#BUT MY HEART IS DESTROYED FROM READING THEIR COMICS

[meltedmush]

This is definitely the largest bulk post I’ve ever done,,,,

[hyperions-light]

Someone was being a fucking hater on my explicitly positive DATV post AGAIN (u all know I can see your tags right. They get delivered to me express mail style) so here’s an essay about how I thought the Grey Warden plotline was great:

First, it was extremely lore-consistent. I don’t know how to tell people this, but the Grey Wardens simply are sort of shady— it’s part of their charm. In DAO alone we found out they:

- kill anyone who refuses the joining

- are definitely using a blood magic ritual to induct people

- tried to usurp the throne of Fereldan

In DA2 they:

-Forced Malcolm Hawke to perform a blood magic ritual against his will to contain Corypheus, by threatening to kill his family

- Built a giant prison in the mountains they didn’t tell anyone about and that someone could wander into and not be able to escape

- the entire Corypheus thing. They didn’t even tell the other Wardens like what he was or how dangerous he was.

DAI:

- the demon army thing was pretty bad

And that’s not even mentioning any stuff from the books or comics or shows! That’s just stuff in the games!

So they’re shady. It’s okay! They’re my little woobie guys, idc if they’re sort of shady!

But the plot in DATV is about all of those previously established issues coming back to bite them in the fucking ass, as they should! Knock knock, it’s the consequences of your actions, baby! The chickens are home to roost

(Which is just good storytelling. Like if you set up a bunch of issues and then never pay them off or anything that’s bad.)

Destroying Weisshaupt was inspired! Firstly bc Davrin is Weisshaupt, metaphorically (bulwark against the darkness, etc, I already made a post) so it serves his character arc. But also because it strips away the pageantry and the grandeur from them; no more castle for you! No more myth!

Davrin explicitly tells you that the First Warden is a traditionalist; he represents the historical attitudes of the Wardens. They do not accept help, they do not give up their secrets, they are standing alone against the dark. And it doesn’t work! He’s fucking wrong (and very punch-able). Being secretive and isolationist is a mistake that costs them nearly everything.

But also, and I’m not sure how many people experienced this on the first go-around, the game does ultimately come down on the side of the Wardens always trying to do the right thing. You CAN talk the First Warden down, because in the end he’s a Warden, and he might be stubborn and curmudgeonly and miserable but he CARES about the world. He came to do good. He admits he was wrong and he helps you. Because the heart of the Wardens is about selfless service to other people. In Death, Sacrifice.

Stripping away Weisshaupt and the glory and pageantry leaves the Wardens at their most vulnerable and forces them to return to their fundamental principles: helping people. That’s what Lavendel is about. Helping individual people and preserving every life possible even if it doesn’t feel that glamorous or heroic. Lavendel isn’t a significant place; it doesn’t matter, but it matters so much.

And then, the Cauldron.

First off, do not at me about Last Flight. I don’t think people should have to read external materials to play this game and understand it. If the information is vital it should be presented to the player in the text.

The Cauldron is the repository of the Wardens’ secrets; it’s where the keep the bones of the Archdemons, the secret to the Joining, ancient and dangerous weapons, as well as the bodies of the griffons, which represents their most shameful errors. Isseya is the avatar of the Wardens’ mistakes; she’s been hurt by what they made her do, and her pain was never acknowledged by them. They buried her story and her suffering like they bury everything they don’t want to deal with and are ashamed of. They left the bones of the griffons, whose deaths they directly caused, to rot because they were too sad to acknowledge them.

But it was wrong to walk away, it was wrong to bury it. Isseya makes sure that they can never do that again, that they have to own what they did and take responsibility. By discovering who she is and by restoring her personhood to her, by reminding her of her love which drove her to her anguish in the first place, Davrin saves her and he saves the griffons. He doesn’t do it using violence, because another sin of the Wardens is just assuming that they can kill their way out of their problems, which the game disproves by revealing the origin of the Blight. You can kill as many darkspawn as you want, you will never fix it! The Titans’ dreams do not need to be slain, they need to be healed.

Isseya is in so much pain because of her incredible love for both the griffons and the Wardens, and because of her guilt. Look what she builds! An alternate Weisshaupt, a distorted reflection of her home. She entreats both Davrin and Assan to join her, because she doesn’t think she’s trying to destroy anything. She’s trying to save them! She wants them to come home. “I am their mother,” she says, and she’s right. She saved them, then, and she ends up saving them now! Because she made Davrin and the other Wardens look, unflinchingly, at what they had done, it will never happen again. She was going about it wrong during the game, but she was ALWAYS trying to save them.

Davrin, Antoine and Evka represent the Wardens’ commitment to being different. They let Flynn undergo the Joining without becoming a Warden, they reveal secrets to non-Warden Rook, they offer to help the Viper without asking for anything in return. They ask for help and offer it freely. If the Wardens are going to persist into a world without Archdemons, they HAVE to change. They can’t be what they were anymore. The game is asking what a Warden is when they have to be more than their oath, when they have to live. It’s a great exploration of and expansion on previously established lore.

Anyway, my advice if you hated the plot and the game and the characters is to a) make your own post b) don’t bother me about it, because I have the time and I will be loudly positive in response!

[gollancz]

Guys. Christmas is coming. Consumerism is in the driver's seat and GAWD don't I know about the existential ennui of all these faceless corporations trying to schill you their wares. It's cold. Impersonal. Bleak.

So I, a fellow tumblr user, will instead try to schill you MY wares, so that when you purchase these items you can say "Hey, that person from tumblr worked on this", and feel the warmth of HUMAN CONNECTION in a way that is completely normal and not parasocial at all. We really are friends. I promise. Yes, you. Love you, bestie. Remember the boop war? Good times. Fond memories.

THIRTEEN STOREYS and FAMILY BUSINESS by Jonathan Sims

Tumblr's favourite Nightmare Factory @jonnywaistcoat has two novels out and they're phenomenal horror that also punch you in the throat with SOCIAL COMMENTARY and FEELINGS. He's so adept at tapping into the specific part of my brain that feels fear like a small child - not the adult creepy scared that I normally get around horror, but specifically the kind of fear that almost freezes your limbs and vocal chords with a terror you don't quite understand because there is so much in the world that you don't know, but you know that somehow this thing might be quick enough or smart enough or sneaky enough to get you before you can get to the safety of your parents sort of fear.

THIRTEEN STOREYS is a haunted house novel, but set in a refurbished block of flats. Each chapter follows a different resident being haunted in a different way, with a style to match the flavour of ghost. It's all tied together phenomenally and brutally.

FAMILY BUSINESS is a story about ghosts in a different way, following a woman who joins a post-mortem house cleaning service while grieving the death of her best friend. But as she removes the stains from the houses of the dead, she begins to suspect something else is removing even more.

Both of these titles are available from Gollancz worldwide!

THE LAST UNICORN, THE WAY HOME, THE INNKEEPER'S SONG and A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE by Peter S. Beagle

Obviously Peter's work needs no introduction, and our editions aren't available in the US and Canada, but I've had a wonderful time working with Peter and his team to bring these beautiful books back to the UK. Meeting him at Worldcon this year was such a magical moment, and he was jet-lagged and I had gone through sleep deprived into hyper and was bringing an Extremely Weird Energy to every interaction I had that day, resulting in this photo:

THE LAST UNICORN and THE WAY HOME are a matched pair of wonderful fairy stories. THE WAY HOME has two novellettes in it, and the first - 'Two Hearts' - won the Hugo award. It will also destroy you.

A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE was Peter's first ever novel, and it's wistful and romantic and so beautiful.

THE INNKEEPER'S SONG is his epic fantasy quest, it's an adventure story that reads almost lyrically. Also there's an orgy in the middle which caught me by surprise when I was reading it for the first time on the train into work.

HIGH VAULTAGE by Chris and Jen Sugden

It's possible that someone on this website doesn't know I was involved with this book but don't worry, I will HUNT THEM DOWN AND TELL THEM. This is the first book I took all the way through the editorial process from end to end and I am SO PROUD of it and Chris and Jen and their wonderful world of @victoriocity. Officially one of the seven funniest books published in the UK this year, shortlisted for the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. It's a chaotic, bonkers murder mystery set in an alternate Victorian London which is the most gleeful dystopia I have ever encountered.

Featuring:

Grumpy Sunshine besties

The Victorian Equivalent of the Chuck Norris Meme

A robot who undertook a course in People Management

An indefatigable beagle

This is another book that you can get from Gollancz all over the world, and you SHOULD because it's amazing. Go into your local bookshop and ask them to order it into stock. It's a great Christmas present. It's my firstborn book baby (like that's a completely normal thing to say when I didn't even write it). Also if you're a fan of the podcast, why not tell the Guardian how great it is, and make a nuisance of yourself until they review. (I would, but the form asks for your name and then they'd know I didn't suddenly discover Victoriocity this year. Either that or think I was a very careless editor.) If you've not listened to the podcast yet, you absolutely should. It pings all my Douglas Adams receptors in the best way. If you like HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE, if you like CABIN PRESSURE, VICTORIOCITY is the perfect addition.

HAMMAJANG LUCK by Makana Yamamoto

SLIGHTLY cheating because HAMMAJANG LUCK isn't out in North America until January (pre-orders make great Christmas presents guys), but it IS out in the UK and the rest of the world next week! This is my second big editorial project and it's a Big Gay Space Heist ft. disaster lesbians, trans characters, and a tech billionaire getting put in his place. It's joyous and energetic and crammed full of Hawaiian pidgin as a love letter to the diaspora. @makana-yama is a phenomenal writer and this is their love letter to their communities, families both born and found, while also a statement on the victims of gentrification (and how those are disproportionally BIPOC communities). PLUS:

friends to enemies to cautious allies to lovers

trans cyborgs

Suck It Space Elon

You know that One Scene in Charlie's Angels where Cameron Diaz is in the white body suit and breaking into the safe and has to stretch out to hit two buttons at once? Yeah. That's the vibe.

Being able to work with Makana is a delight, and HAMMAJANG tapped into all the feelings I got watching LEVERAGE for the first time, so I went to watch it again while I was editing. Also OCEAN'S 8.

DEEP BLACK by Miles Cameron

So, barring Branderson, Miles Cameron may be one of our most prolific authors. He writes a minimum two books a year, one SFF and one historical fiction (as Christian Cameron) and he is... An absolute phenomenon. He IS the Chuck Norris meme. I'm obsessed with him. He's former US military intelligence turned naturalised Canadian Hippy, has written over fifty novels, can turn his hand to any genre and write it fantastically, is a practical archaeologist - running large scale re-enactments from a variety of periods ranging from Bronze Age right the way up to the Victorian era, using traditional techniques to allow academics to study how the practicalities of weapons, clothes, food etc. would have worked in practice. Two years ago he won a medieval combat tournament in Verona, a clear ten years older at least than the next oldest competitor, he teaches Historical European Martial Arts, but ties it into the history of martial arts globally. He can make his own clothes, ink, leatherwork. He's a ballet dancer. I once took him for a day out and he ended it in a different shirt and shoes from the ones he'd started in. I asked him for an author photo and he sent me this:

DEEP BLACK is the sequel to his critically acclaimed SF debut ARTIFACT SPACE, where he has taken his research and experience of global historical cultures and extrapolated to create an interplanetary future where the best of all are celebrated. And then Aliens Happen. And then, in reaction, Capitalism Happens (which is covered in the short story collection BEYOND THE FRINGE).

He's such a thoughtful and erudite speaker, if you're curious about his work, I'd recommend listening to his episodes on the Friends Talking Fantasy podcast, and also his appearance on The Publishing Rodeo.

If SF isn't your bag, he's also got:

Arthurian fantasy

Bronze Age fantasy

Medieval Mages fantasy

A CURSE OF CROWS - Lauren Dedroog

I actually inherited Lauren when a colleague of mine departed for fresh pastures, which gave me the great opportunity to work on this series which is so vastly different from my usual fare. It's epic, sweeping, romantic and lush, with such detailed description and complex political machinations, while also being brutal, dark and heavy (tw: for sexual assault, torture etc, etc.). If you like Sarah J Maas and Cassandra Clare, this should hit the sweet spot. Lauren is an ICU nurse when not writing, and this was somehow created when she was putting in a million hours in hospitals during COVID. The feat boggles my mind.

A CURSE OF CROWS is out now in the UK, Australia and Europe, and it won the People's Choice for Standaard Boek's Book of the Year award in 2023, in her home country of Belgium. It will be hitting shelves in North America next September! A DANCE OF SERPENTS is where I get to pick up the editorial mantle, and that has just landed in my inbox this week so I am excited to dig in.

Featuring:

Harold, they're lesbians

Murder baby is actually a cinnamon roll

Sensitive wings are sexy

For serious, though, I'm lucky enough to work with a lot of authors I'm genuinely obsessed and astounded by. And yes, I do get to work on Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson and Andrzej Sapkowski, but they're not MY authors - they're led by the incredible Gillian and Marcus who I'm not 100% certain sleep. There are so many people on the Gollancz list who I could recommend for DAYS (and will, if you so request), but this is my stable of superstars.

[genericpuff]

LORE | REKINDLED EPISODE 41 - TOWER 4

< Previous episode | Next episode >

Nothing quite sets in the holiday spirit like SPOOOOKY SHIT-

Can you believe it's been a year since Rekindled actually started? The way time flies when you're having fun. I had actually forgotten I had redrawn a lot of those first few episodes when I made it an official "thing" (i.e. when I put it on an update schedule and signed my life away foreverrr /j) so tracing back when Rekindled officially 'began' had me finding old versions of those first few episodes that were oooooof bro-

Okay, but for real, Rekindled's come a long way, and it still has a long way to go still which makes me so excited. As much as those who see what I do here like to assume it's purely out of spite and hate, I really do love working on this comic, and that includes the part of the process where I revisit old episodes of LO that, even after everything, I still love. The newer seasons may be dead to me, but what it used to be has a special place in my heart, and Rekindled has really helped me explore what could have been. It's made Saturday nights a thrill for me again - I get to enjoy two whole doses of LO content now, with a fun balance of flavors that makes being a part of this community twice as fun as normal. You could say it's really rekindled my flame for LO-

A very special thanks to @banshriek, who's helped me bring Rekindled to a whole new level that wouldn't exist without them. They've been an amazing assistant and a wonderful friend and I'm so thankful to have them in my corner <3

And thank you! All of you, for following along with Rekindled, reading my essays, destroying my ask inbox, and just being an awesome community full of awesome people. I've got a busy year ahead with lots of stuff planned, from art markets and expos to plot threads in Rekindled that I'm hyped af to get to; not to mention Lore Olympus officially ends this year, meaning I'll undoubtedly have loads to talk about (which fills me with both a strange sense of excitement and dread at the same time LOL) I'm gonna try and take it all in the best spirit that I can, I wanna come out of this shit sparkling like one of Hades' diamond golf balls.

Let's make 2024 a fucking banger.

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

1968 [Chapter 8: Demeter, Goddess Of The Harvest]

Series Summary: Aemond is embroiled in a fierce battle to secure the Democratic Party nomination and defeat his archnemesis, Richard Nixon, in the presidential election. You are his wife of two years and wholeheartedly indoctrinated into the Targaryen political dynasty. But you have an archnemesis of your own: Aemond’s chronically delinquent brother Aegon.

Series Warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, character deaths, New Jersey, age-gap relationships, drinking, smoking, drugs, pregnancy and childbirth, kids with weird Greek names, historical topics including war and discrimination, math.

Word Count: 6.2k

Let me know if you’d like to be tagged! 🥰

💜 All of my writing can be found HERE! 💜

Is it a story worth telling? I think so. It’s better than nothing. It’s better than watching raindrops slither down the cracked concrete walls until the prison guards come back to bloody us again.

Today I’m sending John McCain taps in the shape of the tale of Io. John has a hard time tapping back—they’re doing something to his shoulders, they’re destroying him—but he likes to listen. He’s getting it a lot worse than I am; perhaps even the North Vietnamese fear Aemond’s retribution if I die here. They should be afraid of him. He thinks he owns everything he touches, and he’ll snap bones to keep it.

So anyway, Io was a king’s daughter, a mortal who Zeus saw and wanted and took when her father kicked her out to avoid the god’s wrath. That’s easily half of Greek mythology, right? Zeus appears, irrevocably fucks up someone’s life, vanishes in a plume of clouds and thunder. He leaves human rubble behind him: ribs, nerves, disembodied hearts that leak blood from torn ventricles, minds broken in two. Zeus impregnated Io and then turned her into a cow to hide her from his wife Hera, ever-watchful, ever-vengeful, an aspiring mass murderess. When this disguise failed, Hera condemned Io to wander ceaselessly through the wilderness, tormented by the constant stinging of a gadfly. Eventually, Zeus returns Io to human form and she pops out a few bastard kids, as if Zeus needs any more of those. Then he ditches her and she marries some Egyptian dude. There are other details that I’ve forgotten. I don’t think John McCain will know the difference.

I’m sure you’re wondering how I acquired all this fabled trivia. I don’t seem like the type to lie around under trees reading folklore from religions that died thousands of years ago. You’re right, I’m not. But Aemond is. He would tell the stories, and Helaena would embroider scenes on quilts for us to burrow under in the winter, and I would dramatically act out the best parts (mostly murders), and Aegon would scribble comics in jagged black pen strokes. He has all these notebooks down in the basement filled with his new versions of ancient myths: Poseidon as a horny dolphin, Aphrodite as Marilyn Monroe.

Wait, I remember what I skipped. While Io was roaming across the globe, she bumped into Prometheus—chained to a rock for giving humans the gift of fire—and he cheered her up somehow. I guess meeting a guy who gets his liver continuously chewed out by a giant eagle would make me more appreciative of my circumstances too.

I have a lot of time to myself here in solitary confinement. My social circle is microscopic. I tap to John through the wall, I have dinner dates with Tessarion the rat. And I think about my family. They’re fucked up, but I miss them. I miss going to Monmouth Park with Fosco to bet on horse races, I miss getting hammered with Aegon while he sings Johnny Cash or Beatles songs. I miss my mother and Helaena and Criston. I even miss Aemond’s wife, though I only met her a few times before I deployed. She’s sharp, she’s hilarious. She’s mean as hell to Aegon, and sometimes he deserves it.

At first I wondered why Aemond hasn’t gotten me out yet, but I understand now. It sounds a lot better to have a brother being tortured as a prisoner of war than one who received a Get Out Of Jail Free card. It’s the kind of thing Aemond would consider. He understands which stories are worth telling.

I feel kind of bad for her. Aemond’s wife, I mean.

I don’t think she knows about Alys.

~~~~~~~~~~

On a chilly mid-September morning cloaked in fog, Mimi is laid to rest in the Targaryen family mausoleum at Saint George Greek Orthodox Cemetery in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Most of the golden plaques already have names chiseled into them: Viserys and Alicent, Fosco and Helaena. Aegon will one day be interred beside his wife. You have a spot reserved next to Aemond. All of you have already lived and died and been entombed; all of this was predestined by the stars eons before you had blood or bones.

Ari’s vault—an unnaturally tiny drawer, less than half the size of anyone else’s—is located just above yours. You can’t stop staring at it. You can’t hear anything the bearded priest in his black robes is chanting. Then Cosmo squeezes your hand and you look down at him. Mimi’s other children are somber but seem to be coping well enough—they are used to being raised by consensus, they would probably be more affected if one of the nannies died—but Cosmo always wants to be near you. He gazes up with those vast, wet, murky blue eyes, so much like Aegon’s, and you offer him a sad, reassuring smile. Cosmo smiles back. And you think: Life goes on.

Alicent is sniffling noisily; it echoes off the walls of the mausoleum. Criston—a man with no plaque assigned to him—is trying to console her. Aegon is watching you from across the cold granite chamber, grim and red-eyed in his black suit, the first time you can remember seeing him in one since your wedding. He wears no small gold hoops, only a row of stitches in his right ear. He wants to say something, to do something, but he can’t. Aemond is beside you, a hand heavy on your waist but muttering something to Otto. Back in Omaha, Otto had spent a few hours alone with the medical examiner, and when the death certificate was issued it revealed that Mimi died of a heart defect, a perfectly blameless sort of misfortune, an innate impending disaster. And so that’s what the newspapers printed, and any gossip to the contrary is confined to salacious rumors, untrustworthy and unproven.

When the ceremony is over, journalists are waiting to scavenge for photos and quotes under the guise of expressing their sympathies. It’s a shameless display, though they at least have the decency to wait by the cemetery gates. Aemond and Otto go to meet them. Alicent, Criston, Helaena, and Fosco, protective of the children, keep them far away from the feeding frenzy, hungry-eyed reporters like sharks without fins. Ludwika is reapplying her lipstick. Aegon is smoking a Lucky Strike and talking to his oldest son, Orion, a stilted exchange that holds the promise of turning warm with time.

You sit on a stone bench and Cosmo curls up beside you, rests his head in your lap, dozes off as you thread your fingers through his wavy blonde hair. In the mist there are shadows of gravestones and trees that turn skeletal as they shed their leaves.

“He is okay?” Fosco says as he ambles over, meaning Cosmo. He has his hands in the pockets of his slim black trousers that stop at his ankles. His suit is velvet, his eyeglasses speckled with drizzle from the slate-grey sky.

“He’s alright. He’s resting. Are you okay?”

“Oh,” Fosco sighs mournfully. “I keep thinking someone is missing. We came into this family together, Mimi and I. We got married six months apart. I have never had to do this without her. And I know she had her problems, but she was different when she was younger. She always liked a party, that’s why she and Aegon got along so well at first. But she was so loud and so funny, always telling these long stories, and everyone in the room would be grinning as they waited for the good part. Viserys loved her. Otto loved her. And then she had all those children one after the other, and that was hard, and Aegon self-destructed when he was the mayor of Trenton, and that was worse, and she was supposed to fix him and she couldn’t, the harder she tried the farther he ran from her. She started drinking her Gimlets before dinner, and then after lunch, and by the time you showed up it was never ending. But that wasn’t who she really was. She was like a moon that got smaller and smaller until the only thing left was a sliver.”

This family breaks people. This family kills people. “We’ll make ossi dei morti for Mimi tonight. I’ll help you, and we can teach the kids.”

Fosco smiles, swipes a tear from beneath his glasses, squeezes your shoulder with one wiry hand. “I am very glad you are still here.”

“I’m not trying to race you to that mausoleum.”

Fosco laughs. And then he says as he spies Aegon approaching: “Um…I will go avoid the paparazzi somewhere else.”

“You don’t have to leave, Fosco.”

“It is no trouble. And I suspect you enjoy your very rare privacy.” Fosco gives you a knowing glace and then heads back to where Helaena, Alicent, and Criston are lingering with the rest of the children. Now Ludwika is fluffing her blonde curls with her French tips, a smoldering Camel cigarette tucked between two fingers.

Aegon comes to you through the mist, plops onto the bench, and looks fondly down at Cosmo—now fast asleep, his face smooth and peaceful—before he speaks. “I can’t grasp that she’s really gone. We barely spoke for years, but she was always there, you know? Christ, she deserved better than this. She could have been happy somewhere else.”

“Your children need you.” It’s not the first time you’ve said it, but it’s the first time he believes you. He nods, staring out into the fog. “They have to get away from this whole circus for a while. And you have to learn how to be a real parent.”

“I’ll have time to work on it. I’m staying here. I’ve already been informed.”

You are alarmed. “What? By who?”

“Aemond and Otto.” Aegon says. “When the rest of you fly west, my kids and I will be at Asteria.”

“They’re getting you off the campaign trail,” you realize.

“They’re putting me on house arrest.”

Not seeing Aegon, not being near him? How long can I stand that? “I’m sure you’re relieved. You hate the grandstanding and the media.”

He shakes his head, running his fingers through his hair. “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“I won’t be alone. I have Fosco and Ludwika.”

“I’ll talk to them.”

“About what?”

“About the fact that they need to look out for you.”

“Aegon, I’ve been doing the political wife thing for over two years.”

“But it’s different now.”

He’s right, it is.

“You’ll call, won’t you?” he asks. “You’ll let me know how the trip is going, you’ll tell me if anything bad happens? Because I can always get on a plane and meet you wherever you are. Otto might pay someone to murder me, but I’d risk it.”

“Of course I’ll call.”

“Hey.” Gently, he turns your face so you can’t hide from him. “Will you be okay without me?”

I have to be. I don’t have a choice. Instead you reply: “I’ll miss the weed.”

The tension breaks and Aegon smiles, and then he pats your cheek twice with his open palm. “Behave yourself.” He waves Ludwika over, interrupting her meditative chain smoking.

“What, what?” Ludwika says. “Are we leaving soon? Yes, it is so sad what happened to Mimi, but us standing around in the rain won’t resurrect her. And I look terrible in black.”

“I can’t be there for the last leg of the campaign.” Aegon points to you. “I need you to pay attention and check in with her at least a few times a day.”

“This is a common request. I should get a degree in it so I can charge people.”

Aegon furrows his brow at her. “What are you talking about?”

Ludwika smirks as she puffs on her Camel. “You are not the first person to ask me to keep an eye on her.” She nods subtly towards Aemond, then sashays off to give a quote to the journalists.

~~~~~~~~~~

In San Diego, Aemond meets with residents of a new public housing complex to hear their concerns about neighborhood jobs and infrastructure. In San Jose, he visits labor activist Caesar Chavez—being treated for debilitating back pain at O’Connor Hospital—and expresses support for the ongoing boycott of all grapes produced in the state. In Sacramento, he attends a Jimi Hendrix concert and receives a standing ovation from the audience; the next day he joins high school students protesting for a more inclusive curriculum. In Oregon, he makes a speech at Portland State University acknowledging the tremendous cost of the Vietnam War—in money, in time, in blood—and pledges to begin dismantling U.S. involvement as soon as he is sworn into office in January. Aemond talks about hope and despair, the bleak reality and the American Dream, and he is so overwhelmed by the crowd that he doesn’t even notice when someone takes his cufflinks as souvenirs. His lack of concern for his own safety exasperates Criston, but Aemond can’t be convinced to increase his security or his distance. If he expects the disaffected masses to carry him to the White House, he has to be real to them.

“What if another Wallace supporter tries to shoot you?” Criston demands. “What if a Nixon stooge stabs you or a crowd tramples you?”

“No one can kill me,” Aemond says, grinning wryly. “I’m not supposed to die yet. I’m supposed to be the president. It is God’s will.” And how can anybody disagree when that appears to be so true?

The earth dies as you drive north, summer withering into autumn. That familiar brisk cuttingness reappears in the air. You shake thousands of hands, smile for countless photographs. Mothers and wives of dead soldiers sob into your shoulder as you embrace them; teenage girls ask how they can get a good man like Aemond. Only one thing is missing from his glorious pilgrimage: something he wants desperately, something he cannot have (though he’ll never know why), you conceiving his child in time to announce it before Election Day. Each morning you sneak a pill and every night you bite the bullet. As often as you can, you duck into Dairy Queens to order lemon-lime Mr. Mistys.

George Wallace is in the South, galvanizing segregationists and accepting the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. Richard Nixon is working his way across the Midwest. He has chosen a politically moderate Greek as a running mate, Spiro Agnew; this does not strike you as a coincidence. He even shares a name with Aegon’s second son.

Nixon promises “peace with honor” in Vietnam, which means no immediate end to the draft. He makes speeches about “states’ rights” and “law and order,” ambiguous euphemisms designed to attract Wallace’s white supremacists without alienating too many suburban moderates. He commiserates with those lamenting the proliferation of sex, drugs, and divorce. He says he will return the nation to a more moral time. You wonder what he means. You can’t think of any such refuge in the bloodletting, spine-crushing history of mankind.

A kindergarten teacher tells you in Olympia, Washington, her eyes alight with reverence usually reserved for heroes, saints, gods: “People are voting for Aemond, but they’re voting for you too.”

And you find yourself thinking as a thousand miles roll by beyond the glass of limousine windows: How many people will I condemn if I don’t help Aemond win? How many lives is mine worth?

~~~~~~~~~~

The Hotel Sorrento in Seattle insists on giving you and Aemond the honeymoon suite: a retreat from the breakneck campaign, a romantic oasis for the future president and first lady…according to half the country, anyway. You are in the impractically large pink bathtub, surrounded by snowy dunes of bubbles. The wall to your right is a mirror, foggy around the edges; just a few yards to your left is the king-sized bed. In the top drawer of your nightstand is the card Aegon gave you in July. You aren’t sure where Aemond is, and you don’t especially care. You are relieved to be alone.

There’s a passion-red phone built into the rim of the tub, conveniently located for sudden room service revelations, champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries, steak and lobster. You have a different idea. It’s 7:15 p.m. here, so after 10 on the East Coast. On the steam-slick keypad, you dial the number for the main house at Asteria.

Eudoxia picks up and demands gruffly: “Geiá sou? Ti?”

“Hi, Doxie. Is Aegon around?”

“Where else would he be? Making himself useful somehow? Killing communists, driving a rocket to the moon? No. He is a burden as always.”

“Please be nice to him. His wife just died.”

“And so he cannot put his empty cups in the sink?” Without waiting for a reply, she sets the handset down on the kitchen counter with a clunk. There is distant, muffled shouting in Greek; she seems to back and forth with somebody. Then Eudoxia returns. “Antio sas,” she says, and hangs up just as a phone elsewhere in the house is lifted from its cradle.

Aegon answers with something halfway between a groan and a yawn. “Yeah?”

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Hey!” You can hear it riding the wire like electricity: a rustling as he sits up, a fresh clarity in his skull. His voice is deep, hushed, still husky with sleep. “What’s up, little Io? Any interesting happenings to report from your neighborhood of the solar system?”

“I just left a riveting tea party. Apple cinnamon scones and smoked salmon sandwiches. We talked about what kind of couches I should get for the White House and I wanted to kill myself. Are the kids okay?”

He’s smiling; you can tell. “They’re alright. I could have used you this afternoon. I was trying to help Spiro with his math homework. Trying, not succeeding.”

“Well he’s in middle school and thus beyond your skill.”

“How’s Jupiter?”

You know who he means. “I don’t want to talk about Aemond.”

“Okay.” Aegon says, curious. “So what should we talk about?”

A few seconds tick by, silent and perilous. “Where are you right now?”

“In my lair. Like a beast.”

“Alone?”

A transitory pause. “At the moment.”

“On the shag carpet or your futon?”

Now he’s very intrigued. “Futon. Why?”

“I just want a visual.” Beneath the water, your free hand is resting on the velvety inside of your thigh.

“Where are you?” Aegon asks.

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Maybe I want a visual too.”

You chuckle, peeking over at yourself in the mirror. Your skin is dewy with steam; stray wisps of hair stick to your face. “I’m in a gigantic pink bathtub. It’s ridiculous, it’s shaped like a heart and everything. They have a phone installed right here in case I find myself in desperate need of filet mignon.”

“Oh.” And then he hesitates, like he’s afraid to say the wrong thing. “Big enough for two?”

“More like five. You should get a tub like this for your basement, it would delight the campaign staffers.”

“My basement’s been pretty empty recently.”

Softly, vulnerably, glass offered for him to shatter: “You aren’t seeing other girls?”

“Nah, babe. I want something they can’t give me.”

You picture him, messy hair falling over his forehead, drowsy eyes that gleam with clandestine wisdom. You can smell the smoke and rum that bleeds from his skin. “I wish you were here.”

“In Seattle?”

“No. Right here.”

Aegon exhales shakily, swallows, takes a few seconds to collect himself. “How’s the water?”

“Extremely hot and full of bubbles.”

“So I wouldn’t be able to see you.”

“No,” you say, baiting him.

“But I could touch you.”

“You already have.”

“Not enough,” he murmurs. “Nowhere close to enough.”

“Do you remember what I felt like?”

“Oh God,” he whispers, and you envision him closing his eyes, rubbing his face with the open palm of his left hand. “Yeah. Of course I do. I can’t get it out of my head. But I’ve been trying not to…you know…it felt wrong to think about you that way unless you were cool with it. Like I was betraying your trust or taking advantage of you or something.”

“No, I want you to think about me.”

You can hear Aegon moving around on the green futon, repositioning himself, yanking down a zipper. When he speaks again, his breathing is quick and jagged. “Where’s your other hand, huh?”

“Under the water,” you reply coyly.

“You bitch,” he says, laughing. “I miss you so fucking much. The house isn’t right without you in it. You belong here, you belong where I am.”

Beneath the veil of bubbles and steam, there is no scar on your belly, no infidelity, no campaign, no distance of almost 3,000 miles separating you and Aegon. Your fingers slip between your legs, finding slickness the water can’t wash away. It’s a familiar sensation, though you haven’t felt it in a while: rising steadily until you hit a plateau like a jet reaching cruising altitude. From here, it will either glide along smoothly until it dies out, or eventually turn sharp and painful. “Tell me about you,” you pant.

He can hear it in your voice, a needful surrender that sets him on fire. He can’t believe this is happening; he never wants it to end. “I mean, I’m…I’m insanely hard.”

“Stroke yourself, imagine it’s me. I wish it could be me.”

“Oh fuck,” Aegon whimpers. “Okay, okay…I want you. I want you with my fingers, I want you with my tongue, I want you to beg for it, and then…”

Impossibly, incomparably, your own pleasure is climbing faster than you can reconcile yourself to it, no longer a hunger but a violent aching, a crushing gravity you can’t fight against, a ship being dragged to the floor of the ocean. What’s happening? When will it end? You moan into the phone, amazed yet petrified. You can’t get enough air; it feels like drowning, like dying.

“I need to see you,” Aegon says. He’s close to the climax that you know men experience, he has to be; he’s gasping. “I need to be with you, let me give you what you want.”

“I want you to finish inside me.”

“Io…babe…oh my God, you’re gonna kill me…”

There are sounds out in the front room of the suite: a lock clicking, footsteps, keys and a wallet tossed onto the kitchenette counter. You’re so consumed you almost don’t notice. Aemond is back. Aemond is back!! And every ion of your ascending euphoria evaporates. “Gotta go, bye.”

“Wait—!”

You hang up just as Aemond is opening the bedroom door. He walks in—immaculately tailored dark blue suit, polished black leather shoes trampling soft pink carpet—and turns to you. He has already taken his glass eye out and put on his eyepatch. Vaguely, fleetingly, you wonder where he’s been. His gaze darts to the red phone, your fingerprints in the condensation. “Who were you talking to?”

“My parents.”

If Aemond doubts this, he doesn’t show it. He crosses the room, sits on the edge of the bathtub, peers down at you with an omniscient metallic glint in his eye. He’s always been less a man than a force of nature. “I know this year has been hell.”

You envision Persephone being stolen by Hades, Orpheus searching for his dead wife Eurydice, Charon ferrying souls across the River Styx. “You haven’t made it easier.”

There’s a flash of something in his scarred face, blazing and instantaneous like lightning, and then it fades. He reaches out to touch your hair, swept up and neatly bound with clips and pins. “We can’t forget everything we’ve accomplished together,” Aemond says. “I still need you. You’re my Aphrodite.”

He’s going to tell you to get out of the tub, to lie down on the bed, to open yourself so he can fill you. You distract him, forestalling the inevitable. Each morning Prometheus dreads the return of the eagle that pecks out his liver; as every summer ends Demeter mourns the loss of Persephone. “Any luck with Nixon?”

Aemond sighs, furious, brooding. “He still won’t agree to a debate. Wallace is onboard, he’s rabid for it, he’d show up if we held it in the fucking asteroid belt, any opportunity to spew his idiocy. But not Nixon.”

“Because he knows standing on the same stage as you can only hurt him. People thought he looked bad in 1960, can you imagine now? Television has gotten so much clearer. They’ll be able to count his sweat drops from their living room couches.”

“So how do I get him to do it?”

You look up at Aemond. It’s not a hypothetical question; he’s really asking for advice.

“I have to debate Nixon,” Aemond insists. “It’s close in the polls, which means it will be even closer on Election Day. I’ll underperform whatever is projected, my coalition is less likely to show up when it counts. College kids, hippies, transients. That’s just a fact. But the old people vote. The suburban housewives vote. Nixon’s resting on his political experience and accusations that I’m a communist, an agent of chaos. But I could slaughter him in an hour on ABC.”

You think of the mutilated Vietnam veterans waving their signs and screaming at LBJ from the other side of the wrought-iron gates of the White House. “Challenge him in public. Say that the American people deserve to see the candidates debate, and do it where everyone can hear you.”

“What if Nixon still refuses?”

“Then you call him a coward. You say he must have something to hide. You ask how he’s supposed to square up with the Russians and the Chinese if he can’t even face you.”

Aemond grins admiringly. “You’re vicious.” And he lifts your hand from the rim of the tub so he can kiss your knuckles. Once you licked up drops of his approval like Tantalus, cursed with eternal thirst. Now it is poison that turns your veins black.

“If there’s a debate, everyone should go,” you say, seized by sudden inspiration. “We should have a united front, including Aegon. It can be his return to the public eye. A month will have passed since the funeral, the timing is right. He can pose for a few photos with the kids to show the nation that they’re doing well and distract from any lingering rumors about Mimi.”

Aemond isn’t grinning anymore. He’s studying you with his cold blue gaze; no, he’s trying to intimidate you, to overpower you. “Otto and I will decide what to do with him.”

“He’s a Targaryen. He should be with the rest of us.”

Aemond stands and motions for you to follow, a snap of his wrist like a man calling a dog. “It’s late. Let’s go to bed.”

Panic, tension, an iron sinking in your belly. The water is only lukewarm now, but you don’t want to leave it. “I’m not done yet.”

“Yes you are.”

There’s nothing else to say. Legally, a wife’s flesh is one with her husband’s. You slip as you step out of the bathtub, and Aemond grabs your forearm. Not like he’s helping you; like you’re something he owns.

~~~~~~~~~~

Two knocks, swift and forceful. “Hey, it’s me. You ready? Everyone else is downstairs in the lobby waiting for the limos.”

You hurry to open the door, almost twisting your ankle as you stumble in your heels. They’re an inch higher than what you’re used to. Aemond chose them, and your dress too, and your sapphire teardrop earrings, and the silver chains around your wrist and throat, and your future and your past, and your life itself. It’s mid-October, and the night of what will almost certainly be the sole presidential debate of 1968. Aemond’s retinue is staying at the Hotel Saint Louis. It’s harvest time, the fields beyond the city being reaped of their soybeans, wheat, corn, cotton, and rice, the beef cattle culled in mechanical underworlds. Aegon’s flight must have just landed.

As soon as he sees you his eyes drop, wide and bewitched, ensnared everywhere except your face. You say: “Can you help me zip this, please?”

He blinks a few times, then shakes it off. “Sorry, what?”

“The zipper’s stuck. I need you to get it.”

“Yeah. Sure.” He steps into the suite and stands behind you. The gown is a vivid blue like the Greek flag, gorgeous and shimmering but a size too small. It wasn’t tight a week ago, but now it is, and you aren’t pregnant just always gaining and losing weight in new places, first the baby and then the pill, and it wouldn’t bother you if Aemond didn’t seem so confounded by it. Aegon says as he tugs at the zipper: “I don’t think it’s gonna fit, babe.”

“It has to fit.”

“Even if I miraculously get this closed, you won’t be able to breathe.”

“Do whatever you have to. Just…just…” You push every last molecule of air out of your lungs, suck in your belly, and you hear the triumphant squeal of the zipper. “Yes!” Oh, but Aegon was right: you really can’t breathe. “Okay. Let’s go.”

“You’re not gonna last the whole debate in that. You’ll be sweating more than Nixon.”

“I’m fine.”

“Io…”

“I’m fine. Come on.” You snatch your matching purse off the coffee table by the couch, check your makeup one last time, and hobble in your heels as you walk with Aegon out into the hallway.

At the Kiel Auditorium a few blocks away, the Targaryen children—Aegon’s five and Helaena’s three—are presented for photographs before being escorted back to the hotel by the nannies. And even in the few weeks that have passed since you last saw Aegon’s kids, there have been extraordinary changes. They talk to their father, and he talks back, and he ruffles their hair and rests his hands on their shoulders and asks them about what they’re learning from their private tutors. Cosmo tackles you before he leaves—a powerful bear hug, though he can only reach your legs—and he says he hopes you’re coming home to Asteria soon.

“Me too, kiddo,” Aegon tells him, and then smiles at you; but above his gleam of teeth his cloudy blue eyes, like the Atlantic in a storm, are gloomy and troubled.

As the audience takes their seats and the journalists are poised to capture the best images and quotes of the night, the three candidates and their wives (minus Wallace’s dear departed Lurleen) meet briefly backstage to exchange the perfunctory well-wishes. Pat Nixon is introverted and bookish, though she tries to hide it; but Aemond reels her in like swordfish until her eyes are filled with him. George Wallace gets one glimpse of your venomous glare and escapes, claiming to need one last trip to the restroom before the debate begins. But Richard Nixon beckons you to accompany him to a quiet, discrete corner of the room.

“I tried to call,” he says. He’s a remarkably normal man: medium height, receding dark hair, rough voice, weathered skin, not a god but a mortal, and—you have the impression—more aware of his flaws than his fiercest critics will ever be. “But no one at that damned beach house would ever put me through to you.”

You aren’t sure what he means. “Oh?”

“I never got the opportunity to tell you how sorry I was for your loss in July, Mrs. Targaryen,” Nixon says with unglamorous, plain, genuine compassion. “Pat and I, when we heard, we wept for you. We truly did. And for your husband to be clear across the country…I can’t even imagine. It must have been awful for you. A parent never gets over something like that. It stays with you like a scar.”

“It does,” you say softly.

“I lost two brothers. Arthur died when he was seven, tuberculosis killed Harold in his twenties. God, it just about destroyed my mother. You’re a remarkable woman. You’re lightning in a bottle for Aemond, do you know that? You’re like one of those Kennedy gals, but even better. More personable than Jackie. More intelligent than Ethel…although, to be frank, who wouldn’t be? And you’re not afflicted with any ghastly vices like Ted’s wife Joan. What would Aemond do without you? He’d lose, that’s what he’d do.”

Nixon’s smart, but he’s wounded. He’s capable, but he’s so desperate to prove it. Power could ruin a man like this. “You’re very kind, sir. You did some great work under Eisenhower. Self-made like my father was, a devotee of the American Dream. I believe you have an important role to play in this country…” You smirk, a bit mischievously. “Just not as the president.”

Nixon chortles. “No matter what happens tonight, rest assured that I hate Reagan more than I could ever dislike your husband,” he says, meaning the Republican governor of his home state of California. “You know that bastard tried to primary me?”

“Actors don’t belong in politics.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Nixon says, and then bids you farewell as the lights turn blinding and the curtain begins to rise.

As soon as the adrenaline begins to fade, all you can think about is that you can’t breathe. You take your seat in the audience between Aegon and Ludwika, who won’t stop making jabs about Nixon: “He looks like a troll,” “He looks like a sasquatch,” “Do you think Pat makes him wear a  Creature from the Black Lagoon mask in bed so she is not so repulsed by him?” The most you can offer is an occasional distracted nod in response.

“You alright?” Aegon whispers.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look alright.”

“I’m great.”

“Sure,” he says, and he acts like he’s teasing, but there’s something tremendously sad underneath. He can’t save you from this. He can’t save you from anything. What must that feel like?

On the debate stage—broadcast to a national audience—Aemond performs brilliantly. Nixon salvages what could have been a bloodbath with a handful of clever retorts that Aemond pretends not to be rattled by. The real loser of the night is Wallace, who is brutally attacked by them both: Nixon because Wallace is commandeering some of his voting bloc, and Aemond because of his near-assassination back in May. After an hour, the contest concludes and the candidates descend to the main floor to pose for photos and get lassoed into brief interviews with various journalists. Everyone in Aemond’s entourage besides you and Aegon flock to his side. By now you’re gasping in shallow gulps, close to tears and in agony from your ribs to your wobbling feet.

“I told you,” Aegon says. And then: “Come on. We’ll take the first limo back.”

In the front room of your hotel suite—one yellowish end table lamp glowing dimly, the rest of the space like twilight—Aegon wrestles with the zipper as you struggle for every breath, trying not to pass out. “Ow,” you whine. “Oh fuck, this was so stupid…”

“Don’t let him make you wear shit you don’t want to wear.”

“I have to do what he says, Aegon.”

“He doesn’t own you.”

“Legally, he does.”

He’s tugging futilely at the jammed zipper. “Are you planning on using this again?”

“I believe that would be wistful thinking.”

“You probably look better out of it anyway.” He grabs his Zippo lighter from the pocket of his emerald green suit jacket and flicks it to life. “Don’t move, okay?”

“Okay.”

“At all.”

“Got it.”

You can feel heat, intense but not painful. Aegon has pulled the edge of the fabric as far away as he can from your skin and is singeing it until it turns black and charred and brittle. Then he tucks the lighter back into his pocket and with both hands rips your dress down to the small of your back. Cool air rushes to meet the ridge of your spine; goosebumps prickle all over. Aegon is marveling at you; you can see it when you glance over your shoulder at him. Then he lays a palm against your bare skin, leans into you, inhales everything you’ve ever been: smoke and sex and starlight, strategies, shadows, secrets.

The others will be pouring into the hallway from the elevator any minute. Aemond. Aemond could find us.

“We can’t,” you whisper, hating yourself for it.

Aegon kisses the nape of your neck—so slow, so kind—and then goes to the doorway. You wait for him to leave, but he doesn’t. He’s looking at you as you hold up the ruined gown so it covers your belly and your chest. You gaze back helplessly, wanting him, needing him, a moon chained to another world’s gravity.

We can’t, we can’t, we can’t.

“I’m so sorry,” you say.

And only then does Aegon vanish.

[gabriellaeva2005]

I really cannot express how much this piece of work means to me! As corny as it sounds I really found this story at the perfect point in my life, I initially started reading the impulse 1995 comics when I was 14 and I ended up falling upon this story when I was 17 I just immediately fell in love! The concept was so creative and fit into the pre-existing plot line perfectly! All the new characters are so enjoyable to read, Nathaniel and Jude have such a wonderful and also sad dynamic, as a twin my self every scene with them just really hit me in the heart! Six especially in the first several chapters was so comically annoying and clearly insecure, in a way that I think a lot of us can relate to, one way or another especially when we got to here is internal monologue, I’ve always been a sucker for the asshole character with an air of insouciance and superiority, who by the end of the story, just ends up being a pretty all right guy! And Five oh my god five! I love this guy so much! he’s just so genuine and someone who clearly cares deeply, and him being technically the physically oldest in the room, but also being the one with the least amount of experience is a very literal take on an experience I think a lot of people have felt, myself included, And I think we all know I’m a Three apologist, his whole story is just so devastating and haunting, part of me is always rooting for him, whilst also being terrified for what he might do to the other characters, there is so much complexity with his relationships with the other characters, such as five and four, every time theirs a seen with three and four the writing always makes me feel so on edge and is really able to puts me in three’s shoes! And god! The way three and five interact is so sweet and sad there relationship is just too much! The last chapter absolutely destroyed me!! And Bart and Thad are so perfectly characterized it truly just feels like a natural progression of their characters, the way they both are just really struggling to deal with the inevitability of change hit me so hard, like I said I started reading the impulse comics when I was 14 so these characters have such a place in my heart, so now being able to read about them going through these struggles, when I was also experiencing a lot of change, is such a comfort to me, it was like in a way these characters got older with me, and you know it’s always nice to see some of your childhood characters going through the same stuff as you, currently being a slightly terrified 18 year old, it was great to be able to read about two other slightly terrified 18 year olds, anyways I wanted to post some of my sketches from the past few weeks, and don’t worry there are definitely more to come cause I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop drawing these guys!

@cryptocism you really sent me on a journey, thank you for that!💖💖

[thattimdrakeguy]

I HAVE BEEN READING ZDARSKY BATMAN, AND I HAVE DECLARED: I FREAKING LOVE IT!!

I'm reading the Batman Zdarsky run in reverse. That way if I see any bull I can back out at anytime: and to be honest--besides a few things. I really enjoy it

LIKE YO, THAT IS JUST STRAIGHT UP TIM DRAKE RIGHT THERE. It knows who he is as a character. his motives, it's great.

Screw the people complaining "oh why is tim still robin :((", THIS IS WHY HE IS STILL ROBIN. Because this is when he's at his BEST. When he gets to hit his character purpose, WHEN HE GETS TO BE HIM AT HIS MOST HIM. It's FANTASTIC.

Reading in reverse because I know I hated the first story, it was so contrived and ridiculous.

But this--this is some good shit.

Tim being an underdog fighter, having to use his wits to win the fight? MY DAWG, MY DUDE, MY GUYS, MY GALS, MY THEMS, MY THEYS, THIS IS SO TIMMY DRAKE. This is so damn Tim Drake, guys. Oh, my gosh, I am loving this so far.

Dick has his temper back? And trust me, he isn't normally like this. But he's hitting a limit AND IT'S SOMETHING NEW, NOT JUST A REFERENCE. HE'S ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING HE'D DO, 'CAUSE HE'S AT HIS LIMIT. That's wonderful, man. That is so wonderful.

Plus Tim is the heart of the Bat-Family again? This feels like someone actually went back to read these characters before writing it. I'm not saying everything is perfect of course, but these high marks are exceeding all my expectations. And I STOPPED reading comics because of how the beginning of this run destroyed any hope I had.

You guys have no idea how much I'm enjoying the few issues I've read. Besides the cussing (I remember after a bit they decided Tim was someone who used funny words instead of proper cusses), this feels like the Tim I know and love during the era I especially loved him.

Tim comparing himself to his predecessors? Tim not being a natural? A WRITER REMEMBERING THAT?? It's been so long since I've seen that! Most writers treat him like he was another prodigy when he wasn't. AND THIS GUY REMEMBERED THAT!

I shouldn't be so happy at just seeing Tim do Tim things, and serving his character purpose. BUT YOU GUYS HAVE NO IDEA HOW LONG IT'S BEEN SINCE A WRITER KNEW WHAT TIM WAS SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE.

Only complaints I have is that Jason feels like a typical Bat-Family member, and not the sketchy outsider that he is. Making him so close makes his character more bland in my opinion. And Steph is--also generic af unless she's wacky quirky...which is a characterization I hate for her, because she started off so damn interesting, but they made her a freaking trope instead, which is such a disservice to her, but she barely does anything so far, so whatever I guess. Doesn't mean much.

--

This is the first honest thing I've seen that I hated.

No

Not this

This isn't the Bat-Family

This is a sitcom world the fandom wants to be the Bat-Family and some comply with

They're not a sitcom. The conflicts, and uniqueness of the characters is what makes things feel alive and well.

This stuff is cheap fanservice for the fanon demographic that doesn't buy comics to begin with.

Fanon doesn't belong in canon.

--

I mean sure Tim could be drawn smaller, the gag of him looking 12 when he's nearly 18 doesn't work when he's bigger than Damian who is 15 (and contrary to some bullshit comics isn't meant to be small. that was a random thing added for writers who aren't clever to write better humor. it actually contradicts things that were already established).

Don't see the big deal though for most of this.

Can't wait to find it, though. Oh boy.

This whole obsession with Zur Batman, is way over done though. So--I wouldn't be shocked if that was the problem, because my golly does that plot point not seem to be stopping--and it was there from the start and part of the reason why I didn't read it 'til now.

Good Tim tho, at least. So heehee, yey for that--I think--I guess.

Oh, well.

It let me peak at a pseudo-version of an AU I made up years ago. So that's pretty freaking cool.

Always a plus.

And redoing Red Robin story beats but better? Normally I'd hate references to Red Robin, 'cause that changed the perception of so many characters for the worst, but ayy, a bit of redemption isn't bad.

Man, just seeing simple stuff like Tim and Bruce being good ol' classic Batman and Robin warms my heart. It's been so long since Batman and Robin has acted like a proper classic Batman and Robin. It's dynamic that's been sorely missed by many.

OH, MY GOSH, WHY DID THE FIRST STORY HAVE TO STINK SO BAD. THIS STUFF IS GREAT.

Like, DUDE, this is such a Tim thing for him to do!!

And he's showing emotion?? He's crying like how he does?? Because he's not a typical Bat-Family member who just angsts his way through?? THEY'RE MAKING HIM STAND-OUT AGAIN BY MAKING HIM, HIM??

WHY DID THE FIRST STORY HAVE TO SUCK SO BAD?? THIS IS GOOD SHIT.

Like this part is why I originally stopped reading, not because Bruce should think Tim is his soldier, and not his son, THE FREAKING OPPOSITE.

But because the original story has Bruce acting weird when unneeded, just to say this was so unneeded, and adding in all these stupid corny Bat-Family moments was so groan worthy.

This run started off with a story that was a total turn off for me.

To end up being a run that could've kept me enjoying DC, rather than running away from it from as far as I have.

Chip Zdarsky started off awful, but really, he ended up great.

And I've seen people complain about his run, and TRUST ME, there's stuff to complain about. But I have only ever seen the stuff worth complaining about, or stuff I WOULD complain about.

WHEN MOST OF THE RUN IS GOOD

At least when Tim is around.

Go figure.

Maybe I should've paid sole attention to how he wrote Tim and nothing else at the very least for that first story.

'Cause even in the first story, Tim was well-written--it's how cheap the rest of the story telling was in that first story that turned me off--and the weird knew about the movie plans that I am still fully judging harshly. (Love the new Superman film suit, though)

[elsa-fogen]

At first i was going to reblog this from @justashadowlooker

but then it got too long and off-topic, i started retelling and quoting my own 10 years old fanfic, so i'm making it it's own post jjdsfjkdfgh

Too long don't read, was a Bloom fan, killed her hundreds of times, than became Icy fan, killed her few times as well, still a huge fan, wanna revive some of my old ideas

When i had just started watching winx, Bloom was my fav AAHAHHAH (it was 2008-2009 year i think). Buuut... being my fav means that you gonna SUFFER. It was always the case, even when i was little. But young me didn't know better than to just kill of a character. And Bloom died SO many times in my early fanfics and arts. I still remember one fic, it was also the first ever fic i posted on the internet, and it was horrible. I typed really slow at that time and i was looking at like 10 A4 pages of handwritten fanfic and was like... weeeell i don't need this part with description of the boat... i don't need this part about wind flowing in her hair or smth... i don't need spaces after dots and commas either. These were real thoughts of 9 year old me lmao.

the fic was about Bloom and Sky going for a boat trip date, but there was also some bitch that fell for Sky and her best decision was to throw Bloom away from the boat. As a result she was sucked into the screw of the motor or whatever this thing called. Sky dived after her and brought her back on the boat, but she died due to the blood loss.

In my handwritten version it was really long and tears queezing scene, but i was too lazy to type it all, so it basically was shortened to 1 (one) sentence: Bloom didn't make it to the port.

i also had a picture attached, it was i think a cover of some of the comics where Sky holds Bloom on his arms and they're stepping out of the water, but i photishoped it and added many wounds and BLOOD BLOOD EVERYWHERE!!!

I also remember photoshopping screenshots from the first winx movie, adding bloody wounds on Bloom and tears and trying to make her face sad lol. And also i remember, i didn't have access to the computer all the time in my childhood, and there was a weird time... when i'd got a chance to be on the computer, i would made a specific search in google, to find that one art with Bloom, being fucking stabbed, lying on the ground and crying, and touching the golden heart-shaped locket with the name Sky on it, and you could see that it was Sky's sword that stabbed her, and he was walking away in the distance. I could stare at that art for hours, imagining how it happened. I also remeber how the art suddenly stopped showing up at the search and i had only tiny squeezed jpg version of it, and i thought that google banned this art for being so violent lmao

Btw i found that art, it's by Chibiusa-Moon, here it is, and i remember it diffferently, i thought Bloom had enchantix on her lmao

BUT THEN SOMETHING CHANGED. I DON'T KNOW WHEN. I DON'T KNOW WHY. BUT ICY CAME AND DESTROYED MY LOVE FOR BLOOM, AND TOOK HER PLACE.

I suspect that it happened after i saw ep1 of season 3, because HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN IN THAT EPISODE?! SHE WAS ✨✨S L A Y I G✨✨ DAMN!!! She freed herself looking fab as fuck (i've only seen her battle uniform at that point, and her casual outfit shocked me, i was like HOLY SHIT?? DIFFERENT COLTHES?) (and it's if you forgen the HOLY SHIT, TRIX IN THE FIRST EPISODE OF THE SEASON?!!!), sayed the edgiest thing in the world, then freed her sisters, skated away from the giant snake ON HER DAMN HEELS AS A QUEEN!!!!! I think this was the moment when i fell for her. Maybe i'm wrong and it happened earlier, but this is all i can remeber.

Well, i also remember when my mom got me my first winx magazine and i was really disappointed that there were no Trix in the comic AHHASJGDAJS it was comic about bloom and diaspro going to the land of the dragons.

And, funny enough, i think i didn't kill Icy in my fics (mostly)

wait fuck. i remembered one (that was actually properly published and finished), let me just refresh my memory real quick- (gonna cringe soo hard ahaha)

oh shit i also remembered some stuff. In my later fanfics i was tending to make Bloom real psychopath, who decided to straight up destroy all the witches and all the dark magic. Hey. Hey. I bet 13 year old me wouldn't mind if i borrowed this idea fom her...

EHM ANYWAY, BACK TO THAT ONE FINISHED FIC!

It's so cringy written, but it's got the spirit HASHDHA. The trix summon some another army of darkness that was created to destroy fairies (hey), but at some point they lose control of it and the army turns against them. They have no ther choice but to seek help from the winx. winx of course don't want to help since their army attacked alfea... but the trix didn't give this order.

by the way tehre's one dialogue that i think is actually good and i think is in character

"But how do we know that it isn't one of your tricks?" - asked Tecna. - "Probability of this equals 85,9%!" Everyone froze. Nobody had this idea before. Then Icy shook her head. "No, it's not." "How do we know?" Stella said suspiciously. "If we wanted to trick you, we'd choose less humiliating way" Icy replied coldly.

in the end witches and fairies teeaming up, and going on an adventure to stop this army with some artifacts. Significant part of the way they had to make on their own without magic, and during that winx and trix are actualy growing to like each other. OH THERES ALSO A FUNNY THING LOL

But as a night roommate she [Icy] turned out to be very restless. She was moving all the time and mumbling something. And then at some point she screamed: "Damn fairies, i wish you all dead!" Bloom jumped on her place and still half sleeping replied: "Shut up, witch, or you're done for!" and fell back asleep. All in all, it was hell of a night.

i still think this is funny af-- damn these dialogues are only getting better. Next day they getting closer to their destination.

Suddenly they heard Stormy's voice: "Wait! there's some sign! Icy, can you read this?" "Why her?" Stella asked offended. "We all here can read!" "Except for you," Darcy noted gloomily and everyone laughed. "Ha, well, if you're so smart, come here and read!" Icy said with the sweetest voice. "And next time we'll ask you." Stella understood that she was cornered. To save the rest of her dignity, she came closer and started staring at the sign. "I-I cant for some reason, this handwriting is awful!" with dispair sloar fairy realised that she doesn't understand these letters. "And this cold is driving me nuts! Give me cup of hot coffee and warm blanket!"

then Icy teaches Bloom how to skate. And then Aisha (Leyla) dies by falling into some bottomless pit- After that they make it to their destination, but the army was waiting for them there

another dialogue

"Let's go!" Icy said decisively. "No, wait! I'll go alone. If they catch me, you all get out of here as fast as you can" [...] "No!" Bloom said. "I'll go with you!" "Fine. But they'll kill you immediately" "And you?" "And I will be tortured" Icy smiled.

I can't with this lol, Icy smiling at the thought of torture as a true psycho she is.

Icy touched the wall, making sure it's quite hard. "Well? What's next?" "You're the brain of the operation, you tell me!" redhead replied, crushing piece of the rock in her hand

i just like this interaction here.

"Winx Believix!" Winx screamed. And Trix didn't scream anything, Icy just snapped her fingers and all three were already in their witch uniforms.

yeah classic.

the fight begins, Icy is trying to understand what to do with the artifacts, Musa dies, then they teleport to some other planet where they can perform the ritual to destroy the whole army at once. They're reading the spell, but something is missing, and the army attacks them here too. This time Bloom is left to figure out what were they missing, and some drops of her blood fell on the artifact and that was the last piece of the spell. The army is destroyed, but Icy was seriously injuried when covering Bloom from attack from behind. Now they're flying back to Magix

FUCK-- guys i'm sorry. More dialogues on the way.

"Why are you here?" she [Icy] asked, opening her eyes. "Doesn't want to miss your death!" Stella screamed, she overheard the talk. "Shut up!" I [Darcy] replied. "Or I'll hit you!" "Oh-oh, I'm so scared!" "Discussed my funeral already?" Icy asked, surprisingly, without sarcasm. "Come on, don't listen to that fairy! She has only fashion and straw in her head." Icy smiled weakly. "Magix!" Bloom screamed looking out the window. Fairies came closer to the glass. "Where?!" Icy got worried. Golden-green disc of the planet surrounded by thick ring of asteroids was hanging in the center of the window. Icy could see it without moving. "And here my dream came true. I got Magix!" she lifted her arm and closed her fingers around the planet. "Didn't think that the view from the space is so beautiful..."

DSHGJADFKAJHSFDJG what have i done. This line about her dream coming true HITS HARD. Fuck, 13 y.o. me knew which buttons she should push.

Icy dies. Darcy and Stormy were forgiven because they helped to stop the army and for Icy's "sacrifice" and everyone very conveniently forget that they started the recent war. The end.

Damn that was a ride.

um, so where were we?... right i was saying that Icy became my new hyperfixation instead of Bloom...

And i had the whole trilogy planned, in the first one she'd escape from some prison and attempt another plan to counquer Magix, but fail, in the next book she'd be KILLED by Bloom but came back to life by making a deal with someafterlife owner (HA) and the last one where she actually succeeds... this one i din't think through at ALL.

I kinda wanna revive that plot fron the second "book" tbh, i still remeber it really well.

In a comic.

(i'd make it a crossover with Hazbin but it won't work unfortunately)

okay i don't know where and how to end this post so i'm ending it here, have a nice day thanks for reading i hope that at least someone made it to the end.

[sheegons]

OKAY SO WHO ASKED FOR A POST THAT DETAILS DAMIANS CONNECTIONS TO MAGIC?.. nobody? oh okay.

(be forewarned, this is long)

now after ignoring batman 666, let's see what we have.

ROBIN: SON OF BATMAN (2015)

now, in robin: son of batman #1 It's confirmed that after his death in batman incorporated, damian went to hell. Hell is usually connected with the more magical side of the dc universe, but that's not it.

The entirety of the comic delves into damians connections to more mystical things. mythical swords and magical ancient towers, weird extinct bat-dragons, magical cults that want to destroy the whole world, etc etc.

this is easily regarded as one of damians best comics and having peak damian characterisation, so obviously Damian being magically inclined can easily work well with his character.

Now, after a barrel load of compliments, let's get to the extremely negative side of things.

TEEN TITANS (2016)

Damian's cloned brother has magic and that sentence is about as much as i care for this book. Moving on.

BATMAN (2016)

Again, dog shit damian characterisation, but here we go. Damian here actually shows an ability to use a binding spell and has a wand, making some sort of deal with a random demon, but a far cry from damian apparently selling his soul in batman 666. Moving on finally out of rebirth because that was a bad time for Damian's character.

ROBIN (2021)

Now we go back to the good. Apparently from the maternal part of damians family, magic is more commonplace. ra's even having a whole spell book to his name. Robin 2021 kinda toys with the ghul family and the lazarus pits magical and devilish side which isn't new... but it's new to involve damian!

In the final parts of this story, Damian's heart specifically is used as a plot device, lord deathman even dubbing it as "the bloodstream of the demon" and ruh (ra's' mother) uses it as a power source to fuel demon summonings, which started the Lazarus rain event.

TEEN TITANS DARK (Unreleased)

Back in early 2023 (i think) dc teased a sort of "teen titans dark" with damian, black alice and monkey prince. The "dark" moniker referencing Justice league dark, a magic team made up of magic users that solve magical bullshit. It's a good book, recommended read, i just thought I'd add this to the pile.

Detective comics/Knight terrors

Now, including these two together because they're about the same topic: Dreams.

damian is confirmed to have some sort of control over dreams and sleep, defeating demons that show up in his sleep, yet never actually disappear when he wakes up. He also has an ability to stay awake after a massive worldwide phenomenon causes everyone, even the dream masters that taught damian, to sleep and experience night terrors.

Dreams are, again, connected to the magical side of the dc universe. Now I'm not going to pretend like i actually read sandman to you, i can't lie on ramadan, so let's all give me a pass here for my lack of understanding of all that.

Batman and robin (2023)

In this, damian mentions a bit of off screen monster hunting with Frankenstein and lays a trap that lights someone on fire. I used to think this was some sort of hex but this artwork is extremely unclear, but since Frankenstein is mentioned and from my knowledge dc's Frankenstein is magic let's pretend this is some sort.

As an extra note: this guy definitely died. There's no way about it, he got lit on fire with nobody helping him. He's gone. Damian just killed a man.

Extra Extra notes:

talia using magic!

now, i haven't included these examples in the "the ghuls have magic" segment because uh...

(batman: the doom that came to Gotham/dc bombshells)

yeah...

Not only are these interpretations of talia EXTREMELY orientalist but also just generally out of character and could've been done with any randomly introduced characters.

For the unknowing white american people in the crowd: arabs actually don't only dress in revealing "belly dancer" outfits and lanterns. i know, shocking, we actually wear normal clothes.

And just to add again, there's a lot of stories that include ra's having magic, but I'm not the biggest ra's head (lol) so i didn't read them all, i implore u to do your own research because I'm not doing it.

this about wraps it up. thank you to the magic damian believers may we all win someday.

[oh-there-she-goes]

Recently, I saw some people criticizing Scott Snyder for trying to make Joker an immortal demon archetype while praising Zdarsky for giving Joker a past and making him more human. And I was like...sorry, but did we read the same comic? Because that was a complete opposite of what actually happened.

Snyder didn't write the Joker as a monster emerging from hell or nothingness. His Joker was a man who found death preferable to the reveal of his real name (DotF). When confronted with the life he left behind, Joker was terrified.

And despite his darndest attempts to reinvent himself and ascend into something beyond mere man (Endgame), he failed.

That's it. That's the very point. He failed.

Hell, Joker might have achieved a modicum of success, had he just left Batman behind. But no, he couldn't help himself. So in his last moment, Batman held him down and forced him to accept his own mortality.

Yet inexplicably, people are so hung up on the introduction of 'the Pale Man' myth even though it can be inferred (rather plainfully so) from the text that Joker was lying.

Batman broke his heart. To retaliate, Joker destroyed his city and haunted him with a tale of the devil whose existence might predate even Gotham itself. Joker knew he outliving Batman was one of Bruce's greatest fears, so in his resentment, he tried to make Batman die believing the Joker to be an unstoppable force of evil that would continue to exist indefinitely without him.

The Pale Man was invented, partly, because Joker wished he could escape from the entwining of their own fates. He no longer relished in the belief that Batman had helped make him.

All in all, I understand not being a fan of Snyder's work. That's absolutely valid. But to accuse him of pushing the narrative of Joker being the devil incarnate is just...unfair.

And wrong.

The pic has nothing to do with my rant btw. I'm just upset it was rejected and replaced by something rather generic so I find any opportunity to randomly include it lmao.

[fanaticsnail]

Searching: Part 2

I thought I'd make a post like this to answer your ask @luarsunny. I can't add a page break in the ask box, and I don't want to accidentally spoil anything for anyone.

Warnings: Graphic depictions of death and grief. Tobiuo is my OC. One Piece speculation and potential spoilers beneath the cut. Page break added just in case.

Canon divergence. I know that's not where they are right now.

First of all, I am very much in denial and have been since I read it. This was the initial comic I did hint at how I saw it going down without spoiling anything. She is looking for the remains of the Victoria.

If she ever found what was left of the Kid Pirate crew in the depths of the sea, the Heart Pirates would be the ones rendered speechless rather than Tobiuo.

"At Elbath, in the New World, the Kid Pirates lead by Eustass "Captain" Kid with a bounty of three billion berries... were destroyed."

There would be no words, no gasps, and no sounds made on behalf of the grief she would feel in her heart at those words. Immediately racing against time and daylight, she would not have to sign with her hands or write a word to have Law turn the Tang towards Elbath.

Being one of the few members of the Heart Pirates who could breathe and speak under water, she would frantically call out for any member to hear them in her search. The remainder of the crew would wait with baited breath, Bepo closing his eyes and whispering soft encouragements to Tobiuo while she attempts to remain composed.

Finding Killer first, who took the majority of the hit from Shanks, would break her. Killer and Tobiuo have an understanding between them: him being the middle ground who gives both Tobiuo and Heat that final push to get together. When she finds him half consumed by the creatures lingering in the deep, she would begin to unleash a scream that can transcend the barrier between oceans and air from beneath the water.

Bringing up the crew, one by one, she would momentarily pause on Heat as his eyes lay glazed and unresponsive. Her heart screams at her to stop and lay beside her lover, but Law commanded her to not rest until she finds Kid. She hasn't found him, and she's been searching for four days without rest.

Lethargic and hallucinating, she finds him. His body was locked between rock and bone. With his metal arm still attached, she attempts to use the last of her strength to drag him up. His body is bloated beneath the pressure of the sea, swollen and pruned with the salt pickling his skin. Dragging him up to lie beside the crew, Tobiuo would crawl over to lie beside Heat. Maneuvering herself to lie tucked into his chest and beneath his arm, she uses the last of her strength to let out a whimpering sob as she exhales the water from her gills. Once the water releases, her cries are once again silent as she mourns.

Regardless as to who attempts to move her, she lays there frozen and stubborn in her motion. She fasts for three days, only waking from her rest to cry for Heat and the crew in this time. The scent of death begins to linger in the air, the bodies of the Kid Pirates are given funerals on long boats lit ablaze by tongues of fire. As Law stoops down to gently rouse his prized fighter while she grieves, the only thing to physically make her release Heat from her arms is the promise of vengeance and crafting her wrath. Just as Law sought his revenge for Doflamingo, he swears by blood oath to aid her in unleashing her scorn onto Red Haired Shanks.

As a final say in mourning her lover, she openly weeps as she sinks her teeth into a lock of his lengthy blue hair, severing it's link from his decaying scalp. Clutching it in her webbed hands, she witnesses Shachi and Penguin cast the boat away to join his body with the others at sea.

Reaching behind her head, she twists the cutting of his hair in a braid interwoven into her own strands, mourning the man who held her heart completely. She would only eat to make herself stronger, develop her Haki to have her abilities foster, and lose a part of herself she had only once again regained. Sleep brings little rest, the world falls to a life without joy and colour, and her once cheeriness is all but lost to her and her crew.

She knows she can't kill Shanks alone. He's a yonko, and Tobiuo is not an idiot. But what she does know now is her reach is not limited to those who walk along the land…

[eyeodyssey]

MOON AGE 15 : DAMNATION (English Translation) Moon Age 15: Damnation is a 1988 short comic by pseudonymous author Not Osada, who openly drew influence from the Tokyo Grand Guignol's work in such a way that can arguably give a loose insight to the TGG's mysteriously anomalous works. While only a slight window into what could've existed in Ameya's vision, each contemporary rendering of his world of gore-soaked medical equipment and rusted metal is valuable in what it represents. As mentioned in my prior Litchi essay, the fragments of the Tokyo Grand Guignol we have now are descendants of a cultural phantom, standing as shrouded windows to a strange intangible stage that's positioned somewhere between post-Maruo inferno, industrial subculture and decadent poetry. While Osada’s manga featured notably grizzly and cruelly morbid scenarios, his stories were made explicitly for the shoujo market with a distinctly shoujo-influenced art style. Characters appear almost doll-like with their visual perfections, all while they’re often dismantled and reassembled in bizarre surgical practices by sadistic doctors. Much like how Zera expresses horror to seeing his own imperfect organs in contrast with his youthful appearance, our pristine victims share the same internals as any other slaughtered cadaver, all in a maddening spiral of narratives that contemporary readers often described as resembling descents to insanity. This fixation of the contrast between perceived beauty and grotesqueness is arguably traced back to the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s own works, with lines accentuating the youthful features of certain characters while audience members were known to fondly look back on the actors’ appearances. Litchi himself was described as being a “cute” robot despite the violence it was programed to carry out. It’s possible that this collision is inherent to Ameya’s conceptual destruction of the TGG. A known detractor to poetic writing, he called on a romantic author to pen the screenplays to the TGG’s first three plays so he could “destroy” them in his direction. The use of beauty could arguably be a mockery of it, taking these idealized dolls and leaving them trapped in worlds of fascism and hospital rooms that are haunted by the stinging stench of antiseptics and blood. Plastic hospital drapes were used in place of stage curtains and autopsy films were shown to the wide-eyed characters, who spoke of pure blood and dirty blood, the antithesis of blood, mercuro. What is beauty a representation of in the Grand Guignol’s works with the prominent fascist leanings of the protagonists? Considering the perspectives of our characters where the Hikari Club and the deranged teachers and Nazi doctors are treated as protagonists rather than explicit antagonists, the plays could arguably be read as the decay of a self-convinced beauty under fascist rule. Songs of the pure-blooded ubermensch fading into silence as the singers all collapse, lost in their own delirium as they pump mercurochrome into their hearts and try to rationalize their own organs that resemble the internals of the so-called ‘landraces’ they rendered into lifeless meat. It’s the natural conclusion of fascism, a collapse that occurs in demented violence to the face of a denial of death. I was originally split on publicizing my translation due to copyright-related complications, but after seeing the increasing gatekeeping of TGG materials at the hands of a rapidly growing market riddled with competitive spending and scalping, I feel obliged to share it to the public who (like myself) can’t afford to spend the now literal hundreds that are required to access angura ephemera that was meant to be openly available to the public to begin with. When originally finding this story, the book it was featured in was only 5 dollars. Now it goes for 60 to 200. That's ridiculous. With all the preamble out of the way, the story is under the cut...

While I made my best effort to maintain accuracy to the source material in translation despite my practically nonexistent understanding of Japanese (my translation method is a Frankensteining of language learning videos, a Japanese to English dictionary from the Internet Archive and Google Translate with a lot of localizing and dissection in between), there are several details I feel I should note for the sake of transparency. One smaller one was the inclusion of the term l * lita. It was in the original text, and I was honestly very unsure of including it in my translation as it’s a term I’m personally icked out by. While I was ultimately recommended to keep the line as is for accuracy, I wish to state that it's a term I'm personally very uncomfortable with in what it represents. The other note, which is the more prominent one in the final product, are the references to The Last Attempt at Paradise. In the original text the club members solely refer to their hideout as paradise and Eden, leaving a lot of excess space in the speech bubbles after translation when making the shift from Japanese text to English. The Last Attempt at Paradise was the name of S.P.K.’s 1982 live album that documents their set at the Off the Wall Hall venue in Lawrence, Kansas. Often considered one of their best concerts and a highlight of the industrial genre, the S.P.K. Appreciation Society of Sydney in their All The Way With S.P.K. / American Tour article describes the concert as being the group's “best performance to date”, further adding that they “Flattened (an) enthusiastic audience with massive P.A. amplification of FX bass regeneration”. This insertion wasn’t done at random, as the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s works were heavily engrained in the original industrial scene of the 80s. Both the 1985 and 1986 performances of Litchi began on a playback of the S.P.K. song Culturcide (from their 1983 Dekompositiones EP), and it was likely that use of the track that led to Not Osada’s early fixation on S.P.K.’s music. At the end of Blind Beast, in a sort of reader Q&A Osada is questioned about some of his favorite music. At the top of the list he features the tracklist of the Dekompositiones EP and the track Mekano from their 1979 Mekano / Contact / Slogun single. Interestingly enough he states that he only likes those four songs from the band, following the text with laughter in regards to their remaining discography. I’m unsure if this means he was unimpressed with their noisier work (which would be curious knowing his liking of Mekano with how it originated from their earliest noise-adjacent album) or if he was directed to their later Machine Age Voodoo material and was alienated by it. In the same Q&A he also mentions the band Funeral Party, who featured specially commissioned art by Suehiro Maruo on their Dream of Embryo single. It's apparent that he also had a copy of the compilation album Vision Of The Emortion, as the list also includes C·C·Mekka and Ego'n Mole, who were both featured in the album alongside Funeral Party's only two other documented tracks, Das Sunde and Gears - Night. S.P.K. references are sprinkled throughout this story along with Osada's other Litchi-adjacent entries. Aside from one of Zera's henchmen being named after the Mekano track, it's very likely that the frequent references to Eden are in homage to the lyrics of Mekano. The first lines of the track include the verses "One by one, odd to even. Break the scenes, rudely eden...".

Moon Age 15 was originally printed in 1988 as a two-part miniseries in the horror magazine Complete Collection of Horror and Occult Works - HELP, namely in volumes 5 and 6. While being an early work that derived from the TGG, it still wasn’t the first comic to adapt the Litchi stage play, with Das Blut : Blood and Eternal Girl preceding it with their 1986 publication in Osada’s debut anthology Night Reading Room, sharing the same year as the TGG’s early closure following creative conflicts between Norimizu Ameya and K Tagane (the group's author, who remains anonymous to this day). It’s to be noted however that while Das Blut and Eternal Girl were the first stories to feature the Hikari Club as antagonists, they are only tangentially related with Moon Age showing more distinct Grand Guignol archetypes (musings of the full moon, examinations of the Hikari club’s misogyny, idealization of technology, and even an early rendition of the Litchi robot itself). First kept solely as a brief serial, Moon Age was later reprinted in abridged form as a short story in the 1996 Blind Beast anthology. While copies of HELP are notably hard to find and demand high prices, I was given an in depth view of both volumes that featured Moon Age’s serialization by a collector earlier last year. While the drawings are still the same on a rudimentary level, the length of the serialized version is notably longer than the later Blind Beast variant, with the HELP serialization being over 40 pages while Blind Beast’s is only 24. This was the product of the manga being entirely revised for Blind Beast’s print, with the layouts being drastically altered along with basic revisions of the line art. Certain scenes that would usually take 2 to 3 pages in the HELP version were condensed to 1, resulting in a unique tradeoff where one version feels unusually spacious in its framing while the other is heavily condensed and almost chaotic by comparison. It’s only a thing that springs on you once you compare the two variants, I saw the revised version first and originally didn’t pay any mind to it. One thing that is certain is the polishing of the art. The brush work in the Blind Beast version is refined with a more elaborate sense of weight and flow while the HELP version is notably rough with the prominent use of rudimentary screentones. It reflects as a somewhat rougher variant of the art shown in Night Reading Room. It feels strangely digital, like it’s the product of early computer art. The line-by-line reuse of the decapitation scene from Eternal Girl being shown on the TVs further adds to the strange digital feel of the art style.

Similar to Moon Age, Osada's other stories of the Hikari Club featured the members luring girls to their brutal deaths. In Eternal Girl the members bring in a student and film her mutilation for a snuff film that acts as the story's namesake, in Das Blut they corner another student to the woods where they hang her, and in Jinta Jinta they kidnap a student who bullied one of her classmates to suicide before trepanning her with a strange device that's somewhere between an electric chair and a drill. Not Osada was very recently namedropped in the concluding essay of an English print of Kawashima Norikazu’s Her Frankenstein under the alternate Nagata Nooto anglicization of Osada’s pseudonym. Their name is a curious case as while there is a prominent written variant (長田ノオト), it’s seen numerous English iterations. In Osada’s own English signatures it is written as Not Osada (with the name apparently being derived from a German phrase), but other variants include Osada Nohto, Osada Nooto and Not Nagata. If I'm not mistaken, it could count as one of the first English acknowledgements of Osada's works in print.

[jomamaofficial]

A Hero's Burden (Midoriya x GN!Reader Angst No Comfort Oneshot)

A/N: FIRST OF ALL, SPECIAL THANKS TO @caramello07, BECAUSE THIS ABSOLUTE LEGEND HAS BEEN HELPING ME CREATE THE PLOT AND BETAREADING MY WORK. LITERALLY, BESTIE, YOU'RE A REAL ONE 🫶🫶.

Hello hello my lovely readers! Thank you for being patient with me. My exams are around the corner so I have been so, so busy with that. But I always pop in to see you guys leave the most beautiful feedback and comments, it makes my day <3. I hope you enjoy this just as much as I did. I really put my heart and soul into this one. 

Please let me know whether I should lowkey create a YouTube channel where I read out my work the way I intended to. 

As always, my Ask Box is open for any requests or just a conversation. I absolutely adore all of you, and I want to take this time to thank you guys for your support. Seeing your comments and messages motivates me to write :) <3. Please remember to take care of yourselves, and enjoy. As always, I would love to see your thoughts in the comments :).

TW: Death and bleeding, SUICIDAL themes. 

CW: SPOILER: Season 6, Izuku’s Vigilante arc, swearing, difficult friendship dynamics.

Masterlist 

Word Count: 3242.

 Summary: Heroes always win. Every folktale, every comic, everything in our life tells us the same thing: good reigns over evil. But the harsh truth comes crashing down in a dark warehouse, where the facade of invincibility crumbles. Amidst the shadows, surrounded by those who once vowed to protect, you can only helplessly watch as your best friend, Midoriya Izuku destroys himself under the weight of this flawed, and broken system. With the entire hero society relying on him, how can he stop giving everything he has? In a world where heroes are human and kindness is a liability. You try to help him, yet even the strongest bonds can shatter under the weight of despair. 

——————————————————————————————————

How does it feel? 

When everything in front of you disintegrates into pieces, whilst you can only sit there and watch? 

It feels like a dark warehouse. Cold and wet. 

Sunken in, casting a dark shadow, impersonating the night sky, your eyelids were heavy, succumbing to the shared lethargy that lurked in the heavy air. Your brain did not allow you to rest however, listening only to your palpitating heart, because what if the villains found you whilst you were fast asleep?

Heroes were there to protect you. 

But why were you still so afraid? The nation's best heroes had congregated together, sharing the same space as you, breathing the same air as you.

They would never let harm come your way– it was their duty to protect you.

So why were they hiding from that harm, sitting with their knees held close to their chest?

Heroes were there to protect you, but that claim was voiceless in the presence of reality: heroes were hidden– whispering and begging the ground to stay silent as they shuffled in the shadows. Villains ran loose– mocking the hopeless souls that they trampled on, with every free, and unabashed step they took.  

Death had not only taken  multiple heroes on the battlefield; it had also snatched their facade. 

They were not invincible. They were not untouchable. 

The world had just forgotten that their heroes were only human after all. 

A phone rang. 

Roaming eyes halted. They could not speak. 

“It’s mine”, Hawks said. 

Breaths were held. 

“It’s from All Might”. 

You leaned in closer. 

“Midoriya-kun came into contact with the second hired gun.”

Your chest ceased to move. 

“...and he won instantly.” 

-

“Young man-”

“He didn’t have any information.”

The sky wept. 

The moon and stars had masked themselves under the darkness   that shrouded the city. If they could not see you, they could not harm you. 

Toshinori Yagi had just watched the last remains of Midoriya Izuku’s innocence drain into the gutters of Musutafu. 

“He might explode too. Be careful.” 

He felt the impact of his student’s departure faster than he could comprehend. Therefore he took the chance to call after Midoriya, summoning the scarce energy he had left, ignoring the rising threat in his weak chest, which was ready to surrender to the bloody phlegm building inside of him. 

“Wait a minute!” Toshinori ran after him– though Midoriya had only moved for a second. 

“Food!” he gasped, his hands lifting a box wrapped in a blue cloth. ““Please, my son, you haven’t eaten…” 

His hands tightly grasped around the soft, crisp fabric that was decorated with orange carrots, and white bunnies with pink noses. When he first saw it, Toshinori chuckled to himself before deciding to buy it– this was made for Midoriya, his rising hero, the purest of hearts. 

“All Might.” Midoriya did not look back. “I’m fine now. You don’t have to follow me.” 

Toshinori’s shoulders slumped down and his brows lowered, pulling closer together. Midoriya was walking away from him without a second glance. 

Midoriya had not met his eyes once today. 

“I am fine now.” The wind howled louder than his voice, unconvinced. 

“Young Midoriya, please...”

The energy around Midoriya had increased, visible power– venomous and hostile– overflowing from his tense body that was moments away from breaking. 

Toshinori had to stop him. Or history would repeat itself.

“Midoriya, please, don’t d-”

“I can move at the same level as your 100%...” Midoriya whispered, more to himself than to anyone else. “You don’t have to worry…” 

His tattered clothes soaked in the rain, his sound of his heavy steps getting quieter and quieter.

“Please”, Toshinori begged, “wait a minute…” 

But before he could finish his heart’s plea, the one who it was meant for had already left, pushing everything away, leaving everyone he had burdened in the dust. 

The lunch that his mentor had lovingly made for him now belonged to the sidewalk and the merciless rain. Soon, it would also flow into the gutters of Musutafu. 

-

The warehouse door crashed open. 

“Midoriya is nowhere to be found!” 

All Might ran in, his hands against his knees, gasping for the still and stale air. 

“He-” he huffed again, regaining his breath,” he, he left… I tried to contact him. Phone… off… he’s nowhere to be found… sent class after him… didn’t find him either” 

Your eyes twitched at the blank stares that his words had harboured. No one batted an eye. 

They were too busy counting the days until they would be found by the real threat. 

All Might’s concern for Midoriya ran thicker than blood. And had you looked past those deep-set eyes, you would have noticed the faint veins that bordered his gaze; something was stolen from him. Midoriya had been stolen by the expectations of the world, held hostage in his own mind. 

“I know where he is.” 

-

Orudera Chūgakkō. Memories had been etched into the red brick walls. You pushed against that same black gate, its groans and creaks forming the haunting symphony that would promptly begin at eight o'clock sharp. 

Lessons would start at eight-thirty, and the low murmurs of the class would subside as your sensei would come in, dropping her bags next to her desk. You would all stand up together, reciting the same monotonous ‘Good Morning Shima-Sensei’ before sitting back down. If she was in a good mood, the class would commence. But if she was (more likely than not) in a bad mood, the entire class would get a scolding.

“You cannot wish your teacher a pleasant good morning, but you can chat to your friends with double the energy?! Do that again. Now! Show me some respect.” And you would all stand for another five minutes, smirking and giggling, repeating it again. 

What once felt like a tedious task now brought a smile to your face as you reminisced about the moments spent in the classroom before you.

Birds would chirp, filling the classroom with a sonorous melody. The walls would be  decorated by the younger children who drew rainbows and flowers and butterflies with every colour they could get their hands on. There wasn’t a speck of grey or black found in these drawings.

It was so fun to be a child– just a few years ago, your life was filled with colour.  

Everything now was grey and bare. 

At ten o’clock, the bell would ring and children would scream as they ran towards their friends, ignoring the poor teachers who repeated: “children, please don’t run in the hallways, children please, you may get hurt!” 

The large corridor was so full with a sea of chuckles and laughter.

Today, undisturbed dirt coated every surface on the corridor. A desolate strip led down to the most frequented stairs of your past. Its laborious steps led to a place that no student visited as much as you did. On the sixth floor, the rooftop brought you closer to the blue sky and the fluffy clouds. You and the sun would overlook the vast plains of never ending buildings, glistening under the morning glow. People would walk, cars would drive; the hustle and bustle of everyday life resided on the grounds below you. So how could anyone truly feel alone? How could anyone ignore the true beauty of your favourite spot in the whole school?

You now understood that beauty was in the eye of the beholder– the painful truth. 

Sleepless nights were spent wondering, what would have happened if you did not visit the rooftop on one particular day? What would have happened to the nameless boy who had stood there, head hanging low, body quivering, feet on the ledge of railings. 

Who could have guessed that this stranger would end up as the only friend you ever had? 

You could recognise him in total darkness and in different bodies, for Midoriya Izuku’s pure heart could never change. It would always draw you towards him. 

You ran up the swindling stairs, the steps leading up to the sixth floor seeming longer and steeper than before. Serenity only belonged to the past– this place brought nothing but a looming sense of dread, weighing you down as time ticked by.  

The closer you got, the weaker your heart felt. You had read about it somewhere– our bodies always knew what would happen, so they could prepare us for the worst. 

But the thought of losing him before you could see his eyes, your beacon of light and hope, would rend a part of you forever. 

So you carried on walking, ignoring the foreboding pricks cultivating in your body.

Those eyes… you could not live without them. They were an open window into the bright and welcoming flame that resided within him. He would give warmth to those who needed it without asking, never expecting anything in return. 

Kindness had no price.

So Midoriya Izuku would live with kindness in his heart, even if it meant that it would be vulnerable and open for everyone to use as they pleased. 

Midoriya Izuku was priceless. There was no one like him in this world filled with deceit and hate. But the world did not like those who were different from the rest.  

He gave and he gave. Yet what would happen when he gave every piece of himself to a world that never gave back? What would happen if he finally had nothing to give apart from his soul?

The world is cruel. 

They would steal everything he had. And that is how you found him, through the already opened door, standing under the thundering sky that showed no forgiveness to the young man who would once smile at them too. 

Tip tap, tip tap, your eyes were blurry, but not from the rain. They had betrayed you, yes your gaze. For the man in front of you was not the man whom your heart could recognise from afar. You were so close, yet your hearts held distances, akin to the stars. Blood wept, following the course of the pouring water, revealing wounds, neglected but vain. They cried for attention they would never get, as the man who was once a stranger, had become estranged from them. 

“Deku…” you did not want him to turn around, praying for this to be a mistake. FOr him to look confused, asking you, “who’s Deku?” 

This can’t be your Deku… he couldn’t be your priceless hero…

His head barely turned, but you caught a glimpse of his glowering eyes. 

They donned an arcane mask of toughness. His front, unbreakable on the surface, yet unfortunately flawed. You could see right through it, uncovering the secrets that he hid in plain sight. 

Immense pain had found an abode in his glassy, teal eyes; exhaustion chipped away at the shell that kept him put up to protect himself from the looming danger that would attack as soon as it smelt his foetid weakness. Midoriya let it happen once, jeopardising everyone around him. 

He wasn’t going to let it happen again. 

“Go away,” Midoriya cautioned. 

His heart expended too much energy pushing everyone away. He could only hope that you would listen to him– he didn’t want to hurt you. 

“Deku…” you pleaded, eyes misting over as you cautiously step forward, hands stretching wearily towards his shoulders, taking care not to brush past those fresh, untended marks that showed through the rips and tears in his clothes. 

“Please Deku… let me help you.”

Midoriya stiffened under your touch, guilt overtaking his body. 

You couldn’t be seen with him.

The eyes. They were everywhere. 

They tracked his every move. And if they saw you now, he would never see you again. 

You felt a strong jolt push you back into the wall, your head crashing against the stone walls, losing your grip on him completely. Your hands felt empty– he had disappeared from under your touch. 

And it all happened so fast. 

Midoriya stared at his hands, his blood fleeing from his extremities. The realisation slowly dawned upon him, raising his heart beat, shifting the energy around him– he was a monster. Mioriya began gasping for air, choking on his own spit and tears, his vision tunnelled in on the surface of his palms.

A monster.

That’s what he was. 

Your body lay limp in the rubble of concrete and dust, you swore you felt something wet on the back of your head, but your eyes urgently searched for Midoriya, who was pale and frozen near the edge of the roof. 

His feet began to sway, and his eyes began to flutter shut. You overlooked the jolts in your body for your mind could not bear this sight again. Despite the clear warnings your aching flesh had given you to rest, you still ran towards him, clutching his body before he fell onto the ground.

Only in your arms had the outer shell of this vigilante’s stone defence fallen, emerging a broken child who had just caused immense pain to his best friend. 

“I’m so sorry”, he whispered through his dried throat, quivering as the walls in his mind closed in on him. “I’m so sorry, Y/N, I’m so sorry”, he repeated, again and again, trapped in a cyclical doom which served only to condemn him. 

He was a monster– that depraved voice screamed. 

He was a monster– that depraved voice echoed as it stalked him in the depths of his own mind, following him into his deepest, intimate fears. Clutching it, taking over.

“I’m so sorry, Y/N.” I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…

He was disturbingly light in your arms; you just noticed his hollowed cheeks. 

Midoriya’s strained forehead loosened as he broke down in your hold, tears running down his thinning face. Your heart beat alongside his, yet you did not dare to glance into his emerald eyes, for they had been robbed of their precious shine. You placed your finger over his mouth as he opened it to say something, a silent reminder– everything will be alright. 

“Give me your pain, Deku, please…” you begged, stroking his curly hair away from his eyes. “I can’t see you like this anymore”. 

A singular tear dropped on his cheek, stinging him with regret. 

“You don’t have to carry that burden alone, Deku… It’s too big… too big to carry alone. You give too much, you don’t know when to rest. You break yourself, for people who don’t deserve it and you take on things bigger than you can ever manage! You think you can do everything Deku, but you can’t!” you cried, unable to stop. 

“You don’t need to work this hard, Deku, you don’t. You’re forgetting who you were, Deku. You’re not indestructible! You’re not untouchable, you’re not All Might! You can get hurt, you- you can bleed, you can die for god’s sake, Deku, you can die!” 

Your voice began raising uncontrollably, as you held his face, shaking him. 

“You’re just a kid, Deku. My Deku… the sweet boy who I love. My best friend…” you grabbed his hands, squeezing them as you took deep breaths, your throat aching.  

“But you’re unrecognisable now… You’re destroying yourself thinki- thinking that you’ll survive but what if you don’t. What if you don’t survive, and all of your friends, your teachers, your mom, they’re all just waiting for you to come back.”

Your eyes solemnly scanned his wrist, eyebrows furrowed and lowered. A litany of cuts, healed and unhealed, adorned his wrists, glaring at you. Your trembling fingers gently ran over them, hovering so as to not agitate them. 

“But since you wanted to prove that you’re a hero, you go around picking fights that you can’t win.”

The scars on his wrist opened wounds of the past.  

Your hands that held his wrist felt empty again. Midoriya averted his eyes from yours, before pulling his sleeves down, stretching the thinning material of his hero-suit, until it covered his exposed skin. 

The rain’s sobbing grew louder with every moment that passed by in dismal silence.

“What would you even know about my life, Y/N?" he asked, his voice drowning in the cacophony of the storm. 

Just like that, all of the progress you made had collapsed in front of your eyes. Midoriya had rebuilt the cage around his heart

“Deku, what happened?” 

Your hands, which reached out for him, were immediately shaken off.

“What would you know about my life? About my struggles?” 

His legs faltered when he tried to run away, cramping as a warning: Midoriya couldn’t move, he had used up all of his energy. 

“Deku plea-” 

“You said what you wanted to say, Y/N. Thanks for reminding me that I can’t let my guard down, even near people I thought I could trust. I’m not ‘indestructible’, I’m not All Might, I never claimed that. But unlike you, I have the world's burden around my shoulders. If you were putting everyone around you in danger, you'd run away too Y/N. But you wouldn’t know that because you're not the one giving everything your body can give, just to find out it's never going to be enough. You’re not the reason this entire city has turned into a ghost town. But what would you know, Y/N?”

He turned around, gaze hardened into stone. 

“You're quirkless".

Blood rushed into your cheeks, your heart beating fast. 

You must have misheard. 

“You don’t mean that…” 

He didn’t. The sweet boy you had met years ago on this same rooftop would never use that against you. He didn’t mean it. 

"Now, I know why I was treated the way I was when I was younger, Y/N. The quirkless really don't know anything."

You couldn't have misheard that. 

You had been beside his side to see every intimate detail in Midoriya’s life– every victory, every laughter, you celebrated together. Every shove and every taunt, you endured together. 

-

“The Quirkless Duo, aw what are you going to do now? Cry?” 

“I wonder how your parents feel, only having one useless kid that can never protect them.” 

“Ya’ know, if you want a quirk, there might be another way. Take a swan dive off the roof of the building, and pray for a quirk in your next life." 

-

We are born into this world completely alone. And we die in this world completely alone. 

Only fools believe that they can escape that. 

‘What would you know, Y/N, you're quirkless.’

You were truly alone in every stage of your life. 

"You're becoming exactly what we feared, Midoriya.”

He stopped in his tracks, swallowing the rising bile that crept up his throat.

“If I knew this is what I'd get after standing up for you those countless times where I got hurt, where I got kicked and punched and teased everytime I defended you, I would have just let you jump off that roof.”

The wind wailed through the night sky, moving everything in its path. 

“You're no hero Midoriya. But you’re right about one thing. You’re the fucking reason everything around you is getting destroyed.” 

It was funny to think that their first and last meeting would be on this rooftop. 

Midoriya looked at the world, greyer than it had ever been. 

It had lost life.

He waited until he heard the door shut behind him.

This life truly had nothing to live for.

[spacelessbian]

thoughts on Agatha All Along FINALE

Full spoilers ahead, 100% don't read if you haven't seen episodes 8 and 9.

I really enjoyed the finale, both episodes had a lot to offer and overall I am quite happy with how the show concluded. Things that I liked in no particular order:

The REVEALS. There is simply nothing better than a reveal that recontextualizes everything. And we didn't get just one, but two! Personally I found Agatha running a con and murdering women for centuries the more fun one, but Billy actually creating the Road was also really good and even though I've only seen the show once (unlike many people on here, no doubt), I can name many points in the story and in the dialogue where this is worked in and suddenly makes sense. Really great stuff.

Agatha and Nicky. I was dreading this part a little bit because I know Nicholas Scratch is some sort of big name in Marvel comics and I truly couldn't care less, so I'm pleased with what we got – a genuinely sweet yet tragic story of a mom and her son, destined to death even before being born. I was surprised (but in a good way) by Agatha's quiet reaction to Nicky's death because we know his death hurt her badly, but that's just how it is sometimes.

Agatha and Rio. I won't say I'd always had fate in Marvel to not mess this up, so yay! I don't think they did. This relationship is the heart of the show (and it is black and beats for the queers) and I think the writers did it justice (apart from one thing which I will get to in the next section). The kiss was intense, sexy, beautiful and also tragic and both Kathryn Hahn and Aubrey Plaza did a fantastic job with every piece of dialogue and every expression. I want them to play doomed lovers in five more projects, at least.

The coven. I already blogged about Jen but man, is it funny. Even this was Agatha all along, but she is such a menace she hasn't even realized that. I'm truly happy for Jen making it through and getting her power back. I'm glad we saw Alice's last moment and I liked how much Billy cared about her, Lilia and Sharon.

Agatha's death. I can't help myself, I need to go to that moment again. I was destroyed by that. It was so beautiful, both thematically and also visually and all. The flowers and mushrooms? The sun coming up? I kept thinking about Hozier's Work Song: When my time comes around, lay me gently in the cold dark earth. No grave can hold my body down. I'll crawl home to her. (whadup, Rio reference)

Agatha and Billy specifically in that last battle scene. She was blue you guys, she was just completely blue and in the exact same blue that Billy wears in his silly Marvel costume. And Billy just offered her his power, without questions and without wanting anything in return! And she didn't kill him! (Writing that down, the bar is on the floor for Agatha lol.)

There are other small things (like the Subaru lol), but I am ready to go to the bad section now. Two things I did not like (hidden for lenght but also because not everyone wants to read negative stuff):

Agatha's ghost. I'm gonna say it. Agatha as a ghost looks fucking terrible and her existence itself diminishes her death scene. I do understand why they did it and even why she looks like that (Agatha in the comics, as I understand it, is Wanda's mentor and also an older white haired lady, so they wanted to keep that but it didn't make sense with Wanda anymore), but I just hate it. Especially the wig.

The Marvel stuff. Yes, I realize this sounds stupid, it is a Marvel show after all. We wouldn't get a stupid gimmick like ghost Agatha joining Billy to look for his brother if this wasn't a starting point for the Wiccan. And I like Billy, I do, I also (obviously) love Agatha, who was first introduced in WandaVision (I realize the hypocrisy), but it just doesn't work for me. I would rather think about the beautiful death scene with it's poetic tragedy than about white haired Agatha floating on a washing machine, I'm sorry.

That being said, I really really liked the whole show and I am happy to say I hooked in my best friend (if you are reading this, you are contractually obliged to like the post, you know how it is) and that I actually know other people irl who watched it and enjoyed it. I'm sad it's over and even sadder that in this day and age, noone will talk about it in about two to three weeks. Anyway, it was lovely.

[aalghul]

read boywonder and exploded died (in a bad way)

talia... what have they done to you... what do they always do to you... ‘there is no honour in assassin’s work’ talia... where are u... the apple of my eye, i adore her sm very close to sending pipebombs to GM everyday waow...

watching people talk about how good this was for talia feels like chewing glass. boy wonder was clearly written by someone who has not read anything involving talia prior to grant morrison and doesn't care about her outside of whatever can justify her becoming an abusive backstory for damian.

boy wonder completely disrespects her struggle during the time when she was so conflicted because she wanted to be loyal to her father but wasn't sure if she believed in him entirely anymore. the struggle existed because talia knew she would not abide by nor aid him if she did not agree with him. because talia has her own moral compass and beliefs that she follows. juni ba disregards this very important part of her journey to instead make her an entirely different character apparently did not disagree with ra's at any point before her own son was threatened (going as far as making her uncaring towards damian's former caretaker to show us how twisted her way of thinking is. mind you, this is supposedly the same talia who cried the first time she accidentally killed someone and has risked her life to help strangers, the JLA, jason todd, etc). she has to be turned into a different person just because boy wonder needs her to be framed as a somewhat sympathetic villain who gets what she deserves by having her son leave her for a better family. her "happy ending" is knowing that damian's other family is making him happy, which she never could because the story deems her incapable of that.

along these lines is another thing i found insulting: juni ba insinuating that talia's love for bruce may have been caused by talia wanting to please her father, who wanted bruce as an heir. when in reality, ra's only took notice of bruce after talia fell in love with bruce. it was because talia was outspoken enough in front of her father to bring up bruce that ra's cared about him at all. it was because talia had been off in cairo studying medicine that she had been caught up in a scheme that took her to bruce. all of those were her own choices, and juni ba wants us to question whether any of it was real because he doesn't believe talia has ever had agency. all because he himself clearly has never read talia outside of recent comics.

related to the above: juni ba insists talia wanted to be the heir to the league of assassins. pre-GM talia has never expressed this. she's never even implied it. from everything we've seen, it's pretty clear she would never want to nor would she able to stomach so much death. because it's canon that talia's heart hurts for everyone she sees killed. but, again, juni ba does not care about this whatsoever because his story is about damian and the bats. talia's characterization is always acceptable collateral damage when it comes to damian and the bats.

the more I think about it, the more I hate juni ba's misinterpretation of her. people so readily accept things like boy wonder and WFA when it comes to talia because they know so little about the most foundational parts of her character and it's really upsetting that big projects will continue to give such ooc stories as the best case scenario for talia. this is equivalent to someone writing a story where bruce decided to not take in dick or jason because the mission's more important than one kid. that would make bruce a different and less compelling character, right? that's exactly what happened to talia here (and in wfa and in everything GM wrote and in pretty much every story written since then). these are very integral parts of her character. if boy wonder as a story can't function without talia being so thoroughly destroyed? it was never a story worth telling (and it really isn't. because it's truly not a good story at all, which makes talia being wrecked for it even worse).

it makes me so angry because things like this are exactly why people don't see talia the same way they see selina or bruce or any other character ever! she continues to be pushed into the role of the harmful past who can only atone for her mistakes by now becoming an obsolete observer.

[kaijuparfait]

I saw ur tags about indulging in the body horror aspect of the Symbiote/Host dynamic and im just here to say: do it >:3

YES.

GOD. ok so. I've always enjoyed the concept of body horror, not all the way, but it looked cool in art! But! Recently Symbrock (and Venom as a whole) has turned that up to 100- both in a "Wow! Cool alien creature biting people's heads off! >:D" way, but also in a "The goo is in his organs, his tissue, his cells... how romantic!" way.

And, if you'll excuse me, I'll only be talking about my (limited) knowledge/headcanons with Symbrock because I haven't read all the comics yet so this is all with Eddie and the Venom Symbiote in mind-

Firstly, I don't think I've ever seen anyone mention how the Symbiote can enter/exit it's Host's body through their skin, without damaging the Host. There's no wounds, just the easy slide in between layers of cells, Venom can be as solid as they want but can also come together so seamlessly, its like watching someone fold a deck of cards.

Even on a psychological standpoint, the idea of actually being "Venom". Singular. Not "We" are Venom. But the idea of two beings, from different sides of the universe, coming together perfectly as one being, one mind, one consciousness. A bit of an OC ramble, I have this OC that goes into this idea of acting as one being and I'll talk about them later but WOAH is it fun. The sheer intimacy of it.. not losing your own self, but simply combing it with another to create something- someone new.

Ok onto the actual body horror-

I am not normal about the Symbiote literally being in Eddie's blood. Blood is everywhere in the body, anywhere you poke, blood will come out- and in that, the Symbiote, ready to heal the wound.

Speaking of healing wounds, and also this post because I keep rereading it, it makes me ill, the Venom Symbiote truly sees it's Host as it's home. and that does something to me. The way it keeps the body healthy, like how you would clean your house, no longer having to worry about illnesses or infections; how it heals any injuries, like fixing a broken wall, repainting it, like there was no damage in the first place.

Knowing it's home so well, able to know what's wrong and how to make it right. Complete and utter devotion to it's beloved home, the one that keeps it safe, willingly, lovingly let's it- wants it inside to keep it safe. To know that something that could tear apart planets if it so wanted to, something that bares it's rows of teeth as a natural expression, something that has destroyed countless lives- to know something like that gently rests in the space between your organs because it wants to. And how much you want it to too.

And this goes both ways too! When they're Venom and get hurt, they way the Symbiote peels away from the body is.. its amazing that the Symbiote can be torn away from it's Host. When Eddie gets hurt, the Symbiote comes out, from inside- When Venom gets hurt, instead of blood or organs, it's Eddie at the center, but he acts as the same anyways. Eddie is the Symbiote's life, he is it's heart, carefully tucked away and protected.

Even though Eddie doesn't particularly enjoy eating people's brains, he comes up with a compromise for the 2 of them anyways, he buys tons of chocolate for it to eat too, and that adds up for a guy that is living in a one room flat. and AND AND I will never get over how, in LTBC, Venom leaves all the red m&m's, because the red dye is said to be harmful to humans in large amounts, so even though it's one of the few things it needs to live, it refuses it to keep Eddie- it's Host- it's home safe.

and, I mean, Venom totally could eat Eddie if it so wanted to, in the first movie, Eddie's literally going through.. several organ failures- but Venom puts him back together, back better! and i am suddenly ill-

excuse my weird ideas but hhhhhh Eddie being torn apart and put back together..... yeah. how much trust is needed for that? how much love is shown from letting it consume his flesh and bones, from it eating the thing it loves the most, from it knowing every ridge and curve of every organ and cell to put everything back where it was?

how much love is needed to destroy something, to be destroyed, and come back together?

also Trust Exercise is a dang good fic, i need more of this. please. or i'll start making it myself (i'll do it anyways)

This, too, can go both ways, I am a big fan of swapping how Eddie and Venom and portrayed, both in canon and in fanon, just for the fun of it- and I'm just saying... let Eddie tear apart the Symbiote! maybe Eddie wants to rip it apart with his teeth and bare hands! Let them fight and rip each other apart, but with love <3 (oh fight/sparring scenes between friends/lovers, how i love you so)

you can't really see it well, and i'll make a better show of it later, but my design for (movie) Eddie has sharp teeth and that isn't for no reason. I.... ADORE the idea that, after being Venom for so long, Eddie starts adapting parts of them into his "normal" body- sharper teeth, clouded eyes, maybe even some of his skin is pitch black too, just because it makes him feel like Venom in his everyday life, even a little bit.

ough i need to lay down after that but- THANK YOU so much for asking me this, this was such a treat to let out, it's like a weight has been lifted off me lmao

i'll probably have more on this topic later on, but i'll probably use those ideas for art/writing, i love thinking about them :3

EDIT: ALSO ALSO ALSO the way the Venom Symbiote literally goes against it's very nature to love Eddie, it goes against what every other Symbiote does, it betrays it's entire race and planet- JUST TO BE VENOM WITH EDDIE <3