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whump-town · 4 years ago

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The Slow Crawl Back to Normal

This is the really long fic I wrote to connect the episodes in season five following Foyet’s attack. As there is a whole month between the episode 5x01 “Nameless, Faceless” and 5x02 “Haunted”. So, naturally, I can’t stand to let all the possible whump go unwritten. However, I am not amused with the material I have produced. I did write is so it is to your own discretion that you read it. Good luck

Word Count: 7870

Getting into all of this, there had been a level of expected conflict. Seven people, six of which are heavily conflicted with a broad spectrum of emotions about one of the others. Luckily, Reid’s managed to procure a little of that attention (mercilessly, really).

That doesn’t stop them, entirely.

Emily Prentiss blinks once, twice at the bulging supply bag in Penelope Garcia’s hands. The two stare at each other from where they stand. A distinct air of mischief in the room, the lightest thing to ghost through all day. And Emily lets herself immerse fully into that hope. Into its ease. “I thought I said only the important things,” she chides softly.

Garcia looks down at the bag in her hands and frowns. Setting it down beside Hotch’s leg, Garcia opens it with a distinctly sassy motion. “It is only the important things,” she defends. She opens the bag to allow Emily to look in and as she pulls it open Emily can smell Hotch. His soap and detergent soaked into the old beige sweater sitting at the top of the bag. Even in the thick cabin socks tucked into the spare spaces. “I had to pack his winter clothes,” Garcia explains. “He gets cold easily, you know that.”

Hotch does stay relatively cold most of the time. Which is how it’s so effortless for him to stay tucked under all the layers of his suits. Emily is glad someone thought of that in the face of all this madness. The paper-thin, rough blankets the nurses are allowing him now aren’t going to be very much help. They’ve all shared a room with him before. He requires several layers of blankets to sleep.

Something green catches her eye and without thinking, Emily reaches in. “What’s--” Emily moves the sweater aside and Garcia swiftly shuts the sides of the bag around Emily’s hand.

Garcia glances at Hotch and then back to Emily, whispering loudly, “that is his underwear. You can’t look at them.”

Emily tries to hide her amused smile. It’s cute, alright? Big bad Aaron Hotchner having his modesty protected by Garcia. “Alright,” Emily backs down, pulling her hand back away from the bag. “Did you bring me anything?” she asks.

Garcia nods, smiling once again bright in place. “I come with…” Garcia turns to the shoulder bag she has, pulling it around to her front. “Books!” She spreads out the pickings and Emily realizes these are Hotch’s books. Because one, even the books that are essentially just decoration they’ve been sitting on her shelves for so long, she still knows their titles. And two, the books are old classic romance novels. Pride & Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre. She would never seek out these sorts of books on her own.

There’s also the additional proof that she’s seen them in his boxes. He’s been in his current apartment for months and he’s still hardly put away a thing that doesn’t get immediate, daily use. She’d been there to help him move and had refrained from commenting on the fact that he buckled the coffee maker into the front seat so it wouldn’t fall over. Which had forced her to sit in the back seat (which might have been punishment for making fun of his “dad” jeans). So, she’d also opened his other boxes to help along the unboxing process and quickly sidetracked so she could bully him for his library.

“You’re a lifesaver,” Emily says, taking them with a grateful smile and presses a quick kiss to Garcia’s cheek. “What would we do without you?” Emily thumbs through the old novels distractedly and wonders what she’s going to learn from these books. Never mind, she already knows: that H0tch is an old boring romantic.

Which is also cute but she refuses to acknowledge that for too long.

“How is he?” Garcia asks.

Her tone is so hopeful that it makes Emily’s throat tight. The truth is grim. And her duty is to the truth but Garcia is all of the light of this job. Her hope and smile is always what greets them when they come home. In the times in which she falls, they’ve found themselves bathed in the darkest nights. Not a star in sight. Clouds hovering overhead. There is so much to consider and no time to dwell.

Emily never has to answer her.

“Sir!”

His head turns sluggishly to them, eyes moving around the rest of him as he takes in everything. Slowly, they slide back to them but he doesn’t ask where he is or what happened. He looks them both over. Typical Hotch behavior to take stock of a situation and then do little visual check-ins to comb them over for injuries. Even though he’s the one laid up in the hospital. “Hello,” he hoarsely greets. His pale lips curl up, a soft smile he has afforded only her. He can always do that one little thing for Penelope Garcia. But he can’t hold it for long and with a tired sigh, his lips fall to his more natural grimace. His blinks are slowing in rate, his eyelids already dropping again.

Although, yesterday, the doctor had been sympathetic to his situation today she is not. She’d allowed him to forgo from taking stronger doses of morphine and sedatives so that he might fight his body and stay awake long enough to say goodbye to Haley and Jack. The three different states of panic he’d worked himself into were enough not to allow her to make that mistake again.

Today, as drowsy and inactive as he has been, he has remained calm. Only waking once in a state of panic early this morning, writhing in pain and crying out softly for Haley.

“Garcia was just dropping some stuff off,” Emily informs him. “Some clean clothes so you can change out of this gown.” But she’s Emily Prentiss and she can’t stop there. “Not that I’m sure the nurses don’t love seeing your ass every time you go to the bathroom.” She looks far too pleased as she remembers-- “Oh and she was totally bragging about being able to go through your underwear drawer. She was just showing me a pair of your boxers when you woke up-- Ow!” Emily is taken by complete surprise when Garcia hits her.

Garcia red in the face vehemently denies this false claim. “I would never do that, sir! I did have to look inside the drawer but I promise I tried to keep my eyes closed so I wouldn’t see everything! I hardly saw anything at all! Just--”

“Garcia. Garcia?”

She comes to a stuttering halt, face still very flushed.

“I know you wouldn’t,” Hotch clarifies with a tired sigh. “Prentiss just has a flair for tall tales.” He says this under his breath, his eyes falling shut. It takes him a long moment but he manages to blink them back open. A few rapid shallow blinks as he forces himself to stay awake just a little longer.

Emily scowls down at him but she can’t really be mad. Not him, not when he’s like this. “I do not have a flair for tall tales,” her voice turns to a childish taunt near the end. Finishing it off with an eye roll and softly knocking the back of her hand against his.

It earns her a sleepy little huff and just the faintest smirk.

Garcia feels a little better having seen this demonstration. As the one left searching hospitals for news on him, half expecting someone to eventually break the news of his death to her, she’s relieved. No one has given her good news in two days. She hadn’t been able to leave the office yesterday in time to make visitor’s hours. All she knew is what Morgan had told her from yesterday: that he was agitated and weak.

Weak. Her boss? No. Her Aaron Hotchner is strong and brave and maybe a little sad but he doesn’t deserve this.

“Garcia?”

She looks up, taken aback by how softly her name comes out of his mouth. “Yes, sir?”

“Thank you for finding me.”

Tears gather in her eyes and she steps around Emily to squeeze his hand. “Of course, sir.” Then leaning down to kiss his temple, she adds. “Just in case though, I’m going to put a tracker in your underwear. I can’t have you all running off on me, okay?”

He makes one of those signature Hotch grunts, a soft noise that comes from the back of his throat.

“I love you, sir.”

If he finds anything in his boxers, he’ll consider that a lie.

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

Aaron Hotchner may be sedated and spending roughly 75% of the last three days hazing in and out of sleep but he’s not stupid. He’s been a profiler for the better part of a decade, longer really, and he didn’t just bat his eyelashes to work his way up to Unit Chief. “You’re angry,” he says.

Dave and Emily have been shouldering the majority of his visiting hours. Everyone has stopped by (even Reid, though it was two in the morning and that was an unapproved meeting) and continues to stop by but seemingly out of duty rather than because they want to see him. Not that Hotch can really blame them. He’s seen himself in the mirror, he’s not looking too hot.

Today is Dave’s day and he’s been with Hotch since seven-thirty this morning. Long enough to watch Hotch sip at some apple juice and neglect the chicken broth he was supposed to have for lunch. His lack of appetite is starting to become a problem and that is what Hotch assumes Dave is frustrated with. Reasonably, Hotch does know he needs to try a little harder but apple juice got boring two days ago and he’s not really a fan of room temperature soup.

Looking up from his Sudoku, Dave sighs. An obvious tell. He straightens the spine of his book. “I’m not.”

Hotch grunts, so he is mad. They’ve had this conversation enough over the years for Hotch to be able to tell. If Dave weren’t mad he would have spent more time clarifying he’s not mad at Hotch, not denying it. Rightfully, Dave always assumes first and foremost that Hotch thinks he’s mad with him. Which is fair because, right now, Hotch is fairly certain Dave is mad at him.

The sound of his grunt makes Dave look up and Dave finds himself looking at the side of Hotch’s head. The younger man avoiding his gaze. Fuck. Sighing, Dave places his pen in the middle of the pages and puts the book down. Way to go, Dave chides himself. Now he’s going to have to backpedal. Might as well call Emily now and tell her to come in and sit here with him. But that would only make matters worse. Then Hotch would have damning proof Dave is mad at him.

“I’ll-- I’ll try harder,” Hotch whispers, scratching dully at one of the bandages wrapped around his forearm. “I will.”

Dave leans forward in his chair, head hitting the palms of his hands with a groan. Does this nonsense ever get easy? “I”m not mad at you, Aaron.” He rubs at his face, around his eyes until he can sit back up. He’s not mad at Aaron, really. He’s fucking livid with George Foyet. With Hotch’s landlord who Derek has been on the phone with for the last two days arguing about nothing and everything. He annoyed with this hospital and the stupid rules but he’s not mad at Hotch.

Dave can tell Hotch doesn’t believe him. “Aaron,” Dave calls softly. He reaches out and puts his hand on Hotch’s thigh, pushing a little to get his attention. “I promise I am not mad at you, alright? You’re doing great.” That’s not really proof. In all honesty, now Dave’s thinking about how all this could have been avoided. If he’d just left Hotch in Seattle all those years ago. Someone would have taken him, surely, he was too good for that office but if Dave had left him for someone else they wouldn’t be here.

Haley and Aaron might still be married.

“If I was mad at you,” Dave asks, “would I have asked Derek to bring you better soup and popsicles?” He forces himself not to react when Hotch glances over after hearing popsicles. “Those little plastic ones that you like--” Dave knows the name but he’s baiting him.

“The colorful ones?”

Dave nods, “yes, those.” He’s not sure what kind of soup Derek’s bringing, likely just whatever is offered at whatever takeout place he stops at. But they are getting the popsicles. They had been the only thing in Hotch’s fridge. Garica had been appalled by this when she told him.

“It was empty, Rossi! Old coffee creamer, a half-gallon of oat milk, and popsicles. That’s it.”

Hotch hums under his breath, turning his head into the pillows. The only positive side to being sedated is that he doesn’t think about Foyet. There are nightmares but he can’t remember them. By the time he wakes someone’s already at his side, walking him through the steps of calming down. He can’t even remember what upset him-- or even if it was Foyet. The attack is fuzzy, lacking the hard edges of memory, but he does know this is temporary.

Soon, two days from now, if not tomorrow, they’ll lift him off the hard drugs. Rest will come second to recovery and he’ll remember.

But for now, he sinks into the thoughtless, dreamless slumber.

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

Technically, this is day two in recovery and he should be up on his feet being forced to walk the long empty halls every hour or so. Core strength isn’t built overnight but as Hotch is learning, it can be killed that quickly. For now, they let him rest as his first twelve hours here on the unit were full of rapid downs. He’d nearly pulled stitches having a nightmare and saying goodbye to Haley and Jack did a number.

Sitting by his side, JJ finds herself thinking about the hours she wasted. Where was her conviction? That gut instinct everyone else seems to run on? She’s known him for years, longer than Emily, and yet she hadn’t thought anything of his phone going to voicemail. Nearly a decade of working by his side and she knows, she knows he always answers. No matter the time, no matter what he’s doing-- grocery shopping, trying to shower, or feeding Jack.

If she calls, he answers.

Her guilt means nothing. It’s just some cruel tactic she’s deployed to distract her from what’s really bothering her. He’s alone. JJ had made those calls to the marshalls. She’d packed Jack’s bag, throat tight as she stacked his little shirts into his even tinier suitcase. And now they’re gone. Already ghosts that Foyet will not be able to find.

That Hotch won’t be able to find.

Her voice is small and trampled but she can’t stand the silence. “Sometimes I forget how he used to be.” It surprises her to hear her voice just as much as it does Emily, who sits on Hotch’s other side, a book loosely held in her lap. She knows Emily’s silence is shock and not just her ignoring JJ. Emily is just one of those people whose silence is often more telling their words-- the same is true for Dave and Hotch.

It’s under that attention that JJ now finds herself a little shy if not stubbornly selfish. Suddenly, her desire to speak is gone. The memory she bathes herself in is her own. To share it makes it lose its depth and the warm familiarity of Aaron. But on Emily presses. She waits silently for JJ to find her voice once again. And JJ decides that she’s being silly. Wistful if not a bit melancholy, which there is no need to be. Aaron Hotchner is alive. Steadily he breathes, he aches, and he lives right between them.

She looks down at the thin white blanket lazily dragged up over Hotch’s hips. Conjuring the image of that Aaron Hotchner from so long ago. Young and smiling with suits that didn’t really fit his long legs. “He was one of those fairytale romancers,” JJ says. She smiles at the look of horror and shock on Emily’s face. This, for that face, is why JJ had begun. They each have this version of him, totally unique to them, that they get to have in these moments. He is not the same man to JJ as he is to Emily. “You could tell he believed in love. He was so--”

Emily is sitting forward in her chair. The book she’d brought lays face down on the bed, inches from Hotch’s limply curled fingers. On he breathes with his trembling crescendo exhales and raspily choked inhales. Oblivious to them.

“He was so enraptured by Haley,” JJ confesses softly, looking to him now. Attempting to manifest one of his smiles from his thin, pale lips. “But mostly,” she finally confesses, “he was so… boyish.” Emily makes a surprised sound, flinching back a little as she considers this information. JJ finds herself watching Emily’s every expression. She wonders who it is that Emily knows as Aaron Hotchner.

JJ smiles as she continues, humored. She’s thrilled by this idea that there might be more to him. That if she tells Emily about her Hotch, Emily will tell her own version. And now, in her hands, she’ll have a larger idea of him. More. She wants more of him so that maybe less might be stolen.

“Once,” she admits, “I told him about the girls from my liaison classes.” It was years ago. So long she needs a moment to really remember the whole thing. Specifically for those little moments and flashes in his eyes. The blush on his cheeks when he laughed and looked away. How he’d shaken his head. “The girls down there are just… they were in awe of him.” She smiles, “and how could you not be? He is handsome and has great manners.”

Emily smirks, rolling her eyes. “Just having manners makes him better than the apes down the hall.” True. Half of the men that work in the building with them are creeps. It seems as if the only half-decent men in Quantico work on their team. Everyone else is more than questionable.

JJ nods in agreeance.

“...Em’ly?” Hotch groans. His eyes are pinched shut in pain. “ ‘m gonna be sick,” he mumbles. He swallows thickly, loud enough for JJ to hear.

Emily gets up in a flash, nearly tripping over her own legs. “JJ raise the head of the bed up,” she instructs.

JJ freezes for only a moment. She hasn’t spoken to Hotch since yesterday when he woke up and they figured out Foyet was targeting Haley and Jack. He’s been asleep every time since. Now, there’s panic in his eyes. As she raises the bed, he grabs her hand. His fingers wrapped tightly around her wrist. Enough to make her stop.

“Wait, wait!” He pants softly, breathing hitching as he writhes uselessly. His chest is on fire, only making his stomach churn more. A few seconds pass and he realizes that he’s going to vomit regardless. “Okay,” he says tightly.

JJ glances at Emily but continues on.

Hotch makes a pained sound, moving his hand from JJ’s wrist. He doesn’t open his eyes, just presses his hand into his stomach. The cramp of his churning stomach more severe than the agitated stitched across his abdomen. “I need the--” his hand wraps around the bucket but Emily keeps holding on.

It’s just water, JJ notes. Being a mother has numbed her to bodily fluids so she doesn’t mind vomit.

Emily doesn’t flinch either. The first time she had. It had taken them both by surprise. Now, for about the fourth time, she just shakes her head. Offering the comfort she can think to-- rubbing his back as tears stream down his cheeks. She already knows they’re going to threaten an NG tube, a longer stay, or something. They always have something to say nothing to help. He’s maxed out on pain meds and still in pain.

They want him to drink something other than water to get his blood sugar back up but hasn’t managed to keep anything down since they started giving him the juices.

Breathlessly, Hotch falls back against the pillows. A light sweat had broken out over his face. “Sorry,” he groans, twisting slowly. His hips are stiff and chest tight but he needs to ease the ache in his stomach. Everything hurts and he can’t get comfortable.

“He can’t keep the apple juice down,” Emily mumbles as she passes JJ with the bucket. JJ follows her to the bathroom to the side of the room. Out of the corner of her eye she glances back at Hotch, watching him. Whether he simply doesn’t care if he’s being watched or hasn’t the presence of mind to consider it, she knows what she sees is a direct reflection of how he feels. No guards. No shields. Just his pale face and weak body leaning heavily into the pillows around him. Lips drawn in a grimace. Pained.

JJ tears her eyes away from the scene. She can’t stand it. Emily must be so strong, JJ thinks, to sit in here with him. To do what she does without blinking. If she weren’t so lost in thought-- stuck circling this stupid idea of all the ways she just keeps failing Hotch-- she would have come up with the idea earlier. However, it takes the sight of Hotch paling even more and grimacing to spur it.

Emily guides the apple juice back into his palm, despite the fact that he turns his head from her.

“Why don’t you water it down?”

Emily frowns, “what do you mean?”

JJ extends her hand and Emily hesitantly gives her the bottle. “Toddlers,” JJ says, “can have juice, right? But it can be a bit much. You have to dilute the juice with water. It can ruin their little teeth but mostly it can spike their blood sugar.” JJ takes the little pink cup Hotch has been sipping water out of and pours a significant bit of the apple juice out. Then she takes the bottle and fills the rest with water. Taking a sip… it’s about the same ratio she’d give a toddler. “You’re still drinking the apple juice, you’re just not going to upset your stomach.”

Hotch hasn’t been throwing up the water so it’s obviously an apple juice problem.

And, sure enough, he keeps the diluted apple juice down. It provides the extra benefit of forcing him to drink more water too as he has to finish at least, one bottle of apple juice a day.

JJ needn’t worry too much about the self-imposed diagnosis of her relationship with Hotch because he, sincerely, considers her a hero for that idea.

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

Hotch wakes from a nap he can’t remember falling asleep to take. His fingers are loosely wrapped around a popsicle. It’s long since melted into an overly sugared blue slush but there is only about a third of it left or what he guesses is about a third. As the palm of his hand is protected by a paper towel that was, at some point, wrapped around the popsicle but now just hinders his ability to see what’s left.

“What times is it?”

“Five thirty.”

Hotch flinches, looking over to his left and finding Morgan and Reid. When he’d asked the question he’d meant it for JJ or Dave. Both of whom are sitting on his right side, his currently favored side. He finds himself self-conscious of this blindness. How weak, stupid even, he must be to miss either of them. Reid is sitting in a bulky wheelchair. Each of either man’s movements measured out by the soft, plastic thunk of round game pieces being moved along the bored.

They’re playing checkers and he hadn’t even noticed them.

“Why does he always do that?” JJ asks no one in particular. She glances at Hotch with an eye roll of exasperation before adding, “always rounds up the time like a little old man. It’s 5:16. That’s hardly 5:30.”

Hotch swallows thickly around his confusion. It takes a whole minute for him to understand but, graciously, JJ has already moved on to another topic. Speaking to Dave now as she searches for something in the bags sitting at the table by his side. She’d meant Reid and his, admittedly, strange habit of significantly rounding up the passage of time.

She pulls out a little bowl, it’s lid fogged with steam, and sets it down. Even though it’s small enough for her to hold in one hand, Hotch’s stomach churns at the thought of having to eat it. Next comes another bowl. “Derek brought you soup,” she says to him. “Rice too but that’s just more so you have options.”

Vaguely, he can remember receiving his popsicle. JJ’s words filling in a memory. Derek had arrived in a flurry of white take-out bags. Emily and Garcia had been around at the time and he’d been only slightly up for small talk. Which they had been strangely understanding about. To the point, Emily hadn’t overwhelmed him with the options. She’d simply wrapped a napkin around the base and given it to him. Already open.

“Do you know which you’d like?”

He can feel himself working into a cold sweat. Overwhelmed with just a simple question. He looks at JJ and then at the rice and then the soup. He’s not sure what the right answer is. Over the last three days, that’s mostly what he’s learned. Though his body craves nothing, not food, and rarely even the need to use the bathroom, he knows it’s supposed to. His eating habits are now watched and, never once in his life, being the type of person to yearn strongly for foods he’s floored. He never knows what they want to hear.

Sure, he’s craved things. An oreo in passing or a specific brand go chips. Preferred a dipping sauce for fries but…

“The soup,” Dave says. He sees that look in Hotch’s eyes, the cast-off-- no one’s home-- look. “It’s your favorite,” Dave takes the soup from JJ’s hand, watching closely as Hotch comes back. He blinks slowly, taking in what’s happening, and nods. Hotch doesn't have a favorite soup but they don’t need to know that.

Hotch looks down, blankly, as Dave gently takes the melted popsicle from his hands. He feels… a strange attachment to that popsicle. Though melted he almost wants it still.

“Eat your soup,” Dave encourages replacing the popsicle with a spoon.

Hotch’s fingers curl slowly around the thin metal. He’s officially at a stage in his life where fine motor movements like this require heavy thought. Pure devotion. He can not think, breathe, or speak while doing these sorts of things. So, eating his soup is going to be far more difficult than he’d like it to be. Neverminded how humiliating his lack of coordination is.

And they’re all here.

His mouth opens, the words I’m not hungry forming but come with no sound. He shuts his mouth and swallows thickly. Again, his stomach twists with a strange vengeance. It’s just clear, brothy soup. Soup. So, why does it feel like his entire chest is pulsing with anxiety?

He flinches when a hand wraps around his own. Obscuring the view of the spoon, of his hand and he knows he can only fight off the tremble for so long. He drags his eyes up, forces himself to keep that hand steady. JJ is touching him but she’s not looking. “Would the rice be easier?” she asks.

White, tasteless rice. Unseasoned. Just rice.

He can’t make words pass across his lips but there must be something that his face betrays because without a word JJ puts the lid back on the soup and puts the rice in his lap. It’s closer than the soup had been. When he looks up, no one’s watching. Morgan and Reid are turned so he’ll see them if they turn to watch. JJ and Dave are settling down to their own respective tasks. JJ snacking on a piece of garlic bread and Dave kicking his feet up on the edge of his bed. No one's watching.

Swallowing thickly, he moves slowly. All of his attention goes to this task. The spoon grazes the top of the lid but no one looks at the sudden clink of the metal hitting the container. He glances up once more time before forcing the spoon into his mouth. He nearly misses but no one sees. A single grain falls back onto his lap. The white rice nearly lost in the sea of the other white blankets.

Though, none of them aware, tomorrow is going to be hard on them all. For today, he remains pliable. Succumbing easily to sleep and to their request. He flinches but he lacks the strength to get too far away. So he remains in his bed, watching them from behind hooded eyes and deep, sedated breaths. Tomorrow he will find the strength for defiance.

“Not too much,” JJ says, after a few minutes. He manages only about five bites and the spoon never has more than a pinch of rice but it’s setting heavily on his stomach and he’s done. “Done?”

Heavy and warm, he nods. He feels her take the spoon from his hands and lift the rice away.

“Hotch?”

It feels like only a second has passed but when he pulls his heavy eyes back open there’s only JJ. Reid and Morgan having left and Dave too, apparently. He hums, mouth too dry to form words.

“Can you finish this juice off for me?” She doesn’t wait for a reply, just places the nearly empty bottle into his palm. He’s tired and so he doesn’t fight the tender way she pushes his hair back from his face and places a kiss on his temple. She knows there are only a few more hours left before his guard slips back into place and he fights her every move. But, for now, she can appreciate that he doesn’t fight her help so long as it’s minimal.

There’s a straw in the juice so he only has to lift his arm a little to get access to the juice.

“Hello,” Emily steps into the room, smiling the whole way.

JJ glances at Hotch but he’s glaring down at the apple juice.

“JJ,” Emily greets, “you’re relieved of your duties. Hotch is safe with me.” Emily tosses her bag on the end of Hotch’s bed, right beside where his feet are. “Don’t worry about us Jayje, we're gonna watch movies.”

JJ glances once more to Hotch, satisfied he’s back to taking tentative sips from his apple juice. Okay. She needs to sleep and catch up on laundry. She’s leaving him in good hands. Nothing to worry about. Reaching out she touches his leg, getting his attention. “Behave.”

He nods and returns back to his own head, looking down at his lap.

It goes without saying that Emily is the one who needs to be doing the behaving.

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

He goes home far too early.

If the nightmares leave him paralyzed, the wounds ooze-- Surely, he is not healthy enough to go off on his own.

He’s a body caught in the loop. Just a capsule for time, each second measured out on his paling skin. Every minute, each hour-- the blood trickling down over his ribs. Slipping into the grooves of skin and staining his once white t-shirt. He breathes but he is not living. With no thoughts, no feelings is he even a thing at all? Just a body that remains where he was left five days before to watch the sunrise from his window and set on the other side of his house. Every day. For five days.

On the sixth day, as the sun sets over the top of the house-- noon-- there’s a knock at his door. The calendar on his fridge wrestles softly with the breeze coming in from the window Derek Morgan left open in the kitchen. Their names with their own smiling stickers and color-coded which had meant to be for Aaron alone wave pathetically with each coming breeze. It was meant to be a way to keep track of passing days and who would be coming to terrorize him every day. Garcia had hung it up and wrapped his fingers around a black sharpie, smiling when she added he could even use it to mark off the days until his hopeful return to the BAU.

The knocking on the door grows silent and breathily, Hotch whimpers out in relief. He can’t think, doesn’t want to, and is glad that today, not unlike the last five days, whoever it is has wisened up and chosen to leave him alone. All he wants is silence and pain. The only things he knows for sure are real.

As the nurse had watched them go, she spoke those same words over and over. Monitor. He’s meant to be monitored and watched.

Unless the shadows that warp into George Foyet-- and not just him but Hotch’s father, long and tall, and Carl Arnold and his cackling, taunting observations, and beasts and ghosts from his nightmares. Unless those monsters count, he’s been alone.

Outside his apartment door, David Rossi and Emily Prentiss argue loudly. Enough to stir the rest of the apartment complex’s occupants but none dare stick their heads out to inquire on the trespassing. They all know of the agent nearly killed and none want to get mixed up in that (that is, the few that remain).

“There.”

Emily looks up from her side bag and Dave from where he’s leaning, unhelpfully, looking in as well. For a moment, all Emily can do is stare down at the slightly ajar door. Slowly, her eyes lift to Garica and then back to the door. “You scare me,” Emily says as her face is split by a wide, proud grin. “That, though, was the sexist thing I have ever seen in my life! What are you hiding from us, Penelope Garcia?”

Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear Garcia shrugs modestly. Honestly, she’d learned a lot about picking locks from her brothers but, most of what stuck came from Reid and a phase he went through two years ago where he decided to learn how to pick every lock he could get his hands on. She’d picked up a thing or two, as well.

All the cheer dissipates quickly.

“Stay here.”

Emily glances at Garcia but neither disobey Dave’s order. Fearful of what they might find, really.

Dave pushes his way into the room, hit with the thick scent of heavy settling. Distinctly dusty scent. “Aaron?” He steps around a pair of discarded sweatpants, a puddle of dark grey fabric on the carpet. “Shit--” Dave winces as the sight of blood seeped into the fabric of Hotch’s shirt. “Aaron,” he cups Hotch’s cheek, shaking him.

Hotch groans, peeling his eyes open. Despite the deep panic settling in over his chest, his heart beating so hard that he can’t tell the difference between the rate at which his chest aches from the stab wounds and the pace of his heart. He shoves blindly at the arms grabbing at him. His mind chanting-- Foyet, Foyet, Foyet, Foyet--

“It’s me, Aaron!” Dave pins Hotch’s arms to the bed, startled by the ease at which it takes. “It’s okay, it’s okay!”

It’s not. It’s not okay. Hotch can see him, right now. George Foyet looms just behind Dave, knife poised in hand to kill. It’s not okay and nothing ever will be again. But… they can try, can’t they?

“We’re so sorry, sir.”

Hotch leaning heavily into Emily as Rossi crouches on the bedroom floor, making the best of the little light Hotch can take. He can’t sit up by himself, his head spinning and eyes burning, but with Emily’s right arm wrapped around his hips and Dave’s hand bracing his chest he manages to stay put. Mostly, numb to movement and their voices. He just… exists without thought.

Garcia is full of anxious movement and her constant shifting and rocking is hypnotic. It draws his shaky awareness to her. He’s nearly unaware of the cold air blowing against his bare chest. “Garcia,” he croaks. He feels himself wilting, shaking in Emily’s grip. She shifts their bodies and he remains upright, despite how far he’s pulling them down.

She perks up, “yes sir?”

“You don’t have to apologize to me.”

That doesn’t feel true. Not at all, not even a little.

They left him. For once in all the years that they have known him, they listened to him, and what made them think that was okay? They’d disregarded his orders in the field and pushed his buttons just to get a rise out of him. All for that disobedience to be thrown to the side the moment that he got home. He’d wanted to be alone and they fucking listened. Why did they listen?

There is a certain distortion that spoken word carries, impervious though is the thought. A fact only discovered through effect, is that there will never be the right word to express a thought. As it passes through the lips, it warps as all soft, loved things do. The teeth gnarl and grind and the face betrays meaning and the thought, as gentle as a butterfly's wing, with churn to dust right before the eye. Until nothing but the ash is left behind and there is only the fragment of an idea.

“I--I need help.” His words, the rocks on the boldface of a mountain, come crashing into the way of oncoming traffic. He means them feverishly, without reasons and no hesitation. No brakes, no way to stop. He’s nothing more than the stampede of tragedy as smoke fills the air, tires screeching as smoke plumes above. He, the rock, and them, the cars he collides so blindly with. “I’m, I’m afraid of what I’ll do if I’m alone.”

They are there in every moment, every breath. Overstimulated, he needs the breath of silence that passes between his own thoughts. A whirlwind of the fiber of his being lit on fire. He hadn’t known the loud thrum of the world in so long and he needs them to overpower it. He needs them to speak over the electric hum of the light bulb that hangs a fraction too low and swings with its loose wires. As the seconds tick by and the sounds kill him, he needs them gone. He needs nothing more than his thoughts and the hum and he doesn’t have the words anymore. No way to tell them that it’s all too much and entirely not enough.

That he hates how JJ touches his elbow when she’s near him. He’s certain that if she doesn’t touch him, if Garcia doesn’t ghost smiles his way, or Dave fondly knocks gently into him that he will find he doesn't exist. Nothing more than the air that he pulls lazily into lungs that no longer wish to function. Aaron Hotchner will simply cease to be and he’s no longer capable of deciding if that is what he wants. Still, his bones crave for the gentle stroke of a hand against his own. For someone to grab him by the sides of the head and kiss him until that dark pool of warmth settles once again in his stomach. To feel, in its full, love and hatred.

Please, someone, break down his so firmly built walls. Impose themselves. Force their love into the cracks Foyet’s knife has left. Anything.

It’s clear the line they walk with him. Waves lapping at his nerves. Left to perpetually guess at when they need to override his wishes and when they need to step back. It’s Hotch so it’s not easy work.

“You look good like this.” Dave smiles at the sleepy, inquiring glare Hotch sends his way but it’s hard to look intimidating while exhausted and with a head full of messy hair. Which is ink-like on the pillow, spread out in every direction. It makes Dave wish he were the type of writer that dabbles in the art of another world and, more than that, he wishes to create a character like Aaron Hotchner. So that he might force at least one version of this stubborn man to trust the love his team so willingly provides.

But men are often far more complex than what David Rossi is patient enough to put to paper so he is stuck in this world. With the grumpy asshole that he calls a close friend glaring up at him from underneath a hand-knit several toned green blanket, pulled all the way up to his chin and balled there in his fist. A gift from Garcia.

“I bought you a heating blanket,” Dave says, spreading the thick, soft material over Hotch’s long body. “Mmm,” he notes in disappointment when he finds the blanket just a little too small to cover all of his friend's long body. Which isn’t entirely surprising, nothing is ever simple with Aaron Hotchner. However, heated blankets? That’s rather simple.

Dave smiles, contently, as he cranks the blanket up. Turning the heat to the max and watching its immediate effect-- Hotch’s dark eyes drooping and his mouth falling limply from its scowl.

Garcia made him the green blanket he loves so dearly. She’s recently gotten really into knitting. Though, she’s not very good. The blanket she made Hotch is her best yet even if it’s somehow crooked. It’s a dark, dark green and Hotch has used it every night since Garcia gifted it to him in the hospital. He’s very partial to it.

Content (already falling asleep) Dave feels alright leaving Hotch in the living room while he makes some dinner. Of course, as soon as Dave has rolled up his sleeves and is trying to get some vegetables chopped up Emily has to go bothering him. Dave may not have raised children but he swears to deal with the two of them, is exactly like it. He’s seen the way children do one another. Going to brother the peaceful one to entertain themselves.

“Emily,” Dave fuses, placing a hand on his hip. He quickly drops it when he realizes he must look exactly like his mother had when fussing with him. “Leave him alone,” he finishes.

Emily acts offended, throwing her arms in defense. “I wasn't doing anything!” But they all know damn well she’s still going to go bother Hotch.

She’s stuck in this apartment and hasn't brought anything to entertain herself. Besides, he’s her friend. The whole point of him is to entertain her. That’s what friends are for. “Scoot,” she orders, glancing over her shoulder at Dave. He’s chopping vegetables, probably choosing to ignore them.

Obediently, Hotch pulls himself up. Scowling at her, not heated but just because that’s his face at this point, as he does as she requests. “I’m not sharing my blanket,” he mumbles assuredly. Mostly because he knows she doesn’t want the blanket anyhow, he just needs something to say.

Emily sits down beside him, hip-to-hip, it’s a snug fit. “Here,” she reaches around him and places a pillow in her lap, motioning for him to lay back down.

He’s already moving to obey when he grumbles, “why can’t you sit somewhere else?”

She rolls her eyes and Garcia grins at them. “I want to sit with my friend,” she answers. “Is that a crime?”

He hums, “no but it’s annoying.”

There had been a time when Dave had been jealous of the natural relationship between Hotch and Emly. Despite having known Hotch the longest, Dave can see that his friend is just easily comfortable with Emily. The oddness of that companionship is undeniable but he craves for the proximity they allow one another. So guarded except for when it comes to one another. But Dave has, also, come to terms with the fact that Hotch is just… odd.

Emily may be able to command Hotch to do things. As she had just moments ago when she’d gone into the living room and pulled his head into her lap. Dave wishes he could have that comfort. The sleepy way that Hotch had only minimally fought her until he’d settled down and caved to her. But Dave has what even Emily doesn't. Though he may allow Emily into his personal space he only wants Dave when he wakes up screaming from nightmares. When he needs help.

The same way that only Garcia can tuck blankets snugly around him. JJ can argue about how much food he’s eating and get him to eat more. Only Morgan can offer him help when he’s too tired to walk. Reid is the only person allowed to hold his hand. They take what they can get and pride themselves on what little that yields.

“What if I was bitten by a zombie?” Emily asks. “Would you handcuff yourself to me so we could be together?”

Dave quirks an eyebrow at that, shaking his head but continuing with his current task in the kitchen.

Hotch’s low response is inaudible but he hears Emily’s huff of indignance. “That’s not ridiculous, Hotch! I would handcuff myself to you! That’s love, you ass. Garcia would do it.”

Dave looks up, watching Garcia nod from the chair on the other side of the room. She’d been knitting silently, the clack of the plastic needles hypnotically drawing in comfort into the somber apartment. She doesn’t even stop knitting to look and conform with a serious nod that she would, in fact, handcuff herself to them if they were zombies.

Emily doesn’t seem to have learned her lesson with the zombie question. “What about if I was a worm? Would you let me live in your suit pocket?”

Dave hears Hotch’s zero hesitation reply-- “No.” He smirks but says nothing. Hotch adds, “I’d leave you on a pear tree.”

Emily frowns, “I don’t like pears.”

“I know.”

Garcia huffs a laugh but clamps her hand over her mouth when Emily shoots her a glare.

“Dave,” Emily calls. “He’s being mean to me.”

Dave shrugs, “I told you to leave him alone.” And as frustrated as he could let himself be he can’t. Lowly, he can hear Hotch replying to everything asked of him. The soft chuckle he lets out when Garcia says something to him and he can see the little grin in his voice when he speaks to the two of them.

Just give it some time, Dave assures himself. Before he knows it, they’ll have Hotch back. All of him and things will go back to the way they always are. They just need to decide if they’re really ready for that.

#criminal minds #criminal minds fanfiction #aaron hotchner #aaron hotchner whump #david rossi #emily prentiss #penelope garcia #spencer reid #derek morgan #jennifer jareua #jennifer jareau

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thetldrplace · 4 years ago

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Education and TV

The Desire to Learn I was thinking the other day about all the reading I’m doing. The Harvard Classics series includes a lot more philosophical, historical, and poetic works than just fiction novels. In the current piece, Locke’s On Education, as well as others in the series, there have been suggestions as to what kind of books ought to be used for training up children. I’m obviously interested in the subject, since I am reading precisely to expose myself more to these works and expand my understanding of life and the world.

My Own History with Reading I remember years ago, after I had gotten out of college, thinking- I feel like I haven’t read enough of classic literature. Now I probably would NOT have wanted the extra assignments when I was in school, being much more interested in other things than learning. But once I was out, I had the sense of being underexposed to all this great literature. So I decided to buy some books and start reading. I did this for a while, but then somewhere through the years, I didn’t keep up, until 2018 and a friend revived this instinct.

I had always been a good reader. I could read quickly and it came pretty naturally to me. My parents were both voracious readers. My Dad loved science fiction and westerns (Neither of which I had much taste for….) and my mom loved classic romance (not trashy) and fiction, so books were always around. Even as a young married couple, my wife and I would borrow the readers digest condensed novels, the ones where they would put four novels in one volume, and then devour them. All this to illustrate that reading was something I have always enjoyed. At this point in my life, as I’m reading more philosophy and classic literature, I’m doing so particularly with an aim to understand human nature.

Ways to Learn But I was thinking the other day that education, learning, need not be restricted to reading. It would be possible, though I’m not sure of a good filter, to learn these lessons by watching TV just as well.

I’ll make a distinction. There is a pleasure in the act of reading, at least for some of us. Not everyone enjoys it. But if the point is to learn something, I tend to think TV isn’t a good way. Maybe it isn’t, to be honest, I don’t know how it stacks up against reading, but let’s say I wanted to learn logic. I could read a book on logic, learn the different names of the theorems and fallacies, read some examples, and then, if all goes to plan, I would be able to apply critical thinking to my own processes, and pick out when people are using fallacious reasoning in their arguments.

But would it be just as possible to learn those things by watching detective shows on tv? I may not learn the formal names of the arguments and fallacies, but I’d probably pick up the thinking along the way.

Of course it sounds much more erudite to say, ‘I’ve read X, Y, and Z classical texts’, rather than ‘I binged all 7 seasons of NCIS Wherever’, but it still seems to me quite possible to learn the same things.

Finding the Pearls within a Limited Time Of course a student wanting to read the best texts will have a better filter. By filter I mean, there are plenty of lists available about what constitutes the best texts so that you don’t have to read a million pieces-of-crap books, to get to the few that actually say something worthwhile. Whereas it’s a little harder with TV. Maybe at some point, there will be, but then another problem arises: “classic” TV shows, TV being a visual medium, will look dated and unappealing to whatever the current generation is, which means specific lessons would have to be recreated for each new generation in the latest visual technology.

Then there are the market forces at work. I have considered myself a free-market guy for a long time, and I still do believe very much in the market. But I will have to admit that after listening to thoughtful people from the left side of the spectrum, I see more problems with the market than I used to. One of those is probably going to keep great content from appearing on TV. And that market force is- TV, just like social media, is there not to educate you and elevate you, it’s there to keep you watching, and it will feed you whatever it feels like it has to in order to accomplish that goal. As Bret Weinstein says (DarkHorse podcast- tune in if you are interested) Markets are great at figuring out HOW to accomplish something, they’re terrible at figuring out WHAT to accomplish.

Of course we could try to implement some more centralized effort to plan out and systematically put out shows that would include content that educates and elevates, but now it’s starting to sound like Soviet Russian efforts and that just didn’t work all that well.

Reading- Efficient AND enjoyable Maybe at the end of the day, books are still the most efficient way to learn. And if we want to just read for the sake of the enjoyment of reading, that’s awesome too. I have found my vocabulary increased, although I almost always look up the pronunciation, as well as the definition, of the words I don’t know, since it’s easy to screw it up and accent the wrong syllable. I’ve found through time that it’s better if I get the pronunciation right up front, so I don’t get a habit of saying the word wrongly in my head. I have been ridiculed for mispronouncing words, but I read someplace that when someone does that, they’ve probably read the word, without hearing it in conversation. So give them a break for being someone (just like you) who is reading and learning. Good advice.

AND…. I’ve found myself able to comprehend older passages better. For example, the other day I was reading a bit to someone, and they found it baffling- couldn’t understand what was being said. The passage was from around 1700, and the English used had a different cadence, a slightly different structure. The words were all known, but it still threw them when I read it out. So I explained what it was saying and they were like- Oh. I didn’t get that at all.

Having read volume after volume of works like this, I don’t struggle at all to understand what is being said.

Summary I dunno, maybe I’m just trying to convince myself it’s cool when I’m watching TV. But I don’t HAVE to have a point, or some big life-shaping conclusion, I’m just writing down my thoughts.

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ghostsray · 6 years ago

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@wastefulreverie helped me write a fic (i wrote the story, and she edited my shitty writing into something good) based on a prompt @dannyphantomisameme came up with in the pbs server

basic summary: wes gets captured by the giw (TW: implied vivisection)

word count: 4591

___

By Danny’s standards, it was a normal day. And by ‘normal’ that entailed battling a large, snarling ghost wolf in the middle of Amity Park Park. But it was fine. After a year of experience, he was getting good at these daily fights, and the wolf provided no challenge for him. He captured the ghost with little difficulty, and the bystanders who were watching erupted into cheers. Well, most of them anyway.

“Fenton!”

At the exclamation, Danny reflexively turned his head. Realizing his mistake, he immediately regretted his decision. Wes Weston, smug as always, was standing behind him. Wes turned to the crowd and pointed out, “See? He responded to his name. He’s Fenton!”

For a split second Danny worried that they might listen to him, but fortunately, his worries seemed to be pointless. On cue, the crowd groaned and collectively rolled their eyes. Paulina put her hands on her hips. “Really, Wes?” She spoke with enough expertise to deny his claim since she always watched Phantom’s battles.

With wide eyes, Wes sputtered, “But—come on, that was solid proof!”

“Right,” Paulina dragged out. “Just because he happened to turn his head in your general direction when you happened to say a name that happened to be Danny Fenton’s last name.”

The fury on Wes’s face was almost comical. He gestured again at Danny and yelled, “He literally looks the same!”

A mischievous smile crawled onto Danny’s face. His voice carried a mocking tone when he spoke, “Gee, Wes, I don’t know.” Floating closer to the boy, he placed a hand under his chin and pretended to inspect the red-headed teen. “I mean, you look kinda similar to me, too.”

Dash laughed, lightly elbowing Paulina. When it came to watching Phantom’s fights, he did his best to accompany her. “I bet Wes is Phantom, and he’s just trying to frame Danny to keep his secret!” the jock conceived.

The steam out of Wes’s ears was nearly visible. “Seriously?” he seethed. He held out his arms Will Smith-style toward Danny and shouted, “How can I be Phantom if he’s right here?!”

“Duplication, duh,” Sam suggested. She and Tucker had been observing the entire exchange, straining to stifle their laughter.

Wes growled and grabbed a fistful of his hair. “Whatever, I’m leaving!” he decided. He fled from the park, ignoring the snickers from the crowd.

Phantom gave one last heroic wave to his audience before he vanished from the visible spectrum. A few feet away, no one noticed the flash of light behind a nearby tree, nor when Danny Fenton stepped out beside it. He joined his friends and watched the crowd disperse.

Once they were out of earshot, Sam was the first to speak. “Do you ever feel bad, bullying Wes like that?” she asked. The three friends met eyes for a moment. Breaking the tension, they all burst into laughter.

“As if,” Tucker choked. “That guy deserves it.”

Swallowing his laughter, Danny straightened himself. “Anyway, I’m sure Wes will be fine,” he pointed out. It’s not like Wes was in danger or anything, he was just… a jerk. Danny wouldn’t joke about it if it was actually serious. As it stood, the worst thing that came out of Wes’s wild accusations was some mockery from his classmates.

Danny grinned, kicking his shoes against the sidewalk. “So,” he gestured to his left, “Nasty Burger?”

Sam and Tucker murmured in agreement and the trio finally exited the park. On their way to the restaurant, they passed a bulky white van, but none of them thought much of it. It was just a white van; it wasn’t peculiar or anything.

The next day, Wes didn’t come to school.

Nobody really cared. Wes was known to cut class everyone now and then. Since adopting his obsession with Danny, he spent so many nights plotting Danny’s grand exposure that he either overslept or simply forgot about school.

Everyone simultaneously decided to enjoy this Wes-free time; any break from having his conspiracy theories shoved down their throats was welcome. Tucker even joked that this was like a vacation for them. The day passed, and Wes remained absent, but nobody thought much about it. People missed school all the time! He must have gotten sick or something.

With all his other problems, Danny easily put Wes out of his mind… until later that night. He’d finally managed to find some time to do homework (for once) when Jazz inevitably interrupted his study-time. She entered his room with a knock and held out a phone, gesturing for him to take it.

“Someone wants to speak with you,” she told him. Danny furrowed his brows. The only people that ever called him were Sam and Tucker... and they only called his cellphone.

He spun his desk chair around and accepted the phone. Before putting it to his ear, he asked Jazz, “Who is it?”

Jazz shrugged. “Some adult. He says his son is your friend.”

The only person Danny could think of was Tucker’s dad (Sam’s dad would be caught dead before talking to him). So why would Tucker’s dad be calling him? Doing little to filter his confusion, Danny raised the phone to his ear and answered it. He was taken aback when he realized that he wasn’t talking to Maurice Foley; it was Walter Weston—Wes’s dad.

“Hi, uh,” Walter started, “have you talked to Wes today?”

Danny thoughtlessly shook his head, then realized Walter couldn’t see him. “No?” Danny replied apprehensively. “He didn’t come to school today. Why?”

He heard rustling on Walter’s end of the call and assumed that he was pacing back and forth. “He’s not home. I haven’t seen him… not since yesterday. Out of everyone, I thought you might know something since he’s…”

“Obsessed with me?” Danny completed.

Walter hesitated, “… yeah.”

And suddenly, despite not caring about Wes, Danny was worried. Wes wasn’t the type to run from anything, especially away from home. And if he’s been missing since yesterday, then it was logical to believe that something must have happened….

But Danny didn’t have the faintest idea where Wes might be. He bit his lip and told Walter, “I’m sorry. I don’t know anything.”

Walter sighed, obviously disappointed. “That’s fine. Just… call me if you see him.”

The line was hung, and Danny tried to go back to his homework, but he found it hard to concentrate. He tried telling himself that Wes was fine, and that he probably slept over at some fellow conspiracy theorist’s place or something. Still, that night when he patrolled the city for ghosts, he made sure to keep his eyes out for any red-haired teen. He didn’t find Wes.

The next day, Wes was still absent. Like before, everyone else at school didn’t mind. Heck, nobody really even noticed. Those who had picked up on Wes’s disappearance had decided that he was sick and was spending his days at home. But Danny knew that wasn’t the case—not after his phone call with Walter.

“So you think Wes is missing?” Sam asked. They were sitting at their usual table in the cafeteria. He couldn’t hold it in anymore and had told her and Tucker about Walter’s call.

“He hasn’t been home for almost two days now. What else could it be?” Danny replied and ran a hand through his hair.

“Maybe he…” Tucker paused, trying to think of a good reason for Wes to spend two days away from home. He came up dry. “Okay, fine, maybe it’s a little concerning.”

Danny picked at his nails anxiously. “What if something bad happened to him because of me?”

Sam crossed her arms. “You mean because he chose to spend his time trying to expose you?” she pointed out with a defensive tone.

“Well, yeah…” Danny amended, “but I still feel kind of responsible.” He stared straight ahead, looking between the A-List and geek tables. “Remember that time he followed Skulker into the Ghost Zone to go after me?”

“You think Wes might be in the Ghost Zone?” Tucker wondered.

Danny shrugged. “It’s possible. Otherwise, someone would’ve found him already.”

“So… what?” Sam figured. “You’re gonna search the entire Zone for him?”

Danny seemed to deflate, but then he perked back up as an idea came to him. “Maybe I don’t need to scour the entire Ghost Zone….”

Hours later, after school was over, Danny made his way to the Far Frozen. He found Frostbite inside one of their grand caves and pulled him aside for a favor. Frostbite bristled hesitantly. “I am not so sure,” he expressed. “The last time I lent you the Infi-Map…”

“It won’t be like last time,” Danny assured him. “I promise. It’s just to find my friend.”

The frost giant pondered a while longer, but he eventually acquiesced. “Very well,” he said. He strode to the center of the cave and stopped in front of a floating chest encased in pale blue light. He unlocked the chest with a shard of ice and pulled out a golden scroll. Carefully, he handed it to Danny.

Danny nodded and thanked the yeti ghost. “I promise I won’t lose it this time,” he assured. With a sound resolution, he held the map a few feet from his face and declared, “Take me to Wes.” For a moment, nothing happened, and he wondered if he had been too vague; but then the map lurched, and Danny’s world spun as it pulled him out of the cave. The Ghost Zone passed in a whirl of green and purple before he was finally led straight to a newly formed natural portal.

Danny wasn’t exactly sure where he expected to land, but it certainly wasn’t here. As soon as he fell through the portal, he was greeted with the distinct scent of antiseptics and concentrated ectoplasm. It reminded him of his parents’ lab, but there was something else here… some sort of coppery smell? Danny glanced around and realized that this was a laboratory. But why would Wes be here? he wondered.

He inspected his surroundings more and found that there were tables with beakers, microscopes, and other standard lab equipment. Metal shelves lined the wall, containing what looked like… ecto-weapons? And in the center of the room...

Danny’s stomach did a sickening flip. He felt like he had just floated upside down at two-hundred miles per hour, but his feet were placed firmly on the linoleum floor. Danny fought his nausea and forced himself to keep looking at the ghastly sight.

In the center of the room was a metal table with leather straps, like some sort of demented operating table. It was long enough for a human to be laid on, at least six feet long. And in the dim light of the room, Danny could perceive the sheen of dark, crimson blood. So, so much blood.

Danny practically clasped his hands over his mouth to keep himself from crying out, an alarmed scream halfway up his throat. His stomach lurched again, and this time he was aware that he might… might throw up. Oh Ancients, not good not good not g—

He was subtly rocking back and forth to ease his stomach, to refrain from vomiting. The soft motion helped a bit with his nausea, but did little to soothe his abject terror. And suddenly, he was aware of nearby voices—both male—speaking nearby. To preserve his presence, he quickly turned himself invisible to avoid being caught.

He realized a moment later that the voices were coming from an adjacent room.

“Are you sure?” asked one of the men.

“The evidence is indisputable,” replied the other. “He’s a living human. One hundred percent organic matter, beating heart, lungs, brain—he only has trace ectoplasmic contamination, normal for Amity residents.”

The first man cursed. “So we got the wrong guy.”

Danny hadn’t even realized that he was subconsciously backing away from the voices until he bumped into a metal table. The force of the impact toppled an empty beaker over the edge, breaking it into innumerable shards.

The voices lulled. Then he heard footsteps approaching the door. Danny panicked and turned himself intangible, shooting through the opposite wall and landing in a new room. He realized too late that he had accidentally dropped his invisibility along with his intangibility when a weak voice prompted his attention.

“Danny?”

He instinctively turned to face whoever spoke his name and froze. It was like a vacuum had sucked all the air out of the room, leaving Danny’s lungs empty. In front of him was a shimmering, green barrier—most likely a ghost shield—and behind that transparent wall was… “Wes?”

Admittedly, Danny didn’t even recognize him at first glance. His usually tidy hair was mussed in every direction, dull and greasy. His cheeks were prominently sunken, like he hadn’t eaten in a long time. Not to mention, his bloodshot eyes were weary and tired, emphasized by the dark bags hung under his eyelids. Fresh bruises were peppered across his skin, mottling his skin in hues of blue and purple.

“What—” Danny’s tongue felt like it was tied in a knot, crossed over itself multiple times. “What happ—why—” He struggled to comprehend why Wes was like this, who had done this. Danny stepped close to the ghost shield separating them and pressed his hand against it, trying to move it through the barrier, but it was rock-solid.

Wes’s lips curled into a perturbing smile. His eyes were humorless, chilling. “Why?” Wes’s voice cracked. He sounded dehydrated, broken… Danny doubted he had drunk anything all day, or… maybe he had spent all day screaming. His green eyes misted over and met Danny’s own terrified, neon stare. “They thought I was you.”

His words hit Danny like a hard blow.

The joke that Wes was Phantom had existed for a long time, long before Wes was set on exposing Danny. But that was all it was—a joke. To think that someone genuinely would believe it….

It was then that Danny noticed the bandages wrapped around Wes’s bare chest. At some point, they had stripped his shirt, which allowed Danny a good look at all the new scars gracing Wes’s torso. The white gauze of his bandages was stained with fresh blood, and Danny was instantly reminded of all the blood he had seen on the operation table. Once again, his stomach plummeted—and so did he. Danny dropped to his knees and scoured his gaze across all of Wes’s injuries (that were his fault).

In his peripheral vision, Danny saw his own hand shaking from where it was still pressed against the shield. He considered turning human so he could pull Wes out, but Wes read his train of thought. “Don’t bother transforming,” he informed. “The shield works for both ghosts and humans—you can’t do anything.”

Danny’s eyes darted back to Wes. His chest crumpled at how broken his classmate looked. Wes didn’t deserve to be in this situation. As annoying as he was, he should never have been mistaken for Danny. Despite his helplessness, Danny’s core throbbed with dedication. “I’ll get you out,” he promised.

For a moment, Danny thought he saw a glimmer of hope in Wes’s eyes, a small light in the abyss of dull misery. But it was short-lived. The footsteps—the men from the other room!—returned. Danny whipped around to find a group of white-clad men holding ecto-rifles. Guys in White agents. Of course, how could he have been so blind? The Guys in White were the only organization inept enough to truly mistake Wes for Phantom, ignorant government cronies.

Danny didn’t have time to prepare when they raised their weapons, aiming to fire. Blasts assaulted him from every direction and Danny did his best to fight them off, using the ghost shield behind him to his advantage—unlike a regular wall, the shield would deflect all of their blasts back at them. However, no matter how hard he tried, he knew that it was useless; Danny was outnumbered, and he wouldn’t last forever. It was impossible to defeat them all and break Wes out of the shield before the next round of agents.

In the end, he was pinned under a ghost-proof net, bleeding in about three different places. An agent, a man with cold eyes and calloused hands, stood over him with a lopsided grin. “Looks like capturing the human wasn’t useless, after all,” he said. He placed a foot over Danny’s crouching form. “We got the ghost boy.”

Danny gritted his teeth. He was out of options, and at this point, he wouldn’t be able to escape with Wes. Sure, he still had the map, but he couldn’t just leave him behind… left at the GiW’s mercy...

But what choice did he have?

Danny glanced sideways and met Wes’s desperate stare. Guilt and defeat wracked his conscience and Danny clenched his fists. He didn’t want to… everything in him screamed not to do it. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Wes’s eyes widened. “What?”

Danny held the map in front of him, ignoring the agents’ curiosity and Wes’s gasp of realization. The red-headed boy crawled toward the shield’s wall, trembling as he fought tremors of pain, “No, no, don’t leave me—”

“Take me back,” Danny told the map, firmly holding onto the scroll. The GiW agent standing over him stumbled backward when Danny was pulled out from under the net. As he was whisked away, he heard one last desperate cry from Wes. And then, he was swallowed by a portal to the Ghost Zone, and everything vanished into green.

It was a matter of seconds before he was pulled onto a floating rock and collapsed on his knees. A glance over his shoulder confirmed that the portal he’d been pulled through had closed itself, meaning the GiW wouldn’t be able to follow him. Even though he knew that he was safe now, he couldn’t seem to calm himself down. His breath was still erratic and his hands—dang hands—wouldn’t stop shaking.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Wes and all the scars that had been marked across his pale body, followed by the image of that bloody table. Bile rose in his throat and he haphazardly swallowed it, forcing it down. If what he thinks happened did happen, then….

One of Danny’s biggest fears that he never spoke about, not even to Sam or Tucker, was the fear of being dissected. After all, he was threatened with it enough that it was a probable situation. His biology was rare; obviously getting him on a lab table was any scientist’s dream. His parents rambled on and on about dissecting ghosts that he dreamt about it too—being strapped to an examination table, crowded by scientists, sterilized scalpels digging into his skin. And in every nightmare, he was always the one staring into the eyes of the scientists, on the receiving end of their knives. Not Wes. It was never meant to be Wes.

He clenched his fists. It was never meant to be Wes. This was never supposed to happen, so Danny would make sure it never would… couldn’t… happen.

He made up his mind, stood from his rock, and propelled himself into the air. He knew the way to Clockwork’s lair like the back of his hand and was there in minutes.

“No,” Clockwork refused, upon his arrival.

Danny wasn’t surprised, but that didn’t make him any more content with Clockwork’s answer. “I know you saw what happened to Wes,” he pressed. “They… they thought he was me. It’s wrong. He shouldn’t have been captured.”

Clockwork’s red eyes studied Danny as he shifted into a child, unchanging. “So you’d rather they capture you, instead?”

Danny hesitated. Worst fear or not, Wes didn’t deserve what they had done to him. The images were burned into his eyelids: Wes’s body mottled with half-healing scars, curled up in a heap on the floor, and the sinister curl of the GiW agent’s lips…. He met Clockwork’s eyes with a determined stare. “Yes.”

Clockwork’s sharp gaze softened, shifting into an old man. “I’m sorry,” he stated, “I can’t help you.”

Danny clenched his fists. “So you’re just going to leave him there?” he accused, more desperate than angry.

“Of course not,” Clockwork replied with a staid frown. “He’s going to be released whether I interfere or not.”

Danny blinked in surprise. “Really?” he asked. Clockwork nodded and shifted into a young adult.

“The GiW have seen that he’s not a ghost. They’ll be sending him home by next morning.”

Instantly, Danny felt slightly relieved, but Clockwork’s news didn’t ease all his troubles. He believed the time ghost, seeing as he had no reason to lie. Still, he couldn’t help remember the blood across the table, slick and pooled across the metal surface. Wes’s dark bandages and his abject desperation when Danny left him alone with the agents. Even as a ghost, he found himself shiver. “He won’t be the same,” he realized, quietly.

Clockwork leaned against his staff and turned to look at the circular time window next to them. Danny couldn’t see anything but a swirling green vortex, but Clockwork seemed to discern something in the window. “He’ll heal with time,” he said, watching the swirling green window, knowingly. “You go home. I promise you will meet Wes tomorrow.”

Everything in Danny wanted to argue, to protest that he wanted to speak to Wes now. That he wanted Wes to be okay now, but he knew that it would be useless against the master of time. Reluctantly, he flew from Clockwork’s lair and (after returning the Infi-Map to Frostbite) returned to the human world through the Fenton Portal.

No matter how much he tried, he couldn’t sleep that night. Every time he closed his eyes, he was revisited by graphic images of Wes being tortured, tools of all sorts ripping him open, searching for evidence that he was Phantom—looking for something that only Danny had. He saw Wes pressed against the floor, clutching his bandages, and shaking as he bled. He twisted and turned until finally he couldn’t ignore the sunlight breaking through his curtains.

Normally, Danny flew to school, but something compelled him to walk today. Since it was earlier than usual and Sam and Tucker probably weren’t awake yet, he figured he’d walk alone. His body moved on autopilot, his legs carrying him mechanically to the direction of Casper High.

At least, he thought it was the direction of Casper High. He managed to deceive himself for a while until finally he looked up and found himself standing in front of Wes’s apartment building.

And there, sitting on the doorstep, was Wes.

Danny inhaled sharply. That action must have alerted Wes to his presence because seconds later the broken red-head lifted his head to meet Danny’s eyes. Danny lost himself in the emptiness of Wes’s eyes and realized that they looked just as tired as they had in the GiW facility.

“You’re okay,” Danny managed to say. Even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. After what he figured had happened to Wes, he was certain that he could never be okay. Who could?

Wes must have been thinking the same thing, but he kept his silence. His demeanor darkened and he growled, “No thanks to you.”

Danny gulped. “I’m sorry,” he expressed. His apology was heartfelt, but it did little to express his desire that none of this should have happened. He moved closer to Wes, who kept his posture still and guarded. “I didn’t want to leave you behind, but there was nothing I could do, and…” he trailed off and bit his lip. What could he possibly say to make up for leaving him? For any of this screwed up situation? He didn’t know, he couldn’t think. Staying up all night had stolen any coherent apology he might have been able to scrounge up. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, softly.

Wes’s eyes were glued to him, yet dark and unreadable. “Sorry for not trying harder, or for getting me into this mess in the first place?” he ground out.

Danny winced. “I—I never meant to… but you know I had to keep my identity a secret.”

“So you’re glad they caught me instead of you?”

Danny’s eyes widened. “No! Of course not—”

Wes cut him off by standing up. Danny didn’t miss the way that he winced when he moved, pulling himself to his feet. This time when Wes looked into Danny’s eyes, he didn’t mask his pain—Danny could sense his unfiltered agony and cringed.

“I told them I wasn’t a ghost,” Wes began, “but they didn’t believe me. Even after they ran all their tests, they thought I must be hiding my ghostliness in some way,” he emphasized bitterly. “So they…” A lump formed in Wes’s throat, and he turned his gaze to the sidewalk, letting his eyes roam across the sparkly concrete. He took a shaky breath, one so soft that Danny wasn’t sure he could’ve heard without his enhanced senses. He looked back to Danny and whispered, “They cut me up.”

Danny fell silent. He didn’t know what to say. After all, who could even respond to that? All he could do was watch, paralyzed, as Wes sniffled and wiped away a stray tear.

“It doesn’t matter,” the red-head finally decided. “They know now.”

That admission snapped Danny out of his guilt-ridden haze. “Know what?” He had a suspicion… but no. Not that. They couldn’t know that.

“I told them, of course,” Wes nonchalantly explained. “That you’re Phantom. They didn’t listen at first, but after realizing it wasn’t me, well… they did.”

Suddenly, Danny grew aware of the white van in his peripheral vision. A door slid open and men started stepping out of it, armed with guns aimed at the two of them. He knew, now, why Wes was sitting on the doorstep out in the open. They had been counting on his arrival. Wes was bait—and he had fallen for their trap. He felt his heartbeat accelerate, yet he didn’t look away from the broken boy standing before him.

“They were probably listening to our conversation,” Wes stated, eyeing the agents behind Danny. “If they had any doubts about what I told them, they’re gone now.”

The weapons whined as they charged. White boots crunched against gravel as they approached, closer and closer—

And Wes smiled, his first real smile since he had been taken. “You should run now,” he suggested. “I wouldn’t want you to go through what I did.”

Danny ducked at the perfect moment, barely avoiding getting shot. He felt the blasts from the weapons soar where his head had been a split second before and whipped around. He eyed the agents that were surrounding him, doing nothing to mask the fiery green glow in his eyes. It was too late. They know now, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

They know.

With one last glance at Wes, Danny turned himself invisible and kicked off the ground, using what limited flight he had in human form. Wes was right, he had to run—because once they caught him, it would be all over. He’d end up just like Wes, but they wouldn’t let him go. They’d keep him and use him as their sick little lab rat until he finally died.

He had to run… had to… run.

#consider this my entry for the last prompt of dannymay19 since i never made anything for that #danny phantom #wes weston #angst #fic #mine

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ecto-american · 6 years ago

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Theory

DannyMay 2019 themed story, I’m not late I’m just going my own pace pls be nice to me

Ectoplasm | Broken | Glass | Or Read on AO3.

Day 25: Theory

CW: Talk of injuries

Ectoplasm, unfortunately, wasn't going to clean itself up. And difficult and annoying to clean it is. If left to sit, it was tricky to fully wash ectoplasm out. Years of experience and hard lessons with favorite shirts had left Maddie retiring a typical wardrobe in favor of the easy to clean jumpsuit. The woman could only hope that her husband was actually getting to work on cleaning up the ectoplasm supposedly all over the house.

She glanced at Jazz, nose deep in a book. Maddie didn't need to look at the title to know that it was the new book about psychology of criminal behavior that Danny had gotten her.

"I'm sorry we had to leave early," Maddie broke the silence. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jazz snap her attention to her.

"Oh, it's okay," Jazz assured her. "I know how much ghost stuff means to you guys." Maddie frowned lightly.

"It is, but if it was up to me, I'd just make Phantom wait," Maddie sighed, a bit irritated. Of course, that ghost kid just seemed to do nothing but cause problems for her and her family. Always interrupting something. Always putting their lives and their town on the line. She was so sick of him.

She heard the book close, and Maddie felt Jazz's stare on her.

"It's Phantom?" Jazz asked. Her voice was so quiet, Maddie only barely heard her.

"Yes, it's Phantom," Maddie confirmed.

"Why didn't you say so?" Jazz's voice was accusatory. Maddie sighed heavily. She hated how much faith Jazz put into a supposed teen superhero. More like a phantom pain.

"Because it doesn't matter that much," Maddie lightly argued. "It's just Phantom. He apparently got into another fight, needs some help, and hopefully in exchange for helping him, your father and I can finally get some answers."

"What happened to him?" Jazz questioned. "How hurt is he? What's wrong?"

"I don't know what happened to him. But from what Dad described, it's a broken jaw." And an attempted skinning. But Jazz didn't need to know that. That was such a horrifying graphic detail that she didn't need to know, and a detail that disturbed Maddie more than anything.

A jaw breaking? That was a fairly normal enough outcome for a violent ghost like Phantom. A good solid hook or kick could do that. But a skinning? That spoke to such intent, such psychopathic nature. Even if Phantom was just a ghost, who would want to do that? Even her, as a woman of science, didn't understand why anybody would want to do such a thing? Despite the knowledge rattling in her mind for nearly two hours now, Maddie could not think of a single ghost hunting group that would want to skin Phantom.

"A broken jaw?" Jazz echoed. Maddie stole a glance at her. Jazz looked on the verge of tears. She had her book closed in her lap, hands wringing together. "That's awful. He must be in so much pain. And scared, if he came to you guys."

"He's a ghost," Maddie replied tiredly. "They don't feel pain. And even if they do, who cares?"

"I care!"

Maddie jumped in surprise at the shout. She glanced at Jazz again, and now she had tears freely flowing. The teen was wiping them away with the cuff of her sleeves, and she gave a sniffle. Did her daughter really care that much about a ghost? Maddie exhaled deeply.

"I know you're emotional because of the situation, and because Phantom being a supposed hero, but there's no need to shout," she lightly scolded.

"How can you just say that you don't care about if ghosts feel pain?" Jazz seemed to completely ignore Maddie's statement.

"They're not alive," Maddie argued. "They're just manifestations of ectoplasmic energy. They don't have feelings like we do, or families or lives. They're just...they're just that, honey. They're ectoplasmic energy."

"But that's not even true!" Jazz insisted. "You've seen ghosts get emotional! And they have families! Most of them were once humans, and they had families then. And they still do. Families that miss them, that visit their graves or who still mourn their loss. And they must miss them too! How can you even justify that ghosts don't have emotions when they're just ectoplasmic energy when all people are is just pounds of meat and bones?"

Maddie listened patiently to Jazz's ramble. Her grip tightened on the wheel. Jazz did have a point. A very logical sounding point, and it made sense. But it also just didn't. Ghosts didn't always have bones, nor did they really have anything such as nerves or biology close to a human that would imply that they had such an ability to express emotions the same way humans did.

"Ghosts express emotions differently than humans do," Maddie tried to explain. "And that's different than the physiology of feeling pain."

"Even if that was true, which it isn't, psychological pain can be even worse than physical!" Jazz drummed her fingers on her book impatiently. "You can't dismiss that."

Maddie simply nodded in response. She couldn't deny that. And Phantom was such an outlier to the normal. What made him so different?

"Phantom is an odd case in general," she spoke aloud, mostly to herself. "He's so different than other ghosts."

"Oh?" Jazz's interest seemed to be peaked. And to her surprise, her daughter seemed a bit nervous too. "Do you have any theories?"

Maddie gave a thoughtful hum. She had so many theories. So many possible explanations as to Phantom's odd behavior, why he seemed so different from other ghosts. Why the Guys in White seemed so interested in him, why anybody would ever want to skin him. Why Phantom just behaved so...so aggressive towards ghosts half the time.

"I got a bucket full," Maddie lightly teased. She saw Jazz crack a smile.

"What's your most promising theory?" she clarified. Most promising theory...

"Well, ghosts fit into various types of categories. You know, kind of like how we classify animals, we do the same for ghosts. And Phantom doesn't quite fit into any of them. He fits the mold for some, but not enough to specifically pinpoint what type he is," Maddie began. "His power profile from what we can gather either excludes him or his behavioral patterns don't fit. And so, in a sense, my most promising theory is that Phantom is simply a type of ghost we've never seen before. An entirely new classification of ghost."

"Oooh," Jazz made a noise of fascination, and she leaned forward to lower the gentle background hum of the radio more. "Where would you put him down at?"

"That's the trouble," Maddie explained. "I'm not quite sure where in the spectrum or within the classification he'd fall. He almost seems like...it's not an accurate term but probably the best way I can put it, he almost seems like a jack of all trades ghost. He can be arguably put into any category of ghost because he seems to have something about him that would place him there. It'd be a matter of narrowing down where he fits best, what would be the closest, and then adding on what makes him excluded. And then there's the matter of proving that there's more than one type of ghost like Phantom. That he truly is a new type of ghost, and not just one of a kind."

Jazz made an odd face that Maddie couldn't quite identify in a brief glance over to her daughter.

"So, is this what you're going to do when you're done fixing Phantom up?" Jazz questioned. "Just see where he fits?" Maddie hadn't really thought about that.

"...I suppose," she said slowly. "I'd want to talk over with your dad what we'd want in exchange for helping Phantom."

"...You can't just help him because it's the right thing to do?" Jazz asked with that distinct tone Maddie knew all too well. Maddie sighed. Oh that was a good guilt trip. Very unexpected and sneaky. "I mean, what if it was Danny who needed help? O-Or just any human. You'd do it because it was the right thing to do, not because you want a favor."

"Phantom's not human, and you can't compare him to one," Maddie spoke firmly. Jazz was quiet for a moment.

"Do...do you know how bad his jaw is?" Jazz's voice was barely audible. Maddie exhaled softly.

"I can't say for sure, but how your dad described it, it was bad." She didn't bother to sugarcoat it. He was just a ghost. Maddie could hear Jazz give a sniffle, and she could see her using her sleeve to wipe her nose. "I'm sure he'll be fine."

"...M-mom?" Jazz's voice was cracking bad. "Can I tell you something?"

"Of course," Maddie instantly shifted gears. She glanced over worriedly multiple times, switching from the road and her daughter. "Honey, what's wrong?"

Jazz stared at her, looking conflicted. She sniffled again and wiped her eyes.

"...I'm...I'm just really worried about Phantom," she confessed. Maddie could feel that this wasn't what she wanted to confess, but she nodded anyway. She began to feel a bit sick to her stomach herself.

Somebody had attempted to skin Phantom. And Jazz didn't even know this. He went through a lot, and he likely had nobody truly caring about him right now. Aside from Jazz. It sparked an odd guilt in her, and she couldn't understand it.

"I know," Maddie finally told her. "Don't worry, we're halfway there. And we'll see what we can do for him."

Jazz didn't reply. She simply nodded. She opened her book, and she began to stare at the pages. Maddie stayed quiet as she focused on the road, her thoughts swirling. It was still an absolute mystery why anybody would want to skin Phantom.

#phics #my phics #oc #dannymay #dannymay19 #my dannymay19 #my dannymay #maddie fenton #jazz fenton #theory #broken ectoplasm

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under-the-lake · 5 years ago

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I Suspect Nargles Are Behind It: Luna and Reality - short mind ramblings

I thought that some lighter writing than my usual stuff could be nice during these troubled captivity times. So I wondered and then set my mind on writing about a character, and chose Luna. Why Luna? I just love her. She’s clever but not vain, she’s a proper oddball to whom I can identify, she loves animals and understands the weird. She lives in a strange world of her own, oddly connected with reality, and has values I can share. On a more literature-related point of view, she’s a secondary character but without her the story couldn’t have unfolded as it did. In a very short piece (to my standards at least) I decided to explore Luna’s take on the reality norms the world has built.

Short ID

Name: Luna Lovegood (originally she was called Lily Moon, because it gave Rowling the idea of a dreamy girl - Original Writings for PM, The Original Forty)

Born: 13th February (J.K. Rowling, Twitter, 17th July 2015) and we can suppose it’s 1981 because Luna went to Hogwarts one year after Harry (born on 31st July 1980).

Post-Hogwarts Occupation: Wizarding naturalist (as Rowling called her originally)

Particularities: odd beliefs, and she was able to see Thestrals very soon after her mother’s accidental death, when Luna was nine. Unusually perceptive and creative. Bloody bright.

School: Hogwarts, Ravenclaw

Marital Status: Married to Rolf Scamander (Newt’s grandson)

Children: 2 sons, Lorcan and Lysander

Other Family: Dad Xenophilius Lovegood (Editor of the Quibbler), mum Pandora Lovegood (dead)

Odd Species: Blibbering Humdinger, Nargles, Wrackspurts, Crumple-Horned Snorkack. According to Rowling (Bloomsbury Chat, 30.7.2007), Luna went on discovering and naming many new species, but had to eventually give up on the Snorkack being a real creature.

First Impressions - Hogwarts: from Loony to Luna

She had straggly, waist-length dirty blonde hair, very pale eyebrows and protuberant eyes that gave her a permanently surprised look. [...]The girl gave off an aura of distinct dottiness. Perhaps it was the fact that she had stuck her wand behind her left ear for safekeeping, or that she had chosen to wear a necklace of Butterbeer caps, or that she was reading a magazine upside down.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Chapter Ten, Luna Lovegood

That’s how we are introduced to Luna (in the book). Well… dunno what you think, but she is introduced as a weirdo all right. She’s reading a magazine, The Quibbler, upside down, and that she seems to find that perfectly normal (we do learn some pages later that it’s a thing about reading runes but even if there wasn’t any rational explanation I wouldn’t put it past Luna to read something upside down). You cannot deny that Luna is intriguing. There are many reactions one can have on meeting her for the first time, but there will be reactions, either because she’s so far from what the reader holds dear as values, or because she’s so close. One cannot be indifferent to Luna.

Besides, there’s that strange thing that she can see Thestrals, and thinks they are nothing but normal creatures. Who doesn’t remember the ‘You’re just sane as I am’ line? And who wouldn’t doubt their sanity at such a statement? I’m glad they kept the line in the film.

So from the very beginning of our acquaintance with Luna, we know that she’s different, but not yet why, that she is blunt without being rude, that she knows who she is, and that she has some sort of interest in the natural world. We can also imagine from her Butterbeer necklace that she’s not from a wealthy family, her dad running a not-so-mainstream magazine, The Quibbler. We have another bit of evidence for that in the World Cup (see below). The other possibility -which, knowing all the books, sounds at least as true as the first one- is that she’s from a very creative family. However, at that point of the story, we don’t know about Nargles and Crumple-Horned Snorckacks. Yet. As for Luna’s Hogwarts allegiance, Wit Beyond Measure is Man’s Greatest Treasure, and The Circle Has No Beginning, she’s in Ginny’s year, one year below Harry, and she’s a Ravenclaw.

First Mention

Luna is not mentioned by first name until Ginny introduces her in Order of the Phoenix, Chapter Ten. However, Rowling introduces the Lovegoods in Goblet of Fire, Chapter Six. They are just mentioned, en passant, by Amos Diggory, while he and Cedric and the Weasleys, Harry and Hermione are waiting for their Portkey on Stoatshead Hill (seven past five, and old wellington boot) to get them to the Quidditch World Cup. Amos says the Lovegoods aren’t using the Portkey because they’ve been on the World Cup Site for a week since they couldn’t afford it another way. They live near the Weasleys, the Diggorys and the Fawcetts, somewhere near Ottery St Catchpole (Deathly Hallows, Chapter Twenty).

First Meeting

‘There’s only Loony Lovegood in there.’ This statement by Ginny is the first mention of Luna in the whole series. She’s met Neville who is looking for a compartment on the Hogwarts Express and can’t find one because ‘everywhere’s full’. ‘Don’t be silly, she’s all right’, answers Ginny. (OoP, Chapter Ten).

Straight in: ‘Loony’ is ‘all right’. Contradiction, but also completely true. Luna is a loony if you look at her with the eyes of conventional society and the norms it has set. She is all right, which means Ginny has taken trouble to get acquainted and knows she’s no loony, and at least never uses her ‘nickname’ straight in her face (contrary to Hermione’s line in the film…. which I hate, so much not in character. Is that the girl who started SPEW?). Ginny puts things straight from the beginning, yet she’s struggling to repress her fit of the giggles in the compartment, later, when Luna states Ravenclaw’s motto in a sing-song voice. Luna doesn’t seem to care what people think, and she’s pretty straightforward in her statements, though not in a mean way. For instance, when she tells Harry, still in the same scene in the Hogwarts Express compartment, that Parvati didn’t enjoy the Yule Ball with him because he hadn’t cared to dance with her, it’s just a statement, not a judgement. Luna doesn’t do judgement. I must admit that the feelings, at reading this train scene for the first time, are mixed. You perceive that Luna is someone special who is rather unbothered by others’ opinion because she knows herself and is in a way more mature than her fellow classmates. You basically wonder if she’s got some autistic traits. On the other hand, the series of articles in the magazine she’s reading - and obviously taking seriously - show an openness of mind and fantasy that are quite unusual. How Far Would Fudge Go to Gain Gringotts? or Sirius Black - Villain or Victim? Notorious Mass Murderer or Innocent Singing Sensation? are just two of the titles in the issue of The Quibbler that Luna is reading (see picture below).

The first impressions are tested further because once the lot get off the train, there’s the Thestrals. Harry has never been able to see them before, because he had never understood death before seeing Cedric murdered during the Third Task. He’s completely stunned by those skeletal winged horses. Luna isn’t, and simply explains they’ve always been there. Not at all reassured and still thinking he’s having hallucinations, Harry climbs up behind Luna into the carriage, not sure if he wants to disclose this to his best mates.

This is the first meeting with Luna. You cannot deny the impression is strong. Personally I did like her from the start. She then just grew on me.

Reality? Berkeley? Aristotle?

Believing in things that nobody can see… mental, Luna? Or just aware of the world in a way few modern people are able to? Just more open to nature and unusually perceptive or living on another planet? I reckon anything but mental. Luna is a character who questions our perception and definition of reality throughout the three books she appears in.

Traditionally, if we follow Aristotle (On Interpretation), a statement can be true if both the sentence and the reality it aims at describing match. There must be no contradiction and the statement must be in adequation with reality. Like saying, while standing in front of the Hogwarts Express, ‘the steam engine is scarlet’. It’s the, say, rational way. And it is the way it works in the wizarding world, yet the roots are different from the Muggle one. Magic is the scientific framework in which the wizarding world evolves, and in that world magic is a science in the Muggle sense: it can be studied, divided into subjects, tested (Nadal, 2014).

However, on the other end of the spectrum, there’s another way of seeing things that are less black or white, and it was explained by Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685 - 1753). Berkeley, to put it shortly, states that what one sees is, from the moment it’s apprehended by anything connected with the brain, an interpretation of reality. He says that reality per se doesn’t exist and that the things we see, as a dimension of reality conceived out of the mind, is a mere illusion (Chaillan, 2016; Granger & Bassham, 2016). Seen in that light, Harry’s meeting with Dumbledore at the end of Deathly Hallows is full of sense. So is Luna’s relationship with the world around her. The case of Nargles, Wrackspurts and Crumple-Horned Snorckacks are proof enough. Luna questions our relationship with the norms the world has built around what is considered real and what is not. Can you believe something exists while you’ve never seen it? Well… just ask everyone who believes in any kind of god, magic or whatever. They’ve never seen the source, have they. Still, they do believe it exists. The difference with Luna is that while religion is something built by, and therefore admitted as real, by society (the norm, or one of the possible norms), Nargles and Wrackspurts are not.

If we look at the zoological side of things, the Muggle world has Science (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning), and Cryptozoology. Science proves, tests, confronts, questions. Cryptozoology is the branch of zoology that deals with imaginary species. So there is a society-approved branch of Natural History that deals with what legends and history have given us. Those two sides, in Luna’s world, are, for the ‘official part’, the Ministry Department of Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, Scamander’s book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (notice that the title holds the word ‘fantastic’? What irony…) and Hagrid and Grubbly-Plank as Care of Magical Creatures Teachers. Oh and we could add Charlie Weasley as a Dragon Keeper. The other side of this is The Quibbler and Xenophilius Lovegood (and Luna). So while both worlds have two instances to deal with two parts of the natural world, and while the Muggle world has both sides coexisting rather peacefully because society-approved, the wizarding world is in tension because no official body has ever given any credit to The Quibbler or Xenophilius’s weird ideas. I’ll discuss Magical Natural Sciences later in a bit more depth. What I wanted to showcase here is that this comparison about how Natural Sciences and CryptoSciences are dealt with in both worlds further supports the distinction between Aristotelian and Berkeleyan ways of seeing reality, and supports the idea that the Lovegoods are more Berkeleyan, but therefore also the fact that the Wizarding world is even more normative that the Muggle one, and that’s saying something (for instance there’s only one school and one teacher for each subject for the whole of the UK and Ireland; if that is not normative, I don’t know what is).

Luna openly states stuff that is completely bonkers, which makes her sort of -pardon me- unbelievable. Though it fits with Berkeley. I mean who knows if Rufus Scrimgeour is really a vampire or not? Or who knows if Fudge really has an army of Heliopaths? On the other hand, she was raised by An Eccentric if there ever was one. I mean old Xenophilius (incidentally, ‘xenophilius’ means ‘love of the strange’). We first meet him at Bill and Fleur’s wedding, at the start of Deathly Hallows. ‘Slightly cross-eyed, with shoulder-length white hair the texture of candyfloss, he wore a cap whose tassel dangled in front of his nose and robes of an eye-watering shade of egg-yolk yellow. An odd symbol, rather like a triangular eye, glistened from a golden chain around his neck.’ (DH, Chapter Eight) Xenophilius goes one praising the gnome infestation in the Weasleys’ garden, and the wisdom of those creatures. Not exactly your conventional wizard. He looks even stranger than that wizard wearing a lady’s dressing-gown at the Quidditch World Cup. Thing is, the Lovegoods are taking a step back looking at the conventional world they were made to live in. They don’t fit in because their reality is unproven and therefore not believable in an Aristotelian world. However, Luna has her own boundaries of truth. Somehow they meet Dumbledore’s. He believed the Deathly Hallows existed, as did Xenophilius, and finally Harry. For most witches and wizards, including Ron and Hermione until the last moment, the Hallows are only an artefact in a children’s story, The Tale of the Three Brothers.

Luna’s mum died when Luna was nine; a spell Pandora was experimenting on backfired. Luna witnessed that and has since been able to see Thestrals. Luna’s mum was probably the one who was more perceptive and passed that to Luna (reminds me of Fiver in Watership Down passing his own sixth sense on to the next generation). Luna stays as she is, but eventually, according to Rowling, gives up on Snorkacks as her dad’s inventions (Bloomsbury Chat, 30.7.2007).

I reckon Luna would fit more in a Berkeleyan world than in the normative world our ‘civilized’ societies have built, be they magical or Muggle. Of course every society has norms. Thing is, how much constraint they set upon members makes all the difference. Luna is not a Loony (even etymologically, in my opinion, because loony is short for lunatic, which means mentally ill, from the moon - see all the tales and beliefs surrounding full moon for instance, mostly negative in a normative Aristotelian world). Luna is the positive form of Loony, I’d say. She’s seen as a loony by people whose norms are those of the society they grew up in. With a wee bit of openness of mind, Luna is a great character, a philosophical free-lancer, a mirror in which we can question our society and beliefs about reality.

PS: I want to explore friendship and loyalty in Luna briefly too. Soon... confinement helps the writer :P The wizarding community is at risk too! Stay at home!

Sources:

https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/the-original-forty

https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/thestrals

http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2007/0730-bloomsbury-chat.html

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the-resiliency-of-luna-lovegood

Aristotle, De Interpretatione (English translation), retrieved from http://www.bocc.ubi.pt/pag/Aristotle-interpretation.pdf

Adams, R. (1972). Watership Down. Penguin.

Chaillan, M. (2016). Harry Potter et Berkeley. In Harry Potter à l’école des philosophes, Philosophie Magazine, Hors série n°31, novembre - décembre 2016. 70-71.

Granger, J. & Bassham, G. (2016). Just in Your Head? J.K. Rowling on Separating Reality from Illusion. In Bassham, G. (2016, Eds.). The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy, Hogwarts for Muggles. Wiley Eds. 185-197

Nadal, C. (2014). Magical Science: Luna Lovegood’s Beliefs, Discoveries and Truth. In Martín Alegre, S., Arms, C., Blasco Solís, L., Calvo Zafra, L., Campos, R., Canals Sánchez, M., ... & García Jordà, L. (2014). Charming and bewitching: considering the Harry Potter series. 148-153.

Rowling, J. K. (2000). Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Bloomsbury, London.

Rowling, J. K. (2003). Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Bloomsbury, London.

Rowling, J. K. (2007). Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Bloomsbury, London.

Rowling, J. K. (2007). The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Bloomsbury, London.

Scamander, N. (1927; 2001; 2018; [J.K. Rowling]). Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Bloomsbury, London, in association with Obscurus Books, 18a Diagon Alley, London.

#Louhi #Luna #LunaLovegood #Reality #Philosophy #Harry Potter #Hogwarts #J.K.Rowling #Berkeley #Aristotle #Cryptozoology #Xenophilius #SocietyNorms

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what-the-fuck-is-anime · 6 years ago

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This kid is so fucking strong. He know this is going to get him hit, but he tries to hold his father responsible in a world where nobody else has.

This post contains talk of medical abuse, mental illness, and forced hospitalization.

Sending her to the hospital...it was deliberate. His dad must have been so happy to have an excuse to send her to a hospital. Her one outburst of terrible violence will forever overpower any of her claims regarding her husband’s ongoing violent abuse and manipulation. The media will never believe her about the abuse. They will frame her as incoherent, violent, and hysterical. This was all written to be as deliberate and as evil as possible to emphasize the extent to which this child is trapped. His mother returns from the hospital, inevitably not having been believed. And now she never will be, and she knew it, and that was probably why she was trying to call her mom. To try to avoid having the stigma of mental illness. In Japan, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Mental illness stigma is much worse there, and the views surrounding mental illness are different than many other places in the world. And now whenever either of them act up, the second most physically powerful man on the planet gets to threaten them with forced hospitalization because the whole world knows his mom went to a psych hospital. He may even claim she caused whatever abuse she tries to get help for. The threat of forced hospitalization is an extremely common abuse tactic. He uses hospitals as a weapon. He uses getting help as a weapon. Now he can beat up his son as much as he wants, and he may never want to go to the hospital because that was the place that took mom, and he may not be able to make the distinction between general hospitals and psychiatric hospitals. “Hospital” was the bad place that mom was forced to go to. And when he came home from the ER, his mother was taken from him. He may suffer he may hide illness he may never speak up about pain because he seems to only be around 5 or 6

WARNING

The purpose of the following is to begin to attempt to begin understanding the plight of Todoroki’s mother in terms of Japanese culture and viewpoints. I researched and highlighted some specific aspects of mental illness and psychiatric care in Japan that may not have been considered or otherwise known by a foreign audience. Most of my sources are in English, and a huge number of them are scientific or otherwise academic in nature, so while they are in no way a one stop shop about Japanese culture so to speak, they are quick notes about what I found interesting and potentially relevant to the situation. The content below this point may be difficult to read, and although I included the warning at the top, this is the part where it may get more difficult beyond this point. If you are sensitive to reading medical abuse or stigma surrounding mental illness, I do not recommend reading further.

While many things are lost in translation in terms of cultural differences, it is my opinion that even slightly understanding some aspects of psychiatric care in Japan as well as the attitude towards mental illness are essential to understanding the struggle of Todoroki and his mother in context, and the power that his father holds over the two of them after sending her there. While there are many other important cultural differences that may change the impact of Todoroki’s backstory depending on who is interpreting it, the stark differences between Japanese psychiatric care compared to what I am familiar with as an American stuck out to me as something that is probably less likely to be known by the average anime viewer. I realized I had no perspective on what psychiatric care meant in Japan, so I decided to investigate.

Many sources include clarification for other claims that may appear unsourced, as well as often referencing certain aspects of Japanese culture that appear unsourced. The following is not a scientific paper, nor is it anywhere near a complete representation of psychiatric care in Japan, and should not be treated as anything more than an extremely casual anime essay that I spent a disproportionate amount of time on trying to research statistics in order to put the suffering of Todoroki’s mother into perspective, and the weight carried by a threat of forcible hospitalization in Japan, and give insight into what this may mean in terms of the source culture.

How long she was likely gone, what she may have experienced, and the transition from being physically controlled by her husband to being physically controlled within a hospital. I am not from Japan, most of my readers are not from Japan, so the ways in which we may be inclined to interpret the situation and its impact are entirely through the lenses of our own local cultures. My focus was mostly on facts and results from studies, which while easily citable, are again in no way a full picture of anything; I am not a good source for Japanese culture, this is not a good place to read about it fully, and if you try to use this as an educational resource well, uh, stop that. Beyond condemning a few specific practices, this is also not intended in any way to be a criticism of Japanese culture, but rather, a focus on a bunch of statistics and facts that I thought pertinent to this scene in My Hero Academia. Another important point here is the fact that there is an extremely limited number of English resources regarding Japanese psychiatric practices compared to ones entirely in Japanese, and not even the laws are officially translated, specifically the laws and reforms regarding mental health. One important thing I want to note is that given how nightmarish Todoroki’s situation seems altogether and how much effort is put into making it as bad as possible, I am inclined to believe that his mother’s experience in the hospital was also intended to be on the more negative, potentially leaning towards worst or at the very least worse-than-average spectrum of experiences. My speculation reflects that.

END WARNING

Todoroki’s mom was so scared, she knew she needed to seek help to the point she asked help from people who forced her into the situation, but now that he forcibly hospitalized her, now that she acted out, now that he framed her as this inherently and consistently horrible violent person, the hospital could justify doing whatever they want to her. Japan is one of the last places in the world that uses physical restraints in psychiatric hospitals, and they use them very frequently alongside heavy sedation and otherwise high doses of drugs. Violent patients and patients with histories of violence are treated much, much worse on average, and she entered the hospital directly after having attacked her son. There is, to some extent, fear of mental illness and the mentally ill in Japan, especially in terms of those with histories of violence.

Even though Todoroki’s mother knows just how much she has been hurt and how much danger she and her son are in from her husband, they evidently never believed her, or at least never got her out of there. They may have called any claims of abuse acting out, they may have called it more evidence of her violence or her trying to blame her own assumed tendency towards violence on her innocent virtuous husband, they may have called her hysterical and drugged her even more, maybe even until she stopped claiming her husband was violent and abusive. After all, he is a top hero and has immeasurable influence, he very well also could have bribed or charmed the doctors just like he did everyone else to disregard his abuse and silence her. The doctors may be led to believe that her claims of abuse were delusions, and that she was suffering from a delusion when she attacked her son, so the goal for their treatment may have actually been to explicitly end those “delusions” of abuse to avoid future violence.

Another example of how much power Todoroki’s dad has is how he managed to get her admitted to a psychiatric hospital in the time it took Todoroki to come home from the ER thanks to his political influence. Involuntary admission in Japan requires politician approval. Additionally, who would believe her that she was not the consistently violent one? She brutally attacked her child with boiling water, after all. Surely it must have been the result of her mental illness to accuse him of any abuse, as the trustworthy top hero may have even warned the doctors, so surely all she needed was more drugs until her alleged delusions subsided. She attacked her son due to a claim that she was traumatized by her husband’s abuse, which he surely denied. The fact that he sent her to a psychiatric hospital instead of jail could have been seen as an act of mercy, when it truly was just to ensure he could manipulate her as long as possible, and the fact that having his wife arrested would have been a worse hit on his reputation than having her sent to a hospital. Plus, being charged with a crime might give her the opportunity to have him investigated. Regardless of how her claims of abuse were handled, nothing was done. Now she is scarier to the public than the man who deserved to be locked up a long time ago.

In 2017, a New Zealand man died from a heart attack after being restrained for 10 days in a Japanese psychiatric hospital and developing deep vein thrombosis (DVT) due to the restraints. 10 days not being allowed to leave the bed, to the point a blood clot developed, went entirely unaddressed, and resulted in a heart attack. The average time spent in medical restraints in Japanese psychiatric hospitals is 96 days. Yes, 3 months. Almost everywhere else in the world, that figure is a few hours if any. The source of the average length of time spent in restraints seems to be entirely written in Japanese, and while I was unable to directly read that particular report, I verified that it has been cited by numerous advocacy groups and news sources, and I spent hours comparing it to general information regarding physical restraints in Japan. Deep vein thrombosis is common for restrained patients in Japan, and use of restraints is on the rise. In 2013, about 29% of all psychiatric patients in Japan were placed in restraints (10,299 patients out of a total of around 297,000). Violent patients are more likely to be restrained. According to a 2014 study of a Tokyo hospital, over 11% of patients in restraints develop deep vein thrombosis. And that study was performed with patients wearing compression stockings and receiving regular injections of unfractionated heparin (UFH), both of which reduce the overall chance of a blood clot. Those precautions are not enforced across Japan and may be exclusive to this study. So without those precautions, the general rate of developing DVT from these restraints is likely much higher.

Japan has the highest ratio of psychiatric beds to population in the world. In Japan, hospitals are viewed as long-term care facilities, so while a psychiatric stay in America might be a few weeks, in Japan it can be years. In 2008, the average length of stay in a psychiatric hospital was 290 days. Involuntary admission is associated with an even longer length of stay, and involuntary admissions between April 2014 and March 2016 were about 35% of total admissions. There is no legal upward limit of involuntary hospitalization in Japan. Involuntary hospitalization is initiated by the prefectural governor, with no guaranteed timeline for psychiatric assessment. Japan has on average four times the average involuntary hospitalization rate as other OECD countries.

As a result of research into restraints in Japan, I found https://www.norestraint.org/ , a Japanese advocacy website aimed to improve psychiatric care and campaign for the end of restraints in Japanese psychiatric hospitals. With the help of Google Translate, the page describes how some people in charge of psychiatric associations in Japan believe doctors should be given guns, which are extremely illegal in Japan. It also gives a visual on some types of restraint used. Japan has high rates of high dose medication and forced sedation, electroconvulsive therapy, and isolation in these psychiatric facilities. “Megadosing” is abundant, in that patients are given heavy doses of medicine until they are no longer resistant or are otherwise considered quiet, partially to compensate for understaffing. There are commonly not enough workers in these facilities, and high doses of drugs are often used to make patients more compliant instead of hiring more workers. The psychiatric hospitals in Japan are also mostly privately owned. In researching these statistics, I encountered countless stories demonstrating the worst possible scenarios. These experiences are again not necessarily indicative of the average hospital stay in Japan, and these statistics only represent very specific aspects of medical procedure within Japanese psychiatric hospitals, and are in no way “complete” representations of an average stay or the attitudes of all psychiatric healthcare professionals. However, one thing that came up repeatedly is the idea that some aspects of an individual’s stay can be influenced at the request of the family, including requesting longer time spent in restraints and longer stays.

In Japan, the views regarding mental illness differ greatly from the western model, which likely contributes to the contrast between their physical and psychiatric healthcare. A survey published in 2006 comparing the outlook towards mental illness between Australia and Japan presented four stories describing individuals with major depression, major depression with suicidal thoughts, early schizophrenia, and chronic schizophrenia, and then asked the respondents several questions regarding them. These stories were translated multiple times between English and Japanese to ensure that the translations were accurate. When asked to describe what the individuals in the story were experiencing, the results illustrated a Japanese preference towards phrases like “emotional problems” compared to the Australian survey. This same survey also demonstrated just how heavily family and community are expected to participate in the caretaking of those with mental illness in Japan, with nearly 2-3x the Japanese respondents saying that the individuals in the examples given would be best helped by their families, with more emphasis on the individual recognizing their own problems compared to the Australian responses. In terms of professional help, while the Australian participants largely recommended seeing a general doctor, the Japanese participants pointed towards counselors and psychiatrists.

In terms of what would not be viewed as helpful for the individuals in the stories, there was a significant disparity between the countries. In terms of depression, 87.3% of Australian respondents believed that a general doctor would be helpful, compared to only 30.4% in Japan. 35.4% of Australians surveyed said that a pharmacist would be helpful for the individual with depression, while in Japan only 6.8% believed a pharmacist would be helpful, with 22-23.6% actually saying that pharmacists would be harmful compared to about 8.1-8.7% in Australia. These responses were similar across all four examples. Roughly thrice the Japanese respondents believed that tranquilizers were beneficial across all conditions compared to Australia. Australia showed a heavy preference towards vitamins, with over 50% believing vitamins being beneficial to the individual with depression. In terms of medications being harmful, Australia leaned heavily towards calling tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and antipsychotics as harmful while significantly less Japanese respondents (roughly half as much or less) thought their application could be harmful to the individuals in the stories.

There was significant doubt towards the abilities of the individuals in the stories to recover in the Japanese survey, for example, just 7.4% believed that the individual with depression could make a full recovery even with professional help, compared to 37.3% in Australia. The Japanese survey leaned heavily towards individuals with professional help making progress, but with relapse. While the results are over 10 years old and there has been much change in society since then, I personally just thought the numbers were really cool.

More recently, a 2013 paper attempted to summarize the results of 19 papers regarding mental illness stigma in Japan published since 2001. Chronic schizophrenia was singled out as being viewed as especially dangerous in Japan, largely due to fear of violence, despite not many people being able to accurately identify it in practice. Medication for mental illness was generally poorly understood, with relatively few believing in the effectiveness of antidepressants as a whole. Friends and family were most commonly considered helpful, followed by counselors. Fear of schizophrenia in Japan was prevalent across multiple studies and statistics. Overall, Japan had more stigma than Australia and Taiwan, but less than China. The analysis mentioned that in Japan, personality is more commonly seen as a cause of mental illness than circumstance and biological factors. The findings suggested that the chronic institutionalization of those with mental illness may play a role in the stigma of mental illness, in that more frequent contact with and education about mental illness is associated with better outcomes in regards to acceptance.

Mental illness is commonly thought of in Japan as something that cannot be recovered from. Meaning, someone who has been labeled with a mental illness may never be viewed the same by society. This stigma played a role in why Todoroki’s mother took so long to seek out help, and why she waited until it got so bad to reach out. Mental illness is often seen as a loss of self-control, families are expected to care for mentally ill individuals, and there is a resistance to seeking out professional help beyond counselors. This plays a factor in why sending her to a hospital was an act of abuse on the part of Todoroki’s father within the context of Japanese culture. Although attacking Todoroki with boiling water was an extreme act of violence, general expectations are to discuss within the family how to address mental illness before seeking out a professional, or to at least look into a counselor, both which should have happened long ago. The process is not necessarily the same after an assault, but again, the family discussion should have happened a long time ago.

Todoroki’s mother reached out to her own family for help with what she was experiencing even though they were the ones that gave her to him for the sole purpose of bearing powerful children and were aware of the ongoing abuse for a while. They put her there. They did not get her out of there despite his constant physical abuse, either. She spoke about the situation on the phone as if they already knew. And evidently they also never backed up her claims of her husband actively hurting her and her son, since Todoroki never mentioned him getting investigated or them splitting up afterwards. She tried to seek mental counsel from a group of people who sold her for her Quirk as a readily available womb, because regardless of how they treated her, family is still expected to help. In that same sense, Todoroki’s father was supposed to attempt to help as well. Which would essentially involve telling him to stop being abusive, because it was evidently the trauma from his abuse that eventually led to the outburst. Obviously he did not want to do that. He wanted to punish her for acting out. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Had he truly done this as an act of kindness, he would have changed. He did not, because he is an abusive shithead. As mentioned above, involuntary hospitalization requires authorization from local politicians, so the fact that he is a top hero plays an enormous role in exactly how easily and quickly he managed to get his wife committed. He could easily have her held longer, or re-committed should she ever act out again or even try to seek out help.

In terms of what contributed to the outburst, there are a ton of potential factors. For one thing, we saw Todoroki’s father shove his mother to the ground, leading the audience to believe there is a significant history of violence against her, as well as hints given by Todoroki’s description of his father being given access to his mother. Women in violent domestic abuse situations are extremely prone to having traumatic brain injuries. Experiencing domestic violence also makes someone more likely to develop mental illness in general. In terms of potential PTSD, the absolute inability to get away from her abuser due to how physically powerful and influential he is probably played a role in the severity of the attack. Her family was well aware of the abuse she experienced. She could have already been drugged, she could have already been on medication and experiencing side effects, there are not a lot of details thus far. But there are two things we know about Todoroki’s father for certain: he is one of the most powerful people in the world and has access to whatever resources he wants, and he is a raging abusive asshole. Regardless of the specifics here of what she experienced, the abuse evidently continued after her attack. Otherwise, this would have been considered an event in Todoroki’s life and not his backstory.

The impact of being forced into a psychiatric hospital is not the same in America and Japan, and the culture surrounding mental illness is much different as well.

I do not want to begin to elaborate how traumatic medical abuse is, and I will not pretend like America or any other part of the world is in any way free from it either, but the impact of the hospitalization may be lost in translation depending on the locale of the viewer.

Hospitals are supposed to help people. Police are supposed to help people. Heroes are supposed to help people. They have all failed this kid and he is absolutely trapped. He went to the hospital and returned to find his mother taken from him, leaving him with an angry father and presumably nobody to protect him. Todoroki was forced to grow up viewing “heroes” as people who hurt, as one of the most successful heroes in the world was personally dedicated to make his life hell. To that end, he may have even found himself occasionally cheering for villains, just to find refuge in a fantasy where someone can protect him from his father. His father had political influence, and because politicians are the ones responsible for permitting involuntary hospitalization in Japan, he had the power to send away his family at will if they ever tried to speak up. Even in a society of superpowers, even in a society with magic, the world still fails to protect children. It enables abusers. It did not even bother to consider that people who love violence might be attracted to the job of being a hero, to express their love for violence and to be able to legally hurt or kill people. UA has absolutely no resources to identify abusive heroes, they do nothing about outwardly violent students. They do nothing to guide them, they do nothing to support them. I bet anything nobody is going to take note of all this talk of rejecting his father and do anything either despite it being a huge red flag. All Might straight up asked his old buddy how his student’s home life was, and the response was basically that he was being abused and that the kid wanted out. And nothing happened.

He knows.

And All Might was allegedly the only person in the world stronger than Todoroki’s father, and allegedly the best hero in the world. At some point, Todoroki may have even cheered for All Might, hoping that the man his father viewed as a threat and so desperately wanted to overpower could one day help himself and his mother defeat the villain in their own lives. But that help never came.

This world is an absolute nightmare. Abusive childhood with added superpowers for the abusers and no consequences. People without superpowers are treated horribly. People with mental illness are still treated horribly. They never believed that poor woman, and even if they did, they never followed through to protect a CHILD.

Todoroki spent his childhood being abused by someone beloved by the world and ignored by every institution that was supposed to help him. The man that so many around the world were so excited to meet was the same man that he desperately wanted to escape from. He watched the world praise a man who went home and abused his family. He was forced to watch his mother suffer similarly, and was even attacked by her as a result from her trauma. Instead of this being a wakeup call for his father, he tightened the reins and punished her for not more readily accepting his abuse. Todoroki knew he had to become stronger, but he wanted to do everything he could to never become like his horrifying father. He struggled to make bonds with others, and where his peers chose teamwork, he opted for independence.

And Todoroki finally managed to reach out to his seemingly empathetic and understanding classmate to break the news to him that one of the top heroes that he probably was a fan of prior is a terrible, terrible person. He vents, revealing just to what extent he is trapped and suffering. While he does not detail the specifics such as in the flashbacks, he paints a pretty blatant picture of a very abusive home life without much hope to escape. He admits to the ways in which he tries to cope with his trauma and avoid becoming like his father, while still trying to become strong enough to physically protect himself and his mother, and what does Midoriya say, on international television for all to hear?

REJECTING YOUR FATHER MAKES YOU A JACKASS AND YOUR TRAUMA IS AN INSULT TO EVERYONE AROUND YOU

FUCK OFF

#mha #bnha #liveblog #wtfia #ep23 #reflection

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jayhartwinsterling · 6 years ago

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Bandersnatch (Black Mirror) Megapost

Now loading... A *very* sizeable post with a lot to get through - here I am going to talk about the five “main” endings, the Easter eggs, why constructing a traditional flowchart for this game is technically a bit of a vain effort, how it’s probably best to link everything up in a guide - and the implications this story has regarding *us*.

Chapter 1: The Endings

So, we basically have five “main” endings. I say “main” because... well, we’ll get back to it on ending number five.

Ending One Description: The first of which is what I call the “How It Was Meant To Go” - and getting this one is quite simple. All you need to do is accept the proposal Stefan’s given by the Boss to make Bandersnatch with a in-house team. Satpal shows up and then Colin tells Stefan as he’s leaving “Sorry mate, wrong path.” We then jump forward five months to find that Bandersnatch was rushed in production, cut down and done badly because of it being a team effort and it gets a 0/5 review.

We loop back around to that decision again but this time, Colin thinks he’s met Stefan before and Stefan knows the memory error with Colin’s game when it happens. And we come back to the decision. (Refusal again will give a similar scene btw where Stefan accepts and Colin tells him it was the wrong choice again - but Satpal doesn’t enter and we just... end.

Ending One Analysis: So this first ending is rather simple. But the key to it for me lies rather simply in the fact that it can be done... without doing anything at all. If you left your remote/controller/mouse/finger wherever it is and don’t make any choices, this is where you end up. In essence, the universe just runs as it should and we don’t play god over Stefan’s life at all. I know it might be a little difficult to get what I’m on about here but consider that Stefan makes a remark to Dr. Haynes not too long after you take the refuse path, that he wanted to accept the offer and he doesn’t know what made him refuse. We did. This is more clearly pressed upon if you get to the point in your path where Stefan realises something is dictating his life and asks for a sign. We directly throw him a sign - if you’re super direct, that sign happens to be the most direct interaction we could possibly make with him. Telling him that he’s on Netflix in the 21st century for our entertainment and we’re controlling his life.

So, as I say, Ending One is where we don’t have an impact and thus things play out in the universe as they should. Bandersnatch is finished, it gets a 0/5 and Stefan resolves to try again. Ironically, if you just sit back and don’t take the option of making a choice (because, remember, us even making a choice is in itself a choice), though all the game does terribly - this is arguably the best outcome for Stefan. And all because we listened to the exact advice the trailer gave us with its music choice: “Relax. Don’t do it.”

Ending Two: If you go straight to Dr. Haynes (rather than going after Colin) and take your pills when you get home, you get what I call the “” ending. Stefan takes the pills, we jump forward five months to find that Bandersnatch got completed by Stefan but due to his pills, it comes across flat after the midway point and only gets a 2.5/5 rating.

Ending Two Analysis: Not a lot to say here - but it’s worth noting that the review dude on the TV mentions that if the creator had second chances, they should go back and do this game all over again but differently. Keep that in mind for later. It’s worth noting that if you take Stefan off the path that the universe was “meant” to take and then leave it to its own devices (and Stefan to his own choices) again, not making choices for him - then you’ll end up at this one. Almost as if the universe was trying to course correct itself...

Ending Three: “Stefan Jumps.” explanatory how we get here... We jump forward four months, and find that due to Stefan’s accidental death, the game seems to have been speedily finished by someone else.

Ending Three Analysis: We get no rating this time but TV review guy does say the game is bad. He also mentions that it seems abrupt, jarring, bleak, creepy... Almost a perfect way to describe the ending - since it then just ends.

Ending Four: “The P.A.C.S. Ending”. In this one, we unlock Stefan’s dad’s safe with the password “PAC” (obtained by crossing over paths from following Colin to visiting Dr. Haynes... we’ll come by to the implications of such things later.) and find to our surprise that Stefan’s entire life is part of a conspiratorial program, not only well documented but also manufactured with the trauma of his mother’s death being totally falsified. Dad wakes up, refuses to speak and in his rage, Stefan hits him with somethi--- Oh wait, it’s a dream. Just a dream... But then it goes off the rails, quickly plunging us into the choice where we give Stefan a sign that he’s being controlled. Instead of Netflix, we now have the choice of P.A.C.S. - taking that option leads Stefan to kill his dad with the ashtray in a rage about the apparent conspiracy. Stefan then picks up the phone to phone Dr. Haynes - and we have to enter her number. Entering it correctly means that Stefan outright says to Hayne’s receptionist that he’s killed his dad. As he’s burying his dad, we hear distinct sirens and then cut to a review of Bandersnatch. The game is given a 2/5 rating and we discover that Stefan has been charged with killing his dad and locked up in jail.

Ending Four Analysis: It’s safe to say that P.A.C.S. didn’t actually exist outside of Stefan’s head and it’s his life paralleling Jerome F Davies’ obsession with conspiracy theories and delusions. But... what nobody seems to be really talking about is - we did that. Again. Leaving aside all the choices up to and including the safe, we make the P.A.C.S. sign appear and fuel Stefan’s dream-induced paranoia. In this ending, we in a way become Stefan’s delusion. (Oh, and don’t be surprised if you didn’t get this ending with your choices, or only part of it - again we’re coming to all that...)

Ending Five: “Time Rewritten” - now I’ll be honest, I did all these endings in one straight through run. Which made for a REALLY messy time in both my head and the game. Particularly with Colin... But anyway, for this one, I had to make Stefan pick up the family photo after having followed Colin and heard him say that mirrors let you travel through time. Stefan then seems to head through a mirror in the bathroom back in time to when he was a kid. And discovers that his dad took the teddy away from Stefan and locked it away in his room. He wakes up, I take him through the Netflix sign again. [During this, I led into what I’ll be addressing in a minute as Ending Four-B.] And take Stefan back to the locked room, this time entering the password “TOY”. Stefan unlocks the safe and finds his teddy within... And then it takes an odd turn. Stefan turns to find a younger dad - and then suddenly he is a child again. The younger dad relents and lets young Stefan put the teddy back under his bed. After doing so, suddenly older Stefan is looking at young Stefan sleeping. We cut back to young Stefan on the day Mum leaves... This time, he finds the teddy but his Mum is still running late. She’s gonna have to catch the next train - the one that leads to her demise - and we have to make the decision for young Stefan on whether to go or not. Of course, yes is my choice here - for though it’s a tragedy, it’s the last of these paths to take - we get young Stefan and Mum on the train, cut to black, and then see that older Stefan has died in Dr. Haynes’ office. We then get shown a TV screen and the credits come rolling in, whether we like it or not. And there’s what seems almost a tune playing but we’ll get back to that because if you’re a ZX Spectrum fan like myself, you know where that’s headed.

Ending Five Analysis: Alright, now there’s debate to be had here. Did Stefan really walk through a mirror and change time, undoing his own existence in the present, rendering himself dead on the spot? Did he slip away into a divergent reality and leave his original one behind? Or did he, in reliving the trauma with Dr. Haynes, live too far into it and died? Well, my opinion is that the last of those three is true. (Although, this conclusion is a little shot in the foot for me personally because I never discussed the death of Stefan’s mum with Dr. Haynes ever. Unless you try to make the conclusion that the entirety of my personal run through this game even from Stefan getting up at the very start of it was all in his reliving). Time to come clean about something I’ve been hinting through this post. Delusions. Almost all of the endings involve delusions. But, you’ll have to wait until the end of this chapter before I bring all of that together.

Ending Four-B: “Cut!” - having taken Stefan down the Netflix path and into a fight with Dr. Haynes, I told him to jump through the window. He runs to the window but it doesn’t open - and then we hear something shout CUT! The view pulls out to reveal that Stefan is in a studio, and that - in a very meta move - all of this is just a production being made (for TV, for film... for Netflix?) and that trying to jump out of the window isn’t in the script. Stefan is then addressed as Mike and it seems to be the case that he has fallen a little too much into character. The studio assistant, worried with his insistence that he is Stefan, rushes off to find a medic. And that’s the end of that.

Ending Four-B Analysis: Firstly, I put this with Ending Four because it’s down a similar path, and once again we become Stefan... sorry, Mike’s delusion. And this led me to an interesting thought about this universe where we’ve taken control of a delusional actor - is the alternative for taking the Netflix sign, which is having the fight with Dr. Haynes (as “scripted”) and being dragged off just a part of this universe��s production? In that instance, is the delusional then our own that this world is a reality when - surprise, surprise, it’s a Netflix production (and presumably, in that universe, also a Black Mirror episode)? Secondly, as an aside, the only option presented to me after this ending for a rewind was “Get Rabbit From Dad”...

Well, there you go, five “main” endings (and a bit) and an awful lot for me to explain...

Except... Ending Six. What I Believe Is The True “Main” Ending.

So we lead Stefan back to the sign, give him the Diverging Paths sign (or call it Whitebear, if thus inclined.), make him kill Dad, and make him chop up the body. Then, the Boss and Colin discuss the fact that Stefan is late with his work - Colin convinces him to leave Stefan be for another day. And what happens here on, well, happens. It’s worth noting the reluctance and pain Stefan has carrying out the order we gave him to chop up his Dad. But then, it’s contrasted by the lack of emotion he shows in Dr. Haynes’ office. Perhaps he’s taken that JFD documentary to heart about believing that if all paths occur, and there is no free will - then why care? Why feel guilt on behalf of what seems to be destiny? And honestly, I can’t blame Stefan... Because he doesn’t have free will here, we’re throwing decisions at him and he’s along for the ride. We made him kill his dad. We made him chop him up.

And herein lies our delusion. That in making these choices for him, we have a choice. Because we really don’t - we’re in a Bandersnatch of our own (if you’re a CYOA fan then you might’ve sensed this coming...) and honestly, we should’ve known from the start. We’re the ones that selected the option Black Mirror: Bandersnatch on Netflix and hit play, after all. Just as Stefan has pulled back from making an infinity of paths and left enough complexity to make it seem so. I mean, I’ll be blunt here even though I’ve yet to discuss it in depth in Chapter Two - technically, there is no way that any one human being is getting through every possible path/universe. To us, it may as well be infinite. And yet, it’s all just an illusion of free will.

Endings Two and Three all push us, the player, bluntly into going back into this warren of choices - to try again. Pushing us further on. Ending Four is more subtle, toying with us by giving us a tragic ending for Stefan so we feel inclined to go again and do better for him (and in my case, straight up offers up a path to Ending Five, and what seems a more hopeful ending until you get into it.) Ending One is even there if you decide to take the choice to not make any choices, to not interfere at all. Leaving the universe on course - but of course, this is our game and trap so it tells us not so subtly to try again as well.

And Ending Five leads us to ending with... A delusion. There’s the crux of the matter.

Ending One is our delusion that we can game the system by not getting involved.

Ending Two is Stefan’s (and our) delusion that if we play by the nicest choices and rules of life, it’s all going to turn out happily.

Ending Three is Stefan’s delusion (spurred on by the acid? by Colin’s way of thinking? by both?) that if infinite worlds are out there and free will is an illusion then what does it matter if he jumps?

Ending Four is where Stefan becomes delusional as a result of us and ends up locked up. We are the delusion. Four-B is where Stefan himself, as a person, is the delusion.

Ending Five is either the delusion of a man who relived his trauma too deeply or the delusion of us in thinking that when the paths were all clear and we had what seemed like a final end, that it would be happy. (Or none of the above, if you really want to go analysing this one differently.)

And Ending Six is our delusion. “And now, they’ve only got the illusion of free will but really, I decide the ending.”

In a few short seconds, we realise that we have been the Stefan of Charlie Brooker and co. - being led towards this ending that is out of our hands now. Despite all the paths and other endings you take, you’re likely to end up back here.

And as Stefan says about how he thinks Bandersnatch led to a happy ending, and we see him in his room, with his computer - and walls covered in paths; trying to make sense of the maze he’s playing... well, I think you can piece together the parallels between him and us.

And then we’re landed with the fact that he’s kept his dad’s head. And the 5/5 review we’ve been looking for all game finally comes, but then it turns out even that comes at a price. We’ve driven Stefan insane, certainly - and we’ve tainted the happiness of a moment we were striving for. And there’s a final delusion for us - the delusion that whatever choices were out there for us to make, we could get an ending where everyone lives, Stefan is happy, the game gets 5/5 and all is well. But we can’t. No matter what Stefan does, he can’t divert from the path we choose and no matter what we do, we can’t divert from the path Charlie Brooker chose.

Colin’s daughter takes up the mantle of her father, inspired by having found Stefan’s work, just as Stefan was inspired by having found Jerome F Davies’. (She even has Jerome’s book as well!) And one more time, we fall into the meta hole as it’s revealed that she’s creating her game for TVs and smart devices under Netflix. Her game is the Bandersnatch we’re playing.

As a parting shot, Charlie Brooker brings himself into the web the one we can without completely shattering what remains of the fourth wall. Pearl represents him, trapped in the same madness, trying to put this game together. We are given our final choice - and either way, it’s a moot choice. Both destroy Bandersnatch. Both cause the screen to cut out - did we just erase Bandersnatch? Does it matter, given that our choice or even abstaining meant nothing in the end?

And I suppose you have to feel sympathy for Charlie Brooker, because the pain Stefan felt and the pain we felt - he’s no stranger to it.

And we’re left with one question now that the game is gone: What about real life?

Chapter 2: Why A Flowchart Won’t Ever Cut It (Technically)

TO BE ADDED SOON

Chapter 3: So Many Easter Eggs

TO BE ADDED SOON

Chapter 4: The Best Way To Document Every Piece Of Bandersnatch

TO BE ADDED SOON

Chapter 5: Us

TO BE ADDED SOON

#blackmirror #bandersnatch #stefan #charlie brooker #black mirror

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ra-lek · 6 years ago

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Hi! I know you’ve touched on the topic briefly before, but if you don’t mind I’d love to hear any more in-depth thoughts you have on autistic Elliot. It’s one of my favorite headcanons and it’s always fascinating to see other people’s thoughts on it! (Also I just wanted to say that you have a really interesting way of analyzing the show and you seem like a such a genuinely chill, kind person, thank you for being awesome)

heya, i don’t mind at all!! this headcanon is great and there’s a lot of material to work with and analyze so i’m absolutely on board with elaborating more;

but first i gotta establish a few things:

i am not a professional and can’t talk about autism the same way i’ve talked about body language or dissociative identity disorder. mainly because i’ve done essays on the latter and am more educated on the subject, unlike with this specific disorder.

but yo that doesn’t mean i don’t know anything cause psychology is my sHit- i just felt it was necessary for you to know that i’m not as confident in my analysis as i usually am; so feel free to correct me!!

next, in canon, elliot is diagnosed with clinical depression and social anxiety disorder. with a couple of ’delusional’ mentions thrown here and there. however, we most certainly know he suffers from DID as well- and the fact it’s his MAJOR problem and hasn’t been properly acknowledged by the show leaves us with room to speculate.

and finally- i’ve been diagnosed with and am being treated for clinical depression and anxiety disorder. so i will point things out from my perspective here as well, since people with anxiety have similar symptoms to people on the spectrum and/or people with ADHD/ADD. (sometimes even OCD)

alright now that that’s all clear we can finally start looking at his behavior!!

first and foremost, autism & ad(h)d are developmental disorders because the symptoms for them can generally be noticed in early childhood; as opposed to anxiety which is a mental illness. so it’s entirely possible to have a cocktail of disorders in your head.

i’m bringing ADD up a lot because i’ve been speculated to have it & am supposed to take some tests- but am not officially diagnosed yet. now that we’ve got my entire family history, blood type & credit card number laid out, we’re ready to go.

anyway, these are the symptoms:

1. difficulty with communication & interaction with others

this is probably where anxiety, add and autism collide the most. though in very different ways- and they’re not exclusive to people with one of these diagnosis only.

for example, eye contact. i’m terrible at it. people with autism & anxiety are also pretty darn bad at it, and elliot might seem that way at times; he hides a lot- but not as often as he tends to hold an intense eye contact, instead? which can also be seen as an ‘odd’ thing to do in social communication. as in, not noticing if someone’s uncomfortable under such gaze, let’s say.

that brings me to the next topic which is uh, coincidentally, communication.

he is quite blunt when it comes to it, has a distinctive ‘flat’ #elliotvoice tone. @mototwinkclub pointed out a few instances last time this topic was brought up, such as saying “i’m okay with it being awkward between us” to matpat ollie or “not at all, actually.” with gideon- and he doesn’t do it to be rude. doesn’t really realize it’s ‘bad’ to say it like that, either.

i mean i know he said he’s trying to work on his social anxiety but that’s not quite how you’d go about it? i firmly believe he suffers from generalized anxiety. obviously, that includes social anxiety as well; but this way you could explain why he’s way more concerned with…everything else. and is pretty straightforward in conversation.

since i referenced the pilot, one of the first lines he says about himself is “i don’t know how to talk to people. the only person person i could talk to was my dad- but he died.” which brings us back to the developmental aspect of this disorder. since he’s indicating he didn’t know how to talk to people even when he was a kid. which is true, in every flashback we see he either doesn’t talk at all or talks very little.

what’s interesting though- although he’s bad at reading 'conversation’- he’s extremely good at reading people. and the fact he 'looks for the worst in them’ contradicts the usual aspect that’s brought up when it comes to an autistic thought process, which is made out to be like “if i wouldn’t do this, then why would anyone else?” and it’s not the way he thinks at all.

instead, he feels empathy on a moral level if that makes sense? people on the spectrum are said to either be too empathic or not at all. and it’s hard to pinpoint elliot? because, clearly, he cares for people as much as he doesn’t trust them. use an example the reason he leaked ray’s information. he literally said “but then i keep thinking about those people.” but we haven’t seen him empathize with, for instance, vera- even when he gave a pretty tragic backstory. he can tell who the bad guy is.

when it comes to spacing out, he does it all the time. people on the spectrum do it all the time, i certainly do it all the time. but we have to focus on what he is thinking about when he does it- because that is our indicator.

we usually see his thoughts filled with paranoia, over-thinking, analyzing, etc,.. which i associate with anxiety disorder mostly? but, we have to take into account something he suffers from the most and it’s dissociative identity disorder. so not only does he space out, but he tends to dissociate, as well. perfect example for this is when he mutes the world around him. or just doesn’t listen.

once again, from the pilot, when angela tells him “stop thinking about something else while i’m talking to you!!” he isn’t actually daydreaming or spacing out in the usual sense- he’s recalling the night (mostly for the viewer than for himself let’s be honest) she’s talking about and we see that he was too anxious to go in. he doesn’t tell her that.

now let’s talk about his no-touch policy for a second. that’s something a lot of people on the spectrum have in common. i think it’s, once again, one of those cases where one could be either completely touch-starved or aversive. though we can’t ignore the fact he’d been abused when he was young.

as i was going through the pilot for most of my evidence here (as you can notice) there’s a very small detail at the beginning when ron leans in to ask “are you blackmailing me!?” and we can see elliot flinch in genuine fear. this is not the only instance where he seems afraid to get hit. breaKs my goddamn heart.

but he’s also the one to initiate contact sometimes- and he often misunderstands the situation. shayla told him not to ask, he kissed darlene, tried kissing angela on the train that time when she denied him- he does it cause that’s what he thinks he should do.

2. restrictive or repetitve behaviors

he’s absolutely all about those routines- he doesn’t want anything destructing his ’perfectly constructed loop’ anytime he has one. (season 1 starbucks, season 2 jailtime, season 3 ecorp) but it’s important to point out that in all of these scenarios, he’s been to one to break the loop himself. by realizing they weren’t making anything better.

there are a couple of nervous ticks he has, general fidgeting with his hands/hair/hoodie- all of these apply to every disorder we’ve mentioned here.

comfort item/food is a very good one!! since we’ve only ever seen him eat fries, he has a “crying corner” in his room, he’s constantly 'hiding’ under the hoodie. probably the main comfort item.

he’s also insanely hyperfocused on technology and numbers and hacking, obviously- he has a clear routine every time. burn the disc, delete the folder, write a song over one of the cds, shove them under the table. same goes for when he thinks he’s fucked up- throw stuff in the microwave, destroy it, you get the image.

speaking of those cds though, if he can remember exactly which song he wrote for each person he’s got data on; that could be a damn good indicator of it!!

all of this could be a combination of whys and becauses which is super fun if you ask me. elliot is complex and, although i share 2.5 disorders with him, i can’t relate to his actions/coping/thoughs completely all the time.

it just tells you how different everyone’s brains are, you can’t restrict a disorder to a specific pattern and only consider that when diagnosing somebody.

so, in conclusion, elliot could very possibly be autistic!!

#real long one y'all #lemme know what you think though!!#elliot alderson #mr robot #/mine #shutupneil #sjdhjsjs thank you for the compliments tho💕💕💕

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tinamrazik · 6 years ago

Text

Revisited: My Interview with Lily Tomlin

The Wit, The Wisdom, The Wonderful Lily Tomlin

Lily Tomlin is more than a legend in the Entertainment business. She is living proof that with talent and perseverance, a long and successful career is not only possible but it’s inevitable. Comedian, actress, writer, producer, recording artist, activist, multiple award winner; there is nothing Tomlin can’t do. Many of us remember first seeing her in the 60’s show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Her cast of characters is still as relevant today as they were then. Like us, they have changed with the times, matured (except for Edith Ann, she’s still 5 ½ years old), and developed a wisdom and insight that comes with age and time, much like Tomlin herself. Her films have also spanned the spectrum in regards to comedy vs. drama and the varied women she has played. Comedy classics “9 To 5,” “All Of Me,” and “The Incredible Shrinking Woman,”; dramas “Nashville,” (in which she made her film debut in 1975 and was nominated for an Academy Award), “A Prairie Home Companion,” “Tea With Mussolini,” and “Moment By Moment.” First appearing on Broadway in 1977 her one-woman shows have also been memorable and that of which a legend is made. “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” was made into a feature film in 1991. She has made guest appearances in such critically acclaimed television shows as “Murphy Brown,” “Will & Grace,” “The West Wing,” and “Damages.” Her latest endeavor on the small screen now filming is “Malibu Country,” with Reba McEntire. At age 72 she is once again embarking on the road with a few scheduled stops with her one-woman show. She was called by Time Magazine “the woman with the kaleidoscope face.” There is no doubt she has been an inspiration to hundreds of comedians who have followed after her. A civil and gay rights activist she has been with her life partner Jane Wagner for over 40 years; a personal accomplishment almost unheard of not only in the Entertainment industry but the real world as well. Lily Tomlin is truly an artist in every sense of the word and a woman for all seasons.

May 6, 2012 is South Florida’s time in the sun with Ms. Tomlin; but on this day I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with her one on one. I found her to be extremely personable, funny, thought provoking, and completely in tune with the world we all share. This certainly isn’t the fluff piece I was expecting to write and you may be expecting to read. She was open, willing, and able to talk about everything under the sun, I felt as if I were catching up with an old friend.

Tina Mrazik: Hi, how are you? Lily Tomlin: I’m good. Okay so, I’m coming to Miami. TM: Yes, to the Adrienne Arsht Center on May. 6th. How many dates are on your current tour? LT: I do dates every year, I don’t do a tour. I do what I can do in between other stuff. I think there’s an advantage there. Last week, I would have had to move a bunch of dates. TM: Has "Malibu Country" been picked up for the season? LT: No, I don’t know if it’s been picked up yet or not. We shot it on Tuesday night, a week ago.

TM: How did you get the role starring alongside Reba McEntire in the upcoming ABC TV comedy “Malibu Country”? LT: They had that part and asked me to do it. I know Reba and I like Reba. It was a funny script so I agreed to it. I think it went pretty well. TM: Do you enjoy working again network television? LT: Oh yeah, I like to do a bit of it all. I’ve done a lot of TV this past year. TM: Indeed, you’ve made several appearances on TV including Damages, in which you earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress for your role as Marilyn Tobin. LT: Yes, I did. Web Therapy starts airing on Showtime in July. TM: You’ve also participated in several projects for cable networks including HBO and Showtime. Do you find there’s a lot more freedom on cable verses commercial network? LT: Of course there is, absolutely. You get to step out a bit. And I like all of them. As long as the material is interesting, something exciting to play. I especially love Web Therapy and I did Eastbound and Down too. I had a lot of fun doing that. You know what show Eastbound? TM: Yes, it’s a very funny show. LT: I loved playing Danny McBride’s character, Tammy Powers. It all has a different kind of feel to it. And Reba’s show too. This pilot was interesting too. They let me name the character after my own mother. So I named her Lily May and that was sort of the attraction too. TM: There are many women of this generation that are working in comedy. With the material they’re doing and the way they’re presenting it, do you think women are finally able to keep up with the boys when it comes to edgy material. LT: Yeah, I think there is that youth audience. Yeah, I do. I think it’s expected. Just like on cable, the language is expected too. The sensibility, just being more ostentatious. TM: Do you believe this evolution in popular culture is going in more positive or negative direction? LT: Well, I don’t know. I think the culture has a tendency to become a little coarser in general. Maybe it’s good though. Maybe it’s flattened boundaries. It all depends on how it’s used. I remember on Deadwood, the show on HBO, they said ‘c***sucker’ about every other word. Then they had that woman, that nice woman in the first season that she was sort of gentile and became kind of rough. Her husband, I can’t remember the exact, I didn’t watch it every week. I hardly have time to watch anything every week including myself. She was sort of a gentle woman you know. Educated or married or something; and then she sat out awhile and then she (laughing) began out talking the guy who ran the saloon or whatever he did. But yeah, I wonder all the people talking; probably they used a lot language at that time. You know on Laugh-In we had The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate and the Farkel Family. Everybody was always trying to push the barriers. TM: With Laugh-In there was more innuendo, now everything is in your face. LT: As I recall you couldn’t even say the word ‘ass.’ I remember I was an usher at the movies, movie house. The first movie that ever used the word ‘virgin’ on screen was a big deal. TM: Do you think in some instances, we've become too politically correct when news anchors and TV personalities are having to apologize because they offended certain groups of people with words that most Americans hear everyday? LT: Well some of those just happened recently. It’s part of their vocabulary now. If you do it what’s the point of apologizing you should just own it. But I guess people, the group that’s offended, I don’t know, I’d have to be in their shoes. It does seem a little over the top but it came from a desire to change the vocabulary and the culture, you know? Like calling women employees ‘girls’; "my girl". "My girl will call your girl." Stuff like that- that’s the feminist era. But I remember concepts that were accepted, you know. Even myself, I had begun working on a character and the result was an old person. I had a line in there that goes back to the very earliest 70’s. And I had a line in it which became really foolish; the character was supposed to be like an old woman, 90 years old and she’s saying, “Drop kick those grandbabies up against a wall.” And it seemed funny to me at the time but it was a stupid thing to say. So that kind of stuff when you first hear it, and yet you can do it, the pendulum swings the other way gets deeper and heavier. Because behavior is sometimes imitated is just like children grow up in a white supremacist group. They’re totally programmed to be racist and hateful. They know nothing else. They just repeat the language. So I don’t know where it stops and where it starts. I would be the last one to try and censor someone. And when you judge something, the idea of not apologizing is just immature. I don’t know anyone who’s had to do it besides Tracy (Morgan). Do newscasters do it a lot, commentators? I doubt anybody at Fox does it. TM: Sometimes I think they go a little bit overboard as far as apologizing. Perhaps America has become too sensitive. I remember when we used to be a lot tougher. LT: I think a lot of stuff is accepted, really. There was a time when a certain amount of hatred, not even hatred, I don’t even want to use the word. But you had people thinking Jews or blacks or whatever. Women, gay people, whatever - they’re just going to have an attack mode for those people. They don’t want to have to hear them, hear about them. I think there are a lot of weird points of view in the world. I mean look, I grew up in Detroit, the inner city in a black neighborhood. My mother and dad are both Southern, I went to Kentucky every summer on the farm. I lived in an old apartment house; I grew up with all kinds of people. And I’ve been exposed to a lot of different human beings and weren’t so different. They may appear different on the surface. So again you have to have respect for other people’s feelings, you just do. But if you’re not stupid and somewhat educated or sensitive or have a feeling, then you have room for other people too. To say we’re too sensitive you’re talking about which group is offended; me, I don’t know. I really don’t know where to draw the line. You have to draw it on your own sensibility. TM: You’ve been with Jane (Wagner) for over 40 years, correct? LT: 41. TM: Congratulations. LT: Thank you. She thanks you too. (Laughing) TM: Is she there? LT: No, no. She doesn’t go on the road with me. I love to perform a certain number of dates a year so she doesn’t go out too often. TM: In my opinion, Hollywood is doing something that I’m not really crazy about. They’re doing too many remakes of classic films or turning TV shows into movies. From your and Jane’s perspective as writers, is there a lack of originality in Hollywood? LT. Well, we’ve talked about it sometimes just because we, yeah that has come up with us, you’re right. The idea of remaking something and not doing something that’s original or not perusing something that’s original; we do comment on that. But I can’t say we’ve started a movement in the organization; down with remakes. TM: They’ve put “9 to 5” on Broadway. LT. That’s right, they’ve done that. “ TM: How would you feel about a remake of “9 To 5”? What if it was completely different than the original? Like what if it was remade into a raunchy sort of “American Pie”-type comedy, would that bother you? LT: Well, it wouldn’t bother me, I mean gosh, what bothers me is if we get into a nuclear war. I’d be disappointed probably for a minute the fact that they would do that but I wouldn’t dwell on it. There was the intention of Jane, Dolly and me to do a sequel to it, not a remake but a sequel. And a sequel might have worked closer to the time the original appeared but nothing ever worked out; no script was ever acceptable all around the block. And I know Jada Pinkett Smith had the rights and was going to do an African American version. Now what form that would have taken I don’t know. If it would have been a redo of the original or a completely different invention. I just don’t know. I mean I heard that Queen Latifah was going to redo “All of Me.” So I don’t quite know what it means. Or how far they’d go or don’t go or how far they’d corrupt it. I would see it. Maybe if I were the producer or the director had written “9 to 5” maybe I’d feel more possessive. In the musical they used the actors to look and move just like us from the stage. Even Mr. Hart looked like Dabney; I can’t remember the actor’s name. He was good in the musical. Allison (Janney) looks enough like me from the stage. I mean she’s tall and lankly. Meg Hilty is very stocked and big busted like Dolly (Parton) and a little blonde you know. And then the Jane (Fonda) character, anyway, they were enough like us; in a sense it looked like the movie. For us at that time, I don’t know about Fonda because she produced it originally but all of us felt it looked kind of eerie, surreal. The three of us went to the opening because of Dolly in LA and New York. And sitting there watching those three people (laughing) and they were sitting there almost, because Pat Resnick wrote the book for the musical, and she had written the screenplay. She took very much from herself and the original, even the costumes were similar to what Ann Roth had designed in the movie. And anyway, so that’s the effect it had on me at the time. It was kind of surreal. And I wasn’t sure it was live, maybe it was us up there. (Laughing) TM: Now that you have my number will you give it to Cher? LT: If I run into her I will. (Laughing) Oh, my gosh, you’d get a kick out of her. TM: I’ve actually met her. LT: Yes, she fun and interesting. TM: This is one of the great things about meeting people in the entertainment business and getting to talk to you. Everyone that I’ve met has basically been very down to earth. When I can go on record and say that I made Cher, Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin laugh, that’s pretty good. LT: Okay, (laughing) maybe we should do “9 To 5”? Bette, Cher and I - they’re 24/7...

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demitgibbs · 6 years ago

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Kyle MacLachlan Talks New Gay Dad Role, Reaching LGBTQ Youth

In Giant Little Ones, actor Kyle MacLachlan plays a gay divorced dad named Ray Winter parenting a distant teenage son, Franky (Josh Wiggins), who’s grappling with his own sexual identity. I repeat: Kyle MacLachlan, a gay dad. The 60-year-old actor’s range knows absolutely no bounds, inhabiting diversified worlds and traversing genre, from comedy to drama, from soapy to supernatural.

MacLachlan’s first major role was in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Dune (soon, Call Me By Your Name actor Timothée Chalamet will be slipping into MacLachlan’s stillsuit for the forthcoming remake) and two years later, in 1986, he collaborated with the screen auteur again on Blue Velvet, starring alongside Isabella Rossellini. But it was Lynch’s early-’90s cult TV series Twin Peaks that arguably made MacLachlan a marquee name (in 2017, he reprised his role as Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return).

In his three decades in TV and film and on stage, MacLachlan has played a city official based on first big-city openly gay Mayor Sam Adams, Fred Flintstone’s boss, the guy who fucks Nomi Malone in a swimming pool, Riley’s dad in Inside Out, Charlotte’s husband on Sex and the City, Bree Van de Kamp’s husband on Desperate Housewives, and because why the hell not: Cary Grant’s ghost. Starring in writer-director Keith Behrman’s Giant Little Ones as Helpful Gay Dad was really just an inevitably, but for MacLachlan, Ray is a warm hug of a role he deeply feels is important. One that, as a parent himself, even hits close to home.

Here, the actor talks about raising his son, Callum, much like Ray Winter does, gay fans who slip into his DMs and bears who love his rosé.

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You’ve played dads before. But what about Ray spoke to you differently?

He had a journey in this as well, which I liked. It was really about the connection with his son, and at that age it’s very difficult and made even more challenging by the fact that the parents are separated. Under the circumstances, Franky just doesn’t know what to think or what to say, and I like that (Ray) really hung in there. I think in the original draft he was maybe a little more demanding, and so we kind of softened that a little bit. There are still those issues, but it was really important to me to feel like Ray was there and he wasn’t gonna go anywhere and to remain as non-judgmental as possible.

His presence is always felt, but he’s able to give his kid space at the same time. I appreciated that he tells his son to focus on who you’re drawn to and not what to call it, essentially letting him know that sexuality is a spectrum. How did that resonate with you?

That was a really nice piece of writing on Keith’s part, I thought. Again, trying not to judge. Especially at that age, I remember for myself just kind of trying to find where you fit in, what you’re good at, what you’re not good at, who’s your group. There’s lots and lots of questions and insecurities that are masked by a false sense of identity or control or “I don’t want to hear what you say, I’ve got it figured out myself.” The idea of just being present, it’s the way I approach the relationship with my son, the not judging. I’m not going at it trying to make him into something he doesn’t want to be.

You were the stepfather of a gay son, Andrew Van de Kamp, on Desperate Housewive. Who does the better job parenting a queer kid: Orson Hodge or Ray Winter?

(Laughs) Orson, bless his heart. You know, he had good intentions, and there was an understanding there at attempting to connect. I don’t think Orson was ever comfortable in that role. I think Ray is more conscious and he’s a champion, in some ways, for anyone who’s being judged. In this particular case, it’s “hang on a second.” He’s sort of about turning the page: “Let’s look at this and what’s really happening here.” I liked that. And he does it with an inner strength and a firmness, but it’s not without a wry sense of humor, and that I liked about him too.

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When were your eyes first opened to having an LGBTQ following?

I think it was probably with Blue Velvet, I guess. Thematically it expected so much of the audience and it told a story that was so unusual and so true. That sort of started it, but I think with the advent of social media, suddenly it’s really obvious and present. And it’s great.

How has it become obvious through social media?

Just through comments, and its fun to read and great to feel the support. And then because so much of it is built around David Lynch, there’s a real shorthand just in terms of terminology and phrases, and because of David’s visuals and his images and his dialogue, of course.

I have a friend who says Blue Velvet was responsible for his sexual awakening. Is that what gay fans tell you on Twitter?

(Laughs) Maybe not quite so personal! But you know, that’s film. Film is all about experiencing something and having your eyes opened, and I think that film in particular was about that; the exploration of it and the themes of it were so interesting, and they hadn’t really been dealt with that much.

What kind of attention did Showgirls get you from the LGBTQ community?

(Laughs) I don’t think it found its camp niche until a little bit later. It had to go through the “Oh my god, this is perhaps one of the worst films ever made” reaction and then people sort of said, “I think it was, in a way, a guilty pleasure.” Then that began to grow, and there’s a true hardcore following of it and that’s really fun. I’ve never said, “Oh yeah, in fact, actually, that was the intention,” or, “Oh yeah, it’s a great film” – it’s not a great film. But it succeeds at a level that I think is still entertaining and fun. And why not? That’s our business.

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I was at a gay bar once and they were showing Showgirls on all the TVs. When you shot that film, did you expect for it to live on in the LGBTQ community like it has?

I think we all entered into the film – certainly, I did – looking at the creative side of it. So you had really talented people – (director) Paul Verhoeven, obviously – and I think his intention was to do something that was sort of hard and cutting-edge and exposé and I think it kind of got away from him a little bit and became something else that was unexpected. But at the same time, we’ve all embraced it and said, “This is where it went,” and I gotta say, the film was probably gonna have a much longer life because of how it ended up than if it hadn’t. If it was a film that we intended to make, it would’ve been great and fine and OK, but now, it will live on forever.

Particularly at gay bars.

At least there! And midnight showings!

For 2004’s rom-com Touch of Pink, what was special about portraying the ghost of Cary Grant who gives advice to a gay Muslim man?

It was really fun. First of all, just the research alone was great. Getting to watch all the films, reading up about him, who he was as a person and the business side of things in Hollywood and how he really, really created this persona, which I think he tried to get away from but it was what he was known for. So I loved the research of it.

And the director, Ian (Iqbal Rashid), whose story this actually was, was so lovely and I see him occasionally when I’m in London. He’s just a terrific person and a very, very talented director, and I was flattered. He had actually seen me on the stage doing a new play with Woody Harrelson and I don’t quite know how he got there from that performance (laughs), but he thought I’d be perfect. So that’s a pretty big mantle to try to take on, and so we sort of softened that a little bit and said he’s more the spirit of Cary Grant – he’s not exactly Cary Grant. But I enjoyed stepping in those shoes and trying out that language and that kind of attitude and that whole thing. And it’s got a beautiful message, and just the ending when he has to let go, it’s very touching, I think.

In 2018, you were honored with a Dorian acting award by GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, for Twin Peaks: The Return, and in 2009, Desperate Housewives received Outstanding Comedy Series from GLAAD. Is there something special or distinct about having your work acknowledged by LGBTQ audiences and organizations?

Yeah, those stories, if they can speak to a community and there’s a resonance there, that’s the goal of this. They should be universal, but I think that if there’s a relationship that can be created then we’re doing a good job; something that’s worthwhile that creates an emotional response and a connection, that’s really what you want. I mean, that’s what I want.

You played the mayor of Portland in Portlandia. Do you think that character would make a good mayor of Twin Peaks or Wisteria Lane?

(Laughs) He wasn’t a really good mayor – but he was incredibly enthusiastic! I think that was the fun of it: He always got things a little bit wrong but they kind of ultimately ended up OK, with the help of Fred (Armisen) and Carrie (Brownstein), certainly. But, oh god, at least it would be a lot of fun to have him as a mayor of any community, I think.

Why haven’t we seen you in more openly gay roles?

(Laughs) It’s a good question. You know, the work just kind of comes, and it’s one of those things where once it sort of filters through a little bit of whatever it does in Hollywood it finds its way into my inbox and you take a look at it.

Have there been gay roles you’ve turned down?

It’s always about the quality of the material, so if it there was, it just wasn’t worth telling.

But then you read something like Giant Little Ones.

And you know that it is a beautiful story. I had the reaction that everyone had: This is a story that needed to be told, and for any kids out there who are having this kind of “I don’t know, I don’t know” and they don’t have anywhere to turn, it’s like, well, we’re not the answer, but we’re at least an experience to say, “You’re not alone.”

And a reminder to your own son that his dad is OK with whomever he becomes or wants to be.

In fact, he attends a school in New York and it’s all about that. It’s all about the acceptance of everyone, and it’s a wonderful thing to watch because that wasn’t my experience growing up. Public schools, small town, very conservative. Not unlike the situation of Franky, there was a lot of “however tough you are” and “whatever sports you play,” those are your identifiers. It’s nice that he’s having a completely different experience.

In your spare time, you are a winemaker. Are gay men some of your most loyal rosé buyers?

(Laughs) I should hope so, for god’s sake! Rosé is one of those crazy things: It just keeps expanding and people love it and now it’s not just for summer anymore, it’s not just for the Hamptons anymore. It can be year-round and, yeah, it’s been really fun. And yeah, very supportive.

In a queer context “bear” means a hairy, chubby gay man, so it can’t hurt that “Pursued by Bear” is the name of your brand.

You know, I was really going after the Shakespeare play, obviously, but yeah, not unaware and I thought, that’s kind of funny. There’ve been occasions where I’ve met a few guys – bears, you know – and they’ve said, “Oh yeah, I’ve got this in my cellar.” And it cracks me up! I’m like, “Fantastic, I’m glad you like it.” Its good wine and it should be enjoyed.

from Hotspots! Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2019/03/27/kyle-maclachlan-talks-new-gay-dad-role-reaching-lgbtq-youth/ from Hot Spots Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.tumblr.com/post/183750970250

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Home Alone’s Devin Ratray on Becoming Hollywood’s Ultimate Big Brother Bully, Buzz

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There are Christmas films and then there’s Home Alone.

Released back in 1990, no one really knew what to expect from this low-budget family comedy about a boy forced to defend his house from a pair of bungling burglars after being accidentally left behind from a family holiday.

Yet Home Alone is one of those rare examples of all the stars aligning in Hollywood to create something special. It’s a truly unique Christmas film, both feel-good and immensely funny, rivalled only in that respect by Will Ferrell’s Elf.

There are countless reasons why it remains a festive classic; John Hughes’s script, Chris Columbus’s deft direction, the work of cinematographer Kevin Macat and John Williams’s score are just a few examples.

One that often gets overlooked, however, is Devin Ratray’s Buzz McCallister.

Few actors have succeeded so well in bringing to life all the painfully familiar tropes of the average older brother. Buzz can be mean. His behaviour occasionally borders on bullying. But he’s also funny and, when it comes down to it, has a good heart.

Ratray’s performance embodies that strange sibling duality perfectly.

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Hughes had written Home Alone with Macaulay Culkin in mind for the role of Kevin, while Columbus was always keen on bringing together the diverse talents of Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern as hapless criminals Harry and Marv.

It was Casting Director Janet Hirshenson who recruited Ratray for the role of Buzz – a role he could never have predicted, 30 years later, he would still be talking about.

“I’m asked about it all the time,” he tells Den of Geek.

“At this time of year, I am asked about it on a daily basis.”

According to Ratray, people tend to fall into one of two distinct categories when it comes to realising he played Buzz in Home Alone.

“People either know me right away or they find out after knowing me for some time. It can be quite a surprise. I don’t look the same as I did when I was 13,” he laughs.

Born in New York to actor parents Peter Ratray and Ann Willis, he had already been acting in movies for four years prior to landing the part of Buzz following a “relatively straightforward audition.”

After an initial meeting with Hirshenson he was invited to a hotel in midtown New York to read for Columbus.

“Chris encouraged me to explore the material. If I felt like throwing in a line or improvising, he wanted me to do that so he could get a better sense of who I was. He made me feel at ease and very comfortable and I walked out feeling quite relaxed. It was a pretty good experience in terms of an auditioning process and just a total joy when I got the part.”

Ratray is even able to recall what he read for Columbus, more than 30 years later.

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“I remember doing the Old Man Marley speech in Buzz’s bedroom for the audition. I guess it helped that I had memorised it and felt comfortable with the script. I just felt very at ease with Chris Columbus. Maybe he felt that he could work with someone who didn’t come across as nervous on camera. I don’t know what it was but I’m just grateful that I got it.”

Some actors may have been able to draw from their own personal experience when it came to shaping a character like Buzz – plenty of us have been born with older brothers, after all.

But, fortunately for him, Ratray’s formative years were a far more pleasant experience.

“I have an older brother and there is almost the same age difference as Kevin and Buzz but he and I got along very well growing up. He was nothing like Buzz at all. The exact opposite in fact, so there was no familial inspiration at home.”

Despite his largely negative depiction in Home Alone, the role of Buzz was one that Ratray relished playing and one he had no apprehension about taking on.

“Up until then I had played either nerds or bullies. Both ends of the spectrum. But playing the bad guy is always more fun and playing a nasty, surly, rude teenage bastard like Buzz was great.”

Ratray has fond memories of life on the set of Home Alone working alongside the rest of the kids that can be found running around the McCallister house at the start of the film.

“We would laugh and joke around. We bonded like brothers and sisters. I don’t recall any fighting at all. I was also a bit older than most so they did treat me like Buzz the older brother but I felt very close with them and we had a pretty good time together.”

Even so, Ratray remembers facing a gruelling schedule of filming and school work on the set of Home Alone.

“It was hard. We had to go school on the set for three hours a day as well as putting in the eight-hour work day. We didn’t have breaks really.”

Occasionally, if there was a break in filming, he would be rushed off into a lesson with one of the private tutors on set. However, if filming resumed within 20 minutes, none of that lesson time would count towards the required three hours of schooling a day.

Despite the intense workload, Ratray has few regrets about being a child actor.

“It was still fun. A tremendous, unique childhood. I enjoyed it all. I only wish in retrospect I had paid more attention to the schooling on set. It made for a difficult transition when I would get back from a movie and have to catch up at school.”

The hours may have been long and the schooling stop-start but Ratray still has fond memories of his “very brotherly relationship” with Culkin, who he was already aware of prior to Home Alone.

“He was the kid from Uncle Buck at the time and I loved his work in that. He was great to work with,” Ratray says.

“We would try and crack each other up on set. He never succeeded but I absolutely got him.”

Ratray had Culkin in stitches during the scene in which Buzz intentionally eats the cheese pizza specially ordered for Kevin and then offers to “barf” it up for him – classic Buzz.

“Every time on his close-ups, I would slowly shovel pizza into my mouth. I totally got him. He was at my mercy.”

Some actors might have struggled with take after take of eating pizza – but Ratray had no qualms about enjoying the delights of Little Nero’s Pizza, happily consuming slice after slice on camera.

“I have no idea how many takes it took but I never had any difficulty. I really encouraged Chris to let me eat the pizza in the grossest way possible. Milk it for all it was worth. I did a pretty good job.”

While Ratray remembers laughing a lot with Culkin on the set, he cites his onscreen mother and future Schitt’s Creek star Catherine O’Hara as someone he looked up to on the film.

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“She taught me so much about comedic timing and being real. There’s real acting in her performance. I studied her and learned a tremendous amount. The balance between frantic panic and true comedy. Almost screwball comedy. It’s a very fine line and she does it brilliantly. I just loved working with her.”

Ratray wouldn’t encounter the more fearsome of the film’s two Wet Bandits, Joe Pesci, until work began on the sequel. It was an encounter that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in Goodfellas.

“I let my hair grow out after Home Alone. So, initially I had this long, shoulder length hair. Joe Pesci, at the time, had a massive, almost pompadour style thick head of hair and they shaved him bald for the movie.

“He was outside the makeup trailer once as I was going in with the long hair and he said ‘What? They’re letting you keep that? They’re letting you keep your hair like that? They had to shave mine!’”

“I had to be like ’No, Mr Pesci, I’m going in to get the buzz.’ Then he was still there when I came out with the fresh buzz cut and was like ‘look at that, they got you too! Let me see it’ and ribbed me a little for us both having to shave our heads.”

One person he does regret not interacting with on the film is John Hughes though Ratray was fortunate enough to later be cast in another of his movies, the Home Alone-esque Dennis The Menace.

“I found him to be such a warm and caring and humorous guy. Joking around, laughing with kids. Working for him was an absolute honour and seeing what a great guy he was. I wish I could have spent more time with him.”

The Home Alone movies changed Culkin’s life, catapulting him to superstardom and staggering $8 million pay checks for the movies Getting Even With Dad and Richie Rich.

Ratray might not have enjoyed the same level of stardom but he’s continued to work steadily , popping up on TV procedurals like Blue Bloods, Law & Order Special Victims Unit and Elementary as well as in meatier roles on underrated shows like Mosaic and The Tick.

Alongside that has come film roles in critically-acclaimed fare like Nebraska and Blue Ruin. It’s a CV that demonstrates he’s never ended up typecast as a result of Buzz McCallister, even if it has had its ups and downs.

Devin Ratray in Blue Ruin (2013)

“I am very privileged to have continued to act as my only profession and luckily I am able to continue to do interesting and different roles that aren’t just Buzz. But clearly Buzz is something that is going to stay with me.”

Ratray acknowledges he has occasionally been on the receiving end of people who think it is “funny to challenge Buzz McCallister” in public but has never been targeted or bullied over it. He’s also encountered fellow actors who have told him he “caught a lucky break and didn’t deserve” the role. It’s hard to know which sounds worse.

And like Culkin, Ratray struggles to watch a film millions tune in to watch every Christmas.

“I don’t watch it the same way anybody else would. I watch the film and I think about the set that we were on or something that happened at lunch during that day. It’s a dissociative experience.”

With much of the world in lockdown and many film and TV productions only now beginning to get back up and running, Ratray decided to show the film to his seven-year-old son.

“I was expecting him to be a little more impressed. He was a little disorientated to tell you the truth. He watched it and was kind of fascinated when I was on.

“I’m not quite sure he comprehended that when he was looking at the child on the screen that that was his big bearded dad. It must have been an odd experience for him.”

All these years later and despite the personal difficulties he has with it, Ratray still has a favourite scene or two from Home Alone.

“I enjoy telling the Old Man Marley story. Also, at the end when Buzz tells Kevin it’s pretty cool that he didn’t burn the place down. That was a moment that showed he wasn’t a total dick.”

Generally, though, he is hypercritical watching himself back.

“I don’t really like my performance in Home Alone. I go for obvious choices. If I did it now, I would have been funnier and meaner and better all around.”

Even with all those difficulties and the fact that, 30 years later, he’s still fielding questions about a Christmas movie he made as a teenager, Ratray has nothing but gratitude for being involved in the movie.

“I am grateful and thankful it has become a favourite for different generations and transcended film and become bigger than a movie. People associate the holidays with it and they associate family memories with it. It’s made a deep, visceral impact on many people and also, now, their children and even grandchildren over the past 30 years.

“It’s a tremendous phenomenon to be part of and I am very glad that I get to say I played a part.”

Buzz McCallister undoubtedly played an important part in making Home Alone the film fondly remembered today – and it may yet end up being a part he returns to in the not-too-distant future.

“I’m not at liberty to say right now but there may very well be a future engagement and return to the character. But I am not allowed to say right now.”

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Watch this space.

The post Home Alone’s Devin Ratray on Becoming Hollywood’s Ultimate Big Brother Bully, Buzz appeared first on Den of Geek.

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encephalonfatigue · 5 years ago

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hybrid warfare and leftist alliances

this was originally written as a goodreads reflection on Masha Gessen’s book “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia”, but turned into a sprawling mess.

I breezed through all six seasons of The Americans not long ago — another product of my podcast listening habits involving the Magnificast, hosted by two Christian communists. The Americans certainly stoked a smouldering interest in Soviet history for me. I only recently found out that Gessen did the Russian translations for many of the seasons.

This book was recommended to me by a pen pal who did her Master’s thesis on Soviet hockey propaganda, and will soon be starting a PhD on Russian democratic activism (and lesbians). So she certainly knows her stuff, and am glad I took the time to read this.

As a qualifier, before I begin this review, I have seen Gessen use she/her pronouns and other places that say Gessen uses they/them. I will use she/her because that is the most recent source I have found. And also the pronouns Gessen uses in reference to herself in the book. I will correct this review if I find my use of pronouns incorrect. With that out of the way, I’ll proceed onto the book.

I thought it was an absorbing read, well-structured, entertaining, and full of stuff I was completely ignorant of. There was a fascinating section on the practice of sociology under the Soviet Union, a really interesting section on Freudo-Marxism and its interaction with the Soviet state, and this later comes up in Gessen’s use of Erich Fromm for her stuff on totalitarianism. I think Fromm has helped me a lot better understand the dynamics of fascism. Gessen’s meeting with Putin was very fun to read. The difficulties I had (at times) keeping up with the history, dates, names, etc were some indication that I likely need to brush up on my Russian history. Once in a while I would recognize something, like when Gessen mentions Gorky in her typically humorous style:

“The city was named Gorky, after the Russian writer Alexei Peshkov, who, as was the Revolutionary fashion, had taken a tearjerker pen name: it meant “bitter.” When Zhanna was first becoming aware of her surroundings, she had no idea that a writer named Gorky had ever existed: she thought the name was a literal description of her town. The Soviet government seemed to agree: four years before Zhanna’s birth, it had chosen Gorky as the place of exile for the physicist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the country’s best-known dissident.”

I encountered Gorky a couple years ago by way of the Indonesian anti-colonial writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer (a political prisoner in Indonesia for decades, wasting away in various penal colonies, perpetually accused of being a communist, though always denying that label) who was an enthusiastic translator of Gorky’s writing. Translating Gorky’s novel “Mother” into Indonesian was one of Pram’s first sources of income after his wedding, as I read in his memoir “The Mute’s Soliloquy”. He did the Indonesian translation working off from an English translation, and later found out sections were missing after going through a Dutch translation. He humorously wrote that he had to put up with pointed and critical queries about his translation when visiting the University of Leningrad.

I think my affinity for anti-colonial politics and its attendant resistance and revolutionary movements have created a certain (though limited) sympathy for the Soviet Union at times, although I know that when people like Pram were invited to the Soviet Union or Mao’s PRC — or for that matter when African Americans like W. E. B. DuBois, various members of the Black Panthers (like Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton), or Paul Robeson were also — they were shown a very curated view of those countries (as any diplomatic visitor to the West would be shown also), and these were concerted initiatives to project particular images of Communism into the so-called Third World (and Fourth World as ghettoized areas of the ‘First World’ are sometimes called). These are basic tactics to be expected of modern statecraft. My dad’s friend is Nigerian, and while politically and socially conservative (e.g. homophobic), he has a very high view of the Soviet Union as his father was invited to tour Soviet Russia and was very impressed with the place. This positive view of Russia has extended into the post-Soviet Putin years, and this is a theme in Gessen’s book. I will get into these issues a bit later, but first a word about Arendt.

I think the book’s main thesis and orientation draws substantially on Hannah Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism. Arendt is a figure I have been meaning to read for a while. Her work was very important for leftist philosophers engaged in theology like Giorgio Agamben who elaborated on the notion of ‘bare life’ from Arendt’s writing on Aristotelian distinctions of ‘bios’ and ‘zoe’. I do believe in the value of political life and political engagement, and I think those notions come through in Gessen’s focus on how Soviet repression of political engagement carried on into post-Soviet years. Arendt is not a leftist though (in my view), and while I haven’t read much of her work, I get the sense she would not have identified herself as such (nor would have even accepted the political spectrum birthed forth from the French Revolution). And so I think where I depart from agreement with Gessen’s work is where Arendt’s work on totalitarianism comes into view, and I think part of it also involves disagreements I have with Arendt’s views on Marx and leftist politics more broadly that she elaborates on in “On Revolution”. First I will make some remarks on Arendt’s book “The Origins of Totalitarianism”.

So I think the ‘milieu’ (lol) of literature and essays I spend most of my time thumbing through makes certain distinctions between authoritarian fascism and authoritarian communism. Many anarchists will emphasize similarities, yet I don’t think they would consider Hitler and Stalin as equivalents. Even libertarian communists who are against authoritarian tactics of communist ends, still generally hold similar goals as Marxist-Leninists, e.g. the abolition of class, but differ on how to get there. Now of course there are some Leninists who still use the word ‘liquidation’ and are vague about what they mean — likely some variation ranging from ‘the wall’ to ‘re-education camps’. The problem of realizing a classless society without violent coercion and force is an issue, I’d admit, but there are other mechanisms that disincentive acts of domination without the need for terror. The question of their efficacy is another matter. That being said, even though I think Nazism/fascism did have certain overlaps with Stalinism, I don’t think fascism and communism (even Soviet communism) are inherently two manifestations of the same underlying essence. This is Gessen’s summary of Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism:

“Whatever premise formed the basis of the ideology, be it the superiority of a particular race or of a particular class, was used to derive imagined laws of history: only a certain race or a certain class was destined to survive. The “laws of history” justified the terror ostensibly required for this survival. Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space—in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely. ”

In my mind, I don’t see eliminating a race and class as the same thing, although I do agree that many authoritarian communist regimes ended up empowering people who treated ‘ruling classes’ as almost metaphysical entities and one’s ‘class’ could almost be inherited genetically, e.g. if one’s ancestors were landowners, one could some how be held accountable for that (Gessen brings this up). I think many people who identified as communists in those regimes didn’t think that way, but it only takes a portion of people (who do) to cause irreparable trauma and terror, especially when they have power. I of course find that very troubling, but if one treats classes as relationally constituted, which is exactly the whole point of Marx’s body of work, then abolishing class might involve expropriating already expropriated wealth to return it to the people who produced it and need it more, trying to better distribute all the things produced by society such that no one is lacking hygienic housing, proper health care, healthy food, leisure time to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour etc… and fostering a world where people don’t feel superior to other people and have their identity based around having inordinately more than other human beings. I mean that is another way of abolishing class, and I see no problem with ‘eliminating’ class by such means. It’s an ‘elimination’ of a relation not a person. That is, working towards removing relations of domination between people. How that happens in practice is a whole other issue, if it’s at all possible. Authoritarian impulses not only go back to Marx and Engels, but back to utopian socialists, and even show up in Thomas More’s Utopia. So Arendt’s accusations cannot be so easily dismissed.

So this issue of violence is important to Arendt, and she will work though how Marx is connecting it with issues of scarcity and necessity. Arendt accuses Marx of turning issues of scarcity into accusations of exploitation, saying:

“Marx's transformation of the social question into a political force is contained in the term 'exploitation', that is, in the notion that poverty is the result of exploitation through a 'ruling class' which is in the possession of the means of violence… If Marx helped in liberating the poor, then it was not by telling them that they were the living embodiments of some historical or other necessity, but by persuading them that poverty itself is a political, not a natural phenomenon, the result of violence and violation rather than of scarcity.”

Arendt said something similar, but more forthcoming, in a footnote contained in her 1972 book “Crises of the Republic”:

"Behind it, however, stands the illusion of Marx's society of free producers, the liberation of the productive forces of society, which in fact has been accomplished not by the revolution but by science and technology. This liberation, furthermore, is not accelerated, but seriously retarded, in all countries that have gone through a revolution. In other words, behind their denunciation of consumption stands the idealization of production, and with it the old idolization of productivity and creativity"

This is an argument that Jordan Peterson perpetually peddles. I actually agree that capitalism is a far more productive and dynamic economic system than communism in most situations. I think Marx saw that too, and that’s why he believed capitalism was the stage that must precede socialism and then communism. Now you can debate the morality of whether we should accept such terms, but it’s merely a practical assertion on Marx’s part. That’s the grounds on which China’s liberalization occurred, and I think Soviet industrialization found similar justifications under Marx. I haven’t read enough Arendt, but from what I’ve read, I think Arendt’s focus on technology (especially in the American development case) as the answer to scarcity fails to recognize how organizations engaged in technological development under capitalism are in fact very political. Chomsky has called corporations some of the most totalitarian institutions on the face of the planet. I can say that engineering firms are even worse than other corporations. They are often very toxic work environments, deeply connected to the military industrial complex and resource extraction industries. The fact that military-fuelled corporations are behind so much of the innovation and increased productivity that exists today raises questions if it’s worth it. With all the technology that exists in 2020, how much more innovation is worth the continued exploitation and highly authoritarian working conditions that such increased productivity demands. The ‘falling rate of profit’ as the Marxian economists call it is some indication that ‘value-adding’ innovation can only increase by so much more. We have garnered enough productive capacity to meet all basic human needs. Is it time for something new?

Of course Arendt recognizes Marx’s typically Hegelian reversal from [violent expropriation causes poverty] to [scarcity and poverty necessarily causes revolutionary violence] which she strongly finds objectionable throughout the European tradition, including in Robespierre and Hegel. But in this Hegelian move, Marx is suggesting that only by assuring abundance and meeting material needs can one avoid violence. I agree with Marx in his assertion that poverty produces violence, because poverty is a form of structural violence which poor people are reacting too. Arendt later jokes even Lenin saw the technical basis of abundance as true, though I don’t think it’s that far off Marxist dogma as she asserts:

“…when asked to state in one sentence the essence and the aims of the October Revolution, [Lenin] gave the curious and long-forgotten formula: 'Electrification plus soviets.' This answer is remarkable first for what it omits: the role of the party, on one side, the building socialism on the other. In their stead, we are given an entirely un-Marxist separation of economics and politics, a differentiation between electrification as the solution of Russia's social question, and the soviet system as her new body politic that had emerged during the revolution outside all parties. What is perhaps even more surprising in a Marxist is the suggestion that the problem of poverty is not to be solved through socialization and socialism, but through technical means; for technology, in contrast to socialization, is of course politically neutral; it neither prescribes nor precludes any specific form of government.”

Arendt’s characterization of technology as neutral is maybe somewhat similar to the Saint Simonian vision of the neutral ‘administration of things’ reiterated by Engels.

I think maybe a few decades ago, the problem of productivity and scarcity were still central issues, or as Deng Xiaoping put it: the ‘principal contradiction’. But the so-called ‘principal contradiction’ today for China under Xi Jinping is ‘uneven development’. Haha, I’m quoting CCP Central Committee brass now, and I’m not even a Marxist, lol. So this issue is most often rendered as ’inequality’, but I think ‘uneven development’ is actually a good way of putting it. It’s an inequality of both (1) consumption: the distribution of all that we produce collectively as a species within a larger ecosystem of species, and (2) production: the focusing of labour onto producing things primarily for the interests of richest 10% of the global population (although the rationale here is that this stuff eventually trickles down — now 60% of the global population have access to the internet and 20% have been able to enjoy a plane ride).

Now to take a few steps back again, the question of how much violence is acceptable and justified to pursue a particular iteration of a ‘just society’ does pose a problem, which might be glossed over by simply stating violence is inevitable. This is what Arendt writes about in her work “On Revolution”, where she thinks ‘pity’, which undergirds revolutionary politics, quickly turns to cruelty and justifies almost any degree of violence or vice. In this sense I can see how Aristotle’s virtue ethics has really laid claim to Arendt’s arguments here. She has a certain disdain for the ‘by any means necessary’ folks. I never take that phrase literally. I think it is meant to be an assertion of political force more than anything. I don’t know any radical who uses the phrase ‘by any means necessary’ to literally mean that. They would never justify racial genocide if it led to a classless society. Their values are informed by their goals, and ultimately do constrain their means, but maybe less so than Aristoteleans like Arendt who writes:

“Robespierre's pity-inspired virtue, from the beginning of his rule, played havoc with justice and made light of laws. Measured against the immense sufferings of the immense majority of the people, the impartiality of justice and law, the application of the same rules to those who sleep in palaces and those who sleep under the bridges of Paris, was like a mockery to the foundation,of freedom and the establishment of lasting institutions, and to those who acted in this direction nothing was permitted that would have been outside the range of civil law. The direction of the French Revolution was deflected almost from its beginning from this course of foundation through the immediacy of suffering; it. was determined by the exigencies of liberation not from tyranny but from necessity, and it was actuated by -the limitless immensity of both the people's misery and the pity this misery inspired. The boundlessness of the 'all is permitted' sprang here still from the sentiments of the heart whose very boundlessness helped in the unleashing of a stream of boundless violence.”

This is why Arendt prefers the American Revolution to the French Revolution, because it was not concerned with ‘compassion’ or ‘pity’ for the poor, but because it was solely about freedom, yet she recognizes the glaring problem of her example, which is American slavery:

“Yet we deal here with men of the eighteenth century, when this age-old indifference was about to disappear, and when, in the words of Rousseau, an 'innate repugnance at seeing a fellow creature suffer' had become common in certain strata of European society and precisely among those who made the French Revolution. Since then, the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men of all revolutions, and the only revolution in which compassion played no role in the motivation of the actors was the American Revolution. If it were not for the presence of Negro slavery on the American scene, one would be tempted to explain this striking aspect exclusively by American prosperity,'by Jefferson's 'lovely equality', or by the fact that America was indeed, in William Penn's words, 'a good poor Man's country'. As it is, we are tempted to ask ourselves if the goodness of the poor white man's country did not depend to a considerable degree upon black labour and black misery - there lived roughly 400,000 Negroes along with approximately 1,850,000 white men in America in the middle of the eighteenth century, and even in the absence of reliable statistical" data we may be sure that the percentage of complete destitution and misery was considerably lower in the countries of the Old World. From this, we can only conclude that the institution of slavery carries an obscurity even blacker than the obscurity of poverty;”

Often historians will call the American Civil War America’s real revolution. The French Revolution brought about movements to liberate slaves in the colonies (though slaves themselves of course were the initiators, by way of revolts and uprisings), even if not well sustained. The political impetus behind the American Revolution differed from the French Revolution in that its disregard for liberation by ‘political means’ and its disregard for the suffering of slaves cannot be divorced from this exact ideology enabling slavery. (A particularly scathing critique of the American Revolution is given in J. Sakai’s “Settlers”, which criticizes white communists who lionize the American Revolution.) I think Arendt’s whole view on the matter is succinctly summarized in these couple sentences:

“All rulership has its original and its most legItimate source in man's wish to emancipate himself from life's necessity, and men achieved such liberation by means of violence, by forcing others to bear the burden of life for them. This was the core of slavery, and it is only the rise of technology, and not the rise of modern political ideas as such, which has refuted the old and terrible truth that only violence and rule over others could make some men free. Nothing, we might say today, could be more obsolete than to attempt to liberate mankind from poverty by political means; nothing could be more futile and more dangerous.”

I have been thoroughly propagandized by theorists of the left (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser) to see things somewhat differently than Arendt, though I still have a lot to think through and I think Arendt’s critiques of the left and revolutionary politics more broadly must be taken seriously. They are carefully thought out and worth sitting with. But I think one should be cautious about how Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism are weaponized by certain centrist interests. This critique Gessen made of Bernie Sanders with respect to Cuba and Chomsky’s discussion with Arendt maybe reflects this divergence of opinion (although I agree with her critique of Castro’s homophobic purges must always be foregrounded). This is an excerpt from an article in Monthly Review by Reuven Kaminer on ‘totalitarianism’:

“The concept serves as the basis for a specific historical narrative built around the struggle of good (liberal democracy) against evil (totalitarian) dictatorship. According to this narrative, we are at the present enjoying the fruits of great victories in the battle against totalitarianism which stem directly from the comparatively recent demise of the Soviet Union. This, of course, makes it all the more easier to promote the concept of totalitarianism.

One of the ‘magical’ aspects of the concept of totalitarianism is that it appears to be “fair,” “even-handed,” and really above day to day politics. It seems completely objective because it warns that the dangers to freedom emanate from both the Right and the Left. Thus, the concept of totalitarianism is (almost) universally accepted and admired at all levels of political and intellectual life. All participants in current prevailing ideological and political discourse are assumed to be opponents of totalitarianism. The hegemonic rules of discourse are such that dissenting views may be disqualified if their proponents exhibit any lack of militancy against totalitarianism in thought and in practice. The final Part Three, on Totalitarianism, is devoted to the presentation of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as a new and unique form of government. The point of the author’s argument is clear and direct. Arendt sees a common basis to the two regimes in that they both are embodiments of radical, absolute evil. The content is clear, and so is the context. Never, for a moment, can the reader escape the clear and insistent message that Arendt is writing on behalf of the “Free World” against the looming evil of Soviet Russia.”

He goes on to do a sort of guilt by association thing with Arendt and various neocons. I will get into this a little later (especially how different leftists do this to each other) when discussing so-called red-brown alliances, which is somewhat similar to Arendt’s totalitarian thesis, and which I think is a threat the left should take very seriously. Anyway, Kaminer writes about a similar dynamic of a Trotskyist to neo-conservative pipeline (though I would argue this is not exclusive to Trotskyists: Bayard Rustin was a democratic socialist, Eugene Genovese an orthodox ML in the CPUSA):

“The fact that former leftists, and especially “graduates” of the revolutionary Marxist anti-Stalinist (Trotskyist) movement during the thirties and the forties, became leading ideologues of US reaction from the fifties onwards is well documented. The path of development among this particular section of US intellectuals would have been impossible without the Trotskyist stage. The “family,” as they were known by many, moved step by step from revolutionary, communist, Marxist anti-Stalinism during the thirties to just plain anti-Stalinism. From there the path was short to fervent, militant anti-Communism (minus Trotsky, minus revolution) and on to passionate support of the United States as the bastion of the Free World during the Cold War. Those who began their political life as convinced revolutionary Marxists moved via their core position of “anti-Stalinism” to condemnation of the Soviet dictatorship and on to identification with official US policies, as the only reliable bulwark against the tide of Bolshevik aggression. Current experience with the neo-conservative movement in the United States will help the reader to understand how a relatively small intellectual group can indeed become a vital factor in the ruling circles. It is not pure chance that one can even trace personal and family connections of the present influential grouping back to the anti-Stalinist Left.

This fascinating collection of intellectuals, which attracted Arendt and Bluecher, has been dubbed the New York intellectuals in a book with the same title. Even a partial list of some of the main representatives of the group is studded with highly influential and even famous names such as, inter alia, Irving Kristol, Sydney Hook, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer. In New York, Arendt and her husband became a prestigious social, cultural, and political addition to the New Yorkers. During the war, she had already made a name for herself with articles in various magazines, including Partisan Review and Commentary. She certainly made a strong impression on the local colleagues as someone who spoke on the basis of intimate acquaintance with the broader horizons of European culture. It soon became clear that Arendt knew everything that her new colleagues knew and more.”

I find this very interesting, but it’s worth pointing out that Arendt was very critical of neo-Conservativism. I think Corey Robin, who is in fact a great admirer of Arendt’s work, makes a more compelling case that her writings on totalitarianism, though popular in western discourse, are in fact not the most important parts of her oeuvre. Robin writes, in the London Review of Books:

“This last section [on the Soviet Union as ‘totalitarian’] is the least representative – and, as historians of Nazism and Stalinism have pointed out, least instructive – part of the book. But it has always attracted the most attention. Young-Bruehl claims that the section on imperialism is of ‘equal importance’ to the one on totalitarianism, yet she devotes a mere seven scattered paragraphs to it. Samantha Power uses the last section to examine recent genocides, despite Arendt’s insistence that totalitarianism seeks not the elimination of a people but the liquidation of the person. And when Power tries to explain al-Qaida or Hamas, she also looks to the last section, even though Arendt’s analysis of imperialism would seem more pertinent…

If Arendt matters today, it is because of her writings on imperialism, Zionism and careerism. Composed during the 1940s and early 1960s, they not only challenge facile and fashionable applications of the totalitarianism thesis; they also eerily describe the dangers that the world now faces. By refusing to reckon with these writings, the journalists, intellectuals and academics who make up the Arendt industry betray her on two counts: they ignore an entire area of her work and fail to engage with the unsettling realities of their own time. The latter would not have surprised Arendt: empires tend to have selective memories. The history of ‘imperialist rule’, she wrote at the height of the Vietnam War, ‘seems half-forgotten’, even though ‘its relevance for contemporary events has become rather obvious in recent years.’ America was so transfixed by ‘analogies with Munich’ and the idea of totalitarianism that it did not realise ‘that we are back, on an enormously enlarged scale . . . in the imperialist era.’”

The issue of imperialism is one of the most pressing matters in global politics and I think it’s one of the pivotal factors behind these red-brown alliances that Gessen mentions. Gessen’s elaborations on the National Bolshevik Party and Aleksandr Dugin were likely some of the most important aspects of the book for me. They helped me understand a whole dimension of leftist infighting that I had previously not fully grasped. This is Gessen’s explanation of the red-brown alliances that her grandfather was very taken with:

“He now spent his days reading the emergent ultranationalist press, newly known as the red-brown part of the political spectrum for its combination of Communist and brownshirt fervor. Boris Mikhailovich took to reading antisemitic passages out loud. Tatiana diagnosed this as senility and told her daughter that such was the tragedy of old age: Boris Mikhailovich, who had been an articulate, if generally quiet, opponent of the Communists his entire life, was now aligning himself with people who were not only brown but also red. More to the point, after his brief love affair with politics, Boris Mikhailovich was angry and disillusioned, and the “red-brown” press was the vehicle most immediately available for the expression of his disgust with politics.”

One of Russia’s most prominent figures fusing far-right fascism with certain communist ideas was Aleksander Dugin, one of the pioneers of National Bolshevism which combines Soviet nostalgia with ethno-nationalist and fascist ideas. Gessen actually spends a lot of time sketching out Dugin’s intellectual formation during Soviet years and his emergence into popular Russian attention, and he is mentioned throughout the book. This is one of the places she describes his fascination with fascism:

“Dugin made his own pilgrimages to Western Europe. In 1990 he went to Paris, where he met Belgian New Right thinker Robert Steuckers… He… suggested to Dugin that his ideas might combine into something called National Bolshevism. Within a year, Dugin met a number of other Western European New Right intellectuals, was welcomed to the conferences of the ethno-nationalist think tank Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne in Paris, and was published by an Italian New Right house… If Evgenia and Boris Mikhailovich were merely listening to people who were flirting with ultranationalist and fascist rhetoric, then Dugin was going to the source. He had grown fascinated with Hitler’s philosophy and system of governance.”

The extent to which Dugin has had an influence on Putin has been debated. Gessen seems to think Dugin had Putin’s ear. Whatever is the case people saw strong parallels between Dugin’s ideas and Putin’s geopolitics. This is where the red-brown issues come into focus. Putin is not a communist, and most western communists do not like Putin as far as I know. He is a conservative and reactionary, who has actively stifled celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin within Russia, because he is ultimately an anti-revolutionary. Yet he has remained somewhat esteemed among Latin American leftists, especially within the domain of the Pink Tide, like Castro and Chavez, and even to an extent Lula and Morales. In part, this is part of Putin’s geopolitics which favours the weakening of American hegemony for Russian advantage; Latin American countries despise American hegemony for slightly different reasons. But also these countries, especially Venezuela, are often great sources of market demand for Russian military goods, which is good for the Russian economy. And ceaseless American intervention in the region, which Washington continually refers to as America’s ‘backyard’, is the principle driver (in my view) of their demand for military technology.

So I first encountered Max Blumenthal by way of a video on the Palestine-Israel conflict shared with me by a Libyan friend who is very into Palestinian politics. I have followed the work of Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton over the past while, their podcast Moderate Rebels and their website The Grayzone. I find their analysis of Latin American politics and parts of the Middle East the most useful, but I’m a little more skeptical about their coverage on China and Ukraine, and a lot more skeptical about their coverage on Syria.

They are Marxist-Leninists involved with the PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) — a communist party in the U.S., whose members are often accused of being ‘tankies’, although interestingly enough PSL has its origins in the American Trotskyist movement lead by Sam Marcy. As commented on libcom.org this Trotskyist connection is often carefully written out of their history. Norton has connections with the Communist Party of Canada (speaking at one of their events for a candidate in the Danforth riding) and PSL (like the CPC) is very supportive of ‘really-existing’ Socialist countries, especially in Latin America, so I can see how that might colour their views on Russia. But Ben Norton has very clearly stated he thinks Putin is a “right-wing nationalist” and “anti-communist”.

Norton’s and Blumenthal’s news platform ‘Grayzone’ is (I believe) a reference to what is called ‘hybrid warfare’ in U.S. military discourse. Francis G. Hoffman offered this definition of the ‘gray zone’ in a paper published in PRISM (a journal of the U.S. National Defense University) called “Examining Complex Forms of Conflict Gray Zone and Hybrid Challenges”:

“A formal definition of gray zone tactics is offered: Those covert or illegal activities of nontraditional statecraft that are below the threshold of armed organized violence; including disruption of order, political subversion of government or non-governmental organizations, psychological operations, abuse of legal processes, and financial corruption as part of an integrated design to achieve strategic advantage. This definition emphasizes the actual activities over intent. Placing this to the far left of the proposed continuum of conflict, short of violent military force or war, represented by the thick red line, positions it clearly along the continuum of challenges that our security policy must address.”

Hoffman later writes:

“Numerous foreign sources describe President Vladimir Putin’s preferred method as “hybrid warfare,” a blend of hard and soft power. A combination of instruments, some military and some non-military, choreographed to surprise, confuse and wear down an opponent, hybrid warfare is ambiguous in both source and intent, making it hard for multinational bodies such as NATO and the EU to craft a response.”

I think titling their platform The Grayzone, Blumenthal, Norton, and company are making a self-conscious admission, or maybe a sarcastic non-concession, that the journalistic work they do is inevitably caught up in the complex web of hybrid warfare between superpowers. They primarily see themselves as anti-imperialists, and Empire for them is American Empire. So anti-American sentiment is their common terrain with Russian nationalists. Numerous PSL members like Brian Becker and Eugene Puryear host podcasts/radio shows on Sputnik Radio, and many leftists internationally have RT shows. This acceptance of support of the Russian state by leftists has often generated accusations of red-brown alliances. Numerous articles on libcom and IWW sites go into this phenomenon, often using guilt-by-association tactics, but I don’t mean to say that pejoratively. One example I recently saw on The Grayzone itself was an interview Anya Parampil did with Mark Sleboda who is a Eurasionist (Gessen discusses this movement) who was one of Dugin’s main translators, though he’s since distanced himself from Dugin. But I wonder why even give Third Positionists like him a platform? This is more so the case with other PSL-affiliated media on Sputnik like Brian Becker’s show “Loud & Clear”.

The Grayzone itself is independently funded (at least it claims to be), but some of its PSL comrades in journalism are not. They have support of Russian state-media. I don’t want to be too judgemental here, but I think it’s fascinating when The Grayzone starts harping on anarchists in Rojava accepting indirect American military aid or Hong Kong protestors accepting funding from US state-funded ‘democracy’ NGOs. The issue is about agency, alliances of convenience, and I think it is a complex matter, yet I think the polemical nature of the Grayzone yields to a double standard they feel no shame about asserting. Even anti-colonial leftists like Wilfred Chan (who founded Lausan) have been continually criticized by Grayzone journalists like Ajit Singh. I read Singh’s work, appreciate it, and I think it’s important, but I really don’t get why he spends so much time criticizing leftists in the Hong Kong protest movement. I am personally critical of many dimensions of the Hong Kong protests, but I think it’s absurd for Singh to smear leftist HK protestors by showing how “Ukrainian neo-Nazis and US white nationalists” support the ‘pro-democracy’ protests in Hong Kong, especially in light of the support PSL receives from Russian state-media. I think it is worth contemplating why so many American conservatives and reactionaries support the Hong Kong protests, but it’s also worth considering why reactionary right-wing forces in Russian state-media support communist journalists in the U.S.. It is part of the “hybrid warfare” that the people at the Grayzone know perfectly well about, as it’s enshrined in their platform’s name. U.S. conservatives don’t care about Hong Kong citizens themselves or the actual socio-economic demands of protestors, as long as it destabilizes China and poses new legitimacy problems to the Communist government there. It’s a geopolitical game for them. “Democracy” has always been cover for US intervention that is primarily about economic market interests. The US is one of the most flawed democracies of the West so of course it’s absurd. In a leaked US Army publication, Field Manual 3-05.130 “Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare”, US interests and its military goals are made perfectly clear:

“If the United States is to ensure that countries are set on a sustainable path toward peace, democracy, and a market economy, it needs new, institutionalized foreign-policy tools—tools that can influence the choices countries and people make about the nature of their economies, their political systems, their security, and in some cases, the very social fabric of a nation. In July 2004, Congress created the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS). The mission of the S/CRS is to integrate military expertise and best practices into the civilian world…”

One of the approaches they state is to: “Work with international and multilateral organizations, individual states, and NGOs…”

U.S. Unconventional Warfare (UW) tactics involving the support of ‘resistance movements’ are plainly stated in the document (and this is not actually surprising at all, nor even really controversial, I think):

“Operations conducted by, with, or through irregular forces in support of a resistance movement, an insurgency, or conventional military operations.

This definition reflects two essential criteria: UW must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces. Moreover, this definition is consistent with the historical reasons that the United States has conducted UW. UW has been conducted in support of both an insurgency, such as the Contras in 1980s Nicaragua, and resistance movements to defeat an occupying power, such as the Mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan.”

And again, often times ARSOF (Army Special Operations Forces) is seeking out what it considers as “democratic” elements to achieve these objectives:

“Perseverance in pursuit of U.S. objectives is fundamental to the conduct of ARSOF UW. If the seeking out and support of democratic elements in every nation and culture as outlined in the NSS is “the work of generations” and ARSOF UW is a central tool to achieve this policy, ARSOF UW requires a persistence of USG effort far beyond most other enterprises of government.”

So I understand anti-imperialist critiques of Hong Kong protests in light of all the meddling the U.S. is involved in, but again this is a question of agency. Does communist journalism funded by Russian state-media affect its legitimacy also? Granted Joshua Wong wishing Marco Rubio happy birthday and photo-ops with Tom Cotton are all bad form. I can’t imagine PSL cadre wishing Putin a happy birthday. But leftists Wilfred Chan and Lausan have been actively trying to convince fellow protestors to stop accepting funding from State Department-backed groups like the National Endowment for Democracy because it is delegitimizing their cause. But he is perpetually criticized for giving left cover for Hong Kong protests by MLs. I think the Chinese Communist government has accomplished a number of positive things, but that’s no reason to remain in denial about the terrifying way it’s treating Uyghurs, or the fact that many billionaires are members of the Chinese Communist Party but no one who publicly practices a religious faith can join. I recognize a new cold war with Russia, but especially China is at stake. Biden mentions Uyghar concentration camps in the same breath as moving 60% of American sea power to China. By ‘sea power’ I presume he means naval ships or submarines, some of which I imagine must be armed with nuclear weapons. Can you imagine China doing that to the US over the concentration camps it has for undocumented migrants?

youtube

And yes, it is extremely ironic that NATO makes YouTube videos about Russian information warfare, when the US is one of the world’s greatest meddlers. All this being said, I don’t automatically think anything the U.S. supports is wrong. Chomsky always brings up the example of Trotsky’s criticism of Stalin was agreement with fascists but that didn’t automatically make Trotsky wrong about Stalin. This is also the case with the U.S.. Even still, I’m almost certain what the U.S. does is for U.S. interests alone and it would stop as soon as it no longer benefitted U.S. interests enough.

Gessen goes into a section on the severe crackdowns on Russian NGOs receiving foreign funding, legislation requiring labels like “foreign agent” for such organizations, the removal of USAID from Russia, and mentions Kremlin attempts to shift blame on protests to US intervention:

““They are just doing their jobs,” said Putin, meaning that protesters were working for money—state television channels had by this time aired a series of reports claiming that the protests were bankrolled by the U.S. State Department.”

Now of course the U.S. State Department is constantly meddling in Russia and many other countries. In my view the U.S. was also responsible for Putin’s crackdown. They provide easy justification for gangsters like Putin to crush dissent. Yet the anti-semitism and terrifying homophobia that undergirds so many aspects of the Russian state, including many of its media platforms on RT and Sputnik raises deep concerns about leftist alliances with them, especially when it comes to how dissident journalists sometimes cover terrifying Russian intervention in places like Syria.

In a few episodes of Moderate Rebels, Blumenthal and Norton go off on the anarchist writer Alexander Reid Ross, his ‘red-brown smears’ of them, and his book Against the Fascist Creep. The book is an exhaustive look at red-brown alliances. I’ve actually listened to a talk he gave on it and found it fairly useful for understanding how individuals can cross into radically diametrically opposed poles of the political spectrum. A few months ago I discovered Mussolini was actually a socialist, before eventually becoming a fascist. Ross remarks that Lenin actually liked Mussolini. I looked it up and what Lenin said was: "What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy." Yet these red-brown alliances are not restricted to MLs, but actually came to Ross’s attention when he saw reactionary ideology entering the ecological green and anarchist movements he was a part of. I haven’t read Ross’s book and I’m not sure if he mentions this, but that fascism, communism and anarchism have common roots in Romanticism is likely part of why people can cross extremes of the spectrum so easily, or at least find common cause. As Cornel West points out that Romanticism was a secularization of the Christian gospel, it’s unsurprising that, almost all leftists are pretty good at calling other people either fascists (at the other end of the spectrum) or liberals (the common enemy of the center):

One of the most important aspects of Gessen’s book was her elaboration on LGBTQ activism in Russia. Definitely the parts on Pussy Riot were very interesting. But the vigilante violence against gay people in Russia is at an unimaginable level. Many have basically been lynched for lack of a better word. They are frequently beat up. Some murdered. It’s not illegal to be gay in Russia as it is in authoritarian countries like Singapore, but in places like Chechnya the vigilante violence is extreme. I really think it’s at the detriment of the left to ignore this. If one uses Russian state media as a platform, one has a responsibility to denounce violence against LGBTQ communities in Russia. Leftists often shrug off the horrible homophobia that has latently possessed so many of their movements. Clara Sorrenti, a trans-woman who ran for the Communist Party of Canada in London, Ontario left the party over the Central Committee’s refusal to adapt notions of indigenous sovereignty. In her reflections after leaving, she points out that communist refusals to accept the violence revolutionaries like Che Guevara enacted on gay people was especially wounding to her. The left cannot remain in denial about the homophobia of people like Castro and Chavez. Ignatz, the pen name of an orthodox christian, trans lesbian, communist wrote a piece called “Communism, Catholicism, and Sexuality” in response to an article Dean Dettloff wrote in the Jesuit journal America (Dettloff is one of the hosts of the Magnificast, the podcast I mentioned at the beginning of this reflection). In this piece she writes:

“If the relationship between Catholics and communists has sometimes been more positive than some might assume, we should also address those places where this positive relationship is objectively a form of reaction and a failure of compassion that ought to be inimical to communists, Catholics, and any combination thereof. The Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid tells the story of how when the Argentine Junta cracked down on homosexuals and other sexual ‘deviants’, a letter was written to a number of major Latin American Catholic liberation theologians asking them to sign a statement of solidarity. All refused, claiming sexual issues were not their concern.

Yet, as Althaus-Reid argues, this is to neglect the role of Christianity in creating the political system of heterosexuality that now dominates the globe. Christians created heterosexuality; it is now Christians’ responsibility to help overthrow it… whilst there are severe problems with homophobia and transphobia in both the Catholic Church and the secular left, there are people in both or either movement who are committed to resisting that and finding new ways of practicing these traditions.”

While I might disagree with some aspects of Gessen’s book, I think she offers very important critiques of the left, especially where they have made common cause with right-wing forces. I believe the left must take seriously these issues of violence, terror, and neglect of social issues, especially where racial, religious and LGBTQ persecution are concerned. I did not even go into the anti-Semitism that Gessen takes time to explore in the book. So much to think about; I think it’s a book worth reading.

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ganymedesclock · 8 years ago

Text

New Data

Fandom: Voltron: Legendary Defender

Summary: Despite having Kolivan on the ship, it occurs to Pidge she knows almost nothing about him.

Sometimes, you really couldn’t choose how new data finds you.

The history of science was rife with near-earthshattering discoveries that were made completely by accident. Penicillin, for example. That had been a subject of much discussion in the Holt household, several times everything had gone up in a spectacular mess- she remembered the way her father would smile at her.

“Mistakes are an integral part of the learning process.”

“Even the useless ones?”

“Well, then you can learn how to prevent it next time!”

Things happened. Patterns were disrupted. Projects failed, leads went dry. Even when this wasn’t a science fair any more, and more driven than idle curiosity; when nothing could possibly be more important than her work now- things happened that she had no control over and right when she wanted to rip her hair out over it, she had to remember her father’s words.

And that was, roughly, the frame of mind in which Pidge ran into Kolivan.

Not literally- for a man nearly seven feet tall, he was light on his feet to a terrifying degree- but also that it was very hard to miss the spectrum of indigo verging on midnight blue in a corridor that was usually unattended.

It took a while for Pidge to process. Her last surge of inquiry- the one that had burned out- had dragged longer into the late hours than expected, and in general it was hard to dredge loose of her thoughts sometimes. But in the time she’d blinked, his head had turned toward her, yellow eyes almost luminous in the gloom of the hallway.

“Paladin,” he offered, succinctly, a slight bow of the head greeting her.

“Oh. Uh, hi Kolivan.” She shuffled closer, peering over at the faint light in front of his crossed legs. It looked like a cup borrowed from the castle dining room- but within it, something was burning with an indigo flame. “…What are you doing?”

“A vigil. There isn’t much we can do for our dead, but we try to honor them, when we have time.”

Understanding lurched through Pidge. The fallen Blade member- Antok, she recalled. In her memory, little more than a massive shadow. She didn’t remember ever seeing his face.

He was gone now. Along with Ulaz, and the spy that Keith had gone to help.

They’d died. For Voltron.

Her eyes locked on that flickering light, a lump in her throat she didn’t know how to manage either way.

“Whether or not there was something you could have done, it does not serve you to trouble yourself over it for very long.” Kolivan didn’t look at her as he spoke, feeding a small strip of dark-colored wood into the light. “The purpose of seeing off the dead is that they do not haunt us into the future, that we join their ranks in a moment’s lapse in caution.”

They had held vigils for Kerberos. Vigils that didn’t feature knives, or take place in the hallways of spaceships- but candles of a different kind.

“…But what if we don’t know they’re gone?”

He looked up at her. For a moment, she realized that she couldn’t read his expression- how much she was used to the movement of pupil and iris. She wondered if all galra had thick dark lashes around their eyes, or that fold of skin underneath them- had she never noticed?

“I mean- obviously, sometimes, dead people are just… dead. But- I don’t know if it was like that for you guys, but, back in the day we weren’t that good at telling whether or not someone was dead, and there were people who were buried while they were still alive.”

There was a very small movement of Kolivan’s ears, and his jaw shifted. He turned his head back towards the candle, eyes closing. “Galra traditionally cremate our dead.”

Oh. Right. Yeah, aliens. Different culture. Pidge settled herself, cross-legged, glancing up at Kolivan over her glasses. “You know what I meant, right?”

“You refer to your missing relatives, I presume.”

It really shouldn’t have been that nerve-wracking to have a quiet conversation with a galra when the majority of her experience had them threatening her with swords or shooting at her but Pidge jumped, hard enough that for a moment her seat actually left the castle floor. “Whuh- how did- who told you?”

“Your leader asked if I had information on imperial prison rotations. I am generally unwilling to part with intelligence when I don’t know what it will be used for.”

It was, Pidge realized gradually, a kind of reassurance. Shiro hadn’t been gossiping behind her back, he’d been trying to help, and Kolivan had pressed him for details. Part of her still chafed at the idea that she hadn’t been there for that talk- what was the point of searching Beta Traz’s logs, then- but other currents stirred beneath that. Guilt, and a little bit of warmth. He’d been trying to help.

“You are much smaller than your associates.” Kolivan’s voice drew her out of those feelings, back to the hallway. “Am I correct in assuming you are younger than them, as well?”

“Yeah. I’m fourteen.”

“…I’m sorry, is it an unusual question?”

“Huh? Oh, no- I guess I’m used to people just being able to tell-” A thought plucked, and she chased it with little reservation: “...Right, we’re not really used to galra, but, I suppose you aren’t used to humans, either.”

Silence fell between them. Kolivan’s hands rested on his knees. They were enormous- a balled fist, Pidge guessed, would be the size of her own head, the wrist looking almost too wide for the elongated limb that supported it. At the tip of each finger was a two-inch dagger, wicked sharp and slightly curved. She could imagine that hand like the paw of a bear, swiping through something hard enough for the hooks in Kolivan’s claws to rip gouges out of it.

It was odd, sharing a quiet moment with a galra. Not that it was unacceptable, or unpleasant- Kolivan hadn’t taken Shiro or her parents, Kolivan hadn’t tried to kill her. But it occurred to her almost all she knew about their species had been gathered in moments of survival, fear, hostility- one mantra or another of let me win, don’t let them find me, let me get away in time.

Here, with none of that, it left her with the realization she knew almost nothing about the galra as a species.

They usually cremated their dead. Her eyes slid down to the candle, and beyond it- Antok’s weapon, now small and dark, only the symbol on the hilt still glowing.

“What’s going to happen to it?”

“It’s dormant now, but it will accept another wielder in time. I will take it back to the base with me.”

“It’s going to go to someone else?” That seemed… odd. A touch hypocritical, maybe, with her there wearing her brother’s old glasses, but-

(but that was different, a voice insisted, she was going to give them back)

“Almost every blade has passed through several owners. It is simply a pity that Ulaz and Thace took theirs with them. Perhaps Thace’s will find its way back to us in time.”

Pidge’s eyes, almost unbidden, strayed to the one at Kolivan’s hip. Even without visible pupils she had the distinct feeling Kolivan was watching her sidelong.

“Would you care to see it?”

“Uh-” She hasn’t exactly been part of the conversation, but considering how things went with Keith’s knife, she had come away with major big deal vibes about these things. But- it should be fine, right? If he was offering, and, she’d be lying if she said she didn’t want to look. “…Can I?”

He drew the sword with such a fluidity that Pidge wasn’t completely sure of the exact movement. In his hands, it was a straight blade, as long as his forearm, sweeping to an angled head. A single bar of electric purple ran the length of it, just shy of the edge. In Pidge’s, it melted and flowed like water, collapsed into a knife barely a third of its original size. Even like this, it looked different from Keith’s- it still only had a cutting edge on one side. She peered over at Antok’s, still sitting obediently in place- they were all different. “How does it do that?”

A noise escaped Kolivan- a sort of huffy rasp, and for a moment Pidge thought it was a cough, but he seemed utterly untroubled. “I would think that would be obvious to you. The use of luxite in weapons was inspired originally by the paladin’s bayard.”

Bayard. What had Allura said about bayards? They took a form unique to each paladin. Pidge hadn’t fought with a weapon a day in her life, and yet- when the green bayard had settled into her hand, and projected its blades, something had felt so right about it- perfectly balanced, like an extension of her arm. She’d never had to think much about the functions- not as if she knew it would do that, but simply, everything it did was something she would have made it do, if she’d built it, if she’d had the resources.

She handed the weapon back to Kolivan, watched how he neatly turned the knife once in hand, let it flare back to its full length, and holstered it. “It comes back to that quintessence stuff, right? There’s something in you that it responds to.”

“Yes.” He sounded pleased that she’d made the connection. “There is a resonance between the material, and the galra ourselves, that cannot be falsified by any known means. If it were not for that, I would never have known that your companion was of the blood.”

Right. Because it did that for Keith- turned into that wavy sword. She had to wonder, then, what it meant that it wasn’t the same shape as Keith’s bayard. If there was some kind of wave ‘template’ created by… souls? Life energy? It sounded like nonsense but the idea of germs had sounded like nonsense before people had the equipment to see them-

“Are your relatives soldiers?”

Pidge blinked at the change in topic, her thought process practically creaking as it changed tracks. “Not really? I mean, kind of. The Garrison started with the military, and uses army ranks, but my dad and my brother are scientists. I was going into communication technology before…well, I’m not gonna tell a space princess and a magic lion that I’m not a pilot.”

“Zarkon believes that in order to be truly successful, the galra must live without mercy. Against such an opponent, the idea that he or his forces will exercise restraint is a luxury that cannot be afforded.”

Unbidden, a memory dislodged itself.

“Listen, child. I am a soldier of the galra. Nothing stops me besides victory or death.”

“…Yeah, I got that after the first ten times somebody tried to kill me.” Pidge stifled a yawn. Before all this happened, she’d find it ridiculous to be talking about a murderous space empire coming after her and then be tired at the same time. Now, well… Kolivan has a point. Being shocked suggested it was a novelty. If she tried to constantly be surprised by it, she’d never be able to sleep.

Kolivan looked a bit amused. If nothing else, his brows had lifted slightly, and the line of his mouth wasn’t as firm as before. She had to wonder if galra faces weren’t even that hard to read, normally, and Kolivan was just a very closed book.

“Am I keeping you awake?”

“Huh? No, I mean… I suppose I probably shouldn’t be up this late.” Shiro would be on her case about it- …or, he would have, if he was there. Pidge stood up. “I’m going to bed.”

Kolivan’s attention, almost mechanically, redirected itself to the candle. He didn’t stir until Pidge was halfway down the hallway. Then, softly: “It is important to acknowledge when there is nothing you can do. But, perhaps there’s something to be said for retaining hope, provided it is done wisely.”

It was a very small admission, but one that she turned over in her mind several times in the darkness of her room afterwards.

And the next day, there was no indication Kolivan had done anything at all- in the hallway, or on any of the cups.

#voltron legendary defender #vld #Pidge #Kolivan #readmore #Ganymede Fic Tag

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