#'she was so HARD to LIKE it was the AUTHOR'S fault unlike [literally any horrible man from this story]'

[musical-chick-13]

When all of this is over (*this meaning: when I get through my godforsaken list of 10 wips) I am writing a fic where everyone is just in love with Misa and she does whatever she wants, I have seen TOO MUCH, people do not GET IT.

[itsclydebitches]

Here's a quandary I've suddenly found myself in: where do you stand on writers deleting their own works, fanfiction or otherwise? I've had this happen to me on more than one occasion - I go to look for an old favorite and find it's since been deleted from whatever site I read it on.

On the one hand, I'm inclined to think that, "Sure. The author wrote it, it's their call. I don't own the work - I certainly didn't pay for it. It's their decision, even if it's disappointing."

But at the same time I can't help but consider the alternative - if I believe in death of the author (and I do), that an author's work fundamentally isn't solely theirs once it's been published, posted, etc., then it also seems wrong to have a work deleted. Stories aren't the sole property of their creator, after all.

But then I circle back. D'you think there are different obligations between authors and readers and the works being made in fandom space? I know if I had bought a book and the author decided they wanted it back, I would feel pretty comfortable telling them no, given I'd paid for it and whatnot. But that's a different world from fanfic and fandom space generally.

So. You're insightful Clyde, I'm curious as to what you'll have to say here (and to all y'all thinking about it, don't flame me. I haven't decided where I stand here yet - haven't heard a good nail-in-the-coffin argument for or against yet).

Val are you a mind reader now? I’ve been thinking about this exact conundrum the last few days!

(And yeah, as a general disclaimer: no flaming. Not allowed. Any asks of the sort will be deleted on sight and with great satisfaction.)

Honestly, I’m not sure there is a “nail-in-the-coffin argument” for this, just because—as you lay out—there are really good points for keeping works around and really good points for allowing authors to have control over their work, especially when fanworks have no payment/legal obligations attached. In mainstream entertainment, your stories reflect a collaborative effort (publisher, editor, cover artists, etc.) so even if it were possible to delete the physical books out of everyone’s home and library (and we're ignoring the censorship angle for the moment), that’s no longer solely the author’s call, even if they have done the lion’s share of the creative work. Though fanworks can also, obviously, be collaborative, they’re usually not collaborative in the same way (more “This fic idea came about from discord conversations, a couple tumblr posts, and that one headcanon on reddit”) and they certainly don’t have the same monetary, legal, and professional strings attached. I wrote this fic as a hobby in my free time. Don’t I have the right to delete it like I also have the right to tear apart the blankets I knit?

Well yes… but also no? I personally view fanworks as akin to gifts—the academic term for our communities is literally “gift economy”—so if we view it like that, suddenly that discomfort with getting rid of works is more pronounced. If I not only knit a blanket, but then gift it to a friend, it would indeed feel outside of my rights to randomly knock on their door one day and go, “I actually decided I hate that? Please give it back so I can tear it to shreds, thanks :)” That’s so rude! And any real friend would try to talk me out of it, explaining both why they love the blanket and, even if it’s not technically the best in terms of craftsmanship, it holds significant emotional value to them. Save it for that reason alone, at least. Fanworks carry that same meaning—“I don’t care if it’s full of typos, super cliché, and using some outdated, uncomfortable tropes. This story meant so much to me as a teenager and I’ll always love it”—but the difference in medium and relationships means it’s easier to ignore all that. I’m not going up to someone’s house and asking face-to-face to destroy something I gave them (which is awkward as hell. That alone deters us), I’m just pressing a button on my computer. I’m not asking this of a personal friend that is involved in my IRL experiences, I’m (mostly) doing this to online peers I know little, if anything, about. It’s easy to distance ourselves from both the impact of our creative work and the act of getting rid of it while online. On the flip-side though, it’s also easier to demean that work and forget that the author is a real person who put a lot of effort into this creation. If someone didn’t like my knitted blanket I gave them as a gift, they’re unlikely to tell me that. They recognize that it’s impolite and that the act of creating something for them is more important than the construction’s craftsmanship. For fanworks though, with everyone spread around the world and using made up identities, people have fewer filters, happily tearing authors to shreds in the comments, sending anon hate, and the like. The fact that we’re both prefacing this conversation with, “Please don’t flame” emphasizes that. So if I wrote a fic with some iffy tropes, “cringy” dialogue, numerous typos, whatever and enough people decided to drag me for it… I don’t know whether I’d resist the urge to just delete the fic, hopefully ending those interactions. There’s a reason why we’re constantly reminding others to express when they enjoy someone else’s work: the ratio of praise to criticism in fandom (or simply praise to seeming indifference because there was no public reaction at all), is horribly skewed.

So I personally can’t blame anyone for deleting. I’d like to hope that more people realize the importance of keeping fanworks around, that everything you put out there is loved by someone… but I’m well aware that the reality is far more complicated. It’s hard to keep that in mind. It’s hard to keep something around that you personally no longer like. Harder still to keep up a work you might be harassed over, that someone IRL discovered, that you’re disgusted with because you didn’t know better back then… there are lots of reasons why people delete and I ultimately can’t fault them for that. I think the reasons why people delete stem more from problems in fandom culture at large—trolling, legal issues, lack of positive feedback, cancel culture, etc.—than anything the author has or has not personally done, and since such work is meant to be a part of an enjoyable hobby… I can’t rightly tell anyone to shoulder those problems, problems they can’t solve themselves, just for the sake of mine or others’ enjoyment. The reason I’ve been thinking about this lately is because I was discussing Attack on Titan and how much I dislike the source material now, resulting in a very uncomfortable relationship with the fics I wrote a few years back. I’ve personally decided to keep them up and that’s largely because some have received fantastic feedback and I’m aware of how it will hurt those still in the fandom if I take them down. So if a positive experience is the cornerstone of me keeping fics up, I can only assume that negative experiences would likewise been the cornerstone of taking them down. And if getting rid of that fic helps your mental health, or solves a bullying problem, or just makes you happier… that, to me, is always more important than the fic itself.

But, of course, it’s still devastating for everyone who loses the work, which is why my compromise-y answer is to embrace options like AO3’s phenomenal orphaning policy. That’s a fantastic middle ground between saving fanworks and allowing authors to distances themselves from them. I’ve also gotten a lot more proactive about saving the works I want to have around in the future. Regardless of whether we agree with deleting works or not, the reality is we do live in a world where it happens, so best to take action on our own to save what we want to keep around. Though I respect an author’s right to delete, I also respect the reader’s right to maintain access to the work, once published, in whatever way they can. That's probably my real answer here: authors have their rights, but readers have their rights too, so if you decide to publish in the first place, be aware that these rights might, at some point, clash. I download all my favorite fics to Calibre and, when I’m earning more money (lol) I hope to print and bind many for my personal library. I’m also willing to re-share fic if others are looking for them, in order to celebrate the author’s work even if they no longer want anything to do with it. Not fanfiction in this case, but one of my fondest memories was being really into Phantom of the Opera as a kid and wanting, oh so desperately, to read Susan Kay’s Phantom. Problem was, it was out of print at the time, not available at my library, and this was before the age of popping online and finding a used copy. For all intents and purposes, based on my personal situation, this was a case of a book just disappearing from the world. So when an old fandom mom on the message boards I frequented offered to type her copy up chapter by chapter and share it with me, you can only imagine how overjoyed I was. Idk what her own situation was that something like scanning wouldn’t work, but the point is she spent months helping a fandom kid she barely knew simply because a story had resonated with her and she wanted to share it. That shit is powerful!

So if someone wants to delete—if that’s something they need right now—I believe that is, ultimately, their decision… but please try your hardest to remember that the art you put out into the world is having an impact and people will absolutely miss it when it’s gone. Often to the point of doing everything they can to put it back out into the world even if you decide to take it out. Hold onto that feeling. The love you have for your favorite fic, fanart, meta, whatever it is? Someone else has that for your work too. I guarantee it.

So take things down as needed, but for the love of everything keep copies for yourself. You may very well want to give it back to the world someday.

[vicarfelix]

The Truth About Fate

Vicar Max x Fem! Captain

Warnings: Language. Mentions of death, violence.

Word Count: 5,497

“How could anyone ever get over the fact that the person they loved most was taken from them, and they couldn’t do a damn thing about it?”

This had by far been the worst job the Captain had ever taken. The missions she had dealt with thus far had brought her to rabid canids, stuck-up and brainwashed rich people, and even murderous cannibals living outside the security of Stellar Bay. But this was a totally different kind of uncharted territory.

The Captain would be lying if she said that she wasn’t a little enthralled when a severed arm was delivered on to her ship. She didn’t know the man that she later learned to be Lucky Mantoya (since she wasn’t actually Alex Hawthorne), and the idea of taking the job from a dead freelancer was a bit thrilling. The Captain supposed that she owed Alex in a way, so taking this job was her paying her debt. 

It wasn’t until she was too far into the journey on Gorgon that she wished that she had remained indebted to the late captain.

The Captain knew all about Adrena-Time. She saw the ads everywhere and how it was portrayed to be a performance enhancing drug created by Spacer’s Choice. She had never needed or wanted to take it, but it seemed that it was advertised everywhere she went. 

It didn’t take long for The Captain and the crew to discover that Adrena-Time had created marauders, and Gorgon was the birthplace for them. Spacer’s Choice had poured endless money into The Gorgon Project, continuing to flood the market with cheap items and giving empty promises to the colony. 

The deeper they dug into the mission, the more disturbing it became. The Captain was stuck between a rock and a hard place. It was too late to back out now, but she wasn’t sure how she felt about exposing herself and her crew to the rundown labs and abandoned “volunteer patients” left to die. 

The labs were horrifying. The endless traces of failed experiments and suffering people were forever etched into her brain. The smell of all the dead bodies made her nauseous each time she remembered it. The cubes that were made from literal human parts. The worst part of it all was knowing that marauders were created. 

It was very clear that the entire project was a cover up. She wanted Spacer’s Choice, The Board, and all the other snot nosed corporations to burn anyways, but now that feeling had tripled.

There were two positives to this mission. One was that (unlike other jobs she had taken) there didn’t seem to be any rush on completing this job. It wouldn’t change the outcome if she decided to move on to other things for a bit. The second upside was that the Captain had met some genuinely wonderful people on Gorgon. 

The Sprat Shack had been their safe space during their time on Gorgon, while The Captain preferred that they all stay on the ship for sleeping, she spent the rest of her downtime and breaks at Lex’s bar. The Captain stayed fairly under the radar at first, keeping her head down and ordering her selected crew at the time to do the same. But she slowly began to realize that the people of the small bar meant well. According to Lex, most of them had been forgotten...and the bad ones had made it out of Gorgon instead. 

The Captain had met some outstanding people, some of which she even developed friendships with. She wasn’t surprised that some of them needed jobs to be completed for a fee. The side jobs were actually somewhat refreshing, and it kept the Captain on track without leaving the void blasted rock. 

But there was one side job that she wished had never been offered to her. 

Leonora was a kind woman. She kept to herself and mostly drank the day away. The Captain couldn’t explain the feeling of hurt every time she looked at Leonora. The sense of loss and hopelessness. It all made sense when Leonora asked for a personal favor. 

Leonora told the Captain about her lost husband and their Gorgon story. Leonora had no idea where Jerome was or what became of him. But she wanted the one thing that was left of him.

Truth be told, the Captain wasn’t sure that going out of her way to find a beat up flask was worth her time. But after talking with Leonora and hearing how “a broken heart” had brought her back to Gorgon, she couldn’t bring herself to say no. It was supposed to be an easy job. One that would lift everyone’s spirits. 

But it ended up hurting the Captain even more.

It had been weighing on her a lot. There was something about the way Leonora’s eyes glassed with tears when she said Jerome’s name that made the Captain feel terribly upset. She could tell that Leonora loved Jerome endlessly, and it made the Captain question a lot about love. How could anyone want to fall in love if there was a possibility of ending up like Leonora?

The Captain worried about it, because it was totally possible that it could happen to her too.

Max meant everything to her. She loved him with everything that she was. She looked forward to waking up with him every morning and going to bed with him at the end of each night. She couldn’t even begin to imagine her life without him.

Max was her comfort in this fucked up colony. She had talked to Max about it, taking advantage of his confessional conversation training. He tried to help her get to the bottom of her feelings, which amounted to the fact that she needed to complete Leonora’s job first.

It turned out that tracking down Jerome’s flask wasn’t as difficult as she originally thought, once The Captain, Max, and Nyoka shot their way through a group of strung out marauders. The apartment was small, but she knew that Jerome had been there. 

“I think that’s it, Cap.” Nyoka stated, motioning towards the metal flask sitting on the bed.

The Captain looked at the engraving on the flask, letting her know that it was the one she had been searching for. 

“Yep. I think so too,” The Captain said, “I’m going to take a second to read his journal now that we’re not being shot at.”

Max and Nyoka offered light chuckles at the Captain’s joke, continuing to look around the room for anything they could pocket before they left. The Captain had found Jerome’s journal earlier, but hadn’t had a chance to read it since they had been under attack. 

Now she wished she had never allowed herself to read what Jerome had written.

She smiled faintly when she read the sweet things that he had written about Leonora. But that feeling didn’t last long for the Captain. The fuzzy warmth was washed away with a cold gut drop when she read that he had taken Adrena-Time. Her heart ached as she read on to see his slow descent into marauder madness. It made her feel a sense of dread at knowing that she likely had just killed him within the group of marauders just a few moments before.

“Oh, God...” The Captain groaned, handing the journal to Max and Nyoka so they could skim over it too.

A wave of nausea filtered through the Captain’s senses, but not the kind usually brought on by rotting canids on Monarch. As much as the Captain wished that she had more control over her feelings, sometimes they still smacked her in the face.

Max and Nyoka went through the same emotions the Captain did as they read. They knew what the Captain was feeling, and they didn’t want her to blame herself for something that she couldn’t help.

“It’s not your fault, Cap. We had to kill them.” Nyoka said.

Max seconded Nyoka’s statement, approaching the Captain and resting a hand on her shoulder to soothe his distressed girlfriend.

“She’s right. There was nothing else that could be done.” Max’s voice rumbled low in the Captain’s ear.

The pad of his thumb stroked her shoulder through the hard material of her Rizzo’s SugarOps armor. It was something he always did when he knew she was uptight, but it didn’t always offer her consolation.

“What am I even going to say to Leonora? How am I supposed to tell her what happened to Jerome?” The Captain asked rhetorically, but she had hoped they’d give her an answer.

The Captain already had a feeling as to what they thought. Nyoka and Max were very honest people, believing that the truth was always best. The Captain mostly agreed, but she knew how damn bad the truth could hurt sometimes.

“Cap, I hate influencing decisions. Just...go with your gut.” Nyoka offered, which wasn’t exactly helpful.

“Whatever you find to be best, Captain.” Max echoed.

The Captain sighed, dejected that their advice didn’t help at all. The Captain tucked the flask into the pocket of Max’s jacket, assuring that it’d be safe with him until they made it back to The Sprat Shack. The trek back through the ruins to the saloon felt far too quick. Even if she had all the time in the world, the Captain was confident she’d never fully settle on how to handle this.

These were the moments that she hated about being a captain. The moments where all authority and responsibility fell to her, and when her crew couldn’t back her up. As horrible of a thought as it was, the Captain was tempted to not even return to Leonora. Leonora would never even know that the Captain had indeed carried out her task. But the Captain knew that was probably the worst thing she could do.

She fished the flask from Max’s pocket once they were out of harm’s way, her dirtied fingers trailed over the engraving once more. She hated everything about this entire Gorgon mission. Every side job that she took seemed to be making the main objective worse. Gorgon was by far the worst of the colony.

And it only further cemented the Captain’s hate for The Board.

They entered the building, the dread in the Captain’s abdomen growing more and more as the elevator descended them down to the lower levels. She looked at Nyoka and Max again, her usually confident and determined eyes suddenly filled with uncertainty.

“I don’t know what I’m going to tell her.” She admitted, her usual boldness being chipped away more and more the longer she thought about this.

Nyoka and Max both wished they could’ve been more helpful. Unfortunately, this was just one of those moments where their assistance wasn’t making the job easier.

Max adored the Captain. Their relationship had given his life a whole new purpose and meaning. He loved her endlessly, and seeing her this upset hurt him personally. If he could bear her burdens, then he would without a second thought.

But she was the Captain, not him.

“Maybe she won’t even ask, Cap.” Nyoka suggested the likely best case scenario.

“If nothing else, at least returning the flask will partly offer her closure.” Max tagged on.

That helped marginally, but it barely made a dent in the Captain’s feeling of impending sadness. The Captain led the way into the room where Leonora was sitting, rummaging through a bin of her belongings that amounted to practically nothing.

For a split second, life returned to Leonora’s eyes when she saw the Captain. However, the life left them again just as fast as it had come. It was as if Leonora had hoped that Jerome would’ve been with them. The Captain couldn’t even imagine Leonora’s pain.

“Hi, Leonora.” The Captain greeted in as neutral of a tone as possible.

Max and Nyoka stood back a ways, wanting to give Leonora plenty of space for whenever the Captain broke the news to her.

“Find anything out there?” Leonora asked in her serene voice.

The Captain nodded, revealing the metal object to her.

“I found Jerome’s flask.” The Captain stated simply, passing it to her with slightly trembling fingers.

A genuine, yet sad smile appeared on Leonora’s face as she looked over it. The Captain could see a whole parade of memories flood over Leonora. The Captain refused to cry, but it was taking a lot from her to stop the tears.

“That’s it, all right! Law...still smells like whiskey, his cigarettes, and that awful cologne he bathed in every morning.” Leonora said, but more as a testament to herself than the Captain.

The Captain refused Leonora’s payment when she offered the bits. The Captain was glad Ellie wasn’t there, because she would’ve surely bitched at the Captain for turning down payment. The Captain had this overwhelming sense to leave now while Leonora wasn’t asking questions. The Captain figured she could bid her farewell and good luck and dash out, but Leonora spoke again before the Captain could try.

“You didn’t happen to find anything else out there...did you?” Leonora questioned, very clearly wanting the answer she’d been waiting all these years for.

The Captain felt like she could’ve broken out into a sweat. This was exactly what she was afraid of. Her observant ears heard the uncomfortable shifting of Nyoka’s feet behind her, and she could practically see Max’s lowered head as a show of respect for Jerome.

The Captain’s hesitation was probably not a good sign to Leonora. The Captain knew that she couldn’t completely avoid answering Leonora. The Captain had two very clear paths in front of her. She could tell Leonora the truth and risk breaking Leonora’s heart further, or she could lie and offer Leonora some solid comfort...even if it wasn’t real.

The Captain didn’t want to do this. She wished that she had better options at this moment. But she had to choose what was dealt to her and what was best for Leonora in her eyes. So, the Captain made the best decision that she could.

So she lied.

“I found Jerome. It looks like he died peacefully.” The Captain told Leonora.

The energy from Max and Nyoka changed. They both were a bit stunned that the Captain fibbed. Just as before, a flash of a look of relief crossed Leonora’s features. She didn’t want Jerome dead, but thinking he died comfortably brought her great consolation.

“Good...good. I should’ve been there for him, but I suppose he wanted to be alone in the end,” Leonora said solemnly, “Thank you for the flask. Jerome and I were supposed to live and die together, but sometimes fate has other plans.”

The Captain didn’t hear Leonora’s goodbye due to the ringing of her last sentence.

Fate has other plans.

The Captain felt a million times worse now. She thought about all the plans she had with Max. All the things about their future that they had talked about. They were supposed to live and die together...but what if that didn’t turn out to be the case?

The Captain only gave Leonora a nod for a farewell, leaving her to wallow in a broken lie as an attempt at moving on. It was the end of the night, and the Captain just wanted to get the hell back on The Unreliable. They left The Sprat Shack, the Captain’s solitary question giving Nyoka an invitation to speak once they were en route to exit the establishment.

“Did I do the right thing?” The Captain asked for the first time ever, tears brimming her eyes.

Max didn’t say anything, knowing she’d talk to him more later. Nyoka sighed, clearly torn at what had just happened with Leonora.

“I don’t know, Cap. I hope she’ll find some peace in this, but...sometimes it’s better to know the truth and deal with it.” Nyoka said honestly.

“I just couldn’t tell her. She’s been holding on to a sliver of hope for years and if she knew that he had turned into a marauder...” The Captain stopped briefly, “It might’ve killed her.”

The Captain wasn’t known for theatrics or delivering dramatic lines after an intense moment (no, they left that up to Felix). But her words couldn’t have been more true.

Max hates seeing the Captain so unsure of herself. She usually never thought twice about a decision she had made. She had lied her way out of situations before, but never in that context.

“I’m sure you did the rightest thing you could, Cap. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.” Nyoka added on after realizing that her opinion had made it worse.

“Yeah. Maybe.” The Captain said as they walked up the ramp of the landing pad.

The ship was fairly quiet as they entered, only a few distant sounds could be heard over the hum of the engine. Ellie and Parvati had gone to bed, Felix was raiding the fridge in the kitchen, and SAM was probably cleaning ADA’s units for the millionth time that day.

The Captain wanted to get the hell off of Gorgon, even if it was just for a day or two. But she was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it until the job was finished. She just wanted to get this over with so she could get on with her life.

Her mind was reeling with thoughts and replaying the day’s events over and over again. She couldn’t tell what was bugging her more. The fact that she was responsible for the death of Jerome or that she had lied to Leonora. It was probably a horrible thought, but it offered the Captain some peace knowing that Jerome never would’ve been with Leonora again, due to his marauder transformation and all.

But she subconsciously knew that there was much more to her discomfort than what was on the surface.

Nyoka, Max, and the Captain silently stashed their things away into the lockers at the front of the ship, the sounds of their weapons and whatever they had stashed in their pockets clinking and making other noises. Usually, the Captain took inventory at the end of the day, but she was too tired and honestly couldn’t have cared less.

The Captain’s gear had been stashed away until their next adventure, her head craning from one side to the other as she attempted to adhere to her achy muscles and tired bones. Nyoka didn’t say much else, knowing the Captain needed to be alone. Nyoka snatched a few bottles of Spectrum Vodka from the kitchen before holding herself in her room, not nearly as bothered as the Captain was.

Max had hardly taken his eyes off of the Captain the entire time. He studied her and watched her to see what she was feeling without her actually saying it. The Captain and Max had an interesting dynamic like that. He could read her and she could read him.

He just wished she wouldn’t beat herself up so much about this.

“[Y/N], darling,” He hushed out, his voice like smooth silk in her ear, “Please, don’t dwell on this too much.”

The Captain only shook her head, her eyes stinging with tears again and her throat heavy with the struggle to hold down that first sob.

“I’m going to shower. I just want to go to bed.” She stated, managing to conceal the quaver in her voice from him.

To anyone else, the Captain’s behavior would’ve been coming off as cold and hateful. But Max knew her too well for that. He knew she was hurt and upset with herself. She turned around the walk away from him, knowing that he understood where she was mentally right now.

He instinctively let his hand find her waist, keeping her from straying away from him. He looked into her bleary eyes, seeing the toll that this was taking on her.

“Okay, my love. Whatever you want.” He smiled softly, trying his best to reassure her.

Now, he went to walk away, taking the Captain’s statement to mean that she wanted to be alone. But her frantic grab for him told him he was wrong. He could see the desperation in her eyes, the plain and simple fact that she did not want him to be away from her right now. Even more so, he heard it in her voice. The gentle request that came out as a crack of a whisper.

Almost as if he’d disappear if she spoke too boldly.

“Please don’t go.” She pleaded to her beloved priest.

A singular tear slid down her left cheek, creating a wet line through the layer of dirt caked on the Captain’s face. She wouldn’t let herself completely fall apart. Not yet anyway. She refused to let the emotion show on her features past the tears.

She was supposed to be the strong, blazing captain of The Unreliable. She was supposed to be the one person who never let things get in the way of things that needed to be done. Independent captains were supposed to keep their feelings stored away on a shelf, safe from all the horrible things that they had to see.

But what the Captain was beginning to realize was that all of those other captains had become that way BECAUSE they didn’t allow themselves to feel.

They had ruined themselves by trying so hard not to ruin themselves.

“Oh, Captain...oh, my darling,” Max said quietly and lowly, not to draw any attention in the event that someone was lingering around, “I’m here for you. I always have been and always will be.”

His hand slipped into hers, intertwining his fingers with hers. He brought the back of her hand to his lips and left a gentle kiss, bringing her to the shower of the ship. The water was hot and heavenly on the Captain’s skin, already washing away the dirt and grime she had collected during the day.

Silent tears were still streaming from her eyes as they stood together under the flow of water. He wiped away the tears as best as he could, his heart breaking with each new set of soundless tears that told the loudest story. She didn’t have to say that she needed comfort; he could see it and feel it.

“You’re so wonderful. You’re so incredible in so many ways,” Max said as he began to wash her hair, his hands massaging at her scalp, “Law only knows how you ended up in my life.”

Even through her tears, she managed a smile, along with a saddened and amused laugh.

“Did an outlaw, happenstance captain really change your life so much?” She asked him in a purely joking manner.

“You’ll never understand the half of it.” Max replied as seriously as ever.

Max made sure she was clean first, before getting himself clean as well. He continued to tell her sweet nothings. He continued to love her in the ways that he knew she responded well to. He couldn’t undo everything that had happened, and he couldn’t do much about the Captain’s worry. But he could be there for her through all her tribulations.

She took her usual place on the inside of the bunk once they were dressed for bed and back in her quarters. Max had slipped one of his shirts over her body, kissing her gently and carefully. His lips were met with her quivering ones, her final attempt at not completely breaking down in front of him.

She was pressed between the adjacent wall and Max’s body. She snuggled up next to him like she always did, but it wasn’t in the giddy way that she normally did when she was eager for cuddles. No, this was more of a slow pull of herself flush to him. Her head against his left pectoral and her hands reaching for one of his to play with. She was needy for comfort, rather than her usual nightly snuggles.

The trace scents of Max’s cologne filled her nose as she formed herself into his side. It was a smell that always grounded her. It brought her a sense of care. A sense of direction when she didn’t know where to go. A feeling of all the answers in a world of so many unanswered questions.

It made her feel a sense of home.

“Max?” She called out, not hiding the tremble in her voice this time.

He could feel the glass about to break. The glass underneath her that was protecting her bottled up feelings was beginning to crack and was on the verge of shattering and causing her to fall.

But he’d be there to catch her safely.

“Let it go, Captain,” He persuaded softly, holding her a little tighter in preparation for her inevitable meltdown, “I’m here.”

And then she did indeed let go.

The first real sob was a gut wrenching one. She felt it all the way from the bottom of her lungs to the tips of her toes. It was an overwhelming reaction, one so intense that even Max was a bit taken aback. She buried her face into the soft material of his shirt, muffling her pathetic cries in an attempt not to disturb anyone on the ship. 

“I lied to her, Max.” The Captain sputtered, each word being thick with distress.

“You did what you simply had to do. Your decision wasn’t out of disrespect.” Max answered, his hand caressing her damp hair. 

“It was her husband. I killed her husband, and I didn’t even have the guts to tell her that.” The Captain drawled, her tears seeping through Max’s shirt.

“You didn’t kill him. He was dead long before you ever pulled the trigger,” Max reminded her, referring to how Adrena-Time pretty much had sucked any life out of him beforehand, “Leonora and Jerome never would’ve ended up happily together again. Even if we had managed to get away with not killing him.”

The Captain seemed to be understanding that. It registered well in her head, but there was one part she was still so hung up on. 

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell her that I killed him. I just couldn’t tell her that he had turned into a marauder. How could anyone come to terms with their lover becoming a fucking maniac?” She wept, “How could anyone ever get over the fact that the person they loved most was taken from them, and they couldn’t do a damn thing about it?”

Max was intrigued by the Captain’s specific choice of wording...but he sensed that there was a deeper issue that was causing her to fall apart like this. Max was doing absolutely everything he could to make her feel better. Unfortunately, she had just seen and dealt with too much since taking this Gorgon job. She was exhausted in every regard: emotionally, physically, mentally. He just wished that there was more that he could do beyond talking things out. 

“It’s so overused to say, but life is unpredictably cruel sometimes. There was a reason for the way that things turned out.” Max said, kissing the crown of her head.

The Captain dwindled down into a series of sniffles and hiccuping cries, her head too rattled to say anything for the time being. Max caressed her skin, kissed her, touched her, and loved her. Anything he could do to remind her that he was there for her.

“Max?” She called again after a few more silent moments.

“Yes, my love?” He answered, letting his hand relax so she could fidget with it easier.

“I love you.” She declared, wiping at her tears fruitlessly.

Max and the Captain had exchanged “I love yous” before this moment. Surprisingly, Max had been the first to say it. He and the Captain had found themselves sitting alone together on Groundbreaker, sharing a bottle of Iceberg Whiskey and drowning out the day’s terrors. He had leaned over to press a kiss to her temple, when he whispered it lowly in her ear. She had returned the endearment, and not a day had passed where the two of them hadn’t said it at least once a day. 

Even when they had been fighting or arguing over something meaningless, they never let the other go to bed angry. He could be past the point of enraged at her, and he would still tell her how he felt before they fell asleep. They were connected in the most beautiful way. 

It felt so different to hear her say it in this kind of situation.

“I love you, Captain. I love you so much.” He drawled, suddenly interlacing his fingers with hers once again. 

“When Leonora was telling her story...I couldn’t help but think about us.” The Captain admitted, her tears beginning to slow.

Max’s brows knitted together in both confusion and curiosity.

“What do you mean?” He questioned, leaving yet another kiss on her head.

“They traveled the colony together...ended up at the wrong place at the wrong time,” The Captain explained, “Max, that could easily happen to us.”

The Captain sat up from where she was laying next to him, her cheeks wet with tears and her eyes puffy. She wanted him to understand her worries and why this was bugging her so much. 

She wanted him to see that she was afraid for them. 

“Oh, darling, I assure you that’s nothing to concern yourself with. We’ve seen what Adrena-Time can do and it’s the reason for marauders, I’d never even give taking it a second thought.” Max assured her.

“I don’t mean with Adrena-Time. I just mean in general. This colony is so messed up. Literally anything could happen and if I lost you...” She trailed off, not even daring to finish the thought. 

The vicar’s eyes softened even more than they already had. Although he knew better than to say this to her right now, he knew that they could realistically lose one another at any given moment. He wasn’t kidding when he said that life was cruel. It was always an open possibility...and not just for them. 

“It could happen. I won’t deny that to you, but I find that it’s more important to savor and cherish the moments that we are blessed with...preferably while they’re still here,” Max said, knowing that probably wasn’t offering her any kind of resolve. 

“Easier said than done.” The Captain grumbled.

“I know it’s not a great answer,” He confessed, a grin appearing on his face, “But for what it’s worth, I enjoy every single moment with you. I’ll spend every moment loving you.”

The Captain gave a light laugh, amused by his words.

“Even when I’m a crying mess and hysterical?” She tried to joke.

Max cupped her face, swiping more tears from her face as he answered with full seriousness.

“Especially then.” 

The Captain took a few seconds to try and collect herself. Talking had helped some, but this was something she’d have to allow herself to work through. In time, The Captain would come to terms with what she had told Leonora. While she’d never know how Leonora came to terms with it, the Captain would rest easy knowing that she’d done what she thought was right. 

Max gave her time to bask in the quiet, continuing to rub her leg that was peeking out from under the sheet. He kept his sights on her, watching her as she dazed out the window in front of her desk. He was proud of her for letting herself release her feelings out into the open. He knew that she kept things to herself more than he wanted her to, but as long as she knew that he was a resource for her, then he was okay. 

“Come here.” He said when her gaze returned to him.

She crawled back into his open arms, falling into his frame for the millionth and certainly not the last time. He showered her with love for the rest of the night, wiping any tears that slipped down her face. He felt relief when she finally fell asleep, because he knew how badly she needed rest. 

He stayed up long after she fell into a snooze, keeping her close in case she woke up again in a meltdown. He was sure that she was releasing lots of emotions that had been building up for quite some time, so he expected her to not fully be herself for a few days. 

He’d be there for her until she felt better. Until she was back to being the woman that he had grown to love...but he loved her just as much even when she wasn’t feeling completely normal. While he hoped that he and his captain had lots of more adventures to go on and endeavors to discover, he was content with his happily ever after that he knew to be her. Because she had shown him love. She had shown him HOW to love.

She was his forever.

[linkspooky]

Ten Favorite Female Characters

I was tagged by @midnight-in-town​, so now I have to show them how much I love my favorite women. 

Name your favorite female characters from 10 different Fandoms and tag 10/or the amount you wish people

Tagging: @hamliet​ @amonmahboi​ @inumaqi​ @thyandrawrites​ @kaibutsushidousha​  @harostar​.. yeah, I don’t know ten people. 

Enoshima Junko 

“Hope is harmony. A just heart, moving toward the light. That is all. Despair is hope's polar opposite. It is messy and confusing. It swallows up love, hatred, and everything else.”

Junko wishes she was a psychopath. She’s spent her entire life pretending to be a crazy psychopath, because living that life is just so much more interesting than the one she’s stuck in. Enoshima Junko is just too smart for the world, and everything is too easy for her, and rather than try to dumb herself down a little bit she’s decided to knock everything else down. She’s a girl kicking down sandcastles because building them out of sand all alone is no longer doing it for her. 

Junko’s interesting because of the weird logic and loops she runs her brain into. There’s a complex character behind the whole “I exist only to spread despair” thing. She’s perfectly capable of forming emotional attachments to people, and genuinely caring. But the people she likes are generally far worse off than the ones she doesn’t care about. 

Junko wants so badly to, just not be human. She does the most inhuman things possible to prove that she’s not human. What really made me love her is the lengths she’s willing to go, to the point in Dangan Ronpa Zero where she basically took a screw to her own brain and started acting like a normal girl only when all of her memories were removed. 

Junkos relationship with Matsuda shows two conflicting sides of her character. How much she's humanized by her love of him,  and also how much she wants to completely destroy that part of herself. It's like she physically can't be a normal girl. Or rather she doesn’t want to be to such extremes she’ll break everything and then herself. 

And if she can’t be normal than Junko decided that self destruction is her next best bet. There’s just nothing that will satisfy Junko, and it’s interesting to watch someone that empty decide the world is going to end, or she’s going to end herself and she doesn’t really care which. 

Ajimu Najimi

“Call to me with affection, Anshin’in-san. Well, I don’t really care what manga characters call me.” 

Hey, I put Junko on this list twice. Both Ajimu and Junko live in a world that is too easy for them, and therefore they have no reason to get emotionally invested in others or try to attach themselves to anything. Which is why it’s fun to see Ajimu attempt the same thing as Junko to kill herself in style and eventually get saved from herself.

Medaka Box is such a meaningful manga to me because they take the weirdest characters and no matter how deranged they are they find the parts of them that are relatable and go, well guess what you’re human too. Ajimu literally calls herself a non-human and she’s just as human as all the rest in the end. 

The best part is it’s not her good points that make her human, it’s all her flaws. It’s easy to feel like the world isn’t real, that nothing in the world is worth living for, to feel no emotional attachment. Those are all human emotions. Not because they’re good and shining, but because they’re petty and terrible. Ajimu is this brilliant character, but she’s also kind of just a petty little girl using a ‘fiction is reality’ lens to cope. She’s not that special actually, she’s just suicidal, and kind of awful in general. It’s nice to see that human side behind the mastermind character. 

Azula

“My own mother thought I was a monster. She was right of course but it still hurts.” 

Azula is someone thoroughly dehumanized by everyone even the “good” members of her family (Uncle Iroh, Zuko, her Mother). I like how Azula in some part seems to be aware that both her brother, and mother seem to kind of consider her the “bad sibling” and she just decides to embrace it. Like it’s... not emotionally healthy in any way and it’s terribly tragic but there’s something about characters who actively make the decision to be a monster that gets me. 

There’s something about Azula’s writing that makes me uncomfortable, and it makes me sad that Zuko like... continually associates her with his father’s abuse, and demonizes her like she wasn’t also a kid going through the exact same situation, but Azula getting increasingly unstable is at least an appropriate response to that. 

Even if her brother, her mother, or her father won’t see her as her own person and they all see her as an extension of her father’s abuse on her, Azula is just so determined to be her own person even if it means burning the world, or herself A common theme I guess, but a lot of these characters have narratives about not being allowed to be their own person or shown any kind of humanity or normalcy. 

Morrigan

“Well, well, well what do we have here?”

Morrigan is mean, and nasty, and grumpy and bitchy and witchy. She’s allowed to be unlikable, because Morrigan never bends to anyone. Her survival, and freedom will become first before anything else. 

It feels like Morrigan is the main character in her own story, and you just happen to be a part of it for a short while. You may even be an important character to her, she may be attached, but ultimately you’ll never be more than support to her. 

Morrigan is such an ambitious an singular entity that her character development is letting you be a part of her life and not the other way around. She'll always survive on her own.  Morrigan is irrevocably shaped by her environemnt, and yet she craves freedom in that too because she doesn’t want to be bound by her past or shaped by her mother. So much of herself is dedicated to being better than the environment that she was raised in that she defeats her mother not by killing her, or freeing herself, but rather by being a better mother than her. 

Raven / Rachel Roth

“Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos...” 

Raven is fun, because a bunch of monks thought the best way to teach her to handle her emotions was to never allow her to feel any emotion ever. So, Raven is eternally running on a zero. She’s terrified even a small amount of happiness will end the world. She’s not allowed to be her own person, neither her bastard father, nor the monks treat her like one.

Raven is so gentle, and selfless, and emotionally perceptive and sensitive to others needs but she can’t ever display almost any of these good traits because she’s internalized the idea that she’s such a bad person. She always believes all the time that she exists to hurt others and that makes it so difficult for her to connect to others. 

Which is why her true friends bond with the Teen Titans is so meaningful, because Rachel found a family in spite of all of that. She has friends who think she’s a good person unconditionally despite the fact that Raven continually tells herself she isn’t. There are people in the world willing to navigate the maze of walls that Raven has built around herself, and that her environment forced her to build and closed up, and she’s so happy to have them. 

Midna

“Some call our realm a world of shadows, but that makes it sound so unpleasant... The twilight there holds a serene beauty... You have seen it yourself as the sun sets on this world. Bathed in that light, all the people were pure and gentle...” 

Midna just steals the show. Her story now. The game’s not called Legend of Zelda anymore now it’s Legend of Midna. Not only is she the most important character in the game she appears in, but she’s also in character someone so selfish she’ll always prioritize herself over everyone else. However, only because she feels that she can’t exist as anything other than the princess of the twilight and has to prioritize her survival for the sake of her people. Midna even says so at the start of the game, she can’t be kind because she wasn’t spoiled like princess Zelda in the bountiful kingdom of the light. 

Midna is so selfish and yet doesn’t really have her own wants and needs as a person outside of the role she has to play for her people, which is why she’s so terribly lost without it and just because this terrible selfish little gremlin. Link and Zelda affect Midna so much because they humanize her. They both sacrifice themselves to save Midna the person and she doesn’t get why. She doesn’t get why two people would help someone who has been so unkind to them and who has failed them this much so far. 

That act of selflessness moves her, and also freaks her out. She even says she didn’t want to be saved by either of them. Which is what makes her redemption in the second half of the game so interesting, because Midna really improves herself so she can become someone worth their kindness. She doesn’t want the selflessness of people like Zelda and Link to go to waste, and because of that begins to care about things outside of her kingdom and her role as princess 

Vriska Serket

“After all of this is over. Do you want to go on a d8?”

Unfortunately one of my top 3 favorite characters of all time comes from a really terrible source material. Vriska is everything I like in a character.  She's a mess. She's really hard to swallow. She's a character that's not meant to be liked.

Nobody really likes Vriska and it's all her fault for being such a horrible person, nobody wants her damage. Which is so interesting because usually main characters get forgiven over and over again. Everyone leaves and if they don't Vriska will burn those bridges herself. No character better embodies what it's like to be stuck in a self harming cycle

Authors are always so obsessed with making characters look good or showing what a good person they are few characters are allowed to be just plain unlikely in ugly ways. It’s what lets Vriskas genuine desire to be better actually seem like a struggle. 

Kocho Shinobu

“Are you angry? Yes, I’m angry Tanjiro. I’ve always been angry.” 

Shinobu is just all pleasantries on the surface, but so full of negative emotions in ways women aren't allowed to be. I love the medicine / poison dynamic to her character and how it rots her to the core. Too much medicine is a poison, while poison can be a medicine when applied to the right situation.

Shinobu is, two faced. She’s beautiful and kind, and full of ugly emotions and empty. She nurses people back from the dead, she sees no point in living herself and purposefully throws herself into a suicide in her plan against Doma. There’s just such a destructive dance between extremes for her because Shinobu is such a unique individual, trying to deal with all of these emotions she just can’t deal with. She can’t be noble, or better than her trauma, she just pretends to be a good person while she slowly rots away inside.  

Shinobu can put on smiles all day -

But she can't be like her sister.  She can't love people like her sister can. Maybe she could once but all that's left now is anger. Bitter, unpleasant, and completely in denial of it and still masquerading as a good person. The most beautiful kind of poison of all.

She’s not her sister, but she’s also not really her own person. She doesn’t know who Shinobu is, doesn’t know who Kocho Shinobu lives for. She just doesn’t imagine herself living past her revenge, and even though she’s surrounded by love she’s just so cracked it all pours out of her and absolutely nothing could be worth prolonging her life after everything she’s lost. 

Toga Himiko

“What exactly is a normal life? I also live a normal life, you know.” 

Himiko Toga is a girl who lives entirely on her own terms. Which is just so rare for a female character, you know? It’s so genuinely subversive to know that Himiko was once a nice girl, who always smiled, always put other people’s feelings first, and that sort of ‘good girl’ behavior drove her completely insane.

Toga deciding to be true to herself is an act of rebellion against the world. 

For Himiko everything is flipped. What others regard as psycho behavior is her normal. She doesn’t let other people define her story as a tragedy, and even murders the one person who tries to control her story. In a story where female characters constantly downplay their own importance to support the male characters Himiko is the only character important enough to be the center of her own story. Himiko’s story is so subversive as well, both of how society treats her, and how the story treats characters like her. 

Himiko is such an excellent yandere, all yanderes wish they were himiko. She comes off as this batshit stabby girl,  but then you find out that shes actually emotionally perceptive. She first comes off selfish, bratty, and self-centered but she turns into one of the most sensitive characters in the manga. She eschews the ideals of being a good girl that was forced down her throat, but that doesn’t mean she’s not empathic, or that she’s not capable of goodness. She’s good to twice. She’s good to the people who accept her. 

Himiko no matter what will always be a deviant. Always be an outsider. Instead of trying to make room for her her parents forced her to lie and wear a mask until her identity became completely shattered. I like Toga because under the knife wielding psycho she's a normal girl. Then under that normal girl there’s also a knife wielding psycho ready to fight back, and both of them are the real her. 

Ihei Hairu

“I saw the reaper, he was very beautiful.” 

Every character from the garden is just fundamentally broken.  Hairu and Rize are interesting foils, because if you think of about it a loveless childhood turned them both into ruthless killers. It’s just they decided to live for different things, Rize lived rejecting love and Hairu lived chasing after love. However, fundamentally they are the same. They are children starved for any kind of love or nurturing.  Hairu is so desperate she devotes her entire life to the first person who acknowledged her. However, the same sort of desperation to live, that tragic need to make the most out of the few short years they have exists in all garden children.

Hairu wants so badly to be a person, but she’s not a person. She’s half ghoul. 

There's just something about a girl who was never meant to be born and never meant to live, still trying.  There's a dark side to her character, she's violent and inhuman exactly like the environment she was raised in but she was also still a child at heart seeking love.

Which is why though her narrative is a thoroughly unhappy one, it does make me happy that there was someone who loved her in the form of Koori Ui. There is someone who wanted her to live longer. Her life was short, but she did live, and it’s that struggle to connect to others that made her truly alive. 

[arabellaflynn]

Text of a test monologue. Would you like to see me deliver this on camera, with no makeup, no lighting equipment, and using Notepad as a TelePrompTer? Head on over to my https://www.patreon.com/ArabellaFlynnPatreon, and for a dollar a month you too can see me waffle on in real time.

Hi, all. You may notice that I am on video now. I was going to shoot a couple of tests and apologize for the poor quality of the footage, and explain that I want to start vlogging and streaming in addition to writing, but I need some equipment to do it properly and for that I need to raise some funds... But fuck it. This is going out first instead.

As I record this, it is the fourth of July. You can probably hear the fireworks outside my window. I know I can. There are a lot of those, because we've all been inside and bored for the past four months. 

I know a lot of people who have opted not to observe the holiday this year. The 4th of July is often viewed as a celebration of the American institution, which is a little bit on fire right now, with a few people determined to squirt lighter fluid all over the flames like a bored suburban dad at a barbecue. On the other hand, it's also Independence Day, and marks the end of the long, painful process by which a population broke free of distant, uncaring overlords who cared mainly about the financial dividends of their colonies, and ignored the grievances of the people until they started breaking shit. So YMMV.

I would comment on some of the details, but I don't know them. The Late Show is on hiatus, and John Oliver doesn't air until tomorrow. I, like a lot of my demographic, get most of my current events from comedians. There's a reason for that.

I actually watched a lot of news as a teenager.

Well, "watched" might be too strong a word. It's easier for me to fall asleep if there's some sort of droning noise in the background. When I was about fifteen, I discovered that, unlike the main CNN channel, which has actual shows and documentaries, CNN Headline News just runs the day's top stories over and over again in an unending 30 minute loop. Interesting enough to keep me from falling into a train of thought that will prevent me from sleeping, boring enough that I don't want to stay up and listen.

I have no memory of the desk anchors. I'm sure they were consummate professionals, but they also had no distinguishing human characteristics whatsoever. I know they were updating the loop live, because occasionally a story would be added to the list and another one would drop off the back, and occasionally one would flub the text on their prompter, but other than that there was no hint that the face at the desk was attached to a living, breathing person.

I do remember a couple of the correspondents. One was Christiane Amanpour. Her voice stood out; CNN is an American news station that was originally restricted to American cable networks, and the vast majority of the staff is from the US. Amanpour is British-Iranian, having split her childhood between Tehran, before the revolution, and London, after. They liked to send her to the bowels of Eastern Europe to report from the war-torn streets of Citygrad in Countrystan. She had already caught some criticism on her reporting of the Bosnian War, for advancing the apparently controversial opinion that genocide was bad. I didn't know that at the time; I just thought she sounded more like she told real stories than read off lists of facts.

Another was Anderson Cooper, who was not nearly such a big deal then as he is now. Cooper, a self-described adrenaline junkie, was a war correspondent at the time, with a habit of ducking only briefly for explosions before standing back up to continue his piece to camera. He wouldn't be infamous until his coverage of Hurricane Katrina years later, both for the overall stellar job he did, and also for that one time he got tired of getting non-answers from some government toad in a live interview and very professionally flipped his shit at the lady, asking if she realized how tone deaf it was to sit there thanking other politicians for doing essentially nothing while there were still bodies in the street.

I quit watching the news when I moved away to college. It wasn't necessarily that knowing was worse than not knowing, but I felt a lot of pressure to be "adult" about it at that point, and watching proper news shows made me anxious to the point where I wouldn't sleep. I outright avoided it to the point where I made it to a canceled class at 4 pm, Mountain Standard Time, on September 11, 2001, before anyone told me what was going on.

I wasn't able to put my finger on why I found the news so horrible until many years later. I can't remember what rabbit hole I'd fallen down, but I ended up sitting on YouTube watching segments of the live news coverage of the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan. Reagan was shot in the side and later recovered without complications, but his Press Secretary, James Brady, was struck in the head and sustained considerable neurological damage. Brady, together with his wife Sarah, later went on to be a noted advocate for gun control, but at the time was reported to have died on the scene. 

I wound up watching a lot of one of the news desks -- ABC, I think. It started out like all the others, until the anchor tripped up a couple of times and referred to Press Secretary Brady as "Jim", and I realized: He knows these people. Personally. He's a member of the White House Press Corps, or a friend of the Bradys, or both. I'm watching a journalist reporting on a moment of historical significance to the American people, and a human being who has to tell the entire nation about someone's personal tragedy. His investment did not make him any less professional or informative than any of the others, but it did make his coverage feel very grounded in reality in a way that most news, then and now, does not.

The older I get, the more disquieting I find it to have a talking head behind a shiny desk read me a list of horrible things that have happened today without any apparent reaction. It makes it seem like these things are a randomized representative sample of the cruelty of the universe, rather than what they are, which is a list of things so unusually terrible they made the news. I realize that this is part of an effort to remain impartial so that the viewer can decide how they feel about events, but it's also disturbingly normative. Yes, everything is on fire, everything is always on fire, this is nothing new. 

I can't say I'm any more enamored of the opposite, either, the more recent style where the news anchor's entire job is to tell you that entirety of human existence is awful and here's what you should prioritize being afraid of this week. Everything around you is on fire, the fire is racing right at you, and here's whose fault the fire is.

A lot of Americans, especially younger ones, have taken to getting their news mostly from political satire because-- well, one, because for about the past twenty years, our comedians have been better at fact-checking than our actual newsrooms. You can thank Jon Stewart for getting a bee in his bonnet over that. But also because their coverage of major issues takes neither of those paths. The Daily Show alumni write up stories like they actually live on the planet they're reporting from. You're on fire? They're on fire too! Holy shit, let's all find some water! 

The conceit behind the comedy of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report and Full Frontal and Last Week Tonight and now the monologues on The Late Show is not that this is a normal amount of fire for everything to be on so it's fine, nor establishing that someone has set you on fire on purpose and here's who should be punished for it. It's bewilderment and frustration at the way we somehow keep catching on fire over and over again. Yeah, they crack jokes, because it's their job, but all the jokes are predicated on the idea that this is, above all, just very, very, inexplicably stupid. We can, and we should, be better than this. And the hosts stubbornly refuse to just give up and internalize as immutable all the reasons why we aren't.

You wouldn't know it to look at him, but Jon Stewart has accumulated "fuck you" money from his time on The Daily Show, among other things. I really hope the rest of them are doing the same. Because we need some figureheads who are able to say "fuck you" to a lot of authority figures right now without having to worry about how their family is going to survive the next month. John Oliver has HBO backing and I'm pretty sure Last Week Tonight has roughly equal budgets set aside for handling lawsuits and shoveling money at charity. Stephen Colbert has been insulting Donald Trump as hard as he possibly can since day one, and he just re-upped until 2023. Samantha Bee has her husband holding the camera to shoot her monologues out in the woods. 

They've all figured out how to produce their show over the internet, so at least we have something to watch in the After Times.

I really hope the neighbors run out of fireworks soon. Aside from not wanting the neighborhood to be literally on fire at any point, one of my housemates has a dog, and the dog has epilepsy, so this has been an interesting evening. Sorry about the fireworks, sorry about the camera, sorry about the country, sorry about the state of the world. Imma go find my Xanax. G'night.

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[oldwarriors-fireandwater]

Breezepelt, Nightcloud, and Crowfeather

I know I said these posts would be a criticism of issues within Warriors, but this post is going to be more of an analysis of their dynamic and a bit of a criticism on fandom attitude when it comes to these three. The debate around their relationship has been going on for years, and there's always been people who are staunchly on the side of “Breezepelt sucks”, “Crowfeather didn't do anything wrong”, “It was all Nightcloud’s fault”, or “Breezepelt had his reasons”, “Crowfeather sucks”, and “Nightcloud did nothing wrong”. So… here's my take! VERY long post ahead. This got.... pretty out of hand. I may do another post on just Breezepelt and his actions, because there’s kind of a ton to cover on both ends.

The trouble to begin with when it comes to their relationships is that a lot of it isn't shown directly to us and ends up as subtext or discussed outside of the book, such as Rock commenting on Nightcloud’s attitude or Kate saying she wants Breezepelt to be a great dad. And… honestly, it seems like a lot of the fans simply don't want to pay attention to that subtext.

On the surface, we’re shown a family of grumpy, irritable cats who don't seem to get along. They're all known for being sharp-tongued, and all seem pretty stubborn. Nightcloud is protective of Breezepaw and Breezepaw seems to resent a lot of other cats and is generally bad natured. And that's kind of… it. We don't see a lot of Breezepaw or his parents until the journey to the Tribe, and there's at least one book where he doesn't actually show up at all. So, again, a LOT of his arc his subtext and there’s only a couple of really notable scenes that actually speak to his character and relationship with Crowfeather.

Here's the thing where a lot of people will probably disagree. I think Breezepelt is a well developed character. Yes, on the surface level look we’re often given, he’s stubborn and rude, and that seems like all there is. But he IS given characterization—he has motives and insecurities, and is constantly grappling with his poor relationship with his father. His arc as a villain grows from that, as shown in a scene where Dark Forest cats fuel his hatred for Crowfeather and his Clan. I'll get more into this scene later.

Breezepelt isn't just some randomly mean cat. He's shown multiple times to long for his father to give him approval for once, or outright states that he believes WindClan hates him and wants him gone. This is shown while he’s still a young apprentice—it's not hard to deduce that his entire childhood is spent thinking his Clanmates hate him, which isn't healthy for anyone. No one other than Nightcloud actually encourages him at all, which… brings me to my next issue.

The fandom hates Nightcloud. I've never been able to entirely understand why. I mean, I get it, she’s also pretty rude and stubborn, but there are plenty of fan-favorites with similar personalities. Crowfeather still has plenty of people who actually like him. So why is Nightcloud hated?

The most common reason I see is that she’s actually the one to blame for Crowfeather and Breezepelt’s relationship, as well as the reason that she was a horrible mother. Which… what? There’s ONE line, during the battle with the Dark Forest, where Crowfeather claims Nightcloud make Breezepelt think that Crowfeather didn't like him. But… there's literally nothing in the text that supports any idea that Crowfeather was ever supportive of his son. In fact, it's very deliberately shown when they're traveling to the Tribe that he praises Lionpaw’s hunting while ignoring Breezepaw’s, which Breezepaw recognizes and points out. Nightcloud isn't present for this at all. We don't see her going “Hey, see that? Your dad should have praised you. He hates you.” Breezepaw works this out on his own and makes his own conclusions. Even if Nightcloud had said things before… it's not like Breezepaw was WRONG to think that it sucked his dad praised all the other apprentices and not his own son.

Also… Crowfeather has plenty to do with his bad relationships with his mate and son. The authors directly said that he resents Nightcloud because he doesn't actually love her. This is despite the fact that he took a mate to prove his own loyalty to WindClan. He chose to pursue a relationship with Nightcloud for his personal gain… and then loathed her for it.

Back to Breezepelt, and into his actions specifically. When he’s introduced in The Sight, we see him a couple of times, being a bit rude and irritable. There’s nothing much of importance until WindClan has trouble with dogs and Breezepaw returns to report there’s no damage to the barrier he was supposed to investigate. We get this scene:

It’s not all that major, but it does give us some information. Nightcloud is protective of Breezepaw, who is irritated when his father doubts him. This is one of those times when it’s less explicit, but sets up a brief moment that shows the tension between the family.

There’s not much of importance for some time. We see Breezepaw and Crowfeather every so often, being grumpy about one thing or another. Then, in Outcast, Breezepaw is forced to go on the journey to the Tribe, despite voicing he doesn’t want to. Before this, Tornear notes that Breezepaw has in been trouble lately for trying to find dogs and starting a fight with RiverClan. After being told he’s going, Breezepaw says he doesn’t want to. Hollypaw tells him he’ll come home, and Breezepaw says “How do you know that?”, and his tail droops as he continues with “I think my Clanmates just want to get rid of me.”

Then in Eclipse, the apprentices hunt. Breezepaw is being a grump as usual, and Hollypaw thinks to herself that “Crowfeather hadn’t acted glad to have him along”, and “He didn’t seem proud of anything Breezepaw did, unlike Brambleclaw, who made her feel like the best warrior in ThunderClan.” Then, there’s this:

Breezepaw wants his father’s praise desperately. Other apprentices notice that his father doesn’t ever praise him, and then Crowfeather says nothing to Breezepaw while complimenting Lionpaw’s catch. This angers Breezepaw, and serves to further reinforce the fact that Crowfeather never shows pride in his son and that Breezepaw is hurting because of it.

There’s not much more of Breezepelt in Power of Three until Hollyleaf reveals Leafpool’s secret in the last book. He is, of course, angry. Breezepelt plays a bigger role on OoTS, this time as a villain. I’ll address his arc as a villain in another post (as well as why I think it was so poorly done), but there is one scene I mentioned earlier that I want to touch on.

In Fading Echoes, Breezepelt is revealed to be training in the Dark Forest. Tigerstar, Brokenstar, and Darkstripe each goad him on. Tigerstar and Brokenstar both point out that Crowfeather is a traitor and never valued Breezepelt. In this scene, Breezepelt is described as looking “kit-like” as he listens to the Dark Forest cats talk about his father, and says they’re the only ones who understand that. Tigerstar is even described as being like “a snake mesmerizing his prey”.

This scene feels pretty important when it comes to his and Crow’s relationship. Breezepelt feels deeply that he’s been wronged by Crowfeather, and this seems to be his motivation for training in the DF. He’s also very explictly being manipulated, as the cats continue to remind him that Crowfeather is a bad father and Breezepelt needs to get revenge.

So... I’m not sure how exactly I mean to conclude this. Is Crowfeather abusive? Maybe not. He, however, is extremely negligent towards his son, seems to care little for his feelings, is known by everyone with a POV to never seem proud of Breezepelt, and eventually, he blames their bad relationship on Nightcloud... the cat he resented from the start. There is little to no textual evidence to support Nightcloud being a terrible parent. Aside from Heathertail, she is the only cat that encourages and defends Breezepelt. She’s never really shown to be “feeding lies to Breezepelt”, as Crowfeather himself suggested. All in all? I think it’s easy to say that Crowfeather was a dick of a dad and Nightcloud, despite popular belief... isn’t to blame for the downfall of his relationship with Breezepelt. He’s given multiple opportunities to praise and encourage Breezepelt, and he just doesn’t. Kate herself knows Crowfeather wasn’t a good dad - she’s commented on this before to say that she wants Breezepelt to be a great dad so he can “show Crowfeather how it’s done”.