#;WHETHER I ESCAPE OR DIE I AM FREE. (aesthetic)

[hisapcstle-aa]

tag dump - general/dynamics

[hisapcstle-a]

i didnt disappear again shut up my tags broke-

[aprilsrant]

Happiness.

Harry Potter x Slytherin!Fem!Reader.

Word Count: 1.3k

Warnings: mentions of the war, mentions of death/dying (promise nothing too serious), kind of angsty but fluff in the end. Enemies to lovers (kind of). Loosely based on the song Compass by The Neighbourhood.

A/N: This is a gift for my amazing girl Val, @minty-malfoy, I hope you can enjoy this fic, it was really fun to write. Happy Holidays to everyone reading this and to all of my followers, I love and appreciate all of you so much!

English is not my first language. Pictures are not mine. Open for more quality.

“I'm lucky you've been keeping me around

You're the star I look for every night

When it's dark, you'll stick right by my side.”

                                      Compass, The Neighbourhood.

Harry had never been one to believe in luck or chances, but there was no denying that ever since he was born, his entire destiny had been written in stone by someone who wanted nothing more than to destroy him; there was no denying that it felt like years of bad luck and a curse strong enough to affect everyone around him had been placed on his shoulders even before he could walk. 

After years of fighting Voldemort and his followers, Harry had the tendency of thinking that the norms of normality didn’t apply to him. Every new term at Hogwarts meant a new danger, threatening his life, his friends and the rest of the Wizarding Community that wasn’t part of the elite group of blood supremacists. 

Therefore, finding someone never did the top of his list when the number one was surviving through it all. Finding someone meant, at least to him, a glimpse of ordinariness and a sense of home, things that he never remembered of experiencing outside of Hogwarts and the Burrow. That being said, not under any circumstances Harry had believed encountering her would have been possible. 

(Y/N) was someone he had ignored and bound in a cage of old prejudice because of an ancient — and unhealthy — rivalry, one started centuries before they set foot on the castle. Their relationship wasn’t one for the romance movies the Muggles loved, those where the protagonists fall in love the moment they see each other. Instead, Harry and (Y/N) loathed the other ever since the first Potion class in their sixth year. 

For a Slytherin, dreams and ambitions are what you hold closely to your heart and anyone trying to defy them, or achieve them first, is waving a battle flag right in front of you, too loud to dismiss — or perhaps, the receiver of the message is too proud to ignore —. For (Y/N), seeing Harry Potter get all of Slughorn’s attention and praise when she had been the best on the subject for the last five years, was a slap in the face interpreted as a sign to unleash the rabid dogs of war.

If anyone had told Harry that he would grow to love her, to adore every piece of her, he would have laughed while claiming the person was mental. But, what was once a feud quickly transformed into a weird, unpredictable friendship. After that, it was only a matter of time for feelings to blossom.

Neither of them wanted to admit it, but deep inside of their chests and hearts, both knew that the sweaty hands, the longing stares, the intimacy of their jokes and the tenderness of their touch wasn’t the part of the play that friends acted.

It was then that the idea of bad luck and cursed for life appeared on his head again. How could he be so selfish to let her into his life when a real war was coming for him and for everyone who dared to choose his side? How could he pretend that the claws of death weren’t reaching for him, that his life didn’t depend on the shaky and ancient hands holding the scissors? Harry knew pulling Hermione and Ron, and his whole family, into the mess was already bad enough, but doing it to the girl who had become an unexpected beacon of light would make him even more guilty. It wasn’t fair that he had to worry about whether being with her or not would endanger her life, but Harry hadn’t been born for normality.

“Why are you ignoring me?” Harry heard her voice from behind him, strong but trying to cover the anger and hurt. It was only the two of them in the corridor since most of the other students were still in class or using their free period to study. The distance separating them gave the sensation of facing an endless ocean, one you could never cross. “Did I do or say something upsetting? Is it because of your friends? I know Ron doesn’t particularly like me but I promise I’m trying.”

“It’s not that and I’m not ignoring you,” Harry responded shortly, not stopping his walk or daring to glance back at her, afraid of giving in with only seeing the expression plastered in her face. The cold words escaping from his mouth and his attitude, rising the fire in the pit of her stomach.

“What do you mean you are not ignoring me, Harry?,” she scoffed while the pace of her footsteps increased to chase after the boy,  “you can’t even look me in the eye and say it to my face.”

“I’m answering your questions, am I not? In what way is this ignoring you then?” (Y/N) had admired Harry’s tendencies to sarcasm or ironic responses ever since they became friends — and perhaps even before —, but now she wanted to slap him for acting so unfaced.

“Well, I don’t know, maybe because one day you look like you’re finally about to ask me on a date but the next one, you avoid me as if I were sick!”

Harry’s steps faltered, his chest tightened at the thought of (Y/N) reciprocating his feelings.

“Please, just tell me what I did wrong so I can fix it,” she whispered, putting herself in front of the boy.

“You did nothing wrong.”

“Then why are you acting like this? Is it because I’m a Slytherin?,” (Y/N) insisted. Now, Harry could see the ache and a hungry desperation in her eyes to know the answers, only there because of him. “Just don’t leave me, I- I can’t bear it. We can go back to hating each other if it makes it easier, but don’t do this, don’t leave me like this.”

“I don’t hate you, (Y/N), but I can’t give you what you want,” Harry said watching as her hands took hold of his owns, making his heart skipped a beat, “I’m not someone that can live a normal life, not with Voldemort threatening me and everyone I’m close with.” Harry didn’t miss her efforts to not flinch at the mention of the Dark Lord.

One of her hands travelled all the way up to his right cheek, the feeling of Harry’s skin and the way the boy had leaned into the touch of her fingers, forgetting for just a second all the worries plaguing his mind, had (Y/N)’s stomach almost bursting. 

“I don’t want nor need a normal life, Harry. I want you, I couldn’t care less about the rest,” she confessed.

“But I care! I care about what’s going to happen to you!,” He yelled (?), “you can get hurt, you can die, (Y/N)!”

“And so can you! Let me remind you, you’ve been there a couple of times now, Harry.” She was glad of choosing the empty corridor to confront him, not having to endure the hushed whispers and the stares, pointing at her as if she wouldn’t notice. “If there’s a war coming then I prefer to spend this few minutes of peace with you.”

“But if you-”

“And if I die, then I got to be with you in the end,” (Y/N) interrupted him, “I’m not afraid of dying, Harry, but I would love to live a little before doing so.”

He closed his eyes, releasing a shaky breath before embracing her figure and resting his head against her shoulders, smelling the signature and familiar fragrance of her perfume. A small smile appeared on (Y/N)’s face while she let herself enjoy the feeling of being in his arms, guarded from the evils outside the castle and loved by the boy she once used to loathe.

“We all deserve some happiness, and maybe even a tad of normalcy, Harry,” she whispered in his ear before looking at his green eyes and closing the distance between their lips.

Taglist: @vivianweasley @feetoffthetablee @gcdric @shadowsinger11 @thisismynerdyself @cappsikle @idont-knowrn @theweasleysredhair @aesthetically-hailey @slytherinsunrise @bannerbubble @lilac-wrists @storyisnotover

[child-of-hurin]

So I’m thinking of a Narn AU where Húrin isn’t set on Thangorodrim and remains a prisoner in the fortress. His children are still cursed and he is still regularly shown images of them but it doesn’t take up all his time as it does in canon. I bring this up because I was curious what you think about how much of the bad things that befall Túrin and Niënor were explicitly planned before. Because I’ve always thought that the compelled incest part was at least in some way planned before and was very specifically about Húrin watching the ruining of his bloodline (which goes back to my other cursed HCs) in addition to the suffering it would bring his children.

Anyways no pressure to answer or anything I was just curious if this was something you had thought about

-@outofangband

(Disclaimer: I haven’t read much of the HoME besides what pertains the Narn, meaning I haven’t read any extended material on Melkor and so on.)

Honestly this is a very interesting question that I have posed myself before. It brings to mind this passage:

[Transcript:

Report of the Dragon-helm in the land west of Sirion came swiftly to the ear of Morgoth, and he laughed, for now  (1) Túrin was revealed to him again, who had long been lost in the shadows and under the veils of Melian. (2) Yet he began to fear that Túrin would grow to such a power that the curse that he had laid upon him would become void, and he would escape the doom that had been designed for him, or else that he might retreat to Doriath and be lost to his sight again. (3) Now therefore he had a mind to seize Túrin and afflict him even as his father, to torment him and enslave him.]

My conclusions here are:

(1) Melkor’s ‘eye’, which Húrin had been forced to access as well, couldn’t penetrate Doriath under Melian’s power. Makes me think the whole time Túrin was growing up, Melkor had Húrin watch Morwen and Nienor’s growing misery in Dor-Lómin instead?

(2) Everyone has talked about this a hundred times because it is so incredible. So the doom was defeatable? So, cosmically speaking, there was some validation in Túrin’s methods of seeking war and power? Much to think about

(3) This bit is the only passage I can recall where instead of vague threats, the text gives us a concrete plan of Melkor’s for this family. When he sets Glaurung forth, we have absolutely no idea whether his actions were meticulously planned by Melkor, a mastermind, or just strokes of Glaurung’s own evil creative genius as derivated from Melkor’s will or whatever.

So. My opinion is that it isn’t a plan. First and foremost because I hate the anime villain type who was secretly controlling all the variables of the game, but also because I genuinely don’t get this aesthetic from Melkor/Tolkien. Melkor’s power is godlike; it doesn’t come from logic control over the material world, but from a more intimate relationship with what makes the material world itself. 

Thinking of two events: one, when Melkor releases Húrin. Melkor has changed and posioned Húrin’s spirit, but Húrin isn’t aware of that. Húrin still hates Melkor, but, as we see in the Wanderings, he is still an agent of Melkor (to use a term @promin-blog​ used in [that interesting meta post you reblogged recently]). Compare that to Niënor, to whom something very similar happens: Glaurung poisons her spirit and then sets her free.

In my understanding, in neither of those two situations did Melkor or Glaurung know exactly what was going to be the outcome; they just knew it was going to be bad for their captives, and thus, good for them. Melkor is a being of chaos against the benign order of the world, so he fundamentally gains from an increase in the chaos, or a corruption in the order of the world. So when he explains the curse to Húrin, he says:

‘You say it,’ said Morgoth. ‘I am the Elder King: Melkor, first and mightiest of all the Valar, who was before the world, and made it. The shadow of my purpose lies upon Arda, and all that is in it bends slowly and surely to my will. But upon all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom, and it shall bring them down into darkness and despair. Wherever they go, evil shall arise. Whenever they speak, their words shall bring ill counsel. Whatsoever they do shall turn against them. They shall die without hope, cursing both life and death.’

I take that at face value in terms of, this is literally how it works. He didn’t know exactly that Húrin would kill Mîm, bring the Nauglamír to Thingol, then fight with his once-beloved Haladin kin and cause their destruction, just like I don’t think Glaurung knew Niënor would find Túrin, fall in love with him and have his child. BUT they knew releasing these poisoned agents would benefit their cause one way or another. (I do think Melkor presumed correctly that Húrin might try to find Gondolin though! Hence the spies). So I guess I don’t agree with you that the incest was pre-planned, although I do think the ruining of Húrin’s bloodline was definitely a huge point that, in Melkor’s mind, was probably inevitable. If Túrin had, say, had a baby with Finduilas, Melkor would have gotten a hold of that baby too, at some point... I think when he says he is the master of the Fates of Arda, he means that his will has too powerful a hold over Arda to be broken, and not, necessarily, that he controls every detail of it.

That makes me think of that passage you mentioned recently in your blog:

“But ever the Noldor feared most the treachery of their own kin who had been thralls in Angband; for Morgoth used some of them for his evil purposes, and feigning to give them liberty sent them abroad; but their wills were chained to his and they strayed only to come back to him again” (”Of the Ruin of Beleriand”, p188, The Silmarillion)

It makes me wonder how many of these elves were, like Maeglin, aware of their own collaboration, and how many might have hated Melkor their whole lives while still being agents of his will 😬

It’s a super depressing thing, this possiblity that the Narn puts forth, of an otherwise free person being permanently and inescapably ruined for as long as you hold your material existance in this realm. It is the ultimate corruption of free will, because it means no matter which choices you make, they will always come to evil. You’re helpless: intent doesn’t matter, hard work doesn’t matter. I think it’s fitting with Melkor being a god, after all! That’s why it’s relevant that out of the five members of this family, only one is directly murdered by Melkor’s actions. The others take their own lives, although more indirectly in the case of Morwen - the only one who “was not conquered”. The rest of them, Túrin, Nienor, and Húrin, end up choosing death as an escape, and I think it is in a way because they ultimately understand that Melkor is playing on a godlike level that they, as mortals, cannot reach.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO ANOTHER DEPRESSING THING. We, as readers, have the benefit of knowing that Mandos exists and Eru exists and the Ainulindale happened. We have also read about Beren’s spirit lingering in Mandos waiting for Lúthien. So we ASSUME there is an afterlife for the second-born. We know Tolkien envisioned that, spiritual man that he was. But in the narrative, mortals themselves don’t have any reassurance of that! 

So this exchange here becomes even more chilling:

So? 

Did he lie?

[thatdamnokie]

so, as everybody knows, our man, the lovely mark strong, turned 57 this past august 5th

since the kingsman films have had a huge influence on several aspects of my day-to-day life (gee, wonder what group of people i could be referring to...), i decided to sit down and do something i’ve been thinking about since getting my medical card earlier this year: getting high as a kite and watching them back-to-back.

to celebrate mark’s birthday, i decided to do another running commentary post like the one i did for rocknrolla ages ago, under the cut. it’s a pretty similar style, which is to say not necessarily super coherent and might be hard to understand if you’ve never seen the movies. D:

there are some mentions of the roanoke society, but not many.

if even just one person finds this mildly entertaining for four seconds, then i’ll have done my job. there is a lot of cursing and this is NOT spoiler-free.

enjoy~

edited 9.1.20 to correct typos and such, please remember that i was Not Sober while i wrote this lmao

how many times have i watched these movies at this point? i don’t even know.  

i always liked the nifty like—retro arcade marv opening animation

and the thing with the tapes! we love book-ending devices!

kingsman: badass motherfuckers worldwide incorporated

like why was merlin even with them? i understand why lee and james would be there, but merlin, was he not acting quartermaster then?

i have SO MANY FEELINGS about lee unwin

i think it haunts harry and merlin more than anyone thinks, but these are fun spy movies so we just don’t talk about trauma and shit, don’tcha know

don’t look at how merlin tears up and tell me he doesn’t drink about it *HEAVILY* later

it’s such a stark contrast to see the 1990s interior vs. what it’s like when eggsy’s grown :(

michelle baby i’m so sorry. you deserved better than this.

and BABY EGGSY

omg. like this scene is both heartbreaking but is also adorable.

colin firth has gd anime legs, that dude had to straight up unfold himself as he stood up lmao

aaannnnd swooping logo, whooooo, goin’ over some mountains~

and mark hamill, ladies and gentlemen!

this whole thing with james deciding to kinda go rogue makes me wish that we knew more about his backstory as well. like, is this james being james, or was this a weird one-off situation and he was just unlucky?

YES unlucky. nobody could plan for the hurricane of sleek destruction that is gazelle

who has one of my favorite aesthetic designs as a villain (although i guess i’d put her more on maybe henchman level? but idk, it seems like valentine looked at her more as a partner, less like an assistant? and they had a very interesting chemistry together too, like i would’ve added more valentine x gazelle scenes)

i would LOVE to be this chill about just—draping blankies over bodies

blankies over bodies sounds like a cool band name

DIBS you guys can’t have it

i am SO GLAD samuel l. jackson gave valentine a lisp!

valentine, to me, does fit a lot of the usual spy movie villain tropes

but since this movie doesn’t take itself super serious, it’s more fun than annoying

and we never hear about any of the other knights?? like

half of this is just gonna be me whining for additional footage that there just wouldn’t have been room for realistically lmao

michael caine, you are lovely

MARK STRONG, LADIES AND GENTLEMAN

WITH LEGS THAT DON’T QUIT AND AN ACCENT THAT I’D DIE FOR

i’m an embarrassment

like let’s all stop and thank god that mark didn’t have time to learn the welsh accent

not that i would’ve been disappointed, because all accents are good accents on this blog

but at this point i can’t imagine merlin as—not scottish

“try picking a more suitable candidate this time”

arthur you DICK

like were you this cold-blooded when lee died, you fuckin’ reptilian-ass son of a bitch

no wonder you were charlie’s pledge person thing

and enter the fabulous taron egerton, stage left!

DEAN you are DISGUSTING

god, michelle, you need better friends, if you were my bro this entire relationship would’ve never happened

;-; and eggsy’s so sweet with his sister! i know there probably wasn’t “room” for it but i AM glad that there are scenes showing that family is one of eggsy’s kinda “core values”or whatever you want to call it

dude is a hufflepuff through and through imo

can you imagine eggsy as a villain? we would be so fucked. he’s sly, he’s smart, he could’ve made life v e r y difficult for lots of people if he really wanted to

but look at him with the squad!

eggsy’s just like the british version of a good ol’ boy

this car scene is some dukes of hazzard bullshit (ramp-jumping and fun car horn aside)

if butterflies are harry’s main symbolic critter, would foxes be eggsy’s? or would it be a pug instead? i guess that’s like asking if harry would be either a butterfly or a cairn terrier, like mr. pickle. let’s say both.

this fandom is pretty on top of character associations like that

you get symbolic associations! YOU get symbolic associations! EVERYONE gets symbolic associations whether they’re actually in the canon or not! don’t have any? don’t worry, we’ll assign you at least one!

the guy playing the interviewing officer is ALSO the patriarch in the witch which i didn’t realize until—like, a while after

and it was while @circlesofbone​ was visiting, and we were just “oh, okay, guess we can’t escape this cast at all, this is fine”

“your father saved my life.”

harry you’re such a fucking peacock, waiting all posted up and posing so you’ll look cool

you big doofus

i’d kill to be inside his head during this first conversation with eggsy though

like is eggsy like lee? is harry seeing lee the entire time he’s talking to his son, in his mannerisms, how he carries himself, how he speaks?

or is eggsy the opposite? which—i don’t know if that would somehow be sadder?

there’s just a lot going on in the background of this bit that’s left up to interpretation

“although i’m sure it’s well-founded—“

harry’s just so casual about this entire thing, nobody’s that casual without practice

harry you rabble-rouser, what kind of life have you led

“manners. maketh. man.”

our timeless motto, my flowers

kingsman STILL to this DAY has some of the most well-choreographed fight scenes i’ve ever seen??

like yeah the church scene but even just this initial bar fight

harry could’ve been a dancer

in a way i guess he already is

like he moves so fluidly and gracefully, it is BONKERS

colin you did so good! i’m so proud!

the way eggsy’s just O.O

whether or not you ship hartwin, like, you gotta admit, that was hot

and his BODY LANGUAGE, he’s sitting like RAMROD straight, this poor dude lmao

nobody prepares you for a situation like that in public school is all i’m saying

harry, exiting stage left like a suave, smooth motherfucker

remember when iggy azalea was relevant

ugghhhh i hate this part

“I WASN’T WITH NO ONE”

can you imagine being harry hart listening to your dead friend’s son getting the shit beat out of him

like, surely he heard the cleaver, he knows dean was going to fucking gut eggsy right?

listen to how cold and icy his voice gets, oof

yeah, he’s pissed, and dean is lucky

PARKOUR

ugh, i want to go to london ;-; i want to walk in front of the shop and visit harry’s house and kiss cute english boys

i’d like to think harry’s super excited to show eggsy everything but he’s gotta keep it dialed back because “decorum”

the way eggsy pauses though

“come on.”

and he says it so softly.

if i was eggsy, i’d be nervous, too.

but i didn’t realize how quickly harry tries to give off signals like “hey there’s no reason to be scared.”

“like my fair lady?” “well, you’re full of surprises.” <3 one of my favorite sceneeesss.

harry’s voice is so soothing but eggsy is so freaked out by the elevator that he’s just—there’s no room for anything else beyond processing the elevator lmao

“how deep does this fucking thing go?” asking the real questions

aannnddd KINGSMAN BULLET TRAIN

i’d like to think they have like soft jazz or something playing in there

and then they get to the hangar and there are obviously a buuuuunch of people out on the tarmac that we just—never hear about? i just assume they’re all like technical officers or maybe other agents

“your father had the same look on his face. … as did i.”

harry is already rooting for him.

“late again, sir.”

that. brogue.

fuck, i could listen to him talk for hours, scottish accents are my favorite thing

#squadgoals

not a very diverse cast :/

the body bag speeeeech

and of course nobody was in any actual danger, but merlin doesn’t want them to know that so he becomes mr. hard as steel, i am emotionally stoic at all times, do not test me you bunch of rugrats

“classic army technique.”

ROXY

ROXY I WANT TO JUST HOLD YOU IN MY ARMS TT.TT

aannnnddd charlie, also

who we might’ve found sympathy for if we knew aaannyytthiinnggg else about his backstory

like, could he just be Like That, yeah

but most people i know who are assholes like that are that way because their parents were first /shrug/

can hardly fault the dude for turning out like that when poison was all he was given to drink

anyone else a hundred percent positive they would’ve drowned in the first trial

i would absolutely have panicked and bit it

but then again, i’m not kingsman material, i’m roanoke

and if this is the exact same test that merlin and harry went through, does that mean there might be some weird drowning trauma hidden back in there that’s just ANOTHER thing we’re not gonna talk about?

(yes the correct answer is yes)

god that’s such an american response to the problem though

glass can’t cause problems if it’s in a million pieces!

“yeah you can wipe those smirks off your faces…”

i wonder if there was ever a situation where a trainee actually drowned

and i don’t mean like amelia, i mean some poor kid who just failed the test

merlin knows how to put the fear of god in people though!

and mark strong, very handsome, yes, very scary, also yes

he and colin both look like they’re 80 percent leg in every single scene

harry literally had brain matter smatter ALL OVER HIS FACE and still somehow had the mental facilities to be aware of those dudes, leave a bomb and dive out of a window (and then escape said dudes)

billy badass, y’all

“just get it done.” okay, i took back what i said earlier, maybe he does see her as more of an assistant, less than a partner. their relationship is weird.

the puppy scene!

“it’s a bulldog innit?”

YASSSS the golden trio

because of what happened with our other canon charlie has become a weird character for me to watch, like, yeah, i “watch” charlie be himself in tss but the charlie i “see” is like—”our” charlie.

“bollocks!” and then he just runs with jb in his vest, makes me smile

aannddd we see valentine’s super cool factory

harry your hair gets so long <3

“water!” wow, who wants to bet that the fact he was instantly screaming means that maybe he’s gonna have some stuff to talk about in therapy later

roxy baby i’m sorry they made you hold the balloon and have to trust these dumbasses to not shoot you on accident

i would trust roxy to not shoot me

i love, love love valentine’s house

it’s gorgeous

set design is always such a cool way for filmmakers to include details about a character using pure aesthetics and i’m such a slut for it

tilde!

see also: one of the characters done the WORST by these movies imo!

the fact that she not only says no, she says no with enthusiasm and gets blatantly pissed, is one of the best insights we get into tilde’s character and then it just—gets wasted

like it takes three steps and then gets mowed down in the hallway like her guards

i would never be given the opportunity to be asked if i wanted an implant but i draw the line at having stuff put into my neck

awwww harry’s so proud!

that finger point “yeah, see, be more like your uncle”

merlin is SO TALL

“a bit much innit?”

he’s just—tapping a normal clipboard

… nobody wanna talk about how that’s a normal clipboard

anyway

i also love how they show him in professor sweaters for the beginning acts of the movie

definitely a softer aesthetic than one would guess for a dude who apparently did field missions sometime within the past decade or so, but i also have a theory that lee’s death directly contributed to merlin maybe being the man behind the screen as opposed to afield

because trauma is a thing but this is a FUN movie so we’re NOT gonna talk about it

“you’re gonna be all right. you’re top of the class!” this was the scene that made my mom a reggsy shipper

regardless of how you feel about them as a couple, their friendship is one of the best things about this movie, along with their dynamic with charlie, asjdnaskdjna WHY could we not have had a trio movie instead

eggsy you show-off “lemme just throw my arms up and dip outta this plane like it’s not a big deal”

roxy you can do it!

ugh, there goes my baby, off to have a near-death experience under merlin’s immediate supervision lmao

“good girl, rox, glad you made it!”

guys, they’re just kids.

i love this big group scene because it reminds us that these are just young folks, still

“my, my, you’re all very cheerful...”

“rufus, come on!” dude eggsy—and not even just eggsy, charlie and rox too--at least made an attempt at teamwork. you get points for that bro

but man, for all they know, they’re about to beef it in a very permanent way, i’d be freaking out too

merlin getting caught up in the drama

because again, he’s supposed to know that eggsy has a parachute

i think he wasn’t prepared for these two to get that close to not making it and that’s why we see him break face and drop his mug

*WHAM*

i HATE the sound of them landing

it’s not like you can hear bones breaking but it hurts me, guys

and then there were three

plus one daddy long legs quartermaster

“if you have a complaint you come here and you whisper it in my ear.”

yes SIR

“you need to take that chip off your shoulder.”

merlin coming’ in with the tough love portion of the kingsman core squad

there’s no reason for me to think harry’s persona was inspired by cruella de ville somehow but i do anyway

she reveals the mcdonald’s and valentine is just :D

idk if he was expecting a specific reaction or was just excited to see a reaction period

valentine is definitely a fun villain, which, given the tone of the movie, makes sense, it’s all supposed to be fun

one of the reasons i love kingsman is that it’s like, this golden ray of goofy cinematic fuckery in a world of grim!dark remakes and other superhero/spy films who are presented as more serious stories

“and thank you for such a—happy, meal.”

harry got a puppy smile

but see, then, here at his house he’s a lot more relaxed with gazelle! like, patting her butt, etc.

maybe what we see of their relationship is dependent on setting, because valentine himself has it compartmentalized?

perrrrrrhaps

“and i am never, EVER GOING TO AGREE!”

tilde, you deserved better, and i think all the weird hate you get from our ohana is unfair

you don’t twist a runner’s ankle before the race starts and then get mad when they don’t win

your story was mishandled from the beginning

asmr: hanging out with the golden trio watching worrying news in the kingsman trainee bunker room

the way he says “biblical sense” lmao

i have never been able to figure out if the way he says that line is supposed to infer spiritual respect, or lack of it, but i might be looking too into it

“it’s an acquired taste, mate.”

what—what would you even do if you were at a club and three people as hot as taron, ed and sophie all came up and start talking to you at the same time

like i know the target got up and left pretty quick because of the training exercise

but i’d be doing it because i’m ugly and if three hot people are all talking me up at a bar something is Bad and Wrong

which—the CAHONES on both eggsy and roxy

they both literally said “yeah i’m willing to die for this organization that hasn’t even given me a permanent place yet, what of it”

look at harry’s dimples in this scene, he is fighting a huge grin, he’s SO PROUD

i know that charlie’s response is supposed to be just more fodder into the “charlie hesketh is a tool” fire

but given that i’m not unconvinced that his home life wasn’t super shitty, like—

idk, this makes this scene a lot less fun to me. it makes it sad.

like, maybe charlie didn’t even want to be there deep down, maybe this was all for like, arthur, or his dad, or some other person he looked up to

and the way merlin looks when he tells charlie to go home, the way that he’s kinda grimacing? i’m wondering if he’s along the same kind of feeling. he’d know more about charlie’s history

have i also mentioned how much i love harry’s war room?

“YES harry!”

an evil plan is being born!

“true nobility is being superior to your former self.”

eggsy is still in his club clothes, so like—has he slept? y’all let those kids sleep after fucking drugging them, right? … guys?

“—when one is popping ones cherry.”

and eggsy is just CHEESING he is SO EXCITED

am i the only one who wants to learn more about the store clerk guy though?

he’s like the one person around who’s legit just there to run the shop

has no idea about any of the spy stuff happening

his name is donald, he’s married with three children and has two spaniels he loves

“THAT is sick.”

i would KILL for this room.

i don’t need anything in here for any reason but still

foreshadowing, foreshadowing, foreshadowing, more foreshadowing—

harry is such a NERD

“put it back, eggsy.”

the amount of self-control it would take to not have a sudden change in expression in that moment, omg

i wonder how THAT gets trained up in kingsman

“i guarantee it.” ha, get it, it’s a reference to that one commercial

“y’all—talk so funny.”

and this all means that they had a contact at that hat shop and got all that info to them before valentine got there, and somehow made sure he did end up buying a hat that they could also successfully put a bug on, how deep does this goooooo

“jack bauer?”

it says a lot about eggsy that out of all the jb’s it could’ve been, it was jack

uggghhhhhh of course they HAD to do this scene with eggsy with arthur

obviously harry couldn’t do it

i just think most of us would NOT be fans of arthur at this point in the movie, we’re all rooting for eggsy, like, he needs this moment with this other character because we gotta drive home that he’s an asshole

also—would have absolutely failed that test

and i’m not sorry at all

“welcome to kingsman--lancelot.”

i was really happy that it was a female agent who ended up getting the handle

aannddd more echoes of past scenes, man, nobody can say that this crew wasn’t intentional with their cinematography

when eggsy rolls the window down you can see his chest moving up and down, like, he is MAD

dean you asshole

so no wonder he gets so pissed that the car suddenly decides “nope, no, we’re not doing this, c’mon”

this entire conversation at harry’s house is—tense

and you don’t pick up on it the first time, i don’t think, but uh

i’m seeing it now

harry’s not just mad, he’s hurt, and eggsy’s furious but he’s also maybe regretting his actions.

it’s these two men who are rapidly trying to figure out their headspaces and trying to figure out how to navigate this situation with each other

and the way eggsy tries to apologize ;-;

kentucky is a beautiful state, actually

ohhhhhh y’alllll

we’re at the churrrccchhhh

we’re gettin’ closer to the coolest part of the movieeeee

it’s telling that gazelle was trying to make sure that they’d be safe

“… so hail satan, and have a lovely afternoon madame.”

the most metal lines colin firth has ever uttered on camera

the siren noise after it’s switched on bothers me in a way i can’t quite articulate

it might be because i have silent hill-colored trauma, who knows

FREEEEEE

BIIIRRRDDDDDDD

THE GREATEST ACTION TRACKING SHOT IN THE HISTORY OF CINEMA

but then eggsy and merlin are reacting aaaanndddd it’s—a lot less fun

because you realize that they’re watching their bro mercilessly slaughter innocent people and not stopping

and still not stopping

and still not stopping

but plot twist, i’m really glad they kept the track going, because if they’d suddenly picked *this* part of the scene to get serious, that would’ve brought the mood down so low that i don’t think there would’ve been any bouncing back

i just

how do people exist who aren’t attracted to harry hart

that man is a machine

and colin worked so hard to be able to do the scene himself, and that work SHOWS, that man cuts a FIGURE

i don’t know how they managed to somber it up just the right amount, either? maybe because they waited for the “fun action sequence” to be over so there wouldn’t need to be noise that had to be masked by a fun rock track?

“… what did you do to me.”

i cannot imagine what harry was feeling in that moment.

the way he spoke it was like he didn’t even have time to be afraid to die

“that tends to happen when you shoot somebody in the head. feels good, right?”

“no, it does not feel good!”

i love that exchange because we normally hear the opposite.

also—whiplash.

mark has this way of expressing grief without showing any—blatant signs.

like merlin’s not especially tearful, or crying, but his eyes look MASSIVE. and SAD. and he has just the tiiiiiniest tremor in his voice.

and eggsy, dude, like, we’ve all had it come on us really quick and suddenly it’s like your chest is pumping like a piston and when did it get so hard to breathe?

ARTHUR you REPULSE me

like look at how egssy’s shoulders sag when he realizes that arthur isn’t on his team

and in a way, this is eggsy’s final test as a kingsman trainee, imo

do you realize how quickly he had to assess what was happening and figure out what to do, all without arthur noticing?

“you are all alone. it is all up to you. remember all you have learned. good luck.”

it’s a very—almost horror-esque situation from that pov

and he passed with flying colors to go on his first true mission, because after he puts on the suit, that’s his visual cue of graduating, if that makes sense

that’s the knight putting on his armor.

“i’d rather be with harry. thanks.”

“so be it.”

*click*

me: *laughing at arthur’s big dumb stupid head*

… man i’d love a replica of that decanter and glasses set though

not to mention that eggsy recognized the flaws in arthur’s character and weaponized them, which is a whole other level of shit that isn’t necessarily easy; he knew that arthur carried the kind of pride that would leave him open

god, he looks so exhausted though when rox has him at gunpoint.

i think he was being pretty serious, about harry

sick helipaaaaaaad

that thing looks vaguely like a rock-‘em sock-‘em robot but in pieces though

more grandpa sweaters <3

man. you can see roxy swallow, you know she’s scared, but then she just sets her jaw and—

roxy baby you are the best i love you

i like the vintage vibe of the mountain lair

i think that’s another visual poke at the aesthetic themes of some of the older, og spy flicks out there

merlin looks SO LANKY walking back to the plane for some reason??

he stays until the last second for roxy. that’s love right there.

“a bespoke suit always fits.”

which can be good spiritual life advice too but that’s a separate conversation

“what the fuck is WRONG with you people?”

and his fuckin’ disco ball

uuggggghhhhh his speech reminds me of so many… “public figures” that i dislike

even though it’s obviously a bad thing that the chips are everywhere, i appreciate that phones and such are being shown in a positive manner (like, michelle talking to someone in the park, people at a ball game taking selfies, people at the beach, etc.) because i get so sick of that anti-tech boomer humor tbh

and the big reveal of eggsy in his suitttt

A KNIGHT IS BORN

“how’s the view?”

“hideous.”

you’re allowed to be crabby baby, you just let it out.

“lookin’ good, eggsy.”

“feelin’ good, merlin.”

merlin is so calm heading into the fortress and i don’t know if it’s because he’s very, very good at compartmentalizing and that’s genuinely how he is at the moment or if he’s that way through extreme self-control and effort

he can rock a pilot’s uniform though

just like eggsy can rock a suit

they’re both so handsome, help

i also wonder how eggsy’s feeling right then

like, i’d imagine that the pressure of having to perform a role to literally save the world would be enough to distract him from the bite of grief

that’s—probably enough to distract everyone, tbh

i a hundred percent believe there are breakdowns we don’t see

i wonder if eggsy told tilde he’d spoken to lindstrum(sp?) after everything was said and done

like, that’d be some kind of weird foreshadowing in hindsight

this scene is anxiety-inducing in a big way so to distract myself i imagine roxy as a mech pilot

dude i’d totally watch sophie in a role like that, like, let her be in a movie like pacific rim, she’d kick ass

and now we have The Chaos

otherwise known as that point when Everything Is Happening All At Once All The Time

also a thing that doesn’t exist in spy movies: hearing damage

because like his voice is right in eggsy’s ear and without it he’d have a LOT harder time surviving

imagine being an agent, merlin trying to talk to you, but something either hits your ear or goes off right next to it and suddenly it’s just silent

SYSTEM FAILURE

YAAASSSSS

WE WIN

GGOOOAAAAALLLLLL

THE AUDIENCE IS DOING THE WAVE

except JUST KIDDING

The Chaos 2 Electric Boogaloo!

merlin with a huge gun: hot, also, very scary

eggsy is just 10000% done

“this is mine. i’ll show you yours.”

i wonder who e man was supposed to be that valentine called.

like is that a reference to a real person that i just did’t catch?

… elon musk? maybe? idk

eggsy slides like a gd anime character

when he uses the rainmaker, it’s just like harry’s protecting him from somewhere else

(oh—wait, technically kentucky, i guess)

“merlin, i’m fucked.” you can hear the anger there. not only did he fail, but he—and everyone else—is about to die

but this? this is the pinnacle of eggsy showing himself as a kingman agent

he was staring death straight in the mouth and STILL

SOMEHOW

REMEMBERED THE IMPLANTS

so i guess if i say that the moment when he puts on the suit is when he becomes a true agent, then maybe this is the moment when he becomes galahad.

*bobs head to pomp & circumstance*

i remember getting a huge kick out of how colorful they made this

because in real life you know a bunch of people literally blowing up would be like—DISGUSTING

viscera everywhere

no fun rainbow mushroom clouds

“i’ve always wanted to kiss a princess.”

ANOTHER knight reference, very clever matthew

mmmmm Do Not Like that noise

aaaannndddd *that* line

which—maybe that’s mr. vaughn’s sense of humor, or what he thinks the sense of humor his core demographic has, idk

but it always kinda rubbed me the wrong way

the mass brawl scenes are edited so like--jarringly compared to the other fight scenes in the movie

that’s probably for a reason

also, a showdown to the tune of something disco: kind of another trope homage

this shot of gazelle is so sick, i love everything about it, she is so cool

this entire fight with eggsy is awesome tbh

we got a little bit of what gazelle can look like in combat earlier with tilde’s guards, but now we get this epic showdown seeing her at her full potential against someone who’s actually a challenge

and the way valentine is shouting for her to kick his ass from upstairs and yelling encouragement lmao that’s how real friends act when there’s a fight

daisy ;-; ugh, that’s the visual gutpunch that makes it juuuuuust serious enough by reminding us of the stakes

which is why it’s fitting that then we see the Slo-Mo K.O.

and that smile with the fun little chimes in the back, lmao

and eggsy, quick on his feet again byyyy being quick on gazelle’s feet—foot—whatever

man, impalement deaths are always fun.

coulda done without the vomiting but that’s also one of valentine’s quirks that makes him different from a cookie cutter villain

aaannddd have a heavy sigh from merlin

that dude needs a full-body massage and a drink

“is this where you say some really bad pun?”

reminder: i love that this movie is self-aware! i could not picture a super serious kingsman movie! i just picture something depressing!

there had to have been a better option besides—this, for this eggsy/tilde ending scene

i’m not saying i’m mad it ended with them fucking, i’m mad that the extent of the joke was anal and that was it.

also the idea of my boss possibly seeing me having sex would have me a little more concerned about the hardware on my face, but okay??

aannddd the tapes.

gah, we love visual throwbacks!

we love being able to see that despite all this growth and change, family remains very important to eggsy—he hasn’t changed into a different person, he has grown more into himself than ever before! THIS! THIS is eggsy unwin!

… GET READY FOR IT

time for tgc! (and to get into my roanoke feels, maybe, this is the nexus where our canons connect)

the BAGPIPES

okay

i did not stop to consider how unpleasant this was going to be to watch stoned but we’re gonna power through it and get through it together

if i cry i cry

the way the music swells into the main theme <3

and the perfect reveal for our boy eggsy!

reflected in gold, looking sharper than broken glass

and SUDDENLY CHARLIE

the pacing in tgc leads me to believe that matthew had huge plans for this movie, and a lot of cool stuff probably ended up on the cutting room floor for time

i also love that they brought charlie back

i love his voice box and his cool robot arm

and i’m not just saying that because it made it super easy to blend him into our canon, either, this is like—charlie’s evil twin in terms of his new aesthetic, the contrast is really cool

YYAASSSS THIS SCENE

WITH PRINCE PLAYING??

*CHEF’S KISS*

like we are IMMEDIATELY thrown back into the gold parts of it all, like how physics is a little broken so we can do cool shit like have a knockdown drag-out fight all within the space of a small cab

i wonder what would’ve hurt charlie worse—being thrown onto his organic side, or having all his weight land on his metal arm if it hadn’t disattached

but then he’s up and standing so i guess we’re fine?

MERLIN! <3

otherwise known as the character entrance that literally changed my life

i try not to think about it too much or i get weirded out

ANYWAY

(and to think i almost never even saw the movie)

Sick Car Chase, Bro

and as an american, like, everything’s on the opposite side to me, it’s stressful to watch a little bit

“i seem to remember in your training you were rather good at holding your breath.”

man, that’s uh—kind of a macabre thing to say, merlin

just a little bit

i’m not even gonna attempt to hold my breath to see if i’d survive this scene just assume i’m dead in that universe

we all live in a kingsman subarmine, a kingsman submarine, a kingsman submarine~~

“not boasting, but i trained him well enough that even he wouldn't mess that up.”

merlin are you okay??

gah, i love that chest-deep laugh though.

is it real love if they won’t crawl through the sewer to get to your house in time

i love that harry’s house looks basically the same

i know they talk about eggsy not wanting to change anything in the novelization but i haven’t read it yet so I’m not a hundred percent sure what all is in there

and we still get to see him hanging with his friends, and his girlfriend, like, this dude is still all about the family

“wwwwOOOOO!”

i love this group so much omg

for as much as he’s galahad, he’s still eggsy

the transition in the weed bag looks super cool

… oh, i guess watching this while high makes the main storyline hit a bit different

welp

i love that poppy is an aesthetic slut and really doesn’t give a shit about anyone’s opinion about how she makes her space

like, “i want a big 50s-style diner with a gourmet kitchen that i can cook people in, soooooo i’m getting one”

it’s also refreshing to see julianne moore in a bad guy role!

not that i’m super familiar with her filmography but i feel like i’ve mostly seen her cast as like a good guy?

i could be wrong

awwwww jet and bennie!

there’s so much to love about this set

cannibalism and the fact that she bulldozed jungle to build all this aside (suspend that belief!)

the breakfast sceeeeeene

it’s so bittersweet, for obvious reasons

and it’s more evidence that he’s not super ready to move on into new territory yet, like making new memories with tilde that ring close to home

“i wish i could have met him.”

and the way he has to turn away, ugh.

eggsy. i’m sorry.

tilde, i’m sorry, too. you had good intentions, but they lost against his pain.

michael gambdon! the new arthur we didn’t know we wanted until we got him.

charlie had a moral glo-down, it’s fine, happens to everybody

FFFFFF his imitation of merlin lmfao

man, poor charlie, like

you wake up, you can’t make a sound, your arm has been blown off and your family’s dead

like his reaction to that entire scenario isn’t entirely unrealistic, i’m just saying

also LOOK AT ROX

omg everyone in this movie can wear the FUCK out of suit, y’all

man, i’ve gotten a few tattoos that were exquisitely painful—i can’t imagine how much it would suck to do it with literal molten metal

dude this means clara laid on her stomach and probably screamed at the floor as she got hers D:

this kinda—riffs off of hannibal, a teeny-tiny bit

like we’re so overloaded with the aesthetics and behavior of a certain character so it’s like, we forget about the much darker parts untillllll there’s a mood change and we’re looking at that dude’s legs, to the burger this other dude puts in his mouth, and thinking “oh, oh dear, ew”

i love eggsy in the orange jacket <3 snaps for the wardrobe crew across this series.

tilde’s face, omg, she was heart-eyeing so bad. and like, that little proud nod at her dad (who was of course being Like That on purpose)

and roxy, coming in in the clutch, you are tonight’s MVP

uggghhhhh i hate this part

because again, it’s just--a bunch of bad shit colliding outside of anyone’s control

(it was also really jarring seeing the war room with blank walls the first time i watched this)

like—granted, you should maybe not touch stuff that’s not yours, but…

like we *just* saw eggsy and brandon in a very casual, intimate scene with each other, how can anyone get angry with brandon?

this is all stress-inducing

i remember being in the theater watching this and feeling like i was watching some awful slow motion car wreck and i couldn’t look away

idk what other story i would’ve wanted to see but i was NOT a fan of Sudden Death For Christmas, especially concerning roxy!

and poppy is such a *bright* villain, not just because of taste but because of her personality, which is another weird thing to have next to the cannibalism

gaaahhhh charlieeee your arm is so cooooool

this shot is gorgeous and incredibly depressing.

what do you do?

gah, and the way merlin comes out of the dark, like

i probably would’ve drawn a gun on him too

“you think *i* would?”

this scene shows 1. how much he trusts eggsy to not shoot him, and/or 2. how good merlin is at compartmentalizing, because this is an even bigger blow than harry’s death, and he’s following the protocol like it’s an art form

i hope that we see some reference to this safe in the next movie, that’d be a cool way to tie the narratives all together

“i suppose that must be upper class humor. … i don’t get it.”

reminder, merlin is working class.

if you’re a ho for this fandom and went and bought this whiskey specifically because of this movie clap your hands *clap clap*

and they proceed to just get HAMMERED

“country rooaaddsss… take me hoooooome…”

another reminder: kentucky is a beautiful state!

i would love to tour a whiskey distillery, that’d be super cool

“shame it’s not scotch”

again, with his weird night vale clipboard.

who would win: two highly-trained kingsman agents vs. one (1) cowboy

channing tatum, ladies and gentlemen!

“y’all look damn sharp!”

i am forever gonna be mad we didn’t get more of tequila in this movie, and not just because of roanoke either, but like, “that dog don’t hunt,” whatever he has in his mouth sealed a leak in a barrel, and it took him all of two minutes to incapacitate both eggsy AND merlin? hello??

i’m glad we’ll get to see more of him in the another movie.

“you know why the measurement of alcohol is called proof?”

just dumping it on their laps, so disrespectful

“—and you can go fuck yourself.”

eggsy fucking just giggling.

these two doofuses

also it’s hot to see merlin be sassy ngl

“HARRY!”

these guys have been fast thinkers in stressful situations but as it turns out, people being unexpectedly not dead can kinda fuck with your day

aaannddd halle berry, everybody! i love ginger ale omg

(and so does merlin, he is instantly enchanted)

;-; this reunion scene

i don’t know how colin manages to be two completely different people at once

like there’s a huge difference between former agent galahad and harry hart the lepidopterist and i can’t explain it

i really, really hope we see at least one little hint at kinsman’s relationship with statesman in the new movie, i just think it’d be really cool

in roanoke canon, there’s an office rumor that the nanobot tech used by statesman was influenced directly by the same technology developed by dr. wernicke in the outlast games. i still think it’s one of my better crossover ideas.

also

god bless whoever decided to get elton john involved with all this?? because i was DELIGHTED

i love poppy’s wardrobe as much as i love her weird 50s-land in the jungle

i also really love the main statesman theme? it reminds me of all those fun epic westerns

jeff bridges! :D

champ vaguely reminds me of my dad

“can you imagine us in the tailor business?”

and he’s super quick with the questions. my headcanons for champ are all over the place but one that i really like is that he was maybe a sheriff or in law enforcement before being recruited by statesman.

aaanndddd pedro pascal, everybody!

otherwise known as *another* character that this movie did dirty, that’ll probably come up in this later

imagine being harry hart, not remember all of yourself, and suddenly your entire room just—fills with water

that had to have been so terrifying, and it was just as hard for merlin to watch (and possibly remember something unpleasant)

and like

that sounds like SUCH bullshit, too, like “yeah we thought if you came close to drowning it would help”

which, is that what merlin meant, no, but is that what harry heard, probably

enter jb the second ;-; <3 sweet baby

tilde’s trying so hard. i see you!

aha, penis jokes.

and all of the unnecessary weird festival stuff, uuggghh

there are so many different things they could have done, like, all of this is just weird from the get-go

first of all, whiskey striking out? hello?? saying no to a man like mr. pascal???

not realistic

the way whiskey takes a shot as he walks away lmao, relatable

and poor clara, like, it’s not like she was asking for any of this D:

hmmmmmmm don’t know how i feel being a stoner watching other stoners get this blue rash thing when i know it kills some of themmmmmmm

i love charlie in his newsboys cap!

poppy has a little bit of a point. like, booze is way more dangerous than pot, as is tobacco. like i would never advocate anyone try meth or heroin, but i think weed and some hallucinogenics get bad wraps.

seeing a dude get torn in half in the reflection of elton john’s sunglasses is the surprising bit of gore we need to remember that oh, yeah, the villain isn’t fun, she’s a murderer

uuggghhhh the TENT SCENE

and, look, i’ll defend tilde forever, but i did NOT like the weird marriage ultimatum. i still think it’s a dick move, like, in that situation either decide to trust your boyfriend or break up with him

the tent interior is super cool-looking

and like, man, he tried, he tried to bounce D:

/sigh/ work hazards, i guess

mmmmmm we don’t need any of what’s happening on screen right now so i’ll just sit patiently and wait for it to be over

and like, there’s nothing funny about merlin and ginger being able to hear everything that’s going on, it’s so grosssss, poor ginger has to have heard some shit before to be so nonchalant about it

everything about this sucks

and then he tries going to the one person who he needs the most and having to deal with him still existing in some state between alive and dead

his body is here

but harry is not

“maggots turn into flies, perhaps you mean larvae!” :D he is SO CUTE

but this entire conversation, with harry still not remembering and eggsy trying so hard to reach him through the fog, is so depressing

like, i’d need a drink too

*and* a joint

i’m seeing my coping mechanisms on screen here folks

the way he comes up with the idea is kinda ingenious though

like, he’s looking at stuff to make himself bummed on purpose, but therein he finds the thing he needs to fix the issue

harry’s smile when eggsy hands him the puppy TT.TT

and then eggsy just becomes a stone cold motherfucker with no emotions

“no one’s sick enough to shoot a puppy!”

hi, flashback!harry

and as SOON as he remembers himself, it’s like his eyes are different, something about him looks like it did before kentucky

“… eggsy.”

one of my favorite movie hugs

and eggsy has to stand on his tiptoes because harry’s so tall

like yeah merlin and harry’s reunion isn’t as overtly emotional, but there’s definitely a sense of joy and relief there.

harry my baby ;-; much better with the sunglasses (and merlin was so close to telling him he looked spectacular)

“now is that any way to welcome a visit from outta town, moonshine?”

he! tried! to! defend! harry!

i hate that jack got a villain story line!

we could’ve had something so much better and infinitely more compelling!

“hurrrr durrrr morgan you just like redemption arcs because you don’t want anybody being a villain permanently” i also like them because sometimes that’s better writing, y’all sit down

“that is NOT what i call a kentucky welcome.”

i love so many things happening in this scene, like

we get to see whiskey kick ass, like yassss gimme those sweet action sequences and give us some character development by showcasing his fighting style

and also NOBODY shits on harry for not being able to handle the situation. both eggsy and merlin were like “dude we’re still celebrating the fact that you’re alive tbh it’s fine if you’re not back up to speed right this second”

you can really tell that this was penned by british people writing american slang because having grown up in the southern half of the u.s. i have never ONCE heard ANYONE say shit like “i feel like a tornado in a trailer park” lmao

and poppy’s fun little death threat infomercial, so great

“what have you done to me you FUCKING BITCH” oof, that’s a mood

!!!!! gonna be honest i kinda forgot that bruce greenwood plays the president

okay but save lives, legalize isn’t an entirely bad idea tbh

hnnnnnnng the scenes about people not being able to get into the hospital hits different in the year of our lord 2020 huh

… y’all i’m being weirded out by all this hospital scenes, this is unpleasant

i, too, wish i could pull a tequila and just be slipped into a chilly coma until shit wasn’t so fucked up

“the fact is, this presidency has won the war on drugs!”

THIS SCENE!

look, y’all can come into my inbox and call me a pothead, or a lazy stoner, or some third insult, but this dude’s VP is bringing up some very, VERY important points when it comes to any kind of discussion about drug use in the u.s.

am i drug-friendly, sure, but i’m more friendly to the notion that we stop demonizing addicts/users

harry looks fucking SCANDALIZED when he sees champ spit into his spittoon thing

i don’t think whiskey even brought up harry not being ready to return to the field in an insulting manner, he literally just saw him get his ass beat in a bar, but eggsy’s faith and loyalty are up there in the category of unstoppable force/immovable object, so here we are

am i the only one curious about the whole charlie x clara thing? because he’s definitely grown up a bit by tgc, and i wanna know how much of that might be because of clara

and he MISSES, e for effort harry

“so sorry about this—“ WHAM

and now that guy can say colin firth busted his face with a fire extinguisher, which is very cool

“*you’re* wu ting feng?” “… yes?”

“you motherFUCKER” ohhhhhh charlie maaaaaad

ginger and merlin though, #couplegoals

the only person more pissed off about the hallucinations than everyone else is harry

imagine remembering that you’re one of the top people in your field and you just keep seeing imaginary butterflies everywhere

like, yeah, i’d be pissed at not being able to do what i knew i was capable of, too

if it wasn’t careening towards a random retirement center, getting stuck in a wildly rotating gondola thing could be fun

nice tuesday afternoon activity

i would loved to have seen more galahad/whiskey field stuff

“you’ve got to be fucking kidding me—“

meanwhile, in the continuing adventures of eggsy and jack: shit goes from bad to worse like a formal spiral only going downward

their expressions as their both just SCREAMING always make me laugh

”that’s the first decent shit i’ve had in three weeks.” <- as does that line, that old dude’s just telling it like it is

eggsy’s comment about the antidote just reminds me of when boromir looks a the ring and says something like “all this for such a tiny thing”

dun dun DUN what are THOSE? hints that whiskey may not be who we think he is??

great. so excited about that. i say, rolling my eyes into the sun

“i’ll fix their wagons.” no one says that matthew!

i. love. this. scene. because now we get cool gun tricks AND the second most metal thing that happens with a lasso in this movie (we’re coming up on the most metal thing)

like please please PLEASE show us more lasso tricks in the statesman movie

“well thank fuckin’ christ i didn’t need any backup.” i wonder if whiskey’s acting angrier than he actually is to throw off the fact that he might’ve caught harry’s glance at him betraying suspicion

RIP jack

imagine the timeline where whiskey was never a bad guy and harry hart just blew a dude away for NO REASON

now THAT would be an interesting movie

because harry and eggsy, for all they went through in the first film, never had a conflict where it was harry in the position of mangling the ropes up

but of course eggsy would never, never tell merlin what happened because he’s still ultimately on harry’s team

damn, charlie, literally blowing up your girlfriend seems kinda extreme

“THIS is vital!”

and here we get to see the biggest difference between merlin and ginger

now, i know there’s extra stuff in the novelization about their relationship and i can’t talk about it because i have no idea what’s in the book

but!

i DO still headcanon as merlin quitting fieldwork after lee’s death

his comment is either what he genuinely believes, or maybe what he fashioned his beliefs into after stepping down from his field role, and ginger is just as sincere in her desire to break into that aspect of working for statesman

it’s like seeing the same character but in two points in time, and it’s really cool

that balance would’ve also been a fun aspect of their romantic relationship to explore but alas! ’twas not to be

colin and mark could both play slenderman

look at those limbs.

gracious.

also this facetime scene with eggsy and tilde T.T

that has to be so terrifying to watch when you know the steps of death and what they look like as they get closer

but it also puts a fire under eggsy though

“i’m leaving with, or without you.”

and of course they’re both gonna go because that’s NOT characteristic eggsy behavior based off of how we know he views family/squad

that’s how they know he’s being for cereal

uugggggGGHHHH and THAT FORESHADOING

stacey pruitt, attorney at lawwwww

hmmmmmmmmm

what does this conversation between poppy and the president remind me of

gonna just sigh into the void

and now we have harry and eggsy on the jet along with the BIGGEST LIE harry hart has ever told in his LIFE

kingsman and statesman aesthetics at least tend to be the same color schemes. lotta golds, yellows. browns.

eggsy, yeah, it’s a bummer your gf dumped you, but this relationship wasn’t very well-developed or written so i’m not as bummed as i could be

“… and in that moment, all i felt was loneliness and regret.”

harry shut the FUCK UP

you felt NOTHING??

you weren’t thinking of, gee, i dunno, EGGSY? or MERLIN?? your MOM???

like these lines from him just seem to come out of left field and i can’t even halfway suspend my belief long enough to come close to believing him

like mr. hart you just gonna be like that in front of jesus and everybody????

so, yeah, of course he’s on board with saving tilde! because he recognizes (apparently just right that second) that “having something to lose is what makes life worth living”

and i don’t know if they felt like there need to be some weird, deeply contrasting reason for harry to swing around to being in support? or something?

like

i’m forever pissed about this characterization and i don’t even know if i’m expressing my anger in a way that makes it easy to understand lmao this is fine, i’m fine, literally not a single person in this fandom ever believed those lines anyway, it’s fine

moving on

... and even if they WERE true then honestly that just makes me more excited about butterfly knife, because that means that harry acknowledged both the bad side of the coin, and also the side with rae on it (which would mean seeing her for who she was and also recognizing his feelings for what THEY were) and drew the ultimately correct conclucision that love! is! always! worth! it! let that shit in like a welcome guest in the home of your heart, and they will stay as long as you let them!

as SOON as he wakes up ginger looks a thousand percent done lmao

and the “process” that they use to wake people up or whatever is—interesting

because all it is, is trauma turned into a tool which is kind of a weird concept to see in a “fun spy movie” imo

and this is one of what i feel were like only what, two? glimpses we get into whiskey’s Tragic Backstory

and the other scene isn’t a glimpse it’s just straight up exposition in his dialogue :/

jack, i’m sorry, you deserved better than this as a character

i’m sure the name “silver pony” is a reference to something but i don’t know what

“lookin’ GOOD merlin!” “feelin’ good, eggsy.”

ladies and gentlemen when i tell you that i lost my pool-noodle mind seeing him put on that suit watching this in a theater, i--

ANYWAY

because now that i have the horrible burden of having seen these movies a million times

i know it’s more symbolic

he stays in sweaters so long, as an agent of the background, because he walked a man to his death

so it figures when he puts the armor back on for the first time in ages

he walks to his own

uuuggghhhh the minesweeper

i hate this

i hate it

i hate everything about the feelings i’m having while this is happening

*beep-beep*

“you move, we die.”

i HATE IT

but like, i don’t know, how preferable is this to the end scene we almost got, which was merlin dragging his newly-legless corpse through a doggy door?

because it’s been literally multiple years and i still have no fucking idea

they’re both horrible in their own terrible, awful ways

damn, matthew, it’s not often someone manages to come up with multiple versions of a thing and have every version be so gut-wrenchingly horrific, i’m truly impressed and completely disgusted

“do as your told!”

god

everyone just going through twenty shades of Bad Feelings in the space of fifteen seconds here in the jungle

and colin and taron do this thing where it’s like—their eyes go dead? like, there was a light here, it’s gone now

it SUCKS

oh

oh no

ALMOST HEAVEN

WEST VIRGINIA

… fuck

LIFE IS OLD THERE

OLDER THAN THE TREES

“… singing?”

this sucks.

this sucks this sucks this sucks

MOUNTAIN MAMAAAAA

TAKE ME HOOOOME

COUNTRY ROOOADDSSSSS

*THUNK*

and he even took off his glasses before he hit him, he had his end coming towards him and he was still a gentleman

TAKE ME HOOOME

COUNTRY RROOOOAAAADDDSSSSS

his EYES AT THE END

FUCK

… okay i had to get up and go for a lil’ walk

anyway

(and again, roanoke canon, fucking fixing’ shit left and right, because we’re the goat)

harry and eggsy look MURDEREROUS

MERLIN SAID KNOCK YOU OUT

it DID make the grand ending fun action scene a lot more satisfying

because like, without merlin there, that means harry and eggsy get to go full feral

poppy you big idiot you just robbed them of all their motivation to show any kind of restraint and now everybody’s gonna get blown up

except for those dudes who get kicked by elton john

which would be an HONOR first of all

(the part where eggsy’s using his gun and shield vaguely reminds me of the specialist, @bloodofthepen​)

and harry and eggsy just—they’re drift compatible! that’s it! the teamwork! the grace! the flow! my god!

eggsy vs. charlie: round like 4 if you count the first movie

it was also satisfying to see charlie’s new arm in action

we love fun robotics and gadgetry in this house

colin firth is really just not afraid to throw himself full force down a bowling lane huh

ugh, seeing charlie slam eggsy over and over again makes my chest hurt

the sound mixing on all these films is top notch which isn’t always a good thing T.T

ROCKETMAN~~~

that shit will never NOT be funny

a wild elton john appeared!

eggsy is indestructible, he can walk off anything

but charlie, charlie i feel really sorry for, imagine being attacked by a superior version of your own limb, i.e. something that you can’t exactly quickly remove from yourself, that would be TERRIFYING

harry + elton = dream teaaaammmm

“darling if you save the world, you can have a backstage pass.”

i love you elton john :(

i would have been the most OBNOXIOUS hype man in the background of the entire kingsman vs. poppy land face-off

“let’s make this fair.” eggsy you’re fuckin’ cheeky

and poor harry, all that lank just getting tossed like noodles

i thought the robot puppers were very cool

“for the record charlie i’m more of a gentleman than you’ll ever be.”

mmmmmm do NOT like this death for charlie

SUPER glad we fixed it

and another scene where i can’t stand the sound mixing T.T it makes me cringe every time

“i don’t consider genocide especially lady-like.”

and are we gonna talk about how merlin knew how to make heroin?

… no?

nobody wanna talk about that?

ugh that houndstooth dress is so PRETTY though

high!poppy is weirdly comedic for all of two seconds and then it stops being funny real fast

whiskey D:<

this is so dumb

this is all so, so dumb

“our agencies were founded to uphold peace, to protect the innocent—“

there’s that nobility again

is what happened to whiskey fucked up, yes

i’m not saying we have to completely remove that from his story

i just

literally anything but this would have been preferable

and then HOT DOG it’s one of my favorite shots in the movie with the whip where harry’s just chucking it away from his face like a bamf, YES

how great is this cover, let’s be honest

like, i’d be lying if i said i didn’t enjoy this scene visually

plus

HARRY GETTING PEGGED RIGHT IN THE FACE WITH A FRYING PAN

gracious

it’s one fluid tracking shot, so kinda in alignmentment with what we’re used to

some people get annoyed with repeated junk but when you can do it THIS WELL you can get away with anything

D:

but then jack

you did NOT desert that

yes, you were in dire need of an attitude adjustment but jesus

“this is for you, merlin.”

/ugly sobbing/

and tilde is all betterrrrrr ;-;

you guys did itttttt

COUNTRY ROOOAAADDSS

TAKE ME HOOOOOOMMEEEE

TO THE PLAAAAAACCCEEEEE

I BELOOOOONNGGGG

and the scene with jamal and liam T.T #wholesomecontent

poor tequila, after i knew that you would have a bigger role in another movie, i was less annoyed by the fact that they iced you so quick into the story

#FOX2020

“… now we’re brothers, working side by side.”

spoiler alert i actually love champ’s toast

“y’all shittin’ in high cotton now” WHAT DOES THAT MEAN???

and ginger becomes the new whiskey like she always wanted T.T

merlin is proud from heaven (or london, depending on which canon)

iiiiiii have mixed feelings about the whole wedding scene, which is probably because i take HUGE issue with the weird proposal ultimatum thing that happened earlier

but the way eggsy says “not a doubt in my mind,” he says it so seriously and i remember that tilde almost died

there was such good intention packed into this couple that was so badly written that i just

augh

“but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”

there’s ***merlin! lmao i see you dude, they did you dirty

look

i was pissed off about a lot of things that happened in this thing but i was honestly hype seeing tequila at the very end walking into the tailor shop

like, yeah, i’ll stick around to see what happens in this universe but i’m gonna complain the whole time

GO JACK RABBIT

RUNNING THROUGH THE WOODS

and again, i almost didn’t see this movie.

… i think about that morgan sometimes.

hope she’s doin’ okay.

…

she’s probably not. D:

[diveronarpg]

We’ve arrived at day four, everyone! Today, the admin team would like to take a moment to appreciate one another. Running a group for two years comes with many moments of excitement and joy. It’s incredible to see the plot make leaps and bound forwards, and watch characters that first began in our heads flourish into the player’s own on the dash. It also, admittedly, comes with its challenges; challenges we embrace with enthusiasm as a team, relying on one another and encouraging one another when life gets demanding.

For a DiVerona admin history lesson — Rosey and Jen first opened the group together in August 2018, preparing diligently to launch DiVerona and bring it to Tumblr after a few years of hiatus. Minnie acted as an invisible admin beginning August 2018, offering advice when requested, and came on as an official admin in MAY, 2019. Julie joined our team as the graphics admin in JULY, 2019 and ushered in a beautiful era and graphics revamp for Act II. Last, but certainly not least, Rogue was welcomed to the admin team in APRIL, 2020 to create stunning, heart-wrenching characters and continue building on the momentum of the plot.

Below, you will find a little love letter each admin wrote for one another. For this particular day, we will not be requiring any activity from our members. Feel free to take a break! If you’d like to show admin appreciation, you are free to do so, but we are not expecting it and hope you do not feel pressured to do so.

Thank you all for a wonderful two years of being admins of an incredible group like DiVerona!

JEN

My fire sign soulmate, my BITCH. As an admin, you bring aLL of the Montague spirit and heart and fire, and it shows in how passionate you are when guiding DiVerona’s story and development. Your creativity? Your flair for drama that inspires the most game-changing plot drops and the most iconic line in this group’s history? I mean, who else could have come up with infant king? For me, Jen, you embody the creative and collaborative spirit of DiVerona, and I treasure the fun you bring to the group and to the team. On a personal level, you have shown up for me time and time again. For that, I am so, so thankful for you. Your honesty is invaluable to me, whether you’re telling me I’m being impulsive or need to calm the hell down. You’re the sense of humor when we need it most, the ride-or-die who both starts adventures and cleans up the messes after, and my dear friend. — MINNIE

I’ve never met someone as passionate as you. You stick to your guns the whole way down and there’s something so deeply admirable in that -- you take such great pride in the things you do and how hard you work and what you bring to the table both as a writer and as an admin. We have exactly the same sense of humor and I love sending you memes and text posts through Discord at like, four in the morning, and seeing a reply from you when I wake up. It’s like taking a shot of orange juice right after rolling out of bed. Wakes me right up! You’re dedicated to the end, even when you’ve struggled, and I think that spokes both to your character and who you are as a friend. You’re like a sister to me in the sense I feel like we see right through each other, and I couldn’t be happier to know someone like you and get to work with you, even on opposite sides of the world. Our calls together are one of my favorite things to do -- we just click. <3 -- JULIE

Getting closer to you, Jen, has been one of my favorite parts of coming online as an admin. I have always admired you, I’ve always loved writing with you, but being your friend is one of the most rewarding things in the world. You have such fierce passion for things, all this burning intensity inside of you and an unflinching way of confronting the world that leaves me in absolute awe. The way you can always see around the corner to what a character needs (rather than what they want or what they might say) gives you such a great ability to build masterful plots and expand our world. Our shared weird insomnia has led to so many absolutely insightful, ridiculous, very hazy conversations, and I am shocked the team has put up with us for this long, but also more glad than anything in the world. Every word you write is precious to me, in character or out, and I’m going to save all of them forever so I can drag you within an inch of your life at ANY moment. Like a clingy little barnacle. I treasure both the experience of working creatively with you and of getting absolutely nothing done with you, and I love you with all my heart!! — ROGUE

to my idiot jen, sometimes i really can’t believe how we found each other again. i truly believe that it was no less than fate (and my utter disregard for any sense of self-preservation) that we would come into each other’s lives right when we did. i have never really questioned why or thought too much on how - because truly i cant really recall a moment where i didn’t know everything about you. there are so many things that i love about you: your tuna sandwiches and food pictures, our really really extensive aus, sharing with me every little frightening piece of your heart, forcing vulnerability and honesty and unconditional LOVE and being so very patient with me...over the past two years there has been so much that i’ve learned about you and still so much that there is still left to learn and love. i adore you to the moon and back you idiot. - ROSEY

JULIE

Hopefully you're not cringing too hard over this Very Formal Approach that I'm taking but trust me, if I could throw a meme in here somewhere I WOULD. Anyway, ever since you came on board, you've been nothing but a blessing to the team, and I mean that in every sense of the word. Your graphics and aesthetic vision for the group have inspired us in amazing ways, and beyond that you've lifted the team up with your pragmatic sense of judgement and gentle sensitivity to things. You really represent both sides of the same coin, dude, like… IT BLOWS MY MIND. I'm so happy to be sharing this anniversary with you, and I'm so proud of you and how far you've come ever since I met you, not just when it comes to the growth of your incredible talents but also when it comes to your writing and your maturity and pretty much everything about you. Thank you for being part of this amazing journey with us. I wouldn’t want to share it with anyone else. — JEN

Goosie, I really think you’re the closest thing to a renaissance woman I’ve met, not just in ability but also in who you are. Our entire admin team is pretty creative and original, but you are I think the true artist among us! And while your graphics are truly godlike and unlike anything I’ve ever seen in the RPC before, it’s in your writing I see it most. You’re the most versatile member on the admin team, Goosie, and I think you ground us in so many ways. Not just in doing major graphic makeovers or writing the single most iconic plot drop of DIVerona, but also with your kindness, compassion, intuition and self-awareness. I really would feel a little lost without you, Goosie - not only as an admin, but as a person! Every time you speak, I want to listen; every time you create anything, I want to frame it in a museum. I love you to fucking BITS, and I am genuinely so proud to call you buddy. (I thought about using friend instead, but buddy felt more accurate for us…) — MINNIE

Where would I begin? How can I even write a note when I feel like everything I do and every act I take is part of how much I love you, because it’s like, an entirely indelible part of me? Julie, you’re one of the most talented people in the world. Literally. Your writing is so piercing, so emotionally intelligent and brave and just vulnerable in a way I’ve never seen. Your graphics and art have such a passion to them; I think I love them because they’re beautiful, but I know I love them because I see little parts of you in them that delight me every time. I would crawl across broken glass to be a part of anything you do; I feel so lucky that I’m someone who often gets to see your works in progress, the messy edges of things, the half-finished projects. You bring such warmth to the team and such a grounded, different perspective; there have been so many times where we would entirely miss things if you hadn’t pointed them out when we were blind. You are our cornerstone, the one who anchors and glues us all together in so many ways, and I want to bask in that warm glow of your sunlight forever. — ROGUE

to my dearest julie, i wish i could just put a cody ko meme here but i am ABSTAINING EVEN THOUGH I FEEL LIKE YOU KNOW WHICH CODY KO MEME I WOULD PUT HERE. whenever i think about the times that i dragged you back into my life...like there are so many things in life i thank god i did but keeping you in it EVEN WHEN YOU TRIED TO ESCAPE MY CLUTCHES - that is number 1. having late night conversations with you about literally everything and anything makes my heart feel so full. you have been so much to me and trying to put it into words is really really difficult because none of them feel like they’re ever going to be enough. i love you for so many reasons: your humility, your determination to be there whenever, every single video and podcast you send me, your ability to listen and make people feel heard. you are special and if we are to take on this world i thank god i get to take it on with you. i love you. -- ROSEY

MINNIE

We complete each other and THAT'S JUST THE TEA. I admit, I can be a little over the top and just Too Much sometimes, but you always get me, and it's something that I appreciate more than I can put into words. You're the rock of this team, Minnie, and even though it's a pretty lame way of saying it, it feels right. I truly don't know where the team would be without you, but I know it wouldn't be anywhere near where it is now. You have a way of holding us together, of keeping us steady when we're weighed down or doubtful, with your kind heart, endless calm and unconditional support. I honestly don't know what to thank you for because it feels like there's way too many things and I wouldn't even know where to begin… but thank you for being here and being at our side through everything. I'm so proud of you and the amazing, one of a kind person that you are, and I wouldn't wanna share such a special moment with anyone else. — JEN

When it comes down to it, I think the best word to describe you would be a powerhouse. I’ve never met a woman in my life who works quite as fucking hard as you do -- and if not harder, then smarter, y’know? This past year I’ve spent getting to know you more and more, slowly wheedling you into opening up (motherfucker! We are Known in this house!) and sharing bits and pieces of myself, I’ve come to admire you just for who you are as a person. I’ve learned so much from you in standing my ground and not letting the wind blow me over. You’re funny and witty and sharp as a knife when it comes to your style of prose, and your love not just for Maeve and Paola but for the group shine through everything you do. You’ve held us all together like glue when we needed some extra assistance and let us know when we needed to pick things up, too. You’re open and honest with your feelings and I value that so much about you, knowing I can come to you and lay the cards down and ask your opinion on things and you’ll give it to me straight. I’ve never really had someone “at my back” in the sense of friendship, but oh man, Minnie, you make me feel safe, and I think you’ll know how much that means when I say it. -- JULIE

Oh, no, I’ve already been so embarrassing about how much I love you Minnie!! I suppose it’s only right I do it on main as well. I genuinely feel like I haven’t had another friend in my life who balances with me so well. When we’re united and on our peak shit, we complete each other, shoring up the places where we’re both insecure, making us both feel safer with each other nearby. I’ve written some of my favorite dynamics in RP with you, here at DV, and I don’t think I’d have grown half so much in my outside life or my rp life without you there to talk to. You are also the absolute rock of this team, to steal Jen’s words. When we’re all freaking out and afraid to act or worried about getting stuff wrong, you cut through everyone’s bullshit and get right to the heart of the matter. Your direct and straightforward way of speaking and of loving is a force for good in the world and on the team, and you are also maybe one of the funniest people alive, or at least in my acquaintance. I love your laugh, I love how open you are with your heart when you’re with us, I love you so very much. I want to write with you and talk to you for as long as you let me. — ROGUE

to twin-flame minnie, i wish you could see my face as i type this because this amount of vulnerability is making me like...ew. but minnie your soul resonates with me so much - never would i have ever thought in the time that we’ve known each other (it really did start with a conversation about glitter and then somehow just expanded from there and tbh i am not at all surprised) that i would bare myself to you as much as i have and felt completely and totally understood without having to say things in so many words. i cannot wait for the day when i can sweep you into my arms in a great big hug and i probably will cry when i do because i love you so much. there are too many things to love about you: from your signature giggle, to your ability to take on the world, to your conscientious growth as a person...you give me so much hope. and i don’t think it’s necessary to say anything more than that. i love you. -- ROSEY

ROGUE

When you first joined, you fit into the team so naturally, Rogue, it honestly felt as though you had always been a part of it. I remember being SHOOK AS FUCK at all the incredible things that you were doing in NO TIME, like, right from the start, you crafted the most amazing bios, offered the most rich and intriguing input for the plot, and helped us when it comes addressing issues and concerns in a way that made it all so much easier to tackle over time. Not to mention your sunny presence and the unconditional support that you offer, which never fail to brighten everything when we hit a bump in the road or things get a little tough. It's amazing to consider all that you've achieved and all the ways you've uplifted the team despite being with us for the least amount of time. In my eyes, you've always been with us, and I'm SO fucking proud of you and happy to be sharing all of this with you. Thank you for being a part of this team, and a part of this journey with me. — JEN

Maybe it’s a little cheesy to say, but I think the universe meant for us to meet, and having you on the team with us is a gift. We all mesh together so well and you pull things up out of nowhere on the fly, whether it be individual character plot development or actually writing The Most Iconic Plot Drop Of All Time(TM) and letting me tack on a little flourish at the end. You’re like... the cheese to my cracker, the whipped cream to my slice of pie, the biscuit with my coffee. We complete each other, and you listen to me when I really need to just word vomit all over the floor about something either entirely related or all too related, from time to time. I know if I need to call you anytime I can, and maybe my favorite memory of 2020 so far has been us watching Cats together and just suffering the entire time, but getting through it together. You’re funny, smart, endlessly endearing, work harder than the devil when it comes to threads and replies, and I’m grateful as all get out to have you with me in life!! -- JULIE

ROGUE, YOU REALLY CAME IN HERE AND SAID YEAH, I’M GOING TO SHAKE SHIT UP FROM DAY ONE. Whew, I remember one week you knocked out like four bios back-to-back and I just stood there trying to stop myself from booking a flight to your city and camping out in front of your house like the stan that I am. Sometimes, I still can’t believe there was a day you weren’t on the admin team because you not only fit seamlessly, but you also are just so essential now. Everything you’ve done in the few months since you joined our team, Rogue, has been *chef’s kiss* flawless. From the characters that I’m ANXIOUS to see on the dash to the ways you’ve helped guide our decisions and responses, I can’t imagine DiVerona and the admin team without you anymore! You brighten my day on a daily basis, and I love brainstorming with you, screaming with you, and I just love YOU! — MINNIE

to baby rogue, you see and know my True Sinner Nature rogue and the fact that you, in turn, have shared yours with me makes me feel so warm and bubbly inside - as well as makes me giggle. we really do have this habit of taking little smidgens of inspiration and connections and growing them into something extraordinary. geeking out about anything and everything within that encyclopedic brain of yours is one of my favorite things - our late night conversations, watching cursed together, plucking characters and plots from each other’s names as if they were already written in the stars...i dont know how to live without. there are so many things that i love about you: how you want to make everyone feel seen, how inclusive you are and kind, how you foster such creativity to others...i love and treasure you so very much. and we have so many more characters and worlds to explore together. -- ROSEY 

ROSEY

I don’t think I'll ever forget the day that you asked me if I'd like to be an admin and offered me a spot on the team. It was just you, me and Bree back then and I was way in over my head, but you made me feel at home without even trying, honestly. DV is my first longstanding admin experience and truly the best one I've ever had, and it’s all thanks to you, which is something that I'll always cherish and keep close to my heart. I've looked up to you, learned a lot from you and felt inspired by you over the years, not just because everything was so new to me at the start, but because you're a guiding light for anyone who's lucky enough to have you in their life and share with you the experiences that I have. I'm so incredibly proud of everything we've done together, and proud of you most of all. Thank you for being the one to bring me along for this amazing journey, Rosey, and thank you for going through it with me for two amazing, unforgettable years. — JEN

I think, sometimes, that people think I’m joking when I tell them you saved my life, Rosey Ro, but you did, in a way that I would never have guessed. I felt utterly alone, coming fresh out of a physically and mentally abusive relationship, juggling court dates and other things that seemed impossible to conquer. I’d left Diverona unsure of my present, what I’d considered my past, and my future, but I happened to log into Discord one day and came upon that good ole’ 9+ messages notification. All of them were from you. Every single one. It felt like a sign, of some kind, and so, as I scraped my life together, we chatted and I re-apped for DV, and in spite of tumultuous times on both our ends, I don’t regret a fucking minute of it. You have truly helped me in figuring out who I am as an individual person, where I fit in the world, and with every crisis and “OH SHIT” moment, you’ve been there for me, whether it was in your writing, your jokes, late night calls with you, messages over Whatsapp knee-deep in irritation or excitement. You’re the older sister I never got to have. Without Diverona, my life wouldn’t be the same. Without you, my life wouldn’t be the same. I love you so much. -- JULIE

How far we’ve come since we talked about Greek life parties and glitter… Rosey, my sister sign and my mirror, the mother to my father, I love you very much. Your creativity is – as we all can tell from DiVerona’s success – UNMATCHED, and your heart goes even deeper than I think most people realize. For someone who writes some of the scariest and evilest characters, you are one of the most considerate, thoughtful and empathetic people I’ve yet to meet. Thank you for creating this space and reminding us time and time again that we’re more than just admins; we’re individuals with Big Feelings as well as Big Brains. You did an amazing job, Rosey. It doesn’t get said enough, and if I could, I would tattoo it to your brain if it meant it would stick: you created a beautiful group, and no one can take that away from you. — MINNIE

Rosey, Rosey, Rosey. All of this is your fault. I never thought I would join any kind of mafia RP, always having been prone to more fantastical settings in my preferences, but when you asked me to look around at the bios, how could I say no? How could I have known it would entirely change my life? Before DV and in DV, you and I have written some of my favorite relationships to work on, some of my favorite threads of all time. You pull out such creativity from me that I never would’ve imagined existed in my brain. I love you such a ridiculous amount. I could, would, and do talk to you about anything and everything. I want to spend like 50 years of my life fighting with you over whether Hope from Legacies is hot and indulging in our weird shared white boy thirsts. You are so funny, so talented, so bright, so interesting and I don’t know how I got so lucky as to be your friend. If you and I aren’t writing together when we’re 80 it’s because I died early and tragically and you wore a sexy fascinator to my funeral. — ROGUE

[yanjuniverse]

RANKING MY TOP 5 FICS

hello everyone. let me just take a moment to introduce myself. my name is Megan and two years ago, I started this blog originally under the user name @/syzygy-yoongi to post one shots about the boys from IQIYI’s Idol Producer. since that time, i have gain a mass following (2,000+ today) that i am forever grateful for. i have also made many friends that i love dearly and am so blessed to have in my life.

when i began this blog, i didn’t expect so many people to pay attention or to read my stories. if you remember, i was pumping out chapters two or three times a day, finishing series within a week or two because i loved writing that much.

today, i’m going to rank my top five completed series that i have written. feel free to reblog with your own opinions/rankings as well or leave me an ask with your opinions about my stories! (i’m very bored).

Now let’s get this show on the road!

SPOILERS BELOW! vvv

1. Girls Like You (Cai Xukun)

Summary: IP High School is one of the most prestigious boarding schools in China for the fine arts. Owned by the Huang family, the school only accepts the best of the best. Many of China’s biggest stars came from this school and many of their students already have offers upon their graduation.

This year will be Cai Xukun’s fourth year at the school and fourth year witnessing the favoritism of his classmate, Zhu Zhengting (who’s parents are world class dancers) as well as the favoritism from students Fan Chengcheng (little brother of China’s most famous actress) and headmasters’ son, Huang Justin. The three of them are known to run the school. They get away with being late to classes, missing classes completely, missing assignments, talking back and Xukun swears he’s never seen them in full uniform. Safe to say that he kind of despises them and their “holier-than-thou” mindsets.

So when Justin’s sister joins them for her senior year, he could only roll his eyes at the news. While all of Xukun’s friends seem to fall for her, he can’t see the magic of it all.

“Girls like you? Girls like you are the kind that I can’t stand! You think just because you’re rich and pretty that we all have to fall for you? Well news flash, it’s not going to work on me. Now stay out of my way!”

MY OPINION: I really hold this fic near and dear to my heart because of the amount of work I put into the relationship between YN and Justin, YN and Zhengting and YN and Xukun. These were the three main relationships throughout the story that I feel really made readers pick sides. In all honesty, I was very nervous the first half the the story because everyone was on Zhengting’s side. This story was one of my most popular series and I was very pleased with the outcome, though I do have some regrets.

LOVED MOST: The relationship between YN and Justin. Justin’s character was the most difficult character I have ever portrayed. The early stages of developing his character actually spurred from Charlie from the movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower. As for YN’s character, I grew up in a household where my parents were always at work and so I had to raise my younger siblings (obviously not to the extent of YN’s and my parents are kind people). Her motherly tendencies came a lot from the things I had personally done growing up (making meals, putting together backpacks, so on and so forth). I think of all the relationships I’ve ever written, YN’s and Justin’s “Huang or Die” relationship is always going to be my favorite.

BIGGEST REGRET: The ending. Looking back on it now, I honestly think the story should have gone another way. Of course YN runs from Zhengting but I personally think that the ending was way too rushed. It was something I put together in the matter of hours just because I wanted to get the story over with. I think now, I would have let YN have more time to be herself and to be a kid in Korea rather than carrying on being a mother. I also would have liked it if she had ended up with Chengcheng, the only boy in this entire story besides Zhengting, who had been there from start to finish . I would have also liked to have seen the more interaction with her and Yanjun and Ziyi, considering they, along with Bingbing were the main hands that took part in her escape.

2. SUBSCRIBE! (Xiao Gui)

Summary: Wang Linkai just posted videos of himself playing videos for fun. He never in a million years expected to build the type of following he did.

or

Zhu YN started off just posting little home videos for her and her friends. She never in a million years expected to build the type of following she did.

or

The one where you and Xiao Gui have no idea who the other is until one day, your brother sends you the link to a video called “REACTING TO TEXTS FROM AN ANGEL I MET TODAY!”

MY OPINION: Though Xiao Gui continues to be my bias up until today, the fic that I wrote for him is second place. I had a lot of fun writing it but with a more regrets than I did with Girls Like You. (Also let’s all remember when I wrote that he was a matcha frappe guy and then days later, he was papped with that exact drink).

LOVED MOST: Xiao Gui’s character development is something I’m always going to take pride in. I think out of all of my stories, his character was one of the most carefully planned. There were little details (such as when Gui goes from stealing Ziyi’s car keys to asking for them in the end) that really showed how much he grew. I’m also glad he didn’t just give up his dream for love and how he wanted YN to be free while he was away. I feel like had he been the same person from the beginning, he either would’ve given up his music career or made YN wait for him. I really loved to see how much he grew during this story.

BIGGEST REGRET: How YN knew Xiao Gui’s mother 🤦🏻‍♀️. That was such a plot twist ending that didn’t even make sense. I wish I had found a different way for YN to have gotten Gui to be with his mother other than “oh she sells me fruit”.

3. Smile for the Camera (Zhu Zhengting)

Summary: Nine Percent Photography is a small company with big names. Owned by Y/N, it features the faces of Cai Xukun, Chen Linong, Fan Chengcheng, Huang Justin, Lin Yanjun, Wang Ziyi and You Zhangjing.

Nine Percent Photography is best known for their creativity and ability to push their models into various aesthetics. They are one of the richest companies in Asia with every model raking in an estimated 2.3 million dollars every month. It is every model’s dream to be apart of this world class company.

Zhu Zhengting is an aspiring model. Up until this point, he has only scored small gigs. That is, until one phone call changed his entire life.

Zhengting finally has the chance to follow his dreams. He’s not going to let anything get in his way. Right?

MY OPINION: This story was the first story of mine that really blew up. It’s my pride and joy and where my following really started to build.

LOVED MOST: I loved the harmony between the company. It was like they were all destined to be together. I also liked how they were so honest with each other towards the end. I loved how they all had to fall apart to come back together. I also really appreciated Yanjun’s friendship with YN and how much YN loved her company.

BIGGEST REGRET: I should have made the the story longer so that YN and Zhengting could have had more time to fall in love with each other. I reread it a couple of weeks ago and honestly, the way the fell was so awkward and rushed. Had I gone back to write it, I would have focused more on their love story. I also wished I would have gone and written more about their modeling and/or their work since they were a modeling company. I also wished I had gone deeper into YN and Zeren’s backstory.

4. Oblivious (Wang Ziyi)

Wang Ziyi has never been the type to confront his feelings head on. He’s always swallowed the butterflies, tied his shoe laces and held on to the safety handle to make sure he never let him fall for anyone. He likes to say it’s because he doesn’t want to get his heart broken but his friends say that maybe he’s just saving those feelings for you.

or

the one where people aren’t sure whether you two really hate each other or really like each other.

MY OPINION: This was one of my more humorous stories. I’m usually an angst writer so getting to write Ziyi and YN in such a playful manner was like a breath of fresh air. This is also the story that came after I took my first hiatus (which was supposed to be like a week but ended up being like a day lol). I remember the stress of wanting to write something angsty for Ziyi and not having the storyline so instead, I decided to write a funnier story for him. Though, not as popular as Girls Like You, Subscribe! or Smile for the Camera, it still ranks high for me.

LOVED MOST: I LOVED HOW FUNNY ZIYI AND YN’S CHARACTERS WERE — actually all of them! One of my favorite parts of the story is always going to be the line where Linong says he has “bible study in an hour” and Yanjun replies “PLEASE STOP CALLING YOUR THEOLOGY (the study of the nature of God and religious beliefs) CLASS BIBLE STUDY!” All of the characters played a big part in the story unlike in the others where characters like Zhangjing and Linong are more of the background extras.

BIGGEST REGRET: THE WHOLE ENDING! I remember a lot of people were upset with YN and her plans and I agree because what she did was a bit uncalled for. But I remember just wanting it to end so I let it end the way it did. Had I gone back and rewritten it, I probably would have let Xingjie and YN play out for a bit before the two realized they were better off as friends. Sort of along the lines of Lara Jean and John Ambrose.

5. Trust Me - Lin Yanjun

Summary: Summary: Ever since you were a freshman in high school, Wang Ziyi has always felt the need to protect you. Now you’re a freshman in college and nothing has changed. When he hears that the labeled player, Lin Yanjun, is trying to make his way into your life, Ziyi finds it harder to keep his secret under wraps - especially when you make friends with You Zhangjing, Lin Yanjun’s best friend.

MY OPINION: Ah yes. I feel like this is a forgotten story of mine. It was one of my first ever series. I think I was still @/syzygy-yoongi at the time that I wrote this. I still get nostalgic when I see people finding it now. This is actually the story that got me into writing series (I had never written one before Trust Me) when a follower suggested the idea to me.

LOVED MOST: I really loved the plot twist at the end. I think of all of my stories, this was the only one that I really planned out and stuck to it. I didn’t overthink Trust Me because at the time, I did get have many followers and I didn’t have anyone to disappoint.

BIGGEST REGRET: I think the reason why I ranked Trust Me so lowly is because of the lack of quality it had. It was the earliest development of what yanjuniverse is today. This is the story that made me realize that I really had a knack for angst. I have the fondest memories of Trust Me and I’m so happy I wrote it.

Conclusion: This was my top five rankings for my completed series. Of course it doesn’t go into my incompleted series (I Bet would’ve knocked Trust Me right off of this list). This was a complete waste of time but just something I wanted to do because I had just spent the past couple of weeks rereading my fics. Hope you all enjoyed and if you made it this far, thank you so much. I’m so grateful for this blog. It really made me who I am today. I’m so grateful for the memories and how much I grew from these stories!

[cupcakesandmisandry]

My speech at FILIA 2018:

“#MeToo and the fall of idols: about the beginning of the end of impunity for criminal artists.” 

©Lise Bouvet 2018

  “So my name is Lise Bouvet, as you can hear I am French, I am a philosopher, a political scientist and a feminist author. I am also a voluntary translator for the abolitionist collective “Ressources Prostitution“. I am very honoured to speak at FILIA today and I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart the wonderful team of women whose remarkable work allows us to be here together today. I have been a feminist activist for over 20 years now, and I know – almost painfully – to what extent the women’s movement depends on women’s time, on women’s labour, in joy as in sorrow. For so much love and dedication, I am endlessly grateful.

This year, my first book has been published, on the impunity enjoyed by powerful men, whether artists or politicians, notably pedo-criminal filmmaker Roman Polanski. It is called Untouchables: people, justice and impunity, and is co-written with lawyer Yael Mellul. Today I would like to share with you my thoughts about this impunity of criminal artists, especially filmmakers, which the #MeToo movement has begun to put an end to, especially because it started at the heart of the film industry, with the denouncing of a major Hollywood producer.

How and why pedo-criminals such as Woody Allen or Roman Polanski have been praised worldwide and almost washed of their crimes for nearly half a century? In the name of what? How does this way of thinking work? On what sociocultural mechanisms is this defence based? I will try to deconstruct the arguments put forward by the unconditional worshippers of these filmmakers.

Let’s start at the beginning by analyzing what Allen and Polanski’s defenders are telling us. They are basically telling us that these men are not litigants like the others, nor really men like the others, because they are accomplished authors. According to them, one cannot really judge these men because they are great artists, because they have created an extraordinary work. First, there is a suspicious logical connection between their talent (which is undeniable) and its relationship to the criminal justice system. Listening to Polanski’s defenders, especially in France where the film industry is very elitist and authorist, one would almost believe that he is a unique being, in short, that one cannot do without him and that it is out of the question that we could consider him losing a day of his precious life in prison.

But who gets to decide about this extraordinary social utility? Let’s take an example: in the middle of winter, when we are cold, and our heater breaks down, who can do without a good plumber? We would surely be very angry if our excellent plumber went to prison for the rape of a 13-year-old girl in the middle of winter, but the law is so made in a democracy that even exceptional and indispensable professionals are, like all other citizens, liable to the same penalties for the same crimes. Nevertheless, let us try to go further in this comparison. Polanski’s defenders would oppose us, that indeed it would be unfortunate that our highly competent heating engineer were imprisoned in the middle of winter at the time of our heater’s breakdown when it is very cold, but that, certainly even with difficulty, we would be able to find another competent professional, while nobody else in the world makes films like Roman Polanski or Woody Allen.

Thus, they make a point: indeed, one can say that the particularity of the artist, and of a gifted filmmaker, is that, unlike the shoemaker or the baker, he produces a unique work. In our capitalist and industrial society, the artist is considered exceptional because he creates something non-reproducible and out of fixed market value, an object in total contradiction with all the others, which would be likely to give him an almost sacred status. We must therefore examine the underlying link between the work of art’s status and that of the artist.

In a fascinating essay (1), “From the humanization of divine creation to the divinization of human creation.” (De l’humanisation de la création divine à la divinisation de la création humaine), art historian Lucile Roche brilliantly analyses this theme of the god-artist in modern aesthetic theory in the West. She writes: ‘’It is then in its distance from the divine model in favour of a refocusing on the artist, subjected only to the whim of his views and teleological requirements, and focused on his own creative abilities – originality, imagination – that the analogy Artist-God and God-Artist closes. An inexhaustible creativity source of which he is the sole source, the romantic artist is part of the divine (with whom he shares the ex-nihilo) without submitting to it. In his humanity, the artist is then, paradoxically, deified.’’ It’s all said and done: the die-hard defenders of authors such as Allen and Polanski are caught up in an outdated social representation that carries a deeply romantic vision of the artist, which will be illustrated by this sentence from Victor Hugo: “Art is to man what nature is to God”. If these men are at the gods’ level then they escape the justice of men, here is the fundamental unthought of the defenders of Polanski, Woody Allen and other criminal artists, not only guardians of their social castes and its corollaries impunities (impunity of men and the powerful), but especially, according to us, bogged down in outdated conceptions of art, which are put at the service of this impunity.

In a recent interview, the art theorist Carole Talon-Hugon (2) shed light on these unthoughts around the artist: “A rape committed by an anonymous person and a rape committed by an artist are both the same thing – because the crime is just as reprehensible – and not the same thing. Because he is an example, the artist enjoys a special status in society. At least since the 18th century. At that time, we were starting to consider art as a separate field, totally distinct, subject only to the rule of beauty and independent from the question of good. Thus, for Diderot “there is a moral proper to artists that can be in reverse of the usual moral”. This idea can be found in Oscar Wilde’s (19th century) or André Breton’s work (20th century). The artist then becomes a “wild and singular individuality, in rupture, in opposition and totally independent of ordinary morality”. This image, built over more than 200 years, prevents us from facing the reality of these assaults. It is here that the emperor appears naked: in profound contradiction with our democratic values, artists have become the new aristocracy above the laws. By consecrating some to the detriment of others, the community of citizens is abdicated, and it is said that there are values superior to human life. Our role as feminists is to perpetuate the effects of what was initiated by #MeToo, that set in motion a healthy social movement to get rid of these rotten idols, including by taking on the desecration of art and artists. Basically, it is time to stop giving into confusions that only serve sex offenders whom profession is to be artists. It is not because, for a few centuries in the West, art has been thought and affirmed as a distinct and independent domain, notably of society, that this autonomy grants a particular political status to artists. Moreover, this aestheticism has been challenged by many 20th century artists such as the communist play righter B. Brecht and especially women and feminist artists of the Second Wave. Thus, not only is it more than debatable that art can claim to exist outside any social or political sphere, but even so, what could apply to works of art does not logically concern artists at all, especially those who use their work or their talent to guarantee themselves criminal impunity. The art world may pretend to escape morality, good for it, but in no way can artists use it to escape the law and the justice system.

We now understand that the underlying thesis of “Polanski’s friends” is that this man’s exceptional talent should be able to transcribe itself into an exceptional derogatory political status. It will be noted with irony that these people often claim to be left-wing, while carrying a feudal vision of a society where the talent and status of some would grant them special rights over others and their bodies, let alone minors. This position is all the more fragile when one understands that the requests for exceptionality of treatment for the filmmaker Roman Polanski are based on conceptions discussed as debatable art theories. And after all, Polanski’s or Woody Allen’s friends have a right to hold on to a particular theory that we do not share. What is indisputable, however, is that we live in a political system in which artists, however gifted they may be, are citizens and citizens like the others. We hear that Polanski’s fans cannot do without the pleasures that his talent brings them. However, only the judiciary as an independent institution can say whether Roman Polanski should spend another day in prison. And from the moment he has fled the legitimate court about to try him and we are asked for our assent and our audience, it is our right, as the public, to grant it or refuse it. Roman Polanski has the strict right to do what he wants, since he is free in Europe, but from the moment he makes movies that the public is invited to see, it is necessary to accept that this public, or a part of it, refuses. The great unthought also present here is that the public is us. It is us who are asked to go see and applaud the Polanski or Woody Allen films. However, no one has to follow any injunction to remain silent or forget that a man praised to the skies is also a man who admitted to having drugged and then raped a young teenage girl, and who is accused of similar acts by other women. The impunity of these men rests largely on a conception not only of the demiurge artist, but of a passive and docile public in its reception of this sacred work, and as if, not by chance, these qualities cover the values traditionally associated with the masculine and the feminine… We see here that we are basically in a religious and reactionary way of thinking, paradoxically carried by “leftists”.

Another element of defence heard ad nauseam is the injunction to separate “the man” from “the artist”. But it is precisely because the “man” and the “artist” are one and the same person that we are constantly being ordered to separate them. But how is that possible? By what miracle? To “save” who or what? Creation is a complex and highly personal act: when Polanski starts directing, there is not another Polanski who arrives to make films and then leaves to make room for “the man”, it is completely absurd. This irrational injunction of separation is a blind spot of thought, a dead angle, that in my opinion rests on a social taboo induced by an archaic conception of artistic creation. The presupposition here is “Kalos Kagathos”, our pillar of Greek thought according to which Good and Beautiful are inseparably linked, which prevents us from imagining that one can be both a sex offender and a great artist. But art has long since become amoral in our contemporary societies and artistic creation is by no means antithetic to perverse activities (3). Further still, when the artist is a famous and powerful man, his very function as “director” places him even more in a position of power and predation over actresses who owe him everything (4). If we were to go to the end of this reasoning which consists in wanting to separate things, it would rather be the art that would detach itself from the artist, as Roland Barthes and structuralist thought suggest: “once his work is finished, the author is no longer bound to it. The art work exists by itself. (5)”. It is therefore urgent to leave creation, art and talent where they are, for what they are, that is to say, something other than a system for defending sex offenders. Just as the crimes committed by an artist do not detract from the quality of his work, so this work, in the name of his existence, does not confer any derogatory status to the artist, who, like any citizen, is subject to common law.

We can hear Polanski’s worshippers’ screams: ‘’but then, what is left of these wonderful films?’’

To add insult to injury, Chinatown, for example, is a film about incest and rape… We are here perhaps touching one of the greatest social injustice and the greatest male privilege: these men, not only rape with impunity, but then, of these rapes, make masterpieces, acclaimed, awarded and applauded. And, forever, it is the rapist’s masterpieces that will remain engraved in art history, while, dust, the devastated life of the victims will return to dust. This brings us to an important point about these directors’ movies, particularly pedo-criminals. Among the injunctions against us, there is the corollary prohibition not to judge the movies of the man whom we are urged not to condemn (particularly in France as denounced by the film critic Paul Rigouste (6). Yet, feminist critique has developed as an autonomous and academic theoretical field for a long time, including in France, thanks to Geneviève Sellier’s work. And of course, what grieves our devoted fans is that we can conduct a feminist film criticism of these men’s work. For example, an attentive viewing of Woody Allen’s films allows to notice his pedophile obsession for very young girls, just as it seems to me that Polanski faces very personal problems of crime and guilt in his work, and this, in an almost systematic way. By definition, the process of thinking and analysis cannot be limited, criticism must address art as a whole and it seems both implausible and counterproductive to limit the field of cinematographic studies by prohibitions under penalty of ‘’lèse genius’’. We must denounce this double injunction on which these criminals’ defense is based: not only would the judicial institution have no say under the pretext that they are artists, but their work would be immune from any reading in connection to their crimes, a reading which nevertheless seems to me very interesting from an art theory point of view. We have here the incredible opportunity to analyze the work of criminals who precisely do not hesitate to create from their own crime, so in the name of what would we deprive ourselves from this research? We must go frontally against the popular opinion: Not only can we not separate the man from the artist, as we have just seen, but it is specifically relevant here to link the artist to his crimes in order to study his work from his criminal activity, without of course reducing it.

Another very important point on this subject was raised in a stimulating article in the New York Times. Journalist Amanda Hess (7) suggests that to all the clichés’ users defending rapist artists and to the incantations to distinguish them from their works, one can object by referring to the existing relation between the artist and the industry which produces it, what seems particularly relevant for cinema which is indissociably an art and an industry. She rightly notes that the Hollywood machine’s artistic alibi has deprived itself of all the human resource infrastructure present in other major North American corporations, including sexual harassment laws enforcement, and thus allowed Weinstein to prosper with impunity. She adds that our habit to treat artists as creators transcending all materiality instead of ordinary economic agents protects them from the basic requirements of labour law, also making us forget that, as for any industrial product, movies are also consumption objects, made in specific conditions, the suffering and sexual assault of actresses being part of them. Finally, and as others did during the Weinstein scandal, instead of focusing on the now “soiled” art by their creators, we can also mourn all the talents that were destroyed by these attacking artists. The victims of Weinstein, Louis CK or others never saw their creativity blossom, never had the leisure to create their art (8). Perhaps we should ask ourselves about these shortcomings, too.

Another aspect that also seems important to me and needs to be considered in the analysis of these speeches defending criminal filmmakers, is the phenomenon of the wide public’s fascination for these abusers. Fascination rapists use to assert their defense, which of course can only benefit from confused feelings that must be deconstructed.

In La Photographie, art theorist André Rouillé makes a remarkable analysis of what a “star” is in our contemporary societies. Star in English means an object that shines, even in the night, and by extension the image of this aura that rests on the media exposure, which is also an optical exposure machine. The stars are apart beings, beings of light, glittering, illuminated in reality by the celebrity machine which, according to us, works on a fundamental ambivalence: these people are familiar to us, they look like us, but they are different, they live in a higher social sphere that arouses fear and respect. This situation of multiple levels of reflections allows  movements of identification-evasion, a confusing but rewarding phenomenon, and above all, deeply dual. The public is caught in contradictory positions: men in a patriarchal context are tempted to identify with the famous and powerful accused, as the feminist philosopher Michela Marzano rightly notes, and women are trapped in several conflicts of allegiance. Who among us didn’t grow up laughing at Woody Allen movies or Bill Cosby shows? Who didn’t like Polanski’s movies or Morgan Freeman’s performances? They are familiar to us, they remind us of good memories, they are figures of attachment who have our a priori sympathy more than anonymous victims who, by their denunciations, are breaking these positive feelings. Let us be reminded here of what we now know about our social reflexes in the face of these denunciations. Researcher Judith Herman warns us that “it is very tempting to take the perpetrator’s side. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”

We can observe it in each of us in these specific cases: there is a conflict between the citizen and the spectator. The citizen condemns the artist’s crimes, but the viewer wants to continue enjoying the criminal artist’s work. Because we loved these creations, because they are now part of our life, of our culture. Because the work of art is considered unique and its author is worshipped, because creators are the new gods of our secularized society. This resistance around the artist is certainly due to a powerful impregnation of art conceptions from the last centuries and contemporary neoliberal myths; the artist in capitalist mythology embodies at once the exceptional individual, freedom, transgression, moral exception, and a form of archaic sacred.

The only counterweight to these confusions enabling this untouchability of criminal men, the only authentic democratic force, is feminism. Only the feminist analysis of male domination in its functioning makes it possible to dismantle these hypnosis effects in order to demand strict equality of treatment between citizens. The main feature of the rapist’s discourse is the inverted presentation of reality; the feminist argument opposes it with a materialistic analysis in terms of revealed power relations, associated with a return to the world in an egalitarian order.

I will close this presentation, in which I have tried to face up to the arguments of the criminal filmmakers’ defenders, who, in my opinion, divert certain aesthetic concepts and take art both as an alibi and as a hostage. My conclusion here is that art and artistic creation have more to offer to the world than a system of defending pedo-criminal rapists.

I will leave you on a personal note: Like all of us I was not always a feminist. As a teenager, I passionately loved Woody Allen’s or Roman Polanski’s films and today the question of their re-viewing arises. I am at the front line to experience this conflict between the citizen and the viewer that I have analyzed, and in my case, it is a conflict between being an assiduous cinephile and an equally demanding feminist activist. A sister once told me that she had decided to no longer impose the works of rapists on herself, particularly because, as a survivor, she analyses them as elaborate perverse devices, which double the effects of hypnosis and confusion that I have mentioned. Adverse effects according to her, because women are once again ordered to remain passive, to dissociate themselves, to anaesthetize themselves as female spectators in order to escape yet another annihilation, thus reproducing the most fundamental patriarchal violence. I recognize that this is a very fair view and a consistent as coherent feminist position. I must admit that, for many years now t, I haven’t been able to watch any of these movies again, whose DVDs  take dust on my living room shelves…

Thank you so much for listening to me!”

  Lucile Roche, « De l’humanisation de la création divine à la divinisation de la création humaine », Academia, http://www.academia.edu/6710025/Dieu_crea_l_artiste_a_son_image_Le_theme_du_Dieu-artiste_dans_la_theorie_artistique_moderne_XVe-XVIIIe_siecle_

Marie-Adélaïde Scigacz, « Pourquoi les scandales sexuels à Hollywood bouleversent-ils notre relation aux artistes et à leurs œuvres? », France Info, le 14/11/2017 http://mobile.francetvinfo.fr/societe/harcelement-sexuel/pourquoi-les-scandales-sexuels-a hollywood-bouleversent-notre-relation-auxartistes- et-a-leurs-oeuvres_2461788.amp

On this topic see the excellent work, under Joyce McDougall’s direction: ‘’The artist and the psychoanalyst’’. Presses Universitaires de France, 2008.

In an interview given to Le Monde on 10/23/2017, Juliette Binoche analysed clearly these power relations: “Women are easily mocked, ridiculed, we need to reduce them”. http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2017/10/23/juliette-binoche-deuxou-trois-choses-que-je-sais-d-harvey-weinstein_

Roland Barthes (1967), La mort de l’auteur. Aspen Magazine.

Paul Rigouste, ‘’The Ghost Writer (2010: Polanski and the French critic’’. Le Cinéma est Politique, January 10, 2013. http://www.lecinemaestpolitique.fr/the-ghost-writer-2010-polanski-et-la-critique-francaise/

Amanda Hess, ‘’How the Myth of the Artistic Genius Excuses the Abuse of Women’’. The New York Times, November 10, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/arts/sexual-harassment-art-hollywood.html_r=0&utm_content=buffer9fd04&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Caroline Framke, ‘’Instead of mourning great art tainted by awful men, mourn the work we lost from their victims. Some sexual abusers made great art. Countless more of their victims never got the chance’’. Vox, November 13, 2017. https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/11/13/16637250/sexual-harassmentabuse-art-legacy

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– Speech at FILIA 2018: “#MeToo, #Polanski and the fall of rotten idols.” My speech at FILIA 2018: "#MeToo and the fall of idols: about the beginning of the end of impunity for criminal artists." 

[psychicdan]

Chapter II:  Jack enters the time portal in pursuit of Magnus, the man who assaulted his home and father. He lands in Magnus's future and one thing leads to another, labeling him a criminal. Who is Magnus, what is the Magnus Protectorate, and how does he escape? Jack runs from his human enemies as he reunites with someone dear in this grim new future.

Samurai Jack: Renegade Samurai Rating T to M, depending how graphic you see this. Warning: The following is a work of fanfiction and is not intentionally connected to real word places, events, or people, nor intended to copy others’ work. Samurai Jack is the work of Genndy Tartakovsky, his team and affiliated studios and companies. This is solely fanfiction for fun and not profit. Chapter II: Reunion in the Grim New World The sensation of the black and white ring time portal was both familiar and different to Jack. The flickering lights and feelings of distortions along his body brought back some memories, many unpleasant. The first time it happened, Aku had sent him to the future that he had conquered in Jack’s absence, and the Jack didn’t know it then, the sudden loss of his victory then as well as the dramatic uncertainty of the experience was traumatic. He had found several time portals of similar nature to that one of black and white distortions in space, but many times he was denied. The only pleasant time travel he ever had was when Ashi had used Aku’s own powers that she inherited to send Jack back home, a dream he thought long lost. Even that happy memory was tinged with pain, as the changes Jack caused in the past erased Ashi as well. It brought even further pain when he realized that erasing Ashi with Aku’s destruction meant the whole future was erased, and all his friends and experiences were no more. All he could tell himself then was that hopefully they would all exist again in the new future, free from Aku and leading happier lives. Even if his adventures never really happened, he took some solace knowing he might have saved them all in the long run rather than condemn them, but that was something he would never know in his once again normal lifespan, losing his agelessness with his return to the proper time period and Aku’s destruction then, him being responsible for ripping Jack from his proper moment in time, at least, that was Jack felt and surmised. Even the people of the future couldn’t make sense of time travel. What felt different about his latest time travel was that rather than falling down, he felt being drawn forward. Made sense, since previous time portals were in the ground while he entered one from in front of him, but what was most different was what he was thinking and feeling now compared to when Aku first tricked him. He wasn’t distraught or panicked, but now travelled with purpose. He would eventually return home again some way, but not until he set out what he intended to do. Whatever time this took him to, he would find Magnus. Whatever his reasons or formidability, he repeated in his mind he would have Magnus answer for the assault on his father and people and return the stolen key, whatever Magnus intended it for. There was no fear, only steeled resolve. Of course, no matter the resolve, it would soon be overshadowed by the surprise Jack would find himself in. He finally exited the portal and found himself in midair like last time, coming near the side of a tall building. Jack collected himself and stabbed his sword into the building to slow his descent, and once he stopped, he saw some hovercars within his range. He flung himself using his own momentum, ejecting himself and the sword to the traffic flow. The hover car he collided with got into a panic, a flew out of the flow into an array of buildings. Jack quickly realized he was at the front window, and crawled to the top of the car. The driver could finally respond, and it seemed they were a good one, considering all the near crash incidents that they barely dodged in that interval. Soon there was the sound of sirens and a booming mechanized voiced. “Stop, in the name of the Protectorate, or we will fire!” said the voice from an armored flying vehicle with firearms and black and grey aesthetic. The warning seemed only a formality though, as warning shots came across and the second volley turned serious towards Jack. It seemed they had noticed him. Not this again, thought Jack, as he jumped from vehicle to vehicle to the pursuit vehicle. He deflected the shots that came at him with his sword as he got on top of the vehicle and made his way to the back turbines, slashing them to disable the vehicle’s flight. The vehicle came crashing into a nearby street as Jack jumped off before the crash. Looking from the vehicle, he now took in his surroundings with stunned awe. This was definitely the future alright, but not Aku’s future. No longer was there a perpetual smoggy red sky with blackened buildings and jagged arcs in the image of the demon. The air seemed cleaner, and the sun gazed on the city, appearing to between evening and twilight with sun radiating in the distance. The buildings appeared of greater variety and emitting varying lights, obviously bearing different purposes. He could now see plants here and there, such as a series of trees lined near the street. The hovercars were nothing new, though they also crowded streets on the ground too. There were displays on the buildings too, advertising various things, but none of them Aku. The aesthetics of the city resembled nothing of the dark ruler, instead bearing geometrical aesthetics such as pillars in the form of hexagons here and there. A common element Jack noted was an insignia marked across the city. Whether on flag posts, draped near street lights, or placed on the sides of walls, was an insignia of a gray shield, and in that gray shield, a black armored figure raising its fist in the air. It evoked a feeling of power, force, and protection, and Jack wondered if it was the national symbol here. Despite the noted improvement compared to last time, Jack couldn’t help but feel that the city felt… cold, or down, something conveying an unsettling feeling. Not the ever-present evil in Aku’s cities, but the city did not feel as welcoming as he thought it looked somehow. He looked around, and a crowd was starting to gather. He noticed their garb was similar to what he saw back in the previous future, generally aesthetics like shirts, jeans, and shoes that would be widely available then and make his garb look out of place. There was a discrepancy he noticed though. Back in Aku’s future, the crowds were populated by many alien races, with the human population under Aku’s oppression becoming a minority. Here, it looked reversed, with so many humans but the nonhumans few and far between. In fact, the nonhumans seemed to be the most distant, as though they wanted to avoid the crowd more than Jack. Everyone looked at Jack as though he were dangerous. “Wait please, I don’t wish to cause ha_”, “Stop right there or die!” shouted a mechanized voice coming towards Jack. The crowd backed up, and Jack tensed as he saw the guard coming up, as he was the same as the soldiers who assaulted the palace. Jack readied his sword and let out a battle cry, with the soldier readying his weapon in fire. Jack ran and deflected the fire and slashed the soldier’s arm, blood spilling and unable to resist. Jack pointed his sword at him. “Where am I, what do you want of me, and where is Magnus?!” demanded Jack. “Wha, the Lord Protector, what’s a criminal like you, ahh?!” the soldrier said in a pained voice as he collapsed from his injuries. “YOU, STEP AWAY AND STAND DOWN!” shouted another mechanized voice. Jack kept his guard up, refusing to let down his guard before his clear enemies. The guards were only pissed off by this, and grunted as they let lose more gunfire, ignoring the screaming crowd they risked fire at. Jack was upset they would harm bystanders, and returned his attention to them as he charged them, gracefully jumping from the spot they fired at, cutting one guard down with a descending slash at cutting the next one with a follow up on the ground. Jack was surprised as screams followed. “AHHH, MURDER! MURDERER!” cried someone in the crowd. They spilled away in terror, another person shouting, “Someone call the Protectorate, there’s a crazy killer out here!”. “No, wait!” shouted Jack, but it was too late. He should have thought this out more, he knew his opponents were, in some regards anyway, human, so of course people would be terrified to armed soldiers killed by a stranger. He only acted in self-defense though, not trusting the killers who assaulted his home. Still, he stood there in saddened dismay, distraught he alarmed innocents. He was soon alerted to the sound of sirens booming through the city, and in the distance, he saw more pursuit vehicles. Jack darted to the crowds of buildings, intending to lose his pursuers through the alleys and lose his pursuers. Hopefully, he could then figure out what kind of world he had gotten into this time. … Within a steel fortress of black and gray, designed with both grace and imposing pressure, a meeting was being carried out with a rather displeased man, none other than the Lord Protector himself. The current area was the throne room of his Citadel, and carried the cold geometric aesthetic of the cities, appearing steel with a touch of black here and there and lit by white lights and the sun from the windows overhead on the wall. The Lord Protector, Magnus, looked down, appearing the same as Jack had when he faced him, only now with a cape behind him. He wore it for formalities, but discarded it in battle, as it was frankly a nuisance otherwise. To his downward gaze were representatives of an alien race called the Synolicans, beings who, like ants, had thick exoskeleton outside and the rest inside. They were here to discuss immigration to his world. Yes, it was another long day for the Lord Protector. “Great Lord Protector of the planet Earth, we are humbled by your presence and grace to meet with us. Our planet has fallen into civil war between the between the super powers that have had a falling out, leading to widespread catastrophe. Those who do not fight have been caught in the middle and, with our people dying day by, we could only leave in exile for a new, peaceful world that can take us in and support us. We have looked and looked, but yours is the only one with enough peace and stability to sustain us. We are merely 500,000 now, and would be forever grateful to live under your benevolence. Caution and suspicion dwelled within Magnus’s eyes rather than sympathy. “I believe our interplanetary immigration policies were laid out from the beginning to you. We will only allow admittance of 1000 nonhumans from each population each month after the proper negotiation procedures, and each person will be screened through the process to avoid the chance of inviting galactic criminals. It is the duty of Protectorate admittance officials to decide when and where you will be sent. Still, I have looked over it myself, given you are a new race, and have already decided to allocate you to one of our immigration cities in Section D. Employment Division is already been informed, and your people will be allowed to labor opportunities." The Lord Protector said flatly. The presenter’s companion spoke out of turn with “L-Lord Protector, those terms are abominable, our people are very weary, some wounded and sick. We can’t live as space vagrants for so long! We need access to resources to help rebuild ourselves, and 1000 a month?! We would never be able to relocate everyone in time, please give us more reasonable,” before a steel pillar came crashing down at him with a wave Magnus’s hand, the Citadel itself connected to him. “I’m sure your aware that we have had issues in the past and therefore our own planet is in a precarious situation. We restrict immigration from other worlds to keep the consumption of resources beneath their growth, else we risk starving ourselves. Introducing foreign populations will put our own people into unrest and promote conflict, and so nonhumans from other worlds must be integrated at the proper pace. Do we have an understanding? THEN GET THE HELL OUT!” Magnus screamed with impatience, through with his political persona for the day. The remaining Synolican quickly scampered out, not wishing to share the same fate. “Oh, and someone clean up this bloody mess, why do they have to talk back?” sighed Magnus As cleaning personnel arrived, showing this was not uncommon, an official came through the door. “Um, pardon me, Lord Protector Magnus” said the Protectorate official nervously with his head down. “Grrr, what is it now?” grumbled Magnus. He had already sat through his fair share of meetings and paperwork today, and the only reason someone would come to him outside of appointment could only mean more messes to deal with. “Well, sir, field observation had taken, um, notice of strange readings in City Area 1B37, and upon examination of this, it resembled chronal energy readings, the original formation suggesting use of a time portal, my Lord Protector.” The informant told him, sweat clenched in his hands, knowing that his ruler was already in an ill mood, “I’m sorry, what? Time portals don’t appear at random, and the only person who possesses the means to open and authorize them is me, and I know I authorized no such thing. So why are you here bothering me with nonsense?” said Magnus sternly. The attended gulped before collecting himself. “Well, Lord Protector, we were suspicious, so we had looked into the area to see if there were any noted incidents in conjunction with the recorded events. Cyber Trooper patrols had shown an armed stranger in Japanese traditional garment appearing and causing trouble in air traffic, and had assaulted several guards and terrorized the citizenry. He has yet to be apprehended, but we have images from recording devices.” Reported the informant as he used device to display holographs of images and other data from the incident. Magnus looked at them with just a flick of interest. What he saw was puzzlingly familiar though. This man in a white gi and sword, he swore he saw him somewhere before. Then the memory hit him. “Wait, that yokel Samurai from way back when, he’s the cause of all this? I suppose I did just leave that portal there, but I didn’t think he would just charge in. It’s been thirty years though, so I suppose he went in at the last minute and got delayed.”. Yes, it had been thirty years from Magnus’ perspective since he bested the Samurai in his own time and home, yet he had not aged a day. Magnus looked at the video of the ensuing violence, and the only interest then was of mild irritation. “So, can anyone here explain to me why our soldiers CAN’T SHOOT FOR SHIT?! I mean, this guy is bringing a sword to a gun fight, and our troops are getting cut like salami!”. The audience within his throne room fell silent, but everyone, particularly the officials in charge of military and law enforcement operations, had cramped, sweating faces. Magnus merely held his hand to his face as he sighed. “I suppose we’ll have to focus on the aiming issues of our troops another time. Still, I have faced this Samurai before, and if our troops can’t handle it immediately, we’ll just have someone specialized help them in the meantime. Come to think of it, didn’t the High Overseer from the Inner Sanctum request an opportunity for real life combat situations to test her Special Assassination Force? Last I checked, she had been raising those experimental soldiers for over 20 years, was it?” Magnus proposed. “Ah, yes Lord Protector, somewhere along that timeline. The High Overseer reporter her, uh, “daughters”, have been of age for a few years now and that their training has been promising, an actual field experience is all that is required.” Stated one of the military operation personnel. “Well then, this is a good opportunity as any, but don’t send all seven, that’s just overkill and prevents us from gauging their value. Tell the High Overseer to send whoever she thinks would benefit most from it”, stated Magnus. “Yes, Lord Protector Magnus.” said all the order pertained to. … Within a remote sealed base belonging to Magnus, armored women patrolled and trained in dedication to the Lord Protector himself, a statue of the man centered in the central corridor where they trained under his guidance. This was the Inner Sanctum, a section of the Magnus Protectorate that could be the most dedicated to Magnus. In part, it was an experiment to see how effective and devoted the troops could be in response to the Protectorate’s modified doctrine in extreme degrees. It was also where several other “questionable” experimental procedures took place, all for the sake of creating more effective and loyal soldiers who doubled as followers. In the long run, it’s true purpose was to spring up a faith surrounding Magnus himself. There were mostly women as it was still more risky to implement cybernetics into women compared to men, and so most women ended up here instead of in the main infantry, with some exceptions. Some women did take well to the process and became adept troopers, but worst comes to worst it could result in paralysis or fatality, and even the men weren’t absolved of this possibility ether. Still, to put female personnel into military service without the dangerous use of cybernetics, this was the place. That being said, given how secretive it was, all manner of inhumane conditions was leased without the public to disapprove. It’s founder, the High Overseer, was a true devotee to the Lord Protectorate. So much so, all the other personnel in Magnus’s circle tensed at her presence, and even Magnus found her fanaticism a bit overmuch, choosing to speak through proxies so he wouldn’t have to lose hours to maddening praise. Perhaps the Inner Sanctum’s faith was a little too effective. The Special Assassination Force was one of the earliest projects given to her close to the Inner Sanctum’s beginning. She was to test a certain genetic modification substance and conceive infants in the hope raising super soldiers. It couldn’t be known immediately if it was successful enough to generate the next generation of soldiers, so the seven daughters birthed from the High Overseer would be first trained and observed to be put in service of the Magnus Protectorate. They were taught the doctrine from birth, learning of the Lord Protector Magnus and his deeds, the safety and protection he provided the world, and how anyone who opposed Magnus and the Protectorate was an agent of chaos threatening the world Magnus strove for. They were trained to destroy such enemies. Learning the highest martial arts and combat routines one could learn in the Protectorate, and training in several melee weapons as well as firearms. All were dutiful in their training except one. Lately, the eldest of the septuplet daughters had been plagued by dreams and visions of late. She told of how in the reality she saw in these moments, the Inner Sanctum was a cult, and the one worshipped was a demon instead of Magnus. Other parts she left out. The more comforting visions detailed a man who she saw herself fighting against, with the more recent ones becoming kinder, seeing the man in white garb affectionately and comfortingly, something reality in the Inner Sanctum had not granted her. There was one vision where she passionately embraced this man for an instant, but the most recent one she experienced was horrible. She was walking towards the man in a moment of bliss, but then felt weak, the man holding her in his arms. She felt herself fade as she stared into the man as she awoke from her nightmare. Looking up, she saw her mother, the High Overseer. “It is time you learn to disregard these ridiculous distractions and serve our Lord Protector. We have received a request from the Lord Protector about a dangerous individual running in City Area 1B37, and the main forces are having some difficulty. I’ve chosen you because you are the strongest and most skilled, but also the most troubled of late. Perhaps this will put you back in place. This is your chance to prove to our Lord Protector the value of yourself, your sisters, and the Inner Sanctum. Return with success, or don’t return alive at all.”. “Yes, mother.” Said her daughter solemnly. In the end, she knew these were only false ideas in her head, and if they proved to distract her, then she was better off dying in service to the Lord Protector. Any who can’t serve him were less than worthless. The assassin, already in a padded black uniform that allowed for flexibility and some protection, put on her mask, resembling a thinner, tighter fit of the helmets Cyber Troopers wore. Finally, she prepared her weapons, a kusarigama and an SMG. She headed for the teleportation device to begin her mission. … Jack had been running and hiding for several hours, evading pursuits and patrols by any means he could. Though he was in no place to choose, hiding in the garbage was not particularly honorable for a Samurai. But engaging the soldiers in combat would be eventual suicide. They knew and controlled the city, he knew that much, and it would only be a matter of time before such a fight let them overwhelm with tactics and force. They weren’t like the beetle drones who just marched on programming and destructed without a care. Despite their internal circuitry, these soldiers were human enough, so they all fought with survival instinct. More than that, they could plan in advance and in combat, and some were trained enough in effective tactics. He might still have the advantage in skill, but enough of them with a strategy would prove his undoing. So, for now, avoiding them was the best chance for survival. Honestly, Jack couldn’t believe he missed fighting the robots. Fortunately, night had fallen, allowing the Samurai to move more easily under its cover. He went to the top of a building looking down at the streets to see the soldiers’ patrols still ongoing. The citizens appeared to be confined in their homes, frightful of what happened. What happened? There is no sign of Aku, who was responsible for everything wrong with the future before. I thought with him gone, things would be better, but now the future makes even less sense than before. Men made of flesh and technology, people cowering in their presence, and Magnus is connected to all of it, but how? Why?” Jack thought. Jack’s thoughts were interrupted yet again as the bladed edge of kusarigama crackling with energy grazed his side, leaving a minor injury. He turned to his midair opponent, a figure in black wielding both the weapon and then firing an SMG at him. Jack ran and roll from the bullets to his cover, somehow feeling a sense of nostalgia in the danger. His second of reprieve ended, as the assassin appeared over his cover and ran the chain of her weapon towards him, wrapping it around his weapon, closing in as she tried to wrench it away. Jack resists, but it gave his opponent the opportunity for few jabs at his chest, jaw and forehead, disorienting him. She held the bladed component of her weapon and lunged, intending for a fatal strike on the hated enemy of Magnus. But Jack foresaw that follow up and was able to lift his sword just in time for a block. He then grabbed the chain, wresting the weapon and her hand as he headbutts his opponent, freeing his sword from the chain and breaking pieces of the assassin’s helmet. His opponent shook her head, but not simply from the headbutt. Ever since she saw the stranger, her head was actually searing in pain, as the dreams and visions felt very real, this man, was he the same one from her visions? That was ridiculous, he was a criminal, an enemy of Magnus. Yet the details were starting to become clearer as they fought, as though a past life recalled from this encounter. She had fought this man in another time, and with her sisters. They had served a different lord, but in the end, they couldn’t succeed, and she was the only survivor, her opponent spared her and shown her the truth of the demonic master. The assassin turned from her reforming memories to her target, as Jack charged with her sword, with the assassin, evading the cuts as bust she could and parrying with the blade of her weapon. That was cutting it close though, as the enemy’s blade had left a cut here and there, as well as chipping off more of the mask. Jack himself wasn’t having such a headache, but he swore this was familiar. The weapon the fighting style, and even the presence his enemy gave off was so familiar, but where had he seen it before? No, that was absurd, he thought, she was gone, why would she even be here, of all places? His mental distraction took enough focus though, as the assassin gout in a headbutt and punch of her own, sending him off from the edge of the building as he grabbed a hold of a jutted edge in the next though. He prepared himself by placing his feet on wall he had grabbed, a propelled himself as the assassin went in for midair attack. The countered each other and reached opposing ends, Jack grabbing another jutted edge and as well as the assassin. They continued this pattern as they descended to the ground of the alley, and the assassin’s mask cracked more and more from the force of the fight. She found an opening though, as she was a little above Jack as the parried one another, allowing her to kick him down to the ground below. They had descended enough that the fall wasn’t serious for the Samurai, but the impact took the wind out of him, giving the assassin her chance as she descended upon him to bring her blade upon him. As she stared into the eyes of her enemy though, she knew she had met this man somehow, that he was not the enemy, and the worst mental attack yet had seized her. The visions turned into clear memories crashing into her thoughts, and it was not pleasant as she screamed plain, colliding her face with her hand as she made sense through the raw information and pain, causing her mask to finally collapse. Jack was dumbfounded by what had happened, as he had no idea what was happening, but the slow reveal of his enemy’s face stirred more familiarity from the surface. Finally, the assassin’s pain subsided and she released her hand from her face, and Jack knew without a doubt who this was. “A-Ashi?” said Jack in stunned disbelief. The assassin, clearly the same Ashi, with the same face, hair, and voice he had known when they journeyed together, looked at him with a mixture of confusion and recognition as she said, “J-Jack?” … “A-ASHI!” Jack yelled, all the tension and uncertainty turning to joy as he hugged her as passionately as he could, no longer thinking how or why, just glad he could see her when he thought she was lost. Ashi, was surprised by this, but was also swept by feelings of joy to see Jack again, returning his embrace. After a moment, Jack parted to look at her, still overjoyed, but with questions. “I-I don’t understand Ashi, I’m happy to see you, but how are here, I thought you vanished, why are you in a place like this?” he questioned. “I don’t know, it’s like I remember two lives now. The last I remember was seeing you when I faded at the wedding, and now I also have these memories of training with my mother and sisters,” Ashi responded and then suddenly stopping with fear and shock, getting a grip of the situation. Her mother and sisters were alive again in this new timeline, just as brutal in the last, only serving some new self-centered master. Chances were the doctrine was false like Aku’s. Fear sprang up in her mind, not for herself, but for Jack. She had been sent here under orders from the Lord Protector to kill him. She would never do it now, having recalled her previous life with him, but the things she had learned of her current world, though limited, told enough to confirm something grave. Jack was not safe. He somehow antagonized the most powerful entity of this world, and now they wanted him dead. Ashi didn’t care now about the rewards and consequences of success and failure of her mission, now she just wanted to save Jack from the massive danger coming for him. “Jack, listen to me, you need to go back home, now!” she said to him with stern fear. “Wait, go back, not safe, what are you talking about Ashi?” said Jack confused and alarmed by the fear in her voice. “Don’t question it, Lord Protecto-, ugh, Magnus wants you dead, so-aahh, quick follow me!” she commanded as she pulled him along as a pursuit vehicle came towards them flashing a light down, barely escaping the search light. Jack, though puzzled, did as told, as Ashi led him down to the lower areas of the city, as it lost its elegance resembled a ghetto. Here, it seemed the patrols stopped looking, allowing Jack and Ashi to catch a breath. “Ashi, what is going on here, who are these people, and how do you know of them?” Jack asked perplexed. Ashi looked at him with a grim look in her eyes, telling him of her brutal life in this grim new world. She explained how she had been having strange visions of him lately, and meeting him caused her previous memories to return, but she didn’t know how. Maybe her existence then and now was connected in some way. She explained the Inner Sanctum and its doctrine, noting it wasn’t all too different from the Cult of Aku, and so what she learned there was very suspect. She did know now that her family had fallen into similar state of brutality as last time, which saddened Jack, knowing Aku’s destruction didn’t spare Ashi from that life. Ashi disregarded that, and told him what she confirmed based on what little she knew was true from the Inner Sanctum and her current observations. That a man named Magnus now ruled the world, supposedly eternal and unaging, and commands all the world through the power and force of his Magnus Protectorate, claiming to do it for the protection and guidance of all, as he was some hero in the past that saved everything, that he knew best. Ashi definitely doubted that part, as her upbringing was too similar to Aku’s rule, not to mention that it was Magnus that ordered Jack’s assassination. Jack more or less understood what was happening, realizing he had basically landed in a future run by an extreme regime. “So, Magnus rules this world in the name of “protection”, and the government is run by his Protectorate and… Cyber Troopers was it?” Jack asked. “Cyborg soldiers basically, at least that’s what I heard.” Said Ashi. Jack affirmed this, as he had fought cyborg bounty hunters before. It didn’t comfort him that he would be needing to face more and more human opponents now, as killing living beings still left him with the pain. “Anyway Jack, you need to find some time portal and head straight back home! It’s not safe here!” Ashi pleaded with him. “I can’t go back home, not until I have Magnus answer for the crimes against my people.” said Jack sternly. Ashi looked confused by this, and Jack understood he didn’t explain his side. He explained how he had been readjusting to life back home, but how that was all torn from him when Magnus invaded from the future. Ashi was perplexed, wondering how and why Magnus time travelled from here to the past. It didn’t make sense. When he told of how Magnus had slaughtered many of his people and fatally struck down his father the Emperor, Ashi was caught in grief. She had not known him long, but she had become acquainted with him enough to see a kind, honorable man who gave his all for his family and people, and knew how close to Jack’s heart he was. “Even when I return, father… likely won’t survive his injuries.” said Jack in saddened pain. “Jack…, I’m sorry.” said Ashi, at a loss on what to say now. Jack decided that it was best not to dwell on it and focus on figuring out his new quest. “For now, I intend on blending in and getting information, in the hopes to find where Magnus is and how to confront him.” said Jack with determination. “By yourself, are you crazy?! He has armies all over the world, and you couldn’t beat him in your own time. Like hell I’m letting you go alone.” Ashi said with irritation. Jack looked at her in surprise, saying “Wait, you mean…”. “Well yeah, what else did you think I was going to do? I think those cuts and bruises show I can still beat you to the punch.” said Ashi with confidence. Jack looked at her affectionately, relieved he was together with her again and not alone in this formidable endeavor. That tender moment was interrupted by the sound of screaming and struggling down the street. “HEY, LET GO YOU CYBORG BASTARD!” screamed a male voice with similar remarks from a female voice. Jack and Ashi ran to the site to see two youths a bit younger than them in their very early 20s, being held and dragged away by Cyber Troopers. “Let them go, now.” Ashi said, not intending to give a second warning. “Hey, wait, is that…” said one of the troops. “White robe, sword, yeah, he matches the target description, so shoot on sight." The troops disregarded their captive to shoot at them. Ashi pulled her SMG and shot back, riddling one troop with holes while other ducked and looked for cover. It was an opening for Jack though, as cut through the guard before he could fire in surprise. The two youths looked up at Jack and Ashi in surprise. “Who are you, are you dead-enders too or something?” said the girl in surprise. “Dead-enders?” said Jack, looking at Ashi who only shrugged. “Grr, listen thanks but we can’t stay here, more will be here soon!” said the young man in frustration. “Um, you can come with us, if you want, we have a hideout they don’t know about.” said the girl cautiously. “I-I guess it’s cool, just follow quickly.” the boy grumbled. Jack and Ashi looked at each other and affirmed, a safe refuge would be best in this situation. “Yo, what are your names anyway?” said the boy. “Ashi” she responded. Jack reminisced about his name from the last future, now using it once more. “You can call me Jack.” Author’s note: So, that was a huge information dump, huh. Sorry for being wordy, but I kind of visualize the scenes in my heads and put detail in the actions, characters, and settings so people can see it when they read it. It is Samurai Jack after all. So, Jack’s hasn’t been in Magnus’s future for two minutes and he’s already a criminal. Speaking of the Lord Protector, I hope you like him so far. My sketch wasn’t so great, but basically his build and age is similar to Jack, only he’s a head taller, has a more pointed chin and nose, and wears armor designed for both flexibility and protection. There will be plenty of character building that parallels and contrasts him and Jack, but right now I wanted to portray an antagonist who is brutal as a regime ruler needs to be, human and humorous in a human way, such as his frustration with politics and the incompetence with his troops. They might as well be discount storm troopers in his eyes, huh? Now, Ashi. I wanted to bring back Ashi in a meaningful way and have her become a part of Jack’s journey early on. I could have delayed the memory catch up, but that felt like interfering drama. Basically, she is technically the same person, just having lived a different life in Magnus’s future. Since she was the center of the time paradox before, I’m kind of screwing with time travel concepts like Butterfly Effect and whatnot (like it’s not vague enough already. I also plan to use this in her character building later. Speaking of that, there will be original characters joining their journey in later chapters and fleshing out. For now, I will be building up the world and action, so if you’re wondering where the hell the Scotsman is, calm down, I’ll get to him when the story permits. Be patient for Chapter III.

[arc-ada]

Baby's first liveblog - Save Me! Lollipop ep1

This isn't my frist time watching this series. That would have been back sometime in my early middle school (maybe younger?) years, shortly after discovering the wonder that was the free anime section on Hulu. As such it was one of the frist anime I ever watched.

My actual memory of the show is limited to the point I'm honestly kinda surprised I found it again.

The things I remember are as follows:

1.  Even at the time I would have hesitated to call the series as a whole......good. I probably wouldn’t have called it bad either but... (not that that stopped me from staying up late bingeing it)

2. The characters are very clearly color coded.

3. I found the bad guys oddly compelling (the main aspect I'm curious to see whether or not it holds up)

4. The gist of the plot was that the female lead swallows some magic something and tus needs protection by the mail leads

5. The people who want the magic thing intend to basically rip it out of her killing her in the process

6.The villain's backstory ep made me sad and frightened and I loved it

7. My tiny child self’s introduction the concept of the beach ep. horribly risqué by my standards at the time

8. The ending was kinda disappointing

Also worth noting that I'm watching the dub, because that is how I originally experienced it.

So here goes episode one “The Princes Who Fell from the Sky!” 

I may regret going with the dub. (I'm leaving the captions on to so then I can get dialog in screen caps and type less.)

We open with our main heroine finding herself unable to relate to her friends attraction to a boy. #relatable

She then relates her Ideal guy in a manner that's generic but not as generic as my old go to of “a nice one I guess?” #significantly less relatable

The main attribute she seems to want?

Willingness to die for her.

Somewhat interesting that there's already two of them in her fantasy sequence

Honestly I kinda understand getting the urge to stick the magical-gem-thing in your mouth even without mistaking it for candy (the candy thing is definitely a better reason than that though)

Part of the way through the conversation, after the subject of cake comes up, One of her friends starts quietly repeating the phrase “I love cake” while the other friend keeps talking to Pink (I’m just gonna call her pink). I now headcanon nameless friend #2 as being autistic. I’m glad she’s happy.

The rest of the main cast literally fly down from the sky, accompanied by a bunch of other randos. Our heroine is rightfully alarmed by this, causing her to swallow the gem. The male leads calms her down.

instantly meeting her one real standard.

I'm glad I've reached a point in my life where I don't feel the need to try and force myself to enjoy this particular wish fulfillment fantasy

I have thoughts about this whole theme song but I'm just gonna leave you with the opening line.(if you ignore the chanting the song really opens with, that is)

Our heroes quickly figure out Pink has swallowed “the crystal pearl” as it is apparently called.

Blue proves himself to be the less composed of the two but Red keeps him in check.

Things are all moving pretty fast right now.

useless sidekick I haven't felt the need to mention until now screws things up.

This new guy's voice is the worst yet and that's saying something.

Middle school me is legitimately shocked and scandalized. I feel nothing.

The boys reveal that they’re sorcerers from some non-earth place, despite already having seen them fly and use magic Pink doesn't believe them.

The boys go into more detail explaining that there completing a final exam of sorts by playing a really intense and competitive game of fetch. Whichever team gets the pearl becomes pro-sorcerers

Pink finally believes them and realizes the danger she's in (or at least the inconvenience of her situation.)

Magic HQ say they can make a medicine to get the pearl out

(well isn’t that a fun coincidence) Honestly kudos for these guys for keeping their Wizard aesthetic intact without going so far as to ban usefull things like  cellphones. (looking at you harry potter)

The boys vow to protect Pink just in time for the giant owl to show back up.

Red tries to employ the same escape strategy as before.

Gotta get this all laid out as fast as we possibly can. Definitely not any more interesting ways to convey something like that than to just say it.

The party splits up to get Pink away from  the villains. Half of them fly into the air with the less-useless-than-expected-sidekick

She then proceed to try to wriggle her way out of blue's arms (no really) almost falls to her death and then gets embarrassed when he catches her.

Middle school me and I are a bit more on the same page here, seriously man what the hell. I thought we were supposed to like you.

They plummet for real this time. Pink uses blues face to break her fall. Good on her.

I feel like this show really doesn't trust its audience to follow what's happening at all. It's seems like every thought the characters have needs to be said out loud at least twice.

Purple cuts right to the chase.

I have a certain respect for Purple.

Brown's (? I swear I remember this guy being Green before. I may have misremembered just how color-coded these characters are) laugh sounds like a chipmunk.

Purple begs for sweets, Brown contemplates murder.

I can't decide whether or not I'd find Purple annoying if it weren't for nostalgia. As it is I'm getting the warm fuzzies.

Okay that's adorable.

Cuteness continues.

Brown gets jealous. Declares he won't protect Pink.

Purple establishes why she and brown are the villains. Much to Pink and Middle school me's surprise.

look at her little face

I love her so much

Absolutely brutal.

Brown is inclined to agree.

I guess the sudden turn they take from non-threatening to dark is part of why they stuck out in my mind so much.

If they had shown this scene first I would have thought they were overreacting.

oh my gosh

holy shit

she just

okay so the snakes are browns thing and he has a magic whistle

Okay apparently the flute is a bigger deal than I realized

also

the ugly CG snake seems like a needlessly complicated and drawn out form of murder.

there's multiple flashbacks to early in the episode with dialog I don't remember being there before?

admittedly there's a decent chance I just got caught up writing this and forgot. (I swear I didn’t intentionally get a screenshot where it looks like she’s staring at his ass)

I'm pretty sure this is new.

Pink gathers up her strength and cries for help. This seems to make the boy's magic doodad tracker, which I believe I failed to mention before, go off.

it's shaped like a teddy-bear

The boys Make a dramatic entrance kool-aid man style

Oh? Snap? What an amazing zinger?

Magic fight ensues. Baddies continue to be very open about the plan to brutally kill Pink.

Brown makes clear his plan to hypnotise red and blue while awkwardly talking around his flute.

Pink gets all martyr-y

sidekick assures Pink Red and Blue can't lose because “there fighting for something Important”

We get some backstory about red and blue having been protected by someone themselves once. Other than the fact this guy uses he and is older than blue which don't know who but they make sound like stand up dude.

This does go a way to make blue seem a bit more likable so I guess it serves it's purpose pretty well.

Honestly the whole protection spiel here is fairly sweet even if it's super cheesy. I think the explicit mention of familial love makes it a lot more palatable than the plain “boy knights protect girl princess because that's how it works” thing they've had going on up until this point.

Doesn’t really relate to the situation at hand all that well though. Trying to make us feel the same way about pink and these boys she just met rings pretty hollow. and trying to have that same dynamic in what is clearly intended to be a blossoming romantic relationship is still pretty uncomfortable. It’s really one sided. I'll be interested to see how they handle that and if Pink gets a chances to come into her own any.

The Boys get what looks like a magical-girl transformation sequence but they don't change clothes.

Blue blasts off the baddies à la team-rocket

I love her

The team reaffirms that everything's cool between them and their devoted to their mission. Pink swoons some more.

until hijinks ensue again

And so we reach the end of the episode and I am left with the start of a beautiful collection

[hisapcstle-a]

tumblr loves breaking my spirit and my tags (pt1: general)

[theothermuses]

2: What do you struggle the most with when roleplaying?3: Has there ever been a moment when you were uncomfortable roleplaying something?

Okay. This is gonna be verbose because it’s Munday and I don’t wanna just give a superficial answer when I can use this time to let you see into the Niki-brain. There will be a TL;DR at the bottom ;) But you’re a dear friend and so I’ll just give you the nitty gritty and just be totally real for the world to see. 

2: What do you struggle the most with when roleplaying? Physical description. Of any kind. Whether it be clothing or surroundings or what a character looks like. I can tell you and describe their emotional state all day long, but don’t ask me the details of their house! I think this stems from my personality, and the fact that I don’t really put that much worth into aesthetics, it doesn’t generally matter what I’m wearing at the time (unless I’m uncomfortable in it) or what my surroundings look like, everything I experience personally seems to be filed away per the emotions I’m having at the time. So if you were to ask me to describe what I’m wearing, I would say “Jeans and a long sleeved shirt”, it’s not first instinct to go “Blue jeans, and a long sleeved black shirt with a V-neck and thumb holes cut out” Unless it’s something wacky that’s meant to draw attention, I usually skip over describing it. I SUCK at it and it’s something that I really need to start working on as a roleplayer. 

3: Has there ever been a moment when you were uncomfortable roleplaying something? Absolutely. All the fucking time. At least once a month. I’ve RP’d some seriously horrendous things, I really really have, my characters aren’t always the greatest people and some of them are downright scary and go to scary places in my head. Oddly enough, despite where I let my characters take me sometimes, the most uncomfortable I get while roleplaying is when my character has either lost, or is in the process of losing something or someone that they love. You don’t see it a lot on tumblr, but in my google docs and more personal RP with other people, it’s there and rather frequent. 

It sounds really weird and stupid, I know. I think that stems from some personal abandonment issues from my past.So when I’m doing something I love (Roleplaying) and it’s my escape and my happy place and the place I use as an outlet, and I’m faced with this very thing… it effects me emotionally far more than I’ve ever ever told anyone.

My characters handle it slightly differently, some better than others, but in the end the same emotions always rise to the surface of me and them when I’m playing them, absolute rejection, self loathing, and a feeling of ‘what did I do? How can I fix this? Why am I not good enough?!’ and it honestly has been known to effect me on a very very personal and emotional level that I don’t think I could describe and even if I could I wouldn’t want to. 

I roleplay these things regularly, despite the emotional distress it puts on me because it’s PART OF ROLEPLAY. Things happen. Drama is GOOD. Angst is GOOD. My characters shouldn’t get a free pass to live happy fluffy lives! People die! People break up! Family homes burn down! Beloved heirlooms get lost! It’s part of life and why shouldn’t that be part of their life too? No matter how it personally effects me, I can’t ask to only play fluff, and I never have. I’d never ever want to. Characters aren’t real people, and this is all a game. 

Again this is only in the case of loss or impending/the threat of loss, not in other stuff like violence, torture, rape, their own death, and the like. It’s the single most uncomfortable thing I ever roleplay and you’d think after 20 years, I’d get used to it. I just… haven’t. 

TL;DR: Physical Description. Loss.

Edit: The latter doesn’t just revolve around people. I once had a character named Dante who had a huge stash of money he’d been saving up so he could run away from home and the town he grew up in. It was stolen… and his devastation and mine were very very real. Obviously - I get over these things very very quickly, I don’t hold it against the other player, ever, and I use it as a catalyst for better RP ;) 

[gam702mjordan]

Game 2. Part 3.

POST PREDUCTION PROTOTYPE PROJECT 2. ITS PRETTY PRETTY.

For this project we were given the task to create a game around the word dreckley. For it, I chose to create a playground game. What I did create in the end is a playground game with folk narrative elements. I’ve made something interesting, of which I am very proud. It got elements from other playground games, due to the sport like aspects of playground games their was bound to be some similarity, but I’ve not just straight up plagiarized. I have incorporated different rules from a couple different games (such as red rover, piggy in the middle and tag) and made something new from the pieces.

The game is called klav dre gerensa which is the Cornish translation of “lovesick”. The idiom comes from the Cornish language. Its genesis comes from a story about saint Agnes and a Giant by the name of bolster. Bolster falls in love with saint Agnes and preeceds to be a really creeper. She gets fed up and figures out a cunning plan to finally do away with the tyrant. She asks him to use his blood to fill a gap in a natural rock formation that occurs in Chapel Porth cliffs, unbeknownst to the giant though, the cliffs feed out underneath into the sea, and he proceeds to bleed out and die. The myth has many version, one in which he didn’t really do anything wrong, but as they have updated the myth they’ve really turned him into a right ogre (pun intended). In which he is lazy, crude, flatulent, abusive to his wife and very much a philandering creeper. Find the story here: https://www.toadhallcottages.co.uk/blog/legendary-cornwall-giants/.

I prefer the updated version; it at least makes the monsters a fiend. In the classic myth, he didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just a Christian allegory about class based romantic hierarchy, in which a brute must not defile something so pure as a saintly lady blah blah blah, and for no reason except for malice does she get him to cut his whole fricking arm off and then jam it into a hole from which he bleeds to death. All for only falling in love. In the update he at least deserves it for being a disturbing and wildly inappropriate stalker, and at the end she feels some guilt and lays flowers for him (which is also kind of problematic). What is this teaching kids? To not bat above your station? Jeez…

The game itself works as such: it is game in which 4-10 players take roles the roles of characters, the characters being; The suitors (of which there is 3-8 players) and father and a maiden (of which there is only one. Though for more suitors maybe you could incorporate a mother role so that it ups the mania of the play space- but anyway I digress…). the sutiors wish the rescue the maiden from the fathers clutches, the father want to stop all these lustfull suitors from spoiling they’re precious daughter, and the maiden wants a man to be saved from the clutches of her psycho control freak father. The play space is divided up into concentric circles of varying size. The outer circle is the garden in which are the suitors, this is the only circle that is divided into quarters which acts as constraints during play for the suitors because they are not allowed to leave their quarter while the maiden is play (getting on a tangent again matty pull it back), the middle circle is the house (in which resides the father and mother), and lastly in the inner circle, which is the maidens room (where the maiden resides). Play begins with everyone singing a rhyme and skipping (or running) around in their characters respective starting circles, at the end of the rhyme at each stage of play the suitors must in unison cry out “demedhi genev dreckley” (marry me immediately!- which ties back into idea of being lovesick and incorporates the theme).  The aim of play is for the suitors to intercept (catch) a favour that is thrown by a maiden, if they catch the favour they are allowed into the house, the rhyme begins again and the suitors in the garden skip once more. If a suitor is in the house, they must avoid the father for the duration of the rhyme. If they are caught, they are once again relegated to the garden. if they avoid the father, then they all once more say the phrase “demedhi genev dreckley” and the maiden throws the favour once more. If it is caught by suitor in the out garden then they are also allowed to enter the house and will add a level of complexity to for the father roles play state. If a suitor in the house intercepts the favour though, he is allowed to enter the maidens room and free her. This will cause the endgame state, in which the suitors in the out garden must sing the rhyme, the suitor that has freed the maiden must escape the clutches of the father with the maiden in tow. She will act as an anchor of resistance that will add another level of difficulty for the endgame state. If they are caught then they are relegated to the garden once more and play starts anew. But if they escape for the length of the time of the Rhyme then they win and will live happily ever after.

I feel like I really nailed the theme this time. Thematically, it’s strong. My idea for the mechanics to loop back and tie into my aesthetic theme beautifully, and as an unintentional bonus: they complement each other well, by using the favour and the maiden it evokes classical romance tradition. Having the lovesick suitor is my personal favourite thematic element, I really like that it all ties in with the games name. It lends itself well to easy comprehension, and therefore by extension, it explains and bolsters the rules via conceptual osmosis.

My self-imposed pillars were simple and elegant, with an intention to make something slightly layered (but still not complicated) using these concepts. I gave a myself a strict set of guidelines form which I was to strictly adherent too.  I used it as a foundation from which to build my game around it. Like a idea igloo. I spent no extra time faffing and flapping. Yes sometimes creation is iterative, but as I wanted to focus on rules as mechanics, it was beneficial for me to incorporate rules into my very workings. In regards my to whether I completed my own goal of setting out rules as mechanic and tying it back into eh theme. I feel like I got it right. The work speaks for itself. It might be a little toto complicated for children but its something that teens and young adults could play.

I feel that the character personas work nicely too. One aspect that does worry me is the sexiest undertones of the thing. I don’t think anyone would mind due to the fairy tale aspect of the piece, but if it really bothers them then they are more than welcome to change the characters around to make it more progressive.

[mercerislandbooks]

Kelleen Tries It: Doing Nothing

This month’s “Kelleen Tries It” was a tiny bit foiled. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing appealed to me by its cover, title, and back cover summary about “all that we’ve been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world.” I assumed this book was going to be some sort of self-help on mindfulness and disconnecting from social media (it has “How to” in the title), but I was pleasantly surprised. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is a theory book, brilliant and well-written one, but not an instruction manual.

She offers a guide of sorts by writing thought experiments and commentaries of her own meditations, but a reader might end the book thinking well, now what? Part of this has to do with the disjointed narrative between chapters. She starts the book by discussing her impetus for writing it, the artistic inspiration and social change that motivated her talk about the poison of the attention economy. Then she transitions to discussing times in history when people have tried to retreat from society and failing, follows that up with explorations of artists who played with the idea of “refusal in place,” and ends the book with deliberations on communities, ecological and interpersonal. In the first paragraph she states, “In a world where value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily” and the last page ends with a meditation on the power of existence in the 30 million-year-old design of pelicans.

There’s a lot going on in this book.

Ultimately, I could not take direction from someone who would not give it to me, but she did open doors for challenging my perspective. What I loved most about the book is that after all the academic discussion and block quotes, she is simply inviting readers to take the time to sit in stillness in a park and say hello to our neighbors. She doesn’t think of technology in itself as evil, instead condemning the way social media sites suck us into a never-ending slough of stimuli. She openly claims to be anti-capitalist looking for existence outside of economic and material success, but she never suggests escaping or rejecting it completely. Do I agree with everything she said? Just about — it’s hard not to see her points, to feel the wear of the everyday grind in your body and to see the change in climate around the world.

Here is a picture from when I did nothing last weekend, sitting on a bench on Marsh Island, watching dragonflies and lily pads, and getting a sunburn.

One of the ways she introduces her position is through fourth-century Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou’s “The Useless Tree” to readers:

The story is about a carpenter who sees a tree ... of impressive size and age. But the carpenter passes it right by, declaring it a “worthless tree” that has only gotten to be this old because its gnarled branches would not be good for timber. Soon afterward, the tree appears to him in a dream and asks, “Are you comparing me with those useful trees?” The tree points out to him that fruit trees and timber trees are regularly ravaged. Meanwhile, uselessness has been this tree’s strategy: “This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? ... What’s the point of this — things condemning things? You a worthless man about to die — how do you know I’m a worthless tree?”

Points of view in the social world are what she identifies as paradoxes. Good for one being is bad for another, and the tree resists in place by challenging the carpenter’s definition of usefulness.

Odell explains how taking steps to acknowledge all living things and systems as actors of their own accord can decentralize our goals from human progress to earth’s progress. She suggests paying attention through apps that identify plants by their names, by following rivers to their origins, by learning about the place we live in the physical world we share rather than the altered one online. Not only does she talk about the way nature gives her sacred spaces of peace but also how close attention to physical reality deregulates the constant desire to be plugged-in and competitive.

Where we can pay attention, we can act in something she calls “manifest dismantling,” undoing the damaging effects of attitudes like Manifest Destiny that thought of earth as a blank slate for human progress and a resource to build upon. The urgency for change comes from climate crisis but also from internal desires to escape politics and social media we all experience at some point. Resisting in place, looking away from the screen, staring at the birds, are ways to enact a passive kind of change that decentralizes our focus.

This is my childhood backyard, my mother’s garden. It should not be a wonder to me that looking towards nature stroke a note with me.

For me, this book’s usefulness materialized in putting language to struggles I’ve always had with my understanding of living in the moment as a synonym to laziness. The concept of productivity is something that has long haunted me. My personal mental health struggles with my perfectionist anxieties and the pressure and competition to be at the top of my class in college has made me think intensely about my relationship with productivity. The compulsions to be the most productive me possible may create results in the immediate but in the long term I suffered. I see people close to me suffer from the same type of anxieties, as if their free time must be used in the most productive way possible – taking on projects and mastering new skills with fervor and determination as if they have to prove they are worthy of having free time that they can show all these results from. As if their existence needed to be productive to be justified. This bothered me for reasons I couldn’t explain.

Last weekend when I chose to read and nap on a hammock. It felt like the right setting for the book.

Lucky for me, Jenny Odell’s book spoke to the issues I have been struggling with. Doing the majority of my work for the book store and tackling other freelance contracts from home has been a struggle with boundaries. Jenny discusses disappearing job stability and labor unions in the context of the modern work force when she says:

The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries – eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will – so that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.

The phrase “twenty-four potentially monetizable hours” stuck with me as the source of much of my concern, frustration, and anxiety over the past year since graduating from college. Every second is time that I could be productive, since I can work from anywhere at any time. In fact, I do work most everywhere, out with friends, at family gatherings. When I’m not working, I’m thinking about it. Now, I am not comparing the stress of my work to anyone else’s (I mean I get to write and go on Instagram and take pictures for work), but the stress of constantly feeling available to work is a growing cultural disquietude within the rise of freelance work and the gig economy. It’s even aesthetic to work as hard as possible for as long as possible, to be “always on the grind.”

Odell doesn’t have direct answers for any of these problems. In fact, she distinctly talks about finding a third option from the “yes or no but you have to say yes or else you will be fired” culture of the job market. She looks for an “I would prefer not to” response taken directly from Meville’s Bartleby and more loosely from Zhuang Zhou’s tree. In this arena, she looks to environmentalism, bioregionalism, and spaces of appearance between people. Places where context can give you a bigger picture, and the bigger picture can calm the crazy.

The trifecta of recent mind-bending.

Reading this book in harmony with Forest Bathing (see the post here) and more recently Conscious by Annaka Harris has been a trip in decentering my point of view. If literary theory and the work of Derrida and Lacan disrupted my internal and static identity in college, Li, Odell, and Harris challenged my external identity in my post-college exploration for meaning. I question what I spend my time on, when I am happy doing what I am doing, and why I become overwhelmed by tasks and time. Forest Bathing made me think of nature, not as a resource but a necessity. How to Do Nothing forced me to confront my anthropocentric point of view and remember there is an existence outside of capitalism, and that it is okay to spend some time there. Conscious lead to an upheaval of my understanding of non-human things, making me look at my external world with wonder. Together I have been re-thinking what’s most important to me and trying to put it those ideas alongside what is most important for the planet.

As I said, the best thing about How to Do Nothing is that all she suggests are small steps to looking at our world with context outside the human systems. Stop to look at a flower. Dedicate an afternoon to stillness. Take a detour on your roadtrip to stop at a reserve, a park, and remember that life will go on on Earth whether or not you make that deadline.

I’m continuing this theme next month when I post my interview with the author of the forthcoming Hollow Kingdom, Kira Jane Buxton. We will be discussing Buxton’s take on the holocene, the endurance of life, and how language frames our points of view.

– Kelleen

[kalesandfails]

speaker of your house

Friend, do you call yourself ugly? Or is it just me?

I had an eating disorder for two decades, from before I got my braces put on — from when I barely had all my grown up teeth, honestly — to, well, roughly the time I got pregnant with my first son.

For the entirely of that time, I went around telling people I was fat. I did this like I would have told them I was in nursing school, or had grown up Seventh Day Adventist, or that I had a brother.

Actual fat people, and also all the not fat people who weighed more than me (often, but not always, this was most people): I am sorry. I was kind of a a-hole.

Disconcertingly, though, as I’ve just made myself stop saying that — mostly — I’ve gotten a little closer to the truth of how I feel about myself. So now I go around telling myself, and those around me, as a matter of course, that I am ugly.

I do this by way of explanation or humor: this thing happened to me, and I understand that it happened because I am ugly. Or, the nice thing about being ugly is that I don’t have to deal with [x]. 

And, of course, I do it so I don’t ever forget. Because possibly the most basic lessons I learned growing up is to not believe people who tell you good things about yourself, that those people are secretly laughing at you or feeling sorry for you. That if you believe you are beautiful and worthy, if you believe anyone wants you around, you are doing something wrong and you’re going to be punished. These punishments can range from the Trauma-Rama column in YM to the more deep humiliations of, say, childhood sexual abuse, but they will come, because you deserve them, and your sense of security hinges on a view in which the world is a giant Excel spreadsheet and things are fair and easily manipulated - although strangely, very rarely or never by you.

It’s a somewhat unconventional, but unassailable, power move: I will define myself on my own terms, even if those terms are kind of a bummer. It is, honestly, a fairly comprehensible response to a set of circumstances in which the strength of others — say, Christ — is supposedly “made perfect in [your] weakness”, but also weaknesses, are routinely attributed to you, whether you agree or not, and then identified as both personal failings and as justification for other people’s hurtful behavior.

And after a couple of decades, feeling like you’re not good enough stops being so painful, right? A more solid essential truth of life is that life is happiest for people when we can escape the trap of self, and what better way to avoid that trap by making yourself an extremely  unpleasant thing to think about or look at directly?

But here’s the thing — and gentle reader, if you think I am talking to you here, I probably am. (And if you don’t, then guys, Jonathon Van Ness is reading my blog!)

Stop calling yourself ugly. Not because you’re truly gorg - you absolutely could be, but I’m not here to die on that hill today. But because what kind of Flowers in the Attic mom or sibling or friend goes around evaluating the physical appearance of the people they love?

It’s a weird thing to say, guys! Are my kids literally more attractive than the children of other people? Likely no. But when I say my kids are the most mindblowingly perfect creatures on the planet, I’m actually  just saying that I love them, because whose mom is in any kind of a position to make an aesthetic argument about someone she has lost entire nights of sleep over, whose shit she has tenderly washed out of her own hair?

When you call someone you love beautiful, it’s like a code, but instead of being meanspirited and making people around you uncomfortable, you’re saying a totally normal thing (possibly you are also re-inscribing the stipulated connection between worthiness as a human and value as an aesthetic object, but let’s all walk before we run here, ok?)

Look, I don’t know whether you’re beautiful or not, or what that even means, but I do know that you don’t owe it to anyone to hurt yourself with mean code words.

If you have a better filter than I do, and manage not to work your negative feelings about your appearance into conversation, but you hang out with them in your downtime: stop that, too. Because even if you don’t go around saying mean things about yourself out loud, your belief that they are true is keeping you afraid.

Look, there are ways of being invulnerable that don’t involve desensitizing yourself to painful “truths”. To the degree that you think you have to do this — to the degree that other people’s possibly negative opinions of you pose a threat — you’re still doing all this extra work to accomodate the expectation that you entertain what they say to you.

Stop making yourself invulnerable to other people by laying waste to your mind-castle, friends, and start channeling your inner Nancy Pelosi. These people are staff, flunkies of the pointless and meanspirited. Do you engage with staff? You do not.

Everyone gets exactly one opinion and, imagining a world in which your estimation of yourself was more positive than someone else’s, you’re under no obligation to “face facts” as defined by that person. People who try to force you to accept their shitty thoughts and feelings as your personal reality are holding up, not a mirror, but their own weirdly private selfie. They are not a useful source of information about who you are. 

You are the speaker of your own goddamn house. They are Kelly Ann Conways, yapping with hungry eyes in the hopes that some random piece of mouth-garbage they spit out will hit somewhere and stick. (Guys, remember when Kelly Ann insulted Michelle Obama? Of course not, because no one cares about Kelly Ann and her garbage opinions).

Second thing: I don’t know the degree to which other people feel like they have to normalize painful beliefs about themselves to feel invulnerable. But judging by the odds that a stranger or acquaintance will lash out at obstacles or negative feedback or poor deli service or undocumented immigration in a given day, I will guess that I am not the only one who’s been doing this.

So, you know, be kind. People need your negative feedback much less often than you think. Most people aren’t being dicks to you because they just feel too great about themselves.

Every single person you know is getting older, and there is only one Beyonce, friends. I can think of few situations in which affirming the worth of these around you is a poor move, and to the degree that it makes you feel vulnerable, remind yourself that you’re telling that person something about them, not you.

Today, friends, picture a world where you don’t have to talk shit about yourself and you also don’t have to talk shit about anyone else, however distressing their attitude or work ethic or politics seem to you. Could there be a bigger get out of jail free card?

Happy Friday, you absolutely fucking rock star. You are 100% enough for your life, today and all the days.

[hisapcstle-a]

You are Miles Upshur, an investigative reporter whose ambition is about to earn him an intimate tour of hell on earth. Always willing to risk digging into the stories no other journalist would dare investigate, you will seek out the dark secret at the heart of Mount Massive Asylum.

MILES + OCCUPATION 👮 for a moodboard about my muse’s occupation (sent by @voiceofmany <3)