for not acting. In March 1965, Baldwin joined marchers who walked 50 miles from Selma, Alabama, to the capitol in Montgomery under the protection of federal troops.

Nonetheless, he rejected the label "civil rights activist", or that he had participated in a civil rights movement, instead agreeing with Malcolm X's assertion that if one is a citizen, one should not have to fight for one's civil rights. In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Baldwin refuted the idea that the civil rights movement was an outright revolution, instead calling it "a very peculiar revolution because it has to...have its aims the establishment of a union, and a...radical shift in the American mores, the American way of life...not only as it applies to the Negro obviously, but as it applies to every citizen of the country." In a 1979 speech at UC Berkeley, he called it, instead, "the latest slave rebellion."

In 1968, Baldwin signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Inspiration and relationships

As a young man, Baldwin's poetry teacher was Countee Cullen.

A great influence on Baldwin was the painter Beauford Delaney. In The Price of the Ticket (1985), Baldwin describes Delaney as

...the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my teacher and I as his pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.

Later support came from Richard Wright, whom Baldwin called "the greatest black writer in the world." Wright and Baldwin became friends, and Wright helped Baldwin secure the Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Award. Baldwin's essay "Notes of a Native Son" and his collection Notes of a Native Son allude to Wright's novel Native Son. In Baldwin's 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel", however, he indicated that Native Son, like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, lacked credible characters and psychological complexity, and the friendship between the two authors ended. Interviewed by Julius Lester, however, Baldwin explained, "I knew Richard and I loved him. I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself." In 1965, Baldwin participated in a debate with William F. Buckley, on the topic of whether the American dream has adversely affected African Americans. The debate took place at The Cambridge Union in the UK. The spectating student body voted overwhelmingly in Baldwin's favour.

In 1949 Baldwin met and fell in love with Lucien Happersberger, aged 17, though Happersberger's marriage three years later left Baldwin distraught. Happersberger died on August 21, 2010, in Switzerland.

Baldwin was a close friend of the singer, pianist, and civil rights activist Nina Simone. With Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry, Baldwin helped awaken Simone to the civil rights movement then gelling. Baldwin also provided her with literary references influential on her later work. Baldwin and Hansberry met with Robert F. Kennedy, along with Kenneth Clark and Lena Horne and others (see Baldwin–Kennedy meeting) in an attempt to persuade Kennedy of the importance of civil rights legislation. Kennedy referred to Baldwin as "Martin Luther Queen" throughout his life.

Baldwin influenced the work of French painter Philippe Derome, whom he met in Paris in the early 1960s. Baldwin also knew Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Billy Dee Williams, Huey P. Newton, Nikki Giovanni, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet (with whom he campaigned on behalf of the Black Panther Party), Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Rip Torn, Alex Haley, Miles Davis, Amiri Baraka, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothea Tanning , Leonor Fini, Margaret Mead, Josephine Baker, Allen Ginsberg, Chinua Achebe and Maya Angelou. He wrote at length about his "political relationship" with Malcolm X. He collaborated with childhood friend Richard Avedon on the book Nothing Personal, which is available for public viewing at the Schomburg Center in Harlem.

Maya Angelou called Baldwin her "friend and brother", and credited him for "setting the stage" for her 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Baldwin was made a Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur by the French government in 1986.

Baldwin was also a close friend of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison. Upon his death, Morrison wrote a eulogy for Baldwin that appeared in The New York Times. In the eulogy, entitled "Life in His Language," Morrison credits Baldwin as being her literary inspiration and the person who showed her the true potential of writing. She writes,

"You knew, didn't you, how I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wildernesses for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn't you, how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No. This is jubilee. 'Our crown,' you said, 'has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,' you said, 'is wear it.'"

Death

Early on December 1, 1987, (some sources say late on November 30) Baldwin died from stomach cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. He was buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.

Legacy

Baldwin's influence on other writers has been profound: Toni Morrison edited the Library of America two-volume editions of Baldwin's fiction and essays, and a recent collection of critical essays links these two writers.

One of Baldwin's richest short stories, "Sonny's Blues", appears in many anthologies of short fiction used in introductory college literature classes.

In 1986, within the work The Story of English, Robert MacNeil, with Robert McCrum and William Cran, mentioned James Baldwin as an influential writer of African-American Literature, on the level of Booker T. Washington, and held both men up as prime examples of Black writers.

In 1987, Kevin Brown, a photo-journalist from Baltimore, founded the National James Baldwin Literary Society. The group organizes free public events celebrating Baldwin's life and legacy.

In 1992, Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, established the James Baldwin Scholars program, an urban outreach initiative, in honor of Baldwin, who taught at Hampshire in the early 1980s. The JBS Program provides talented students of color from underserved communities an opportunity to develop and improve the skills necessary for college success through coursework and tutorial support for one transitional year, after which Baldwin scholars may apply for full matriculation to Hampshire or any other four-year college program.

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included James Baldwin on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

In 2005, the USPS created a first-class postage stamp dedicated to Baldwin, which featured him on the front, with a short biography on the back of the peeling paper.

In 2012 James Baldwin was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates LGBT history and people.

In 2014 128th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, was named "James Baldwin Place" to celebrate Baldwin's 90th Birthday. He lived in the neighborhood and attended P.S. 24. Readings of Baldwin's writing were held at The National Black Theatre and a month long art exhibition featuring works by New York Live Arts and artist Maureen Kelleher. The events were attended by Council Member Inez Dickens, who lead the campaign to honor Harlem native son, Baldwin's family, leaders in theatre and film, and members of the community.

Works

Go Tell It on the Mountain (semi-autobiographical novel; 1953)

The Amen Corner (play; 1954)

Notes of a Native Son (essays; 1955)

Giovanni's Room (novel; 1956)

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (essays; 1961)

Another Country (novel; 1962)

A Talk to Teachers (essay; 1963)

The Fire Next Time (essays; 1963)

Blues for Mister Charlie (play; 1964)

Going to Meet the Man (stories; 1965)

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (novel; 1968)

No Name in the Street (essays; 1972)

If Beale Street Could Talk (novel; 1974)

The Devil Finds Work (essays; 1976)

Just Above My Head (novel; 1979)

Jimmy's Blues (poems; 1983)

The Evidence of Things Not Seen (essays; 1985)

The Price of the Ticket (essays; 1985)

The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (essays; 2010)

Jimmy's Blues and Other Poems (poems; 2014)

Together with others:

Nothing Personal (with Richard Avedon, photography) (1964)

A Rap on Race (with Margaret Mead) (1971)

One Day When I Was Lost (orig.: A. Haley; 1972)

A Dialogue (with Nikki Giovanni) (1973)

Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood (with Yoran Cazac, 1976)

Native Sons (with Sol Stein, 2004)

Music/Spoken Word Recording:

A Lover's Question (CD, Les Disques Du Crépuscule – TWI 928-2, 1990)

Wikipedia

#James Baldwin

[margridarnauds]

laz and solene pls

THANKS FOR MY LIFE AVERY

Lazare

Sexuality Headcanon: GAY GAY GAY. I mean, the man has a RAINBOW across his crotch at one point. (Now, you could argue that it was a trick of the lighting, but come on. We know the truth.) Possibly with a side of demi, since I really don’t think that he really has any interest in sex until Ronan comes into his life, despite having a longtime (unfortunate and unrequited) crush on Artois and I genuinely can’t see him, say, going to a brothel or even having an affair with another officer or a soldier. I just think the man, with one, single exception, is more or less completely married to his job, and given the emphasis in army training on avoiding libertinism, the idea that “vices” weren’t inherent and could be stomped out, and my own headcanons as far as his family history...it ain’t gonna happen no matter what. Like, there are probably ongoing challenges in court as to who can successfully get the D, with no one being successful. (This has led to a number of young ladies swarming him at any given function in the hopes that they’ll be the one to melt his brooding heart.) In some AUs, like the Polyam AU, he’s obviously bi, but that’s the odd one out on multiple levels and is one of the few I’d really put into its own continuity (Come on, it acknowledges R/O, for God’s sake.) Asexual homoromantic Laz is also Very Important to me, with him trying to deal with everything because Ronan unleashes SQUISHY FEELINGS in him but he still doesn’t feel any sexual attraction towards him, though he’s not 100% opposed to sex in principle, and Ronan taking it personally because it’s Ronan and, in all fairness, it’s not like they have pamphlets on asexuality in the 18th century, though eventually they decide to navigate it in a way that makes them both happy.

Gender Headcanon: Generally, I write him as more or less cis, but trans Laz has a very, very special place in my heart since it puts his need to conform to society in an entirely different light. Like, it could be a Lady Oscar-esque situation where he’s an only child and Mama Peyrol and Papa de Peyrol (mainly Mama de Peyrol because *someone* is probably either in a brothel or on campaign WHOOPS) get worried and just...straight up raise him as a guy from the time he’s about 4-5 years old and he’s okay with it because, well, he is a guy and he’s happy that they finally notice that (and since boys habitually wore dresses until about the age of 7 when they had their breeching, this wouldn’t even be a Major Deal and they could probably come up with some bullshit reason for why they’d had a daughter baptized but now have a healthy son. Or if not, they just, like, bribe the local priest. Because they’re aristocrats and can afford to do shit like that). Then Papa de Peyrol dies, Grandpapa de Fuck comes into play, and it becomes more of a Thing, with always Upholding the De Peyrol Name and Fulfilling His Duty becoming the focus rather than, idk, raising a well-adjusted kid. Like, he gets some points for not misgendering him, but on every other level? Dude’s still an asshole. Because he’s Grandpapa de Fuck.

Laz is taught that he has to be the best grandson and heir that he can be, that no one can ever have a suspicion about him, which also becomes a bit of a strain as the pressure to marry looms in the future and Grandpapa de Fuck dies without even being useful. (Typical). And so Laz tries very, very hard to conform, to not so much as bend a single rule, to be the perfect military man. He gets this reputation for being standoffish from the time he’s a young officer, about the age of 14, never really interacting with the other men, even changing his clothes in secret, always sleeping on his own when he has the opportunity to, and, despite the other officer’s best efforts, never going into a brothel or having an affair no matter how many bets they make among themselves. Until one day some reckless peasant boy charges into his life and Laz really, really tries to fight it because this could ruin EVERYTHING but. It’s Ronan. Ronan’s persistent. And also an oblivious toenail so it takes a little while to get it through his head that, no, Laz is still a man and Ronan’s STILL gay AF. (Sorry, Ronan, you can’t no-homo your way out of this one. Full homo. All the homo.)

A ship I have with said character: R/L is pretty much my be all, end all for Laz, though I also can and do ship O/L and R/O/L.

A BROTP I have with said character: Poor Laz in canon doesn’t really have any friends that we see, unless you count the one time he and Artois conspire. (I don’t.) Even though I tend to have his troops shipping Laz/Ronan, that’s out of selfishness as much as anything else (if he’s getting laid, he might not be so snappish.) In the Abomination (which...obviously doesn’t go with the whole “Peyrol wanting to fire on him”...thing from the Zuka version), I like the dynamic between Laz and Papa du Puget, where you have the latter really helping him out in terms of figuring out where he is in terms of his relationship with Ronan and getting his sense of individuality back. Like, it shouldn’t require a neon sign to say “Hey, maybe not having anything to do with your boyfriend except for when you have sex might be part of the reason why he’s not speaking to you right now, maybe cuddle with him?” but Laz is new to this, doesn’t exactly have a roadmap, and thinks that his relationship with Ronan can be neatly packaged into his schedule. Which...surprise, it can’t be. Since du Puget is also very much a man of the Enlightenment with a HUGE library to match it (really, we know this, because when the Bastille fell he demanded compensation for it), if anyone can help Laz get grounded again, it’s him. And, since Laz is about 24-ish in the Abomination, he’s the perfect age to be Du Puget’s son (with Olympe being about 19), which adds an extra dimension as du Puget (my very, very specific version of him modeled after the historical figure) really mirrors Laz’s father in a lot of ways, from his friendship with de Sade (who Laz *loathes*) to his military career and his habit of occasionally having affairs. (Which is pretty shitty, but not unexpected given the times.) The difference is, du Puget really does get the opportunity to do what Papa de Peyrol never could: Do his best to protect Lazare from Grandpapa de Fuck’s influence, even if the damage has already been mostly done, as well as ultimately give up his career and his post for his family. (For what it’s worth, I tend to headcanon Papa de Peyrol as a wannabe Validad who was just...flawed in his implementation of it. Like, my take on him is this guy who would always bring back his son toys and souvenirs from his campaign, tell him stories when he tucked him into bed, etc., but whose own weaknesses ultimately still led to his death and his widow being left absolutely destitute to the point where she had to make a deal with Grandpapa de Fuck. Because it’s the 18th century and life’s a bitch, especially if you’re a widow with weakened financial prospects and a young child and your father in law is convinced your kid is his second chance from God.)

A NOTP I have with said character: Generally, I’d say Artois/Laz in anything that’s not set pre-canon given that, for all it could be interesting in a fucked up way, there’s no way it’ll end up well for Laz, but I have also seen Danton/Laz and it scarred me deeply. Salieri/Laz is something I’ve also seen a bit, which I don’t *get* because any time they would have met it’d be like: *gay staring*

*gay staring*

*gay panic*

*gay panic*

And then both of them rushing over to their extroverted boyfriends. If anything, I could only really see the two of them bonding over having absolutely ridiculous boyfriends (and, if it gets to postcanon for both, bonding over WHOOPS I ACCIDENTALLY KILLED MY BOYFRIEND).  

A random headcanon: Oh God, pretty much everything I have on him is a headcanon. Like, even the things I take for granted on him (like Sugardaddy!Laz) are headcanons. The man is one massive, walking headcanon because no one in the writer’s room wanted to sit down and work on their contract cop-out; they were just like “fuck, let him keep Maniaque. And give him this new song. And a bit in the opening, where he demonstrates the beginning of his homoerotic tension lifelong hatred with the lead. That’s good, right?”

Laz always liked music growing up; he liked how steady the beats were, he liked the smooth texture of the harpsichord keys, he liked his mother sometimes sitting him on her knee and gently moving his fingers over the right keys, he liked the way he could channel himself into the music. Communication was hard, mired in social niceties that he didn’t always understand, things that the adults treated like they were life and death, but music was simple. Hitting the key one place produced one sound, hitting it in another produced another, every time. When his father was at home, he would sit in the drawing room and listen to the two of them play, applauding at the right moments and praising Lazare enthusiastically. This was the first time young Lazare tasted success and praise, and he basked in it. By the time his father died, when was about seven or eight, he was quite good at it in his own right.

Obviously, since this was a bright, happy period in Lazare’s life, guess what Grandpapa de Fuck did? Yep, it went out the window. A man, Grandpapa de Fuck believed, could only ever be talented at one thing, barring some few geniuses (with his grandson not being among them), and Lazare was going to be a soldier. Everything else was going to go. As with most things relating to his childhood that his grandfather robbed him of, he chose to convince himself that it had been a childish indulgence. He still felt the music, though, in the steady rhythm of soldier’s boots and the beat of the regimental drum, but he could only direct it now, never play it for himself. Once, when he was a young officer being used by enthralled with the Comte d’Artois, the latter took him to a performance of an opera, chastising him when he noticed the way Lazare’s hands moved throughout the performance. Lazare buried it even further, not even talking about it when it could be avoided, much less consuming it.

Then, Ronan comes into his life. And Ronan’s not a music critic; the most he knows are the peasant songs they played at festivals or sang as together in the winter months when things looked bleak and they had little else to do. He probably doesn’t know the difference between a harpsichord and a piano, just that they’re Rich People’s Instruments. But, despite everything else, despite the hard time he gives Peyrol for it at first, he ends up egging him into taking classes again because, Hell, it’s something besides homicide that makes Laz happy and, for all of their differences as a couple, Ronan wants him to be happy. And it’s frustrating, because he should know how to do this; for so long everything in his life has been something that he already knew and could predict and, with this, he can hear his failure. There are many times that he takes his anger out on the keys or scatters the sheet music around. But, over time, he feels himself improving, the keys start to become old friends to him, and, gradually, he starts to play again. And it’s not like it was when he was a child, there is no audience eager to praise him, but, sometimes during a late practice session, Ronan will come over from behind (with some amount of warning, since approaching the experienced army officer from behind tends to have unforeseen consequences), drowsily nuzzle into Laz’s neck, and it’s just as good. (Also, he probably reaches around to play a few notes of “Ah, Ca Ira” or “La Marseillaise” while Laz is briefly distracted because Ronan Mazurier is, first and foremost, a little shit). (Also, they totally bang on the harpsichord at one point.)

General Opinion over said character: MY SON. My useless, emotionally repressed, gay, homicidal, aristocratic son who needs to have some sense knocked in his head but is trying his best and is quite possibly the only officer in Paris who is actually doing his job. Deserves more screentime and/or cuddles from his boyfriend who is STILL ALIVE, thank you very much, if and when he gets into the position when he’ll accept them. I wish he got something resembling character development or an arc, but HE’S MINE NOW. (And, tbh, I’m a little worried that it’ll be a monkey’s paw type situation with him getting more time. Like, I’m fully prepared to sell my soul to the Toho production, but I’m also preparing myself to see a much darker take on my son than I’m used to. Including when it comes to Ronan. And that might be a bitter pill to swallow.) Even though I love all my sons equally, I prefer the opportunity for nuance that original!Laz afffords (and the amount of Done he seems to be most of the time), as the other two lean a little more towards sadistic (though sex dungeon Laz is too good for me to pass up entirely). Also, I still hold Toho!Laz as an ideal faceclaim for Grandpapa de Fuck. 

Someone please save him. I would, but I’m too busy tossing him into the Seine atm.

Solene

Sexuality Headcanon: Solene’s sexuality has always been tricky for me because bisexual Solene is very near and dear to my heart (ONE OF US, ONE OF US), but I could also make an argument for lesbian Solene who separates her working life from her private life. In another universe, she very likely would have ended up with a man no matter what, I’m not sure if she’d have been entirely content, but she probably wouldn’t have questioned it so long as she was decently secure and well-cared for, like most WLW throughout history probably did. Even in canon, I could see her taking up with a man (like in the Zuka and Toho versions where she and Danton have a longer term “relationship”), because it’s a means of security + stability so long as he’s not some abusive assfuck who thinks that he owns her, but as far as actual trust and companionship are concerned? I can only really see it with women, which makes sense when you consider how closely tied Solene really is to women, especially in the French and Toho versions where she’s got “Je Veux le Monde” which is literally her belting out about how awesome women are and how men (specifically Ronan) are too blinded by their own ambition and bloodlust + the fact that we always see her surrounded by the other women, during La Nuit M’Appelle, Je Veux le Monde, and Fixe.

Gender Headcanon: She’s most likely a cis woman. Je Veux le Monde has a great emphasis on childbirth, etc. associated with that, though I could also roll with a significant portion of that being her taking power in her own terms, using the only language she knows, like she also seems to be doing in La Nuit, while still perhaps being a little unhappy with the way gender identity is dealt with in 18th century French society. 

A ship I have with said character: Solene/Olympe. Like...was there any doubt?

“Oh, I think Peyronan’s my OTP and I can’t wait to work on all my fanfiction for them!” *Accidentally writes Solympe fic after Solympe fic*

“How did THAT happen?”

I mean, it does help that they aren’t at each other’s throats for the early part of their relationship, unlike SOME PEOPLE.

In all honesty, given how little Solene actually gets to do, there’s really not all that much room for shipping, save with the women around her and Lucille in the Zuka version. Which is an option, definitely, given that they “become friends” BUT.

A BROTP I have with said character: Despite headcanoning Solene as one of a VERY small number of people who can genuinely scare Laz, I do like to imagine the two of them bonding over Ronan’s more ridiculous moments. Like, at first she’s pissed as HELL at him for obvious reasons, but it also becomes a matter of “What did he do this time?” “He told me that my chess set was royalist propaganda. Then he jumped out the window. I have yet to try to retrieve him” “*Sigh* Let me talk to him.” And, in the Abominationverse, with the advent of the twins, Uncle Lazare is the nearest thing they have to a responsible adult when Solene and Olympe want to have a date night and Olympe’s parents are otherwise occupied, and since the children are already strangely drawn to him, well...there are worse babysitters, especially during the period of time when Ronan is off playing Hero of the Revolution and the twins are the only thing Laz really has to keep his mind off of him.

A NOTP I have with said character: Solene/Danton as a ship somewhat creeps me out, given that (1) He still has the ability to throw her out on the street with nothing and (2) ...Historically, we know how this one’s going to work out. Danton’s married, eventually he’s going to marry a fifteen year old a couple of weeks after his wife dies, and then he gets fucking guillotined. There is no way Solene doesn’t get fucked over AGAIN in this one. (Also, I just...don’t see them as a romantic couple. He was a customer, they did the do, Ronan was SUPER pissed about it and Danton’s probably forever on his shit list for it, but still. It wasn’t a *romance* for her. It was food for the day. It was part of her rent for the month.)

A random headcanon: The pink ring that Solene wears in the “Je Veux le Monde” music video (and, seemingly, in the showcase video) belonged to her mother. When Mama Mazurier realized she wasn’t going to survive her last birth, when Solene was probably about 5-7, she pressed it deep into the girl’s hand, as if hoping that she could press the ring into her memory as well. It was the last movement she would make in this life. As time went on, the taxes mounted up as one disaster after another seemed to befall the family. They sold off whatever they could, with the ring being one of the few things that remained. (And it got to the point where their debt was so high that, really, selling the ring wouldn’t have helped in the long run, and so Papa Mazurier decided that at least Solene could have it, nearly crying for the first time in front of his children when she offered it to him once before firmly putting it back on her finger). She briefly considered selling it off when she got to Paris, to the point where she had it in the palm of her hand, ready to sell to a street vendor before she decided that it wasn’t worth it, feeling the sharp press of metal when she clasped it hard. When Ronan later told her, “When people lose their dignity, it’s the end,” he didn’t know what she’d done to avoid doing just that. Ronan, as always, saw only what she’d lost, rather than what she’d kept.

Also, since I’m just returning home from the angst wars with Laz and he got a nice, long headcanon, Papa Mazurier loved both of his children equally. Really, he did. He was a true validad, which is also why he had to die. But, looking back, Ronan always felt a little bit like he was the least favorite of the two of them, because it seemed like, generally, Solene tended to get what she wanted more. In reality, though, as Solene would later tell Ronan when he, Olympe, Lazare, and her were sitting down together, it was really just that she knew how to ask for things tactfully, including when to wait, whereas Ronan went in guns blazing. Solene learned how to play the long game, and it paid off. (Also, even though she was initially pissed off over her brother screwing their father’s murderer after abandoning her to pursue a half-baked revenge plot, she is also personally amazed at the fact that, not only did Ronan get a gig that her and most of her friends DREAMED of, a furnished apartment with a faithful, devoted, aristocratic lover who is willing to buy him anything he asks for, not the least well-tailored outfits, he did it accidentally. By continuously insulting him. In prison. If Ronan ever screws this up, Solene is going to personally kill him. And then kick Laz’s ass because Ronan is still her brother dammit.)

General Opinion over said character: Hello, continuing evidence of my bisexuality. The Superior Mazurier Sibling, AKA THE ONE WHO ACTUALLY HAS SOME COMMON SENSE. Deserved better writing, hot cocoa, and to have seen Olympe at least one time that wasn’t over her brother’s corpse. She is one of the few things I think the French cast did best with, since later productions really tried to sanitize her, though I love Zuka!Solene directly calling out Ronan in La Nuit m’Appelle. LET HER HAVE A PLOTLINE DAMMIT. Also: WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T WE GET HER SHOWCASE COSTUME?  (Also, Matthieu Carnot would have rocked as her sibling, just saying.) I just...have many emotions about Solene Mazurier and what she deserves and what she got and I will never forgive the show for skimping on her storyline the entire time and then having the last thing we see of her being her crying her eyes out over the brother who abandoned her (and, okay, in other productions, they reconcile, but it doesn’t ACHIEVE anything between the two of them and it’s mainly Solene reaching out to him whereas I want him groveling). It’s a good thing she hooks up with his beard after his funeral, otherwise the angst and overall incomplete nature of her arc might be too much to bear. 

#1789 #or rather my very specific take on it #janetcarter

[linkbumble796]

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(1819 – 1892) American poet

Whitman was born on a Long Island (New York) farm to a typically heterosexual family. His father drank too much; his mother suffered; and his eight siblings did poorly except for two brothers. The poet idolised his mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, and credited her with inspiring his poetry. From first to last, his writings applaud sexual love. ‘Song of Myself’, published in 1855, contains Section V, which celebrates the soul through the trope of fellatio: ‘Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, / … Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice’. Leaves of Grass, the title Whitman gave his collected poems, pivots upon this dalliance with a young man in the grass. In 1889, the poet told an interviewer, ‘Sex, sex, sex: sex is the root of it all.’

During the Civil War, Whitman worked in Washington. An outraged Methodist fired him from the Interior Department after discovering a copy of Leaves of Grass in Whitman’s desk, but Attorney-General James Speed quickly found him another position. Speed’s brother Joshua had spent four years sleeping with Abraham Lincoln in Illinois. Lincoln himself had read and admired the second edition of Leaves of Grass. One of the soldiers, Alonzo Bush, wrote Whitman about a friend who ‘went down on your BK, both so often with me. I wished that I could … have some fun for he is a gay boy’ (22 December 1863); ‘BK’ might mean ‘buck’ or ‘book’, but one writer suggests ‘Big Cock’. The death of President Lincoln devastated Whitman. He wrote his last great poem, ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed’, for Lincoln. The poet himself suffered a stroke in 1873 and he moved to Camden, New Jersey, with his brother. The later poems became more abstract and less homoerotic, although Whitman’s health recovered after he swam in Timber Creek with his lover Harry Stafford, Carpenter and other young men.

Whitman may now be the premier United States poet, but his work had to overcome much resistance. Leaves of Grass first appeared in a self-published edition in 1855 with few readers; it underwent multiple transformations before the so-called ‘death-bed’ edition in 1892. Leaves of Grass certainly marked the boldest departure from standard English prosody. Of the five reviews to the first edition, Whitman wrote three anonymous favourable ones. Another reviewer was lukewarm, but the other denounced ‘that horrible crime not to be mentioned among Christians’. The fervently homoerotic 1860 edition with the Calamus cluster attracted little attention and the publisher quickly went bankrupt; the 1882 edition was banned in Boston.

During the 1950s, biographer Gay Wilson Allen established Whitman as the philopietistic poet for what Henry Luce (head of the Time-Life conglomerate) called the ‘American Century’. When the Roman Catholic authorities in New Jersey protested against naming a bridge from Camden to Philadelphia after the poet, Allen certified that Whitman was no queer. New Jersey later added a Whitman rest stop on their turnpike. Gay interpretations outraged traditional Whitman scholars; they excoriated Robert K. Martin, whose Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979, 1998) declared, ‘Whitman intended his work to communicate his homosexuality to his readers.’

Good evidence supports the view that Whitman was an urban sophisticate. He followed theatre and opera and during the 1850s was associated with musical, dramatic and literary critics in New York City; ‘my darlings my gossips’, he called them. Whitman wrote in 1863, recalling these ‘dear boys’ company & their gayety & electricity, their precious friendship’. The poet claimed that contral to Marietta Alboni inspired his work; he attended her every performance in New York City. He encouraged his lover Peter Doyle to attend the theatre regularly; in Ford’s Theater on 14 April 1865, Doyle saw actor John Wilkes Booth assassinate President Lincoln. Whitman was then visiting his mother in Brooklyn, where he wrote his extraordinary memorial to Lincoln, which follows the outline of an opera.

“The Icon History Display was created by a student intern and is not meant to replace a comprehensive search on these historical figures. Content on these biographies was created from the following sources: Queers in History: The Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Historical Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, and Transgenders by Keith Stern (2009); The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present by Paul Russell (1995). To suggest an addition or change contact us at [email protected] or 217-206-8316.”

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[momsalt54-blog]

A Mutual Bewitchment

NOVEMBER 21, 2018

READING A WRITER’S LETTERS to a beloved friend is the best way to get into that author’s head. Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport were soulmates, deeply devoted to modern art and literature. They were poet-critics — a term Marjorie Perloff fastened to Kenner — “whose books and essays place [them] among writers rather than academic commentators.” (As Davenport described his method: “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.”) The bulk of the letters collected in these two compelling volumes are from 1961–’71 — almost two-thirds of the 2,000 pages — with 1961–’66 taking up half. Editor Edward M. Burns has done a monumental job assiduously annotating this vast correspondence.

The crux of their mutual bewitchment occurs in 1963, just as the major American Modernists they revered — Williams, Eliot, Moore, and Pound — start to die off. Though there are glancing references in the letters to contemporary persons and events, such as Vietnam and Nixon, both writers were much more interested in issues of art and poetry �� the source of the term “wine-dark” in Pound’s “Canto II” or the films of Stan Brakhage. Pound’s work was a particular obsession (“He was a renaissance,” Davenport stated simply). Independent of each other, both men visited the aging poet in St. Elizabeths Hospital during his 12-year incarceration there and, later, in Italy during his self-imposed exile.

For both Davenport and Kenner, modern painting had fundamentally changed writing itself. They were particularly interested in the discovery of prehistoric cave drawings in Europe, which so deeply influenced Picasso. Davenport, himself a draughtsman, had an ingrained respect for visual art, but Kenner came to this view in his own way. Kenner believed the drawings Davenport did for Kenner’s Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (1962) and The Counterfeiters (1967) were as important as the texts; he tried, unsuccessfully, to get Davenport 50 percent of the royalties for the first book.

Kenner (born in 1923, four years before Davenport) studied under Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto before going to Yale, where at the age of 26 he wrote The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) over the course of a summer break. This book was central to Davenport’s own thesis at Harvard on the first 30 Cantos, delivered in 1961 and published in 1983 as Cities on Hills. A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Davenport came from South Carolina, “having been born into the black Depression and raised in picturesque poverty, homely morals, and love.” The two men met in 1953 but didn’t start seriously communicating until 1961. They visited each other only around a dozen times; in one early meeting, they conversed avidly for 30 hours. Kenner tried to arrange for Davenport to join him at UC Santa Barbara, where he had a teaching position, but the younger writer landed a job at the University of Kentucky, near his family, where he remained for three decades. Already an established writer, Kenner helped secure a reviewing gig for Davenport with the National Review; later they would occasionally review each other’s works. Of Davenport’s 1981 book The Geography of the Imagination, Kenner said: “If having known a man for twenty-five years is to disqualify one from talking about his work, then our literary culture will have to be left to hermits.”

The frenetic pace of their letter writing is astounding, with sometimes two or three letters piling up in a few days before the answers to the originals were written. Some of the letters are long, some stark and confessional, yet all display good humor as well as a unique patois — “Tennyrate” for “at any rate,” “Hahvud” for “Harvard,” “nuvvle” for “novel.” Occasionally one will poach the other’s words, as when Kenner used Davenport’s comment that “[t]hought is a labyrinth” as the final sentence of The Pound Era (1971). Kenner also frequently asks the classically trained Davenport — who brilliantly translated numerous works of ancient poetry — about Greek and Latin meanings. For his part, Davenport usually defers to his more prolific friend, claiming he could hardly call himself a writer compared to someone who averaged a book every two years over a three-decade stretch.

There is the usual grousing about the literary world, especially critics who couldn’t stomach Pound or who couldn’t see the importance of Beckett. They complain about reviewers who attacked them based on all sorts of wrongheaded ideas (e.g., accusing Davenport of being a “cryptoconservative” when he claimed to always vote Democratic). Neither man suffered fools gladly, but they also yearned for recognition. Kenner received the brunt of bad press, including scorn for his supposedly mannered “style,” in which he deliberately aped the style of his subjects. Davenport, more combative but also more sickly (various maladies are bemoaned), struggled to see his fiction (mostly short stories — Kenner dubbed them “assemblages”) skewered by the major critics of the day.

The volumes are filled with little gems of observation, as when Kenner writes that the “whole point of a book is what happens in the five minutes after one has finished reading it.” Secrets are disclosed, as when Davenport tells of how his father died in the hospital and of his admiration for him, despite their differences (“I never ‘rebelled’ and he never coerced”). Kenner responds with mystic wisdom: “To have done his part in making you what you are, and to have so much grown beyond the natural concerns of his generation as to take an understanding satisfaction in contemplating your place in yours, these are two substantial moral achievements for which his memory should be honored.” Later, he thanks Davenport for caring for his five children after his first wife died of cancer, helping him “to realize what an achievement family is: and it is her achievement. They are, singly and collectively, her memorial. Everything perhaps perishes but tradition.”

These letters are also an elegy for a world not dominated by technology, where one had to physically track things down — as in their quest for the copy of Eliot’s The Waste Land that Pound sedulously edited, which occupied them in the early years (it was discovered at the New York Public Library in 1968), or the details Kenner sought from Davenport when the latter retraced Pound’s visit to his childhood home (“What part of town could Pound see from the porch?”). Such dogged modes of research are now in eclipse in our digital world. We can thus be grateful for an editor like Burns, whose scholarship here includes tracing the lost history of Lester Littlefield, a hanger-on of Pound and Marianne Moore, who sent the former books at St. Elizabeths and rented the house in Venice once occupied by Olga Rudge (Pound’s late companion). Littlefield badgered Kenner and Davenport with critical and raving letters, sometimes 40 pages long. Google him and there is barely anything, a stray sentence in a book result or two, but Burns gives him an almost three-page footnote — an internet-resistant epitaph, at least until these volumes are digitized.

From 1979 until Kenner’s death in 2003, there is a large drop-off in the friends’ correspondence — a great mystery, yet the greatest of life: friends growing apart. According to Burns, people who knew both men believe that Davenport’s homoerotic fictions put Kenner off, though as early as 1961, Davenport shared details of his seeking out young men on various trips. He referred to them as “Erewhonians,” from Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, about a utopia where people fear that machines will develop consciousness. Also, Davenport grew more hermetic as he aged, responding to Kenner’s query if he would do a lecture with a steely “Tell your students I do not travel.” Certainly they spoke on the phone, but in those last 25 years, it is almost always Kenner writing to draw his friend out, and often Davenport doesn’t respond — their revels had ended. Did Davenport feel rejected? In the last letter, Kenner writes: “We have been apart too long.” He died 14 months later.

Over the course of their long careers, Davenport and Kenner helped to shape the best ways of reading difficult works of modernist poetry and prose — not only Pound but also Joyce, Eliot, Beckett, and many others. Kindred spirits reminiscent of Emerson and Thoreau, these “questioning minds” were two of the most refined artistic sensibilities this continent has ever produced. Readers can be grateful that their complex friendship has been so beautifully enshrined in Burns’s scrupulous volumes.

¤

Greg Gerke’s work has appeared in Tin House, Film Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, and other publications.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-mutual-bewitchment/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

[henrytcasey]

Watch This Wrestling 6 (2/10 – 16)

Welcome back, and yes, I’ve changed the name of this gimmick from the imprecise “Don’t Miss This” to “Watch This Wrestling.” So without further preamble, here’s what you need to see from the last week of pro wrestling.

WWE Match of the Week:

John Cena vs AJ Styles vs Bray Wyatt for the WWE Championship

WWE SmackDown Live, 2/14

While the 2017 Elimination Chamber is the match that got all of the attention this week, I prefer the WWE Championship rematch that took place two nights later. Why? The Chamber match had a slow, stilted pace, or at least it did until it was just these last three.

So, not only did SmackDown Live’s triple threat match between John Cena, AJ Styles and Bray Wyatt rule, it did so while playing on our expectations.

That “A Wild Luke Harper Appears!” moment at the top of the match existed in-part to toy with fans worried that Wyatt’s run would last a mere 47 hours. Further, while we knew to expect great things whenever Cena and Styles face off, this confirmed that Wyatt and Styles is a top-flight pairing that will do well in the future. I look forward to their post-Mania program.

Non-WWE Match of the Week:

Tetsuya Naito vs Michael Elgin for the IWGP Intercontinental Championship

NJPW, The New Beginning in Osaka, 2/11

Pop some popcorn folks, because this one goes long (more than 35 minutes). And sure, some might not like it for its length (time constrained viewers should check out Shibata/Ospreay or Kamaitachi/Dragon Lee) but I believe the reward is worth the investment. Naito’s detachment and chill make for a perfect pairing with “Big Mike” who plays ever the angry, straight-forward, revenge-driven babyface.

The match shows Naito taking a ton of punishment, and makes Elgin look incredibly powerful. It even has a couple of surprising moves in it that I won’t spoil, just look out for Naito going for a Tope Suicido.

And while this match shows Naito working over Elgin’s injured knee and eye socket, the match isn’t overburdened with the moments where Elgin’s knee isn’t able to support him. Elgin’s expressions are great, too, especially his look of exhaustion and surprise when Naito kicks out later in the match after a sit-down powerbomb. 

Available here with NJPWorld Subscription .

WWE Segment of the Week:

The Festival of Friendship

WWE Monday Night Raw, 2/13 

I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but hot damn this was good. 

Haven’t watched it yet? Watch these clips and then read. In that order.

Even the intro, Jericho’s colorfully-lit pre-taped message that welcomed “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, grandmothers and grandfathers,” to “The Wrestlemania of Camaraderie” was confoundingly weird.

I’ll be honest, I got lulled into a sense of security. Just as Graves looks startled by all the fireworks, I got bewildered the second I saw Jericho’s super-huge, extra-doofy smile. He wears that smile to close the video and as he walks out to split apart his feather dancers, and he just had me scratching my head.

Even knowing what we now know, Owens’ look of boredom doesn’t telegraph the ending, it just gives viewers this sense that he’s as confused as they are. From the blatantly homoerotic sculpture by Ralph Guggenheim (a name borrowed from a graphics designer from Toy Story) to The Creation of Kevin (“it’s art, you don’t need pants”) this segment is chock-a-block with laughs.

Also, note the Jericho line “true art grows on people,” because you need to rewatch this segment. Its pacing is perfect, with Jericho’s rapid-fire dialogue and Owens delivering deadpan line after deadpan line (“scarfs are your thing,” “Chris, where did you find Friendship The Magician?”).

You don’t even need to know about Triple H pulling Owens aside erlier and speaking likely-evils into his ear. But that added layer, that puppet master moment, gives the little flakes of humanity in Owens, which you see when he’s shaking his head wearily, hoping Jericho delivers Goldberg, to redeem the utter silly stupidity of this all. And the utter disappointment on Owens’ face when freaking Gillberg shows up. Yes, that’s how much Jericho cares about his best friend, he called up The J.O.B. Squad’s finest: Gillberg.

So as Owens says “I don’t understand!” to Jericho, he’s saying “What do you expect me to do? Triple H was right, you’re making me into a joke!” And then Jericho goes and says it all:

“For the last year, I gotta tell you, listen, I’ve had such a great time working with you, being your partner, it’s made this last year in the WWE one of my favorite years of my entire career.

And a lot of that’s because of you.

I’ve had a lot of friends in this business and a lot of partners but I haven’t had the chemistry with any of them like I have with you. It’s been a joy. You’ve made my job here and my time in the WWE here a better place, and I wanted to thank you for that.”

So when Jericho ends that emotional unfurling by promising Owens a Fast Lane win over Goldberg, we now know Owens cannot retain his title. We know that this friendship is doomed.

We don’t know who made The List of KO. It could be Owens, it could be Triple H. But once Owens decides to ask for it, it’s all over, and he’s relishing in the moment. Kevin Owens may have humanity (I think I see hints of him feeling guilty) but he also derives a terrible joy from destroying those who trust him.

So we heard the words

“How come my name’s on this?”

Then, after the brief beatdown, this gets the signatures of KO and Jericho. First, Owens giving Jericho the ring-apron powerbomb (Sami Zayn is chuckling somewhere) and then putting Jericho through the TV, just like Jericho put Shawn Michaels through the TV, as Michaels put Janetty through the barber shop window.

Oh, and check out the Samoa Joe interview with Michael Cole and Emmalina’s return if you missed those.

Non-WWE Segment of the Week:

The Broken Hardys in Tijuana Part 2

Impact Wrestling, 2/16

It’s almost as if everyone else saw the festival of friendship and thought, “well, no bother trying to top that.” Except that both the ROH and Impact this week were pre-taped and NJPW doesn’t really do non-match segments.

So, I can’t really credit Kevin & Chris for this one, but this segment (which I’m not even a huge fan of) is another Broken Matt bit that beats the field. Here’s part 1 , 2 , 3 , and 4 .

I can’t stand The Wolves Breaking Up stuff, the Mini Moose & Big Moose setup for Jealous Cody’s Return, and especially Braxton Sutter’s Bachelor Party and Laurel Van Ness’s Bachelorette Party. Even Eli Drake & Titus’ segment stank.

#wrestlewords #watchthiswrestling #dontmissthis #smackdown live #wwe #john cena #aj styles #bray wyatt #njpw #new beginnings #michael elgin #tetsuya naito #monday night raw #chris jericho #festival of friendship #impact wrestling #broken matt hardy