#And I am do powerless to fix it because I have no ability to physically leave

[jeveuxmeplaindre]

./

[afterthefeast]

re lrb in any case to me astarion’s arc is less about regaining agency than becoming aware that he already has it and has to act like that. there's a distinction between agency as a material fact, ie having the ability in theory to make your own decisions and act on your desires, and the awareness of having that agency.

i'm no psychologist, but in my experience one of the most helpful steps in recovering from mental illness has been the awareness of my own agency ─ yes, sometimes I feel as though my life is completely run by my intrusive thoughts, but invariably getting out of that place has involved a recognition that ultimately, I am the one in control of my thoughts and I have the agency to work through them. that doesn't mean that it isn't hard, or time-consuming, and sometimes I don't succeed in the way I'd like, but nonetheless the ability to at least try is and always has been in my power.

in baldur's gate 3, your companions appear with varying degrees of agency (aside, obviously, from the tadpole they all share). they range from gale, whose current situation physically and magically restricts him but who at that moment in time doesn't have many other immediate restrictions on his day-to-day actions, to wyll, whose every move is watched by his abusive warlck patron.

nonetheless, your companions benefit from being shown that they not only could have agency at some point in the future, if they break their pact/shar's curse/free cazador/free orpheus/fix the infernal engine/get the crown of karsus, but they have agency now and must therefore use it responsibly. wyll is already to some degree aware of this, i think, even if it's only because he is so morally forthright ─ he's one of your companions who remains actively trapped by their abuser during the game, yet he refuses to kill karlach because he knows that would be wrong. even within his severely limited circumstances, he makes a choice, he demonstrates agency. in the shadowfell, shadowheart ─ a cult victim subjected to extreme psychological and religious abuse ─ has the choice whether or not to kill aylin, and can make it either way.

astarion, at the point at which you meet him, has just been given freedom for the first time in, essentially, his life. it's no surprise that he doesn't know what to do with thise newfound agency, and doesn't recognise it for what it is, given that he literally cannot remember ever having control over his own life. that's deeply tragic, but it doesn't erase the fact that he has control over the things he does during the game. those actions (for example, given i am still talking about that last rb, talking about the children he kidnapped and gave to cazador as though they were nothing), are things he has agency over and is responsible for. nonetheless, he acts as though he does not, lurching from one attempt to gain power to another (killing the druids to suggesting you use whatever's in moonrise to your advantage), because his own self-perception as someone completely powerless is so overwhelming. he must accrue power because that is the only way he can make sure he's safe and can never be hurt again. it's just that that self-perception is not completely accurate, he does have agency; if he makes choices that result in moral wrongs, those moral wrongs are his to bear.

i'm not getting at astarion here, I don't mean to imply that he's at fault for this attitude. it is, obviously, the natural response to 200 years of enslavement and abuse. kind of the whole point of the game, of all of your companions' quests, is that if people are hurt and abused often they will feel as though their only avenue towards power is to do the same to others. but being severely traumatised doesn't make his behaviour okay; he doesn't get a free pass to do whatever he wants because of cazador. you can like him, literally who am i to say otherwise (i like him too!), but don't just excuse everything he does or get rid of the most interesting parts of his character because you're unwilling to grapple with the fact that as it stands in the game, he's morally incredibly complex.

i think there's a tendency to assume that a character either must or must not have agency, and to present it as a binary, because for some reason it's used as a shorthand for moral culpability, when in reality the relationship between agency and culpability is significantly more complicated. i haven't really been getting into coerced choices here because that's a whole other kettle of fish (though i will give the necessary disclaimer that my stance on this is quite clearly influenced by the fact that deep down i'm a bit of a virtue ethicist). nonetheless, while this is my pop philosophy take and i'm not trying to impose this overall moral framework on people, i think it's pretty reasonable to say that lack of agency does not mean that what you did was not wrong.

implying that astarion is at fault here would be indicative of the very attitude I am trying to oppose ─ the idea that people either have agency or don't, and if they do bad things with agency they are evil, but if they don't have agency they are victims. astarion is both ─ he is the victim of horrendous, harrowing trauma and yet he has done bad things and in fact visited that same trauma upon other people. there's no escaping this, and i think it would be bad for astarion to just brush everything he did for cazador under the rug because he did it for cazador. he still did those things ─ he might not be culpable, i do not think he can be considered as such, but there's no way you go through all of that and don't feel guilty for it.

notably, if shadowheart kills aylin and wyll kills karlach (if he can? i actually don't even know if he can do that, but hypothetically), they are still responsible for that action and it was still morally wrong. they have to deal with that: part of dealing with it can be to recognise the coercion they were subject to, but the fact that they lacked agency doesn't just erase the wrong or mean it was never wrong in the first place. likewise, astarion becoming the ascended vampire is still obviously a terrible thing to happen for him and everyone else, and is in no way justified just because it might finally give him the sense of safety and control he craves. the whole point of that moment is that even when he is being retraumatised, when he has returned to the place and person that hurt him, astarion has the capacity to choose, and to choose the right thing. acting as though his trauma means he has absolutely no agency whatsoever and so never has to address the fact that he can, at various points, greatly fuck up, just removes one of the biggest themes of his whole character.

tldr: astarion has agency, one of his greatest challenges is realising that he does and that he must use it responsibly, and acting as though that is not the case does a disservice to his character and the story it is trying to tell. also it is deeply deeply boring. the end.

[sailormoonandme]

Usagi’s Evolution as a Healer Goddess

The other day I saw a post discussing the evolution of Usagi’s fuku and it occurred to me how Eternal Sailor Moon’s costume was her first Senshi uniform to ditch the tiara. 

That in turn led me to consider how that kind of makes Usagi weaker as it removes a very useful weapon for her. After all, if you include the movies, Usagi uses some variant of Moon Tiara Action in practically every season prior to Stars.

However, dwelling more upon it I realized how this tiny change was all too appropriate for Usagi’s character development.

Firstly, by supplanting the Tiara with her Moon planetary symbol, Eternal Sailor Moon more closely resembles both Queen Serenity, her own Princess Serenity form and her future self as Neo-Queen Serenity. 

Since all three are objectively more powerful than Usagi typically is as Sailor Moon I think the change emphasises how she has ‘levelled up’ in her Eternal form. When combined with the angel wings, Eternal Sailor Moon shifts Usagi visually closer to her future self as NQS, which in the anime is implied to be her most powerful incarnation.* It is almost as though the visual was communicating that the Divine Miracle Magic that she’d previously drawn upon as Princess Serenity in Classic-SuperS had now become ingrained in her standard Senshi form and thus was more accessible to her. 

It was in thinking of her previous efforts as Princess Serenity that I inevitably recalled her duel with Metalia/Beryl in episode 46 and realized that Eternal Sailor Moon was the first time since Classic that Usagi’s default attack was a healing  technique not a destructive one. 

Moon Healing Escalation was Usagi’s first healing technique but until Starlight Honeymoon Therapy Kiss (and it’s later upgrade, Silver Moon Crystal Power Kiss) it was also her only healing technique. 

Between regaining healing techniques and ditching her tiara/other destructive attacks/weapons, I think this represents her subtle growth in both her power and status. After all, it is a sad fact of life that it is easier to destroy something rather than fix it, thereby making the latter far more impressive.**

This skewing towards healing power rather than destructive power is also (arguably) thematically appropriate given the nature of Sailor Moon as a female power fantasy as (rightly or wrongly) the act of healing is typically coded as feminine. 

We can even take this further by examining things from the ‘opposite direction’ as it were.

Consider that in the climactic final episodes of Sailor Stars, Eternal Sailor Moon’s healing technique actually fails her when used against Galaxia. In later episodes, upon adopting her Princess Serenity form (complete with larger and more obviously angelic wings), she uses a sword to duel Galaxia.

Obviously a sword is, at least predominantly, an offensive weapon and can therefore be viewed as symbolic of aggression; let’s leave any Freudian or gendered interpretations alone for today. Her use of the sword is highly uncharacteristic (in the anime). Even her explicitly offencive weapons (like the Cutie Moon Rod or Spiral Moon Heart Rod) weren’t as clearly aggressive nor obviously violent. Desperate times calling for desperate measures? Perhaps, but we might also speculate it was her subconsciously reacting to grief. Not only can grief make you act in ways you wouldn’t normally, but a sword after all was a weapon wielded by her lover in his Prince Endymion incarnation. Her lover whom Usagi had just learned Galaxia had murdered. In other words, amidst her grief she reacts by going too hard in the other direction after healing her enemy proves ineffective.

However, when all is said and done the sword fails her.*** Ultimately is simply escalates the conflict by prompting Galaxia to become Chaos Galaxia and thereby make Usagi’s chances of victory all the slimmer. If we wished to stretch things, you could perhaps say that this is a commentary about how war and violence ultimately begets yet more war and violence.

Even if that is an over extrapolation though, it still served to emphasis the point that a sword is not befitting of Usagi, that she was doomed to lose if she continued to battle with destroying her enemy as the end goal.

In fact, her road to real victory begins when she not doesn’t attack Galaxia but makes it easier for herself to be attacked. In the end, Usagi doesn’t confront her most powerful enemy as the God-Queen of the future, the demi-goddess Princess of the distant past, the sailor-suited soldier of love and justice in the present, nor even a humble school girl.

She does it by literally stripping herself of all those things, of stripping herself of everything in fact.

Her weapons? Gone.

Her other items, like her Tiare? Gone.

Her comrades? Gone, and they’d be powerless against Galaxia anyway.

And finally, even her clothes? Gone!

Beyond the Silver Crystal (an outward visualization of her heart/soul) and the angel wings (symbolic of her role as a saviour) she is completely (but tastefully) naked.

Usagi visually and quite literally is more vulnerable  than she’s ever been, even more so than on her first night as Sailor Moon.

And yet this is Usagi at her actual most powerful.

It is her distilled to her absolute essence as a person, all other trappings removed. She’d just one person showing another they will categorically not harm them, that they bear them no malice and they have nothing to hide. That openness and compassion is what ultimately enables her to connect to the good within Galaxia and pull her away from the darkness that had corrupted her.

Usagi in this moment completely fulfilled her character arc.

·      In the Dark Kingdom arc Usagi destroys (or seals away depending upon your POV) Beryl/Metalia.

·      In the Hell Tree arc, Usagi resolves the over all plot via a healing technique (although it is functionally similar to a destructive attack). However, that only happens because the Hell Tree both instructs Usagi to do that and because it lets her. It is the equivalent of a sickly doctor instructing a nurse on what to do to make them better. The nurse might have the power but their agency as a healer is limited.

·      In the Black Moon arc, Usagi, with help, destroys Wiseman/Death Phantom. 

·      In the Death Busters arc, Usagi does save Hotaru and ‘purify’ her. However, like the Hell Tree, that was something Hotaru wanted. Additionally, her purification functioned as a way to heal the body of someone sick and who wanted to sacrifice themselves, not someone actually evil. The evil in question was Pharaoh 90 and it is presumed that Usagi destroyed him (although it might’ve been Hotaru or the pair of them together). 

·      Forgive me for skipping the Dead Moon Circus arc as Chibiusa is the real protagonist there, and Usagi’s role is chiefly as a rescuer. It therefore doesn’t really apply, although the Nehelenia mini-arc from Stars is a different story. There, Usagi was a healer again, but she did it with the help of her loved ones and with the aid of her Tiare device. Nevertheless, we can see by this point Usagi’s capacity as a healer heroine had been gradually growing until we get to the battle with Galaxia.

By the end of series, Usagi has successfully healed Galaxia and it is neither with the aid of her comrades, nor with the power of a weapon or device, nor with any instructions from her ‘patient’ or any other third party.

Additionally, Galaxia (unlike Hotaru) wasn’t someone’s who was saved from a noble self-sacrifice or had a physical ailment that needs to be addressed. In Galaxia’s case, her very soul had lost it’s way and become corrupted. She had lost who she was supposed to be and her purpose in life had been perverted.****

When combined with how powerful Galaxia always was, how Chaos and the Star Seeds empowered her further, Usagi’s victory here cannot be understated.

Her ‘patient’ was more powerful than all her other adversaries, was in need of more healing than her other ‘patients’ and was more resistant to being healed. Not to mention, since she’d directly murdered her beloved friends (and indirectly aborted her future daughter), Usagi would’ve been forgiven for not  even trying to salvage Galaxia 

And yet, with no weapons, no backup and just the power of her heart and soul basically, Usagi succeeded. 

After Stars the idea that Usagi could heal the entire planet after a global catastrophe and reshape it into a fairy tale crystalline utopia was all too believable.

What’s healing one planet when her ability to empathise had already healed a whole galaxy?

Who needs a tiara to reduce evil to dust when you can simply convince evil to be good?

*This is arguably symbolized by baby Hotaru’s vision of NQS transforming into Eternal Sailor Moon in episode 1 of Stars.

In fact, we might argue that a low-key subplot running through all of Stars (both the Nehelenia and Galaxia portions of it) is gradually transitioning Usagi closer to the person she is destined to become as Neo-Queen Serenity, hence why the first episode features the most explicit reference to her fate as Queen since R. 

**Personally I am an atheist, but nevertheless I and others like me can grasp why  deities in most major religions through history weren’t simply capable of mass scale destruction, but also of essentially manipulating reality to create  things too.

By that same token, it’s little surprise that perhaps the widest spread religious figure in history was Jesus Christ who rarely (if ever) engaged in aggression or destructive acts, predominantly employing divine healing powers.

I suspect the attraction of such figures to human beings lies in the fact that on some level we know that, given the right time and resources, we mere mortals would be capable of destroying anything. Given time it’s all but certain we will develop the technology to even destroy planetary bodies. On the flipside, I think we also intuitively grasp that  reversing  such damage, of reattaching a limb, of stanching bleeding, etc, is far more difficult if not impossible. Hence we attributed the ability to do such things to larger than life Divine Entities.

*** Now that I think of it, it’s also poignant that Usagi tries and fails to defeat Galaxia with a sword when we take Sailor Uranus into consideration. 

Uranus is of course associated with her weapon, the Space Sword and, like Usagi, tried and failed to use such a weapon against Galaxia.

Giving Uranus a sword is symbolically appropriate given her role as the leader of the more aggressive branch of the Sailor Team. Having her fail against Galaxia and Usagi consequently fail by in some way ‘mimicking her tactics’ is equally symbolically appropriate. Not only because of their ideological conflict in Sailor Moon S but also their tensions in Sailor Stars itself. In both situations Usagi’s more open, less aggressive, ideology was ultimately proven correct. 

Thus in using a sword against Galaxia it represented how Usagi was always doomed to fail by taking the aggressive/destructive route and how she was arguably not being true to herself in that moment. 

****It’s not to dissimilar to Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker now that I think about it. 

[cherriesink]

Takeuchi - Murmurs

Murmurs are snippets of character reflection earned by increasing Explore Points during Exploration. They usually include 6-7 monologues about other characters and 3-4 monologues about things important to the specific character.

These lines are taken straight from the English translation of the game, so fair warning of bad grammar.

About Yatsufusa “According to my statistics, older vampires tend to rank above C-Class... Presumably, D-Class and under end up dying. 

But it’s a shame with Yatsufusa. Because he is a C-Class that has all the potentials to fight in a battle. Yet, he cannot demonstrate that in a different way than Kurusu can’t. 

It seems he occasionally uses the umbrella I gave him... He’ll end up hurting himself if he carelessly swings a sword since he has never trained for it. And he will break it if he uses it with all his strength. I can’t let a civilian hold a sword anyway. So, an umbrella was the best solution.

...Oh! I have an exciting idea that improves his umbrella. Haha, this will help him even if he’s not a good fighter...”

About Kurusu “Kurusu is very intriguing. He is the strongest vampire in Japan! How is he different from other vampires?! Unfortunately, current science does not allow me to analyze blood at a micro-level... In that case, I must invent a machine that can. I’d love to improve Kurusu’s abilities from an A-Class to S-Class and above through my inventions. 

If Colonel Maeda who is a human can defeat unranked vampires, then that means dynamic visions can be improved through training. This then leads me to the question- do I use a drug or machinery to improve his speed and muscle strength...

But Kurusu must improve his speed of judgement more than anything. That, I cannot help him no matter how great I am. It probably comes from his kindness. But, oh well. I’ll let Colonel Maeda deal with that.”

About Maeda “Colonel Maeda is certainly an intelligent person. A true rationalist and finds the best course of action in an instant- because how else can someone decide to amputate their right arm after being bitten by a vampire before the poison enters their system? The surgery went well because he was in luck with a series of events. His wound was a clean-cut, he was able to stop the bleeding, and the fact that Code Zero has plenty of blood supplies for us vampires...

I’d say he was still lucky to survive despite having an aftereffect due to hemorrhage of the heart. I must say he is an astounding human being since his combat skills are still the same where he is capable of beating vampires to death with his prosthetic arm.

Ah- that reminds me that he asked me to fix his arm. What next functions should I add next?”

About Yamagami “Yamagami is the best to experiment on. I wonder what will happen... if I can make him strong enough so he can fight with my inventions? Alas, the greatest assassin will be born! We vampires cannot detect ones that rank below us- they appear like an ordinary person to us.

Yamagami on the other hand is capable of detecting every vampire out there since he is unranked. Which makes him the best candidate to become an assassin sneaking up on vampires from behind! I must conduct every experiment on Yamagami then! It will become a revolution for us vampires if the experiment succeeds.

However, there is just one problem... Yamagami’s personality is not ideal to become an assassin...”

About Suwa “We did not have any vampires that specialized in combat at the time when Code Zero was established. That is why we induced Suwa into our team. I knew the moment I heard the rumor about a vampires that hunts other vampires that he will join our unit.

One of the reasons was that I heard he was alive even before the Edo period... He must be clever if he managed to survive hundreds of years since it is not easy for vampires to survive such a long period.

Secondly, we carry the same goal if he enjoys hunting vampires, whatever his reasons may be. Back then, vampires in the Imperial Capital shivered when hearing “Vampire Hunter.” It’s very promising if that “Vampire Hunter” joins Code Zero.

His body was of a child’s, so his arms were too short for Japanese swords. That is why I made him two daggers.”

About Defrott “I wonder if Defrott will allow me to study his blood... We don’t have any blood samples of S-Class vampires nor any data yet. But he’s not the type that goes with “Please” and “Thank you.” After all, I do not want to die either.

...All I want is to conduct my research peacefully. No need to panic or rush. It’ll become available someday. I can get close to the birth of vampires- if I can learn about S-Class vampires. When, why, and how did we derive...? The only thing we know is that the oldest vampires on the recond spoke ancient Greek... Were they the first? Or did vampires exist long before that, but the records got lost...

It is a mystery how humanity began, but it is even a bigger mystery how vampires started. Was it a strain that occurred during the evolution process. Or mutation... Some call it evil or the devil’s doing. However, I do not believe in unscientific things.”

About Tenman-ya “Come to think of it, our relationship with Tenman-ya has been going on for quite a long time. Considering Colonel Maeda’s personality, there is no way he will miss a vampire’s nest like them...

But perhaps they’re untouched because of the amount of information they’ve accumulated about vampires since the Edo period and the fact that they’ve been confining vampires that are in the Imperial Capital. 

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a give-and-take relationship since they refer me to wholesales to sell my drugs I invented. The vampires referred through Tenman-ya are all clean and diligent. Some practice Western medicine like me so it helps. 

It appears vampires fight all year round when just looking at Code Zero, but the one that avoid battle are the ones that live long. Tenman-ya supports those vampires.”

About the Experiments “There are three ways to kill a vampire. One, have them fight a vampire that outdo them. Very primitive method. Two, make them powerless through science. What we are currently doing. Three, obtain strength that overthrows higher rank vampires through science. This- is our homework.

Creating heavy firearms is easy, but we are dealing with swift subjects... Even unranked vampires may be described as “...at lightning speed” to an ordinary person. 

Thus, I am working on a drug that improves our physical ability... I mixed some into Yamagami’s food the other day, and the results were quite surprising. It was as if he got drunk. I thought I developed a drug that makes the world seem slow, but Yamagami said “The world is spinning! You blockhead!”

My work is trial and error. Well, I do have plenty of time.”

About the Past “I never would’ve imagined that I would end up being a serviceman when I was just an ordinary human being working at a pharmaceutical company. It all happened when the military authorities asked me to research a certain blood sample. I accidentally exposed it to sunlight without knowing that it was vampire blood. The flask exploded from the boiling blood...

Luckily, I did not die from the poison and gained a brain that never degenerates. It was pure coincidence, but I was lucky indeed. I can come close to the secrets of this world with an eternally young brain. 

I don’t mind not being able to walk under the sun. I was in the lab day and night in the first place. Not feeling time or seasonal changes aren’t important to me. I don’t care much about food either. 

Research is my life! I am the happiest vampire on Earth!”

About the Side Job “Code Zero hardly has any budget for R&D... But we aren’t a special unit that simply gathers vampires for combat. Weak, domestic ones can benefit from my drugs and put up a decent fight with the ones ranking above them. I believe- that is the purpose of our unit.

Colonel Maeda couldn’t care less about the name of the unit. So I named it “Zero”- implying “Starting everything from zero.”

Either way, you need money to experiment. That is why I sell my inventions beneficial to humans to department stores and medical institutions made in the process of my vampire studies. The profit I make all goes to my research. Every purchase helps us foster future vampires.”

[moonknight-ep5]

Hello there! You mentioned in a recent post that you headcanon/interpret Caleb as having DID, and that thought never occurred to me but it is? So good? And I would like to hear more about it, if you have more to say on the matter?

i'd love to! this is a long one haha.. (@anonym-potato)

disclaimer

please note that i am only theorizing, and that i am a system host myself, so don't cancel me. also: please don't tag this post as anything relating to the DID/OSDD community in your reblogs! thanks!

key

for future reference in this post, i thought i'd need a key of some kind.

red = personal experiences

orange = scientific evidence

green = assumptions based on canon lore

blue = historical context

pink = minis

headcanons/interpretations

i'm basing this off of the assumption that bren and caleb alone are a system, but there could always be more.

• bren is caleb's alter, despite being the born identity. in my system, host-switches (the act of the title of "host" being given to another alter through constant fronting or a retire of position) are fairly common, one happening every few years. it's completely possible that caleb, through constant fronting (or forced fronting), has adopted the title of "host" from bren, leaving bren nearly powerless to take it back for himself.

• he went to the sanitorium for having DID, not for being insane. throughout history, it has been said that people that were seen as less than neurotypical were sent to asylums and sanitoriums (there's a difference!!) to be "fixed" and to churches to be "exorcised." in d&d, you play as characters in medieval times, where this practice was most prevalent. to medical professionals at the time, seeing a switch of any caliber could yield "unstable" behavior, which could've lead to his hospitalization. maybe he was insane when he left, but he definitely wasn't when he went in.

the eleven years. the time spent in the sanitorium is entirely blocked off from his mind, and nearly impossible, even with caleb's eclectic memory, to recall. DID has few requirements, yes, but arguably one of the most important symptoms is dissociative amnesia. this amnesia occurs during high stress situations that can constitute as trauma or while one isn't fronting, both of which are caused by dissociation (directly or indirectly). for the purposes of these theories, i'd say it's a mixture of the two.

the "cure." while caleb was recalling his time at the hospital, he remembered that there was a woman that helped him get rid of the "cloudiness" from his mind. DID is a trauma based disorder caused by amnesia. "getting rid" of his trauma would cause amnesia. keeping his trauma would cause amnesia. it's a paradox with no happy ending. as a result, all the woman got rid of, in my opinion, was his vegetative state. this is why there are still times where you could conclude that caleb is still unstable. there's many of these moments in c2 so i'd rather not sift through them all.

• DID and its causes. intense, repeated traumatic experiences during childhood/early adolescence (around 7-11, with a few years error) causes DID. according to the timeline of his backstory, he was approached by the representatives of the soltryce academy at around 9 years old, which means he started working with ikithon at 10. this puts him just under the threshold of the most apparent developmental stage for this disorder.

• "caleb widogast" seems like such a fake name, not even with alias standards.

• caleb has been seen dissociating for hours at a time. if you're new to the program: after fights where he gets a hdywtdt on a humanoid while using pyromancy, caleb has to make a wisdom saving throw to avoid dissociation. this dissociation could last for hours, whether it be active dissociation (blankness while doing menial tasks) or full dissociation (unable to move, talk, or think). only something intense could snap him out of it, whether it be a slap of the face or a kiss on the head (that scene lives rent free in my head).

• some of caleb's attributes are changed from time to time. caleb likes a lot of things: bread, the scraggly hobo life, books, and numbers, to name a few, though there are times where some of these likes get shifted into obsessions, where caleb likes spellcasting, but bren loves the idea of staying up late and working on a spell with no sleep (and that counts as a point of exhaustion for both of them, not just one, because they share the body and therefore have to take care of it). it's not either of their faults, its just how they were conditioned during the time of their trauma.

• caleb has canonically talked to himself in the third person.

• constant polymorphs and shapeshifting alters. in my system, there is a veth fictive that can shapeshift between "veth" and "nott." she has admitted to using this ability to stay "front-stuck" (where an alter physically cannot switch out) because she can't switch when out of her "true form." now think of it like this: caleb and polymorph, especially in recent history. there's a tag going around, reading "*polymorphs into a creature to stupid to be depressed*" in reference to caleb's now constant use of the spell. it could just be us, but its still something to think about.

• there has been a "switch" in canon. i mentioned in the original post that there was a scene in canon where caleb has been seen switching, as a result of a confrontation from trent ikithon and the cerberus assembly. (don't mind the watermark im not rich)

this is a switch as a result of an auditory trigger. the hearing of one's name, a song, or even a random word adversely connected to trauma can be considered an auditory trigger. hearing bren's name, especially from trent, caused caleb to get immediately defensive and angry. when the camera pans back to caleb after everyone's reactions, you see him hyperventilating slightly with a face of worry, shut his eyes tight, and open them with a slack face to get a sense of his surroundings. he also leans near beau, someone who he could ask for context or reason, but then thinks against it as he remembers: they don't know.

[flowerslut]

happy whumptober 

I’ll be following the lead of @volturialice in doing however many of these as I can in a Very Random order throughout the month. They will all be painfully unedited and posted as they’re written. Tonight’s prompt is a ‘canon’-divergent piece for my Call of the Night readers. (MAJOR SPOILERS for those who haven’t finished CotN)

No 16. A TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY Forced to Beg | Hallucinations | Shoot the Hostage

Rating: T for allusions to violence Words: 2,238 Summary: The Protectors don’t make it to the clearing in time.

Borrowed Time

There isn’t a clock in the room.

There’s nothing, really. Not a bed—there would be no purpose for such a thing—or a chair—again, it would be meaningless—or even a window. Not one leading indoors or out. There’s a tiny vent on the ceiling, circulating air he doesn’t need to breathe, and there’s an intercom next to the black-painted door. The intercom is as pointless as the vent, in Jasper’s opinion. He hasn’t had a visitor in days.

Or maybe it’s been months.

He doesn’t quite think it’s been that long; his thirst isn’t bothering him as much as it usually does on a regular, everyday basis. (Or at least, he doesn’t think it is.) Which means he has to have fed recently. Which means someone has brought him blood. (Probably. He doesn’t think he’s hallucinated his meals.)

It doesn’t even frustrate him that he doesn’t remember. Or that he can’t tell what is real.

But there isn’t a clock in his room.

Sure, it won’t exactly help him orient himself. Knowing whether it is nine AM or six PM makes no difference in the grand scheme of things, but it may help settle him more.

His vision shimmers and blurs slightly. Jasper does what he’s done for days (or weeks or months) now: he stares straight ahead, unable to even brace himself, as the hallucination seizes him.

He doesn’t mind them anymore. After all, he’s been powerless to stop their onslaught. Just in the same way he’s powerless to control anything he does while they take over. It’s a strange feeling. He’s slowly becoming accustomed to the way his mind and body act while the world around him—a world that he’s not entirely sure is real or not—morphs and shifts.

He’s barely aware of the way he screams sometimes. At nothing, at everything.

It’s as if he’s been split in two. He is Jasper. He knows that much. But whatever hold Skye has put on him—whatever sickness she’s afflicted his mind with—has forced him, or the essence of who he is, to retreat far back into the recesses of his mind. When he’s able to think coherent thoughts he wonders if he’ll ever be able to make it back out of the pit he’s dug for himself in his own mind. In the area of his subconsciousness that is still his.

He’s partly aware of how he sees Maria in front of him. She’s dangling something, trying to draw his attention. He focuses on the detached limb she’s waving in front of his face, as if taunting him, and instantaneously he recognizes Alice’s skinny wrist.

He lunges at Maria but when his hands squeeze around her throat suddenly she’s not in his grasp and he’s spinning and hissing and screaming.

“You did so good,” he hears her voice purr as he desperately tries to find her in this room. “You did everything I needed you to.” Her accented voice is as high and clear as it’s ever been. 

The part of his mind that is still sane struggles to be heard. She isn’t here. She’s lying. Alice is fine. Alice is okay. Focus. Ignore it.

But Jasper growls and lunges and yells for so long that eventually it’s been so long since he heard Maria’s voice in his ear that he doesn’t know how long he’s been screaming for.

And there isn’t even a clock in the room.

His body calms down as his mind begins to agonize over the woman he loves.

Alice. He wants to cry out for her. Where are you?

But he’s terrified to even attempt to speak the words out loud. He isn’t confident in his body’s ability to obey an order from the part of his mind that still belongs to him. And even if he could find his tongue and utter that two-syllable name he’s petrified that Maria’s voice will answer in reply.

Dead. She’s dead and you killed her. Those are the words she would say. Those are the words he’s heard her say in his mind for days or weeks or months now. Even before he’d been confined to this room they were the words he’d been haunted with. From the first nightmare Skye gifted him with to the most vivid hallucinations that seize him in this tiny, inescapable room.

He’s not entirely sure where he is. He knows he’s not in the clutches of Maria or her radicals any longer. The only solid memory he’s been able to form in the past few months is of the night his comrades took him back into their custody.

The smell of funeral pyres burning had registered in his senses before his airways had been cut off with a strong arm wrapping around his neck, ready to pluck his head from his shoulders at a moments notice.

He would’ve recognized Emmett’s signature hold anywhere and would have cried with relief if he’d been able to inhale enough air to complete the motion, but he was instead stuck frozen. After an unknown amount of time being subjected to Maria’s manipulation and Skye’s torture, he had nearly forgotten what it felt like to see, and to feel, and to breathe the air around him.

He’d forgotten what it felt like to exist in the real world.

With the way Emmett was holding him, Jasper’s head was stuck upward, staring as smoke filtered it’s way into the sky, the dark gray slowly blending into the blackness and dimming the stars above.

“Maria,” he managed to choke the word out with the little bit of air still left in his lungs. Kill her, he screamed mentally, just in case Edward was nearby.

And he was. Not two seconds later the sound of Edward’s distraught voice carried across the clearing.

“She’s dead,” Edward spoke monotonously, and Jasper couldn’t figure out why he didn’t sound relieved to be saying such a thing. Instead of relief, waves of sorrow and dread rolled over him as Edward continued uttering the words, over and over again, as if in disbelief. “She’s dead.”

He heard Bella crying—of course Bella was nearby, that was probably how they’d momentarily freed his mind from Skye’s hold—and then suddenly the haze was back, and he was lost to the nightmares once more.

Jasper doesn’t know how long ago that was, but it had been far too long.

Perhaps they’re still searching for a more permanent solution to his predicament. After all, Bella can’t linger by his side and shield him for the rest of their eternity. Perhaps there isn’t a solution. Perhaps this is their solution: to keep him locked away.

In all of his past research into Alice’s records, he’d never once given a thought about how a vampire asylum might operate if such a thing existed. But here he is, locked away with his mind wrapped up tight inside a snare, at the mercy to the lunacy that owns him now.

Time passes, because it always does, but Jasper doesn’t have a clock, so Jasper doesn’t know how long it is before suddenly he’s on his knees, inhaling what feels like his first breath of air in years.

He’s caught himself somehow and spends several seconds staring at the backs of his scarred hands. What he’s seeing is real, and he can just barely hear the sound of very muffled voices from beyond the door of wherever it is he’s being kept.

He’s scared to speak but after a few seconds, when the clarity doesn’t subside, he calls out as loudly as he dares. “Hello?”

His voice isn’t raspy but he knows that it isn’t carrying beyond the door. “Hello?” He calls louder this time, and the quiet sounds coming from somewhere outside of this room silence completely.

The lack of noise nearly drives him back into madness instantly.

“Please, don’t go. I need to know what—where am I? What’s going on?” He’s begging before he can control himself. On his hands and knees he pleads to whoever is listening in on his desperation, feeling like the shell of a man. “Please tell me you can fix this,” he raises his voice even louder as he calls out. “Please, I just want to talk to somebody.” Along with the clarity, he realizes something. “Bella? Are you there?”

The intercom clicks on.

“Hey, Jasper. You gotta stand up and back up or I can’t come in.” 

It’s Emmett.

Jasper is so relieved to hear his voice that in a millisecond he’s off of the ground and as far away from the door as he can physically be in the tiny room.

“Now, I don’t want you attacking me or whatever, so you’ve gotta turn around and put your hands on the back of your head. Sorry man.”

Before Emmett’s even apologizing for the request Jasper has already done what has been asked of him. He doesn’t even care—and it makes sense; Jasper isn’t positive that he won’t attack Emmett—he’s so full of hope and relief that he would jump up and down like a fool if it meant he’d be in the company of someone familiar for any measure of time.

Jasper can hear more muffled noises before the intercom clicks on again. There’s a long sigh. “I know,” the first two words aren’t directed at Jasper, but the rest are. “You’re not allowed to turn around while I’m in there, okay?”

“Okay, I won’t.” Jasper quickly assures the man. He’s so antsy to be in Emmett’s presence. He has thousands of questions and he’s praying his comrade—the closest thing to a friend he has in this world—will be able to help him understand what’s happening.

The hiss of the door opening causes a feeling of such pure relief that Jasper knows Emmett feels it the instant he’s in the room. But when Jasper doesn’t feel the door close behind Emmett, he knows something is off.

“Emmett?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

Hearing his voice in person brings emotion straight to the surface and suddenly Jasper is afraid he might start to cry. As he struggles to reign in his emotions, he laces his fingers together behind his head and presses his forehead against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut tightly.

“Where is everyone?” Jasper asks. “Bella is here, right? That’s why I can talk to you. I know that much. Is Skye dead? Is that why I can’t break free from whatever is wrong with me?”

“Bella’s around,” Emmett confirms, his words short. “Skye is alive, too.”

“So she can fix this?”

There’s a pause in which Jasper feels his stomach tighten. “We think so.” But Emmett’s words sound strange.

“Alice?” Jasper asks, still afraid that Maria will appear before him and start taunting him again. The fear just drives him to ask again, but louder, and with more urgency. “Is she here? Is she around?”

“Yeah,” Emmett’s voice cracks as he takes a few steps closer.

“I—can I talk to her?” He hates how childish he sounds. At the same time he hardly cares. He needs Alice more than he needs his sanity. Without her, he doesn’t even know what the purpose of fighting his way out of this haze even is.

“Yeah, you can.”

“I—” It only takes Jasper a few seconds to realize he can’t sense Alice in the vicinity; her emotional climate is so distinct that he would be able to sense her anywhere. Perhaps even in a hallucination. But with that thought, he isn’t so sure. “Do you have to call her? Where is she?”

“You can talk to her soon.” Emmett is much closer now, and every one of Jasper’s instincts has begun to alarm. He wants to turn around so badly and face his almost-friend. He wants to see a face that doesn’t belong to a hallucination and he wants more than anything to hold Alice in his arms once more.

“How soon?” Jasper demands, a crazed desperation beginning to take hold as he feels Emmett stop directly behind him. “I have to talk to her. I need to know she’s okay. You were right, Emmett. I love her. I need to tell her; I haven’t even told her yet.”

Emmett has to interrupt his escalating tirade. “You can tell her in a second,” and he hears Emmett shift slightly. With relief Jasper relaxes, anticipating the inevitable phone conversation that will transpire soon. Emmett must be pulling up Alice’s number because there’s a couple of seconds of silence before he speaks again. “You did really good, Jasper. You helped us finish things.”

“The war is over?” Jasper lets more of his weight rest forward and against the wall as Emmett’s words seep into his bones. “Maria is dead?”

“It’s all over buddy. Everything is going to be okay now.”

“And I’ll be able to talk to Alice soon.”

“Yeah,” and as Emmett’s voice cracks again, Jasper feels emotion begin to stir in him, too. “Real, soon, Jasper.”

“Okay,” Jasper whispers, relaxing as he hears Emmett shift his stance once more. “Okay.”

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

There is no clock in the room. Jasper Whitlock isn’t given a time of death. But time continues to pass nonetheless. The future comes, unseen. Ashes are intermingled with ashes. Love reunited in death and laid to rest together.

There is no clock in the room. But time does not stop.

[miniaturephantomprincess]

You know those times, when your thoughts go flying and your own headcanon gets thrown into an (alternate) bad ending scenario?

Definitely guilty here... ^^‘

The bad ending

„You do realize this is quite your own fault right?“

Neptune came to hate this voice so much during the last weeks and months. Her fists were already trembling by the bare sight of her opponent, while she simply refused to believe any of those words Venus’ whispered to her right now. However, the former Senshi of love was far more successful in this than Neptune would have liked. While manipulating Haruka had been fun but far from any real challenge, Venus had come to particularly enjoyed teasing and driving Neptune over the edge. It had ended painfully for herself on more than one occasion but damn, it had been worth every single moment. Haruka had been easy. There was so much anger, so much hatred for herself buried that close beneath the surface. A small little push and pull, that’s all that had been necessary for the nice little chaos to unfold and things quite naturally following their way. Neptune on the other hand… even Venus had to admit it was way different with her. The senshi of the sea was much more complicated, her feelings much more concealed, but oh how her strength had proven to be her greatest weakness. It shouldn’t have surprised her but still, even Venus found the irony behind this strangely amusing.

„I actually have to thank you, you know.“

Venus grinned as she carefully followed the impact every single one of her words caused. Oh, how she enjoyed having Neptune on this point. Her careful held facade breaking away slowly, giving way for the much more pleasant feelings of hate and anger Venus feed on for her own joy.

„I don’t think I could have done all of this myself. Not that quickly anyway. You did help quite a bunch you know. Poor Haruka. In the end, you broke the very rest of her spirit.“

Venus felt the by now nearly familiar pressure on her chest, rapidly and mercilessly growing as Neptune used her powers, however, none of this stopped her lips from forming into a cold and deeply satisfied smile. Despite everything, this was her victory. They both knew it was.

„Shut up!“

The roaring depths of the sea sparked back through Neptune’s eyes right before a wild hit of energy knocked Venus off her feet. Neptune’s attack sent her crushing against the nearest wall, the force breaking at least two of her rips in the process. Nevertheless, Venus laughed out loud.

„Well, look at who cannot bear the truth!“

Venus coughed, the sharp pain exploding at her side, but the so-called senshi of love grinned. She bathed in the sea goddess’ hatred. In that guilt cracking up Neptune’s soul and seeping through this raging sea of emotions. To Venus, this felt like the most exquisite wine or perfume and it was worth each and every risk she just took.

“Come on! Tell me I am wrong.”

Quite some dance with the devil this was, but Venus had not come this far to let this end without a little bit of fun.

“She asked you not to keep her away, didn’t she? Her only wish not to be a useless bystander on the battlefield. And you...? Tell me again, what did you do exactly?”

Venus never actually was surprised to find her body lacking the ability to move. She knew that part of Neptune’s powers all too well by now. She could also tell what probably would follow, but Venus never actually intended to give Neptune time to call upon the crushing waters of the sea to rise deadly from beneath her feet.

“Don’t worry.”

The pressure on her chest made it more impossible to breathe. It literally cut off her breath and caused Venus to cough. Her mocking words no longer escaped her as easy as before, but nevertheless, she pushed on. The blonde tasted her own blood in her mouth and fought to take her next breath, yet she knew in only a moment she would have won everything there was.

“I fixed your mess.”

The wicked grin on Venus’ face quite successfully drove Neptune mad. She would end this. Here and now. Once and for all.

But along with those last mocking words came a change of atmosphere that made Neptune freeze. The very air seemed to have changed and shifted. The wind picked up and with it came a far too familiar brush not only on her skin but on her soul.

“Haruka...”

Venus forgotten, Neptune turned, instinctively knowing where to look for her partner. Standing several meters across and away from her was Uranus, strong and mighty, her presence so radiant Neptune actually shivered. The aura of her partner choked her and she painfully realized how long it had been since she felt the soldier of the sky embracing her full potential and power like this.

“You know what to do.”

Neptune didn’t even turn as Venus summoned another portal to disappear, maybe to watch in all safety the confrontation that was about to happen. Neptune could not care less about their former leader, retreating once more cowardly and fleeing from their battle. It could not be more insignificant when it was Uranus who caught Neptune’s every attention.

It had been weeks... no months...

Months since Haruka had vanished.

No... since Michiru’s very own actions had driven her away...

Since then, since she had found the crash-site of Haruka’s bike and all traces were grown cold, Michiru had pushed herself to her own breaking point and limits, both physically and mentally, with her powers finally growing (or was it breaking?) to their fullest potential.

Vision after vision she had witnessed Haruka suffer…or get tortured…

As vague as her visions could be, the pictures they brought to her this time always remained crystal clear. Right to the point where Michiru, for all she knew, felt like she too was with them back at that chamber of tortures. A powerless bystander to Haruka’s cries, her screams…to every damage inflicted on her bruised and broken body as well as to her spirit.

At times, Michiru was sure Mars knew she was there as well, for she could feel a grin behind the searing flames occasionally appearing on the edge of her mind. For some reason, they both shared this strange connection to this realm of visions. And Michiru was sure the only reason Mars allowed her to stay was because the senshi of fire knew to have Michiru watch her lover’s endless tortures would do way more damage, than burning down Michiru’s thoughts.

It never made a difference anyway.

No matter how many times Michiru returned back to this living hell, no matter how many times her visions either overtook her out of nowhere, or she forced her mirror to do her bidding, she never got closer to actually find Haruka or reveal her location.

The prickling on her skin, the actual shift of the wind should have warned her, but Neptune cast away all instincts of the warrior inside her because they could not matter less.

She still managed to dodge Uranus’ attack, close as it was, but never rose her arms to send the roaring sea down at her attacker in response. Instead, Neptune’s thoughts, ever so calculated even within the fiercest battle, grew blank.

Too many things she wanted to say... too much to apologize for...

But there she was, staring back at eyes clouded by a dark and restless storm, that did not even seem to recognize her and her own regrets and guilt bound her tongue, as she looked at Uranus with disbelief.

„How pathetic.“

Uranus‘ voice was as cold as her appearance and demeanor. It did not bear any emotion other than the ever so small sign of growing impatience.

The senshi of the skies took one single step towards Neptune’s direction and with it came another set of attacks Neptune barely managed to avoid. Uranus always had been fast. Way faster than her and it never took long for the raging winds to cut deep into her skin. Those blows she reflected with her mirror didn’t make much of a difference, leaving Neptune bruised and shaking, way too soon for her own liking.

„This is a waste of my time.“

Again grey, empty eyes looked down on her and if Neptune recognized anything it was the displeased hint marking the end of Uranus‘ patience.

This wasn’t the challenge she had hoped for. Too easy. Too weak. It was a mere mystery to her how no one before her had not already silenced the disobedient sailor of the seas. But it wasn’t her place to question the princess‘ orders. She had been sent her with a clear mission and order she planned to execute without further toying around or wasting her time.

A sudden change of energy washed over Neptune senses, a spark, bright and clear, that spiked the second Uranus across from her summoned her sword.

„You got it back..-“

Neptune watched the scene in front of her utterly puzzled. Seeing the mighty talisman appear in her partner’s hands shocked her in a way she never had expected. It took the ground from underneath her feet and Neptune never grasped the moment Uranus charged at her without further hesitation. Instead, visions flickering in front of her eyes robbed her of the reality. Fast and hectic fragments, all tinted dark and red drilled themselves into Neptune’s consciousness.

Flashes of chains…of pain and suffering…a broken pledge of obedience…the cover of nothing…of strength..and purpose…and power born anew…

Neptune choked, both from the impact of her visions rendering her frozen, as well as the force of the blade knocking out of breath.

„Does it mean, it’s gone..?“

Neptune barely noticed it, the searing blade cutting through flesh and bone, nor the pain exploding from her abdomen to quickly cover and wreck every last part of her body.

„All your suffering and pain....“

Neptune blinked. Her vision blurred from sudden tears and pain, neither of which she could differentiate at this point. But still, the strangest kind of smile flickered across the dying soldiers face.

„I-I … I am glad…-“

She tried to raise a bloodstained hand. Just once... just one last time...but another thrust cut off her words, robbed her of her breath.... her pain...

Her last moment, gone just like that...

The transformation of the warrior vanished, leaving behind the body of the young woman who suddenly appeared way more fragile. The storming sea gone and vanished from deep blue eyes, turquoise locks torn and tattered while the mirror shattered on the ground.

A broken relic to prove the execution of her order.

A useless thing the princess told her to keep, without Uranus ever grasping the reason or intention why.

[bestworstcase]

in the wake of once a handmaiden i’ve seen a few posts drawing comparisons between the final shot of cass in the ruined throne room and either (1) varian at the end of queen for a day or (2) varian and the saporians in the throne room mid-rapunzel’s return. which... sure, i guess, but to me both of those feel a bit superficial, as parallels go. they’re like the “hu hu hu gothel said ‘now i’m the bad guy’ and so did cass (but the context and meaning is completely different)!” of comparing varian’s villain arc to cassandra’s SO INSTEAD!—

the plot of handmaiden is best understood, imo, as kind of moral argument between cassandra and zhan tiri. cassandra’s side of the argument is “i am not a bad person; i did bad things, but i can fix it.” zhan tiri’s side of the argument is “you can try to fix it, but you will fail, because just like me, you are a bad person.” cass pursues a convoluted plan to “fix” things that involves very low risk to her (and also in no way addresses the bad things she has actually done) because she is, deep down, afraid that zhan tiri is right. all zhan tiri has to do is coax that fear to the surface, then gently place her thumb on the scale to ensure that the fear becomes reality, to make cassandra snap, thus “winning” the argument. 

when cassandra exclaims “zhan tiri was right!” after breaking free from the amber, she’s talking about the existence of project obsidian, but subtextually, she’s also talking about this argument. that’s is why the next thing out of cassandra’s mouth is “you want me to be the bad guy? fine. i’m the bad guy.” using zhan tiri’s potion against rapunzel and taking over corona is cass lashing out in rage, yes, but it also has an edge of defeat: zhan tiri is right, cass is a bad person.

thus, this final shot with her in the destroyed throne room of corona is not a triumphant moment; it’s grim, and dark, and she sits heavily and hunched over in her stolen throne. this is cass at what i would argue is her lowest, most miserable moment thus far. here, cassandra has achieved everything she’s worked for this entire season: she has total control over the moonstone’s power, she has usurped rapunzel’s destiny, brought corona to its knees, and claimed her throne. she has her power. she’s won—but she’s still angry, still hurting, still lost, and now that she knows who her “friend” is, she’s beginning to understand the ways she’s been (figuratively) imprisoned and (literally) manipulated and thus controlled, and the worst part? she has wholly accepted that she is a bad person, that she can’t escape from being a bad person, and the only thing left for her to do is embrace it no matter how awful it makes her feel.

she has never been more powerful, or more trapped.

NOW LET’S TALK PARALLELS!

in this scene at the end of tangled: before ever after, rapunzel faces her father’s wrath and disappointment. her coronation was crashed by a group of criminals who wanted to kidnap everyone in attendance, including her father, and rapunzel beat them soundly and saved everybody. instead of celebrating her accomplishments, however, all frederic can see is the danger she is in: because her famous magical hair is returned, and because she threw herself into a high-stakes battle against his express commands. he demands an explanation that she can’t offer fully (because she has to lie about cassandra’s involvement in the black rock adventure, in order to protect her friend from being forcibly sent to a convent), then doubles down on “protecting” her by controlling where she goes and what she does, literally imprisoning her in her own home.

like cass at the end of handmaiden, rapunzel’s victory earlier in the day should have been a moment of triumph, as a culmination of everything she longed for at the beginning of BEA: freedom, excitement, the ability to live according to her personal values and truths. instead, it’s soured and becomes a source of misery.

and, just as cass’s hollow victory at the end of handmaiden is visually represented by the framing, so too is rapunzel’s. in both shots, the throne room is in ruins and looks dark, cold, and unwelcoming, and cass and rapunzel are both dwarfed by the enormity of the room. but there are also a few key differences:

in the handmaiden shot, the camera looks straight into the throne room, making the set symmetrical save for where the black rocks and rubble have disrupted the order of the room, and cassandra is positioned in the exact center. this emphasizes the power cassandra has over this situation. fundamentally, this misery is something she did to herself. zhan tiri has never forced her to do anything; manipulated situations, twisted facts, and blatantly lied to persuade her, yes, but even so, every step cassandra has taken along the road to razing corona is one she took of her own volition. she isn’t intrinsically bad; she does have a choice.

whereas in the BEA shot, the camera is set at a slight angle and places the tiara in the center of the shot such that it separates rapunzel from frederic. rapunzel isn’t trapped by her own hopelessness, as cassandra is; frederic’s authority is real, and the conflict between them hinges on his overprotectiveness and the expectations and responsibilities of rule, both represented by the tiara (this symbolism continues through the rest of the scene; when fred confines rapunzel to corona and orders her not to speak to the black rocks to anyone, he hands her the tiara. it’s a physical symbol of the weight of his authority). while the handmaiden shot establishes that cass is sitting in a deep, dark pit of her own making, the BEA shot shows the precarious balance of rapunzel’s relationship with her father, the authority he has over her, and foreshadows his role as the major antagonist of the season.*

(*varian is the villain of season one, but fred is the antagonist in the sense that he is the primary obstacle preventing rapunzel, the protagonist, from achieving her goals.)

further, the BEA shot is much brighter than the handmaiden shot, with lots of moonlight pouring in through the windows and the side door and the polished floor reflecting it back while in the handmaiden shot, the entire room is in shadow save for a tiny beam of moonlight filtering through a broken window pane. the comparative brightness of the BEA shot reflects the comparatively lower stakes (rapunzel is being confined against her will, but the kingdom is not in immediate danger, and rapunzel has friends/allies whom she can rely on for emotional comfort, whereas in handmaiden the kingdom is literally in ruins and cassandra has driven away everybody but her emotional support demon). at the same time, the handmaiden shot is not entirely without hope: that last, lonely beam of light falls through the window and lands directly on cass, symbolizing that she is not past the point of no return. 

lastly, comparing these two shots side by side is interesting because they can represent the broader conflict between rapunzel and cassandra. rapunzel struggles against external forces that seek to confine her or steer her in directions she doesn’t want to go, and most of the time she comes out victorious (by the end of s1, the clash with her father set up in the BEA shot is resolved with him encouraging her to leave corona and find her destiny). in contrast, cassandra’s struggle has always been internal: she is fighting her self-doubt, her fear of abandonment, her inability to believe that she is loved, her discontent with her station, and her tragedy is that she keeps trying to fix this internal problem with external solutions, and failing because she is applying a bandaid to a hemorrhage. and the end result is that she is left like this: sitting on a broken throne, in the ruins of a palace, in the dark, completely alone, with nothing.

BUT WE’RE NOT DONE YET!

let’s talk about varian. 

varian’s villain arc and eventual redemption gets compared to cassandra’s a lot, and that makes sense because there are some obvious similarities. they’re both friends of rapunzel who eventually become frustrated with her, blame her for their problems, and lash out violently out of anger. however, i would argue that in spite of this, they are much more different than they are similar, and to talk about why we’re going to talk about the real parallel between varian and the handmaiden shot. and that’s this:

this shot, when varian is being dragged away by the guards in the middle of queen for a day, does not take place in corona’s throne room, but it has the exact same visual symbolism as both the handmaiden and BEA shots. varian is made insignificantly small in the enormous but somehow still claustrophobic halls of the palace, and the lighting is dark and cold to reflect the emotional mood of the scene. he is rendered powerless visually (he’s minuscule compared to rapunzel, who occupies fully a third of the shot and is the character with all the power in this scene) as well as literally (because he is being dragged away by two guards who are twice his size). 

and, like both cass and rapunzel in the handmaiden and BEA shots, a moment that should have been triumphant for varian—he finally made it to the palace after a grueling journey through a deadly snowstorm, and he found the one person who might be able to save his father!—goes horribly wrong, and he’s reduced to begging frantically for rapunzel’s help while the guards drag him away from her and, back home, his father dies.*

(*of course, quirin does not actually die, but varian has no way of knowing that a year and a half from now, rapunzel will be able to safely release his father from the amber. for purposes of this analysis, quirin is effectively dead.)

ANYHOW. the key difference between this shot and the handmaiden shot is that for varian, this moment of powerlessness is a) not in any way his fault and b) happening at the very beginning of varian’s descent into villainy, rather than at the end or very close to the end.

this scene sets the rest of varian’s villain arc in motion. his agency is taken from him at a critical moment, preventing him from fixing a horrible mistake that cost his father’s life. instead of collapsing and being eaten alive by his own guilt, varian funnels his anguish into rage directed at rapunzel, who is easier to blame than himself (especially because he is fourteen and doesn’t grasp that rapunzel did make the correct choice when she refused to leave corona). this blame and anger is exacerbated by rapunzel’s inaction after the storm; in failing to check up on him, she leaves varian to fester in resentment until he finally just snaps. 

like rapunzel in the BEA shot, varian is up against an external force (rapunzel) preventing him from achieving his goal of saving his father, and his villain arc is a kind of counterpoint to rapunzel’s s1 struggle against her father; they both fight back against their antagonists, she against fred and he against her, but varian does so in a violent, destructive way and thus ultimately fails to achieve his goal; rapunzel by comparison fights back by asserting her independence and relying on her friends/allies to help her, and ultimately achieves her goal by persuading fred to see her as a capable individual rather than an object to be guarded. 

like cass, varian lacks rapunzel’s extensive support network; he spends his villain arc alone, stewing in his resentment and guilt, spiraling deeper and deeper until he is unrecognizable as the innocent boy he used to be.

unlike cass, however, varian has a clearly-defined, straightforward external goal: he wants to free his father and punish rapunzel for her inaction. as i discussed earlier, cassandra by contrast is trying to fix an internal problem with external measures, which is why her villain arc is so much messier and more complicated than varian’s, and why it has been driven partly by cassandra falling victim to the manipulations of a demon who keeps passing her concrete goals to pursue with the promise that achieving them will fix her problem.

and this is why varian’s handmaiden parallel happens at the beginning of his villain arc while the handmaiden shot occurs at the end or very close to the end of cassandra’s: the QfaD shot is varian’s inciting incident, but the handmaiden shot is cassandra’s end result. 

in the QfaD and BEA shots, varian and rapunzel both have choices taken from them, and everything they do from this point onwards is driven by their drive to fix that injustice. but in the handmaiden shot, cassandra has given up on her ability to choose, and this comes at the end of a long, self-destructive road. unlike varian, whose villain arc hinges on an external problem with an obvious, clear-cut solution (save his father), cassandra’s villain arc hinges on an internal problem (she is unhappy, anxious, and hurting) with no real answer, and because she is unable to seek comfort from her friends (who have spent a year not treating her well in general) and rapunzel specifically (because rapunzel doesn’t hear her when she voices her pain, and because a lot of her pain is connected to or outright caused* by rapunzel), she clings to the first source of emotional validation and comfort she encounters—which happens to be an ancient, evil being who’s really just using cass as a means to an end, and who keeps telling cass, “if you do this bad thing, you will fulfill your destiny (and your pain will stop).” and cass, because she doesn’t know how to fix her problem, and because zhan tiri starts with small, palatable ideas like stealing the moonstone, swallows this hook, line, and sinker.

 (*to be completely clear, the pain rapunzel caused stems from their argument in the great tree, cassandra’s subsequent horrific injury, and the way rapunzel blamed cass for everything that went wrong in the tree. i am not talking about gothel’s abandonment.)

all of which is a somewhat long-winded way of saying varian’s villain arc and cassandra’s villain arc are not really comparable, because varian’s involves him turning to extreme, violent, desperate measures to save his father, while cassandra’s involves a self-destructive downward spiral exacerbated by the machinations of a demon, and the timing of when these parallel shots in QfaD and handmaiden occur in their respective villain arcs perfectly encapsulates that difference.

[jordswriteswords]

Clextober19: BYOB - Bring Your Own Boos

"How do I look?" Clarke asked, twirling about the living room. She was dressed in her Halloween costume, showing off her talent for makeup.

"Are you serious?" Lexa asked, mouth agape.

Clarke laughed, her hat falling down over her eyes. "Come on, don't be so offended."

"I mean, it's just…" Lexa trailed off, chewing on her lip. 

Madi bounded down the stairs, yelling a, "whoa, mom that's so witch-ist!"

"Witch-ist?" Clarke asked. 

Madi floated an apple from the fruit tray to meet her when she plopped down on the couch next to Lexa. 

"Feet," Lexa admonished her eight year old. 

Madi huffed and chomped down on the apple, a few pieces falling out of her mouth as she said, "yeah, it's prejudice against witches."

Lexa clicked her tongue at her daughter, scooping up the pieces of apple that had fallen from her mouth and wrapped them in a tissue. "No talking with food in your mouth, Mads."

"It's a joke!” Clarke said. "You guys don't even look like this. No wonder humans haven't ever been able to find you." Her face was painted green with warts on an exaggerated nose. Her head was covered by a pointy hat and she wore a long black gown. "Really, why would you ever want to look like this if you could change it with magic? Besides, it’s a rocking costume if I do say so myself.” She twirled again, and Lexa had to fight down her smile at her wife. She really, truly loved her, even if she was being highly insensitive right now.

“It’s kind of like saying that all humans are stupid and slow,” Lexa commented instead. “Like shoving our faces with the garbage some of you call food, and talking about how we’re the superior race and whatnot.”

Clarke twisted her mouth to the side in thought. “Okay, but I don't think like that,”

“Obviously, or we wouldn’t be together,” Lexa quipped.

“I just mean -- it’d be so much easier to be a witch. I mean, Madi can talk to animals, you are a superstar athlete. You’re like the spoiled brats of society.”

Lexa scoffed. Madi rolled her eyes. “I am so not a spoiled brat,” Madi chimed, more apple crumbs falling from her lips. Lexa glared at her child until Madi picked up her trash from the couch. She tried to wiggle her nose to send it to the trashcan, but Lexa snapped her fingers before she could, putting a safety lock on her nose.

"Come on!" she whined.

"You have legs," Lexa retorted. "Use them."

With a huff, Madi got up and dumped her trash into the trashcan in the kitchen. Lexa joined her, stirring the pot she had started for dinner.

Clarke continued her rant, “You kinda are. Whenever you want something you just have to poof it into existence. Lexa snaps her fingers or you wiggle your nose and there it is, whatever your heart desires.”

“What would you do if you had magical powers, babe?” Lexa asked over her shoulder. “Since you clearly have had such a horrible hand dealt to you.”

Clarke shrugged. “I’ve never really thought of it because it’s completely impossible. It’d be like a vacation, though. I'd probably make everything silent so I could just relax. Man, you guys have it so easy.”

Lexa smirked, and then winked at Madi. "Alright babe," she said, turning to her wife. "Deal." She snapped her fingers, and the costume on Clarke’s frame shrunk down to fit her snugly, and the green paint disappeared from her face.

“What the --”

“Let’s see what you got,” Lexa teased, crossing her arms over her chest. “I’ve just handed over my powers. You, Clarke Griffin, are now a witch for twenty-four hours.”

“You mean to tell me that you’ve had the ability to turn me into a witch for our entire lives and never bothered to do so? Rude!”

Lexa laughed. “It’s not quite how it works. You have to have a deep emotional and physical bond with someone.”

“Like a soulmate?” Madi asked.

“Yeah, like a soulmate. Seeing that you’re my wife and also have bore my child, our connection is more than strong enough to allow me to pass my powers onto you for a short period of time.”

“So I’m legit a witch?”

“And I’m human,” Lexa replied.

“Cool! Can I be a werewolf?” Madi asked.

“No!” both parents barked at the same time.

“How does it feel to be powerless?” Clarke asked. “You do realize I’m not going to help you with any of the housework so you can get a sense of how tough it really is to grow up and have to fold your own laundry.”

“I look forward to it,” Lexa said with a small laugh.

“Wow,” Clarke said, marvelling at her hands. “How do I like, make it go?” She tried snapping her fingers and blinking excessively, but nothing happened.

Lexa chuckled. “Stop forcing it. Just let it come to you.”

“Got it, Chief,” she said, pointing her finger guns are Lexa that she typically did when she was trying to be sarcastic. With a flash of light and a poof of smoke, Lexa’s head donned a Native tribal headpiece.

Clarke’s eyes widened and she looked at her hands. “Oh, come on!” she bemoaned. “I can’t believe my trigger is finger-guns!”

***

Lexa bit into the dinner she had prepared, noting the meatballs ended up a little spicier than she had originally anticipated.  She stood to refill her glass of water, but Clarke held a hand up to stop her. 

“Don’t worry babe, I got this.” She finger gunned at Lexa and said, “water.”

Lexa sighed.

A sudden downpour of water fell atop Lexa's head, soaking her clothes right through.

A few seconds later, an empty glass appeared in the air, only to crash onto the kitchen floor.

***

“Jesus… Christ… How do I… Stop this… from… happeniiiiiiiing?” Clarke asked as she bounced up and down in the air, trying to get control of her levitation. She pointed her finger at Lexa, who sighed as she floated, and tried her best not to throw up at the sudden rollercoaster that her wife forced upon her in their living room.

***

Halfway through the pile of laundry, Lexa pouted at her smiling wife. “I got this, babe,” Clarke said. She finger-gunned at the last of the clothes and said, “fold,” but the already folded clothes exploded from their spot on the bed, littering the room in the family’s underwear.

***

“How’s it going?” Lexa asked, poking her head around the corner to Clarke’s art studio.

Clarke huffed and pouted at her wife. In front of her was a series of canvases covered in sad clowns and dreary landscapes.

“Moody,” Lexa said. 

“I don’t seem to know how to control any colour other than the black. This was easier when I was human."

***

Clarke was determined to master her magic, knowing that she would never hear the end of it if she came out of this day not being able to cast one proper spell. 

Lexa drove them to the store to get groceries for the week. She perused the aisles while Clarke thought and thought and thought about what she could do to get it under control. 

She thought over the words and the basic spells that Madi taught her when Lexa wasn't working, finger gunning without casting the spell aloud so she could practice her posture.

“Hey Clarke, isn’t that Harper?”

“Who?” Clarke asked, finger inadvertently pointing at her wife.

Suddenly, there was a poof of smoke and a bright flash of light, and hovering in front of her was an owl with the greenest eyes she had ever seen.

“Lexa?” Clarke gasped.

“Hoot, hoot, hoot,” the bird replied, fluttering its wings furiously. "Hoot, hoot, hoot!" The owl called. Clarke slowly backed away as the owl squawked and screeched and flew after her. 

***

The next morning, Clarke awoke to a platter of eggs, bacon and pancakes, and a single lily in a vase.

Lexa leaned against the doorjamb, smiling at her wife as she handed over a cup of coffee. “Come downstairs whenever you’re ready.”

Bashful and cowed, Clarke took a sip of her coffee and nodded at her wife.

After she finished her breakfast, she brought the plates downstairs and marvelled at the sparkling clean home. “Looks like someone got their powers back,” Clarke teased her wife.

“Nah, you still have a few more hours,” Lexa replied, hands busy scrubbing the pans used for breakfast.

“Really?” Clarke asked. She finger gunned in the direction of the milk container, and made the entire jug explode, coating the ceiling in dairy. She sighed. “Wheres Madi?” 

Lexa laughed and pulled out a rag from the cupboard, already moving towards the mess when she said, “At Jordan’s. It really was Harper we saw yesterday.”

“So, you’re telling me you cleaned our entire place and made me breakfast without the use of your powers?” 

“Clarke,” Lexa sighed. “I always do. I don’t want Madi to grow up thinking that her powers are the answer to everything. Everything I do at home I do as an equal to you. I only use my powers to spoil you if I can… or to fix something I broke on occasion.”

Clarke’s cheeks dusted pink at her wife’s words. “You really are something, Mrs. Griffin-Woods.”

“I’m yours, Mrs. Griffin-Woods.”

“I’m sorry for saying you were spoiled. This magic stuff is harder than I thought. I love you.”

Clarke leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss on her wife’s lips, and with a gentle poof of smoke and a warm flash of pink light, Clarke's magic worked properly for the first time ever, levitating her and Lexa off the ground together, high off their love.

[thesmollestsnek]

Anxiety

So uh... I’m not really sure what to call this. What started as me venting about being anxious about minor tasks turned into an in-depth description of some of my worst panic attacks. The last paragraph is about how I recover from said panic attacks, so it does end on a hopeful note, I guess. Read at your own risk.

I sit, staring at the little line on the screen. It sits there, blinking. Mocking me. Mocking me with my inability to complete even this simple task. My inability to write even a few measly paragraphs, for fear of writing them “wrong”, somehow. Even the knowledge that there isn’t a wrong answer, not really, does nothing. My fear is irrational, so mere facts, however true they may be, have little chance of overcoming it. How could they, when it is not even a conscious fear, so much as it is a vague sense of impending doom, interpretable only through context clues and years of practice. And I sit there and say to myself “this is easy, why can I not do it?” And I receive no answer. There is no reason that I cannot do it. And yet, when I look at the prompt and again begin to plan my response, again I hit it. An invisible wall within my mind, blocking me off from all the ideas that were accessible to me just yesterday. Ideas that are still so close I can almost taste them, and yet so far away in all the ways that truly matter.

And so I give up, for a while. Distract myself. Tell myself that I’ll just take a little break, and try again later. That break ends up lasting several hours. And yet, when I come back, I still find myself paralyzed by that all-encompassing force. Still find myself helpless to that formless beast within my mind. And its silly, I know it is, to let something so mundane control me so, and yet I am unable to stop it. The anxiety may be mundane for me, but it is no less potent for it. After all, a kitchen knife is also mundane, for all it’s sharp enough to kill. And so I try, time and again, to get over myself and just start writing. And I fail, time and again, to actually write. And I struggle, time and again, to ignore that voice in my head that berates me each time I am unable to start. That calls me stupid, that says I should be used to this fear by now, that points out how I had no problem thinking of things before, why didn’t I just write them down then? And each time I hear it, I get a little less sure of myself, and it gets a little harder to try.

Others have told me that I am having trouble with this because I’m anxious about doing it wrong. Like I didn’t already know that it’s my anxiety causing my thoughts to freeze. Like being told that it’s irrational would make it any easier to overcome. It didn’t help. It never does. Not in this, not in anything. I’m fully aware that my thoughts are irrational, that my fears are inappropriate, that there is no reason I shouldn’t be able to do the many things I struggle to do. I know. If such knowledge were enough to keep the fear at bay, I wouldn’t be struggling in the first place. And yet I am. Because the knowledge that I should not be anxious does nothing to fix my brain’s proportions of neurotransmitters. Does nothing to dispel the adrenaline in my veins. Does nothing to help me actually do the thing. Their words can only reach as far as my head, which is already fully aware of the situation. But my head is powerless to soothe my heart, and it is rare for anyone to speak in a way my heart can hear. I could count on one hand the number of people who have managed it. Truthfully, I am not among them, however much I may wish it. The most I can hope to do is wait, with the knowledge that it should, eventually, pass on its own. The knowledge is a cold comfort, then, as a choke on my own tears and struggle to breathe. When my chest aches and I want nothing more than to curl up in a tiny ball where no one can ever find me again.

I feel as though my mind separates from my body, then. I’m still me, still a pathetic pile of limbs struggling to breathe, but at the same time, I’m not. It still hurts, physically, but on some level I cannot feel it. Cannot feel anything, except mild annoyance at the time wasted. My body chokes and I distantly catalog my symptoms, as though I were a scientist observing some other person. Watching, uncaring, as someone else fell apart before my very eyes. And while I still seek comfort, it’s not because I truly want it. It’s just the fastest way to get that helplessness to end, so I can move on to other things. Through my own suffering I am clinical. Dispassionate. The only person I ever seem to struggle to empathize with is myself. And I cannot even find it in me to worry about it, when I’m in that state. After all, it’s only temporary. It’ll pass, just as it has countless times before. I’m… not even sure I can, worry, like that. I never have before, at any rate. Through some of the most intense emotions I will ever feel, I am numb.

The numbness doesn’t feel bad, not really. How could it, when it robs me of the ability to feel at all? No, what really sucks is what comes after. When my body has settled a bit, and I start fading back into reality. Suddenly, I feel all those emotions I couldn’t before, and it hurts. Not like before, when it was purely physical. No, by that point the physical pain has faded, leaving behind a dull hollowness. This is an emotional kind of hurt, and after the numbness I am wholly unequipped to handle it. Sometimes (often), the shock of it sets off round two, and then I’m back off into numbness again. Truly, the cycle only really ends when my body is too exhausted to maintain it any longer. Too fucking tired to do anything but lay there, drained and upset and feeling rather broken. Which is its own kind of awful, really, but at that point I’m so glad to not be panicking anymore that I don’t really care. And I don’t have the energy to care, either, so. I couldn’t even if I wanted to.

At that point I’m feeling rather empty, but it’s a relief after everything that came before. After all, if something is empty then it can be filled again. And without any hurt remaining, even a little bit of positivity can feel like the goddamn sun. This is the part where I pull out my phone, and start looking through youtube. Sometimes I want something specific, but often I’m too tired to really care. There’s this one youtuber I’ve been watching for close to a decade, who never fails to make me smile. Silly and nerdy and so kindhearted. He’s pulled me out of some of the darkest corners of my mind, with his bad puns and constant enthusiasm. He’s entertaining at the best of times, and a goddamn lifeline at the worst. His light is bright enough to guide me, when I’ve sunk so deep in my own tumultuous thoughts I can no longer tell which way is up. Even when I am at my lowest, too tired to reach out to my real life support network, he is there. Spreading enough positivity for me to drag myself out of the dark. Helping me recharge, to recover until I’m ready to face the world again.

[alittleoptimistic]

Favorite Character Tropes as Wish Fulfillment?

I wrote that title after I analyzed this stuff because I realized a thing about myself I was unaware of. I always get attached to the Same Character. Like, they are literally the same person in different stories. And I want to know why. So I did a little digging and thinking and all that good, good stuff. 

Here are a few examples of my typical favorite character

Charlie from Lost

Virgil from Sanders Sides

Philip from Travelers

the Doctor from Doctor Who (specifically 10)

Klaus from Umbrella Academy

Stiles from Teen Wolf

Riley from Sense 8

Cisco from Flash

Peter Pan from any version of this story

Jim from the Office

Peter from Heroes

Merlin from Merlin

Will from Hannibal

Felix from Orphan Black

Chuck from Chuck

Josh (the werewolf ) from Being Human

Jessica from Jessica Jones

Castiel from Supernatural

Loki from Marvel

Skylar from Heroes

Sherlock from Sherlock

Zuko from The Last Airbender

Killian from Once Upon a Time

I could probably find more but you get the idea

General similarities seem to be:

out of 23

21 are male?

15 have some type of addiction/problem they have difficulty controlling? (drugs, attention, adventure, eating people, killing people, ya know, etc)

17 have a secret

‘neuro-divergent’ in some way? (ADD, PTSD anxiety, depression, something? the kids are not alright)

All 23 have grey morals (probably chaotic good-ish? they all would break the rules for a good reason or get what they want)

19 have a crappy homelife/large tragedy in the past

20 have ‘superpowers/special ability’

18 are physically weak in appearance

18 are Underdogs, underestimated but actually powerful/very intelligent?

7 have a redemption arch

17 have dark hair lol

18 have a sarcastic, sense of humor

14 talk too much

mostly white in one form or another :/

So... why?? Why do I tend to like these characters more than others?

male. I am female and there are a few female characters that I LOVE. They happen, but, in all honesty, they are far and few in between. Wonder Woman, Jessica Jones, Hermione, Rey, Riley, Rory (Gilmore girls) Perhaps it is the way girls are often written? I like Jessica Jones because she is a hilarious mess and I relate. Same with... all of the ones I like, actually. They have that grey-moral vibe of real people, but lack the sexy Cat Woman, I’m-so-bad-I-can-kill-you-with-my-massive-butt-and-boobs?? Thing?? yeah? how unfortunate. They are small breasted or, at least, that is not drawn attention to too much. Could it be. holy moly, ya’ll. could it be I like women characters when they’re written... like people? like. like, as if girls are screwed up humans! not objects?? isn’t that incredible.

srry but not srry

an addiction. now, why do I tend to go here? Its a kind of a painful trope. They always go back, and back and back again to what we know is horrible for them. Perhaps there is enjoyment in watching the struggle and seeing them inevitably win their struggle, whatever it is? The strength to conquer the darkness within themselves and do the right thing. It might just make you think you can conquer your own battles?? Maybe I feel like I can relate in some sort of way, going back to old habits, struggling to be the person I want to be. Year after year of the same new year goals...

a secret. This is honestly just a nice trope and its neat, fun writing. Creates tension, and it is usually connected to the addiction. You get invested in this secret!!! It builds up to the inevitable discovery of that secret and the aftermath and all the reactions of their friends. (merlin, Will graham, chuck, etc.)

Neurodivergent. I think this is just me relating to these people. I have bouts of depression and anxiety and am currently researching the possibility of having ADD (thats a whole new weird thing idek) so this is just something that I think I see in myself.

Grey-morals. Again. This is my moral alignment, shocker. So, again, me relating to the characters. Also, characters that obviously have flaws are just well-written, well-rounded characters? No one is actually Clark Kent. characters that seem perfect either come off as plastic and fake because real people do not act like that, or they come off as kind of creepy?? because they must have some darkness lurking beneath the surface (when this is done on purpose, i actually like this quite a lot. Rose Quartz is an example of a character who seemed perfect on the surface, but as the show moved on, is revealed to be a Real Disaster Queen. she isn’t evil, just kind of a brat, but that redeemed what seemed to be sloppy storytelling because it was realistic)

Tragic past. This is just something that authors give to Disaster People to justify their screwed-up-ness. Course, not all of them had tragic pasts, but something bad happened to all of them (except Jim from the Office I think??, but then again, that is a sitcom...)

Special Ability Again, wish fulfillment. Not even gonna lie. I often feel powerless and out of control, this Freaks Me Out. I think there is comfort in seeing the ‘little guy’ (aka le me) having with a BAMF hashtag

 Weak And once more on Relatable-Station. This is in connection with relating to feeling and looking powerless, but finding comfort in the secret strength these characters have whether through supernatural means, superior intelligence, biting humor, a quick tongue, etc.

Underestimated the cap on this trio. The last 3 points could be summed up as one thing. A weak, underestimated person actually has some secret strength. These characters might just be a coping mechanism I have to deal with feeling weak and overlooked and powerless, whether or not those feelings accurately portray reality. I wonder where those feelings came from in the first place.

A redemption arch This trope is often a result of having grey morals. These also help deal with feelings of inadequacy or guilt in the reader?? It makes you think, if they can be loved, surely I can. (i am really dragging myself in this post, which was not the plan lol but here we are) 

Dark hair/brown hair. I have dark hair, I also wanted black hair as a child and found it very beautiful. Also, I think the dark hair goes with the personality trope as a Screw Up. Not gonna lie, messy brown/black hair on boys and girls, honestly, but the short messy thing, is great. and when they go evil for a bit and the hair gets Extra Messy?? That. That’s. Good. (for reference see: Stiles, Killian, Peter, Virgil, Loki)

Sarcastic my flavor of humor. this is turning into the realization that we do, in fact, like characters we relate to the most. I thought that might be far fetched because I’m ‘nothing like’ these characters, but let's get real. They’re me but as a cute boy or girl.

Talk too much This isn’t me. but This is who I want to be, I think. I’ve always struggled with anxiety about being the quiet one while my brother was so much better at talking, making friends, etc. so this is, again, wish fulfillment. i swear i didn’t think this was going to be this self-indulgent but i obviously was wrong

White They aren’t all white. Zuko is Asian. Cisco’s actor is Columbian American. But that’s... thats a really small amount of diversity. Like, I’m concerned. (when i say white btw, I don’t mean just American or British or whatever, because there are characters on here that are from all over. I just mean overall white-looking for the sake of this analysis) 

So, First Hypothesis: prejudice is very ingrained and even with good intentions, i could be subconsciously avoiding characters that are POC??? If this is all a ‘projecting myself’ thing, then I relate to white people the most? Im sure im screwing this up, but i’m not gonna chicken out and avoid this because thats what I’d usually do to keep from dumbly saying something offensive, but if I dont address a problem, then no one is getting anywhere 

Second Hypothesis: Its been known the fiction industry as a whole has a problem with representation,,, I don’t want to discount me being white, but I don’t think this is just me and my tiny entitled butt. There probably isn’t as much access to that type of character for POC. How often do creators have well-rounded, stick-around-for-a-long-time, flawed, funny, sometimes-problematic-but-well-meaning characters that are also POC? not often enough. Maybe it’s not always on purpose. But because of ‘Diversity Points’, character development might get pushed aside, and then the character’s personality becomes Their Race, which is... a crappy way to build a character? The industry has a hard enough time with diversity in general. Maybe people just don't write POC as that type of character. Which makes characters like Cisco unique. I’ve never even thought about that... Good on you, Flash writer crew.

let's fix this??

need more Ciscos???

 if any POC feels inclined to call me out on my bull or give their insight (only if you want to, of course), pls do.

In conclusion: this was interesting, and it makes sense, I guess, why people like different types of characters if their favorite characters are projections in one way or another of them. I’m not saying that we all relate to our favorite characters, but me, because I have this weird, dozen or more of the same type of character that I love, it might be reasonable to assume there’s something about that character I see in myself or wish I saw in myself? Anyway, an interesting thought. What do you guys think? Do you see yourself in your favorite characters?

This has been an honest essay that got too long. I wish I was as invested in writing school essays as I am in Tumblr posts.

[ernmark]

Does Rita actively try to help Juno through his depression and intrusive thoughts? If so could you please show us some instances where she does?

She definitely tries to make an effort at it.

We don’t see it much in Season 1, in part because we don’t see all that much of Rita in general, and in part because Juno’s depression isn’t quite as major of a theme, and partly because Juno’s got something that he’s actively working toward during the entire season that keeps him too busy to get too preoccupied inside his own head.

In Season 2, though, he’s so much worse than he was before. 

RITA: Boss, you been different since your eye blew up, realdifferent— You’re cranky all the time now! I mean, you were always cranky, but thisis different! (Kitty-Cat Caper)

And right away there’s evidence that she’s tried to help him through it, spinning a pretty horrific physical mutilation into something more lighthearted and at least somewhat positive:

RITA: ...you justshowed up with an eyepatch one day and after I was so worried about you cuz youdisappeared but you said it was okay so I thought okay maybe we can dress upand buy a little beakmonkey like all the pirates get in the movies— 

Rita’s been giving him his time and space for six months without pushing him for an explanation or even to act beyond his capabilities. And that’s her trying to help him with his depression.

And this scene itself? When he gets physically violent and smashes her stuff, she doesn’t cower-- she calls him on his bullshit and holds him accountable, and that also is her helping him through it. 

And she is holding him accountable, not rubbing his face in it. She’s calling him out because she’s hurt, but also because she cares. And she’s not blaming him for not trying hard enough or whatever. She understands that there are extenuating circumstances. She’s not taking it personally, which is... just so very nice, I gotta say. 

JUNO: Rita…It’sjust a dry spell. That’s all.

RITA: That’s theproblem, Boss. You always get like this when you don’t have a case.

And once he concedes, she forgives him and immediately suggests that he get some sleep, and offers to help him get back on his feet.

JUNO: I…yeah, sure. I guess.

RITA: Well, I’m gladyou seen the error of your ways. Now go take a little nap in your office andI’ll call you just as soon as the next case comes through the door.

When he’s anxious about his abilities, she builds him up and encourages him:

RITA: Boss, you can do it! I know you can do it! You’re Juno Steel, remember? The winner of the HCPD’s Sharpshootin’ contest three years in a row!

When he’s caught in a spiral, she tries to help him logic his way out of it:

JUNO: Hey, Rita?Cancel that order for a new case. I’m feeling under the weather today.

RITA: What! But MistaSteel, you can’t! You gotta take a new case! You gotta helppeople!

JUNO: They don’twant the kind of help they’d get from me, Rita. I haven’t done anything goodfor anyone in months.

RITA: Of course youhave! You got Mick outta all that trouble with that shark!

JUNO: Thatwas a loan shark, Rita. I paid him.

RITA: Well,you got Cassandra Kanagawa off Mars, didn’t you?

JUNO: Thatwas you.

RITA: Well, it wasyour idea! And… and… hey, because of you, Billie Navarro is dead!

JUNO: That’ssupposed to make me feel better?

RITA: She was a realmean lady, Mista Steel. I’m sure it makes… someone feel better?

And again at the end of the episode:

RITA: Hey…what’s the matter, Boss?

JUNO: Nothingyou can fix.

RITA: But… we won!It was just the case you were waitin’ for, exciting and life-threatening, andit even ended with some real nice fireworks! It’s everything you coulda askedfor, and Ms. King is safe now, ain’t she?

JUNO: I’llsee you tomorrow, Rita.

RITA: Well… alright,Mista Steel. You’ll feel better after you sleep a little. You gotta. I know youwill.

Notice how it just doesn’t get any footholds?

We keep seeing her do this stuff throughout the season, but it never really takes, does it?

She’s not the only one who does this stuff, either. Mick and Peter are also pretty awesome at being supportive of their depressed little lady, but more often than not it doesn’t land. When they offer him space, when they offer him positivity, when they offer him solidarity, when they offer him reality-- sometimes they can derail his spirals, but there’s only so much that they can really do to help him.

And that comes back to a sad reality that’s talked about at the end of the season:

But it never worked -- none of the people he'd ever helped had stayed helped -- because you can't force someone else into it. Because getting better's always on you. It has to be. And that doesn't mean you're alone, doesn't mean you can't lean on others when you get tired or ask for directions when you get lost, but... Getting better's a long road. And if you want to go down it, you have to start walking. (Man of the Future)

Juno has to make that decision over and over again: in the FreeDomer’s compound, in the desert, in the Cerberus Province, and inside his own head. 

And after he’s made that decision, Rita keeps doing the exact same stuff she’s been doing, but for the very first time he’s actually responding to it.

When she calls him out (via the THEIA bot) for leaving her behind, he realizes and acknowledges his wrongdoing and apologizes. 

THEIA: Cuz maybe then she should disappear for weeks instead. Not say anything. Cuz that would definitely make you less worried. And not way more worried. Ain't that right. Boss?JUNO: Oh. I… What did I do? Rita, I’m… sorry. I’m so, so sorry. (Long Way Home)

And just like before, after she’s aired her grievances, she hugs him and forgives him. 

JUNO: I... Uh... I'm sorry, Rita. I'm just... So sorry. It won't happen again... Rita?

SOUND: RITA TACKLE-HUGS HIM.

RITA: I missed you, Boss. I was real worried.

JUNO: I know. I hear you. For once. And I missed you too, Rita. Really.

And when he does misstep, she reassures him that she’s still on his side, even after he’s been called out.

RITA: And besides, Boss...(SHE HUGS HIM)JUNO: (GETS HUGGED)RITA:I ain't goin' nowhere. (Man of the Future)

And she keeps calling him out. 

RITA: Mista Steel, how come you're bein' so mean to your second-best friend!JUNO: Because he's a chump, Rita. I always knew he was a chump but it's still disappointing to find out just how true that is.RITA: Oh, come on, Boss--JUNO: You "oh come on!" Sorry. I'm just... disappointed. I really thought that he'd have the answer, or at least that... Ramses wouldn't sucker him, too. Like he did me.RITA: Aw, Boss...JUNO: Either way, I don't think Mercury's gonna help us with this one. And we only have... Twenty-one hours left. We've gotta keep moving.RITA: But first...?JUNO: "But first" nothing! All of Oldtown, hell, probably all of Hyperion's on the line, and you want to "but first" about my loser friend? No! Hell no! ...Yeah, wow, that sounded pretty bad, huh?RITA: Mmmhmm.JUNO: I should probably just... apologize. 

I’d like to point out here that she’s not being mean or nitpicky here-- she’s helping him not be an asshole and push his loved ones away. She’s recognizing that this is a behavior pattern that he falls into when he’s scared and self-loathing, but it doesn’t excuse him being cruel to the people around him. 

And because Juno’s in a place where he wants to get better, he’s accepting this as constructive criticism, rather than a personal attack or evidence that he’s a terrible person. 

Rita also acts as a point of calm to ground Juno through his own panic/depression spirals:

JUNO: This is a nightmare… A billion to one chance... oh god damn it, this is a nightmare…!RITA: I can do CPR, Mista Steel. You just tell me when he’s breathin’, okay?

And again:

JUNO: A bad spot! Me? After all the times I've scraped you off the sidewalk, Mercury, you're really gonna stand there and tell me that you were worried I was gonna put you in a bad spot?!RITA: Mista Steel.JUNO: What?RITA: I'm almost there. Okay? It's almost done.JUNO: Right. Right, almost... done. Thanks, Rita.RITA: No problem, Boss.

And again, when he’s starting to voice some intrusive thoughts:

JUNO: I told you I'd change. Hell of a lot that was worth. Maybe the Theia was onto something. One bad choice and all your progress is gone. Maybe the reason it was so terrifying was because it was right.RITA: No, Mista Steel, I think it was probably scary because it brainwashed your best friend and then threw him through a door at you.

Notably, she also helps Mick calm down from a panic spiral:

MICK: Me and...?! What, did I already do something wrong? Ohhhhhh I knew I shouldn’ta switched those two chairs when I moved in! They said this place was gonna be fit to my specifications exactly, and then I came in and saw the chairs and I went, “hey, maybe they’ll look better this way,” and they didn’t! And now they’re gonna kick me out of Newtown, aren’t they?!RITA: No, Mista Mercury. We ain’t gonna kick you out. An’ we can help you move the chairs back if you really want. (Man of the Future)

Also notably, even now, she’s powerless to help Juno if he’s not in a headspace where he is willing to be helped. Which is why she’s ineffective when THEIA Mick gets under Juno’s skin:

MICK: One weak day. That's all I'm saying, Jay. Your punishment for one weak day could be to lose fifteen years of progress. You could go back to feeling how you did after you were booted out of the HCPD. You might feel fine now, but...

RITA: He wouldn't! You don't have to listen to him, Mista Steel, you're better'n that now in a million ways, and I wouldn't letcha anyway, and--

And again here:

MICK: Puck Falco, that's right. Where are they now?

JUNO: I don't know. We... fell out of touch.

MICK: Heard that one before, am I right?

RITA: Mista Steel, this is all wrong! Diamond was gone before you left the HCPD and Detective Falco just transferred to another planet and--

I’ve gotta say, she’s really good at handling him when he lets her. I suspect that she’s developed a lot of these skills over the course of fifteen years being his friend, and this latest dark period is largely her exercising every skill she’s got in her arsenal to try and help him. 

[ihaveonlymydreams]

Warning: Captain Marvel spoilers

OK, I must start off by saying that I loved Carol Danvers. But while I liked the movie Captain Marvel, I didn't love it, and I feel like it fell into a trap that seems all too common today in movies with strong female protagonists: it didn't give her a chance to fail.

See, we want to see our heroes succeed against all odds. So we need odds. We want to see them defeat the enemy - so there have to be stakes. There has to a possibility of failure. There has to be a moment where, physically or psychologically, it doesn't really matter, the hero has lost. And then, to see the hero come back from failure, to snatch victory in the teeth of defeat, to find power in powerlessness - that is true cinematic poetry. That's why we thrill to Diana's final victory over Ares, when he has succeed in breaking her faith and her innocence just five minutes before. That's why victory over Thanos, bought at such a horrible price, will feel EARNED.

Now I'm not saying Carol didn't have moments of failure and loss, but they essentially happened at the beginning of the movie or in retrospect. Yes, she lost her life and her best friend and her beloved mentor and all her memories, yes she was brainwashed and her true power was suppressed, and yes, her captain/trainer manipulated and controlled her by making her doubt herself. But all this is the groundwork of the movie. Carol's arc is one of slowly freeing herself from this control, regaining her life, becoming her own woman. It's beautiful - and then it starts to fall flat somewhere around the last twenty minutes. Basically, the moment she rediscovers her powers and breaks free, the movie might as well have ended, because there is nothing to challenge her anymore. She is now a being of pure power, so physical challenges mean nothing. She has rediscovered her past and her true self, so psychological attacks mean nothing. We have literally no worries that anything will or even could happen to prevent her from getting what she wants. And that's a problem, from the perspective of plot, because there's still an entire epic confrontation to go - which is no longer a confrontation. And while it's satisfying to see the bad guys get pummeled, the story offers very little in the way of a moral or deeper truth except this power fantasy: "be yourself and you will be invincible."

I'm sure this idea is highly inspiring, especially to people who feel trapped and controlled, and I don't mean to disparage its power to change lives. But I am worried about its long term consequences, because, like it or not, it is ultimately a fantasy. No one is invincible. Even at our best, human beings have flaws, have weaknesses, or are simply thwarted by the reality of the physical universe getting in our way. Stories with this kind of power fantasy offer a short term fix to a massive problem of insecurity, fear, manipulation, self-loathing - but eventually there will be negative results, and I see two possibilities.

First: a person begins to live the fantasy and believe it entirely. They consider themselves to be perfect and invincible, becoming blind to their own flaws. This has a devastating effect on the people around them, who are unable to penetrate the barrier of fantasy in order to voice real concerns about how they are being hurt or negatively affected. The person living in a fantasy fuels it with the belief that they must simply live in self-confidence, never question themselves, and thus achieve perfection. Contrast this with, for example, Cinderella, who at the moment of her triumph calls herself "Cinderella," accepting the pain and the failure and the shame of her past as part of who she is, and who moves forward into queenship with the compassion born out of imperfection.

Second: a person might find themselves uplifted by a power fantasy, enough to escape a horrible situation and change their lives. But then, something happens to make them aware of their own flaws and problems. They realize they are not perfect, that confidence and willpower have not magically fixed them, that the world is still an obstacle and they can't always have what they want. Unless they have been fed something other than fantasies, such a person is likely to fall into despair and even deeper self-loathing. Contrast this with the ending of Wonder Woman, where Diana finally unleashes her true power, only to discover that she cannot save the man she loves, just accept the sacrifice he made.

But again, to reiterate how I started: I love Carol Danvers, I would die for her. I love her snark and her confidence and her straightforward approach to life, her no-nonsense attitude (unless she's doing the nonsense), her compassion and her ability to love. I love that she regains her power and blasts Jude Law into a cliff. But I wish she'd been better served by the story she was in. I wish we could have seen her have to sacrifice something in order to win, have to make an impossible choice and bear the burden, have to push up against her limits somewhere. Because at the moment she's still a child - she's had no chance to mature, to discover that one choice closes off another, that you can't solve or fix everything. The only glimpse we had of that possibility was end credits scene - and I would have loved to see her react to the realization that by leaving to save the Krulls she had been unable to save Fury and half of the human race. Maybe in the next movie.

[discoveringmyselfagain]

Life

Deep, lingering sadness.  A sadness I cannot explain to anyones liking. A sadness that runs so deep that thoughts outside of it are fleeting.

I am so fucking tired, cold, and truthfully I’m hungry a lot of the time.  But the sadness is all encompassing.  I feel like it’s all I am.

I feel lost and powerless though I know that the control I desire I already have… But do I really?

Physically so much is out my control and I can do very little about because that’s the nature of surgery (surgeries at this point) and chronic injuries. I do acknowledge that some of the physical stuff will end and won’t be this challenging/uncomfortable forever but let me just say that does absolutely nothing for the powerlessness I currently feel. Knowing it will end eventually does not lift me or bring me any kind of positivity.

At the same time I should be thankful I’m low key broken because if I’m real with myself I know full well that if I had the physical ability to work out in the obsessive way I crave so much my life would be complete shit. I understand myself and those truly obsessive and destructive thoughts all to well. At least in seasons of life such as this running specifically is not about the runners high (though that doesn’t hurt anything) it’s more about how I control my pain and control my body in a way gives me self destructing powers I desire.

Crazy? Perhaps. But thats real life and I won’t apologize for it.

I’m done trying to hide my unhappiness or protect others from it because your reactions or thoughts on my sadness are not my fucking problem. Their yours. You want to judge me or tell me all the positive crap you can think of then by all fucking means. If it makes you feel better and proves the point you’ve given yourself then do what you need to make yourself feel better because if you can make yourself feel better than why the hell not. Who cares how your selfish needs to “fix” things affects my life. It clearly doesn’t matter and you have no intentions on understanding my perspective so please make yourself feel better.

Tell me that all will be okay and that everything is fine until you’re blue in the face if it helps you. Tell me stories of people who have it worse than me to drive in your point. If you truly believe that that is helpful then keep going. I will sit here silently and let you do what you need to do to feel better. 

Silence that also angers you because now on top of not “seeking the positive things of life” and believing that “everything will be fine” I am being disrespectful because I refuse to speak about anything. Good or bad. Silence that you assume you understand because “you’ve been down this road before” when you have no fucking clue what this road is. 

I’m sorry, I don’t care that you are my family you have no fucking clue. You have no clue what my internal experience is right now. You don’t know my sadness, my desires to self-destruct, my desires to give up, nor the passing thoughts that I can choose to die if I so choose. 

I also don’t give a single fuck on your thoughts on food. Whether or not I eat is my fucking choice. If I want to eat a single meal a day, 3 meals a day, or survive on coffee that’s my choice and my choice only. Anything you say “with care”  I don’t need the food police or to be reminded that I need food. Don’t you think I fucking know that?!?

I am so fucking tired and I’ve got nothing left.

Stop attempting to “help” by serving yourself.

[cryptid-jack]

Once a Hero - Prologue pt 1

Title: Once a Hero Rating: T+ Genres: Action/Mystery/Romance/Comedy

Summary: In a world where super villains constantly fought for control of city-states under the protection of a world government, an alliance of heroes rose up to combat them for the sake of peace and justice. No one could have predicted that this alliance and their sworn enemies would be compelled to join forces to fight an alien invasion that threatened to wipe humanity from the face of the Earth.

They won the day, but not without suffering a tremendous loss on both sides

Ten years later, a super villain with a complicated history in heroics uncovers a conspiracy that flips the narrative of their very world on its head. To get to the source of it all, he finds help in the form of a Hero with a strange past of his own, and the key in the form of a little girl with big dreams.

AN: So this is actually the first part of the prologue to a Super Hero story I’m working on in hopes of getting it published some day! In an attempt to get me hyped to work on it again, I thought I’d share it with you! Do me a favor and let me know what your favorite parts are, because I love to hear that and It really helps keep me inspired to write!

There will be four more parts after this one; I hope you enjoy!

November, 2002

(Prologue pt 1)

The air in the assembly hall was ice cold, but Keir was sweating. He could feel it slowly bead, then trickle down the column of his throat to the collar of his shirt where it was absorbed by the increasingly damp fabric. He longed to wipe at the skin there, but any movement on his part now would be a dead giveaway that not all was right with this supposedly brainwashed ‘asset’.

“Asset 543759-11,” said the sharp looking man standing on the dais at the front of the room.

“Sir!” replied a young woman close by as she snapped to attention, eyes straight ahead, right hand lifted to her brow in a picture perfect salute.

“Report to hangar 3 for duty at the end of roll call. Assignment details will be provided by your handler. ”

“Yes sir!”

Keir’s dark eyes remained fixed on a distant point above the left ear of the asset in front of him as more numbers were called and he waited for all hell to break loose.

...

Life had been so much easier before he’d had free will.

‘No doubt about that,’ mused a quiet voice in .his head that was not his own. ‘There is the downside of not being able to say no, however.’ The voice was female, and by this point, as familiar as his own.

‘I don’t get to say no now either,’ he retorted silently as the man on the dais continued reading off assignments.

‘You chose to rebel,’ the voice pointed out. ‘It’s almost over now, I promise. We’re almost free, Keir.’

Free... A week shy of his eighteenth birthday and Keir wasn’t even sure he knew the meaning of the word.

Taken from his parents before he’d been old enough to form lasting memories by agents from the Blackridge Academy, Keir had been molded into the perfect weapon through a combination of brainwashing, operant conditioning, and corporal punishment. Trigger words to guarantee obedience and control his every action had been planted deep in his psyche, making him completely powerless before any handler who knew a few key phrases.

He could run a four and a half minute mile, bench press four hundred pounds, speak eight languages, and was a top class marksman with both rifle and pistol. He was highly trained in espionage, war tactics, assassination techniques, and a master of three different kinds of martial arts... And that was before the super powers.

Blackridge Academy specialized in producing human weapons for the elite to serve as bodyguards, personal assassins, or (if you happened to possess the GDP of a small country) unstoppable military units to turn the tide of battle in your favor. For those with a smaller budget at their disposal (or a trail to cover), they also rented out their ‘assets’ on a mission-by-mission basis.

In 1971, however, the Academy had perfected a serum that, when applied to compatible individuals, resulted in abilities previously beyond humankind.

Well, mostly.

There had always been those few individuals at the fringes of society, people that inspired myth and legend with power to rival the gods. Gifted, they came to be called, but what they could do, and how powerful they were varied wildly between individuals. Some changed the world, for the better or worse, depending on who was telling the tale. Others lived quiet lives in the shadows, either afraid of their own power, or of what people who wanted to control that power might do to gain it.

Keir was one of many who had been given power by the Academy’s scientists at the age of twelve, just at the onset of puberty after proving to have the appropriate genetic markers that made him compatible with the serum. Class-S telekinesis had been the most powerful of his new abilities, followed by Class-C super healing, and Class-D telepathy. The telepathy was just enough to make him empathic, granting him the ability to know what people in his general area were feeling at any given moment, and an uncanny ability to detect when someone was lying.

They were all skills that made him extraordinarily useful as an asset to the Academy, and as soon as he turned eighteen in a week, he’d be auctioned off to the highest bidder, as was tradition. He allowed his eyes to slide sideways a few degrees, allowing him a glance at the people around him.

Cattle, every one of them. Bought and sold at the whim of their masters…

‘If we pull this off, they’ll never get their hands on another child, Keir, I swear it.’

The assassin’s eyes drifted back to the phenomenally boring point straight ahead of him, and focused on keeping his breath slow and steady, just like those around him. Not for the first time, he wondered if the voice in his head wasn’t just wishful thinking. Maybe he was mad.

He wouldn’t be surprised. It could have been the conditioning that had broken him, or the physically demanding training he was constantly subject to. Hell, it might have even been the serum they pumped him full of when he was twelve.

‘That last one makes no sense at all. I doubt it would have taken almost six years for you to lose your mind if it really had been the serum.’

‘It could,’ Keir retorted. ‘Or it could be that combined with all the other shit.’

The voice was quiet for a moment, then replied, ‘You’re not mad, Keir. I know you remember the day we met. I can see it in your head. You remember every detail.’ There was a fondness in the woman’s voice that threatened to make him squirm with embarrassment.

He would never forget the day he had met Layla. It was the first day he’d truly existed as a human being.

He’d been on duty guarding asset 783529-96 with an older agent from his unit. He had never seen said asset, but at that point in his life, it had never even occurred to him to ask about her, or why she required such a heavy guard. All he knew was that a non-agent would be bringing a prisoner into the room they were guarding, and they were to act only if said non-agent requested backup.

He had guarded the room many times before, and it wasn’t the first time he’d seen a desperate looking person in chains dragged within. It was, however, the first time the accompanying non-agent had called for assistance.

Keir and his fellow agent had entered immediately, rifles at the ready, just in time to see the man in chains lunging for a tall, frail looking woman seated in a chair that had been bolted to the floor on the far side of the bare little room. The non-agent had been slumped in a corner, cradling a gushing head wound, but Keir had ignored him. It was protocol that had been drilled into him for this particular duty. Protect asset 783529-96 at all costs.

A gesture of his hand had slammed her would-be attacker into the far wall with a powerful telekinetic force. While his duty partner leaped on the prisoner, Keir had immediately stepped protectively in front of the woman and raised his rifle, ready to fire on her attacker should it be necessary.

What he hadn’t expected was for asset 783529-96 to reach out and touch him.

It was such a small gesture, just a brush of her fingertips across the exposed skin of his left hand that had sent an electric shock straight up his arm into his brain... and suddenly he had been awake for the first time that he could remember; fully conscious of both himself, and of a presence that was not him at the back of his mind.

He’d been left reeling mentally at this sudden shift in reality for what felt like an age, but had been only seconds. Keir had turned and looked at asset 783529-96 then, really looked at her, something he couldn't remember having ever done to anyone. He recognized her as an individual with thoughts and desires of her own, which was a concept he had never truly comprehended before either.

He felt like a man who had been color blind his whole life suddenly seeing the blue of the sky for the first time.

Asset 783529-96... no, her name was Layla, he’d realized abruptly, the information arriving unbidden in his mind. Whoever she was, she was painfully thin, as though she were being given only the very minimum of nourishment required to keep her alive. Hunger had not robbed her soft brown eyes of their brightness as she smiled down at him, however.

It was the first time someone had ever really smiled at him before.

Layla was a few inches taller than himself, with untrimmed ash blonde hair that fell past her waist. He had opened his mouth to speak to her, but an infinitesimal shake of her head had stopped him.

‘I am here,’ a voice had said in his mind, quieting the chaos that hat reigned there only a moment before. ‘I am here, but now you have to go. Do what is expected of you or we’ll both be killed.’

Keir had turned to see that his partner had gotten the prisoner under control and the non-agent was slowly getting to his feet, one hand still clamped to his bleeding temple.

“Lilac equinox,” the injured man had said, and Keir had felt that familiar compulsion to do as instructed. For the first time that he could remember, though, he resented it.

‘I’m sorry,’ Layla had said as she watched the non-agent order Keir and his partner to pick up the prisoner and haul him back out of the room. ‘If I free you from your programming now, there’s a chance you won’t respond correctly when ordered. They’d notice. If you were lucky, they’d simply send you back through reprogramming. If you weren’t...’

Thoughts of his own mortality had been new to Keir as well.

‘But don’t worry, I will free you from them when the time is right.’

‘And when will that be?’ he’d asked, speaking to her for the first time as he’d taken up his station outside her door once more while his partner and the non-agent dragged the prisoner away.

There had been silence between them for a long moment, long enough that he’d wondered if he hadn’t just imagined it all. Eventually, though, Layla replied, ‘As soon as possible.’

And now the day had finally come, assuming he hadn’t lost his mind that day two years ago and just imagined every interaction with Layla ever since. After all, that had been the first and last time he had ever seen her in person. She had been a near constant presence in his mind ever since, though.

To say they had become close during the intervening years was an understatement. They knew everything about one another. How could they not?

Good thing he liked her so much, or it could have been a miserable two years.

Amusement rippled across the surface of his mind. ‘Aw. I like you too, Keir.’

Embarrassed again, he asked, ‘You’re sure Binah will come through?’

Binah, the third member of their little coup, was perhaps the most vital to its success.

Much like Layla, she too was kept in a small room where she was put to work with her unique power set. The Academy rented out Layla and her empathic abilities as a sort of lie detector for anyone with the money to pay. More than that, she could reach into a person’s mind and pick through their memories the same way he could flip through a book. Binah, on the other hand, was a technophage. Her ability to interface with, control, and reprogram electronics was unmatched.

Both she and Layla were considered ‘support assets’ by the academy, while Keir was labeled a ‘combat asset’. Due to their nature, the two women had stopped undergoing brainwashing and conditioning as soon as their powers were revealed. He could only assume that practice had proved counterproductive to capitalizing on support assets.

Besides, the Academy had other ways of bending people to their will. Food deprivation was the first step, with corporal punishment being the next in the face of particularly stubborn assets.

Despite her S-Class Telepathy, Layla’s reach did not extend very far past her room. Only Keir’s own, weaker telepathy allowed her to maintain a bond with him after he had left her presence that day. So it came to be that Keir was the one to make contact with Binah.

It had surprised him just how much the ‘masters’ discussed openly in front of their combat assets, obviously assured of the iron grip their conditioning had on them. With his eyes and mind opened, he had listened and learned.

A technophage, he had quickly gathered, could be an invaluable resource in escaping the academy.

Even with that mission in mind, though, it had taken nearly two years to work out a plan they could act on. With Keir being the only one of them able to communicate with both individuals and gather the necessary intel, things had progressed slowly. His schedule was as regimented as ever, so it was only through hastily scrawled notes shoved under her door as he passed by that they were able to communicate. It had taken time to get her to trust him, but desperation must have ridden her as hard as it did he and Layla, so she eventually agreed.

‘It’s time!’  Layla crowed, startling Keir from his reverie. ‘Now, do it now!’

Keir moved, then, launching himself into the air to land in the center of the room.

“You there! What are you-” the man on the dais began to demand, clearly startled by the sudden show of free will. The ominous rumble that rolled up from beneath their feet interrupted him, however, making him look down in confusion.

Keir reached out with his power, letting it fill the assembly hall until it touched every asset there, none of whom had so much as blinked at the disruption as they stood at attention. When he was sure he had them all, he pulled everyone in as close to him as possible, a mass of bodies huddled together like penguins in the arctic.

As the building’s gas main exploded and the room erupted into flames around them,Keir shielded them all, pushing out with his mind as hard as he could against the torrent of fire, heaving earth, and crumbling building that fought to overwhelm him. Encompassed in a bubble of still air, he and the other assets remained untouched.

When the fire died away and the ground settled, Keir finally released his power and sagged to the ground, feeling drained. It was the greatest use of power he’d ever exerted. In fact, he hadn’t even been sure he would be able to do it at all. To save so many people…

Chest heaving breathlessly, the man struggled from amongst his peers and took in their surroundings. The assembly hall was in ragged tatters, but as they had suspected, some individual rooms still stood in the distance. Cells where support assets were kept were heavily reinforced, though Keir wasn’t sure if that was to keep things out, or to keep their contents in.

“Come on, move, damn you!” he growled at the mass of people around him. Most of them lay motionless, like a child’s cast off dolls. Others sat up, seeming disoriented as they asked the open air for orders.

‘Be kind, Keir, they can’t help it. The assembly stasis command is one of the most firmly entrenched in combat assets. It has to be, to keep so many of you in one place without fear of you turning. Come let me out and I’ll be able to help them like I did you.’

‘Alright, I’m coming,’ Keir replied as he fought his way free of his fellows and waded out into the shattered remains of the Academy.

He paused long enough to grab a rifle from one of the Academy staff that lay dead on the ground, half buried beneath a collapsed wall. He hadn’t bothered to save them or any other non-asset in the room, though there had been many of their number in attendance. Mostly they were handlers waiting to be assigned a combat asset. Others had been wealthy investors or potential buyers there to size up the goods. None of them were innocent like the assets were, taken at infancy and conditioned into the perfect tools to wreak crimes against humanity at the command of others.

He’d let them all burn.

A few staff still survived in one of the far wings as he made his way to Layla, but he killed them as he passed, wanting no pursuit when he and Layla made their escape. No one could be left to tell what had happened here.

It took time, but he eventually found her room, buried deep beneath the rubble. Tired though he was, Keir levitated the wreckage and cast it aside until he was able to see the door at last. It had been so badly damaged by the explosion that he had to tear it free with his mind as well. Metal shrieked against metal until the hinges snapped and he finally cast the door aside.

“Layla?” he called, her name unfamiliar, almost strange, on his tongue as he said it aloud for the first time.

“K-Keir,” called a week, rasping voice from the darkness within the chamber. His first time hearing her speak outside the confines of his own head. She stumbled to the door and the man reached out to catch her without thinking, pulling her taller frame in against him so she could lean on him.

“It’s alright, I’ve got you,” he said, hands shaking as he ran one of them absently over her hair. She was so warm against him, like nothing he’d ever experienced before.

How fucked up was he that simple human contact was enough to make his knees want to buckle?

‘Don’t worry, you’re not the only one,’ Layla remarked weakly, speaking to him silently out of habit. As she did, Keir realized that she was trembling under his hands, spurring him to hold her tighter yet as she buried her face in the crook of his neck.

They stood that way for a long minute, each clinging to the other until their breaths synchronized and both felt a little more able to take on the tasks that still awaited them.

“We’ve got to go find Binah,” Keir said eventually, breaking the peaceful silence between them. He reluctantly released his hold on Layla, though took her hand and began to walk.

“Wait,” she said, voice rough with disuse as she refused to follow, bringing him up short.

He turned and frowned at her. “Layla, we have to move. I don’t know if they have assets stationed elsewhere that will be sent back to investigate when they realize the Academy has literally been leveled.”

“I know, but please,” the woman insisted as she pulled her hand from his, then turned and stumbled across the debris on unsteady legs until she reached another half-buried, steel reinforced room that looked much like her own. “There’s someone in here, we have to get him out.”

Keir followed quickly after her, moving more sure-footedly than the malnourished psychic.

“You’re going to make me free all of the support assets, aren’t you?” he asked with a grimace as he caught her up.

Layla smiled weakly at him and asked, “Would you really condemn them to die alone and frightened in their prisons? Worse, would you leave them to be found and used against their will again?”

Keir looked at her earnest expression and pleading brown eyes. He wasn't surprised to find that he had no ability to tell her no.

“Fine,” he agreed with a sigh as he shouldered his stolen rifle then took her gently by the arm and made her sit on a collapsed piece of wall.

While he worked to excavate the room next to Layla’s the woman said out of the blue, “He’s been there so long, Keir. Longer than any of us, I think.”

“How do you mean?” he asked between grunts of effort as slabs of stone and entire steel beams were lifted and tossed aside.

Layla watched him quietly for a moment, and Keir got the impression that she was having to think on the matter. “I’m not quite sure,” she admitted eventually. “But I could hear him dreaming sometimes.”

The room finally unearthed, Keir paused at the door and glanced back at his friend, brow furrowed in question. “I thought your powers didn’t extend past your room.”

“They didn’t, not by much, anyways,” Layla said with a shrug. “I could tell when people were passing by, catch the occasional thought...Maybe it’s because his room is directly next to mine, or maybe he’s like you,” she suggested with a shrug, clearly unsure. “He’s only woken once that I can remember. He was so frightened and angry and then...I don’t know. He just stopped. Like he wasn’t there at all anymore.”

The woman shuddered a little at the memory. It had been years ago now, not long after she had first been imprisoned. Even so, she would never forget that fear, or the hurt that had inspired it. His anger had burned her senses, and then it had all cut off as surely as though someone had shut a door in her face.

“What, like he died?” Keir asked, confused as he turned his attention back to the door.

“It felt like it at first,” she explained. “But later, I heard him dreaming again, and I can hear him in there now, still at it.”

The man grunted at this information, then proceeded to try and drag the door off its hinges. He swore quietly under his breath when it wouldn’t budge. He could pull harder, but as he inspected the box of a room again, he noted that the ceiling appeared to be a weaker point of entrance than the heavily reinforced door.

Keir lifted himself into the air so he could have a better view, then proceeded to peel the ceiling away so he could peer within. After a moment’s consideration of what he found there, he pushed out the walls and descended, making the entire thing pull apart at the seams so it bloomed outward like a strange flower.

The room was larger than Layla’s, full of tables, computers, and other now ruined machines Keir did not know the function of. It was, he noted, less a prison cell and more of a laboratory. Papers were scattered everywhere, many of which had been damaged by the strange liquids that had leaked from shattered vials to pool in a toxic looking puddle on the floor. Stray files, all with ‘Project Adam’ stamped in their header started to smolder as embers drifted in on the ash clogged breeze.

The centerpiece of the room was a large cylinder that had become unmoored from the wall when the gas main went, and toppled over onto its side. A glass window was built into the front, and through it (and a thin layer of frost) Keir could just make out the shadowy figure of a man. Engraved on the brass plate riveted to the steel just below the window were the words ‘PROJECT ADAM’.

“It’s a cryo tube,” he observed aloud. Layla joined him then, clambering over the remains to get to Keir as he pried the chamber open, icy air hissing out when the seal broke and he peered at the man within.

Coming to crouch on the opposite side of the tube, Layla reached in and brushed her fingers along the stranger’s pale, frost coated cheek as Keir pushed himself to his feet and started climbing out and away from the ruined lab.

“Wait!” she called after taking a moment longer to examine the sleeping man’s peaceful visage. “We...we have to take him with us, we can’t just leave him,” Layla insisted as she too got to her feet and pursued him.

When she stumbled over the uneven ground, Keir reached out to steady her with his power on reflex, then simply levitated her over to his side to save her the effort.

“We can’t. We don’t have time to free everyone and help some popsicle guy who’s been on ice for who knows how long.” he insisted. When she looked ready to object, Keir sighed and added, “I just can’t, Layla. I’m already tired and we’ve got a long way to go before we can rest. I can’t take care of both of you and save the other support assets. We just won’t make it. You have to choose: take that guy with us, or stay long enough to free everyone before we get the hell out of here.”

Layla’s thin features contorted into a deeply unhappy expression, which sent a pang through Keir’s heart, but this time he remained firm as she looked him in the eye, clearly weighing his words. He knew she could feel the truth of them, but that didn’t make his ultimatum any easier to accept.

Finally, the woman turned and cast her eyes back the way Keir had come to where the other combat assets still lay in a sad, graceless heap. Her brow furrowed with effort as she stretched out a hand in their direction. Sweat beaded on her temples, and after a moment, her legs gave out beneath her, forcing Keir to step forward and catch her before she could hit the ground.

“Layla!” he said, shaking her gently, worried by the way her already pale features had gone white as a sheet, her breath shallow. Fear sparked in his heart at the thought of losing her so soon after finally attaining everything they had been working for, but it was quickly allayed when she stirred in his arms a moment later. Her eyes fluttered open and she managed a weak smile and a gentle pat to his cheek with her long, thin fingers.

“I’m alright,” she whispered, then turned to look at her handiwork.

Keir straightened, but maintained his hold on her as he asked, “What did you do?”

“Freed them,” she said, gesturing towards the people he had saved from the blast. He turned to look in time to see the previously insensate combat assets slowly beginning to get to their feet and look around them, seeming at a loss. Most of them began to wander off, but a small handful of the younger ones headed towards them. “I’ve asked some to come look after our friend here,” Layla explained. “They can take care of one another,” she added quietly.

The man nodded, satisfied with this compromise. Before he could say as much, though, movement at the periphery of his vision made him snap his head around. Some distance off, someone was crawling out from amongst the debris. Reacting on instinct, Keir grabbed his rifle, racked a round, and aimed in one fluid motion. Before he could consider firing, though, Layla grabbed the barrel and pushed it down to point at the ground.

“It’s Binah,” she said, and he did not question how she knew, simply trusted that she did. He shouldered his gun again as Layla raised a hand in greeting. After a moment, the distant figure did the same.

The woman to whom they owed their freedom was short, but just as thin as Layla, with short cropped black hair and mahogany colored skin. She didn’t approach them, however. Instead, after the long moment that stretched between the three of them, she turned and walked away, clearly deciding to make her own path away from the hell they had managed to bring an end to.

They watched her go for a time, Keir’s arm instinctively finding its way around Layla’s thin shoulders.

“Come on,” she said eventually, “We have work to do before we go.”

~*~*~*~

“Hey, wake up.”

“Maybe she was wrong after all. Maybe he’s dead.”

There was a sensation of warm fingers pressed against his skin, gentle, but insistent.

“No he’s not, I can feel his pulse. Here.”

The fingers disappeared and were replaced by others that settled slightly to the right of where the first had been pressed.

“I don’t feel anything.”

“Not there,” someone forcefully lifted and then shifted the fingers to the correct place. “There.”

“Oh.”

“Enough playing medic, we need to get out of here ASAP,” a third voice said from almost directly overhead.

The first voice spoke again. “Well we can’t just leave him. The lady said we had to take care of him.”

“Well screw that, I’m not sticking around just because some woman I don’t even know told me to-”

“Where are we going to go?” A fourth voice asked, high and reedy with a hint of tears.

‘Children,’ the man realized foggily. ‘They’re all just children.’

“Project Adam,” the second voice said. “Think that’s his name?”

“That’s stupid, what kind of name is ‘Project’,” the third muttered.

“Not ‘project’, idiot. Adam!”

A fifth voice, equally young but a little more level sounding, remarked, “These papers all over the place say ‘Project Adam’ too. Some have pictures.”

“I-I think some of this is blood...” the fourth and youngest sounding voice said uneasily.

“Adam. Hey, Adam, or whatever your name is, wake up!” demanded the first voice as small hands shook one of his shoulders.

‘Adam’ finally stirred, though not in response to his supposed name being called. He didn’t know what his name was, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t it.

His limbs responded sluggishly as he slowly pushed himself upright, eyes struggling to focus as their lids pried themselves apart for the first time in...well, who knew how long. He ached deep down in his bones and his muscles felt both impossibly tight and improbably loose at the same time.

There was a general clamour from the people around him, and many hands landed on his person as they helped him sit upright. He opened his mouth to speak, but the words barely came out a sigh.

“What?” someone asked, right by his ear. “What did he say?” they asked again to the group at large.

He cleared his throat and tried again, though his voice came out rough and thready. “Year?”

“Huh?” asked the third voice.

‘Adam’ took a breath and forced his eyes to focus, blinking rapidly as the people around him slowly came into focus. Five young faces stared back at him, and his previous suspicion was confirmed. Every single one of them was a child dressed in identical black combat uniforms and matching boots. Two of them had picked up rifles half their size, though they held them with a practiced ease that made the man distinctly uncomfortable in a way he couldn’t quite place. It felt... wrong, seeing a child handle a high powered rifle with the competence of a trained soldier.

Not a one of them looked over thirteen, and the youngest, who had yet to speak, couldn’t have been more than eight.

The man pushed himself to his feet, one of his hands landing heavily on the shoulder of an older child when he nearly toppled mid-attempt. A girl, he realized as he found his balance and was able to get a good look at her. At that age, with all of them not only wearing the same clothes, but sporting the same buzzcut, it was hard to tell them apart.

“Are you okay?” she asked, brow furrowed as she looked up at him. She was the first child to have spoken, he recognized.

He tried again. “Not particularly. What year is it?” he rasped.

All the children shared a look, then the girl under his hand answered. “Er, 2002?” She looked at him as though she worried he might not be entirely stable, and the man couldn’t blame her.

“Sixty-two years,” he muttered after doing the mental math. Fuzzy as his mind felt, the numbers didn’t come easy, though.

“Huh?”

“I think I’ve been in there sixty-two years,” he clarified, then fought to straighten his shoulders before turning his attention to what was left of his prison. The children spoke among themselves in hushed tones at this revelation, and he let them as he struggled to gather his thoughts.

“What happened?” he asked, voice still rough, though recovering quickly, just like the rest of him it seemed. The building around them appeared to have been reduced to a smoking crater. In the distance he could still see others dressed in much the same way the children making double-time away from them.

“The lady and her friends blew up the academy,” the girl who’d leant him her shoulder said. “They freed everyone and they left. She asked us to look after you. Said that you’d look after us in return when we got out of here.” The girl looked up at him with large blue eyes, head canted to one side as though she were debating on how likely this were to pan out for them.

“Whatever we do,” another of the older children, a boy, said, “it needs to be fast. Who knows who’s going to come looking when the smoke clears.”

The man ran his hand down the length of his face, then up into his dark, close cut curls as he tried to think. His memory was a mess. Fragments of different times and places all jumbled together and distinctly out of order. He remembered growing up by the sea, the ocean air blissfully cool in the summer as it rolled in across the bay and up into the hills of the city. He had been different, growing up. He’d had power like the people around him could only dream of; power his mother had forbidden him from using for fear of someone coming and taking him away.

He remembered the people in the fire, remembered the way he’d carried them from the burned out ruins. Fragmented images of men finding him, taking him away from that seaside town…

What had come next he tried very hard not to remember.

The sharp crack of crumbling architecture and the startled yelp of a child activated instincts that even decades spent on ice could not repress as a nearby wall, two stories high and unable to bear up under its own weight any longer, tumbled towards them. Too close to the source to hope to get out of the way in time, the children tried to run anyways, with the exception of the girl onto whose shoulder ‘Adam’ still held.

“Run!” she shouted at him and tried fruitlessly to pull him away while the man beside her turned to look at their impending doom. She watched, wide-eyed, as he reached out with a hand as though commanding it to stop. It didn’t, but a barrier, transparent, glittering, and milk-pale appeared in the air between them and the tumbling stonework.

The wall crashed into the shield with the boom of crumbling stonework and remained there until Adam took a step forward, arm still fully extended, and pushed the shield before him. The rocks fell away, and the barrier dropped as the children hurried back to his side.

The man turned to look at them with his bright blue-hazel eyes, and smiled. “Alright, let’s get going, shall we?”

He started walking, and they followed after him without thinking, clamoring for answers to their many questions.

Eventually, one voice was heard over the rest when the girl demanded “Hey! What do we call you?”

The man frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Adam will do for now.”

“Told you that was his name!” one of the boys boasted.

“It is not! It’s obviously just a codename!” one of the others argued.

The girl who had remained with him cast a rueful smile back over her shoulder at them as she walked at Adam’s side. He set a quick pace, but they were keeping up for now. “So, which is it? Code, or real?”

The man gave her a sad sort of half-smile, and admitted, “Honestly? I don’t remember.”

Hope you guys enjoyed! Please do leave a comment and let me know what your favorite bit was! I love hearing that! Reblogs are, of course, super appreciated as well!!

(On to Prologue pt 2 >)

(( Buy me a ko-fi?))

[personalcoachingcenter]

Power Coaching Tool: Fear Versus Action

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/power-coaching-tool-fear-versus-action/

Power Coaching Tool: Fear Versus Action

A Coaching Power Tool Created by Stephenson Robert (Transformational Coach, UNITED KINGDOM)

Introduction

As a coach, who works with the narrative elements of the client, not the story that we can get caught up in, but more the Narrative of their current existence in relationship to the goal or challenge. I am keen to explore who they are “being” at the moment, that enables the challenge to exist in the first place, or the narrative they are holding onto that prevents them from taking the next step without the coaching intervention.

During the opening of many coaching sessions, we can notice the blocks, limiting beliefs, or perceived truths that allow fear to come into the client space.

When I talk about fear here, I am not talking about fear in relationship to real danger, fear of falling, fear of doing a dangerous sport. However, these fears may play apart in the coaching, often as metaphors for a more internal fear that my tool seeks to shift to create or rather enable action.

As coaches, we are fully aware that it is the client that takes the step, and the coaching is the space that enables the step to be noticed, realized, gathered up by the client through the process.

Explanation

Noticing fear.

One of the first steps is to notice fear showing up in the first place, and this might come from the client’s tone, energy, or physicality when talking about the goal or challenge. As we hold this in mind, it is essential to be mindful of applying our own agenda of fear being present, into the coaching space. Instead, we hold this lightly as a possibility, the same way we might look out for words like “should” and “must” as these are linguistic gateways into a client’s thoughts or feelings.

The tone of fear.

When working with Bobby on his desire to be a public speaker, one was able to notice the strong and confident tone of voice that flowed during the coaching conversation unless Bobby was exploring how he might handle questions from the audience that he didn’t know the answer to. There was a pulling back of the volume, a drop in tone. The was also accompanied by words such as “can’t”, “stuck” and “confusing”.

By paying attention to the client tone and in fact language we might notice the “fear” making itself known but not necessarily in the clients conscious, but under the surface, which makes it important for the coach not to jump on the first noticing of tonal change as meaning fear, but reflecting the noticing of tonal shift with inquiry and openness, being very aware of continuing to hold rapport and presence with the client. A too forceful question may break rapport, cause the client to close up, or move away from the current felt state to relieve themselves from the coach’s path of questioning.

Observing fear.

When we can see our clients, we might also notice a physical reaction take place as fear becomes part of the conversation. We often talk of leaning into a challenge or leaning into space and can notice this happening physically as someone becomes more engaged in the conversation.

However, when something pulls fear or anxiety into space, our clients may lean back, pulling away from the space, creating distance for themselves, retreating, or even getting smaller in front of our very eyes. However, these movements can be extremely subtle, and having trained as a mime artist in a past career; my eyes are tuned into physical detail, noticing the smallest of gestures.

There is something else to be said here, too about noticing the client’s physicality. If we look, with focus, at the client’s face, we will miss the rest of the client and not see other physical signs showing themselves for noticing.

When working with Bobby, as he got closer to his stuckness, there was a curling of the shoulders, a slight turning inwards and forwards. There was also a tilting of the head. All of this can be easily missed when working with the client when we become too focused upon one aspect, so the ability to be present while also not attached to any-one element is so important.

The energy of fear.

When we take the time to breathe, relax, and tune into the space between ourselves and our clients, we can often notice the energy between us. Sometimes we are not even aware of it until it changes or shifts. This is similar to walking into a room and noticing the tension in the space, or when a person of high positive energy walks into the room, and we feel that lift in energy.

Depending upon your belief or paradigm, you may be more tuned into energy than others, and that is just fine, because as coaches we can still, regardless of our belief, notice the shift in energy, rapport, or attention between our client and ourselves during the session. Similar to the emotion we notice, just before it is physically displayed, by the client.

We might think about it from a spacial perspective; there is the client in their space, us in ours and the space of the coaching relationship, and it is the caching relationship space we can notice shifting and changing as fear enters into it from the client. Sometimes we might notice this as our own fear but are unsure where this sensation is coming from, and we might just take the time to explore is this me, or is this in the space. You may even ask the client this as an open question, or a reflection of what you are noticing.

So far, I have spoken about my own observations of fear, and I feel it is essential to share a few other perspectives:

The dictionary talks about; an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm. And while there may be no real physical danger for the client, they are often battling with the emotional aspect of fear, the felt sense as opposed to the physical threat of danger.

Verywellmind1* talks of fear as being; a natural, powerful, and primitive human emotion. It involves a universal biochemical response as well as a high individual emotional response. This can allow us to know that this is a very human experience and that our clients are not odd, wrong, or broken to experience the emotions, it is simply a human reaction.

They continue to say; Fear is a natural emotion and a survival mechanism. When we confront a perceived threat, our bodies respond in specific ways. Physical reactions to fear to include sweating, increased heart rate, and high adrenaline levels that make us extremely alert2*. This reinforces the idea that this is simply being human. However, as coaches, we work with our clients to explore the “realness” of the perceived danger which is where the Action part of the power tool comes into play, which we will explore in more detail later.

In her book Positivity, Barbara Fredrickson says; fear is linked with the urge to flee….3*

This may give us evidence, to notice why clients avoid leaning into what they fear, when exploring their goals or challenges, within a coaching session.

Paul McGee also talks about fear, and how it can cause us to exaggerate our perception of danger, in his book Self-Confidence he says; ….feeling anxious is not the problem. The problem occurs when you allow the anxiety to overwhelm you…..being over-anxious causes you to exaggerate the negative impact of an event or the likelihood of that event occurring.4*

Application

So how might we put this knowledge into action? Here I outline the steps one might take, Using my client Johnny (name changed to protect the innocent: permission gained to use our sessions as examples) to highlight both the noticing of fear and the process that enables us to move from fear to action.

Johnny had several public speaking engagements lined up, the initial excitement had shifted, leaving Johny with a very temperament at the beginning of the session. Initial observations;

Lower tone of voice than usual

A slower pace of speech

Shoulders leaning forward

Upper torso leaning backward

Chin downwards towards chest

An additional observation is a story being shared, the use of language such as;

This is happening

And then there is….

They are doing this or that

One can notice how this language isn’t about the self but for others. In some way, we can notice how Johnny is giving away his “power” in the situation, leaving a sense of powerlessness.

First step – Reflection

Here we reflect our noticings as the coach, without judgment or meaning, just what we are seeing and hearing—making sure to use as much of the client’s language as possible. This creates an observable perspective for the client to make their own reflections and noticings.

Second step – Questioning

Here we use our open questioning skills to explore what “might” be going on for the client. Keeping what I like to call “fluid language”. Words such as might, have an unusual quality of fluidity about them, not fixed. And that allows for changes, expansions, and emergence to take place for the client, without them being wrong or having to change their minds, just allowing the newness to exist and it emerges into space.

The third step – Eliciting emotion

This is the most delicate step of all, where one must be mindful of putting our own agenda or feeling onto the client. Firstly we ask the client.

“I am wondering if there is any emotion here?” Or you might ask

“What is the emotion that is happening for you right now?” One could also ask

“I am wondering what emotion is coming up for you right now as you hear this/share this/reflect upon this?

The client may share a myriad of emotions here, and you might even need to help the client name the emotion they are feeling using tools like the ‘emotion wheel’5*

One can also use Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion

As we view these tools, we can see the emotions linked to or associated with fear. It is not for us to diagnose the client as having fear, but to explore if this is a possibility, which leads to step four

Fourth – the challenge

Whenever we, as coaches, name what we feel as being in the space or a possibility, it is important to do so in a way that it is a question not a statement of fact.

One might even ask for permission to share this reflection; however, this permission might have already been gain within your original coaching contract. You may wish to recontract at this moment or not, but one must make sure that we continue to hold the space for the client, as well as coaching presence and rapport.

When working with Johnny, with who I have had a daily long coaching relationship, I can simply ask the question, without seeking additional permission, using language that is open, reflective, and a holding supportive tone.

“Johnny, as I hear you share and we explore I am wondering if fear might be playing a part here….What are your thoughts on that?

Having worked with Johnny for a while, we have explored the idea of fear before, so this word is familiar, you may wish to wait until the client brings the word into space, for concern of leading or bringing the coaches agenda into space. However, I feel when done right, the client can reject your wonderings easily if there is no resonance. And the coach must allow this rejection to take place without attachment.

Fifth step – the consequences

Once you have elicited the emotions, as it may not be fear that is holding the client back or keeping them stuck, we can then explore the consequence of staying in this space.

I am aware that in each of our coaching spaces, there may be other routes that may come to mind or be more useful, as it is with all coaching processes. However, to share how I enable movement, I will assume that the client is stuck, held back, or inactive in progression at this time.

We can call on the consequences questions, which we can also use with visualization if our client desires.

If you stay in this place for 3 months, what might happen?

If you stay in this space for 6…..

If you stay in this space for 1,2,3…5 years, what might that mean/bring/happen?

This visualization journey allows the client to picture what may continue to happen if they stay where they are right now. This often brings about a desire to move forward, to take action, to create change, especially as the client may see how being inactive/passive/settling, how they will not be able to achieve the goals that they desire. This shift in perspective brings about a desire to take action, which we can then continue to coach the client for them to build the steps of action.

 Reflections

While working with my client’s I am mindful not to allow this tool to drive my coaching, but to sit in the background, brought into space when the vocal and physical indicators show up in the space, and even then not to push but allow. It is all too easy for a tool to become leading, and it is our offering into the space that allows us to bring it with openness and gentle offering, that allows it to be accepted or rejected without tension or a breaking of the coaching relationship.

I also feel that it take a sense of connection and courage to bring this tool into the coaching relationship, challenging the client to explore their fear without having developed a relationship with them, can lead to damaging the coaching relationship in a way that is unrepairable. However, one needs the courage to challenge our clients, challenge them to look deeper, to go further, to take a deep breath and face what is, so that they can address it, except its presence, and make the choice to do something about it when and where appropriate to them.

I hope this tool enables you to assist your client’s movement from Fear to Action, in a supportive, encouraging, and powerful way, leading to the achievement of their goals.

Reference:

1* https://www.verywellmind.com/the-psychology-of-fear-2671696

2* Kozlowska K, Walker P, McLean L, Carrive P. Fear, and the defense cascade: Clinical implications and management.

3* Positivity, Barbara Fredrickson,pg19

4* Self-Confidence, Paul McGee, pg 144

5* Emotion wheel

Original source: https://coachcampus.com/coach-portfolios/power-tools/stephenson-robert-fear-v-s-action/