#''Powerhouse'' and ''Nature'' were left out on purpose

[enthusiastic-nimrod]

💚

[whencyclopedia]

Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

"Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories" is a sweeping and jarring work of how opium became an insidious capitalistic tool to generate wealth for the British Empire and other Western powers at the expense of an epidemic of addiction in China and the impoverishment of millions of farmers in India. The legacy of this “criminal enterprise,” as the author puts it, left lasting influences that reverberate across cultures and societies even today.

Written in engaging language, Smoke and Ashes is a scholarly follow-up to the author’s famous Ibis trilogy, a collection of fiction that uses the opium trade as its backdrop. In Smoke and Ashes, the author draws on his years-long research into opium supplemented by his family history, personal travels, cross-cultural experience, and expertise in works of historical verisimilitude. Composed over 18 chapters, the author delves into a diverse set of primary and secondary data, including Chinese sources. He also brings a multidimensional angle to the study by highlighting the opium trade's legacy in diverse areas such as art, architecture, horticulture, printmaking, and calligraphy. 23 pictorial illustrations serve as powerful eyewitness accounts to the discourse.

This book should interest students and scholars seeking historical analysis based on facts on the ground instead of colonial narratives. Readers will also find answers to how opium continues to play an outsize role in modern-day conflicts, addictions, corporate behavior, and globalism.

Amitav Ghosh’s research convincingly points out that while opium had always been used for recreational purposes across cultures, it was the Western powers such as the British, Portuguese, the Spaniards, and the Dutch that discovered its significant potential as a trading vehicle. Ghosh adds that colonial rulers, especially the British, often rationalized their actions by arguing that the Asian population was naturally predisposed to narcotics. However, it was British India that bested others in virtually monopolizing the market for the highly addictive Indian opium in China. Used as a currency to redress the East India Company (EIC)’s trade deficit with China, the opium trade by the 1890s generated about five million sterling a year for Britain. Meanwhile, as many as 40 million Chinese became addicted to opium.

Eastern India became the epicenter of British opium production. Workers in opium factories in Patna and Benares toiled under severe conditions, often earning less than the cost of production while their British managers lived in luxury. Ghosh asserts that opium farming permanently impoverished a region that was an economic powerhouse before the British arrived. Ghosh’s work echoes developmental economists such as Jonathan Lehne, who has documented opium-growing communities' lower literacy and economic progress compared to their neighbors.

Ghosh states that after Britain, “the country that benefited most from the opium trade” with China, was the United States. American traders skirted the British opium monopoly by sourcing from Turkey and Malwa in Western India. By 1818, American traders were smuggling about one-third of all the opium consumed in China. Many powerful families like the Astors, Coolidges, Forbes, Irvings, and Roosevelts built their fortunes from the opium trade. Much of this opium money, Ghosh shows, also financed banking, railroads, and Ivy League institutions. While Ghosh mentions that many of these families developed a huge collection of Chinese art, he could have also discussed that some of their holdings were most probably part of millions of Chinese cultural icons plundered by colonialists.

Ghosh ends the book by discussing how the EIC's predatory behaviors have been replicated by modern corporations, like Purdue Pharma, that are responsible for the opium-derived OxyContin addiction. He adds that fossil fuel companies such as BP have also reaped enormous profits at the expense of consumer health or environmental damage.

Perhaps one omission in this book is that the author does not hold Indian opium traders from Malwa, such as the Marwaris, Parsis, and Jews, under the same ethical scrutiny as he does to the British and the Americans. While various other works have covered the British Empire's involvement in the opium trade, most readers would find Ghosh's narrative of American involvement to be eye-opening. Likewise, his linkage of present-day eastern India's economic backwardness to opium is both revealing and insightful.

Winner of India's highest literary award Jnanpith and nominated author for the Man Booker Prize, Amitav Ghosh's works concern colonialism, identity, migration, environmentalism, and climate change. In this book, he provides an invaluable lesson for political and business leaders that abdication of ethics and social responsibility have lasting consequences impacting us all.

Continue reading...

[fmhiphop]

Three Cultural Icons With New Projects: Cheers To Film And Culture

If one thing hip hop celebrates is culture, and cinema has been a monumental piece of the culture. No two people have shaped Black culture in films like Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. While the likes of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poiter paved the way, Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson came along to smooth the path. And for those much like Denzel's son, John David, and others with like-minded pursuits, that is invaluable. Cinephiles are in for a treat in the upcoming fall season as three legendary cultural icons, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and John David Washington, are set to grace the silver screen with three highly anticipated films. And with these three new features, one thing is undeniable. The fourth quarter of 2023 is shaping up to resemble the cinematic Super Bowl. Let's take a closer look at what's on the horizon. Cultural Icon #1 Denzel Washington https://youtu.be/19ikl8vy4zs?si=QzhedvmEkbcndh3z When it comes to film, Denzel Washington is the man. Denzel Washington is undeniably a cinematic powerhouse. His career, spanning back to the early 1980s, showcases his exceptional acting prowess, making him the embodiment of a natural-born actor. So, with a filmography that boasts well over 60 titles, as listed by IMDB, it's challenging to pinpoint a single work that encapsulates his brilliance. However, one standout gem in his repertoire that bears mention is "The Equalizer." While Washington first appeared as MaCall in 2014, moviegoers were far from seeing the last of him. And now he's back. Washington will once again bring MaCall to the big screen in September in Equalizer 3, which is sure to be monumental. McCall has always been about his business and is known for his unwavering commitment to his unique brand of justice. However, some nasty business has called him out of his leisure in this segment. And he's got some lessons to teach. As Blexmedia notes, in this installment, "McCall has relocated to Southern Italy to put his past behind him, but his plans take a sharp turn when he uncovers his newfound companions are under the sway of the Sicilian Mafia. What ensues is a gripping narrative." Denzel Washington's return as McCall is eagerly anticipated, and his portrayal of the character's dedication to justice is bound to deliver another thrilling cinematic experience for fans and newcomers alike. Cultural Icon #2 Samuel Jackson https://youtu.be/Kk89vbx_k3w?si=bP-ZG5vIKHFsqcc6   Jackson defies convention and epitomizes staying true to oneself while achieving great success. Jackson might not fit the stereotypical image of a picture-perfect movie star, but that's precisely what sets him apart. What distinguishes Jackson is his unwavering authenticity. He knows exactly who he is and his purpose in the industry and excels at it. His ability to embody characters with a no-nonsense, devil-may-care, and no-holds-barred attitude is unparalleled. With a career spanning since the 1980s and a vast portfolio of projects numbering in the hundreds, according to IMDB, Samuel L. Jackson has left an indelible mark on the film industry. Whether he's Nick Fury in the Marvel Universe, John Shaft in the action genre, Mace Windu in "Star Wars," Coach Carter in a sports drama, Augustus Gibbons in an action franchise like "xXx," or Ptolemy Gray in a dramatic role, Jackson brings his characters to life with remarkable authenticity. That's why any news of an upcoming project is fantastic news. Fans of Samuel L. Jackson are in for an exciting treat as he returns to the screen in the upcoming feature "The Kill Room." This promises to be a compelling and intense film, especially with the involvement of talented co-stars Uma Thurman and Joe Manganiello. As Blexmedia highlights, the plot of "The Kill Room" revolves around these characters forming an unconventional alliance. They use an art gallery as a front to launder money, setting the stage for a complex and thrilling narrative. However, tension escalates as their activities become intertwined with a high-stakes plot to assassinate a Russian oligarch. Cultural Icon #3 John David Washington https://youtu.be/ex3C1-5Dhb8?si=tcCvMCk7MVEVC00U If there is one example of what a trailblazer can inspire, it is the career of John David Washington. John David Washington gets his acting prowess in earnest. While he is the son of Denzel, making him a torch bearer, he is self-made. His accomplishments are a testament to his own merits and dedication to his craft. John David's journey in acting began in the early 1990s with a role in "Malcolm X," and he has steadily been making his mark ever since. His filmography includes a diverse range of projects that showcase his versatility, from "Love Beat Rhymes" to "Monster," "BlacKkKlansman," "Tenet," "Beckett," and "Amsterdam." Each role highlights his commitment to delivering captivating performances across various genres. With two upcoming features on the horizon, John David Washington is signaling that he is just getting started in his career. For fans of the younger Washington, "The Creator" is on the horizon. Washington plays the lead character of Joshua in this futuristic: action, adventure, drama. According to Blexmedia, The Story of “The Creator” follows Joshua, a former special forces agent enlisted to track down and eliminate the elusive Creator, the enigmatic mastermind behind the advanced AI. However, what he discovers in his quest is extremely disarming. Highlighting the Best Parts There is nothing quite like progress. And no three figures in Hollywood exemplify progress like Denzel Washington, Samuel Jackson, and John David. Seeing the accomplishments and works of such great men who are still pushing forward is extraordinary. Their success stories show that individuals from marginalized communities can succeed in the highly competitive entertainment world with talent, determination, and hard work. And it is with great hope that many more will rise in their shadow. Written By: Renae Richardson Read the full article

[fadebolt]

Alrighty, it seems we're getting another room to appear twice within a single round of 1v1s. A02 is nowhere near as much of a powerhouse as TREETOP is, but to be fair, that applies to a ton of rooms in this round (making it somewhat surprising that it lost, though it did put up a real good fight against one of the biggest fan favorites in the entire game, which is quite something, no matter which way you look at it). I find it quite convenient that the repeated appearances are happening during the weekends. I know it's a coincidence, but I appreciate that I can ramble a bit less on the individual polls.

Anyways, speaking of rambling, let's talk about one of the only Saint rooms that have made it this far.

I've been generally pretty vocal about my love for a lot of the rooms within that campaign.

The inclusion of them was definitely a strange choice, as not only have they vastly increased the already enormous cast of contestants, but most of them are also basically identical to their past counterparts.

I think everyone just sort of rolled with it, and I too accepted it as a part of the pollrunner's strive for consistency. Whether or not they were fully successful in that regard is very much up for debate, but to be fully consistent in a tournament of this nature is an extraordinarily difficult task, and I think they did a damn good job there (the only somewhat eyebrow raise worthy moment was the addition of a certain Inv room, as that's certainly something that could raise a few questions, especially since a lot of regions in that campaign was renamed… but I'm willing to look past all that, considering that there was a public vote, and that the campaign is, y'know, a dumb shitpost xd).

Comments about the poll running aside, I did frequently support the Saint rooms, usually due to a combination of great visuals (listen, I grew up being a Tower enthusiast in Heroes of Might and Magic 3, while living in an area where it rarely snows, of course I would have a weakness for snowy industrial environments), well thought out modified spawns, and the room working really well with Saint's general gameplay.

And of course, B04 ticks out all the boxes wonderfully!

The Dropwigs that used to inhabit this place have completely disappeared by the time of the Survivor's campaign, getting replaced by Lizards. Saint actually keeps this consistency by still having them be Lizards, but instead of Greens, Caramels or Pinks, they're the Oranges that are the most well-adapted to this new ice age.

The layout and the spawns also work well for gameplay purposes, as they put up a pretty interesting sense of balance. Because sure, your tongue is incredibly powerful here, but the number of Lizards is still rather high, and they can absolutely get to you from most parts of the room, so the sense of danger is still there - especially if you're entering from, or leaving through the lower left pipe.

I have given praises towards plenty of Saint rooms where the grapple is stupidly overpowered, making it feel extremely satisfying to use, such as B06 and D01 from Icy Monument, or most of the upper rooms in Primordial Underground.

But this one is a little different from those, as there's a lot more to it, than just a simple power trip.

While power trips can feel incredible, the main source of dopamine that this game has to offer come from environments that are balanced, yet difficult, and require smart and skillful play to get through. That's the kind of experience we sought out from this game.

And B04 delivers it wonderfully.

Now, there is the question of how it all compares to the neat and tight and effective design of A02, and I'm not gonna beat around the bush here - I'm voting B04. It's hard to say if that's the objectively correct choice, but sometimes, you just see one room that simply has everything you could possibly want from a RW room, you know? Obviously, your wants will be different from the wants of everybody else. That's just how these things work. And I think that's beautiful, because it allows our art and entertainment to offer a ton of really different things, and we all get to pick and choose our favorites, be it games, stories, characters, ships, areas within games, or whatever you could think of. It just has the unfortunate side effect that a lot of my beloved Saint rooms are getting knocked out way sooner than I'd like. (Though loosing to A02 is quite fair, honestly. The reblogs on these 1v1s are very fun, and the A02 support is definitely very convincing here. Also, I did support it in its previous matchup, so there's that as well)

Pick Your Favorite Rain World Room, Day 291.1 R5

There is a hidden slugcat in one of the rooms (they can be in any color). If u can see it comment or reblog with where they are and if u are first, u get a cookie!

Credit for game screenshots goes to: Rain World Interactive Map, Rain World Wiki and me

[arvinsescape]

His wife

Summary: Mobster Tom Holland was never going to get married and then he met her.

Warnings: Swearing, implied smut.

W/C: 1.9K

Tom Holland was one of the most feared men in London. He took over his family’s business at a young age and was growing more powerful by the year. He never thought he’d get married; he became so wrapped up in taking complete power throughout London that he never thought past one-night stands. Then he met her.

Tom walked into the club in hopes of finding a way of relaxing. He’d been cooped up in his office and meeting room all week and he needed a distraction for the night. He noticed her instantly, black dress that stopped just above her knees, a rare sight for one of his establishments. Most women would show up in the shortest and skimpiest looking outfits in hopes of the mobster taking them home for the night. Not her though.

He made his way over to where she was standing at the bar and was instantly taken back by her beauty. She wasn’t covered in a ridiculous amount of make-up, she let her natural beauty do the work for her. He’d found his distraction.

“Now what is a pretty girl like you doing at the bar alone?” He asked. Usually he would instantly be met with the batting of eyelashes and his job was half done. Not her.

“Does that line usually work?” She asked him amused.

“Every time love.” He fired back equally as amused. She’d laughed at that.

“Gonna have to try a little harder if you want to get me into bed.”

“Darling, you are aware of who I am?” He smirked.

“Very Mr Holland.” She’d challenged. Fuck that sounded hot coming out of her mouth.

“So you know I have a reputation for not disappointing.” He was being cocky now, hoping maybe she’d find that attractive.

“I’ve heard rumours. But what makes you think I want to sleep with you?” She asked, amused look on her face. He was somewhat taken aback by it, not used to having to work so hard, he liked it.

“Well most of the women that come in here hope to end up in my bed. Forgive me for assuming.” He tried. She snorted as she brought her drink up to her lips.

“Maybe I just came in for a drink?” She fired back. There was a hint of flirtation there but not enough for him to work with. He had never met anyone who challenged him like this and he found it that much more of a turn on.

He found himself distracted in a different way that evening. She was flirty but kept him at arm’s length. She challenged him and didn’t seem to have that look of fear in her eyes most people did when they spoke to him.

“So, I have to point out. You don’t want to sleep with me, yet here you still are?” He was close to her now and most bystanders could almost feel the sexual tension radiating off them. Tom included.

“Here I still am.” She leaned in a little closer to him, she snaked her arms around his shoulders which took him by surprise. Most of the women he encountered wanted him to dominate them from the second he met them. But here she was somewhat taking control. His hands instantly found her waist.

He wanted to kiss her but he wasn’t entirely sure it was just to get her into bed anymore. He found her intriguing. His wants took over and he found himself leaning closer to her. She moved one of her hands and slipped it into his suit. ‘Got you’ was all Tom thought and just as he was about to kiss her, she moved away from him.

He looked at her dumbfounded as did most of the bystanders. No one was used to seeing this.

“Mr Holland. I don’t kiss before a man has bought me coffee.” She’s said and this had him smirking as she winked before grabbing her purse and walking out of the club.

It wasn’t until he got home that night that he realised she’d slipped her number into his suit. He’d smiled upon finding it and found himself texting her almost daily. He learned a lot about her in a way he’d never taken the time to know anyone outside of his close family and friends. Usually he wanted to know about people for business purposes, but not her. He found himself wanting to know more and more about her, it was as if she was reeling him in, not the other way around.

It wasn’t until six months after that meeting that Tom found himself in bed with her and by that point he was hopelessly in love and completely wrapped around her little finger. Some people thought she was using him, that had been the rumour at first, women became jealous when they heard Tom Holland was off limits.

That was not the case at all, she was just as in love with him as he was with her. He found himself asking her to marry him eighteen months later. Some people said it was too fast but in his business, life held a different sort of meaning. It could be ripped from you any day. She’d not hesitated to say yes. They married six months later and became a powerhouse of London.

He loved everything about her. She wasn’t intimidated by the men around her; she was powerful in her own way. She knew she didn’t stand a chance physically but mentally she could outwit every man in the room. She was the reason he didn’t fail business deals, the reason he got what he wanted. She became someone he wanted there to close deals.

He remembers the first time she’d somewhat taken control in a meeting. He was negotiating territory with a mobster who was losing power but being stubborn about it. He wanted to avoid bloodshed with the older mobster, so he’d have to take it from him slowly.

“Ask for 50% Tom.” She’d said as she sat on the edge of his desk fixing his tie.

“He’s not going to give me that. I’m not sure he’ll be happy with 40.”

“No, but if he thinks you want 50, he’ll settle easier for 40. He knows you want to avoid bloodshed but he also knows he’d lose if it came to it so he has to give you something.” She’d said as she finished fixing his tie.

“You’re too clever for your own good my love.” He said as he placed his hands on her waist and she wrapped hers round his shoulders as she laughed. He thought it was a beautiful sound.

“Makes me wonder how I got everything done before.” He leant down to give her a kiss. The kiss quickly became heated as he moved her back further onto the desk. His hand was trailing up her thigh as she let out quiet whimpers against his lips.

Just as he was about to get where she needed him most someone knocked on the door. He stood as he brought her with him. She was smoothing out her dress as he spoke.

“Come in.” Harrison popped his head around the office door. He smirked when he took in her flushed state.

“He’s here.” Harrison said.

They’d been in the meeting for half an hour, you were sat on your husband’s lap as his arm was around your waist.

“Tell you what Holland, I’ll give you 40% if the lovely lady has a drink with me. A drink of my choice.” The older mobster said. She wondered for a second if he was purposely trying to rile Tom up.

“I’m a married woman.” She said as she smiled flirtingly at him. Tom tensed but she quickly smoothed a hand down his cheek to calm him down.

“What are you doing?” Tom had whispered into her ear.

“Trust me.” She whispered back as she kissed his cheek.

“Look, I understand that the lovely lady is off limits but what’s the harm in a drink?” The older mobster laughed. Of course, he chose whiskey, it was almost cliché. The strong whisky went down her throat easily as she downed the whole drink, she’d spent enough nights drinking with Tom and could drink as well as they could.

She placed her glass on the table, fingers still grasped around it. The older mobster had laughed when he saw it was empty. “I like you.” He said as he reached over and took her wrist in his hand. She panicked for a second but it quickly dies down. Tom was here. He wouldn’t let anything happen to her and it filled her with a confidence she’d never had before.

She felt as Tom reached for his gun and found herself stopping him as he looked at her confused but he trusted her, she asked him to so he would. He wouldn’t let anything happen to her but he knew she was powerful and a small part of him wanted to see how it would play out.

She looked the mobster straight in the eyes as she spoke.

“Continue to touch me and he’ll take 100% of your territory.” She smiled at him. Tom was impressed to say the least.

“Oh yeah? And how’s that sweetheart?” He fired back.

“All I have to do is ask and you’ll find yourself with a broken wrist and a bullet between your eyes.” She said in a sultry tone as her eyes flicked towards Tom. God, Tom was in love with this woman. “Now I’m not sure about everyone else but I know for certain my husband doesn’t want any stains on this lovely carpet and I wouldn’t want to upset him. He wants to avoid bloodshed but he won’t if you continue to make him angry.” She smirked. Tom swears to God he was instantly hard.

"Is that a threat little bird?" The mobster said and he watched as his wife leant over to speak in his ear.

"That's a promise." And he just came in pants.

Tom watched as fear flashed through the mobster’s eyes momentarily. ‘God, fuck, how did I get so lucky to marry her.’ He thought. The older man let out a loud laugh. “I like her Holland. I really do.” He said as he removed his hand.

Tom instantly relaxed when he saw the hand leave your wrist and he tightened his arm around her waist. They continued to make the deal and Tom found his hand wandering to hem of her dress every now and again. When they left, deal happily made he kissed along her shoulder.

“That was fucking hot.” He said as he kissed her neck. She smirked at him as he moved her back onto the meeting table.

After that she became his secret weapon, she knew what to do and she guided him in the direction of getting everything he wanted. He’d managed to start taking over quickly, he was avoiding fights and bloodshed when it was unnecessary because of her and it was keeping the police off his back, making his job easier. They were absolutely in love with each other and pushed each other to be better, to get what they wanted and although he never thought he’d get married he was so thankful he did.

[loving-villanelle]

I agree with your opinion about this season. I also have mixed feelings, because I still think that the show is great and if this season wasn't the last one it would have been kinda amazing. But because it is, it's...well, not.

This season feels like it's been focusing on Eve's journey. Villanelle has felt like a side character and after the church shenanigans she's just kinda been...there. I did love Eve's arc but what I didn't like is how it was done at Villaneve's expense. There was no point for her to hate and reject her half the season. And like you have said, there really hasn't been any proper progression happening in the Villaneve dynamic and relationship (the promo they did was soooo misleading!). After all they just circle back to the place they were at the bridge. And that is something that is very hard to forgive. Not to mention that they gave so much screen time for Pam and actually made her have a whole arc...a totally new character in the final season? Also Yusuf with whom Eve actually shared way more screen time than with Villanelle. And again, this would have been ok IF THIS WASN'T THE LAST SEASON.

Laura Neal certainly made a choice there. She made a choice that the Twelve plot was the centre of the show, not the relationship of Villaneve. Now it's about how the Twelve has affected the lives of all the characters and how it has hurt them. And it's what is going to bring Villaneve together in the final episode and what they want to focus on. Not on what's between them. Not the feelings they have for each other and how THAT has affected them. I would have made a different choice after the three seasons but oh well.

If we knew there was another season coming after this, I agree that there would be some things to like about this season. My feelings about it heavily containing recycled themes and a lack of meaningful progression probably wouldn't change much, as it feels like we took the long way round to end up back at the same s3 ending (only with a conflicted Villaneve vs Villaneve at peace with each other, which is only a regression in my opinion), but if I knew there was time to continue to build off of this, I could get on board with this season. The problem is that there isn't more to come, they knew for a long time that this was the last season, and they still structured this season as though they had all the time in the world to tell this story. Despite my complaints, I agree that I still love the show. Nothing else like Killing Eve exists and it's unlikely that we'll ever have another show like this, especially one anchored with two powerhouses like Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer. However, it's hard to keep that perspective with so much material left unexplored. It's precisely because this show is anchored by these two incredible actresses that this season is so disappointing, because how do you NOT take advantage of that? How do you pass up the last opportunity to explore every facet of what these women can do on screen together?

I agree that Villanelle has very much felt like an afterthought this season, which I hate because we all love Villanelle and she's such a force of nature. It has been so disappointing to not see her be an active agent in this story. I think we'll see it in the finale, but one episode of the whole season rings hollow. Even Eve feels like she's been sidelined somewhat to make room for Carolyn's expansive screentime and then there's also K and Pam. There's just too much going on and the two characters who should've been used the most are being really under utilized, in my opinion. Some people love that Carolyn and K are being fleshed out and again, if not the final season it would be interesting. But I didn't need to know the life stories of two people that I consider to be side characters when 1) the nature of their relationship has already been heavily alluded to throughout the seasons and 2) when Eve still hasn't even been given a backstory.

I think Pam serves a good purpose but was given too much filler time. She served to further Villanelle and Konstantin's story by showing K come to terms with how drastically he altered the direction of these women's lives (like Villanelle) and it also shows how even someone with a penchant for the macabre could still want for normal things (like Villanelle). But I don't need to see her having 10 scenes with carnival boy to get that point across.

I hate that it seems like the Twelve will take center stage until the very end. I've said multiple times now that this season was not built to be a true farewell to Villaneve and the existing show, it was structured to launch potential spin-offs and what a slap in the face. They had to spend this much time trying to make people care about the Twelve, because what else are the spin-offs possibly going to be about? If this season was truly a farewell to Killing Eve, it would've been all about Villaneve because they are the show. Villanelle and Eve deserved better, Jodie and Sandra deserved better, and the fans of this show deserved better

[mai-fanblog]

Ducktales Antagonists

Hello everyone, here I bring you the antagonists of the three seasons of Ducktales. 

Since the show ended, I want to highlight the three antagonists of the show of the three seasons: Magica De Spell, Lunaris and Bradford Buzzard.

The following points will be rated:

Who are they? 

Their purpose and relationship to the season? 

Threat to the characters 

Personality

Process of your plan

Impact on the season and history

First point 

To quickly summarize the three characters, I would describe them as follows:

Magica De Spell: The most powerful sorceress and the most evil member of the De Spell, who wields dark magic (shadows); who was created in 1961 by Carl Barks in the comic book "The Midas Touch";  in the reboot she lost her brother to her and Scrooge, massacred an entire town causing the birth of Phantom Blot, was locked in her enemy's first dime for 15 years, psychologically abused Lena, generated chaos with the shadows, was temporarily without powers after she recovered them for Webby and Lena and transformed Bradford into a common animal.

Lunaris: He was the leader of the moonlanders, his first appearance was in 2019; he lied to all his people and Della, he wanted to conquer the earth, because... superior (even that sounds ridiculous); he invaded the earth, was defeated by 4 characters (by a millionaire idiot, a mutant krill, a lucky deux ex machina and his lieutenant) and was left orbiting the earth (And possibly he died).

Bradford Buzzard: The C.E.O. of F.O.W.L in the DT17 version; his first appearance was in the episode pilot, he was a discreet character until his moment came in the end of season 2; he was the grandson of a famous adventurer, he worked for S.H.U.S.H, he had ideals of keeping the world safe with strong methods, he had a justification about adventures and negative consequences, he allied with Black Heron to accomplish his goals, he was using Scrooge discreetly until the middle of season 3 he was discovered, he put Scrooge and his allies in check, he was defeated and transformed into a common animal.

When summarizing the three, the difference in actions is very noticeable; Lunaris is the weakest in terms of description, Bradford has a definite backstory and Magica is better known for her appearances in the original series and the comics.

The point goes to Magica, for being the most known and generating more intrigue; I'll give a half point to Bradford for his backstory (which they made a little effort). 

Magica: 1  Lunaris: 0  Bradford: 0.5

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Second point: objective and relationship with the season

In the first season, Magica's mission was to obtain McDuck's No. 1 dime in order to get out of the object that was locked up and take revenge on him; for this she used her "niece", Lena. The relationship in this objective of hers, was related to the search of Dewey and the theme of his mother, since both are looking for something related to Scrooge and the negative impact on the life of the two ducks;  besides that they are very focused on themselves and don't care about the rest more than main goal. This gives a good parallelism and the different conclusions that both came to. Magica's story will be deepened in the penultimate episode of the series.

In the second season, Lunaris wants to conquer the earth to be superior and to be feared. The objective of him and Louie are very different and has no direct relation on the theme of the family, Lunaris only wants to destroy the main family because if, that is, it has no basis; his motive is very absurd because it has nothing to do with the actions of Scrooge, so it is ridiculous that he wants to kill his family, it is more for simplistic drama than something substantial. In terms of situations it may be there, however, they executed it half-heartedly and it doesn't manage to be memorable as the previous case.

In the last season, Bradford is revealed as the head of F.O.W.L and wants to acquire control of the world to keep it safe from the dangerous adventures it affects economically and physically. His and Huey's goal have some similarity, in the sense of how they handle adventure and different points of view; they both want to have treasure, only Huey wants to search it to leave it intact and Bradford wants to confiscate it for "safer" uses. While their goals were different, they managed to get to the same point where they meet.

Bradford's motivation is reasonable and he has a certain reason, Scrooge's adventures, his influence as an adventurer, brought bad times to those close to him and swallowed several huge expenses; his idea gives for a lot of analysis. In this section, I will give the point to Bradford for being the most interesting and fresh to the franchise, I will also give half a point to Magica because it was the initial hook in general intrigue.

Magica: 1.5  Lunaris: 0 Bradford: 1.5

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Third point: Threat to the characters

Here if the threats are of massive scales, it's complicated which one to choose; it all depends on how the season is handled. 

I'd give a point and a half to all three, because if they had a powerhouse, even Lunaris, walking around that his army are idiots (except Penny), at the last minute he got the urge to be threatening all by himself, that's an accomplishment. 

Magica: 2  Lunaris: 0.5  Bradford: 2

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Fourth point: Personality

Villains must always have striking qualities to be memorable, at Disney in the classic and golden era, they have made iconic villains. In the show, they tried to do the same, but with some becoming fondly remembered and others detested.

Magica easily steals the show every time she appears, I know she is more cruel than her original version, but she also highlights her moments of evil, brazen and sarcastic that she manages to be; an addition that strengthens her personality was the loss of Poe, which shows that she did love someone and justifies her hatred against Scrooge.

Bradford is very strict, equally I highlight those moments with Heron which shows more of his personality clashing with a more impulsive one. 

Lunaris is manipulative, however, he is very bland in terms of personality traits.

I give the point to Magica, as it is more charismatic and entertaining to watch, I know that many do not like them for mistreating Lena, equally that what makes it more remarkable. 

Magica: 3  Lunaris: 0.5  Bradford: 2

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Fifth Point: Process of the plan

The plans of the three are carried out in very different ways and failed.

Magica takes a long time to get her plan started, using Lena as a puppet was good, even when she was revealing herself, she blackmailed her to go along with her plan, that was good.

Although I hate Lunaris with all my heart, I do recognize that his lie was well thought out and the strategy of the fake ship at the beginning was good. However, he was defeated in the most absurd way by Flintheart, demonstrating that he isn't as smart as he claimed.

Bradford was more calculating than Lunaris, keeping his identity from being revealed, although he was later found out in the most convenient way by half, I still applaud him for taking several steps forward than Scrooge.

The point I will give to Bradford, for the possibilities he had at hand to complete his plan, I will also give half a point to both equally. 

Magica: 3.5  Lunaris: 1  Bradford: 3

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Last Point: Impact on the season and history

Here if I discard Lunaris, although he has made an invasion, he had no relevance in almost any character, except one; it is only mentioned, but as if it was an anecdote.

The Bradford case, with all its plot twists, can be shocking to some because of the confusing and far-fetched nature of what happened at the end of the series. Although it was discreet in the two seasons, it gave hints of something bigger that in the end happened.

As for Magica, if the consequences are few, they were important, the development of Lena, the introduction of Violet, Glomgold's past and Blot's revenge. Although she temporarily lost her powers, she did manage to achieve certain consequent actions, especially in Lena.

The last point is for Magica. I could give Bradford half a point, but with the whole clone thing, which confused a lot of people, I didn't give it to her.

Magica: 4.5  Lunaris: 1  Bradford: 3

So with a lot of difference with one and little with the other. Magica De Spell is the best antagonist in DT17. 

 (Likewise kudos to Bradford for putting up a good fight, though he lacked a bit more. And... fuck Lunaris, no one will miss you.) 

That was all, Chao

[megashadowdragon]

The Truth Of Yachiru & Nozarashi Finally revealed by Kubo !!

comments on youtube @dopepoisonivyoncrack

So by Zaraki giving Yachiru a name, Yachiru didn't only Manifest but also evolved to gain/become more human like by being a soul reaper? Isn't that fascinating

Bleach still remains to be a thinking man’s anime/manga. From the start clues were dropped left and right or Kubo conveniently built off the concepts he already introduced. We know from the fact that zanpakutou’s can manifest and these stems from the fact that everything in soul society is made up of reishi which is also the source of reiatsu. Higher spirit particle grade (main concept used on the latest bleach one shot)  means higher reiatsu and who’s to say reiatsu can’t be turned back to reishi right? That’s the phenomenon that’s happening. High level reiatsu can manifest even other beings such as yachiru and her being just a part of zaraki’s power means that zaraki is much more powerful than we thought.

a form of nozarashi's bankai....meaning kenpachi's bankai has more than one forms..and by the way, tensa zangetsu had two forms..the hollow form and the qincy form

Well this confirmed my suspicion. There is another character that never called their character by their true name and never got it’s full power, the guy with the eyebrow piece that is under Kenpachi. He hates his sword because it is a Kido weapon so he called it by a different name which altered its form. Kenpachi gave Yachiru her name in a similar manner, but because of the nature of their relationship she became something different as it was not a name out of spite. He gave her a unique identity. She had a true name but Kenpachi never knew it. I believe that is because Kenpachi never tried to depend on his weapon to work with it, speak to it and be United with it. It was just a tool that served. Giving Yachiru a name separated her from the “tool” as he actually cared for the spirit form of his Zanpaktuo without realizing it when they first met. Others who have done the same thing, making their sword a tool, never had real relationships with their weapon but knew exactly what they were doing, they were subjugating their servant. Kenpachi was just using a sword while caring for Yachiru. That is honestly why Kenpachi had to be lead away during the Zanpaktuo rebellion arc. That would have exposed the secret of what Yachiru was. Honestly I believe Yachiru purposely led Kenpachi away from Muramasa knowing the nature of their relationship would have been destroyed before Kenpachi was ready. Kenpachi and Yachiru’s story was beautifully done even though I was already certain Yachiru was Kenpachi’s Zanpaktuo in physical form. It wasn’t the first time that had occurred and Kenpachi was clearly not ready for that step in his life as a Soul Reaper.Show less Kubo has a Q and A website called Klub Outside The process of naming Yachiru so that she gains Soul Reaper powers is something we see before. This process is analogous to other Soul Reapers who don't have good relationships with their Zanpakuto. Firstly, Yachiru is a part of Kenpachi's Zanpakuto, correct? That means her relationship with Zaraki is a Zanpakuto and it's master. Problem is, Zaraki doesn't even want to listen to his Zanpakuto. To reach out to Zaraki, his Zanpakuto manifests physically in the form of Yachiru. Yachiru sort of does embody Zaraki. She is carefree and seemingly oblivious to the world of violence and massacre in the same way a child doesn't understand the true magnitudes of atrocities. This sort of encapsulates Zaraki as he loves to fight, he loves the feeling of going toe-to-toe with someone. Yachiru is probably a unique case because Zaraki's Reiatsu is so damn high it can facilitate such phenomena. Okay, so Yachiru is definitely a part of Zaraki, she is like a Zanpakuto, she can exist because Zaraki is a powerhouse but why does she gain Soul Reaper powers? The answer can be seen with Yumichika, Hihio Zabimaru and Zangetsu. Yumichika's Zanpakuto is unique because it has preferences in colours. It loves the colour azure but hates the colour wisteria. Yumichika knows this and leverages it. Yumichika doesn't like his Shikai because it's a Kido type, which is forbidden in the 11th Division because they hold only melee Zanpakutos as acceptable for their Division. Yumichika doesn't want people to know that his Zanpakuto is a Kido type because he wants to stay with his friend Ikkaku and doesn't want to be forced out for his Zanpakuto. Thus, he calls his Zanpakuto "Fuji Kujaku" or "Wisteria Peacock", which makes the Zanpakuto unhappy and only draw out part of it's power, creating a melee weapon that is acceptable in the 11th Division. Only by calling the Zanpakuto by it's true name of "Ruri'iro Kujaku" or "Azure Peacock" can the Soul Reaper draw it's full power, and by definition, it's true nature out. Similarly, when Yachiru forced herself into existence, Kenpachi giving her a name also gave her some powers. If Yachiru was thought of as a sword, he could now draw out some of it's power with a name, albeit, not it's true power, but some power nonetheless. That's why we see Yachiru with her own Shikai because it is part of Zaraki to a very small degree. I.e. Bloodthirsty to the point of lacking sanity -> Oblivious to the carnage like a child -> an actual child's behaviour and tastes manifesting in a Zanpakuto. The fact that Yachiru was Zaraki's Zanpakuto is even referenced chapters before Zaraki unveils Nozarashi. Yachiru seems to be inexplicably getting closer to hit Guenael Lee based off of pure instinct , just like how Zaraki fights. As for Hihio Zabimaru, it's a much closer comparison to the Yachiru-Nozarashi/Kenpachi dynamic than the Yumichika/Kujaku one. Renji thinks his Zanpakuto's true name is Hihio Zabimaru, which we learn is not true. How is it that Renji achieves Bankai while not using it's true name? Because "Hihio" is only partly it's true name, just like how "Yachiru" only describes Zaraki through Unohana, the bloodthirsty, diabolical criminal that knew every swordfighting style just 'cause she loved to fight. But that didn't describe who Nozarashi was, so only a part of Yachiru's power was drawn out. When Zaraki discovered Nozarashi's name, perhaps Yachiru was called back as Zaraki released all of his power (not on the Bankai level but in the sense that he realized who he was and who his Zanpakuto was - the shackles were broken). Even more on the nose, Old Man Zangetsu even said that any attack is more powerful when you know it's name. It's why Ichigo shouts "Getsuga Tenshou!" every time he wants to release that attack. He has to, otherwise it won't be as powerful - it'd just be the force of his sword. Similarly to both Zabimaru and Yachiru, only parts of their true name, and by extension, their true nature, has been revealed which is why only part of their power had been revealed.Show less

@dopepoisonivyoncrack

[random-mha-thoughts]

Mama’s Boy/Lover’s Boy (Bakugou x Reader)

Pairing: Bakugou x Fem!Reader

Genre: Fluff

Inspo: “Down for You” by Cosmo’s Midnight/Ruel

Summary: Bakugou hates being dragged to fancy parties for many reasons, but only one thing makes it all worth it.

Word Count: 2,322

Tags:  @yuki-osaki​ @liviitehe​ @iamsoftsodonttoucheume-blog​ @bunnythepipsqueak​

a/n:  I absolutely adore this picture, ngl that was the whole inspo for this.

It's not fair that a whole Katsuki exists while I'm bleeding out and my hormones are out of whack.  I'M A LOYAL SHOUTO HO, STAY IN YOUR LANE KATSUKI!  DON'T TAKE ADVANTAGE OF MY INSTABILITY LIKE THIS!

When I was at the last few paragraphs, I realized I would've loved to let Baku lose his shit and almost crash the entire thing like in Murphy's Law (man I loved writing that), but that wouldn't be good.  We love a good chaotic fluff monster.

This turned out a lot longer than I thought it would, but I really like how it turned out!  Definitely more fluff than I expected, but who's mad at that?  I'm bleeding out of my uterus and my mom and dad got me feverish and sick and I definitely needed this, so I KNOW you Baku stans are gushing at this too.  Thanks to @rubyred-imagines​ for one of the story beats here!

Spice might be incoming in the next day or two ;3  Not sure which character yet, but it's gonna happen!

"Babe, your face."

"What about it?!"

"Stop looking like you want to kill everyone."

"But I do!"

"I know you do, but don't look it."

Katsuki walks into the grand hall, muscular arm linked through his dazzling girlfriend's slender one.  He really doesn't want to be here; he hates these high-class, uptight gatherings, he hates this constricting tuxedo he has to wear, he hates how he barely knows anyone here, and he especially hates that he could've been on a date with her alone instead of being surrounded by these suffocating faces.

His lovely girlfriend announced this unfortunate outing a few weeks ago right before Katsuki was going to suggest the idea of having a date night, since they haven't had any quality alone time together in a while.  Her eyes lit up when she reported that she RSVP-ed for both of them to attend her company's fancy dinner.  And his plans were crushed like that.  He wanted to grumble and refuse, but she'd yell right back at him anyway, being the stubborn person she is.

She reminds him of his mother.

"You're just like my mom," Katsuki rolls his eyes.  "She used to drag me to her company dinners all the time, too."

"We won't stay for long, I promise," she pats his arm with her perfectly manicured fingernails.

"She used to say that too, and then we'd be out for hours," he mumbles to himself.

The girl looks up at him sweetly.  "And you'll be a good boyfriend and stay here with me the whole time, right?"

The blond growls low in his throat.  "I don't even belong here, you were invited, not me."

"Katsuki, you're my guest, of course you belong here."  She leans up to whisper in his ear, "Besides, you're more handsome than any of the guys here, show them all up."

That makes Katsuki smirk.  "Damn right I am, babe."

The couple find their table after an irritating amount of time.  Every few steps, some other pretentious stranger from his girlfriend's company sweeps over to exchange empty kisses and the same empty conversation.  Katsuki thinks it's some kind of script everyone practiced from, no one deviating from the script or else the entire simulation might fall apart.  Actually, he would like to say something inappropriate just to relish their horrified or disgusted faces, but he for the sake of his precious girlfriend, he keeps his mouth shut, teeth grit, and smile plastered each time he's introduced to a new face.

"Do you really know everyone here, babe?" Katsuki mutters in her ear as they finally approach the table.

"Not everyone," she hums in response, "I don't know most of the employees from the other two companies here, but I know the higher-ups through my boss."

He briefly remembers her saying this dinner was for a big merger deal between these three companies.  His girlfriend works tirelessly for her boss, usually taking on more than she can handle and coming home late most nights.  She'd been promoted from just being a regular company worker to being in a near-the-top position right under the main board managers.  He admires her dedication, but he's always worried about her health and energy level.  He may be a Pro Hero, but she's the real superhuman in the relationship.

Katsuki does the gentlemanly thing of pulling the chair out for his lady and pushing her back in before settling in his seat next to her, purposely shifting closer to her than the person on his other side.

"What manners your boyfriend has," one of the older ladies at the table coos at the couple.

"Thank you, I'm very grateful to have him," the girl smiles politely in response.

Katsuki's heart melts at the pride dripping from her voice as she compliments him.  "And I'm very lucky to have her."  It felt like the right thing to say as he squeezes her hand under the table and briefly glances into her eyes.

The two don't tear away from each other until someone else approaches his girlfriend and she stands to greet him briefly.  Katsuki surveys him in case he would do something ballsy to his girlfriend.

She turns and places a hand on Katsuki's shoulder.  "This is my boyfriend, Katsuki Bakugou."

Hell yeah, I am, you better not pull anything, dumbass.  He stands and shakes the other man's hand, polite but stiff.

"Nice to meet you.  Your girlfriend is honestly a powerhouse, she's amazing," the man gushes.

"Yes, I'm aware," the blond replies tersely.  He's on guard because he doesn't get a good vibe from this man.

Sure enough, he goes on a little too animatedly about how much his girlfriend does for the company and the rest of the company.  It comes off to Katsuki as fake and kiss-ass.  Nonetheless, his girlfriend accepts all the compliments like the graceful goddess she is.  He realizes this boy is one of his girlfriend's juniors as they descend into a conversation surrounding work and future projects.

After dismissing him, another group of his girlfriend's underlings rushes over with compliments and "Oh my gosh, senpai!  You look amazing!" and the like.  Each time, she would accept the praise, introduce him, before launching into more work-related subject matter that Katsuki learned to tune out eventually.

Honestly, he's annoyed at how everyone here is overwhelmingly toxic.  All the subordinates or peers are kiss-ups and her superiors are pretentious stick-up-their-asses that look down on his girlfriend.  He can't stand that his lover is surrounded by this atmosphere all day.  They don't know the genuine type of person she is, other than that she's kind and easy to walk all over.  No one seems like they care enough to carry genuine conversation, and he'd rather not tune into that energy.

Instead, Katsuki directs his attention to his lovely girlfriend.  Staring at her face, he recalls how painstakingly long it took for her to paint her face with makeup to look this flawless.  He's sure she would've had a mental breakdown while doing her eyes, especially putting on her eyeliner.  She was chanting to herself cutely to get them even, almost coaxing her shaky hands in front of the mirror to perform some kind of magic.  If he had done the wrong thing and hurried her or teased her habits, she would've unleashed all her anger on him.  He's learned that the hard way.  In the end, she was able to achieve this masterpiece on her face without making herself look like a completely different person, highlighting her natural beauty.

Scanning downward to her dress, he remembers fondly going shopping with her last weekend.  Her hair was in a topknot as she fumbled through the racks for a dress to wear.  She had dragged him along because she trusted his opinion on fashion choices.  While he would've liked for her to choose a scarlet red gown, Katsuki knew she'd look infinitely better in the sapphire blue number she's wearing now.  The skinny straps holding the dress up leads down to a not-too-plunging neckline that suits her shoulders, collarbone, and chest perfectly.  The dress cinches in at the waist to emphasize the figure he knows she has before falling straight down from her hips, and the mid-thigh slit on one side is subtly sexy without having her risk overexposure.  Finishing the entire outfit is a classic pair of nude pumps, a dainty gold necklace, matching dangling earrings, and a clutch matching her shoes.  Her hair is curled in waves cascading down her back with some stands hanging over one shoulder.

Katsuki can't help but smile unconsciously.  He can't wait to someday place the finishing touch she deserves: a simple but elegant ring on her left hand.

After all the formalities, the two finally sit down and start eating the dinner courses that have started gracing their place settings.

"I know you wanted to go out for date night today," his girlfriend begins gently, "But we can imagine this is a fancy restaurant with just us two, and everything else is just a backdrop."

"Shouldn't you be paying attention to what's going on?" Katsuki quirks an eyebrow.

She waves her hand and takes a refined sip of her wine.  "I've already heard them practice this speech too many times."

The devilish blond smirks and slinks closer to her.  "That's not something a good employee would do, is it?"

"I'm not working right now," she smoothly responds back, replicating his energy.

The organizer of the dinner finally takes the stage and starts his speech.  Katsuki keeps his gaze on his beautiful girlfriend, admiring her delicately picking and eating at her plate.  She's so precious to him, he doesn't care if he's making heart eyes and everyone can see.

When the speech finishes, his girlfriend's glass also empties and she indicates that she's going to get another.  It leaves him on edge, he hates being alone with all these strangers even for a few minutes.  He doesn't want to tell you this, but if one of these people try to small talk him without you here, he might actually break something.

"So, Bakugou, what do you do?" the same lady from earlier chirps at him.

He whips his head up.  For fuck's sake.  "I'm a...public safety worker of sorts."  He tries so hard to sound polite for his girlfriend's sake.  He also can't resist scanning the room for her as a safety reflex.  With all the shady people around, he doesn't trust that something bad won't happen.  And he also wants your comfort in these uncomfortable situations, but he'll never admit that either.

"Oh, I see."  The old lady seems satisfied with his tone, barely noticing his fidgeting as she launches into a whole story about her grandson wanting to do something like that, and all the tangents related to that.

Katsuki is relieved that he doesn't have to talk for the rest of the time, just nodding along  and humming to prove he's passively listening.  He finally spots his angel a few tables away, groaning internally that she was stopped by someone, keeping her from coming back to him.  It seems they were having a deep conversation at first, but suddenly the man cracks a smile and a joke that makes her cover her mouth in respectful laughter.

Katsuki's annoyance is cut through at her wholehearted display of emotions.  The entire night, he's been complaining about how much he hates everyone here, but it's only now he realizes how relaxed she looks in the entire situation.  She's completely in her element; he'd get easily drained by all the suffocating small talk, but her?  She thrives off this, she gains energy from it.  Although she comes home late, overworked and tired, she still faces every day with a smile on her face.  She makes it look so easy to talk to people, striking up and following conversations with everyone in the most endearing and poised way possible.

Katsuki smiles to himself, warmth washing over him.  Yes, just like his mom, but it makes his girlfriend all the more stunning and admirable in his eyes.

His girlfriend finally returns to the table, her recently-acquired glass already half empty.  "What did I miss?" she asks, buzzing with both energy and alcohol.

Katsuki leans his head on his palm.  "Nothing much."  He's still basking in the glow of his wonderful girlfriend, casually sipping his own wine absently.

She turns towards the clearing in the center of the room and takes his free hand.  "Let's go dance, babe!"

Any other time, Katsuki would have sternly declined, but he can't resist her today.  Without a single complaint, he rises and lets her drag him by their entwined hands to the dance floor.  Guiding his large hand around her waist as her one hand plants to his shoulder, she raises their joined hands and starts swaying them to the classic orchestral ensemble's upbeat performance.

The man doesn't know if it's the overwhelming feeling of pride he recently uncovered, or the way their bodies press together gently as he inhales her floral perfume, but he can't find the words to describe everything he wants to say. He settles on simply smiling warmly down at her as he whispers, "You're amazing, you know that?"

His girlfriend's cheeks flush and she erupts into giggles.  "What's with the sudden compliment?"

He shakes his head.  "I just realized it, that's all.  Just like my mom."

"You sure are a Mama's boy, aren't you?"

He scoffs at the idea.  "I love the old hag, but I'll never tell her that.  Besides, I'd say I'm whipped for a different woman in my life."  He brushes hair behind her ear, her earring glinting against the light, and places a kiss on her perfect temple.  "You look stunning tonight."

His girlfriend's eyes close in half-lidded affection.  "I'm sorry this isn't the perfect date night you wanted."

The blond leans his forehead on her's, slowing their pace to allow time to pass much more leisurely around them.  "I get to dance with you, I think that's a definite win."

"I guess so."

Katsuki comes to realize that he can be forced to come to all of these events.  All that matters is his enchanting lover and her smile.  When the night is over, he can't wait to let her take her heels off and carry her bridal style to their car as everyone watches in envy and awe.  He'd let her recline and rest her weary feet, telling her stories of his adventures of night outings with his mom to lull her to sleep in his passenger seat.  And then he'd carry her sleeping figure up to their bedroom and wake her gently so she can clean herself up and change into her cute pajamas, just so they can cuddle in each other's warmth until they fall asleep.

Maybe he's not a Mama's boy anymore.  More like he's a Lover's boy.

[seiin-translations]

2.43 S1 Chapter 5.4 - Stand By Me

4. TRANSITION ATTACK

It kind of sucks that the anime cut out a lot of the cringe comedy in the books

Translation Notes

1. Three-stage attack refers to the offense where the ball is received, set, and then the attacker spikes it over the net

2. De Cecco refers Luciano De Cecco, an Argentine volleyball player known as one of the most talented setters in the sport

3. Abe refers to Yuta Abe, a setter who’s 191cm tall

4. A deuce is a term that refers to a tie score where a player needs to score twice consecutively to win

Previous || Index || Next

Starting with his right thumb, taping was applied to his index finger, middle finger, and then his left thumb, index finger, and middle finger, in that order. He covered the nails and left the second joint open. He could already measure the exact length he needed by eye.

Normally, every time he finished taping a finger, he felt a switch turning on inside him, but today, he hadn’t felt that once. He wanted to feel a definite response, so he found himself taping harder than usual. The tightening sensation in his fingers told him that blood was flowing to and nerves were stretching to every corner of his body.

He had brought his bag for club activities, so he had all his familiar gear, including shoes and supporters. He changed in a corner of the gym, having said that he didn’t need a changing room. Finally, he tied the laces of his shoes tightly, stretched lightly, and then stood up.

He kicked his left and right foot backwards in order to check the slippage of the floor, and heard some nice squeaky sounds. It was indeed a nice gym. It was quite a difference from the Seiin gym, where the wax had peeled off the floor and made it slippery. He was so used to practicing in a gym that was as hot as a steam bath that the air conditioning made him feel cold. His body felt like it was stiffening up, so he stretched with great care.

He turned his eyes to Kuroba. Kuroba was bouncing up and down on the sideline. “You have nice shoes,” he said, admiring his borrowed shoes. His jumping power was the same as ever, able to hug both his knees lightly just from jumping a little. Kuroba didn’t have his practice gear with him, so he was only wearing his T-shirt that he wore underneath his shirt and his uniform pants rolled up to his knees.

Meisei High School had two gymnasiums, the larger but older first gym and the slightly smaller but newer second gym. The boys’ volleyball team practiced in the second gym. It wasn’t like in Seiin, where six clubs divided up the days each of them could use the gym, and they could only envy the environment of being able to practice in the gym every day.

On the other side of the court, a dozen or so Meisei team members were gathered, chatting among themselves and sneaking peeks at them. The Seiin team had team jerseys for game days, but their regular practice clothes were all different. Meisei had practice uniforms with their team logo on them. It was intimidating to see a wall of matching practice uniforms lined up in a row.

The only people present were the first- and second-year members of the club. The third years, the coach, and the advisor were having a meeting in the coach’s office with the members of the opposing school for a friendly match. Using that timing, the second years took the initiative to accept the “challenge.”

“Didn’t Haijima get into the best six?”

“He’s gotten big…Having that height with that volleyball sense, how much does he have…?”

He frequently heard his name mentioned in the gaps between conversations. He didn’t know what Komukai and the other first-years thought, but he got the feeling that the second-years were generally interested in finding it out—if the “genius setter” who dropped out of a powerhouse private school had lost his edge.

On the other hand, they seemed to take no notice Kuroba for the present. It couldn’t be helped, as an ace attacker from a no-name school in a prefecture they didn’t even know wouldn’t ring any bells for them. Even though Komukai had talked down on it, best 16 in the Kanto Tournament was a considerably good level. Before entering the Kanto Tournament, there were more than 150 schools that participated in the Tokyo preliminaries alone. They were in the best 16 in the tournament, on top of winning the block against a number of schools that was incomparable to the scale that Kuroba had experienced at Monshiro and Seiin.

The rules were two against two. Since beach volleyball was played with a two-person team, there was no reason they couldn’t play. Since they didn’t know when the third-years would come back after their meeting, they decided to keep it short and play only one set with whoever getting twenty-five points first winning. At the turnaround point of thirteen points, they would change courts. There were only two people on the court, so there was no rotation. Naturally, each person would have a wide range of roles, and both people must play receiver, setter and attacker.

For the Seiin team, it went without saying that the two players on the team were Kuroba and Haijima. In contrast, the first player for the Meisei team was the second-year, Tatsumi. Tatsumi was only about 180cm tall, but he remembered him to be a good blocker in middle school, making use of his long arms. To be honest, he was surprised to see Ikawa, a fellow first-year, was put on the team. Ikawa himself seemed puzzled by his selection, fidgeting unsurely.

“Alright!”

Kuroba shouted after finishing his relatively proper warm up. “Oi,” Haijima called out to his back, grabbed his waist belt and pulled him close.

“Whoa, hey, stop that. My underwear would be showing if I was wearing track pants.”

Kuroba, who had turned around to complain, blinked. “Nnn?”

“You’re playing with your glasses? What about your contacts?”

“I didn’t bring them today.”

Isn’t that your fault in the first place…? He glared at Kuroba, who feigned ignorance, and clicked his tongue. He hadn’t practiced properly in a while, so he didn’t carry his contacts with him. Since he started play volleyball, he had been wearing contacts out of necessity, but he avoided using them as much as possible because they didn’t suit his constitution and were too much trouble. This was the only thing Haijima was “lazy” about when it came to volleyball.

“You get it, don’t you? Two against two, we’re at a disadvantage.”

He thrust his face forward and made his voice stern. “You’re talking about that now? You’re a guy who keeps changing your own subject.” Kuroba shrugged and said indifferently.

“They have the same conditions, don’t they? How are we at a disadvantage?”

“You should be aware of your own weaknesses. You were the one who came up with the idea to challenge them. Who’s going to receive the ball?”

Kuroba was worse at reception (serve receives) than digs (spike receives). It was probably because he was strangely under pressure while waiting in the stance. His digs were not so bad, because he didn’t have time to think. Though he had strengthened his reception skills during the intensive practice at summer camp, he had finally become average at it. The dilemma arose when Haijima had to cover Kuroba’s defensive range, but Haijima couldn’t set the ball if he did the first contact.

“You say that, but we can’t back down now. It’s gonna be okay. Let’s go.”

With a strange confidence of unknown basis, Kuroba escaped from reality and stepped onto the court while spinning his arms. It looked like there was a flaming aura rising from his shoulders, and Haijima stared at his back in slight astonishment before hurriedly following him to the court.

He had never seen Kuroba showing so much fighting spirit. The usual Kuroba had the disposition of a spoiled only child, and winning or losing a competition wasn’t fundamentally his purpose of action. Usually, he was the one who was frustrated by his laxness, but…

Komukai and the other freshmen, who were responsible for keeping score and line judging, ran from courtside to take their positions.

The second-year team members watching from the walls, the first-year team members scattered around the court’s perimeter—all eyes were on them from all sides, as though to see what they got.

“You mean, a performance?”

…That was what was said.

He recalled Komukai’s confession again.

So they all conspired to see how I’d react to a teammate’s suicide attempt. So, what did you think when you saw my reaction, where I endured a lot, as planned? Did you enjoy it…?

Before he knew it, the contours of the people disappeared, and many eyes floating in the air surrounded him on all sides and stared at him. …What is this. For the first time, he cared about the stares pouring in from outside the court. I wonder how I’m being looked at.

He said, and then he was suddenly grabbed by his chin and made to look at the court. He blinked in slight surprise and saw Kuroba peering into him with a severe look on his face.

“I didn’t tell you to not care about your surroundings. It’s natural to care about it. I’d rather show them what I can do. Let them know how big of a loss it was to banish Haijima Kimichika from Meisei. I hope your former teammates’ senpais chew them out hard because of that. We’ll make them say, ‘If he had been here, we wouldn’t have just finished in the best 16.’ We’re gonna show off, and then I’m gonna carry you off back to Seiin while laughing. That’s the outline of it. In the first place, if we ran back shamelessly while our crucial setter disgraced, Oda-senpai would yell at us.”

With his both his cheeks squeezed, Haijima blankly looked up at Kuroba. “Still not enough?” Kuroba sniffed in dissatisfaction, then looked like he suddenly thought of something and then whispered to him with his hand over his mouth, as though telling him a secret. “Hey, before we go home, I’d like to go sightseeing just once in Tokyo…like going to Harajuku or something. Those girls from earlier looked like they wanted to talk to us, right? What if we accidentally get scouted…”

“…Don’t get carried away.”

When Haijima gathered his eyebrows and said that in a low voice, “I-I was joking.” Kuroba said and let go of him in fear. “I was just trying to ease your nerves, you know? There’s no way I’d be saying that seriously.” He said, but he probably wasn’t all that opposed to the idea.

“You look happier than before, don’t you? You’ve got a shameless look on your face.”

He said with a grin. Haijima adjusted his glasses with a sour expression on his face. Do I always have a shameless look? It’s not like I’m consciously making faces.

…I can talk now…huh. That reminds me…

He put his fingers to his throat and breathed in and out gently. Somehow, as he followed his usual procedure to prepare, he felt relieved, and the foreign object feeling that had been pressing against his vocal cords disappeared.

He gently manipulated the three taped fingers of his left hand one by one with his right hand. He then did the same with the opposite hand. They didn’t feel cold. His body temperature went through to them. He could handle the ball as usual. I’m fine. My fingers…are still attached.

Alright…maybe this can work?

“Nnn? …You’re kinda…”

Kuroba blinked and looked at his own palms suspiciously.

***

“He’s kind of like you, isn’t he? No, you’re much more developed, but the things he’s trying to do are…”

Kuroba was also surprised and let leak such an impression.

The Ikawa that Haijima knew until his second year of middle school was a reserve setter with no special characteristics. He had a quiet personality and always waited for others to make a move before making a move himself, which was a flaw of his. But today, his impression of him was very different from how it was in middle school. It didn’t seem that the Meisei side sent Ikawa into the court because they looked down on the match.

Tatsumi was an all-rounder with a good balance of defensive and offensive skills, and it was unpleasant how his long reach, especially when it came to blocking and spiking, caused his movements to be a little unpredictable for Haijima. In addition, while he was stuck in the six-person system, Tatsumi on the other hand didn’t stick to the three-stage attack (1) and lightly went back and forth between the first and second stages. There were only two defenders, so even a weak ball would score unexpectedly if it was dropped right at the edge of the court. If you became vigilant about that and stepped back, he would then do the third stage properly and spike. Though they were definitely not losing in terms of technique, it was absurdly frustrating to be reminded of the difference of one school year with such deftness.

He had noticed that he was getting more impatient than ever. If it were a full game, he could spend the first half of the first set observing, and then build up a game to crush them from the second half onwards to crush them in the second set, but this game only had one set. We have to catch them early——.

From Ikawa’s hands came a set that dived straight for the attacker’s hitting point. Now a hard hit came. It was right in front of Kuroba’s block, but Tatsumi skillfully used his long reach to catch his spike on the tips of Kuroba’s fingers and blow it all the way back to the end line. Haijima, who was defending deep, chased the ball, but couldn’t catch up and ended up only used his stamina for unnecessary sliding.

“Shit…”

He should have run. He got up on his arms and pulled up his T-shirt to wipe the sweat from my face. It wasn’t usual for him to be this breathless at this point in the game, but he was more exhausted than usual. “Sorry, Haijima,” Kuroba, who seemed to still have plenty of energy, ran all the way outside the court. He lent him his hand and Haijima let him pull him up to his feet.

“Your hand when you block should be more…” He wanted to give him instructions to fix it there, but he didn’t want to use his energy to even teach him with specific hand gestures, so he just said, “Never mind…court change” and turned around. “Oh, right,” Kuroba was puzzled for a moment before following him. Currently, they were at 10-13. At the turnaround point of thirteen points, Meisei took a three-point lead and they changed courts. The two teams moved counter-clockwise around the sides of the net to the opposite court.

He heard the second-year assistant referee chatting with another second-year by the pole.

“Ikawa’s pretty good. Was Haijima always like that? I had the impression he stuck out more in middle school.”

“No way, he can hit and he’s a good defender? He really can do it all.”

“Yeah, but not as good as I expected.”

“Anyways, the teachers will be coming back soon. We’ll be in big trouble. Should we stop?”

They were beginning to worry about the time. That meant the Meisei side’s concentration on the game was diminishing. The game was not being played in a way that made the gallery lean forward eagerly.

I’ll show you how big of a loss it had been to let Haijima Kimichika go—he didn’t feel like he had shown much to make them think that. Haijima bore much of the defense, so he couldn’t show off his set work. Of course, it wasn’t as though setting was the only thing he was good at. He couldn’t have peace of mind unless he was the best at serving, blocking, digging, and spiking, so he did them all. But more than anything, he wanted to build his offense the way he wanted it to be. He had his hands full with returning the ball in the flow of the game, and he wasn’t able to control the flow himself. Frustration was building up within him because he knew very well that he was playing a mediocre game.

“That set he made just now was a perfect copy of yours.”

Kuroba came up next to him and said. They were looking at the two members of the opposing team, who were moving around the court, talking with relatively cheerful faces.

“Kou is Chika’s fan.”

A voice cut in from the side. It belonged to Komukai, who was keeping score. He leaned languidly against the score board’s frame and looked at Ikawa with a look of displeasure on his face.

“Apparently, he’s been studying Chika’s game videos from middle school, watching them hundreds of times. He said there’s a lot of cool plays he wants to copy. But with how he is today, it looks like he already caught up to you. I think Kou must be disappointed that his idol turned out to be not that great after all.”

When Komukai boasted that, purposely stirring him up, Kuroba said, “Shut your trap. You guys only knew him until second year of middle school. You don’t know high school Haijima at all, do you?” He stepped in between them like a shield and pushed Haijima to the court.

“Good grief, standard Japanese is so creepy. So it wasn’t just you that’s creepy.”

Haijima asked Kuroba, whose anger still hadn’t subsided when he entered the court.

“Am I having a bad day today?”

“Huh? No, not really. In fact, I’ve never seen you have a bad day.”

“If you have the time to see my games a hundred times, you should watch the video of the Argentina game and see De Cecco’s (2) set work a hundred times. You’ll never get bored and it’s way more interesting. I’m still not even ten centimeters away from Abe (3) yet…”

When he muttered that to the floor, Kuroba tilted his head to the side and peered at him.

“You’re…not used to being praised much, are you?”

“…”

He sullenly shut his mouth and looked away.

He saw Ikawa on the opposing court looking at him over the net. The gallery seemed to be getting bored, but Ikawa seemed to be enjoying the game and his eyes were shining in his flushed face. No matter what he did, he was more often shunned or envied than praised, so he just couldn’t get used to being looked at in such a purely admiring way.

He remembered the first time Ikawa replaced Haijima as the setter in the Fall Tournament in his second year of high school, when he would come to the warm-up zone repeatedly while wiping sweat off his face and looking like he was about to cry for help. But now, there was confidence in his face. As Komukai said, he might be beginning to believe that he was more equal to his opponent than he thought.

“…Crush Ikawa.”

He declared, narrowing his eyes and glaring at beyond the net.

“Huh? What did you say? He’s your fan, you know.”

“That’s why it’s good manners to not hold back. I’m going to crush him with all my might and push him away. I’ll make him regret ever hoping to catch up with me. I haven’t done anything to make it easy to catch up to me.”

He hadn’t found much motivation to play this game, but his fighting spirit was finally ignited and his heart began to boil.

Kuroba sighed in disgust. “…You’re a guy who’s never satisfied with anything. There’s not much people out there who can keep up with you.”

He rolled his shoulder blades and relaxed his shoulders. Before he knew it, he was straining in a bad direction.

He wasn’t aware of strange things like showing off his setting to Komukai and the second-years who were watching from around him. It would be enough to remind Ikawa, who was fighting on this court right now. You watched videos of me from up to second year of middle school hundreds of times? Then, don’t you want to feel it for yourself now——?

In that instant, the view outside the court disappeared. He was no longer conscious of the gazes from the gallery that often glanced over at him. He didn’t care what the people outside the court thought of him. He was in absolute control of the court, both enemies and allies. He connected his nerves to the court and made the world move on that board. Because this intoxicating feeling was addicting, he didn’t want to give up this position to anyone.

“Kuroba, starting now, you’re doing all the receives.”

“Huh, all by myself?”

“If I’m on defense, I can’t play setter. I want to play in the middle.”

I’ve said something like this a long time ago…when I was in Meisei. At that time, his statement had caused a wave of disquiet. However, then and now, he had felt that he was being selfish, but he didn’t think he was wrong either.

“You don’t have to return the A-pass. It doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you get the ball up somewhere. You have to do the second contact. As soon as you get the ball, you have to run and hit it.”

“You’re being unreasonable…there’s only the two of us.”

Although he looked fed up, Kuroba opened his legs on the stop without much hesitation, twisted his body left and right, then let out a shout. “So, I should take them all myself. It’ll be easier if it’s that simple. I’ll do my best to keep you from running as much as possible. It’s more something to aim for, though.”

***

After changing the strategy, Kuroba’s movements improved dramatically. It seemed that he had been confused by the unfamiliar two-person team, unable to grasp the scope of his jobs. When Haijima affirmed that he wouldn’t be getting involved with the reception, he seemed to have a clearer idea of what he needed to do and moved on.

Although he called it an unreasonable request, if his partner wasn’t Kuroba, Haijima wouldn’t have said anything at all. Even if he just expanded his defense area, if it was just a matter of catching up, Kuroba could do that. His eyes, reflexes, and physically ability were a cut above everyone else’s. If I tell you that’s your prey, you will react and definitely catch up to it.

“You’re like a border collie.”

When he told him that half in admiration and half in exasperation, Kuroba, looking amazed, said, “That’s rare, you used a non-volleyball related simile.” A border collie chasing a frisbee had come to his mind, but he himself wondered how did he know anything about dogs. That’s right…that was Yoshino’s dog. They lived in a detached house.

He could catch up to it and hit it with his hand, but most of the time it wasn’t even a B-pass, much less an A-pass. However, Haijima predicted where the receive would go based on the angle and rotation of the serve the moment it arrived and Kuroba’s reaction, and got under the ball ahead of time. That was what he meant when he said it didn’t matter where it went as long as it went up. He demanded it because he was willing to do whatever it takes to follow through, as long as he got his teeth into it one way or another. There was no reason to be told that if he was going to tell people to do something, he should do it himself first.

With only two team members, there was no way to make full use of their attackers and show off their combination attacks, but as long as the second touch was given to him, there were plenty of ways to show off his skills as a setter. After letting Kuroba hit the ball from the left or middle as usual, he signalled for him to run to the right. He set the ball to as far as the antenna at the edge of the net and tear off the block. Kuroba alone left the block behind and mutter “This asshole” through gritted teeth as he caught up with the set and drive the ball in straight from the right side.

If he judged that the ball could be stopped even if he set it to Kuroba, he would instantly switch to hitting it himself. The effectiveness of his greatest weapon, the dump, could be demonstrated more powerfully in a two-player system. Fundamentally, the setter set the ball with the right side of his body facing the net, but for a dump, the setter himself threw the ball into the opponent’s court with his left hand from that stance. This was why left-handed or ambidextrous setters were able to perform a powerful dump.

Of course, Haijima’s former Meisei teammates knew the terror of his setter dumps. Ikawa, anticipating that he would do a dump, marked him. He turned his left hand from the jump set stance to do the dump—right before that, he turned his hand over again over the net. Right in front of Ikawa, who had been caught off guard and unable to move, he made a left-handed backhanded set to the right. Even without looking back, he could see Kuroba jumping there. The sound of a crisp impact sounded behind him.

While the two of them were getting into the swing of it, it was Ikawa who had suddenly gotten worse. His face began to show signs of impatience, and he was frequently seen wiping off sweat with his hands on knees. He had been running a lot in the first half of the game, and his legs seemed to be hurting. The two-person team was three times as tiring as the six-person team, so to speak.

However, it was the same for them, as they were approaching the limit of their stamina. Every time the rally was interrupted, he felt so tired that he wanted to sit down.

“Ugh.”

The bottom of his shoes slipped on his sweat and he fell to his knees. He was also quite exhausted. While feeling glad that he wasn’t in the middle of a rally, he knelt down and took out the towel at his belt. There was no mopper standing by to wipe the court like there were in big tournaments, so he did it himself. Even though the air conditioning was working in the gym, a drop of sweat ran along his chin and dripped onto the floor where he was wiping it. He pulled on his T-shirt and wiped his face again, but the T-shirt itself was already soaked, so it was useless.

“Stand up.”

Kuroba held out his hand, but he couldn’t raise his arm. He was squatting down, his shoulders heaving before Kuroba took his arms and made him stand up. “You’re already at your limit…” “What are you talking about?” He spat out those words as he took a breath and interrupted Kuroba. If he could stand up, he could still look up. He wasn’t doing the easy-to-understand actions of looking down and putting his hands on his knees. His experience and force of will was different from Ikawa’s.

Kuroba already knows, doesn’t he… I get that from the way he spoke. But.

“We’re almost there, so don’t say a word. All you, have to do, is give it your all.”

He said choppily while breathing shallowly. His voice had the slight hint of a plea in it.

Kuroba looked like he wanted to say something, but gave up in the end and said, “Okay.”

Just a little more. Just a little… I haven’t been able to show them what I wanted to show them yet.

A feverish membrane enveloped his head, and his consciousness became hazy. Hah… Hah… His rough breathing filled the inside of the membrane and he could hear it reverberating only around him.

But when he heard the in-play whistle, the membrane was cleared away and he could firmly concentrate. It was a conditioned reflex that his mind and body learned.

The ball that Kuroba slid to pick up drew a low trajectory and flicked to outside the sideline. Haijima was already dashing towards it. He braced himself on his outside leg, twisted his body, and dove right under the ball with an overhead stance. Right after he pushed the ball back into the court, he stepped on his sweat again and his heel slipped. He fell backward, unable to keep his footing, but his eyes never left the set he had made.

The set released from his fingers with all his strength tore through the empty space and headed for the net. Kuroba rolled around on the floor, got up, immediately broke into a run and took off. The ball was far away. But Kuroba could hit it. No one except Kuroba could hit it.

He brought his entire body to the front of the net at once with his inherently dynamic jumping distance. Even so, the hitting point was high. Tatsumi jumped to block him, but he didn’t even allow a single touch, as though it was payback for earlier, and went over the block. “Go!” Haijima spontaneously shouted. He could confidently say that there were no high school-class players who could stop Kuroba one-on-one at the net when he was on the top of his game.

He saw with his own eyes Kuroba knocking down the ball with a powerful swing, and then in the next instant,

“Chika!!”

The outside voices that had completely disappeared suddenly flew in from nearby. Komukai?——The moment he turned his head in the direction of the voice, he was hit by something from the side. A violent metallic sound penetrated his head all the way to the other side.

There was a stir around him. All the noise in the gym suddenly came back to his eardrums, and he was temporarily lost in the torrent of disorganized sounds.

“Chika! Oi, Chika!” He heard Komukai’s voice near him, but it was kept away and replaced by another voice saying, “Haijima!”

“Haijima! Are you okay, Haijima!?” “Ugh…” He could still feel the metallic sound reverberating in his head. It feels like I got slapped…he was conscious enough to have that thought in his mind. He could guess from the direction he slid in that it was the metal panel of the score board.

Am I okay…? He checked himself and got the response that he was fine. He sat up on the fallen panel while pressing his face.

“Haijima, oi!”

“Yeah…I hear you. I probably didn’t hurt any…”

The person hanging over him and peering into him was probably Kuroba, but he couldn’t get a clear image of him even if he strained his eyes.

“My glasses…”

“Glasses? Oh, this…mmh? Ah.”

“…What is it.”

“No, this…are you fine with it like this…?”

While Kuroba spoke unfocusedly, he ran his hand over the thing he had given him and checked the shape of the familiar frames. He tried to open the earpieces, but something felt off.

The frames were warped. Well, it’s an emergency measure, but if I forcibly bent it to the other side, I’ll be able to put them on more or less…as long as they aren’t broken… Nope.

“…”

He held up the glasses by the earpieces. Grimacing with all his might, he stared at the fuzzy figure eight outline in front of his eyes.

One of the lenses was gone.

“Oh, here it is, here it is. It looks like it’s not broken.”

Kuroba found the missing lens, but it wasn’t like he could fit it in right here.

“What are you going to do? Quit? We don’t mind if you quit.”

The Meisei second-year who was acting as the referee said. When he used the received lens like a magnifying glass and glared at the referee, he could see the referee flinch a little in the slightly distorted oval.

He pointed the lens at the scoreboard under his butt. The numbers were flipped up and the scores for both sides were unclear, but they were recorded in the scorebook inside his head. Haijima didn’t doubt that Kuroba’s spike right before had went in, so he added that.

“…23-23, huh.”

They were always behind by two or three points, but they gradually closed the gap in the second half and caught up at the end. Now all they had to do was to score two times in a row without giving up a single point. Meisei seemed to be worried that the higher-ups would be coming back soon, but it would be irritating to have the game end with no definite results.

“It’s no problem. I’ll play like this.”

Is he serious? The gallery buzzed. He stood up with his glasses, which couldn’t be used due to the warping of the frames. Kuroba tried to support him, but he pushed his hand away with an “I’m fine” and turned to Tatsumi.

“Tatsumi-san, you’re going to play until the end, right?”

“Yeah, if you’re fine with it. It’s getting interesting, after all.”

Tatsumi said with a wry smile, his voice coming from a completely different direction from where Haijima was facing.

Now we’re talking… His heart boiled up lightly, and he pushed aside his fatigue for the moment. He was glad he was able to play this game. Ikawa was able to rouse him, and there were many things he could learn from an experienced player like Tatsumi.

Absorb it all, push it away, and go up.

“It’s my serve, after all.”

“If you can’t do it, you can rotate the serve order around, okay?” He couldn’t make out the face at all, but a long and thin object that seemed like Tatsumi said.

The serve was Seiin’s. The server was Haijima.

“Kuroba. Put this near my bag.”

He thrust his glasses to Kuroba while glaring at the court. Kuroba let out a shrill “Uweh?”, and he sensed that it was no good. Even though he had been on the top of his game, the current commotion had broken his concentration.

Well, we were able to unveil our ace, anyways.

If Kuroba said he wanted to show off their setter, then Haijima also wanted to show off the fact that there was such an attacker at a no-name public school. He had already accomplished that goal with that shot earlier, and he didn’t need to show their hand any more than that today.

He started walking along the line. His feet were a bit unsteady, but he had no hesitations about the direction he was walking in. Kuroba put his glasses near his bag by the wall and then hurriedly caught up to him.

“Can you see?”

“I can’t. I have 0-0.1 vision without my glasses.”

He stood in the service zone to receive the ball. He tried to catch the ball with one hand and ended up receiving it with his face.

The gallery buzzed for a moment and then fell into complete silence. “…Is this guy going to be okay?”

He once lightly nudged the ball in the service zone. Everything around him looked blurry, like it had rained, but only the white lines, a rectangle of nine by eighteen meters, stood out clearly. Like guide lights illuminating a runway at night, they shone white in his vision. He had only moved away to a place where he couldn’t see the outside of the court. His connection with the court wasn’t broken.

The soles of his shoes squeaked as he checked the feeling of the well waxed floor. He rolled the still relatively new Molten practice ball in his hands.

Haijima liked the feel of a volleyball. Not a soccer ball, not a baseball, not a basketball, but a volleyball. The surface was slightly cushioned, and it fit into his fingers as though wrapping around them. For him, a volleyball was “warm.”

The whistle sounded to resume play.

If the other side scored even one point and it became a deuce (4), then they probably won’t win. They had to score twice consecutively to reach twenty-five points. Of course, they couldn’t miss any of their serves. But there was no option to include a float serve. A lukewarm serve would be easily counterattacked in any case.

To be honest, he couldn’t tell where Kuroba was standing, so he couldn’t tell what defense Tatsumi and Ikawa were taking on the other side of the net. However, the tension given off by those breathing on the court created a slight airflow. He used the feeling on his skin, sense of hearing, and sense of smell to grasp the changes in the air. Even if he couldn’t see it, there was a court in his mind that he could recreate in vivid detail from corner to corner. The bright coat on the wooden floor at his feet radiated out from beneath his feet as though to stretch out the roots of his nerves all around.

He put the ball in his left hand and held it up to his eyes. He could only vaguely recognize the three colors of white, red, and green at the end of his arm, and he couldn’t even recognize the colors of anything further away than the ball.

But…so what?

How many tens of thousands of times do you think I’ve stood in this place and hit the ball from here?

With a snap of his left hand, he threw the ball high in front of him. While looking up at the ball he had just released, he ran forward, sank his knees in the same manner as a spike jump, and jumped. The blurry white, red, and green disappeared completely, blending in with the lights on the ceiling. However, he believed in his set and swung his arm out without hesitation. He felt the sensation of his left hand securely grabbing the center of the ball.

There was a stir at the same time he landed on his toes, and the whistle blew.

“Haijimaaaa!”

Haijima didn’t know what the whistle was for, but it seemed that he had scored as Kuroba cheered and flung his arms around him.

“…Can I hit another one?”

“Of course. You’re our service ace.”

Service ace…it went in, huh… The strength slipped out of him for an instant, and he rested his chin on Kuroba’s shoulder and took a breath. Well, he was confident, but even so, he was surprised with himself.

“Where did that one go?”

“Straight into the right corner…wait, you really can’t see!?”

“That’s what I’ve been saying all along.”

“That’s scary, you’re strong even in this condition…”

He reproduced every serve he hit on the court in his head while digesting the sensations so as to not forget the sensation of every move that remained in his body. He could clearly imagine the white, red, and green ball that drew a slightly distorted trajectory to the left and sucked into the opponent’s court and stab into the right corner, as clearly as if he were seeing it with his own eyes.

One more…I can do one more.

“The ball…”

He muttered heatedly while staring into space. “Huh? O-Okay,” Kuroba caught the ball that had been released and passed it to him.

He didn’t have to think about the whole court anymore today. He didn’t need to think about game-making for ahead. He only had to think about making this serve——

Kuroba’s voice disappeared from his eardrums. The court he had been drawing in his head with himself as the starting point disappeared as though a dark curtain had been pulled down in all directions. The place he was standing in and the white lines at a ninety-degree angle that indicated the right corner of the opponent’s court. The world was condensed into a single sharp, thin line—the shortest path that connected those two points and grazed the top of the net. A ray of light in the darkness, only for the No.5 ball with a diameter of 20cm to penetrate.

If he had only the nerves to make this one serve, then the circuits in his brain might as well be burned out for the rest of the day.

Previous || Index || Next

[auarchivist]

This picture can kind of fit into any one of various AU's. It showcases some of the characters I like to write and draw as well as a few original characters of mine.

((WARNING: long post incoming))

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It isn't everyday that James can get everyone together in one place, so when it did finally happen he planned on making the most of it with a little photo. It took a bit of moving around, but they managed to get everyone in the shot. FRONT----    From the far north is Paula, ever the joker type she finds good humor in almost anything. When she's not out in the wilderness or at home with her faithful blue ox, Babe, she can usually be found having tea and good conversation with her closest friend, Kitty. Out of all of the youngins Kitty has taken in, Hazel is by far the fondest of the bear woman, even going as far as to call her "Auntie Paula". A title Paula seems quite happy with. When it came to the new faces of their little group, Paula was always one of the first to warm up to them, but don't let her sweet nature fool you. Personality wise, she may be a teddy bear, but she's still a bear and she's got the strength to back it up.    Up next is the ever chaotic coyote Huehuecoyotl better known as Huey. Despite what people say about him, Huey is more than just an oblivious fool. In fact, he has often surprised those that doubt him with his random moments of genius. That being said while there is a method to his madness, its still madness. He can often be found at the village of Hatfield ,where all see him as the spirit of the village, hanging out with Calamity or helping James with his research on Moguels and magic. If not, then he is more than likely stealing a scarecrow somewhere.    Zim found himself at a low point, not too long ago, after finding out his mission to conquer earth was in fact just a lie by the tallest to get rid of him. Without goal or purpose and dealing with the realization that he might actually be a bad person, he fell into a state of depression. But all that changed when his ship crashed and he met Erma and the Williams family. Now he has turned over a new leaf, and is determined to achieve greatness by aiding those he can. Despite this though, Zim is very much still the ego filled, deranged megalomaniac he has always been, but now with more noble goals in mind. Despite his shortcomings in socializing Zim has managed to make close friends with Spinel and Catra and even forming a relationship with Erma's old babysitter Felicia (how he managed that is a mystery even to him).    Felicia has been familiar with the paranormal for a few good years now. From being the Williams go to babysitter to dating a former Irken Invader. She has taken all the weirdness in her life in stride, almost unfazed by any of it. Cool and level headed under pressure, a quick thinker and a good dose of bravery has made her infamous to those she has faced on ill terms, especially among the Irkens.    The young girl Erma is certainly a unique one, being a hybrid of human and Yokai descent, people in very high places have had their eye on the little girl for a long time, and for good reason as she is a well and true powerhouse of a child with abilities straight out of a horror movie. Despite this she is very much still a child and when she's not at school or at home watching a slasher flick, or the latest episode of Warrior Unicorn Princess with Gir, she can usually be found with her friends, Hazel Hali and Kaio (last two not listed).    Frosta has certainly had an adjustment period to go through and to be perfectly honest, who can blame her?  After all, its not everyday you lose your home planet. Luckily she has not had to face this alone and has adjusted rather well. All things considered. Nowadays, she lives with glimmer out in the country mastering her ice powers and trying to make friends. Turns out being former royalty can be a blessing and a curse when it comes to socializing.    When Kitty found Hazel one cold, snowy night she had every intention of finding her a proper home elsewhere come morning. But that very night, with the fire roaring, and the child asleep by her side as she quilted, any such notions went flying out the window when morning arrived. Sense then Hazel has been living with Kitty and James slowly and surely coming out of her shell (pun intended) and has become very fond of her new found family. Its clear to those that know her well that she still has some inner demons to work through.    Spinel is the one person that could possibly hope to match Huey in terms of randomness. After Zim stopped her injector plans, with the help of the crystal gems (if you asked Zim he did it all on his own) Spinel stayed on Earth to help fix the damage to beach city and afterwards the two were practically inseparable. The Irken was surprised to learn that the Toony Gem was in fact quite the genius in her own right.  Spinel helps him with a number of his experiments when she's not helping defend the local villages or hanging out with the others. She's even become quite popular with the local children, due to her zany sense of humor and neat tricks and abilities. Which has led to her taking up a side gig as an entertainer. Couch----    Despite appearances Dr. James Algernon was, in fact, human at one point in time. When he was a young boy and the "black ick" had spread across the continent James had the good fortune of running into a young Kajortoq and since then the two had grown to be quite close (much to Paula's teasing). Of course one day old James let his curiosity get the better of him, and he came to an abrupt and brutally painful end.  On the bright side, he did prove Chupacabras were real..and that they could get rabies. For most folks that would be where their story ended, but it seems no one informed James of that fact. As he somehow managed to have his soul inhabit the body of one of angels bizarre puppet dolls, made from wood and the bones of some kind of canine. An expert in the fields of psychology, anthropology, biology, and things retaining to the occult and mystical Dr. Algernon is driven by two things, his love for those he considers family and his borderline obsession with understanding the workings of Magic, both of which have blinded his hindsight and common sense a few times in the past.      The anxious feathered snake Quetzalcoatl, better known simply as Corn, is a quiet soul. Ever sense he was a little hatchling raised by kitty, Corn has always been more at ease alone or with the people he knows well. He earned his nickname when it was discovered the serpent boy had quite the green thumb, especially when it came to growing corn. He has certainly appreciated the additional help he has gotten recently in the form of his adopted sibling figure Hazel and his kindred spirit Wrodak.  Both of which he has become rather attached too.    When Kajortoq was little she was best known for two things, having a lovely singing voice that could heal the sick and for acting way older than she actually was. Now a young adult, she is still known for those things but as of recently she has become known for being the new wielder of the Red Tezcatlipoca. This is an ancient and powerful artifact that takes the form of a burning red wood-stove poker, and can harness the power of the Earth's molten core. It is also said to embody "the virtue of Judgement". Despite her cold exterior, many who know her can vouch that beneath that is a kind, nurturing women. Which has lead her to being what some would call the "mom friend" of the group. It is not too far away from the truth either, as she is already looking after three youngins, Corn, Hazel, and Charles, and has taken Catra under her wing.    Many do not know what to make of Ozama Angeline, or Angel as she is known by her friends. The powerful spirit seems to be a genuinely sweet girl despite her appearance, But the fact that she comes from the "Mictlan Woods", a Realm notorious for being a place for the lost and unwanted souls of the dead; and filled with strange doll and puppet beings made of bone, cloth and other materials (some seemily made by Angel herself), made people a tad hesitant to trust her. But over time people have grown to accept the patchwork girl being around (for the most part).  Nowadays when she is not in Mictlan she can be found tagging along with her adopted human sibling figure, Charles and his friends.    Charles is the very definition of "Problem child" which is no surprise given that his parents were from rival villages, leading to them abandoning him to perish in the cold of winter.  He was found by Angel and Amaroq (not shown). This alone would have lead to the boy having issues, but then it just so happened that he was chosen to wield the Black Tezcatlipoca, a black mass that when left on its own, nearly covered the world in an endless sleep, before being sealed away by Xipe Totec and the three siblings (Xochiquetzal, Ixtlilton and Xochipilli). When he first started using the "black ick" he planned to simply use it to end the villager's feud, but given the fact that he's a kid dealing with the people who abandoned him just for being related to someone from another village, and he now had control over a powerful magical artifact, he got a little mad with power. If it weren't for Kitty and the others' intervention, things could have gotten much worse than it already had. Nowadays he lives both in Mictlan and with Kitty, and while it took awhile, everyone has come to accept him as a member of the group. He has even managed to make a few friends. back----    An expert in illusion magick, Wrip is a master of disguise, all with the help of the magick bottles she makes herself.  If that doesn't work, this resourceful rabbit often uses her skills in flattery and persuasiveness to get her way. A  trick that works on most, save for her significant other Vinkle.    A long time ago Vinkle was charged by the local villages to reign in the illusive rabbit, Wrip.  Whos untethered nature upset them somehow. The finer details of what transpired afterword's is unknown to all, except for them. As what they have told others has, in their words, "creative licenses" but in the end, whatever happened left the two falling for each other and forming a relationship. At first glances it would appear that Vinkle is not all that bright, given his quiet and seemly distractible nature, but in reality he is simply a man of few words and is surprisingly quite perceptive of things.    Catras life has been, to put it lightly, rough. Her childhood was spent as a soldier in training in "The Horde"  with Adora, both of witch were raised by the dark sorceress Shadow Weaver (because that's a name of someone I'd trust around kids).  It was clear to all that while Shadow Weaver loved Adora like a daughter, she merely tolerated Catra, delivering torturous punishments  on the Magicat for any discrepancies caused by either of the two. This harsh treatment would leave psychological, mental, and emotional scars on Catra.  This would lead to her falling into a downward spiral, into villainy, leading to her hurting and driving away the few people in her life that still cared about her. Now after defeating Horde Prime and the exodus to earth, Catra continues her journey of redemption and luckily for her it is not a journey she's taking alone. From Kajortoq who has taken her under her wing, to her two close friends and co-former villains, Zim and Spinel, and finally Glimmer one of the few people in Catras life that has stuck around (and to who she "secretly" feels very deeply for).    Glimmer, the former princess of Brightmoon, was once hailed as a hero of the rebellion and their battle against the Evil Horde. (Why they called themselves "The Rebellion" despite not being concurred by the horde yet is anyone's guess.) But close to the end of the war she lost her mother Queen Angella.  This set her down a dark path, where her anger and grief led her to being manipulated by Shadow weaver. The conniving sorceress convinced Glimmer to activate a powerful device that paved the way for Horde Prime to find Etheria. After his defeat and moving to earth, Glimmer now tries to fix her reputation among the other Etherians as well as redeem herself. Since coming to Earth the former Princess has had a very rocky relationship with her old friends, not only for activating the device, but also for staying with Catra who she has grown very close to (and who she secretly holds feelings for) She has also begun looking out for Frosta, who still greatly admires the sparkly princess.    Icobod, the resident Book worm/stick in the mud of the group, is extremely knowledgeable in a few magical and academic fields. He is also a rather superstitious bird and is obsessed with omens, taking even the most simple ones with the utmost seriousness. Growing up in Hollow, Ichy hid his moguel nature, spending much time in his human form, fearing scrutiny by others if they knew the truth. This lead to him growing distant, even amongst his friends. Nowadays he had grown more comfortable around others, with the resident Irken taking a liking to the "large birdman of science" as he calls him. Another thing worth mentioning is that he has a considerable crush on Wrip that he has not entirely gotten over.    The adoptive little sister of Icobod, Chalchiutlicue, or Calamity as she prefers to go by, is in many ways his polar opposite. With a laid back, free spirit nature, she enjoys spending time out in the wilderness with her friend Huey. Make no mistake though, Calamity may be laid back, but when the time is needed she is more than willing to do what she feels needs to be done. She is also one to usually follow her gut, trusting her instincts despite others input. This has actually contributed to her becoming the wielder of "Tlalocs Tuning fork" a large intricately designed tuning fork that grants the wilder the power to control water provided one sing a certain haunting lyric. When Catra first joined their group, Calamity was very wary of her, but nowadays she has found in some ways a kindred spirit in the Feline Humanoid.    The Newest member of the group, Irina is quite the brawler, seemly always having some kind of bruise or some other injury on her. Despite this the foul mouth canine has quite the cheery disposition, witch goes well with her morbid sense of humor. Her favorite hobby. it seems, is poking fun at Calamity, the only person around who seems capable of matching her wit and despite the Lizard girls statements to the contrary, she always seems happier with the Canine girl around. Nor can anyone deny the glances the two shoot each other when they think the other isn't looking.      Last but certainly not least is "Wrong Hordak", or Wrodak as usually he goes by. When the former drone was cut out of Horde Primes hivemind he was a sobbing wreck as he saw himself as impure and lacking a purpose. Later on though, he saw through Horde Primes lies and aided in his downfall. Nowadays he is happy to be of assistance wherever possible. Usually helping Corn tend to his plants, or with Zim and Jame's research into the occult.               ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kitty, Corn, Calamity, Icobod, Huey, Wrip, Vincle, angel and chareles are from "No Evil" by Betsy Lee it can be found on YouTube and I highly recommend it especially if you love fantasy and Folklore as much as I do (witch is a LOT) Catra, Glimmer, Frosta and Wrodak are from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power on Netflix by Noelle Steven Felitia and Erma are from the Comic series Erma by Brandon Santiago Zim and Gir are from Invader Zim by Jhonen Vasquez Spinel is from the Steven Universe movie and Steven Universe Future by Rebecca Sugar Hazel is from infinity train by Owen Denis

[mocnliights]

hello friends !! i’m kit ( in est , using she/her pronouns ) and so flippin excited for this !! i bring you nadira , my new child who i’m still learning so ... apologies in advance for any mistakes i make about my own muse y*kes . i will add a wanted plots page here when i can get my life together a bit more to help with plotting , but for now , smash that like button and let’s get this ball rolling and i will stop with the dad cliches now bye !! ( not bye , i’m still very much here )

possible trigger warning ( all just brief mentions ! ) : cancer/illness , parental death & family estrangement . i think that’s it , but if i forgot anything , please let me know and i will add it !

* MISHTI RAHMAN, CIS WOMAN + SHE/HER | you know NADIRA KHAN, right? they’re TWENTY-SIX, and they’ve lived in irving for, like, ONE YEAR? well, their spotify wrapped says they listened to GREAT ONE BY JESSIE REYEZ like, a million times this year, which makes sense, ‘cause they’ve got that whole CONSISTENT PLETHORA OF UNREAD NOTIFICATIONS, LACE LINGERIE UNDER SATIN SLIP DRESSES, UNDISTRIBUTED BEAUTIFULLY EMBOSSED BUSINESS CARDS thing going on. i just checked and their birthday is AUGUST 10TH, so they’re a LEO, which is unsurprising, all things considered. ( kit, 25, est, she/her )

THE BASICS  .

full name : nadira sharmin khan  etymology : nadira ( arabic / precious , rare ) , sharmin ( persian / shyness , modest ) nickname(s) : nadi , nadia , didi ( by amir ) birthday & birthplace : august 10, 1994 & los angeles , california sexual orientation : pansexual/romantic hometown : she moved a lot growing up , but would consider new york city & london where she spent her most formative years current residence : aquila drive in irving , north carolina  immediate family ( relation / occupation ) : kashif khan ( father ( deceased ) / renowned fashion designer ) , resna khan ( mother / model , humanitarian ) , amir khan ( younger brother , 21 / student ) occupation : for show , she continues as the public face and head of her father’s brand KHAN , but for all intents and purposes , currently unemployed  education : bachelor’s from columbia university , business management . took a few design classes at FIT  positive personality traits : charismatic , ambitious , loyal , amiable , creative , dutiful , empathetic , honest , innovative , prudent , zealous  negative personality traits : competitive , coquettish , preoccupied , materialistic , possessive , resentful , discontented , opinionated , headstrong 

THE SUMMARY .

tl;dr : nadira grew up as privileged as they come , jet-setting from los angeles to new york to london to tokyo and everywhere in between for her entire life . with her parents at the heart of the fashion industry , nadira grew up with a love for the finer things and a sharp eye for her own designs . she was primped and primed to take over her father’s empire when he decided to retire to irving . she took the reigns of KHAN post-college graduation and was living her dream until it came to a screeching halt just about a year ago when her beloved father received a grim prognosis . with her mother still working ( and estranged ) and her brother younger and in school , nadira decided to step down from her hectic position and move to irving to take care of her father . now , he’s gone . for the first time in her life , she feels listless and unmotivated , so she’s still here , acting like her dad’s going to walk back through the door .

THE EXPANDED BULLETS .

on a hot august day in los angeles , nadira was born to a prominent couple in the fashion world . with a billboard of resna consequently outside the hospital , it only seemed destined that nadira would also take the fashion world by storm ... one day .

for as long as she can remember , she was always in awe of her father’s work . as much as she admired her mother , she was much more interested in the inner workings of a company and designs coming to life from a blank sheet of paper . so as kashif’s design empire expanded globally , it was only fitting nadira tagged along from city to city , even after the family essentially “settled” in new york city following amir’s birth .

her creativity was evident from a young age , producing her own mini spring collection for KHAN at sixteen . while her brother gravitated towards instruments , nadira was hooked to the cutthroat nature of the fashion industry , the constant grind to create great work , and the power of one day running the company at her father’s side .

speaking with a very faint british accent that comes and goes from her years spent in london mixed with her years in america , nadira had a taste of her dreams in college . staying close to KHAN’s headquarters meant she could step into a bigger role ( don’t we love nepotism ) while maintaining her expected 4.0 gpa at columbia .

seeing his daughter’s success and simply tired , kashif decided to retire upon nadira’s college graduation and move away from it all to irving , north carolina , a town he had discovered and frequented over the years whenever he sought the complete opposite of his everyday .

needless to say , resna was unhappy with the decision . though she had allowed his little beach escapades during their marriage , she could not understand moving there permanently when her livelihood was in new york . without officially divorcing , resna declared she was staying put , much preferring the luxuries of a ritz carlton than the laidback nature of a destination town , and kashif could do as he pleased .

nadira watched her happy , loving family crumble before her eyes , which only meant she threw herself into her work even more than she already would have . in the subsequent years of taking over KHAN , she worked constantly , resulting in her most prolific seasons and an exponential boom in sales , but also incredible burnout .

she kept it up for three years , always on a red eye or in a meeting or sat at her desk over a sketchbook . this way , she could ignore the fact that her parents were living in two different states with her brother in a third now attending college of his own ( berklee college of music  , to be more specific ) . but her world came crashing down again when she received a call from her father , informing her that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer .

it felt like a sign . a terrible sign , but a sign nonetheless . she needed to stop . slow down . take a look at her family and deal with what was happening . nadira immediately stepped down , naming an interim head and creative director of KHAN while she uprooted her life to move to irving to take care of her father .

no matter her good-willed intentions when she moved , it seemed only inevitable that the young fashion star who had had it all would grow to feel trapped . she wasn’t going anywhere , not when her mother rarely came down to visit and her brother dropping out of school wasn’t even something anyone would let him consider , but she couldn’t help her growing feelings of resentment  - not towards her father , just her situation .

sometimes , even when money can buy the best , it simply isn’t enough . kashif passed away in july , effectively ending nadira’s obligation to stay in irving , but she hasn’t left . she could step back into her role full time at KHAN , get back to designing and running a global powerhouse , but she fears she’s lost the ability to . for now , she doesn’t see herself going anywhere - physically , mentally , figuratively , literally - despite the growing number of sketches in the notebook she carries everywhere .

[fmhiphop]

Three Cultural Icons With New Projects: Cheers To Film And Culture

If one thing hip hop celebrates is culture, and cinema has been a monumental piece of the culture. No two people have shaped Black culture in films like Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. While the likes of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poiter paved the way, Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson came along to smooth the path. And for those much like Denzel's son, John David, and others with like-minded pursuits, that is invaluable. Cinephiles are in for a treat in the upcoming fall season as three legendary cultural icons, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and John David Washington, are set to grace the silver screen with three highly anticipated films. And with these three new features, one thing is undeniable. The fourth quarter of 2023 is shaping up to resemble the cinematic Super Bowl. Let's take a closer look at what's on the horizon. Cultural Icon #1 Denzel Washington https://youtu.be/19ikl8vy4zs?si=QzhedvmEkbcndh3z When it comes to film, Denzel Washington is the man. Denzel Washington is undeniably a cinematic powerhouse. His career, spanning back to the early 1980s, showcases his exceptional acting prowess, making him the embodiment of a natural-born actor. So, with a filmography that boasts well over 60 titles, as listed by IMDB, it's challenging to pinpoint a single work that encapsulates his brilliance. However, one standout gem in his repertoire that bears mention is "The Equalizer." While Washington first appeared as MaCall in 2014, moviegoers were far from seeing the last of him. And now he's back. Washington will once again bring MaCall to the big screen in September in Equalizer 3, which is sure to be monumental. McCall has always been about his business and is known for his unwavering commitment to his unique brand of justice. However, some nasty business has called him out of his leisure in this segment. And he's got some lessons to teach. As Blexmedia notes, in this installment, "McCall has relocated to Southern Italy to put his past behind him, but his plans take a sharp turn when he uncovers his newfound companions are under the sway of the Sicilian Mafia. What ensues is a gripping narrative." Denzel Washington's return as McCall is eagerly anticipated, and his portrayal of the character's dedication to justice is bound to deliver another thrilling cinematic experience for fans and newcomers alike. Cultural Icon #2 Samuel Jackson https://youtu.be/Kk89vbx_k3w?si=bP-ZG5vIKHFsqcc6   Jackson defies convention and epitomizes staying true to oneself while achieving great success. Jackson might not fit the stereotypical image of a picture-perfect movie star, but that's precisely what sets him apart. What distinguishes Jackson is his unwavering authenticity. He knows exactly who he is and his purpose in the industry and excels at it. His ability to embody characters with a no-nonsense, devil-may-care, and no-holds-barred attitude is unparalleled. With a career spanning since the 1980s and a vast portfolio of projects numbering in the hundreds, according to IMDB, Samuel L. Jackson has left an indelible mark on the film industry. Whether he's Nick Fury in the Marvel Universe, John Shaft in the action genre, Mace Windu in "Star Wars," Coach Carter in a sports drama, Augustus Gibbons in an action franchise like "xXx," or Ptolemy Gray in a dramatic role, Jackson brings his characters to life with remarkable authenticity. That's why any news of an upcoming project is fantastic news. Fans of Samuel L. Jackson are in for an exciting treat as he returns to the screen in the upcoming feature "The Kill Room." This promises to be a compelling and intense film, especially with the involvement of talented co-stars Uma Thurman and Joe Manganiello. As Blexmedia highlights, the plot of "The Kill Room" revolves around these characters forming an unconventional alliance. They use an art gallery as a front to launder money, setting the stage for a complex and thrilling narrative. However, tension escalates as their activities become intertwined with a high-stakes plot to assassinate a Russian oligarch. Cultural Icon #3 John David Washington https://youtu.be/ex3C1-5Dhb8?si=tcCvMCk7MVEVC00U If there is one example of what a trailblazer can inspire, it is the career of John David Washington. John David Washington gets his acting prowess in earnest. While he is the son of Denzel, making him a torch bearer, he is self-made. His accomplishments are a testament to his own merits and dedication to his craft. John David's journey in acting began in the early 1990s with a role in "Malcolm X," and he has steadily been making his mark ever since. His filmography includes a diverse range of projects that showcase his versatility, from "Love Beat Rhymes" to "Monster," "BlacKkKlansman," "Tenet," "Beckett," and "Amsterdam." Each role highlights his commitment to delivering captivating performances across various genres. With two upcoming features on the horizon, John David Washington is signaling that he is just getting started in his career. For fans of the younger Washington, "The Creator" is on the horizon. Washington plays the lead character of Joshua in this futuristic: action, adventure, drama. According to Blexmedia, The Story of “The Creator” follows Joshua, a former special forces agent enlisted to track down and eliminate the elusive Creator, the enigmatic mastermind behind the advanced AI. However, what he discovers in his quest is extremely disarming. Highlighting the Best Parts There is nothing quite like progress. And no three figures in Hollywood exemplify progress like Denzel Washington, Samuel Jackson, and John David. Seeing the accomplishments and works of such great men who are still pushing forward is extraordinary. Their success stories show that individuals from marginalized communities can succeed in the highly competitive entertainment world with talent, determination, and hard work. And it is with great hope that many more will rise in their shadow. Written By: Renae Richardson Read the full article

[jinmukangwrites]

Whumptober 2020 Day 6

No more | "stop please"

Ao3

Warnings: kidnapping and torture pretty much. Misunderstandings. Angst. Lost of angst.

-o-o-o-o-

One month, seven days, thirteen hours, and forty six minutes. 

Exactly one month, seven days, thirteen hours, and forty six minutes ago, Dick went missing. Dropped off the face of the earth. He was last seen leaving work. Bruce knew he made it home, but his apartment was trashed by the time Bruce went over to check it out himself. Though, he had expected that. There had been a complaint called in from the downstairs neighbor about the ruckus.

However, it was a kind of "trashed" that was so unlike Dick. On one hand, Dick  did  have a messy living space. It had been an issue ever since he had first moved into the manor as a boy. Alfred would always be on his case about picking up his laundry or tidying up the action figures that fell off his bookshelf.. And now that Dick was an adult, Bruce knew by now to give Dick a few hours heads up before heading over so he could attempt to at least make the place  presentable  before company arrived. 

But on the other hand, this kind of “trashed” wasn't what Dick was oh-so fondly known for. Clothes tossed everywhere, hanging out from the skink and off the curtain rods. The left cushion of Dick's love seat had a giant cut in the material, like a giant scar, stuffing oozing out like blood. The TV Bruce bought him for Christmas was on its side, cracked and sporting a bullet hole through the center. 

The worst part was that the little compartment Dick had built into his apartment where he kept his suit was wide open, the contents thereof rummaged through carelessly. The suit and mask were missing, along with various high tech weapons, but the rest were strewn across the carpeted floor carelessly. Whoever had taken Dick; they knew he was Nightwing. Which meant Dick went down fighting as Nightwing. He wasn't holding back, he wasn't pretending to be anyone other than the powerhouse of a vigilante that he was. 

Which also meant that this was an all hands on deck sort of scenario. Dick's identity was compromised, which very well meant that everyone else could be figured out as well.

Besides, no one really minded being called in to help find Dick and the people responsible for his abduction. The compromised identities were just a font used to cover the fact that they all cared and were worried. 

One month, seven days, thirteen hours, and forty seven minutes. 

It shouldn't have taken that long, but it had. These people were professionals. The best of the best of Blüdhaven's underground ring of villains. Each hired for a specific purpose: figure out who Nightwing was, teach him a lesson, then take him out. Bruce, Tim, and Barbara could hardly find any information on the people who took Dick besides that. No cataloged fingerprints. No fines or tickets. No history of crime. Though, that wasn't at all shocking. Normally, the best of the best in the criminal world are people who haven't been caught yet. 

All of that added up as to why it took so long. Dick's initial abductors weren't even Blüdhaven natives. Just hired guns to barge in and grab him, then deliver him to the real people who wanted him out of the picture.

After one month, seven days, thirteen hours, and forty eight minutes, the people who had Dick now were a family of foreign mafia members who had set base in Blüdhaven generations ago. Dick had, apparently, about three months ago taken down a solid chunk of their scandals to make money by exposing the drug trade going on in one of the basements of Blüdhaven's many casinos. This was an act of revenge, and revenge was hardly quick and painless. 

Which could be a good and a  bad thing.

Good because it meant—as Bruce, Cass, and Tim scoped out a decently sized company building (near the casino Dick exposed) exactly one month, seven days, thirteen hours, and forty nine minutes after his abduction—that Dick still could be alive. 

Bad, because it meant—as Bruce pointed where he needed Cass and Tim to enter the building and talked over his comm to give instructions to the rest of the family exactly one month, seven days, thirteen hours, and forty nine minutes after his abduction—that when they do find Dick, he wouldn’t be in good shape. 

There wasn’t any doubt about it. However they find Dick, it would be gruesome. Bloody. Filled with the stench of confinement and the reek of torture. 

The most they could do now was make sure the one month, seven days, thirteen hours, and fifty minutes since Dick's abduction didn’t become much longer. 

Bruce entered through a large vent built into the side of the building while Tim and Cass followed suit silently. Jason and Duke were to enter from the rooftop while Steph and Damian entered through the sewers. There wasn’t any telling where Dick could be—if he was being held in this building in the first place—but the building was large enough for it to warrant a whole lot of searching. It might only stand half a dozen stories high, but it had just as many stories going down into the ground as a series of basements. Tim had a theory that a wall in the lowest basement could potentially lead to another secret floor down below. 

Though, the only way to know for sure was to go in and check themselves. Blüdhaven wasn't as… documented, believe it or not, compared to Gotham. Blüdhaven was founded on scam and lies. Corruption ran so deep that it was everywhere you walked, like every person walking the streets and breathing in the air were glitching codes of ones and zeroes hiding behind innocent, lifelike masks. 

Searching through the building took time; time Bruce wished they didn't have to spend. One month, seven days, thirteen hours, and fifty minutes turned into one month, seven days, fourteen hours, and two minutes rather quickly. Too quickly. They stuck to the shadows of the building and focused on avoiding being spotted just yet—but sneaking took time, and Dick didn't have a whole lot of time left to spare. 

If he was alive at all. 

No  . No he was alive. Bruce knew it. He was somewhere in this building and he was breathing and he was  alive . 

He had to be. 

Bruce didn't know what would happen next if he wasn't. 

Finally, one month, seven days, fourteen hours, and three minutes from Dick's kidnapping, Jason's voice whispered over the comms that he overheard a couple of grunts talking about Nightwing, and that he was in the secret level beneath the building like what Tim suspected existed. Bruce didn't say it out loud, but he was sure that Jason and Duke didn't overhear anything. They probably cornered a couple of mafia members in a dark, isolated janitor's closet and scared them until they spilled the information they wanted and probably soiled their pants during the process. Regardless, Bruce luckily took Tim's gut feelings into higher standing than most things. He, Tim, and Cass were already racing down into the basement levels. 

Steph and Damian said over the comms that they might take awhile to get there; as it turned out, these people were smart enough to set up motion detectors in the sewers connecting to the building. 

Eventually, they made it to the very bottom of the building where nothing was very interesting to see besides long, mostly empty hallways filled with various machines and generators keeping power to the activities above. There was the distant, muffled sound of loud electronic music, but that was to be expected because the floor above was a "secret" strip club. 

The three men playing cards on a dinky plastic table next to a bare chunk of wall was proof enough of Tim's theory of a secret room. Men with guns and a walkie sitting between them on top of the table  for all to hear easily, don’t normally sit in shadowed spaces of basements. They were guarding something. 

Bruce stepped  back, waving at Cassandra and Tim and pointing out their targets, but he didn't get far into his silent instructions before Cassandra lifted a hand to cut him off, her jaw set in a firm line beneath her dark mask. 

And Bruce understood. She had really stepped up to the plate when Dick was kidnapped one month, seven days, fourteen hours, and ten minutes ago. She had taken it upon herself to be happy and positive and comforting while everyone else could see that all she really wanted to do was throw something against the wall just to watch it shatter. Cassandra didn't like to express her frustrations in violence, but sometimes, Bruce knew she needed a group of bad guys to demolish. 

Silent as a whisper of death, Cass crept forward with her dangerous fists clenched. 

The fight didn't last long at all. Cass's abilities to fight were and always would be beyond comparison. Even compared to Bruce. He watched her take out each man with a quick series of punches aimed precisely where she wanted to hit and not a single hairsbreadth off. They didn't even get the chance to yell or call for help on that walkie of theirs. One moment they were playing what looked to be some sort of improvised version of go-fish with a classic 52 pack of playing cards created out of boredom, and the next they were taken out of commission by what could possibly be their newest worst nightmare. Cass brushed her hands together in front of her, silently saying that she had taken out the trash, and that it was Tim's turn.

Tim, for his part, didn't need to be told verbally of what he was expected to do. He just immediately ran past her, giving her a brief good natured pat on her shoulder as he did, and started to feel along the wall. 

It was always entrancing to watch Tim figure out complicated technology. The boy was a genius. He knew the in's and out's of 1s and 0s better than most everybody. Bruce was sure, no… he was  confident  that it was only a matter of time before Tim's abilities surpassed his own. 

If Tim hadn't already surpassed him. 

However, tackling a complicated problem alone could take time. Time they couldn't waste. Bruce stepped forward and looked at the hidden hand scanner Tim had discovered under a discreetly placed section of drywall. Tim looked up to him, a question in his eyes, and Bruce thought it over. 

They could try using the handprints of the men Cass took down and risk their biological data not being in the system and setting off an alarm, or they could spend more time taking the scanner apart and searching for the right wires to trick.

Risky or long. Quick or safe. 

Bruce gave a nod, letting his shoulders fall ever so slightly as he lowered himself to his knees and pulled out a set of tools from his utilities belt. Tim nodded back, his eyebrows falling down to umbrella over his masked eyes in concentration. 

It took time. The panel was good. Better than many that Bruce had run into during his years of Batman. Unhackable, most would say. 

Those people haven't met Tim though, and neither had the now picked and flashing green handprint scanner. 

There was a mechanical whirr of practically silent pistons and locks becoming undone. Bruce and Tim stepped back to watch the section of wall lower into the floor, showing a set of stairs that went down directly in front of them for several steps, then turned 180° to continue going down out of sight. 

The walkie behind them crackled to life; a voice asking what that noise was. 

The voice sounded recognizably American, which made it clear they weren't actually dealing with the actual mafia. Just a group of crime-doers that probably descended from the original gangsters in Las Vegas, only difference was that their ancestors didn't make it big and decided Blüdhaven was much easier to do crime in. 

" I told you I didn't want any interruptions  !" The man yelled through the walke speakers. "  I'm not done with him yet -"

Bruce felt his heart clench at the sounds that followed that followed. A Spark of electricity. A  scream . 

Bruce disregarded the walkie...  forced himself to. One month, seven days, fourteen hours, and thirteen minutes since Dick's kidnapping, and Bruce was sprinting down the stairs, his feet barely touching the ground as he went. His movement's as silent as a owl's feathers, his cape flowing behind him like he controlled the shadows himself. 

Running down the staircase barely took any time at all. Within seconds, he found himself looking down one long hallway built like a bunker. Dick had to be in one of these rooms. He just  had  to be. 

Heart in his throat, Bruce, Tim, and Cass spread out into the floor, opening door after door, looking for Dick. Behind most of the doors were crates and boxes and bags and  piles  of drugs, and as Bruce found himself slowly approaching the end of the secret basement he couldn't help but feel intense worry that he had gotten something wrong. That Dick wasn't here. 

But he  heard  Dick scream over that walkie. Dick was alive. Dick  was here. 

He just had to find the correct room. 

And it was just his luck that the last door he opened was the correct one. 

One month, seven days, fourteen hours, and seventeen minutes. 

That was how long it took Bruce to get here, in this doorway, standing with widening eyes behind his cowl's lenses, watching as a man leaned over a table, his hands wrapped around something struggling and writhing in binds. Lining the walls were groups of people, all holding guns and looking comically shocked as Batman barged into the room. Across the room, sitting in a chair to have the best view of the present torture session, was a big rat of man smoking a cigar.

And Bruce saw Dick. He saw Dick's bare chest, his hands tugging on the binds keeping him pinned, his ankles twisting as a natural instinct while fighting to breathe. He saw the man holding Dick's neck between his squeezing fingers. He saw the dried blood splattered over Dick's body. He saw the missing fingernails. He saw the cuts and burns and the broken nose. He saw the pale skin. The weight loss. Every single rib countable if you smeared away the blood.

Red.

He saw red. 

He charged in, his teeth grinding so hard that Leslie would be furious to keep himself from screaming, and punched the man choking…  torturing  Dick across the jaw. The man went flying, roughly hitting the ground as Dick gurgled out a desperate gasp. The rat of a man stood up from his chair, eyes wide and jugular waggling under his butted chin. Immediately, guns were aimed at Batman, thugs all here to protect his boss while he watched what must be his daily torture session. The fat, pathetic excuse of a mafia boss—who Bruce would call a scumbag if that didn't insult all scumbags across the universe—scrambled backwards, lips flapping in a short, flipped sentence that Bruce had heard many, many times to where he almost had to hold back an eye roll. 

But he was too  furious  to roll his eyes now. Not even as the gangster screamed "GET HIM!"

In fact, he hardly even heard those two words yelled at him with a thick sausage of a finger pointed his way. All he could hear were the strangled  sobs  of Dick behind him as he ran forward, swinging his cape to catch the first bullet, throwing his fist to hit the gangster right across his cheek. From then on, it was chaos. Bullets everywhere, shouts and cries harmonizing with the sparks. The singular light above ended up being blown out by a stray bullet around the same time Bruce heard Cass and Tim finally enter. 

Bruce worked like an angel of death. 

No, not of death. 

His blows as if lightning struck the air around him, his will like howls of wind summoned from hell itself. He was the conjuror of destruction, of danger, of catastrophe. He was worse than death. 

He was the crumbling tower, sent to reign down upon those who had thought they could climb too high. 

He blinked, and he found everything silent besides the hands grasping on his shoulder, trying to tug him away from the beaten and broken face of the gangster. Bruce hadn't even realized that time had passed. That the battle was over besides him punching this monster over and over and over in the face. Disgusted—with the man, with himself—he shoved him away and watched so heartlessly it almost frightened him as the unconscious rat splattered onto the grimy floor in a mess of sweaty and bruised limbs. 

He turned towards Cass, her sympathy and understanding lining every inch of her frame, even with the black kevlar covering her features. He turned past her, remembering the whole reason he was here in the first place even though he had never really forgotten. He quickly rushed towards the table Dick was still restrained down onto. 

His eyes were closed, his chest heaving, trickles of water escaping the corners of his eyes and trailing down the sides of his head in more than a month's worth of dust, grime, and blood. His fists were clenched, toes curled, muscles that showed too detailed under the lack of body fat straining weakly against the leather belts keeping him immobile.

Bruce reached forward without thinking and placed his hands on the belt keeping Dick's left arm pinned down above his head. 

Before finding Dick, Bruce had expected a great, many things. A body on one end, a simply trapped and relatively unharmed bored young man on the other. Batman was known amongst the superhero community for always having a plan A through Z for every possible scenario and outcome.

Yet, for some reason, he hadn't ever expected Dick to flinch under Bruce's touch during rescue. 

It was like he was suddenly touching fire the moment Dick cried out, the moment Bruce's fingers just barely brushed the inside of his wrist. He yanked his hands away and stared with wide eyes as Dick broke into more sobs. 

"Stop," Dick hiccuped through his cries; his voice rough like a thousand shards of glass, "stop,  please . No more- I can't-"

The young man dissolved into bubbly suds made out of tears, babbling and begging and beginning to openly weep as he begged for the pain to end. 

"I can't- stop- I- puh-please! Please, no more- n-no more- I  can't- "

The realization crashed into Bruce like a rocket. Dick… didn't realize rescue had come. All he had known for the past month and-  and  was pain and torture and blood. Did he have any hope of rescue left after all this time? Or did he lose it weeks ago, when help had still not come? How long did it take for his quips to fall flat? For his screams to no longer remain silenced? How long did he force himself to stay strong before he must have come to the false realization that no one was coming, and that he would die here?

How long ago had Bruce failed Dick? 

Because Dick not only didn't realize he was  safe  now, but he thought Bruce would hurt him somehow by simply touching the inside of his wrist. 

Dick thought he was going to be tortured. Again. And again. And again. No hope of help. So much pain and suffering in his soul that it ending here and now wasn't even a thought at the back of his mind, hidden behind tearfully closed eyes. 

Bruce took off his cowl, ignoring the way Tim began to whisper urgently towards Cass and into the comm unit. 

"Dick," Bruce tried, forcing his voice to remain calm and soothing, locking all the worry and gravel into a keyed box at the back of his throat. He approached slowly now, but Dick continued to cry anyways. " Chum , I'm here."

A broken gasp. Bruce couldn't take it. 

He reached forward again and gently curled his fingers into Dick's blood matted and sweaty hair, stroking softly like he had always done whenever one of his children ended up in a hospital bed. Dick cried out like he'd been stabbed the moment Bruce touched him, but Bruce didn't back away this time. 

"It's okay, Dick," he soothed, rubbing Dick's scalp through his thick locks like how Dick had always loved because... because Bruce didn't  know  what to do now. "It's me, it's Bruce."

Dick continued sobbing, no recognition. Nothing. Just pain and sorrow and fear. 

"Chum, open your eyes-"

Heaving breaths rattling a chest splattered in red. 

Bruce didn't know what to do. He didn't know what to do. He didn't know what to  do-

But luckily, Tim came up then, giving a smart idea like he always did. 

"We should sedate him," Tim said, his voice barely above a sacred whisper. "Get him at least home and comfortable."

"He's hurting," Cass added, "and scared. Sleep will be good."

Bruce looked down at Dick who was still struggling and crying and babbling and begging words that needn't be spoken now. Not ever again. He took a deep breath then retreated from Dick's hair and reached into his utility belt for a small vial of sedative that he kept on him for a variety of reasons. It didn't take long to take out and fill a clean syringe then  tap the sides to get the bubbles out. It was almost methodical to do so.  This : he knew how to do. He could be given a drug and a needle and someone to stick it in and he could do it without missing a beat. 

But his heart still skipped one when he looked back up to Dick. 

Knowing that it would be evermore unpleasant the longer he allowed this to go on, he shut off the fatherly part of his brain that just wanted to gather Dick up and smother him in forehead kisses. He reached forward and ignored Dick's rekindled cries as he tilted Dick's head to the side to get a better aim at his neck. 

Dick's begging and sobbing increased in pitch and desperateness the moment Bruce stuck the needle into his neck, but thankfully the sedative worked quickly, and soon Dick was little more than a still bag of bones, limp against the table, eyelids flickering in what was perhaps an immediate nightmare.

"What the hell?" A new voice called.

"Oh shit," another agreed. 

It seemed that Jason and Duke had arrived. 

Bruce didn't welcome them though. Dick was… none of his kids were more important than the other, but Dick's situation called for more attention. He quickly got the straps off from Dick's wrists, sparing a thankful glance towards Duke as the young man ran forward to undo the ones on Dick's ankles. The moment Dick was finally free of his binds, Bruce carefully began to cradle Dick towards his body, holding him like a parent would their young child. Head tucked under Bruce's chin, back supported by one of Bruce's arms, legs curled around the other. Bruce held him as tightly and as closely as he dared, listening to nothing but the sound of him breathing as he turned to the others, noting how both Steph and Damian had finally arrived as well, covered in questionable stains and both looking openly upset and shocked. 

Bruce could count the amount of times on one hand that Damian had looked that small, young, and lost. Trust Dick to always be the apple of that boy's eye, trust Dick to be the one to get Damian to look that way. Like a scared, thirteen year old child. 

"Let's go home," Bruce said, and they all agreed one by one. It most certainly would be a pain to get back out of the building without being detected, but Bruce could sense a new fire inside each and every one of them. 

The quickest way out was through the front doors. The people inside this building hurt one of their own. They were all itching for a fight now, more than ever. 

Who was Bruce to stand in their way? This building could crumble to the ground for all he cared. 

As long as he got Dick and the rest of the family home, safe and sound and on the road to recovery, nothing else mattered. 

Not a single, god damned thing.

-o-o-o-o-

Woah? You made it to the end? A reblog would be nice... Haha jk... Unless 👀

[sciencespies]

Looking Back at the Legacy of 'The Great White Hope' and Boxer Jack Johnson

https://sciencespies.com/history/looking-back-at-the-legacy-of-the-great-white-hope-and-boxer-jack-johnson/

Looking Back at the Legacy of 'The Great White Hope' and Boxer Jack Johnson

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | Feb. 25, 2021, 8 a.m.

“There’s nothing you need to make up about Jack Johnson.”

Documentarian Ken Burns would know. His 2005 series “Unforgivable Blackness,” based on the book of the same name by historian Geoffrey C. Ward, brought the true story of the life and career of Jack Johnson, the black boxer who fought his way up through the pugilism ranks to become the world heavyweight champion, to television.

But before Burns, those who weren’t around for the so-called “Fight of the Century” that saw Johnson outslug James J. Jeffries in 1910, would have known Jackson’s story through the play and movie The Great White Hope. That work of historical fiction, by playwright Howard Sackler, perhaps reveals more about the time in which it was written than the time in which it is set.

The play’s message about the nature of racism and racial conflict succeeded in providing audiences with an opportunity to better understand different perspectives through the prism of its characters, but the film adaptation failed to deliver the same powerhouse impact. That said, both served to launch the careers of two actors on the rise and brought to the public a poignant story of interracial romance and the struggle for interracial couples to find acceptance in America.

Alexander and Jones in a publicity still from the 1970 film

(Photo by Afro American Newspapers / Gado / Getty Images)

Sackler’s much-lauded play arrived in 1967, as the civil rights movement’s struggles were at last bearing fruit. In The Great White Hope, black boxer Jack Jefferson—a name change borne out of legal concerns—becomes so successful that a fight is set up between Jefferson and the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, a white man. In addition to developing a story which focused on an equivalent of the Johnson-Jeffries fight, Sackler constructed a storyline based on the relationship between Johnson and his first wife, a white woman named, Etta Terry Duryea, represented in the play by the character of Eleanor Bachman. In addition to mirroring the tensions Johnson and Duryea endured in pursuing an interracial relationship during the early 20th century, Eleanor’s ultimate fate mirrors that of Duryea, who died by suicide in 1912.

The play’s title came from the descriptor assigned decades earlier to any white boxer who stepped into the ring to challenge Johnson, although it was most famously used to describe Jeffries, who had retired from the ring more than five years before the landmark fight. Upon being wooed into returning to the ring, Jeffries made his reasons perfectly clear, publicly announcing, “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.”

As history reveals, Jeffries proved no such thing: not only did Johnson win the fight by a technical knockout in round 15, but as fellow boxer John L. Sullivan told the New York Times, “Scarcely has there ever been a championship contest that was so one-sided.”

Sackler drew inspiration from these events, seeing in Johnson an opportunity to tell a story about a man who becomes a hero but is nonetheless destined for a downfall, someone who many—including the play’s director, Ed Sherin—likened to the titular character in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. “It’s about a man who essentially moves out of his tribe and gets clobbered,” Sherin told The American Theatre in 2000. “And in [Sackler’s] mind, it wasn’t about black-white. The historical circumstances made that the paramount issue in the play. But it’s not. And it taps off white guilt about the way the black man was dealt with, but that was not [Sackkler’s] position at all. He wrote a play about a tragic hero, somebody who oversteps himself—as Coriolanus did.”

***********

The Great White Hope began with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to Arena Stage, a Washington, D.C. theater, which at the time was best known for being the first integrated theater in the city. To find the right man for Jefferson, Sackler reached out to actor James Earl Jones, an established performer was working in Europe.

“Howard suggested that I start getting into shape, which was really important—the man was a boxer—but which I was not and am not and will never be!” says Jones, laughing. “In fact, the young man who was my understudy onstage, Yaphet Kotto, resembled Jack much more than I did.”

James Earl Jones looks at his reflection in a Broadway dressing room mirror on December 10, 1968.

(Photo by Harry Benson / Daily Express / Getty Images)

For the role of Bachman, Sherin went with an existing member of the Arena Stage company: actress Jane Alexander, who would later become Sherin’s wife. Despite the racially charged subject matter, Alexander had no hesitation about diving headlong into the material.

“I really looked forward to doing things like that,” says Alexander. “Of course, civil rights were very high at that time in the ’60s, and we did not shy away from controversy at Arena Stage. We did quite a lot of things, tackling the Vietnam War and racism and so on, so I didn’t have any problem with the subject matter.”

Alexander also politely disagrees with her co-star’s self-assessment. “[James] is a big man—he certainly looks like a heavyweight champion!—and he got in such great shape,” she says. “He was just gorgeous-looking at the time. But he was formidable…and when he gets that look in his eyes, he’s scary!“

The Great White Hope only played for a few weeks at Arena before its success catapulted it to Broadway. Although the audiences were initially almost entirely white, Alexander says that the number of black theatergoers began to increase steadily as the play received more acclaim, hitting the 50/50 mark by the end of the first year. As a result, she also began to notice that black audiences reacted differently to the play than white audiences.

“They didn’t like my character at all…and who could blame them?” concedes Alexander. “I was causing him all these problems! So they would sometimes cheer or laugh at my death…and that was not easy for James Earl, because [he] looked at it as a love story. He had a very difficult scene to perform over my dead body, and they were sometimes not happy with him being emotional about me.”

Even worse, Alexander also began receiving hate mail. “Sometimes they were just disgusting letters from white bigots, male and female. Really awful letters. But I got a couple of death threats. That’s when I said to my stage manager, ‘I can’t open my mail.’”

Jones, for the record, didn’t receive any such threats, but the fact that his co-star did receive them, he says, “sort of measured the height of the bull****.”

Both Alexander and Jones received Tony Awards for their work in The Great White Hope.

(Photo by NBCU Photo Bank / NBC Universal via Getty Images)

Muhammad Ali at a November 12, 1968, performance of The Great White Hope on Broadway

(Photo by Tom Wargacki / WireImage)

Fortunately, those who appreciated The Great White Hope far outweighed those who didn’t, and one of the play’s biggest fans was one of the most famous men in the world: Muhammad Ali, who understandably saw some parallels between himself and Jones’s character. (“What Ali actually said was, ‘This is my play, except for the white chick,’” recalls Alexander, laughing.)

“Muhammad Ali had just done a Broadway play himself—or, rather, a musical—called Buck White, where he played kind of an activist,” recalls Jones. “He considered himself a stage actor, I think, so he’d come back and wanted to talk actor to actor about my work. When the audience left the theater, he used to love going up on the stage and say, ‘Watch this!’ And he’d take a crack at a scene, and then he’d say, ‘And that’s the way that ought to be done!’ I loved it. And the way he’d interpret it? He wasn’t always wrong!”

Ali was also responsible for one of Alexander’s most cherished memories from the Broadway run of The Great White Hope, during the third of his backstage visits.

While the film version of The Great White Hope received its fair share of critical acclaim, with both Jones and Alexander—in her film debut—earning Oscar nominations for their work, few would disagree that it’s a lesser work than the play. The first sign that Hollywood had done some major streamlining: the play originally ran for three-and-a-half hours, whereas the film version clocks in at a streamlined 103 minutes.

“I missed some of the lyricism in the beautiful long monologues—or soliloquies, if you will—that some of the actors had, specifically [James],” says Alexander. “They were cut, a lot of them. “

Jones pulls no punches when offering his take on the play’s cinematic adaptation. “I apologize for the film, because it wasn’t right,” he says. “The big mistake happened when the decision was made not to have Ed Sherin direct the film. It was a big investment on the part of 20th Century Fox, and they made an attempt to work around the cost of filmmaking. They decided to make it… I wouldn’t say ‘cheap,’ but they thought they couldn’t afford to take a gamble on [a first-time film director].”

“They made a decision to shorten it by using a formula which… Well, I won’t try to define it, but they wanted to make it a romance,” says Jones. “Which it was in real life, but it was a mistake to try and ignore all the dynamic stuff going on in that man’s life in favor of trying to make it a love story of this poor black guy and this poor white girl who wanted to be together in life. But America just didn’t let them do it.”

Jones’s description of the film’s romantic plotline is dripping with sardonic wit, something which becomes evident when he abruptly begins chuckling.

“The truth is, I think Ken Burns’ documentary is more important than the film or the play we did,” says Jones. “I thought there was no way you could capture all the dynamics of that man’s life, all the gorgeousness and physical beauty, the human beauty of the man called Jack Johnson. But Burns captured it. Whether you’re a boxing fan or not, whether you have any corner of the race issue you want to explore, it’s something everybody should see.”

Jack Johnson (right) defeated Jim Jeffries in a 1910 boxing showdown.

(Photo by PA Images via Getty Images)

“He stuck around late enough that the stage manager had already put the ghost light onstage. Only the doorman was left, and I was in the wings. And Muhammad Ali walked out in that dark theater and turned to a naked, empty house, and he reprised the last line of the second act: ‘I is here! I is here! I is here!’ It was amazing. And nobody ever witnessed that but me. “

**********

The success of The Great White Hope soon led to conversations about adapting the play into a film, but those conversations didn’t include Alexander until after the show swept the Tony Awards, winning Best Play and earning Jones and Alexander trophies for their roles, too. The acclaim even extended beyond the traditional theater community, with the play winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama as well.

“I was told that [film director] Martin Ritt offered it first to Joanne Woodward,” says Alexander. “She turned it down, saying, ‘You should get that girl who did it on Broadway.’ And then he went to Faye Dunaway, and Faye turned it down! And then what happened after Faye turned it down? The Tony Awards happened. And the next day, I got the offer.”

Burns, who interviewed Jones for “Unforgivable Blackness,” believes the problem with the film adaptation extends well beyond trying to force it into being a love story.

“The much more important thing is something that you find throughout well-intentioned history and art about African-Americans, which is that somehow they always need to have a white person around to justify them,” says Burns. “In The Great White Hope, here’s this incredibly talented physical specimen who plays in all these incredibly dangerous tropes about black people, and yet somehow you need well-intentioned white handlers in whatever form—romantically or fight-wise—to sort of nudge you to the right direction, as if they’re unaccompanied minors who need to be accompanied.

Adds Burns about the real story he found while making the documentary, “What’s so important about Jack Johnson is that he defies all conventions we want a heroic black man to be in. He doesn’t want the job of hero. Somehow we want our African Americans to conform to some version of our idea of an acceptable black person. Jack Johnson just takes dynamite and pushes the plunger on that.”

“I admire the play, and I admire the movie, and it’s heart is in the right place, and it’s intentions are good, but it’s in a narrow bandwidth that doesn’t permit the full scope of Jack Johnson, good, bad, and otherwise,” concludes Burns. “It constrains him with narrative devices that aren’t needed.”

Boxer Jack Johnson

(Photo by Sean Sexton / Getty Images)

Jones in boxing attire

(Bettman via Getty Images)

Even with its flaws, there’s no question that The Great White Hope made an impact on those who saw it, on stage or screen.

“I remember walking down the streets of New York for the next decade, and black men would just come up and say, ‘Hey, Jane, how are ya?’ or something like that,” says Alexander. “I remember once I was in an airport, and Snoop Dogg yells across the terminal, ‘Jane!’ I recognized that he was a big music star, but I didn’t know who it was, so I just sort of inched over a little bit…and he just said, ‘Hey!’ That’s all! But I felt very warm inside that black men recognized me, seemed understanding and supportive, and… I think they were saying that they knew that it was a difficult role.

“It was surprising to me the number of white people who wondered why I had done the film. There were a lot of firsts there. The racism was not as overt as it is today, but it was there, and I was surprised it was there in my parents’ friends, who would just question me and say, ‘Why did you have to do that for your first film?’ I was thrilled! Race relations were different at that time. We didn’t march in the same way. If you look at the marches in Selma, Alabama, you won’t see a lot of white people. But I was part of the Poor People’s March in Washington (in 1968), and I went and listened to Martin Luther King speak. But now we have Black Lives Matter, and there are a lot of white people and black people walking side by side. That’s progress.”

#History

[beautiesandheadcanons]

I've been planning this post for a while, but just haven't had a chance to sit down and compose it until now, so here we go! Also, my spell-checker absolutely hates me now, so you’re welcome.

This week, I wanted to talk about one of the most intriguing and unique races of Dragon Age. Other games, of course, have Elves and Dwarves a plenty, but the Qunari stand out as being a creation all of their own. While they may bear passing resemblances to other fantasy races (and even those are few and far between, from my person experience) between their looks, their language, and their culture, it makes for a complete experience separate from any other mythos.

The word "Qunari" is an interesting word in and of itself, because while most use it in general to refer to the race of grey-skinned, horned giants, it's only translated to mean "People of the Qun", and as a result there are those who are Qunari in race but don't follow the Qun's philosophy, and there are others who are not of the race but who convert to the Qun (they are typically referred to as Viddathari). Those of the race who are born outside the Qun's influence are known as Vashoth ("grey ones"), while those who rebel are known as Tal-Vashoth ("true grey ones"). Vashoth and Tal-Vashoth are terms that, in game, are used pretty interchangeably, but in experience there is a difference. Tal-Vashoth are rebels, usually fighting directly against the Qunari, while Vashoth simply exist outside of it.

The Qunari as a race descended from an unknown race of people known as Kossith, which predate the Qun philosophy. There was a settlement of them in the Korcari Wilds in southern Thedas, but they were overrun by darkspawn during the First Blight (and it's assumed the darkspawn's contact with them is what lead to the creation of ogres). While there is no records of what they looked like in relation to modern Qunari, it is said that they are different, not just in society. Why there was a split from Kossith to Qunari isn't completely clear (and possibly is shrouded in secrets for the purpose of propaganda, though that's just my personal opinion). What is known is that a Kossith philosopher, Ashkaari Koslun, developed a school of thought that became the basis of the Qun, the laws and guide that set down the rules of society for the Qunari, which is wildly different than any other in Thedas. Qunari do not marry or have families, but are bred and the children are raised and brought up in groups by Tamassrans. These Tamassrans also educate them and help to designate their roles in the society, which they are expected to fulfill to the letter. However, they don't see themselves as limited in their roles, they believe that from birth they are given a purpose in their nature and their lives are spent fulfilling that nature. To rebel against their nature is to rebel against order, is to become Tal-Vashoth, is to fall to chaos. Whenever they have led campaigns into Thedas for the purpose of conquering, they see themselves as liberators bringing the Qun to free them from their torment.

Their naming practices are the most unique in the game, because strictly speaking, Qunari don't have names in the traditional sense. They are assigned a series of numbers at birth - similar to a social security number of sorts - and their "name" is simply their profession. And, since their profession can change over time, with promotions and such (especially in, say, the military) then their "names" change as well (more on that later, as there is an interesting specific example).

Magic is seen as dangerous, and they treat mages far more severely than even the Chantry in southern Thedas (which, considering how abusive some Circles were, should tell you how seriously they treat it). Qunari mages are named Saarebas ("dangerous thing"), and their lips are sewn shut, their horns cut off, they are collared and shackled, and they are kept under strict control by a special soldier named Arvaarad ("holds back evil"). If at any point a Saarebas is separated from their Arvaarad, they are executed upon return because the danger that they have been possessed in the meantime is too great to them to risk. In Dragon Age 2, when Hawke escorts a lone Saarebas, if they fight for them then they are referred to as Basvaarad, a non-Qunari who controls a Saarebas (since "bas" is the Qunlat word for non-Qunari).

Physically, they are known as giants for a reason, since they stand taller than any other race in Thedas. While they commonly have grey skin and are usually called as such, their actual skin tone can vary, but is usually darker, like variations of gold or bronze (or even other colours, potentially, as we see in Inquisition). Most Qunari seem predisposed to having white hair, but that's by no means across the board. Their ears are pointed, but smaller than an Elf's ear typically is, and obviously their most prominent feature is their horns, which vary from Qunari to Qunari. Said horns have no nerves, so if they're damaged or even removed, that causes no problems. The horns are said to get irritated in some way (possibly itchy due to growth, at least that's my headcanon) and so they've developed a balm for themselves (otherwise I like to imagine a large, hulking Qunari rubbing their horns against a tree like a deer to relieve the sensation). However, not all born Qunari develop horns, and it seems the chances of that happening are akin to red hair occurring naturally in humans for us. Instead of being shunned or shamed, however, those without horns are revered as special and usually given high-ranking, prestigious roles in their society. For a race that is large and imposing and who typically sport horns, for them, not having horns is seen as scary or dangerous. This is the reason that Saarebas have their horns removed, as an indication of the danger they possess. In fact, the first Qunari we get to meet in the game is hornless, and if recruited, can become quite the powerhouse companion for the Warden.

In the first Dragon Age game, Origins, the first Qunari we get to encounter is Sten (which, again, is his title more than his name). He can be found locked in a cage in Lothering, imprisoned for slaughtering a family after waking up post-battle to find his sword missing (a shameful crime for a Qunari warrior, the consequence for which is execution). The Warden can free him or leave him to die, but there is no reason to leave a perfectly capable powerhouse warrior behind. He is very blunt, to the point, and obviously military born and bred from childhood. He is even puzzled by female-identifying fighters amoungst the group, as for Qunari society, warriors are male only (female Qunari who are adept at fighting are known as Aqun-Athlok, and enter the warrior caste as males and identify as such, since gender is a secondary trait that is considered less important than their duty to the Qun; again, Sten is obviously a fighter and not a philosopher and isn't as flexible in his thinking). Sten's personal quest involves retrieving his sword, which means after the Blight is over and he leaves the Warden's side, he can return to Qunari society without shame. If the Warden has a high enough approval, he'll even refer to them as "Kadan", a term normally associated in later games with a romantic connotation, but which simply means "where the heart lies" and can technically refer to close friends as well as a romance partner.

In Dragon Age 2, there are no Qunari companions, but there is a group of Qunari stranded in Kirkwall that is interacted with several times. They are headed by the Arishok, the general military leader for the Qunari people. At first, their staying there is chalked up to them waiting for a ship to come for them, however it's later revealed that the real reason they haven't left is because they have lost the Tome of Koslun and cannot return without it (which, surprise surprise, Hawke's pirate companion is involved in its theft). The Arishok, like Sten, is stoic and rigid and uncaring for the plight of Kirkwall itself. After spending a few years there, however, the chaos becomes too much for Arishok to handle and he leads his Qunari on a campaign through the city, executing the Viscount in front of the nobles and confronting Hawke, the protagonist of DA2. Hawke has a couple of ways of dealing with him, which include giving back the Tome of Koslun (which means giving up Isabella, the companion involved in its theft), they can fight Arishok and his company, or if Hawke has done enough to earn his favour as "basalit-an" (an outsider worthy of respect) or if Fenris is in the group, the Arishok can be encouraged to settle the matter in a duel one-on-one with Hawke. The duel itself is difficult, especially for squishier characters like mages, but from personal experience, a little strategy and patience can net a win over the Arishok, killing him and ending the Qunari hold on the city. Even if Arishok is given the tome and Isabella and leaves peacefully, however, Isabella later escapes with the Tome again and when he returns to the Qunari homeland of Par Vollen, he faces a court martial and is removed from his role as Arishok.

The interesting bit is, however Arishok is removed from his position, Sten from the previous game is given the role of Arishok, thus changing his name from Sten to Arishok. This can create a little confusion sometimes in referring to the characters, because Sten is no longer Sten at all and to Qunari he is Arishok only. As a result, in talking about him, the fandom has varied ways of referring to him. Some stick to more lore-friendly names - as in the Arishok post 9:34 (the year he was made Arishok), New Arishok, the Hornless Arishok - and others either make an amalgamation of the names such as Aristen or Stenishok, and others will just give him a nickname of their own to personally refer to him. We even get to see him as Arishok in the lovely comic “Dragon Age: Those Who Speak”, and I gotta say, he looks much better with the facial hair. 

In Inquisition, we get the first chance to not only romance a Qunari companion, but also play as a Qunari! If one chooses to play as the Qunari race, they are technically Qunari who were born outside the Qun are Vashoth (though the game keeps referring to them as Tal-Vashoth, as if they rebelled and rejected the Qun). Their default last name is Adaar, which means "weapon", which our lovely Qunari companion comments on appreciatively. As a Qunari, the class options are the same as most races, and the player can be a warrior, a mage, or a rogue, though Solas and Cullen are excluded from their romance options (Cullen is locked for female humans and Elves only, Solas is the most restrictive with female Elves only). There are also unique dialogue options that can both be selected and that can be heard both in direct conversation and in passing … and not all of it is friendly and accepting. I currently have two Qunari Inquisitors that I play with, one a female rogue assassin named Katari (in Qunlat, "one who brings death"), and the other a male mage necromancer named Talan (in Qunlat, "truth").

The Iron Bull, I admit, is the whole reason I bought Inquisition first, because I wanted to romance him. When the player meets him, he is heading a mercenary band called The Bull's Chargers. While he appears to initially be Vashoth or Tal-Vashoth, in truth he works as a spy for the Ben-Hassrath, an arm of Qunari society that act as enforces and protectors of their law and also disseminates information and even sends assassins. The Iron Bull is not his "name" under the Qun (he's known as Hissrad to them, "keeper of illusions" or, colloquially, "liar") and is simply a name he took for himself when sent to spy in southern Thedas. To his credit, he is upfront with the Inquisitor about this, and passes on information from the Qunari along with sending information back to them. As mentioned, he can be romanced, and race and gender does not matter to him. If the Inquisitor doesn't romance him or Dorian, however, and their party banter reaches a certain point, the game will put The Bull and Dorian in a romance of their own (known to fans as "Adoribull"). His personal quest involves a mission given by the Qunari to stop a shipment of red lyrium. At a critical point, the Inquisitor will have to make a decision to either sacrifice The Chargers and forge an alliance with the Qunari, or to save The Chargers and forgo the alliance. This has a large impact on his character, as if his company is saved, he is branded as Tal-Vashoth and he is expelled from the Qun and everything he knows, but if his company is sacrificed, he becomes even more loyal to the Qun. In game, only a few dialogue and cutscenes are different, but in the DLC Trespasser, if The Bull is Qun-loyal or if his quest wasn't done at all, then he will turn on the Inquisitor and the player will have no choice but to kill him, even if they are in a romance.

With Dragon Age 4 being hinted to take place in/near/around Tevinter (who is in a constant slap-fight of a war against the Qunari) it's my hope that we get more of a peek into both of these cultures that we don't get much of a glimpse of in game. While their society and how they work and function is far from perfect, I find it's an interesting juxtaposition from the other cultures present in Thedas, and thus a refreshing change of pace from a lore perspective. I also hope that the Qunari remains a playable race, as while I prefer playing as an Elf, being a tall, imposing Qunari is a lot of fun, too.