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missmentelle · 4 years

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Would you say it's the same thing for ADHD? I was diagnosed as having 'traits of adhd' a few years back and always assumed it was more a reflection of the fact that i was diagnosed by a med student not being supervised who made some significant errors in the way she tested me as well as omitting what I thought were some significant observations from her writeup, but I've been wondering lately whether I am actually ADHD or not

It’s the same for all disorders - if a diagnosing professional wrote down on a psychology report that you have “traits of” a mental disorder, it means that they felt you did not meet the criteria for a full diagnosis at that time, most likely for one of five reasons:

You didn’t have enough symptoms to meet the minimum required for the diagnosis, or you were missing a key symptom that is required to make that diagnosis.

Your symptoms are not severe enough to warrant a diagnosis; they do not cause significant disruption or impairment in your daily life.

Your symptoms only occur in one specific context (eg. you have symptoms at school, but not at home, work or with friends), or your symptoms are a side effect of medication or intoxication.

Your symptoms have not been going on long enough to meet the criteria for the diagnosis, they don’t occur frequently enough to make the diagnosis, you have long symptom-free periods that negate the diagnosis, or your symptoms did not appear at an age consistent with the onset of that diagnosis.

You sort of meet the criteria for the diagnosis, but there is a different diagnosis that does a much better job of explaining your symptoms (this is sometimes listed as a “differential diagnosis”, rather than “traits of X”).

A report stating that a person has “traits of” a certain disorder or “features of” a disorder is actually extremely common. I’ve probably read more than thousand psych reports at this point in my career, and it’s quite normal for phrasing like that to appear on them. Usually, this is actually a sign that the person is being rather thorough - they are noting that they considered ADHD as a possible diagnosis but ultimately could not make the diagnosis for some reason or other. As I said, other reports may format this differently, and include a list of “differential diagnoses” in the conclusion - this is a list of diagnoses that they considered but ultimately ruled out for one reason or another.

Unfortunately, learning that you have “traits” of a disorder doesn’t really tell us much, especially without seeing the full psych report. Maybe you didn’t have ADHD then, but you have since developed it. Maybe you don’t have it and never did. Maybe you have some other sort of executive dysfunction or disorder that explains your symptoms, but it was missed the last time around. Maybe a diagnosis of ADHD was warranted back then, and still is. Maybe you only have ADHD symptoms in a specific context, which would make you ineligible for diagnosis but suggests there is something going on that needs to be addressed. I don’t know enough about your case to know for sure. All that I know is that the only way to be sure if you have ADHD - or any other mental disorder that you may be concerned about - is to seek a second opinion and get another assessment done.

(I’m going to give some clarification about what having “traits of” a disorder means for other readers who may have similar questions. You should know, though, that ADHD is actually slightly different than other disorders like BPD that you may have “traits of” - ADHD is a neurological condition that responds to medication, and if you are given ADHD medication when you don’t actually have ADHD, you are going to notice pretty quickly that you’ve been misdiagnosed. If you calm down and get more sleep while taking what is effectively speed, you can be pretty sure that ADHD is the correct diagnosis for you. People with other disorders like depression, agoraphobia, PTSD and BPD don’t have the same kind of litmus test available for their diagnosis.)

It’s important to remember that everyone has traits of at least one diagnosable disorder - most people will have traits of several. Some people are more easily distractible than others, some people have more trouble sleeping, some people are naturally low-energy or feel more intense emotions. If you browse through a copy of the DSM-V, you are going to find some stuff in there that sounds like it applies to you. Nobody has perfect mental health, especially in their teens and early 20s. But most people do not meet the criteria for the diagnosis of a mental disorder.

This is where we have to think critically about what a diagnosis actually is, why we do it, and what it actually means. Diagnosing a psychological disorder is not like diagnosing a medical disorder, where we can do some blood tests and scans and know exactly what a person has. Psychological diagnoses are always subjective, to some extent - we made categories to describe common clusters of behaviours and symptoms, and we decided where to draw the line between “someone who is just quirky” and “someone who needs formal psychological treatment”. Where exactly we draw that line has always been the subject of debate.

We could make it so that everyone who has any sort of mental health flaw at all gets diagnosed with a disorder, but that sort of defeats the point of diagnosis - if almost everyone on earth has a diagnosis, then a diagnosis effectively becomes meaningless. There’s no longer meaningful distinction between “someone with an overactive imagination” and “someone with treatment-resistant psychosis” - it all just gets slapped with the same diagnosis. It can also lead us to “medicalize” behaviours that might not need to be “medicalized”. After all, if we diagnose someone, we need to do something about that diagnosis. Diagnosing them means we’ve identified that they need some sort of treatment or intervention. But do all quirks in human behavior really need to be ironed out with treatment? Do we really want to build a world where everyone who falls outside a very rigid definition of mental health gets told that they have something wrong with them? Likewise, if we make diagnosis too restrictive, that’s not good either. Now we have the opposite problem - if we make the criteria for a diagnosis too strict and too narrow, we miss people who might seriously benefit from having treatment. If we say “you need to be severely suicidal before we can diagnose you with depression”, we’re going to overlook a lot of non-suicidal people whose depressive symptoms are ruining their lives, and who could be treated if we just recognized them as depressed. If we are only diagnosing and helping the most severe of the severe cases, we aren’t really making good use of the tools available to us and diagnosis once again becomes basically meaningless, because not having one is no longer a good indicator of whether or not you need help.

Diagnosis is a balancing act, and there are a lot of people who fall in kind of a grey area where it’s not totally clear if we should be diagnosing them or not. People are complicated, and they rarely fit neatly into categories. If we have a twenty-year-old girl who experiments with drugs, has a lot of short-term and casual dating relationships that end poorly, struggles to make and keep friends, and doesn’t really have a stable sense of who she is and what she wants, does she have BPD? Or is she just a normal 20-year-old? How would we decide? If we diagnose her, we might be pathologizing behaviour that isn’t really all that unusual for her age group, and making her feel like she’s defective for struggling with things that are pretty normal for someone her age to be struggling with; diagnosing her could make her believe that she’s incapable of healthy relationships, which could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, if we don’t diagnose her, we could be missing the fact that she does actually have a fairly serious disorder, and depriving her of the chance to get life-changing treatment that might help her develop the healthier, more fulfilling relationships that she has been missing out on. We could be leaving her to deal with her destructive behaviours on her own, without having any of the language or tools she needs to disrupt those patterns.

If you’ve been assessed by a mental health professional and you have questions about how they reached the conclusions they did, I encourage you to ask questions and have an open conversation about your symptoms, possible treatments and needs. If you don’t feel that they have a good understanding of your case, I highly encourage you to get a second opinion on your diagnosis from another professional. Whenever possible, seek a diagnosis from someone who specializes in mental health - this should be a psychologist or psychiatrist (or in some cases, a neurologist), and not a general practitioner or family doctor (some family doctors can diagnose and treat basic depression, but even then, you should seek a referral to a specialist for further treatment and assessment). Also remember that diagnosis does not have to be a barrier to seeking therapy - anyone can get therapy, even if they do not meet the criteria for a psychological diagnosis, and everyone can benefit from seeking out a therapist to improve their coping skills, social skills, and general mental health. Hope this answers your question! MM

#Anonymous #AnsweredByMM

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rapeculturerealities · 4 years

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MARTY GODDARD’S FIRST FLASH OF INSIGHT CAME IN 1972. It all started when she marched into a shabby townhouse on Halsted Street in Chicago to volunteer at a crisis hotline for teenagers.

Most of the other volunteers were hippies with scraggly manes and love beads. But not Marty Goddard. She tended to wear business clothes: a jacket with a modest skirt, pantyhose, low heels. She hid her eyes behind owlish glasses and kept her blond hair short. Not much makeup; maybe a plum lip. She was 31, divorced, with a mordant sense of humor. Her name was Martha, but everyone called her Marty. She liked hiding behind a man’s name. It was useful.

As a volunteer, Ms. Goddard lent a sympathetic ear to the troubled kids then called “runaway teenagers.” They were pregnant, homeless, suicidal, strung out. She was surprised to discover that many weren’t rebels who’d left home seeking adventure; they were victims who had fled sexual abuse. The phones were ringing with the news that kids didn’t feel safe around their own families. “I was just beside myself when I found the extent of the problem,” she later said.

She began to formulate questions that almost no one was asking back in the early ’70s: Why were so many predators getting away with it? And what would it take to stop them?

Ms. Goddard would go on to lead a campaign to treat sexual assault as a crime that could be investigated, rather than as a feminine delusion. She began a revolution in forensics by envisioning the first standardized rape kit, containing items like swabs and combs to gather evidence, and envelopes to seal it in. The kit is one of the most powerful tools ever invented to bring criminals to justice. And yet, you’ve never heard of Marty Goddard. In many ways she and her invention shared the same fate. They were enormously important and consistently overlooked.

I was infuriated when I read a few years ago about the hundreds of thousands of unexamined rape kits piled up in warehouses around the country. I had the same question that many did: How many rapists were walking free because this evidence had gone ignored?

Take for example, the case of Nathan Ford, who sexually assaulted a woman in 1995. Although a rape kit was submitted to the police, it went untested for 17 years.

During that time, he went on to assault 21 other people, before being convicted in 2006.

And I had another question: How could a tool as potentially powerful as the rape kit have come into existence in the first place? For nearly two decades, I’d been reporting on inventors, breakthroughs and the ways that new technologies can bring about social change. It seemed to me that the rape-kit system was an invention like no other. Can you think of any other technology designed to hold men accountable for brutalizing women?

As soon as I began to investigate the rape kit’s origins, however, I stumbled across a mystery. Most sources credited a Chicago police sergeant, Louis Vitullo, with developing the kit in the 1970s. But a few described the invention as a collaboration between Mr. Vitullo and an activist, Martha Goddard. Where was the truth? As so often happens in stories about rape, I found myself wondering whom to believe.

Mr. Vitullo died in 2006. Ms. Goddard, as far as I could tell, must still be alive — I couldn’t find any obituaries or gravestones that matched her name. An interview in 2003 placed her in Phoenix, and so I collected phone listings for Martha Goddard in Arizona and called them one after another. All those numbers had been disconnected.

Little did I know that I would have to hunt for six months before I finally solved the mystery. I would learn she had transformed the criminal-justice system, though her role has never been fully acknowledged. And I would also discover that Louis Vitullo — far from being the inventor of the rape kit — may have taken credit for Ms. Goddard’s genius and insisted that his name be put on the equipment.

I pieced together dozens of obscure marriage and death notices to try to find her family members; read through hundreds of newspaper articles to establish the timeline of events; and even hired a researcher to dig through an archive of Chicago police department files from the ’70s. Finally, I managed to speak to eight people who knew or worked with her. From these sources, and two oral-history tapes in which she told her life story, I cobbled together what happened.

Back in that Chicago crisis center, Marty Goddard encouraged teenagers to confide in her, and she began to realize just how many of them had been molested.

At the time, most people believed that sexual abuse of children was rare. One psychiatric textbook from the 1970s estimated that incest occurred in only about one in every million families, and claimed that it was often the fault of girls who initiated sex with their fathers. Meantime, it was still legal in every state in America for a husband to rape his wife. Sexual violence that happened within a family was not considered rape at all. A real rape was a “street rape.” It happened to women stupid enough to be in the wrong places at the wrong times.

In Chicago, rape seemed like some sort of natural disaster, no different from the arctic winds that could kill you if you wandered out in the winter without a coat. “Chicago was not a city you wanted to venture out into after dark,” wrote the activist Naomi Weisstein. “Rape was epidemic.” In 1973, an estimated 16,000 people were sexually assaulted in and around Chicago. Only a tenth of those attacks were reported to the police and fewer than a tenth of those cases went to trial; an infinitesimal fraction of perpetrators ended up in prison.

It was a time — much like our own — when millions of people felt that the police had failed them. Chicago was still reeling from the 1969 killing by the cops of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, while he’d been sleeping in his own bed. The Chicago Police Department was notorious as a brutal, occupying force in black neighborhoods. Citizens’ groups were demanding review boards to reform officers’ behavior.

Amid all that, Ms. Goddard began asking questions that might seem so obvious to us today, but were radical in her own time: What if sexual assault could be investigated? What if you could prove it? What if, instead of a “she said” story, you could persuade a jury with scientific evidence?

A lot of men didn’t like her style. But Ray Wieboldt Jr., heir to a Chicago department-store fortune, did, and in 1972 she was hired as an executive at the Wieboldt Foundation, a charitable family fund that rained down money on progressive causes.

The Wieboldt name became her secret weapon. “I could say, ‘I’m Marty Goddard from the Wieboldt Foundation’ and people would just let me in their doors,” she recounted. And so she Wieboldt-ed her way in to meet with hospital managers and victims’ groups and began asking her relentless questions about rape.

Crime labs did not yet have the ability to test DNA; the first use of DNA forensics would not come until 1986, when British investigators used the technology to hunt down a murderer who raped his victims. But they could analyze pieces of glass, fingerprints, splatter patterns, firearms and fibers. Police investigators could find biological clues to help establish the identity of a suspect by, for instance, comparing blood types.

Ms. Goddard wanted to figure out why — even with all this evidence — no one seemed able to prove that a sexual assault had occurred. She learned that victims usually ended up in a hospital after an assault. The cops might dump a shivering, weeping woman in the emergency room and yell out, “We got a rape for you.” As they cared for the victim, the nurses might wash her off or throw away her bloody dress, inadvertently destroying evidence.

The cops didn’t seem to care. Instead, they would isolate the victim in a room and lob questions at her to try to determine whether she was lying. A Chicago police training manual from 1973 declared, “Many rape complaints are not legitimate,” and added, “It is unfortunate that many women will claim they have been raped in order to get revenge against an unfaithful lover or boyfriend with a roving eye.” Officers would routinely ask women what they’d been wearing, whether they’d provoked the attack by acting in a seductive manner, and whether they had enjoyed the sex. “An actual rape victim will generally give the impression of a person who has been dishonored,” according to the manual.

In the early days of forensic science, the 19th century, rape exams sought primarily to test the virtue of women. A doctor would be called in to examine a woman’s vagina and then report on her motives. Was she a trollop, a harlot, or a pure-hearted innocent who spoke the truth?

In 1868, a British publication, Reynolds’s Newspaper, reported on one such exam. The surgeon “gave such evidence as left no doubt that the prosecutrix could not have been so innocent as she had represented herself to be.” The magistrate “said no jury would convict on such evidence, and he should discharge the prisoner.”

In other words, sexual-assault forensics began as a system for men to decide what they felt about the victim — whether she deserved to be considered a “victim” at all. It had little to do with identifying a perpetrator or establishing what had actually happened.

Even in the 1970s, the forensic examination remained a formality, a kind of kabuki theater of scientific justice. The police officers wielded absolute power in the situation; they told the story; they assigned blame. And they didn’t want to give up that power.

Ms. Goddard’s insight was that the only fix for this dysfunctional system would be incontrovertible scientific proof, the same kind used in a robbery or attempted murder. The victim’s story should be supported with evidence from the crime lab to build a case that would convince juries. To get that evidence, she needed a device that would encourage the hospital staff members, the detectives and the lab technicians to collaborate with the victim. On the most basic level, Ms. Goddard realized, she had to find a mechanism that would protect the evidence from a system that was designed to destroy it.

EVEN AFTER MONTHS of searching for Marty Goddard, I hadn’t been able to find her, or even figure out the names of her family members. But I did manage to track down Cynthia Gehrie, an activist who’d been swept up in Ms. Goddard’s crusade.

The two women met at a gathering for anti-rape activists in 1973 and soon they were strategizing over lunches and dinners, notebooks by their plates. At the time, Ms. Gehrie worked a day job at the A.C.L.U.; she was so impressed by Ms. Goddard that she volunteered to be her sidekick as they figured out how to force men in power to reckon with the rape epidemic.

Their timing was excellent, because 1974 was the year that everything flipped in Chicago. Women who had once been ashamed were now speaking out.

In October, a delegation of suburban women gathered before the members of the Illinois General Assembly. One described how she’d tried to fend off a sexual attacker with a fireplace poker. After the assault, she had carefully saved the bent poker and handed this piece of evidence to police detectives. Then, she recounted through tears, the police returned the poker to her straightened out. The idiots thought she had wanted them to fix it.

A mother stood before the committee and said that her little girl had been molested on her way to kindergarten. The police were already familiar with the attacker, a pedophile who had infected at least one child with venereal disease. And yet he was roaming free.

A nurse at the meeting explained how medical staff handled rape cases — and in the middle of her testimony, announced, “I am a rape victim myself.”

A few days later, about 70 women from a group called Chicago Legal Action for Women, CLAW for short, flooded into the office of State’s Attorney Bernard Carey, and plastered the walls with messages like “Wanted: Bernard Carey for Aiding and Abetting Rapists.”

The rape problem had suddenly become Mr. Carey’s problem, and he desperately needed to look as if he had an answer.

A movement was beginning — an awakening, like #MeToo. The fact that many of these activists were well-off white women forced politicians to pay attention. Black women in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods were most at risk of sexual violence, but their stories rarely made it into the newspapers, and rape was all too often portrayed as an affliction of the suburbs. Throughout her career, Ms. Goddard would wrestle with this disparity and try to overcome it. In 1982 she told an Illinois state legislative committee that “the lack of services on the South and West Sides of Chicago where a majority of our black victims reside” was “totally disgraceful.”

Now, though, in the early 1970s, she had just one obsession. She was determined to convince Bernard Carey that the problem could be solved, if he only had the will to do it. One day she showed up unannounced at his office and to her surprise, he welcomed her in. “I don’t know what the answer is,” he told her. But he had a new plan: He was going to let women like Ms. Goddard help figure out the rape problem for themselves. He appointed her and Ms. Gehrie to a citizens’ advisory panel on rape. Their mission: to investigate the failures in policing and suggest sweeping reforms.

Marty Goddard finally had what she wanted: permission to get inside the police departments.

With her new investigative powers, she headed to the Chicago crime lab building to ask police officers what was going wrong. Years later, she described what she had learned there in the oral history tapes. The cops blamed hospital workers, saying: “We don’t get hair. We don’t get fingernail scrapings.” The slides weren’t labeled, and they’d been “rubber-banded” together so that they contaminated one another. “So there goes that. It’s worthless,” the detectives told her.

The problem, she realized, was that no one had bothered to tell the nurses and doctors how to collect evidence properly.

What if hospitals could be stocked with easy-to-use forensic tools that would encourage medics, detectives and lab technicians to collaborate instead of pointing fingers? Gradually, these concepts solidified into an object: a kit stocked with swabs, vials and instructions.

Somewhere along the way, Ms. Goddard had befriended Rudy Nimocks, an African-American police officer who had handled incest cases and been horrified by what he’d seen. Ms. Goddard and Ms. Gehrie described Mr. Nimocks as a mentor. (He would be in his 90s now; I made multiple attempts to reach him without success.) According to several sources, Mr. Nimocks warned Ms. Goddard to proceed carefully. He told her that she should take care not to challenge the men in the crime lab directly. And he said that she’d need Sgt. Louis Vitullo, the head of the microscope unit, on her side.

Sergeant Vitullo was a scruffy cop-scientist, with a lab coat pulled hastily over his rumpled shirt and the pale, haunted look of a man who spent hours peering at murder weapons.

One day, Ms. Goddard found Sergeant Vitullo at his desk, introduced herself, and presented him with a written description of the rape-kit system. She must have been blindsided by what happened next.

“He screamed at her,” according to Ms. Gehrie. “He told her she had no business getting involved with this and that what she was talking about was crazy. She was wasting his time. He didn’t want to hear about this anymore.” Ms. Gerhie said Ms. Goddard called her minutes later to vent about being thrown out of Sergeant Vitullo’s office.

“Well, that didn’t go so well!” Ms. Goddard said wryly.

As far as Ms. Goddard knew at that moment, the rape-kit idea had just been killed off.

INVENTION, ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN — these are not just technical feats. They are political acts. The inventor offers us a magical new ability that can be wonderful or terrifying: to halt disease, to map the ocean floor, to replace a human worker with a machine, or to kill enemies more efficiently. And those magical abilities create winners and losers. The Harvard professor Sheila Jasanoff has observed that technology “rules us much as laws do.”

When it comes to sexual assault, there are many inventions I can think of that help men get away with it — from the date-rape drug to “stalkerware” software. More striking is how few inventions, how little technology and design, has been devoted to keeping women safe.

Think about our public spaces, and how much they reinforce the power of men. If you grew up as a girl, you were taught to map out potential sexual attacks when you walked through any city. A hidden doorway, an empty subway platform, a pedestrian bridge with high walls — such places pulse with threat.

In my high-school driving class, the instructor lectured us about the dangers that lurked in empty parking lots. “Ladies, you don’t want to be fumbling in your purse if someone jumps out of the bushes,” he said, and suggested that we hold the car keys in one hand as we hurried to the car. Even as a teenager, I remember thinking how crazy this sounded. If there were rapists lurking everywhere, couldn’t the grownups do something about that?

I learned that the streets did not belong to me. Nor did the stairwells or the empty laundry rooms at midnight. I still remember the sense of defeat my first week as a college student on a pastoral Connecticut campus in the 1980s. I’d been aching to explore its tantalizing forests and hidden ponds. But then the freshman girls were herded into a lecture hall, and the head of public safety told us that if we wanted to walk from one building to another at night, we should first call the escort service that squired females around and protected them from rape.

“No way!” I thought.

And yet, at that time I was struggling to understand — and forgive myself for — having been molested as a small child. And though I never did use the campus escort service, I also never felt that the campus was mine.

But this is not how it has to be. It’s entirely possible to create public spaces and tools for everyone. Our environment and technology can foster a sense of equality and pluralism.

At the same time that Marty Goddard was trying to reinvent forensic technology, the disabled community was radically transforming the design of cities by pushing to make streets and buildings wheelchair-accessible. A wheelchair ramp does more than just allow someone to roll into a building; it also sends out a message that the people in those wheelchairs are important and worthy of dignity. This is the power of invention.

You can see why the idea of a rape kit might have been offensive to Sergeant Vitullo and other police officers. Like many of the great technological ideas, this one blasted through the assumptions of the day: that nurses were too stupid to collect forensic evidence; that women who “cried rape” were usually lying; and that evidence didn’t really matter when it came to rape, because rape was impossible to prove.

Now here was this proposal for a cardboard box packed with tools that would allow anyone to perform police work.

Despite his original reaction, Sergeant Vitullo mulled over Ms. Goddard’s idea. He must have found it intriguing. He studied the plans she’d shown him. And he began to see the sense in it all.

One day, Ms. Gehrie told me, Sergeant Vitullo called up Ms. Goddard and said, “I’ve got something to show you.” When Ms. Goddard arrived in his office, Ms. Gehrie recalled, “he handed her a full model of the kit with all the items enclosed.” Sergeant Vitullo had assembled a prototype for the rape kit and added a few flourishes of his own. And now, apparently, he regarded himself as its inventor.

Another friend of Ms. Goddard’s confirmed this story. Mary Sladek Dreiser, who met Ms. Goddard in 1980, told me that Ms. Goddard always praised Sergeant Vitullo in public. But in private, she described him as a petty tyrant who would “only go along with the kit if it were named after him.”

The rape-kit idea was presented to the public as a collaboration between the state attorney’s office and the police department, with men running both sides...

..and little credit given to the women who had pushed for reform. Ms. Goddard agreed to this, Ms. Gehrie said, because she saw that it was the only way to make the rape kit happen

In the mid-1970s, while still at the Wieboldt Foundation, Ms. Goddard began working nights and weekends to found a nonprofit group called the Citizens Committee for Victim Assistance. The group filed a trademark for the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit in 1978, ensuring that her creation would be branded with a man’s name. For years afterward, the newspapers called the rape kit the “Vitullo kit.” When he died in 2006, an obituary headline celebrated him as the “Man Who Invented the Rape Kit.” His wife, Betty, quoted in the obituary, said that her husband was “proud” of the rape kit “but he didn’t get any royalties for it.” The obituary hailed Mr. Vitullo as a pioneer in a new form of evidence collection that transformed the criminal-justice system. There was no mention of Ms. Goddard.

Even if her name wasn’t on it, Ms. Goddard finally had permission to start a citywide rape-kit system. What she didn’t have was any money to create the kits, distribute them, or train nurses to use them. She had to raise all those funds through her nonprofit group, which represented survivors of sex crimes.

This seems strange. After all, state governments covered the cost of running homicide evidence through the crime lab, so why should sexual assault be any different?

And yet it was. And it still is.

Money problems have always haunted the rape-kit system. Testing a rape kit is expensive; today it costs $1,000 to $1,500. Except in the highest-profile cases, police departments have often pleaded underfunding, and let the kits pile up. That’s why victims themselves have had to bankroll crime labs. In the past decade, groups like the Joyful Heart Foundation have helped raise millions of dollars to test rape kits. The money sometimes comes from bake sales, Etsy crafts and feminist comedy nights.

Fundraising was even harder in the 1970s, however, when most foundations wouldn’t give money to a project with “rape” or “sex” in its title. And so Ms. Goddard had to resort to finding money wherever she could. This is where Hugh Hefner enters the story.

Chicago was built on soft-core porn, and Mr. Hefner was one of the city’s most prominent moguls. Men in suits sidled into his clubhouses for three-martini lunches, celebrities swanned into his mansion for glittering fund-raisers, and a blazing “Playboy” sign scalded the downtown skyline.

Mr. Hefner regarded the women’s liberation movement as a sister cause to his own effort to free men from shame and guilt. And so his philanthropic Playboy Foundation showered money on feminist causes. In the early 1970s, for example, the Playboy fortune provided the seed money for the A.C.L.U. Women’s Rights Project, which was co-founded by a little-known lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In the mid-1970s, Ms. Goddard applied to Playboy for a $10,000 grant (the equivalent of about $50,000 today) to start a rape-kit system. And she got it.

Her collaboration with the Playboy Foundation turned out to be a surprisingly ideal one, in large part because Ms. Goddard had a friend on the inside: Margaret Pokorny (then known as Margaret Standish). Ms. Pokorny brainstormed all kinds of ways to support the project that went beyond the big check. For instance, she recruited Playboy’s graphics designers to create the packaging for the kit. And when Ms. Goddard needed volunteers to assemble the kits, Ms. Pokorny came up with a creative solution: old ladies.

“I’ve got this great idea, Marty,” Ms. Goddard recalled Ms. Pokorny saying. “Everybody just loves the Playboy bunny and these older women, they want something to do.” So one day a horde of them showed up in the Playboy offices, swilling free coffee as they assembled sexual-assault evidence kits.

In 1978, Marty Goddard delivered the first standardized rape kit to around 25 hospitals in the Chicago area for use in a pilot program she had designed — “the first program of its type in the nation,” according to a newspaper article.

The kits cost $2.50 each and contained test tubes, slides and packaging materials to protect the specimens from mixing; a comb for collecting hair and fiber; sterile nail clippers; and a bag for the victim’s clothing. There was a card for the victim, giving her information about where to seek counseling and further medical services.

The New York Times, which described the initiative as a collaboration between Mr. Vitullo and Ms. Goddard, said that the “innocuous looking” box “could be a powerful new weapon in the conviction of rapists.” The Times noted that one of the most important features of the system was deceptively low-tech: “Forms for the doctor and the police officers involved are included, as are sealing tape and a pencil for writing on the slides. Anyone who handles the box must put his or her signature on printed spaces on the kit’s cover.” There would be a paper trail that showed how the evidence had traveled from the victim’s body to the crime lab.

By the end of 1979, nearly 3,000 kits had been turned over to crime labs. One of them had been submitted by a bus driver who’d been abducted and raped by 28-year-old William Johnson. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison, and the Vitullo Evidence Kit was credited with winning the day in court.

By now, Ms. Goddard’s friend Rudy Nimocks had been promoted to head the sex homicide department. He told The Chicago Tribune that the new system had improved evidence collection. But perhaps more important, the kit worked magic in the courtroom. “In addition to the kits being very practical,” he said, “we find that it impresses the jurors when you have a uniform set of criteria in the collection of evidence.”

In other words, the rape kit, with its official blue-and-white packaging and its stamps and seals, functioned as a theatrical prop as well as a scientific tool. The woman in the witness box, weeping as she recounted how her husband tried to kill her, could sound to a judge and jury like a greedy little opportunist. But then a crime-lab technician would take the stand and show them the ripped dress, the semen stains, the blood. When a scientist in a lab coat affirmed the story, it seemed true.

Ms. Goddard had invented not just the kit, but a new way of thinking about prosecuting rape. Now, when a victim testified, she no longer did so alone. Doctors, nurses and forensic scientists backed up her version of the events — and the kit itself became a character in the trials. It, too, became a witness.

That’s another reason Ms. Goddard may have been willing to trademark her idea under Sergeant Vitullo’s name. It was as if in order to invent, she also had to disappear. The rape kit simply never would have had traction if a woman with no scientific credentials had been known as its sole inventor. It had to come from a man.

The word “technology” is part of the problem. It’s a synonym for “stuff that men do.” As the historian Autumn Stanley pointed out, a revised history of technology taking into account women’s contributions would include all sorts of “unimportant” inventions like baby cribs, menstrual pads and food preservation techniques. Sometimes the only way that women could navigate this world was to let a white man in a lab coat become the face of their radical ideas, while they themselves shrank into the background.

During World War II, for instance, a team of six “girls” figured out how to operate the world’s first all-purpose electronic digital computer, called the ENIAC. In 1946, one of them, Betty Holberton, stayed up half the night to ensure that the computer would ace its debut in front of the newspaper cameras. And yet she and the others were treated like switchboard operators, mere helpers to the male engineers. Ms. Holberton went on to invent and design many of the essential tools of computing during the 1950s and ’60s almost invisibly, while her male colleagues were celebrated as geniuses of the age.

Ms. Goddard, certainly, had mastered the art of vanishing. Her friends and collaborators from the 1970s had lost touch with her, and were just as flummoxed by her disappearance as I was. But they remembered her in vivid, disconnected flashes. I often felt that I was spying on her through keyholes into other people’s minds.

“She made miniature rooms,” Margaret Pokorny said, describing how Ms. Goddard spent hours with tweezers and tiny brushes constructing fairy-tale interiors inside of boxes. The rooms were scattered all around Ms. Goddard’s apartment, as if a dollhouse had been dissected.

From Cynthia Gehrie, I learned why Ms. Goddard might have been so driven to escape into Lilliputian fantasies. Ms. Gehrie told me that in the late 1970s, her friend had flown to a resort in Hawaii for a vacation and returned to Chicago a different, and broken, person. “I was raped,” Ms. Goddard had told Ms. Gehrie, pouring out a harrowing account of how a man had abducted her.

“He drove her to a remote location,” Ms. Gehrie said. “He taunted her with the knife. She told him she would do whatever he wanted. Finally, he drove her back to the resort. She was astonished when he let her go.” Ms. Gehrie can’t remember whether Ms. Goddard reported the rape to the police, but she’s always wondered if her friend’s prominence as a victims-rights advocate had made her a target. The attacker had won her trust, Ms. Goddard said, by pretending to be a supporter of her cause.

In one obscure interview I found, Ms. Goddard herself mentioned that rape and the scars it left on her body. And, she said, the attacker had infected her with herpes.

I was heartbroken for her, and more determined to find her than ever. By now she had become “Marty” to me — I could think of her only as a friend. I surmised, from the string of addresses she’d left behind, that she had been spiraling into poverty. She would have been 79. Was anyone caring for her? I felt less and less like a journalist chasing down a story. What I really wanted was to save Marty Goddard before it was too late.

Through the 1980s, Ms. Goddard kept fighting for the rape-kit system despite her growing exhaustion. It was “one incident by one incident by one incident,” she said later. “Imagine how many years it took us to go from state’s attorney to state’s attorney to cop to detective to deputy to doctor to pediatrician to nurse to nurse practitioner” and train each person who interacted with the victim and the rape kit. “I felt I had to save the world, and I was going to start with Chicago and move to Cook County and move to the rest of the state. And there was something in the back of my mind that said, ‘Gee, maybe the circumstances will be such that at some time I can go beyond the borders of Illinois.’”

She was right. In 1982, New York City adopted Ms. Goddard’s system because “its effectiveness was demonstrated in Chicago,” according to The New York Times. Within a few years, the city had amassed thousands of sealed kits containing evidence, and the system was putting rapists in prison.

Ms. Goddard had envisioned a kind of internet of forensics at a time when the internet itself was in its infancy. The idea was to standardize practices in crime labs everywhere and encourage police departments to share data to catch perpetrators who might cross county and state lines. And she had personal reasons for grinding away at the problem, for making it her obsessive mission. The man who had brutalized her in Hawaii still walked free. She knew this because she’d seen him, she told a friend at the time.

She had been walking to the attorney general’s office in downtown Chicago when her attacker materialized out of the crowd and locked eyes with her. It must have been a waking nightmare. Had he been stalking her? Had it been a chance encounter?

I don’t know. She was under an extraordinary amount of stress; maybe she was mistaken. I am working from fragments — from bits and pieces of her friends’ memories. What I do know is that Ms. Goddard began to drink; that she depended now on cheap sherry to dull the pain. She was dragging herself from city to city, evangelizing for the rape kit, sleeping in dive motels, giving everything she had until there was nothing left.

In 1984, the F.B.I. held a conference at its training center in Quantico, Va. Expert criminologists flew in to discuss a new system that would detect the serial killers and rapists operating across state lines. But to the dismay of Ms. Goddard, who attended the conference, the country’s top lawmen demonstrated little empathy for victims.

“So, this one man gets up,” a professor known as an expert in sex crimes, Ms. Goddard remembered later. The professor flashed slides on the screen, a twisted parade of naked female corpses. He made little effort to protect the identities of the dead women. Ms. Goddard was horrified at the way he “couldn’t wait to show the bite marks on the breasts” of one victim, as if to share his titillation with the audience.

That kind of attitude might have gone unremarked at a police convention, but there were lawyers, victims’ advocates and nurses at this conference and they “didn’t appreciate it.” Just as dismaying, this so-called expert described “interrogating” women who’d been raped, as if they were the criminals.

“I went nuts,” Ms. Goddard said. She gripped the arms of her chair, “saying to myself: ‘Calm down. Don’t say anything.’”

AFTER THE PRESENTATION, Ms. Goddard approached one of the organizers and said, “Something’s wrong here, and I really object.” Working on the fly, Ms. Goddard gave a presentation about her pilot project in Chicago, explaining how the rape-kit system worked. Afterward, “two guys from the Department of Justice” approached her and asked her to replicate her program all around the country. She was finally given enough funding to travel to more than a dozen different states and help start up pilot programs.

“I don’t know how my cat survived,” she said of those years. “I was gone all the time.”

She was tired out. And “so many people were downright insulting.” They’d ask her why she was an authority on forensics: “Are you a cop? An attorney?” Ms. Goddard was drinking heavily. She began to step away from her prominent role in criminal justice. She moved to Texas, and then Arizona. And finally she faded from public view so thoroughly that I believe she must have decided to disappear.

Her friend and former colleague Mary Dreiser kept in touch. But one day in about 2006 or 2007, Ms. Dreiser was distressed to dial Ms. Goddard’s number and discover it had been disconnected. Ms. Dreiser’s husband, a lawyer, asked a detective to find Ms. Goddard. She turned up in a mobile-home park in Arizona. “She was happy I had tracked her down,” Ms. Dreiser said.

By the time I started searching for Ms. Goddard a decade later, she had moved out of that trailer and her most recent listing suggested she lived in a dumpy apartment building alongside a Phoenix highway. That phone, too, had been disconnected, so I’d assumed that she had moved on once again, perhaps to a nursing home. But just in case, I called up the building’s management office and asked if the people there could tell me anything about Marty Goddard.

“Unfortunately, I can’t,” said the woman who answered the phone. There were rules about protecting the privacy of residents.

But rules are meant to be broken. So I called back. “Listen,” I said, “just hear me out.”

I then plied the woman in the management office with a brief — and, I hoped, heart-melting — tribute to Ms. Goddard’s genius and her sacrifices.

It worked. “OK,” she said, “let me check into it.” Hours later, she called me back. Marty Goddard had indeed lived in their apartment building, she said, then paused.

“And I’m very sorry to tell you that she passed away.”

The news walloped me. Ms. Goddard had died in 2015, at the age of 74, but there had been no obituary. No announcement. I’d searched for pictures of headstones, remembrances, funeral announcements, and I’d found nothing. This woman who had done so much for the rest of us. How could this be?

Paradoxically, at the same time as Ms. Goddard was fading from sight, her name no longer in the papers, the advent of DNA forensics was giving the rape kit a new kind of superpower.

In 1988, a court ordered Victor Lopez, a 42-year-old repeat felon accused of violent attacks, to submit to a blood draw. He would be the first defendant in New York State to be linked to a crime through DNA analysis — and the case would prove the dazzling effectiveness of this new tool. The DNA test showed a strong match between Mr. Lopez’s blood and the semen collected from one of his victims. Mr. Lopez was convicted of three sexual assaults and sentenced to 100 years in prison. One juror, John Bischoff, told The New York Times that “the DNA was kind of a sealer on the thing. You can’t really argue with science.”

When Ms. Goddard began her work, crime labs could establish only a fuzzy connection between a suspect’s blood and the swabs inside the kit — for instance, by showing that the blood type was a match. But now, DNA markers could reveal the path of a perpetrator as he left his semen or blood at multiple crime scenes.

Starting in 2003, several women across the country accused a man named Nathan Loebe of sexual assault, but those accusations had never stuck.

After the Tucson police received a grant to test a backlog of rape kits, they discovered that DNA from several of the kits matched Mr. Loebe. Rape-kit evidence revealed the pattern of his attacks, and last year he was sentenced to 274 years in prison, including for 12 counts of sexual assault.

But DNA testing was expensive. Compounding that problem was the sheer success of the rape kit system: Victims now felt encouraged to report their assaults and submit to exams, which meant that police departments were flooded with evidence.

And so, just as the rape-kit system began to succeed, police departments strangled it. They began hiding away thousands of untested rape kits deemed too expensive to process.

New York was among the first cities to set up a rape-kit system, and almost immediately it fell behind in processing. It amassed a huge backlog — 16,000 untested kits by the year 2000. The women (and some men) who submitted to rubber-gloved exams did so because they hoped against hope that the police might actually catch a perpetrator. Little did they know that their evidence could be thrown in a warehouse — or even in a trash can.

In 2000, Paul Ferrara, the director of Virginia’s crime lab, said that backlogs were growing all around the country and “cost lives.” The year before, the Virginia Beach police had had to release a rape suspect because potentially incriminating DNA couldn’t be processed quickly enough, and the suspect went on to murder a woman.

It is striking how much Ms. Goddard’s trajectory mirrored that of her invention. In the early 1990s, just when she might have risen to national prominence, she drifted south. She retired, though she was only in her early 50s, and eked out a living with some help from friends. By the 2000s, she had sobered up and spent her days clipping newspapers, tracking the issues that she most cared about. And then — this part hurts my heart — she pursued a degree in forensics at a local community college.

Ms. Goddard had founded sexual-assault forensics, and yet she now lacked any of the bona fides required to be recognized as an expert. Nothing came of her studies, and she never really worked again. Ms. Goddard herself had been warehoused.

I know all of this because just a few months ago, I finally cracked the case of why and how she disappeared, thanks to some clues I found in the announcement of her brief 1966 marriage in a Michigan newspaper. Working through a chain of obituaries and phone records and small newspaper items, I tracked down a number for Scott Goddard, who I thought must be Marty Goddard’s nephew.

One day I cold-called him and left a message. It turned out that he was the right Scott Goddard. His father had died in a freak accident in 1980, and after that, his aunt became like a second mother to him. “When I was 9 or 10 years old, she took me to the Grand Canyon. And I remained close with her for her entire life,” Mr. Goddard said.

He told me that his aunt — who’d always been so busy, so engaged — had turned into a hermit in the 2000s. She withdrew into her trailer in the mobile-home park, with her newspaper clippings fluttering everywhere, surrounded by the miniature model rooms she still loved to build. She was vanishing, shrinking down to nothing.

“When she passed, I inherited about 50 boxes of stuff,” he said, including a tiny toy chest filled with dolls for the doll children to play with.

He told me that when he was a boy, his aunt had taken him through the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago — a place she visited many times. Here they had lost themselves in those perfect shadow boxes, peering into, say, a Georgian dining room with crystal wine glasses, like fragments of diamonds, arranged on a silver tray. Beyond the chandelier and the French windows, a painted garden beckoned, with a lily pond and trees wilting in the summer heat, and paths you could follow into even stranger dreamscapes. You could imagine opening up one of the postage-stamp-sized books to hear the crack of its gold-leaf spine and read the secrets contained in its mouse-print text.

I can’t tell you what drove Marty Goddard into her dioramas. People around her tended to believe she wanted to escape into her imagination. But I think maybe she was exploring the dark magic of ordinary things, the way the most forgettable object can be converted into evidence. Some underwear, a pack of cigarettes, the note scrawled on the scrap of paper — how strange it is that any of these furnishings of your life could one day be used to reconstruct your own assault or murder. I wonder if she was building tiny crime scenes peppered with clues, if somehow she was leaving a message about what had happened to her.

Mr. Goddard told me that about 2010, “depression started to set in,” and his aunt became a furious alcoholic. Her once steel-trap mind wandered. Worse, she raged and accused, believed friends plotted to kill her. “In the last few years, she alienated most of her family and friends,” he said.

THE RAPE KIT WASN’T DOING SO WELL EITHER. In 2009, investigators toured an abandoned parking garage that the Detroit police had appropriated for storage and where officers had been dumping evidence for decades. In the dank building, with pigeons fluttering over their head, the investigators wandered past a blood-stained sofa and a bucket full of bullets and shells. In one of the parking bays, they found the rape kits — what would turn out to be a trove of 11,000, most of which had never been tested. Some of the kits had been collected as far back as 1980. The victims ranged in age from 90 to one month old.

It wasn’t just Detroit. Investigators in cities around the country had begun to open up their own warehouses, and they too discovered towers of untested rape kits.

By 2015, the backlog of untested rape kits in the United States had grown to an estimated 400,000.

In 2016, the Justice Department announced a new sexual assault kit initiative and $45 million to tackle the backlog. More than 25 states have committed to testing warehoused evidence. Despite the government funding, the cost of these initiatives still largely fell on women’s groups and the victims themselves, who organized dinner parties, Facebook charity drives and comedy shows.

So far, the efforts have paid off. Five states and the District of Columbia have cleared their backlogs. Testing thousands of kits has led to a bonanza of DNA identifications and hundreds of convictions. Scientists are also using rape-kit data to show that there are more serial rapists than we ever suspected. In one study of rape kits in the Cleveland area, researchers found that more than half of them were connected to other cases.

In other words, when a victim decides to go to all the trouble of driving to an emergency room and submitting to a rape-kit exam, it’s because she believes that her attacker will rape someone else. And quite often, she’s right.

When Ms. Goddard died, she asked that her ashes be thrown to the winds in Sedona, Ariz., along the red cliffs. Old friends like Cynthia Gehrie and Margaret Pokorny didn’t even know she was gone. She left behind those boxes of tiny furniture. And, also, a nationwide forensics system that might never have existed but for her.

Writing this, I dreamed of one day seeing one of the original kits displayed in the Smithsonian, among the parade of great American inventions. Mary Dreiser told me she might have saved one of the kits distributed in 1980. I asked her to hunt for it, and there it was, in the back of a closet, yellowed after decades in storage. The kit was emblazoned with the logo of a female face, as if to declare that this — among all the man-made objects in the world — had been created by and for women.

Today, a new generation of inventors are figuring out how to speed up the testing of rape-kit DNA, to improve the design of the kits, and to draw new insights from sexual-assault analytics. This story of feminist technology is still unfolding. Half a century after Marty Goddard answered the calls of teenage rape victims, survivors and their advocates are assembling a vast net of evidence, and it is tightening, ever so slowly, around the perpetrators.

#history #rape kits #goddard

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midearthwritings · 3 years

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Could I please get an Lotr and The Hobbit Matchup, of you're still doing them? Thanks so much!

🌱 18 year old Woman // Bisexual // Autistic and Disabled with a bonus Anxiety Disorder

🌱 I have a litany of Chronic Illnesses including Autism, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Depression, Dyscalculia (Dyslexia for Math), Scoliosis, Sleep Apnea, Asthma, a Growth Hormone Deficiency, Insomnia, and a very bad Overbite. I also have a condition where my right leg is physically longer than my left, which causes pain in my hip and right leg, as well as trouble walking. My usual symptoms include Fatigue, Back Pain, Executive Dysfunction (struggle to get tasks done), Difficulty breathing and talking, Very short stature, and difficulties with my balance. I also stim by pacing around in circles and talking to myself.

🌱 I have a serious fear of heights, partially because of my balance issues. It's so bad that I can't even use stairs without holding onto the railing.

🌱 I know a lot of Home Remedies and Superstitions for like no reason. For instance, did you know that Raspberry Tea helps with Menstrual Pain, or that knocking on wood invokes the protection of the tree spirit and that’s why it’s said to give you luck? I don’t know why I know that, but I do.

🌱 Winning a fight is on my bucket list, but it has to be for a good reason. I’m not one to just pick fights for the sake of fighting, and I’m actually pretty conflict-averse due to trauma, so I need to actually have a solid reason for throwing hands. But I’ve always wanted to do it for some reason.

🌱 I really like studying Witchcraft for some reason. The first spell I ever performed was a Healing Spell to help my friend who was sick with Crohn's Disease. Thirty minutes after performing the ritual, I got a text saying he felt a lot better and he was released from the hospital a couple days later, so I guess it must’ve worked. 😁

🌱 My love language is definitely gift giving. I’m pretty cheap, but I’m also an artist, so when push comes to shove I’ll just make something for someone when I like them. I pay very close attention to what people like because it gives me more ideas on how to interact with them. I’m essentially a large, flightless Crow. You were nice, so you get something shiny. But though I like giving gifts to others, I’m not very materialistic at all. I prefer to be practical when it comes to things, and I get very nervous when spending money on myself.

🌱 I’m an avid writer and am actually planning on publishing a book this summer!

🌱 I LOVE going outside and getting messy. Playing in the mud, getting soaked in the rain, I’m the type to go outside and come back home covered in dirt and twigs. It’s just really fun to me.

🌱 I've been told that I'm a very good cook, and I can bake pretty well too.

🌱 I’ve always wanted to be a really good gardener. My dream house is just covered in flowers and plants and such. I want to live in a Greenhouse, basically.

🌱 I have a habit of giggling to myself just by remembering something funny that happened, even if it was a couple years ago. I also laugh when I do something stupid, because I find my flaws and shortcomings funny for the most part. I love to laugh with people, but never at them.

🌱 I know way too much about Spirits and Fae. My favorite book is called ‘The Encyclopedia of Spirits’ and it shows you how to contact and interact with a ton of different deities and spirits, and I’m addicted to reading it. It’s the best.

🌱 I’m basically like a tiny, less-impressive Aragorn. I love travelling on foot, getting messy outside, I was kind of a Horse Girl as a kid ngl, I’ve always wanted to be a knight or king of some sort, chances are that I haven’t bathed in awhile, and I too would pine for a hot elf girl for literal years on end.

🌱 My closest friends say I give off “Dwobbit” vibes. That’s a ½ Dwarf and ½ Hobbit btw. I’m around 4’ 10” tall, I don’t shave, I love crafting and art, I live in the Mountains, I’m tomboyish but I also love gardening and can be a bit of a homebody, I love going barefoot, etc.

🌱 I really love History, Folklore, Mythology and Fairy Tales. My favorite is the Irish myth of Oisín in Tir Na Nog. Look it up if you don’t know it, it’s a fantastic story. But I also appreciate myths from all sorts of different cultures, like the myth of Annapurna in India or the tale of Princess Kaguya in Japan.

🌱 I’m an Aquarius, INFP and 4w5 if that means anything. For reference, characters who are also 4w5 INFPs include Lydia Deetz (Beetlejuice), Wirt (Otgw), Frankenstein’s Monster, Luna Lovegood (HP), Napstablook (Undertale), Erik The Phantom of the Opera, and Celeste from Animal Crossing. That kinda tells you a lot about me, doesn’t it?

🌱 I am naturally very shy and take awhile to open up to people. I also get flustered very easily and tend to avoid social interaction a lot. I’m a huge introvert, but I also really do love meeting interesting people, so I try to talk to them when I have the energy to.

🌱 I have very long Disheveled brown hair, that actually used to be blonde when I was little, so there’s a few lighter patches in there. It's essentially a fluffy mane at this point, but because of my poor hand-eye coordination I never learned how to braid it. I have really pale skin, with lots of moles, freckles and scabs. It’s also warmer out, so I almost certainly have a farmer’s tan. I have very light blue eyes and glasses.

🌱 I have a habit of seeing shadows move out of the corners of my eyes, frequently mistaking them for people or animals, but when I turn to look there’s nothing there. I’ve gotten my eyesight checked multiple times, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary, so it’s either a lack of sleep, or the Fae are getting antsy with me. Probably the former of course, but part of me would like to believe the latter too.

Sorry the description is so long, I can't wait to see my results! Thanks so much, wishing you the best!!

Hey darling! First, wow that was really long! Sorry for taking so long to make it, as I mentioned before, I'm a fucking procrastinator.

Aragorn

For LOTR, I'm pairing you up with Aragorn.

Aragorn had probably loved you for a really really long time.

But he's extremely patient and careful with you, so it took him a while to confess his love.

When he did, it was kind of overwhelming for you, and you were really doubting the whole thing. But again, he was really patient with you.

Aragorn doesn't cover you in gifts to show his love. He shows it by remembering all those little things that make you you.

The two of you can spend hours telling stories and tales to the other. It's your favorite thing to do together.

He loves that you write and always ask to read your work. Although, he never pushes you and respects you when you refuse.

He knows about every single one of your illnesses and makes sure that you always have what you need.

Bilbo Baggins

For the Hobbit, I picked Bilbo.

Bilbo loves you deeply and truly. He thinks all the things that are annoying to others are what make you the most unique being he has ever met.

He thinks listening to you tell tales is more fascinating than reading.

Most of all, he loves when you read to him the stories that you have created.

Sometimes, your illnesses are a bit complicated for him to understand, but he does his best and listens to your needs.

His favorite thing to do with you is cooking. Sometimes, you will even compete over who is the best cook. Although he admitted more than once that you were.

When you are out gardening, he sits outside with you and watches you. He thinks it's beautiful how hard you work to make his garden look so gorgeous.

He is often insecure about losing you. He is scared that he won't be able to provide you with what you need, or won't be able to show you how much he loves you.

As for you, you fear that one day he might grow tired of you.

But the communication in your relationship is great and your insecurities are even washed away by promises of eternal love.

Again, sorry for the wait! I hope you liked it!

#max matchmaker #aragorn #bilbo baggins

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technoskittles · 5 years

Text

Catradora fic rec list

I mentioned making one of these awhile ago and I’m finally sitting down and compiling some of my all-time favorite fics. I’ve read a lot (like, a LOT), but I feel like a few of those really deserve an extra shout out.

I’ll separate them between multi-chap and one shots, but other than that they won’t be in any particular order. I’ll also try my best to tag the authors here on tumblr if I can find them, but if not, just lemme know if you see your fic and I can edit this later.

I’ll also be including ratings/word count/trigger warnings/etc

(I’ll mostly be including common tw’s so please make sure you also read the tags for anything that may affect you personally! Also, if I miss any, please keep in mind that it’s been awhile since I’ve read some of these so I may not remember all of them!)

Key:

[E] - Explicit

[M] - Mature

[T] - Teen & Up Audiences

[G] - General Audiences

And for the multi-chap fics:

(O) - Ongoing

(F) - Finished

(?) - Not finished and they haven’t updated in awhile so the author probably died

So let’s get started! (Get ready for a long post obviously)

Multi-chap fics:

1. upper west side by ceruleanstorm (F) [T] ~190,000 words

TW: past child abuse, alcohol abuse

@princessofgayskull

I feel like this is definitely one of the top must-reads for all Catradora fanfics. I know I’ve seen this on a couple different lists but I’m including it on mine as well because it really is just that good.

The chapters are lengthy (but in a good way!) and the story really takes its time to flesh itself out. The character development of the characters as individuals is beautifully done and wonderfully realistic. The pacing of the development of Catra and Adora’s relationship is also sweetly slow, a steady slowburn that invokes that deep-rooted yearning feeling mirrored by the characters themselves.

It’s a really clever premise that takes place in the modern world but implements the canon universe in the form of the book that Adora’s writing that ties back to her and Catra’s shared childhood. The way that aspects of the show were revamped into this fic are so creative and I just....ugh. LOVE.

This fic also has a oneshot compilation that takes place after the events of the final chapter which is currently ongoing and I HIGHLY suggest checking that out as well once you’ve finished this.

The sister fic for those interested: she’s god (and I found her) (O) [T] ~40,000 words

2. The Devil Is In (The Details) by SeasInkarnadine (O) [M] ~58,000 words

TW: Graphic Depictions of Violence, child abuse, emotional abuse, use of recreational drugs, Major Character Death

@seasinkarnadine

This is a really great fic where Adora is an undercover cop who sidles her way into one of the largest gang syndicates to bust whoever killed Hordak, a big gang leader and drug trafficker, whose death was originally ruled as an accidental overdose. Her and Catra (one of the gang members) both know foul play was involved and work together to figure out the truth.

The dynamics between these two is so casual and hilarious but still has those gut-wrenching moments that really ground you and realize that their relationship is dysfunctional on a few levels. The exploration of Adora’s conflicting feelings towards Catra hurt in such a good way as she realizes that she does genuinely care for Catra, but also is aware that what she’s doing will eventually screw her over and land her in jail. It’s the best kind of underlying angst and I highly recommend it.

Another really great selling point that I particularly love is that Adora is deaf in this AU and the author really shows this in such a realistic and natural way that shows she really knows what she’s talking about. It makes the dynamic between the two even more interesting considering that Catra also knows sign language which give the two a lot of moments of mutual understanding that doesn’t extend to the other characters. It’s something that the two of them have that’s sort of just for them to be on that level of understanding and it’s so great.

Also, Morgan is just a great writer in general and I highly suggest checking out more of her stuff (her art too!). She’s one of the writers I’ve looked up to since my beginning days in the fandom and it’s still amazing seeing all the great stuff she puts out.

3. Skinny Love by Maychup (O) [M] ~100,000 words

TW: past child abuse

@maychup

Another staple of big fics in the catradora fandom but for good reason. This fic is a wonderful exploration of events taking place after S1 illustrating Catra & Adora’s relationship in a different path that the rest of the show takes. It focuses heavily on their past experiences with each other and how that affects their current situation being on opposite sides of the war.

This fic is older, published just after S1, so canon divergence is an important aspect of its build. But the way the story is written is so beautiful and grounded that it’s still interesting even now knowing what really happens in the show.

Their dynamic is kind of back-and-forth, with Catra figuring out what Adora means to her and vice versa and where the two of them want to go from that point. It has so many sweet moments and steamy ones as well (btw, there’s a lot of smut) and the exploration into each of the character’s pysches is so compelling and intriguing.

4. Faded With Feelings by yesimgay (F) [T] ~24,000 words

TW: recreational drug use

This was such a cute, short multi-chap fic. It’s a bit older but I think it’s still one of my top faves.

A modern au, Catra & Adora are roommates post-college and trying to make their way in the adulting world. Catra has ADHD and smokes weed to help with that. One day Adora accidentally eats a couple of her edibles and cute shenanigans ensue. And that’s just the first two chapters.

The rest of the fic goes on to the girls figuring out their feelings for each other, especially Adora who, in this case, isn’t really sure of her sexuality. All-in-all, a really cute fic that’s a nice break from all the angst that typically saturates the fandom.

5. Chasing the Spotlight by holymountain (?) [T] ~20,000 words

This is an AU where Adora is hired to be Catra’s, a pop singer, bodyguard. There’s so many cute moments in this, though admittedly it’s been about 6 months since it’s last updated so be sure to keep that in mind.

6. we’ve been making shades of purple out of red and blue by darklady21 (?) [t] ~24,000 words

An “and they were ROOMMATES” au. In this one though, Catra and Adora don’t actually know each other and really only get to know each other over time. It’s cute and has a lot of interesting interactions between the two, but it hasn’t updated in about 7 months.

7. Tuning Out by FaiaHae (?) [T] ~2500 words

I actually really loved the whole concept of this fic but it hasn’t updated in like, an entire year so...only read if you’re okay with the fact that it probably won’t ever be finished haha

8. burnt sugar by jeserai (O) [G] ~11,000 words

@jeserai

Oh god YES this fic. The classic “fake dating” au except Catra is a rich kid inheriting a business who essentially hires Adora, a broke college student, to go on a date with her to this big business function. There’s not a lot to say about it other than that without giving too much away, but the fic is about halfway done at this point so it’s a pretty short read as of now.

Just be warned, it’s currently on a MASSIVE cliffhanger so if you wanna wait until it updates I totally understand lol

9. still waters by summerson (O) [M] ~28,000 words

TW: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, self harm

A “The Last of Us” AU. Personally, I’m not super familiar with TLOU because I could never get into the game myself, but this fic is so well done and the writing style is so interesting and well-executed that I still love this fic to bits. But obviously, for those of you who are aware of TLOU, you already know that this fic is going to contain quite the fair share of angst so be ready.

10. Whispering Dreams by dragonesdepapel (F) [T] ~7500 words

It’s been awhile since I’ve read this one so I don’t remember everything, but I do remember really enjoying the writing style and the construction of this fic. It’s a short read, but it’s totally worth it

11. please could you be tender by erce3 (F) [G] ~40,000 words

@figbian

please please PLEASE go read this fic. I’m actually begging y’all to go read this one I loved it so much it’s still one of my top 10 faves out there.

This fic is set in a modern setting where Adora & Catra were childhood friends and are in college and god it’s just SO. GOOD. The writing style and composition of the flashbacks with the present events is so beautifully done and organized and I really cannot hype this fic up enough GO READ IT

12. buried a hatchet (it’s coming up lavendar) by erce3 (O) [G] ~12,000 words

on the note of that last rec, I highly rec their other work which is currently in progress. It takes place after S3 but it’s an exploration on if Catra and Adora got trapped in the portal instead of Angella and FUCK this person is genuinely amazing go read their stuff

13. Senior Year by SimplyAbsolute (O) [E] ~98,000 words

@simplyabsolute

This is a really cute fic about Adora and Catra in their final year of college and I guess for me personally it really just hits hard because I’m also in my final year of college lol. But really, it’s a great fic and I suggest checking it out. It’s actually only got one more chapter left too so it’s almost done!

14. Assassinating Adora by Wicked42 (F) [T] ~13,000 words

@wicked-42

TW: Graphic Depictions of Violence

Jeez this fic was a real rollercoaster of emotions. I loved every bit of it.

Basically, some people try to assassinate Adora and Catra stops one of them, but both girls are still inflicted by the poison and....it just gets crazier from there. Don’t wanna spoil it too much but this is a must-read for sure.

And this one may seem like cheating but I’m gonna plug one of my own multi-chap fics here

15. Pure Feeling (O) [T] ~30,000 words

TW: brief mention of sexual assault in Ch 5

This is a modern AU set after all the kids have been out of college for a few years.

Adora and Catra were childhood friends but ended up drifting apart and falling out during their college years. Fast forward about 6 years and they run into each other again, except now Adora has a daughter and is struggling to balance her life as a single mother. Overtime the two girls work on rebuilding their friendship and somewhere along the way might even realize that they’re feelings for each other never really went away. But of course, like all things in life, this isn’t an easy process and they run into more than a few complications - internal and external.

One Shots:

(there’s so many of these I’ve loved so I’m really going to try and narrow it down to about 10. If yours didn’t make it, no offense! I just have WAY too many to include and this post is already so long haha)

1. The Interlude That Never Ends by FMLClexa [M] ~2500 words

TW: Major Character Death, brief mention of sexual assault

Okay I’m gonna be honest: If you ignore all the other fics on this list, READ THIS ONE. This is absolutely my #1 favorite without a doubt. It’s a soulmate/reincarnation au and it’s so wonderfully executed that I honestly cannot even begin to tell y’all how much I love this one. It’s old and one of the first fics I ever read, but it’s so timeless and excellent and I promise you won’t regret reading it. I know I’ve read this about a million times over.

It’s been a whole year and this has held my #1 fave position the entire time. READ. IT.

2. after party by summerson [M] ~2000 words

TW: recreational drug use

God this fic was so great I read it last night and I’m still in awe in how well it was written and the emotions it managed to invoke in me. My favorite scene is the part where Catra tells Adora “I love you” because it’s so raw and desperate and I vibed with it so hard. It’s really difficult trying to tell someone how much you love them with just a few simple words because they really just don’t convey how much you love them and it’s so frustrating and GAH this fic was fucking great please read it.

3. jigsaw by jeserai [G] ~2500 words

@jeserai

This fic is so great and I felt so warm inside reading it. Definitely read if you want sweet, slow friends to lovers burn.

4. Vicious by SeasInkarnadine [M] ~3500 words

TW: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Rape/Non-Con

I really highly recommend this one if you can get past the trigger warnings. It was so well written and very suspenseful with the juxtaposition of the timeline between current events and snippets of what had happened just hours before. But the ending is really sweet and the way that Catra cares for Adora after the whole thing squeezed my heart to pieces.

This is one I’ve read a few times over because of how much I love it. Def in my top 3.

5. Basement by spookyscaryskeletons [G] ~2800 words

This was such a great rendition of “Adora and Catra are forced to talk” and the emotions were raw and bleeding and I love the character portrayals.

6. Coming Apart by Whorls [E] ~13,000 words (or ~6,000 words each chap)

@crazy-pages

Okay this fic technically has two chapters but I’m including it here in the oneshots because the chapters are identical in the sense of story but the only difference is that in chapter one Catra is a cis woman and in chapter two she’s a trans woman pre-op. Other than that the chapters are identical so it’s mostly based off which experience you would rather have while reading.

This fic was. So. Fucking. Good. Sen did such a fantastic job with both aspects of this story and I love it to bits and pieces. The smut in the beginning is delicious as can be, but then towards the latter half it absolutely sucker punches you with feelings but in a good way. I really, really fucking love this fic and I think it needs more attention than it initially got so I’m imploring you all to please go read this fic. It’s fantastic.

7. Seconds That I Cannot Replace by Mogatrat [M] ~7800 words

TW: child abuse, underage(?)

This is a really heartbreaking fic set before canon. It’s about all the times that Catra and Adora started a romantic relationship only for Shadow Weaver to come in and ruin everything by constantly erasing and resetting Adora’s memory. I still think about this fic from time to time. Give it a go.

8. Come morning light by dragonesdepapel [T] ~1800 words

TW: Major Character Death

Another one that’s technically two chapters but it’s the same events, just covers the perspective of each girl. Adora’s dying and asks Catra to stay with her.

Basically this fic ripped my heart out and I still think about it sometimes.

9. someone you like by caela [T] ~5100 words

oh fuck me yes this fic. A modern au where Catra sorta stalks Adora on instagram and accidentally likes an old picture. Fluffiness galore.

10. When You Came Calling by ActuallyMe [E] ~5200 words

TW: Major Character Death

A 1940′s Mob AU where Catra is a private eye and Adora married high-ranking mob boss Hordak...who’s just been murdered.

Really great one shot. Personally I would’ve loved to see more come of this but it’s great on its own.

And once again, this is cheating but here’s a couple oneshots of my own that I wanna plug real quick

11. hang tight (all you) [T] ~9200 words

Modern AU fic set when Catra and Adora are in high school. Adora struggles to come to terms with her sexuality in an discouraging environment as well as the fact that she’s had a crush on her best friend since middle school. Personally I think this was one of my best works and a lot of other people seem to have liked it too so yeah!

12. as my World d[ivides] [E] ~2500 words

TW: Rape/Non-Con, Underage

One of my darker fics, but still one I’m pretty proud of. Without giving too much away, Adora suffers from a trauma and engages in unhealthy coping mechanisms and Catra enables her because no one’s taught them any different.

#she ra #spop #catra #adora #catradora #she ra and the princesses of power #fic recs #long post #thanks for hanging in with me guys #but yes I highly suggest all these fics

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buckleysjareau · 4 years

Text

you light my fire

Emily's face stays complacent as JJ reaches out her hand to shake, only dropping the smug act and smiling genuinely when she reaches for JJ's hand. "Welcome to the team, Pennsylvania Petite."

Jemily Firefighter AU

Chapter One out of Three

Word count: 1829

Read on AO3

Moving from a small town in Pennsylvania to a city as big as Los Angeles had been a culture shock for Jennifer “JJ” Jareau. Not only the setting had been completely different, but when it came to the calls she’d answer as a firefighter, she was astonished. Going from small house fires and silo rescues to earthquakes, tsunamis, and generally odd calls was definitely something new. Something she could get used to.

Applying and transferring to the Los Angeles Fire Department had honestly been a very spur of the moment thing. Her recent divorce had just finalized so she had nothing keeping her there anymore, no more connections left there for her. So, she brought it up with the Fire Chief of LA and East Allegheny and got it all worked out. In three weeks, the town she’d spent the entirety of her thirty years of life was behind her.

Her first day on the job, she realizes that it was the best decision she could have ever made. She loved her team more than she ever thought she could love co-workers.

There was of course the captain of the one-twelve, Captain David Rossi. She knew who he was, had watched his Firefighter Guide videos while she was in the process of getting accepted into the academy over and over. To say she was a little shocked to hear a voice she definitely had imprinted in her mind would be an understatement. Embarrassingly enough, the first she says to him is ‘Oh my God, you’re the reason I didn’t completely obliterate the Chief’s interview.’ He doesn’t even get the chance to greet her.

Then there’s Derek Morgan, a smooth talker with a lot of that LA confidence she’d grown used to. He asked a lot of questions, seemed to notice a lot of things. He’d noticed the tan line where her ring used to be automatically and when he’d asked, he’d been hit upside the head by the Captain himself.

She meets two of the paramedics as Rossi - the only time you should call me Captain is when we’re out on calls, don’t be so formal here - gives her the tour of the firehouse.

“Callahan, Reid, this is Jennifer Jareau from Pennsylvania.” Rossi introduces. “She’s come highly recommended by Chief Hotchner.”

Reid’s eyes widened in recognition. “You’re the firefighter from Pittsburgh that did the Maneuver on a man with a gun.”

Callahan recognizes her then, too. “That’s right! Alvez wouldn’t shut up about it, and kept showing us the video. Think you’ve got a fan here, Jennifer. Understandably, though. You’re a badass.”

JJ smiles. “It’s nice to meet you both. You can call me JJ, by the way. I’ll also be sure to have a pen at the ready if this Alvez guy asks for an autograph.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him.” Reid jokes. “Welcome to the family, JJ.”

JJ squeezes her eyes tight in embarrassment when she replies with a you too.

“You know, for someone who smoothly executed the maneuver on a man with a gun, you think you’d be a smoothtalker.” JJ hears behind her and her heart stops the second she turns around to see the embodiment of Heaven.

“Leave her alone, Prentiss.” Callahan giggles. “Just ignore her, she likes to tease.”

“People have their moments.” JJ tries to act cool. “I’m JJ, nice to meet you.”

Emily’s face stays complacent as JJ reaches out her hand to shake, only dropping the smug act and smiling genuinely when she reaches for JJ’s hand. “Welcome to the team, Pennsylvania Petite.”

Her handshake is firm and a little tight but her hands are so soft and JJ has to stop herself from asking what lotion she uses, not wanting to embarrass herself twice in one minute.

“And what should I call you?” JJ thinks she’s flirting, is she flirting? Is this how people flirt? Suggestive, teasing tones? It’s been way too long.

“You can call me tonight.” Emily grins. “Or you could just call me Emily.”

Someone whistles from the right of them, and it’s then she realizes the others have gone in different directions and it’s just them. And someone new, they’re here too.

“As much as anyone loves sexual tension you can cut with a knife, I have to cut in before we get a call and I don’t have a chance to introduce myself. I’m Luke Alvez and will happily let you do the maneuver whenever.”

JJ laughs. “Happy to take that offer. Nice to meet you, Luke.”

“Come get breakfast before you can’t!” Another guy calls down from the loft.

Emily places her hand on JJ’s lower back and she prays that Emily can’t feel the chill that just went through her at her touch. The last time she felt like this was when she met Will at that bar in New Orleans seven years ago.

Emily doesn’t pull her hand away until she’s stopped pushing her to the table. JJ wants to curse herself for being the biggest bisexual disaster anyone will ever meet, but really, anyone would understand if they saw Emily. No one could blame her.

“Ooooh, is this the new probie?” The man standing the sink asks.

JJ scoffs. “I haven’t been a probie in ten and a half years, thanks.”

The man puts his hands up in defense. “My mistake, my mistake. I’m Matt Simmons, welcome to this chaotic, dysfunctional family we’ve got at the one-twelve.”

Introductions are made with three other firefighters and breakfast is half way done before the bell rings. JJ suits up in record time as she focuses on what type of scene they’re about to go to. There’s a five car pileup on the 101, no fatalities, fire and medical needed.

“You get many pileup calls in Pittsburgh?” Emily’s voice comes through the static of their headset.

“I actually worked with the East Allegheny Fire Department, thirty minutes outside of Pittsburgh so not really. It was mainly farm fires and silo rescues but we’ve been called to assist in major accidents in the city, so it shouldn’t be too new.”

“Farm fires and silo rescues? Were you a farm girl, JJ?” Simmons teases.

“I was more into sports than I was into anything farm related but I did have a horse. Blue.”

“The jock and the goth trope, nice.” Alvez jokes and Emily smacks him before JJ could ask what he means.

When they’ve pulled up to the scene, JJ’s eyes automatically land on a pregnant woman, clearly distraught. She’s holding her stomach in agony and it makes her skin crawl. Her first call with the one-twelve and memories are already being triggered.

Compartmentalize. Focus. Listen to instruction.

“Alvez, Jareau, I need you with CO2 on these vehicles now. Prentiss, Simmons, make sure everyone is out safe and see who needs help. Reid and Callahan are triaging. Let’s go!”

She goes through the motions. She’s used to this, this is the job she’s done for the past ten years so it comes naturally while her mind lets her suck every emotion back in while she’s there. Alvez is already looking at her weirdly, like he can sense something’s up but there’s no way he could know why she’s gritting her teeth so hard they could crack.

“You alright, JJ?” Alvez waves a hand in front of her face. “Focused?”

She shakes her head to clear whatever mental fog was there. “Peachy. What’s next?”

It’s the end of the day and after the first call, she’s not ready to go home to an empty house.

Emily and Kate look over. “JJ, you coming out tonight?”

Emily Prentiss, you saving grace.

“Are you paying?” She raises an eyebrow. “I’ll be there.”

“Just ride with us, we’ll get your car in the morning.” Kate offers. “It’ll be good getting to know the newbie.”

Emily snorts. “You know Alvez will always be the newbie. Oh, you get to meet the best 9-1-1 dispatcher tonight.”

“Penelope, this is Pennsylvania Petite, Jennifer Jareau.” Alvez grins. “I can finally stop being the newbie.”

“Be quiet, Newbie.” Penelope smirks.

“Told you he’s always going to be the newbie.” Emily grins. “Alright, shots are on Luke tonight!”

“Not fair!”

“Aw Alvez, it’s my first day, you can’t expect me to pay?” JJ winks.

Luke sighs. “Only because you’re a legend.”

“Atta boy.” JJ grins and pulls on Emily’s hand, dragging her to the bar. Holding her hand feels nice. Being near her feels nice. Being at this bar with her feels so much nicer than she felt meeting Will.

Not to say she doesn’t love Will, she probably always will love him, but he’s not here now. He’s back in Pennsylvania, and JJ needs to start new.

She hears Penelope literally pur beside her. “Look at him.”

JJ turns her head to find Morgan dancing against three girls. He’s got moves, she’ll give him that, but she’s seen better.

“Look at him move, he’s like a cat.”

Emily snorts. “More like a dog.”

“He did not ask him to dance. They asked him.” Garcia defends and JJ feels before she sees Luke tense beside her. Someone’s jealous.

“Okay, he’s a cat. An alley cat.” Emily smirks and turns to Luke. “Stop with the desperate pining and ask her to dance with you, moron.”

Luke sighs. “I’m not drunk yet.”

Emily just shakes her head and looks at JJ. “So what’s your story, farm girl?”

“My story?”

“Yeah. Why’d you move to LA? Tell me about your ex husband, if you want. Or ex wife, I don’t discriminate obviously.”

JJ’s eyebrows raise so high they might have hit her hairline. “Well you’re getting right into aren’t you?”

“I’m nothing if not forward, you should know.” She smirks. “If you don’t feel comfortable with talking about it, you don’t have to, though. I just wanna get to really know you.” The wink kills JJ.

“Ex-husband doesn’t matter. He’s in my past. What I’m really interested in is my future.” JJ really hopes she’s flirting. Like she said, she hasn’t flirted in so long so she’s kind of hopeless.

Emily grins. “Well, let’s go show Morgan how it’s done, yeah?” She holds out her hand and JJ grabs it, lets Emily drag her to the dance floor and oh my god, she looks so good.

She’s having more fun than she’s had in years, dancing against her coworker like she’s a pole and her body feels light and she missed getting drunk with friends. It’s been a while since she had fun while drinking alcohol.

The only thing that would make things better if Emily would kiss her.

Little did she know, Emily was thinking the same exact thing.

Neither wants to complicate it though.

Until JJ can’t take it. She takes Emily’s hand, drags her outside the bar, and kisses her with force.

She thanks every lucky star of hers that Emily kisses right back. Everything feels heightened and yeah…

JJ is fucked.

#jemily #jennifer jareau #emily prentiss #penelope garcia #luke alvez #garvez #jemily fic #my fics

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julie1706 · 4 years

Text

Julie’s incredibly aesthetic incredibly autumny list of movies that she maybe recommends:

Alright! Hi there!

My name is Julie, and I really love fall. I love hot tea, warm blankets, candles, ghost stories, fog and I really, really love rain. I never get tired of any of the aspects of fall, but I think the easiest way to really soak up the atmosphere (aside from amazing books, which I don’t really have the time for), is movies! Here, “autumny” movies.

But that’s a really vague term, and I think many people have a very individual idea of what a fall movie is, that don’t really line up with mine. So the most obvious thing seems to me, to make one myself.

I’m guessing one, maybe two or three people will see this, and I count myself as one of them. The others (hej Sif og Malin!!) might not even get to read this, but if they do, I hope they like it. I hope you like it, Malin and Sif! Also, I love you! And miss you!

Right. I’ve seen a lot of examples of the “list of movies to watch in the fall/autumn”, and they’re all fine and great, but I guess I’ve never been completely satisfied with them, as I mentioned.

So after like 10 minutes of research, I’ve made up my own list, of movies I thought seemed interesting or just plain cozy and nice. I admit, they aren’t ranked, sorry, and I haven’t watched all of them, so a good deal of these will really just be mentioned because of optimism. Also, I don’t think there’s a lot of scary ones, so don't worry.

And I promise I will mention if they’re very spooky. I’ll put a warning like: “Warning! Spooky!”, at the top or something. That should do it.

Lets get started! :-)

1. Practical Magic

This first one I actually saw some years ago, with my mom, when I was much younger. I liked it, but I have a feeling I will like it even more, if I watch it today. A really classic halloween, witchy movie, that was surprisingly touching in the family aspect!

Official synopsis:

Two witch sisters, raised by their eccentric aunts in a small town, face closed-minded prejudice and a curse which threatens to prevent them ever finding lasting love.

//Not very spooky, as I remember it. But good! Lovely witchy aesthetics!

2. Silence of the Lamps

Ugh, I love this movie! That might be a not so good thing to say, it’s really twisted. But I like how creepy it always is, no matter how much i watch it, and how the twists and turns never fail to be interesting, even though I know the plot by heart now. I love Clarisse, I love the foggy, grim nature of the movie, and I don’t really love Hannibal, he’s creepy, but you can’t deny that Anthony Hopkins really carry this movie! Perfect serial killer acting. If that’s a thing.

Official Synopsis:

A young F.B.I. cadet must receive the help of an incarcerated and manipulative cannibal killer to help catch another serial killer, a madman who skins his victims.

//VERY spooky! Or just plain scary. Sif - do not watch!! Many people are killed in many, gross ways.

3. Witch

Haven’t seen this one! I really want to, and have since it came out, but there haven’t really been any (legal) places to see it. I love the tension that was present even in the trailer, and the whole aspect of an oppressed young girl evolving and breaking free in the scariest way possible is really interesting. Not all horror movies are my thing, but I really hope this one will be! And I love everything about witches, so.

Official synopsis:

A family in 1630s New England is torn apart by the forces of witchcraft, black magic, and possession.

//Warning! Just from the trailer, I can conclude that this one is very scary.

4. Julie and Julia

This one I haven’t actually seen either! I think I’ve spotted among my mom’s dvds, but nope, haven’t seen it. I don’t really know a lot about Julia Child either, but it seems like a super-heartwarming film, so I hurried to include it!

Official Synopsis:

Julia Child's story of her start in the cooking profession is intertwined with blogger Julie Powell's 2002 challenge to cook all the recipes in Child's first book.

//This one seems safe.

5. The Addams Family (Both of them are good!)

This one, the “first” one, I saw last year. It’s actually a remake of an older movie, which is apparently based on an even older comic -who knew? And there’s a second one, following this one, I might add later. But tt was so good! Gah! I loved it, and I’m definitely rewatching this year. Wow the whole vibe of this family is fantastic, and I wish more families in movies were as dedicated to an aesthetic as the Addams! Watch it! It’s so nice!

Official Synopsis:

Con artists plan to fleece an eccentric family using an accomplice who claims to be their long-lost uncle.

//I know it seems scary, but trust me, it’s fine! It’s really more funny than spooky. You’ll enjoy it, trust me!

6. Hocus Pocus

Alright, never seen this one! But when I joined tumblr, the americans were always bringing this one up, and it’s always included in those lists I was talking about earlier, and again, witches, so a no-brainer for me, to include on this list. Man I can’t wait to see it, I hope I’ll like it.

Official Synopsis:

A curious youngster moves to Salem, where he struggles to fit in before awakening a trio of diabolical witches that were executed in the 17th century.

//I have no idea what the spooky-level is in this, but it doesn’t seem that bad.

7. Halloween (the original)

I have wanted to see this in FOREVER! It’s such a classic, and a really iconic, classic, older horror movie. I don’t actually know why I haven’t seen it yet, it might only be because there was no place to watch it, the last time I checked. I hope it has changed, I really want to see it. It has all the classic tropes, and a scary serial killer, it really is a peak-halloween movie. Spot-on name, huh!

Official Synopsis:

Fifteen years after murdering his sister on Halloween night 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again.

//Might be a bit too scary for some.

8. The Princess Bride

This is so good!! All the characters are straight of a fairy tale (literally), but they’re neither flat or boring. And the love story! Ah! I loooove it! I really enjoyed it last year, when I watched it, so I understand why it’s become such a classic. And there’s so many iconic lines in this movie. The whole mood of it is such good, and the plot isn’t the craziest thing, so watch it to relax!

Official Synopsis:

While home sick in bed, a young boy's grandfather reads him the story of a farmboy-turned-pirate who encounters numerous obstacles, enemies and allies in his quest to be reunited with his true love.

//Not scary, fret not!

9. The Craft

Have never seen or heard about this movie, until the morning, when I compiled this list. I kind of want to though, now that I’m promised 90′s teenage witches. Hell yeah! The more witches the merrier!

Official Synopsis:

A newcomer to a Catholic prep high school falls in with a trio of outcast teenage girls who practice witchcraft, and they all soon conjure up various spells and curses against those who anger them.

//No idea how spooky. Might be a little scary.

10. Sleepy Hollow (the one with Johnny Depp)

The legend of the Headless Horseman is famous, so that one I know. But this movie, which is based on that story, I haven’t seen. I can guess, though, the vibe from it’s original source material, and Johnny Depp and the male lead, and that makes me want to watch it! Also, how can you not, when you see all that fog?? So spooky and mysterious! I love fog!

Official Synopsis:

Ichabod Crane is sent to Sleepy Hollow to investigate the decapitations of three people, with the culprit being the legendary apparition, The Headless Horseman.

//Might be, like, ghost story-spooky. Or Tim Burton-spooky. Either of those. Hm. I don’t think it’s that bad?

11. Scream

I LOVE SCREAM. SUCH AN ICONIC HORROR MOVIE. THANK YOU FOR USING ALL THOSE CLASSIC TROPES!! I love everything about this movie, and I might actually put it on when I’m done with this post, and watch it with a cup of tea and some popcorn if I can find some. The characters are delightfully flat and simple, what you see is what you get, and that actually makes this movie even better! It really feels like you’re watching THE halloween movie, it’s delightfully creepy and spooky, and I love it all. So. Much. Also - the lovely 90′s aesthetic is very much present in this one!

Official Synopsis:

A year after the murder of her mother, a teenage girl is terrorized by a new killer, who targets the girl and her friends by using horror films as part of a deadly game.

//Spooky! If serial killers are not you thing, don’t watch it. Not that it’s my thing either, but, uh, if watching characters be chased and killed off by a masked individual really freaks you out, stay clear of this one :-)

12. Dark Shadows

Love this movie. Watched it in the cinema, have it on DVD, have watched it numerous times since, and I always enjoy it. Another Depp-movie, and he really pulls it off in this one, as a creepy but also weirdly funny vampire, who has lost his one true love, and wakes up in the 70′s (i think), to help his relatives, now living in his ancestral home, with getting back on their feet. A lot of wild stuff happens in this movie, and I adore it.

Official Synopsis:

An imprisoned vampire, Barnabas Collins, is set free and returns to his ancestral home, where his dysfunctional descendants are in need of his protection.

//Actually not that spooky! It’s not that bad, I think. Some places are a little scary, but there’s enough of humor present, that it should be fine!

13. Eve’s Bayou

I had never heard of this movie until this morning! But wow! It looks so dramatic and promising, doesn’t it? We will just have to see, I guess!

Official Synopsis:

What did little Eve see--and how will it haunt her? Husband, father and womanizer Louis Batiste is the head of an affluent family, but it's the women who rule this gothic world of secrets, lies and mystic forces.

//I have no idea. Really. I hope it’s a little bit spooky!

14. Clue

I have just played the game, sorry. And I enjoyed that, so I hope I will enjoy this too! No, I know I will, I love these stories, with really defined characters, like when someone is named “the soldier”, or “the socialite”. I’m sold, when stories like that are introduced to me. I really want to watch this movie! Also - young Tim Curry! Cool!

Official Synopsis:

Six guests are anonymously invited to a strange mansion for dinner, but after their host is killed, they must cooperate with the staff to identify the murderer as the bodies pile up.

//Nah. You’re good, with this one. Don’t worry.

15. Every Agatha Christie Movie

Yeah, sorry I want to watch every single film adaptation of her stories, and love them dearly. None of them can be bad, to me. But the only one I have watched, is the “Murder of the Orient Express”, and if I have to describe how much i love this one, this list will go on for much too long. I just really love this movie. I love the characters, I love the scenography, I love the choreography, just - Everything! It’s so pretty, and you will NEVER figure out the ending! I didn’t, at least. Watch it! It’s so good!

Official Synopsis:

When a murder occurs on the train on which he's travelling, celebrated detective Hercule Poirot is recruited to solve the case.

//Don’t worry about spookyness - there’s none! But watch it!

16. Twilight

Perfect Autumn vibes! There is darkness, fog, rain, coldness, weird pale vampires, a nice love story - and most of it is out in a forest! Amazing! This whole movie seems to consist of only blue and green tones, in varying degrees of darkness, and I always sit with the feeling, that i can almost smell the rain and damp earth in these scenes. Great movie! Even greater use of atmosphere!

Official Synopsis:

Bella Swan moves to Forks and encounters Edward Cullen, a gorgeous boy with a secret.

//Not spooky!

17. Knives Out

Saw this in the cinema with my brother! I really love the main characters, and the plot is great too - I couldn't figure it out at all! I think it is a very creative, “new! approach to a murder mystery, and I applaud! Very autumny, very great sweaters from the female lead! Actually most of them have nice clothes, for this crisp, cold mystery movie!

Official Synopsis:

A detective investigates the death of a patriarch of an eccentric, combative family.

//Not very spooky! Don’t worry!

18. 10 Things I Hate About You

I watched this when i was like, 12, and definitely didn’t appreciate it. I think it based on Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew”. It’s one the best Rom-Coms I’ve ever seen! The dialogue is funny, the acting is fine, and the love stories are very cute! Also, I just adore Kate, like, in general! She’s so sour and surly! Watch this one, when you want to unwind and relax! Maybe with your friends. Or alone, that’s cool too!

Official Synopsis:

A pretty, popular teenager can't go out on a date until her ill-tempered older sister does.

//Not spooky, lol.

19. Mona Lisa Smile

I haven’t seen this one, except for the very last few minutes, on evening when my mom and I was zapping channels. So I have very little, very confusing knowledge of this movie, based on an ending, with no context. But my friend told me about it once, and wow, it sounds heartwarming! And Julia Roberts is pretty great, normally!

Official Synopsis:

A free-thinking art professor teaches conservative 1950s Wellesley girls to question their traditional social roles.

//Not spooky!

Well then! That was all the movies I had the time to compile this morning! I might add more, I’m sure there’s a few classics, I have forgotten!

I hope you have a great fall, with many chances to be with your family and friends, and experience all the amazing things this read, yellow, brown and orange season has to offer! Have a great day - and thank you for reading!

- Julie :-)

#autumn #movie recommendation #movie list #fall #fall aesthetic

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teababe27 · 4 years

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Notes From the 2020 Myanimelist.net Challenges - Part 2: Manga

Time for Part 2 of the Thoughts on the Challenge posts; this one talking about the manga side.

A lot of the executive dysfunction and side effects of the chemo kinda took away my desire to read sometimes. As such, I didn’t get as far into the challenge as I had hoped, only getting about halfway through the required amount I had chosen for myself. There were even a few manga I was reading for the challenge that I have unfortunately not yet finished (Billy Bat, Battle Angel Alita, Meteor Methuselah), so I reluctantly won’t be including them on here. However, I did still read and finish some decent manga and some pretty good ones, too.

Like the anime post, I will mention some honorable mentions/one I had thoughts on, followed by my favorites that I read for the challenge this year.

Let’s do this.

Honorable Mentions/Other Notables:

Scumbag Loser (aka Saiteihen no Otoko) - completed for the task “Read a manga series you can finish in one day”

Masahiko is a fat, perverted loser who has a smell fetish and thinks everyone is beneath him. He takes solace in the fact that he’s not the Class Loser. However, when the Class Loser gets a girlfriend, Masahiko becomes the new Class Loser. Desperate to get out of this position, he lies and says he has a girlfriend: his childhood friend Haruka, who transfers to his class the next day. But there’s a problem that only Masahiko knows: Haruka died several years before.

This wins Worst of the Challenge, but I didn’t hate it entirely. Masahiko is not a good person, which is usually a negative in my book. This manga basically goes from 0 to 100 real fast. It takes a couple unexpected turns and I couldn’t help but wonder how the problem would be stopped. Ends on a bit of a downer.

Dragon Head - completed for the task “Read a manga that started serialization in the 90s”

While on a school field trip, the train carrying the students crashes after a natural disaster. Teru is the only survivor in his class. While trying to find a way out, he finds two other survivors, Ako and Nobuo. The three survivors try to escape while dealing with lack of food and light, earthquakes, cults, and the freaking apocalypse happening outside.

This manga was quite the ride. Creepy and scary at times. The artwork was really good, definitely adding to the atmosphere. I liked the characters. The story did kinda drag a bit in the middle and I felt the ending was kinda rushed and stopped inconclusively, but I liked this one.

Omukae Desu - completed for the task “Read a manga that started publishing the same month and year as one of your listed favorites” (Azumanga Daioh, in this case)

Madoka is a college student who has the power to see lost souls, kinda like the Ghost Whisperer. He is recruited by Nabeshima (the guy in the bunny suit on the manga cover) to work for the GSG, an organization that helps transport wandering souls to the afterlife. In order to help, Madoka often lets the souls briefly take over his body to do various things that they always wanted to do before passing on.

This manga was actually pretty adorable at times. Lighthearted and fun. Characters are kinda hit-and-miss, though their interactions are very amusing. I liked it.

Deathtopia - completed for the task “Read a manga that got cancelled/axed”

Kou Fujimura is an average guy. One day, he gets into an accident and is severely injured, leaving him blind and on the brink of death. He gets surgery and survives, but he now has psychic abilities and can see weird monsters. A mysterious woman appears, and she recruits him to help her and her fellow hot assassins who work for the police department. He helps the ladies take out the aforementioned weird monsters called Cheaters, people who come back from the dead with special abilities and blend in with normal people.

I liked the story/concept a lot. Kinda gave me Parasyte vibes at times. A little bit too fanservice-y at times. Very good in the beginning, but took a lot of lapses in logic (pointed out in the scanlations I read) near the end, and the ending felt rushed, though I can blame that on the manga being prematurely cancelled. I still recommend this one, as the story is interesting and the action is good.

The!! Beach Stars - completed for the task “Read a manga with a symbol in the title”

The sequel to the manga Beach Stars that I read for last year’s challenge.

Iruka and the rest of the team are back, getting ready for and competing in the Madonna Cup. Iruka’s goal is still the same: to beat the local volleyball champ Sanae Kayakawa.

Everything I liked about the prequel is here. The action/sports scenes are great, and the camaraderie between the ladies is cool, too. Though it is disappointing that this sequel is only 12 or 13 chapters, as some things could have used more buildup and fleshing out, especially the final match. Still a fun read, though.

Favorites from the Challenge:

Watashitachi no Shiawase na Jikan (aka Our Happy Time) - completed for the task “Read a featured manga” (Article: https://myanimelist.net/featured/1561/11_Epic_Manga_That_Deserve_to_Be_Adapted_into_Anime)

Juri is a former pianist who has gone down a dark path after a traumatic event in her life. She has grown to hate her mother, who was once a famous pianist herself. Juri has since attempted suicide multiple times. Yuu is a convict on death row charged with murder, and he has tried to kill himself as well. When Juri’s aunt Monica, a nun, invites her to visit Yuu, their lives both change forever.

This manga makes me think of how a friend told me they recently saw the movie Collateral Beauty for the first time. They said it was melodramatic, but they cried and enjoyed the movie all the same. This pretty much sums up how I felt about this manga.

This one honestly made me tear up a bit, as melodramatic as it was. A little dark, but I was still invested in the characters and the situations. The art is really good, too. It’s one volume, so it doesn’t take that long to read.

Kingyosou - completed for the task “Read a manga that includes a character with a disability”

One day, a girl, Asuka, falls in love with a boy, Manami, after hearing him play the taiko drums at a school festival. Manami is deaf, however, and has closed his heart to love. Asuka and Manami get to know each other and face various obstacles in their relationship, both relating and not relating to Manami’s deafness.

I thought this manga was really sweet. I also liked that there was deaf representation here, though I can’t really speak on how accurate it is because I’m not deaf myself. You don’t see many manga where the characters have disabilities. The relationship felt a little more realistic in this one because it took some time (as proportional as time can take in a 2-volume manga) for Manami and Asuka to get into the relationship. Another manga that was short, sweet, and to the point, at only 2 volumes.

Babel - completed for the task “Read a manga that appears when putting in your username in the Myanimelist search bar”

Kouta is a hotel waiter dissatisfied with his job serving rich clientele on New Year’s Eve at the Babel Hotel. On New Year’s Day, a worldwide terrorist attack occurs, with bombs going off everywhere. Kouta then meets someone who gives him the ability to go back in time. Kouta has to use this ability to stop the terrorist attack from happening and pretty much causing WW3.

I liked this manga a lot. A lot of unexpected plot twists. A fascinating mystery, keeps you hooked. I’ve always found time travel plots to be interesting as well.

Bloom Into You (aka Yagate Kimi ni Naru) - completed for the task “Read a Shounen Ai or Shoujo Ai manga” (tagged Shoujo Ai)

Yuu is a new high school freshman who loves romance manga and wants to experience a love story of her own. But when a classmate confesses his feelings to her, Yuu finds she feels nothing. Yuu sees the student council president, Nanami, turning down a love confession herself. Yuu joins the student council and she and Nanami become friends. Nanami soon confesses her feelings for Yuu, and Yuu is confused.

This one is tied with the next entry in this post for Best of the Challenge.

I loved this manga. So sweet and adorable. Made me tear up at times. Great, well-written character development. Doesn’t rely on bad/problematic tropes like certain other yuri I’ve read and watched recently. I loved watching this complex and realistic relationship between Yuu and Nanami develop. Some of Yuu’s feelings are pretty relatable. Read this one if you’re looking for a great yuri manga.

Inside Mari (aka Boku wa Mari no Naka) - completed for the task “Read a Psychological or Thriller manga” (tagged Psychological)

Isao Komori is a shut-in who spends his time after dropping out of college fapping, playing video games, and visiting a local convenience store every night to see a high school girl named Mari, who he admires from afar. One day, Isao finds that he is in Mari’s body! Isao-as-Mari continues to live her life and tries to find out how to switch back.

I know I mentioned this earlier, but I’ll be giving Best of the Challenge to both Bloom Into You and Inside Mari. I honestly couldn’t decide between the two, as they are from two different subgenres and two different styles. Kinda like how I couldn’t decide between Hereditary and Into the Spiderverse as my favorite movie of 2018 because they were so different form each other that I couldn’t really compare them.

This manga threw me for a loop multiple times. A subversion and deconstruction of the usual body-swap plots. A darker take on one, if you will. A couple of interesting plot twists, and the manga often takes a different direction than you expect, especially about halfway through the manga, where it switches to different characters’ points of view.

Highly recommended, though not for everyone.

#manga #myanimelist #myanimelist.net #scumbag loser #saiteihen no otoko #dragon head #omukae desu #deathtopia #the!! beach stars #the beach stars #Watashitachi no Shiawase na Jikan #kingyosou #babel #bloom into you #yagate kimi ni naru #inside mari #boku wa mari no naka #thoughts of the day

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gone-series-orchid · 5 years

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not sure if you're still taking gone asks, but I was wondering if you found any aspects of the series unrealistic. Obviously, powers and stuff aren't real, but im wondering more about like, character motivations and reactions to situations.

are you kidding? i’m always taking gone asks! thanks so much for sending this, it’s a great question!

in terms of gone’s character realism, i think mg overall does a pretty good job. a few asks ago i talked about how i thought caine’s character arc felt pretty shoddily written, mainly because i think mg had a solid idea of caine as a villain in the early books that sort of dovetailed into putting him firmly into the “anti-hero/tragic villain” trope in the light, despite him doing numerous terrible things and not showing any remorse for them (because, as the early books indicate, he’s heavily implied to be sociopathic--or at least severely manipulative, and lacking in compassion and empathy) by the time he dies. i blame mg’s sentimentality on ending the series he’d been working on for 7 years--there’s always a temptation to treat your characters more charitably (and give fanservice!) when the end’s in sight and this’ll essentially be their last hurrah. but that’s just what i’d hypothesize; i don’t have any insight into mg’s writing process or anything. anyway, caine’s sacrifice and love note to diana fell flat for me personally. i don’t think mg’s writing of caine as a character has mustered up the goodwill and sympathy in the audience that that kind of heel-face turn demands.

diana is a weird character for me. on one hand, i really like it when she gets her her own pov chapters and we get to see what’s going on in her head. i like that she fully knows caine’s a monster and struggles with her feelings for him as a concept. the only problem for me is the messy way she gets there. in the early books, from what i can remember, diana is fully cognizant of how sadistic and abnormal caine and drake are. she’s a smart girl who is essentially using caine for safety and security, as well as using caine’s attraction to her in order to bolster her low self-esteem due to her adolescence being spent in the presence of creepy adult men who sexualize her for her growing body). that looks good on paper, but diana seems to fall full tilt into loving caine anyway in the later books, which i find a confusing leap. i understand that the trauma of the fayz and all the general baggage she carries around is indubitably a contributing factor, but...i dunno, something about the execution feels weak to me. i don’t think we get enough of a proper bridge between “diana thinks caine is sick and manipulates him” to “diana thinks caine is sick and loves him.”

i think mg essentially wanted a tragic dark parallel to astrid and sam’s healthier and (at least somewhat) mutually respectful relationship, and decided to bypass the process of developing diana to the point where she’d want that with caine in favor of attributing her infatuation to trauma and stockholm syndrome, which can’t help but feel like an unfortunate regression from diana’s character as she is first introduced. to be clear, i’m not trying to say that characters who become stuck in abusive relationships are inherently less interesting or are morally weaker than characters who don’t! it’s just that, to me, that didn’t seem like the natural trajectory for diana’s character in the first book. it felt more like mg had to backtrack her initial savviness regarding caine’s true nature in order to create more interpersonal drama for the coates gang, and that’s disappointing that mg felt he had to do that to such an initially interesting, morally ambiguous female character. i can’t see him doing that to a male character in order to develop a semi-plausible (abusive) love story, is what i’m saying.

i think diana’s character gets a lot more interesting when she’s separated from caine and (ugh) pregnant, though that also has a lot of baggage--diana only gets to significantly develop when she’s carrying caine’s baby, which just feels...gross to me. this is a purely “me” reaction, and probably stems from me being significantly older now than i was when i first read the books back when i was 13, but i can’t help but think that there were better ways for the gaiaphage to get a human form than for two fifteen-year-olds in a dysfunctional, abusive relationship to have multiple instances of unprotected sex. i don’t think mg is particularly gratuitous or scummy about it or anything, but i feel it’s a bit unfortunate. not to mention that the fact that diana feels she has to change for the sake of her child is a pretty unfortunate thing--it means that, ultimately, her feelings about herself have not changed, they’ve just gotten worse.

she doesn’t feel she has to change for herself, she feels she has to change for her idealized, hypothetical child still growing in her stomach.

at the age of fifteen.

idk, it seems to imply a loss of selfhood that’s characteristic of pregnant female characters--they lack the agency they once had because oh, the baby. and that just becomes even more tragic when the female character doing that sort of “i have to change for my child” thing is a child herself who hasn’t the life experience to fully know or understand her own self yet. and i don’t think mg understands the full tragedy of that.

diana doesn’t fully inhabit that trope, of course. i really love that she survives the fayz and seems to fully recognize--and more importantly, accept--that, whether he “loved” her or not, caine was bad news. i like that diana’s baby becomes corrupted by the gaiaphage, because--while i don’t like that it adds more trauma to diana’s bucket--i’m glad that the idea of her pinning her hopes for redemption on an infant who’s unlikely to survive the harsh environment of the fayz anyway are dashed. it sounds cruel, but it’s true.

whew! i’m sorry, i feel i’ve ranted long enough. i might have some more thoughts in the future, but i don’t want to overload you with Stuff. feel free to send more asks! and thank you again! :)

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totalenhanceex-blog · 4 years

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aftermathdb · 5 years

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DEATH BATTLE Review: Weiss vs. Misturu

Y’know, I had a gag planned when that required Weiss to be introduced after two other RWBY Characters that I don’t think I can do anymore since Weiss got introduced before them. Maybe I can do a deleted scenes thing later…

Two Ice Queens battle for the true reign over the ice castle!

Weiss′s Preview.

The world of Remnant is full of many things that make it famous. From the vicious creatures of Grimm, to the Huntsman and Huntresses that are sworn to fight them, and many many more. But in this world, you’d be hard pressed to find a person who has never heard of the Schnee family.

And like any famous family, these guys are like royalty. And their princess, is Weiss Schnee.

Like many children born to great families, Weiss’ home life wasn’t that fun. Her father had high expectations for her, and she was set to just run the place… Whenever that happens. But, in defiance to her father’s wishes, she got out and joined Beacon Academy, an illustrious school where everyone can learn how to fight monsters. And once she joined a team, she put the ‘W’ in team RWBY.

But Weiss can’t just get by with money. So like most Hunters (Which is what I’m going to be calling them so that I can save some space), Weiss got herself a weapon, which Boomstick nicknamed Merc-Nasty.

This rapier is nearly three feet in length, and, much like nearly every other weapon in the show, it doubles as a gun (insert “it’s also a gun” joke here)!

Myrtenaster comes equipped with a six-slot Dust chamber. And unlike the dust in our world, the Dust in this world is special. Similar to the materia from Final Fantasy or Crystals from Storm Hawks, these all come with their own stats and effects.

Weiss is a fan of combining water and wind to create Ice Dust

But, if you’re going to fight giant shadow monsters, criminals, and godzilla dragons, you’re going to need way more than just a stick to fight them with.

Think of Semblances as “X-Men” powers. They’re all unique in their own ways. However, Weiss’ Semblance is a bit different. In the sense that instead of it being unique, it’s actually inherited through her family line. Kinda like the mark of the Joestar (Before you ask, no. No Jojo character is up next. I’m upset about it too).

Weiss’ Semblance lets her do all sorts of crazy stuff. From manipulating gravity, to time dilation, to manipulating dust.

But most impressive of all, is the summons, which lets Weiss act like Yuna from FF X and bring out monsters she’s beaten to fight alongside her. And the most powerful one of all, would be knight, the Arma Gigas… Which means “Giant Armor” in Latin.

But yeah. Weiss’ family is pretty dysfunctional, and kinda abusive at times. Her Colonel Sanders-looking dad up there cut her out of the family line, leaving her piece of shit brother as the sole heir to the company.

But if there are any physical weaknesses Weiss has, it would probably be her durability.

Aura is finite, and takes time to recharge. Sure, you’re basically invincible when you do have it, but when it’s out, you’re out. And compared to Best Girl Yang (Fight me), Weiss’ durability isn’t that great. And since using her Semblance also burns aura, she’s more likely to run out sooner rather than later.

But Weiss is pretty tough. She once managed to survive a train crash. Judging by the size of the fragmentation, and applying the appropriate mathematics, the amount of force Weiss withstood comes out to be about…

Not good enough?- Then how about the time she knocked over a giant mech that was designed to fight giant leviathan grimm?

Judging by the size of her partner beside her, Weiss’ output of force should come around to about…

And it’s unlikely that Weiss is doing this using only dust. So, by using the water, we can get an estimate as to how much energy is being used for this attack.

For those of you wondering, this translates to over 230 tons of TNT!

Forget Dust. Weiss could make a killing on giving people renewable power alone.

Weiss might not be the strongest of her team, but with her newfound family, she’s certainly proven that she is far more than just a name. And she’s out to prove that this life is hers.

Misturu′s Preview.

In the early 2000s, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in Japan who hasn’t heard of the Kirjio group, a global conglomerate that was involved in nearly every aspect of daily life. .

And just like any other major company like this, they had a family. And this princess, was known as Mitsuru Kirijo

One day, Mitsuru’s Grandfather was experimenting with some sort of mental world called “The Mind Place.” Officially known as “The collective unconscious.” Because companies doing shady business deals is apparently something we should expect. When is news going to break out that Disney does have their founder’s head in a jar?

Anyways, the Mind Place connects every living being’s subconscious mind. Things known as “Shadows” lived there.

These things are basically demons. But if you want to see an inner demon, you find a person’s “Shadow Self.”

Surprise surprise, Grandpa Kirijo decided to try and get to the shadows for himself. But, as per usual, summoning demons never works out… Unless you play an Archfiend Deck in Yu-Gi-Oh, in which case, go nuts.

So, everything kinda went to shit because of it, and not only were the shadows released into the world to attack an unsuspecting populace, this tower thing here:

the Tartarus, arose. It’s basically the citadel between worlds. The earth was changed with a new “Dark Hour.” A period of time where everything freezes at Midnight.

Most people don’t really notice though. Time resumes as normal when it’s over, and almost nobody really notices.

Almost.

Some people can keep moving around in this time. Mitsuru is one of them. since she felt bad about her family’s company screwing everyone over, so she decided to fix it.

And while her rapier skills are certainly good, on account that she’s in the fencing club at her school, a small sword like that isn’t exactly enough to take down a bunch of evil shadows… Wait, hang on. Do both of these franchises have Heartless ripoffs?- Moving on, Mitsuru also has various abilities that she can use.

And on top of all of it, she even got a Stand Persona, named Penthesilea, which later grew into Artemisia.

With Artemisia by her side, Mitsuru has a lot of powerful ice spells that she can call upon in battle. So it’s basically a Stand except they don’t have that rule of “Only a Stand can defeat another Stand” thing going for them… Huh, note to self: Have Jotaro and Mitsuru get into an argument about terminology. Also unlike Stands, Personas can be defeated, but they’ll come back after a short time.

Similar to Stands, Personas also kinda reflect damage back to the user. But since it’s more linked to the personality rather than the soul or fighting spirit, it’s more mental stress if anything else.

Artemesia gives Mitsuru all sorts of awesome stuff. Like ice powers that could give Elsa a run for her money. It also grants Mitsuru enhanced strength, speed, and durability. In addition, it also makes her completely immune to the cold and ice-based attacks. I’d ask “Why the fur coat?” But, as we all know, Everyone needs a fur coat (And it’s a pretty nice coat). She can also sense her surroundings via analytical clairvoyance, which makes sneaking up on her pretty hard.

But, like all great heroes, nobody really does it on their own. Mitsuru created the S.E.E.S, or the “Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad.” A group of Persona users that were basically the Teen Titans, if they had Stands instead of superpowers. And, as an added bonus, it’s an after school club, so bonus extra credit!

And you might be thinking “How would one summon a Persona?” Well, since this franchise wasn’t done ripping off Jojo (I looked it up, Stands and the Stand Arrows were introduced about three years prior to Persona 1), they decided to uh… Use the Evoker… Which… Fair warning…

(I think I’ll take the Stand Arrow instead).

The idea behind the Evoker is that it evokes a strong traumatic experience to awaken a person’s Persona, similar to how Mitsuru’s first experience in summoning hers was also traumatic.

To add to the unsettling nature of this, you don’t just have it shot at you. You aim it at your face, and pull the trigger. DEFINITELY taking the Stand Arrow over that.

Anyways, with all that power, Mitsuru’s pulled off some ridiculous stuff.

Here’s an added bonus: One Persona user that could outrun a bullet fired from a Magnum. So it’s reasonable to say that Mitsuru could do this too.

If that last feat wasn’t impressive enough for you, Personas can move even faster. One of them reacted to and caught an arrow within milliseconds. And since Mitsuru defeated this user and Persona in a fight.

But if you’re looking for a durability feat, then look no further, because Mitsuru once survived an explosion.

This one to be exact.

This is easily the longest series of images I’ve had to upload in a row. And isn’t Boomstick a Poultry Scientist?- Why’d he say “I’m a scientist now.”?

Ahem, moving on. Artemisia also once helped out in icing these creepy puppet things:

Now, using the surrounding air and accounting for Nitrogen (As it makes up a good chunk of the air we breathe), we can get some calculations for this feat.

The energy output, after the calculations are done, comes to around…

Okay, forget Weiss supplying people with Power, Mitsuru’s where it’s at. Maybe she could slow down out polar ice caps from melting.

And after ending the Dark Hour and redeeming her family name, Mitsuru continued battling for people everywhere. One shadow at a time.

Not too shabby.

The Battle Itself.

Torrian and Kristina are here for animation, Weiss will be voiced by Kara Eberle and Mitsuru will be voiced by Corey Pettit, music (Winter Sonata) by Therewolf, and audio by Chris Kokkinos.

So, we just jump right into the middle of the fight. No explanations, no story build-up, no nothing. It’s just like RWBY Volume 4! Ha ha! … Sorry, I, I just, I had to get that in there… God, that was a garbage volume.

So, with swordplay looking to be about even, both sides are basically going to be relying on their other skills for this bout. Y’know, a fencing tournament getting out of hand would have been an interesting story for this fight.

So, a bit of talking later, and the fight just picks up. And it occurs to me that they should have used this as the example fight for why the “FIGHT!” soundbite shouldn’t return. Like, c’mon guys.

Back on the fight, Weiss uses her ice powers to try to give Mitsuru the cold shoulder, but as we’re already aware, that’s not very effective.

And out comes Artemisia, which Weiss manages to parry some of the attacks, and opts to get the hell out of dodge after a quick burst of fire.

The Wasp up there is then sent to fight Mitsuru’s Persona while Weiss opts to fight Mitsuru directly.

But, let’s face it. The Rapier Wasp is a Bug Flying type. So Artemisia takes it down.

And with Weiss distracted, Mitsuru then gives her a kick to the face. That’s the face of someone who was wondering why she was just standing around when there was someone trying to kill you right in front of you.

But Weiss isn’t a fan of being kicked in the face, so she uses her gravity glyphs to make some distance.

And with that distance comes…

The Arma Gigas! Let’s be real, we wanted this fight so that we could see this knight fight Artemisia. After a couple of combos where neither side seems to make any headway, Artemisia then fires some frigid projectiles towards Weiss.

Her Knight, being a gentleman, takes the blow for her.

Weiss charges (with added assistance from her time dilation glyphs) and manages to actually stab Mitsuru.

Unfortunately for her, Mitsuru doesn’t go down that easily. And she uses Artemisia to knock them both down.

Finishing blow in 5…

4…

3…

2…

1…

Imperious Queen of Executions indeed.

Verdict + Explanation.

So, to Weiss’ credit, her versatility put up a decent fight. But she was pretty outclassed in other categories aside from speed thanks to time dilation.

But with Mitsuru’s analytical clairvoyance, that speed gap gets a lot smaller. To the point that Mitsuru’s the one that can outpace Weiss. Not that it matters, Artemisia outpaces Weiss a few times over.

Now sure, the time powers seem like an insta-win, right? Well, maybe that would give Weiss a win in some scenarios, but not all of them.

Since Weiss is extra reliant on Ice Dust, and her other Dusts are fairly lacking, Mitsuru didn’t really have to deal with fire at all. Especially since Weiss doesn’t have the best track record with fire (As we’ve seen from that fire geyser from before).

It also doesn’t help that the explosion from earlier is pretty up there in terms of destructive power. Power that isn’t really that low for anything Weiss had to really beat it out.

Using calculation provided by Boomstick (Yes, you read that right), the calculations can be made through the height of the bridge.

This puts the explosive yield to about.

And this is even accounting for the fact that the person setting it off wasn’t even planning on killing Mitsuru too.

Also, remember those big ice structures that each of them made?- Well, comparing them directly, Weiss’ energy output doesn’t come close. Even if one were to cut Mitsuru’s stat in half, on account that she had help for this feat, Weiss falls short. About a hundred times short to be exact.

At the end of the day, Mitsuru had the power, skill, and durability to take Weiss down. Sure Snow White there had versatility, but at the end of it all,

Overall impression.

I heard from a friend of mine (And I read it on the Persona Wiki) that Personas can’t really be seen by non-persona users. Whilst this doesn’t really make much of a difference since it was more exciting to see the Arma Gigas directly fighting Artemisia instead of having it flailing around while the Persona just chipped away at it, it would have been nice to have seen this acknowledged.

Also, I kinda had like… Ten jokes that I could have used for my own end quip, but I’ll just post that to my Deviantart account as a list.

Overall, the results are solid, the animation is good, and it feels well-made. Sure, Weiss’ death could have been a bit more brutal (I would have liked to have seen her shattering with the ice), but as far as underwhelming deaths go, this one wasn’t that bad.

6.9/10. It would have been higher, but we didn’t get a “Bites the Dust” reference for Boomstick’s end joke (The song, not the Stand).

Next Time…

MORTAL KOMBAT! DO do do do dodo doot do do doot do doot do do do!

By the Gods I have been wanting to use Johnny Cage for the story. And having another Nintendo rep is always a plus. This… Is gonna be fun!

Is there a fight that you want me to review? - Send an ask/request, and I’ll look into it!

Do you want to read my fanfic based around DEATH BATTLE itself? click here!

Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you next time for…

Falcon Punch vs. Nut Punch

#Death Battle #Deathbattle #review

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conspiracyrants-blog · 6 years

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CONSPIRACY RANT #1

Sustainable Development through Agenda 21

Many would say that I’m a psychopath—my love for gore, murder and death is simply reflected with my taste of music, movie and books. However, my psychopathic mind does have a limit. There are just things that I cannot help but to fear, like my fear of heights, of water and (ironically) of blood. But what tops my list is the possibility of a ruined society due to a dysfunctional government system.

Harriet Parke’s Agenda 21 is the definition of a spine-chilling foreshadowing. The way words were used to construct a world from a (not-so) distant future is a display of both excellence and political agenda.

The story revolves around Emmeline, a young girl raised in “The Republic” after the total take-over of the authoritarian entities over the land once known as America. She was not able to experience nor remember life before Republic, but was fortunate enough to live with her parents unlike those who were forced to be brought up by the authority. Due to her proximity with the truth provided to her by her mother, she slowly unveiled the reality behind “The Republic” and faced challenges invoked by her own obedience to the nation and her yearning for freedom.

The story was backed-up with well-researched data, which was shown through the simple details of the novel from advance technology, wide use of public land, “walkable cities”, reduce use of power and population. The way Harriet Parke built this near-future was exemplary in terms of grounded laws and norms showcased through the dialogue and actions taken by the characters.

The setting was highly effective due to the reason, the characters’ motivation and development arc’s movement was justified and was not forced.

Emmeline, the protagonist of the story, gripped her child-like development arc for a long period of time within the novel which left the impression that the character is yet to let go of her past, including her parents and former husband. However, despite her firm grip on her initial arc, her development was gradual and was a bit expected if I must say.

She turned into a child into a mother, easily adapting the habits of her own mother. It was a great correlation and it puts a bit of spice on the novel. It is with this development from a child to a mother did main driving force of the novel. It was her development, this specific part of it,that led to the events that transpired soon after, therefore solidifying her character’s motive and growth.

Moreover, each supporting character were given a chance to showcase their own story, again contributing to the amazing talent of Parke on world-building.

May it be a character of flat or round identity, they were all motivated towards their own goal.

David, for example, her second lover, was a flat character. He is a supportive and protective character over Emmeline however, Parke managed to show at least misleading strain to these qualities by suggesting that David will stop protecting Emmeline.

It gave a different kind of thrill, especially since it ventures through the world of mild romance, a great change from the problematic sci-fi thriller the novel is originally dubbed as.

Further, the cover testifies greatly to the genre of the novel. The use of grey and black to enhance silhouettes along with the translucent emblem of “The Republic” gives off a sense of authority in a dystopian setting. The aesthetic appeal of the book contributes to the theme of the novel—freedom and dominance.

Mix the aesthetic value of the cover and the domineering title, the book is obviously an eye-catcher.

Perhaps a factor to thank for the well-grounded world this novel revolves in is the real Agenda 21 that the author used as basis.

Agenda 21 is an anticipated UN program that will sustain the Earth’s good health through an action plan of 26 principles and 7 proclamation. The Agenda 21 seems to be a harmless pro-nature propaganda, however, if one will cut through the flowery words used to describe the program, one will come to the conclusion that this program wouldn’t be as harmless as it sound.

However, it is important to take note that despite having its roots from the failed UN program, the novel, Agenda 21, is just a representation of the worst case scenario if such was pushed through.

It was pushing the limits of the program if I must.

But according to the author, Harriet Parke on her own blogpost, this novel is a result of fear from what could transpire if the words written under the program was executed to their fullest meaning. This is a result of her desire to educate those around her of the government’s possible foul plays.

The only drawback of this novel, for me, is the cliffhanger. Yes, Parke was able to achieve the goal of a cliffhanger: ask for what will happen next. However, I think the cliffhanger was positioned too early. The scene wherein the device was used was just the climax of the story, there were many questions unanswered and there were no resolutions. The cliffhanger was hanging dangerously along the tip of the cliff, and if Parke weren’t able to create such a wonderful piece of a novel, then that misplaced cliffhanger could have ended the novel’s career.

If one must look at it plainly, “Oh, it’s just a book, no one will read it,” then perhaps, there’s nothing to fear. Its just a work of our powerful minds, one that is far from our reality. But for someone like me, whose reality lies within the pages of a book, there’s much to fear--and that’s when these “work of the mind” became reality.

#conspiracy theories #conspiracy #agenda #agenda21 #government #governance #system #rants #conspiracy rants

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cosmi-trashbin · 6 years

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My Top 5 Favorite Ducktales 2017 Episodes (So Far)

I’m pretty new to DuckTales as a whole.

The reboot has been my official introduction to Scrooge McDuck, Duckburg, and otherwise. So, it may be awhile before I’m familiar with or better acquainted with the original comics and the first cartoon series, as well as other series referenced such as Darkwing Duck and Talespin. After getting caught up with this series, I’m definitely curious about the source material that bits and pieces of the toon makes loving references and homages to. Regardless, these picks are based on what I’ve personally liked and enjoyed about DuckTales 2017 so far.

5.) "The Golden Lagoon of White Agony Plains!"

Golden Lagoon is the reboot’s introduction to Scrooge’s old flame Goldie O’ Gilt. She’s cunning, she’s devious, she’s beautiful, and she’s one of the few ducks that can really give Scrooge the proverbial run for his money. It’s kind of fun to see how dramatic, complicated, and dysfunctional her relationship with Scrooge is. Scrooge and Goldie definitely gives off vibes of ‘This is the only man/woman I have genuine feelings for’ but it’s tempered by the idea of a perpetual cat-and-mouse chase.

Goldie and Scrooge sync up on so many things, but their attraction towards each other and the big deal-breaker are their respective obsessions with and opinions on treasure-hunting. For Goldie, treasure is the ultimate objective, she will go to any length to get it, and she’ll do whatever she thinks she needs to do to keep it. For Scrooge, he’s obsessed with gold and hoards treasure like a true miser, but he’ll pick a loved one over treasure every time if it comes down to those rough circumstances. It’s a bit of a toss-up as to how Goldie will react to or behave in certain situations. The ideal meeting for Scrooge and Goldie is a fairweather Indiana Jones venture with low stakes and only the other as their worst enemy. It’s more fun and the focus is on being both enchanted by and disgusted by what the other will do next.

Scrooge and Goldie had the spotlight for this episode, but Glomgold is a ridiculously welcome third wheel. Apparently, his jealousy of Scrooge’s love life is the kind of kicker to give him “Grade A Villain” casting for at least an episode. It was unexpectedly grim when Goldie slipped into that river of molten gold.

4.) "Who is Gizmoduck?!"

I love episodes of cartoons that focus on and follow another character of the cast for at least that one story.

This episode is pretty much the underdog story of how Fenton, the humble and starry-eyed intern, became the hero Gizmoduck. Previous episodes set up Fenton as an awkward, kind of over-compensating, but sympathetic figure. All he wants is to earn his boss and personal hero Gyro’s respect and get a few words of encouragement. Viewers learn that Gyro isn’t the only one Fenton’s trying to impress. His M’Ma, Officer Cabrera, is skeptic of Fenton’s role as an unpaid intern and his insistence that “it will lead to bigger, better things, I swear!” In short, Fenton is caught between his personal hopes and the expectations of others.

With how much respect Fenton holds for Gyro, the expected story was that he’d be let down by how the man doesn’t live up to the idealized image in Fenton’s mind. Instead, Fenton has been losing respect for and blind admiration of Gyro for awhile. Fenton’s attention shifted to Gyro’s highly experimental prototype suit of armor and what kind of potential said suit has. It’s no longer about gaining Gyro’s approval. It’s about figuring out who Gizmoduck is and what he can do. Whether he expected it or not, Fenton unexpectedly stumbled into his life’s purpose. Suddenly, Gizmoduck isn’t just an abstract idea or an idealized concept, Fenton is Gizmoduck. Since the episode shows things from Fenton’s perspective, Gizmoduck can be considered a key part of his own journey towards self-actualization.

Honestly, I consider “Gizmoduck” an example for why this toon has something for everybody. Kids have the triplets, Webby, and Lena. Older adults have Donald, Scrooge, and Beakley. And personally, as a twenty-something on a self-discovery journey, I relate to and empathize with Fenton.

3.) "From the Confidential Case Files of Agent 22!"

There was a scene in the very first episode where Webby posed dramatically in front of a Scrooge statuette. Part of me was pointing excitedly at the screen thinking “She’s Scrooge McDuck’s thematic echo for the current generation!”

I was a bit off. Arguably, both Louie and Webby have traits, goals, and motivations in common with Scrooge. In Webby’s case, she shares Scrooge’s intense enthusiasm and zeal for adventuring and the history attached to the relic/site they’re about to visit. The reason why she’s so drawn to and utterly fascinated by Scrooge is that she’s Scrooge’s kindred spirit for lack of a better description. “Confidential Case Files” is the most significant episode so far for fleshing out this particular idea and Webby’s specific bonding-with-Uncle-Scrooge episode.

Viewers are treated to a fun James Bond parody, the official reveal and confirmation of Mrs. Beakley’s background as a spy, and direct focus on Scrooge and Webby’s dynamic. It’s fun to see Webby’s and Scrooge’s vie to rescue Mrs. Beakley compared/contrasted with the first time Scrooge teamed up with Agent 22. Webby naturally goes for similar conclusions and approaches to island threats that Scrooge originally had, but her actions are tempered by Beakley’s shrewd instincts. Scrooge and Webby’s team-up is a showcase for what kind of impact Beakley had on both of them: Scrooge tries to be more conscientious and responsible of his actions and Webby’s reckless adventuring spirit is teamed up with thorough training from Beakley. In short, Webby benefits greatly from having both Scrooge and Beakley as her mentors and guardians.

Scrooge and the triplets have been a driving force in Webby opening up and exploring how to be more comfortable her strange, eccentric self. When Scrooge acknowledges how important bonding with her is, it’s pretty much on-screen confirmation that Webby and Beakley are extended members of his family.

2.) "The Other Bin of Scrooge McDuck!"

Throughout the series, Lena kept trying to convince herself and her aunt Magica that she was just ‘using’ Webby and that she’s locked away all of her ‘weak’ emotions. But it was just lip service the entire time.

I’ve loved her character writing over the course of the entire first season. Viewers can see Lena’s struggle and empathize with how difficult it’d be to act against her aunt, but root her on that much more the bigger and more significant her defiance becomes. It starts with how ambiguous her reasons for saving Beakley were and grows into signs that she sincerely cares about her friendship with Webby, if not the McDuck family at large, when she uses her magic to destroy Magica’s money shark. Lena’s personal dilemma has been gaining her freedom vs the possibility of hurting someone completely innocent. Despite her position, when things get dire, Lena opts for the decision that helps/protects others from Magica.

Lena’s freedom was the most powerful incentive Magica had to keep the girl under her control. The nightmare is Lena’s bucket of cold water. It’s one thing for the McDucks to find out about how she was part of Magica’s plot, but the bigger realization is that Magica can and will hurt the people Lena cares about no matter what she does. Even worse, Lena was always just a tool for Magica and that if she can, Magica will use Lena to destroy the people Lena cares about and revel in it.

Watching Lena inadvertently destroy Webby permanently left a bigger impact than anything else Magica did. The build-up and execution of that scene, in addition to Lena’s relief at it all just being a dream, is hands-down one of the strongest scenes in this series. It’s satisfying to see Lena try to reach out to Scrooge for help. It adds to how fantastic a twist the Magica possession is and gives ample weight to how tragic Lena’s death is.

After “Shadow Wars,” I’m really hoping Lena returns at a later point in the series. While there’s a certain kind of narrative closure and gravity to the idea of Lena as Webby’s guardian spirit, the sappy part of me wants her to come back. I want the happy, fairytale ending of Scrooge adopting Lena, okay?

On a side note: It’s kind of interesting that plush doll Webby partly resembles her original character design from the 1987 DuckTales series. Maybe this scene could be interpreted as having a double meaning or something?

1.) "The Last Crash of the Sunchaser!"

This episode is an emotional gut-punch because of the ending montage. The entire season kept dropping bread crumbs about the missing Della subplot. As the story keeps building, it’s like a rubberband is slowly getting pulled to the point of snapping with Scrooge’s confession about the Spear of Selene. In the heat of the moment, the triplets directly blame Scrooge for losing their mom and old wounds are ripped open for Donald. It’s understandable why everyone is so emotional and the big fallout that follows. As if seeing the triplets’ hearts break wasn’t enough, viewers see Scrooge’s side of the story: He was getting used to the idea of having family join him on adventures, building the Spear was a gesture of goodwill and hopes for how grand future adventures would be, how everything went wrong when Della took off against his warnings, and how desperately he tried to get Della back home safely.

Losing Della broke and devastated Scrooge just as much as it did everyone else. Over the course of adventuring with his niece and nephew, he was starting to become more open-minded and open to others in general. He already took people under his wing if they had interesting ideas and rebellious ideas that stuck out to him, but even then, they were just colleagues or employees. Della and Donald started to convince him to consider others, family especially, as someone he could trust, confide in, and learn from just as much as he could teach them. Seeing Scrooge sink back down into that big arm chair was the dramatic climax of his character arc in this series; a weighty echo of this series’ fantastic take on the classic ‘curmudgeonly Scrooge’ story.

In short: This episode’s writing tugged at my heartstrings and made me feel things.

#ducktales 2017 #ducktales reboot #scrooge mcduck #webby #ducktales lena #ducktales della #favorite episodes list #top 5 list #top favorites list #favorites list

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liquidstar · 6 years

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finn!!!! tell us more about your ocs!! is amary (mightve gotten that wrong sorry) the main character? or are there several? or is it equally spread out? whats the first assignment the characters go on?? :o :o :o

I know this answer is SUPER late and I’m really sorry about that executive dysfunction has been kicking my ass but i still really wanted to answer!

Amary and Rue are the two main characters, though I guess Rue may be more of a deuteragonist due to the fact that her backstory isn’t really made clear until later on, for plot reasons and all. Plus the early story follows Amary to allow easier introduction to a huge cast through her eyes as the new girl. The “main four” and Amary, Rue, Sorrel, and Aloe having about equal importance, then it expands to the whole class of 16+Aster. It’s a bit hard juggling 17 characters at once and giving them all the same level of focus (aside from the main four which get some more focus but not a LOT), but what I like to do is sort of introduce stuff slowly. We’re introduced to Rue through Amary, Sorrel and Aloe through Rue, the rest of the class through the main four, and the other two classes by the main class. Plus all the characters being in close proximity all the time makes it very easy to insert interactions between characters, even if it’s just background stuff. It makes their relationships seem a lot more natural if it’s built on in the background or through small stuff even when the focus isn’t on them. The main class of 16 kids all get a LOT of focus, they all get to be in the spotlight at some point but all 16 character arcs and relationship arcs going on all at once so even when the spotlight ISN’T on them they’re not forgotten.

The first ever assignment mission that we actually get to see would be one with the main four, they’re pretty much at the center of everything after all! It would be a fairly simple one, all they have to do is deliver something! Across a monster-filled forest. They’re not expected to fight the monsters, in fact they’re encouraged not to since they’re only freshmen and only upperclassmen would be ready for stuff like that. But of course, things go wrong because of 1. Rue and Amary’s inability to get along, and 2. Sorrel’s getting kind of jealous about how well the new girl gets along with his crush. Aloe is pretty much the only one keeping the group together at that point so when stuff REALLY hits the fan and they’re in actual danger he gets to be the one to deliver the “pull your shit together and get along”-type speech. After that mission the ones we get to see are usually ones that follow Amary and 2 or 3 other students until she goes on one with every kid in the class, since we’re being introduced to them through the “new girl” point of view (of course in-between missions there will also be stories that just take place in school). The reason she goes on so many so quick is kind of explained as her needing to catch up to the others, but after she does the students picked to go on missions will be more “random”, so it could be anyone. I like that system better because it allows for more unique character team-ups and interactions, and it allows everyone to be in the spotlight for a bit. That’s also something that really helps with juggling a big cast like that!

#finn's ocs #ace-the-martyr #answered

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dispetal · 5 years

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every even number :^)

Boy oh boy – here we go! Under cut, ‘cause it gets LONG.

PHYSICAL PRESENCE AND GESTURE.2. How much physical space do they use, active and at rest?

Oh, Ruby usually uses all the space around her. She’s very sporadic and will use up all the space around her because it’s hard for her to stand still (it’s the good good ADHD). At rest she’ll still tend to use up her space in small ways, she has to constantly be moving and doing things with her hands.

4. What is their size and build? How does it influence how they use their body, if it does?

She’s relatively small - 5′2″ - and I headcanon her as a little rounder than the series portrays her as? Like, she’s toned but still has chubby cheeks and chubby upper arms and a little bit of tummy. She’s round. Because she’s not nearly as good at hand to hand combat as, say, Yang, she’s a little softer and a little more weak, especially in her core. ( She’s not entirely dependent on her weapon, but she’s mostly dependent on it! )

6. What are they like in motion–in different environments, and in different activities? What causes the differences between these?

Fast. She’s speedy quick, like, all the time. As mentioned earlier, she has to be moving constantly or doing something to keep her mind stimulated. The only times she really isn’t moving a lot is when she’s over exerted herself, so say, after battles and stuff.

8. Where and when do they seem most and least at ease? Why? How can you tell?

Ooh! This is easy! This comes in two parts. For one: she’s most at ease around the people she loves, normally when relaxing. Like, if she’s playing video games with Yang and Qrow, or if she’s hanging out with RNJR or RWBY just chilling. Alternatively, she’s most at ease when she knows she’s got a battle or fight. When she’s fighting, she’s in her element. Oddly enough, she’s also least at ease when she’s fighting a fight she doesn’t know how to win – or if she’s doing something she doesn’t know how to do. She’s not exactly comfortable in social situations, especially ones that have a lot of sarcasm.

10. What energizes and drains them most?

Motivation and lack of motivation. That good ol Hyperfixation™ feeling. She grapples with executive dysfunction quite often when it’s something she doesn’t particularly care about. ( Classes at Beacon were particularly hard because of this, it wasn’t that she didn’t want to learn, it’s that sometimes her brain wouldn’t let her learn ).

12. How are they bodily expressive? How do they use nonverbal cues such as their posture, stance, eyes, eyebrows, mouths, and hands?

As mentioned before, she’s Everywhere. Her hands are always fiddling with something or playing with the hem of her “combat skirt” and she’s also prone to looking around. Her mind wonders so it takes her a while to really focus in unless it’s something she’s hyperfixated on.

DISPOSITION AND TEMPERAMENT.14. What do they care deeply about? What kind of loyalties, commitments, moral codes, life philosophies, passions, callings, or spirituality and faith do they have? How do these tend to be expressed?

She has a strong sense of morality and she cares deeply about helping the people who can’t be helped. She’s got an almost romanticized view of being a huntress – at least at the beginning – and would do anything to become one and serve justice in a way she sees fit. She grew up with all of the fairy tales and stories told to her by her family and that imbued a sense of almost childlike wonder in her. She is willing to lend a hand and gives second chances because she believes in the inherent good in people and that it can be accessed even if tedious. That, however, also makes her hard to deal with because she’s stubborn. She’s optimistic ( read more about that here ) but that also goes to her detriment as well. As far as passions and callings go, easily – EASILY her biggest passion / calling is being a huntress. Spirituality works a bit different for her, the beliefs that she holds are more in people than incorporeal beings. In this, though, her love of fairy tales can also be considered a belief of some kind or a spirituality / faith at its core. The fairy tales and legends she grew up on had become a sort of faith to her. She revered the heroes in the stories and wanted to lead by their example – ergo, a following.

16. Do they dream? What are those dreams like?

She does dream, but the dreams vary. Lately she’s had more nightmares than real dreams but rarely addresses them, they’re all of her friends dying or the worst possible scenario. When she was a kid she used to have dreams about her mother or her family reuniting or her becoming a huntress as an older girl. Now, her dreams are less dreams and more nightmares, her past and passed friends all in shambling corpses, telling her how little she did to save them – that she could’ve done more. That’s why she wakes early. That’s why she likes being awake. Not because she doesn’t get tired – it’s because she doesn’t want to dream. Not anymore. She’d much prefer to be awake.

18. What kind of person could they become in the future? What are some developmental paths that they could take, (best, worst, most likely?) what would cause them to come to pass, and what consequences might they have? What paths would you especially like to see, and why?

Ooh, interesting question! I think the most likely path is for her to realize the err of her coping mechanisms and get help with the help of her team. Bad end though, is something I’d want to see. Bad end Ruby would probably break ( because of the loss of another party member – more than likely Qrow or anyone from RWBY though at this point it could be ANY one of her friends ) and the silver eyes would end up doing more harm than good. Salem could brainwash her and use her as a minion. There are millions of ways she could get corrupted and I’m interested in exploring them, but I’m also interested in exploring one where she admits to her faults and gets help. I’d like to see Ruby put herself first for once.

CONNECTIONS WITH OTHERS.20. What kind of individual relationships do they have with others, and how do they behave in them? How are they different between intimate relationships like friends, family, and lovers versus more impersonal relationships?

Oh boy, that’d have to be a post for another time, because I could go into every single interaction she has. I’ll keep this one broad though and say she’s pretty easy to get along with and pretty easy to make friends with. She’s always looking for new friends and new opportunities to talk to people. She’s very curious and invested in the people she likes! More intimate relationships will see different sides of her but most see her as the cheery girl she presents as – the girl who wants to help others out. She also forms personal relationships but they’re all based from a very real and pure heart that loves to make friends.

22. How do people respond to them, and why might these responses differ?

There are people who think Ruby’s Too Much All Of The Time because of her bouncy / plucky / optimistic nature. She’s also very loud – it’s hard for her to control her volume and sometimes more difficult to read social cues which can kind of put people off. But, most of the time, they see her as an open, cheery girl who loves people, and sometimes that pisses people off. She’s a good person though, at heart, and that draws people in.

24. How do they present themselves socially? What distinguishes their “persona” from their “true self”, and what causes that difference?

Oof. This is a good one. She presents herself, as mentioned above, as a bubbly, optimistic, loud, fun-loving person. In actuality, she’s very sad. She’s very sad and developed several unhealthy coping mechanisms that from the outside look totally healthy. Whereas Qrow depends on cynicism and alcoholism as his way to deal with grief, Ruby does the opposite. She relies on optimism and hope in an unhealthy way. ( Sidenote: she also eats a lot out of a way to deal with her grief: fun fact ). Not many people – if anyone – have seen the really sad part of her because she’s repressed it so far. What she doesn’t realize is sadness when repressed often leads to anger unprompted. She’s repressed enough at this point to get very, very angry at another, and that’s horrifying to think about.

26. How do they view and feel about relationships, and how might this manifest in how they handle them, if it does?

She’s “open” with relationships. In that she’s totally okay with the other person being open and she’s very warm and welcoming and excitable, but she puts most of if not all of her focus into that other person and how they feel in the relationship. Romantically, she isn’t actively looking for a partner, though she wouldn’t mind one. ( I will say, I doubt that her having a partner at this time is healthy. ) It’s hard for her to read people so the person who has the crush would have to straight up say “hey, let’s date” because otherwise it’s a lost cause. Usually she’s very flattered even if the feelings aren’t returned! Someone having a crush never ruins a friendship for her.

ACTIVITIES AND PREFERENCES.28. What are they likely to do if they have the opportunity, resources, and time to accomplish it? Why?

Anything, if she really wants to. She’s a determined person.

30. What is their preferred level of activity and stimulation? How do they cope if they get either too little or too much?

Ooh! She’s got a lot of activity needed but if it’s unprompted and sudden it can trigger a sensory overload. Large crowds make her uncomfortable for that reason. She can be around people but only really when she’s prepared herself to do so. Even then, it can be hard for her. Stimming helps with that! Her most common stims are spreading her hands out, hands flapping, or playing with something in her hands! Tapping also helps.

32. Do they have any “props” that are a significant part of their life, identity, activities, or self-presentation somehow? What are they, how are they used, and why are they so significant? How would these props’ absence impact them, how would they compensate, and why?

Other than the obvious being crescent rose, her cape is symbolic as hell. I’m gonna get into that in a separate post.

THINKING AND LEARNING.34. How do they understand the world–what kind of worldview and thought processes do they have? Why?

I think I’ve pretty much already answered this one? Check 14 again. ( I will go into her opinion on Faunus rights -- spoiler, she’s completely for them -- later. )

36. How much do they rely on their minds and intellect, versus other approaches like relying on instinct, intuition, faith and spirituality, or emotions? What is their opinion on this?

Emotions, emotions, emotions. She is lead by her heart almost completely. Sometimes she’s prone to thinking things out rationally but most of the time? She’s all heart bapey. She doesn’t mind people thinking logically but sometimes she wonders why people don’t listen to their hearts more, unaware that it can be as harmful as it can be good.

38. Is there anything they wish they could change about their worldview or thought processes? What, and why?

I think if she totally snapped that could all change but it’d take quite a lot of time to get that way.

40. What do they wonder about? What sparks their curiosity and imagination, and why? How is this expressed, if it is?

Everything! She’s a very curious girl and asks a lot of questions! It’s not because she’s completely unaware but more that she’s totally interested in the things around her. It doesn’t take much to spark curiosity and imagination but things like semblances or fighting styles are things that pique her curiosity.

#soultimed #hc.

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