#I agree with most of the criticisms about his personality becoming more 'dull' and boring in the later games

[prowerprojects]

Ok.

So, I've been thinking for this for quite a while. The Metal Virus. Or more so, Tails. Tails lost the cure for The Metal Virus, the thing everyone was counting on him for.

And now Sonic Frontiers, blaming himself for everything, being a burden to everyone.

Sonic Prime, Tails hiding his needs and wants from Sonic.

Would we say that Tails is going through some sort of anxiety or depression of his childhood trauma???

I think he's just going though childhood trauma period haha DX

But in a way, yeah. In the comics, it's hard to know what Tails thinks. He doesn't really get introspective moments unlike a lot of other characters. Maybe like a panel or two to show that he's still alive and has feelings, but nothing that would really get into him.

In Prime he also has like 3 minutes of screentime.

In the games... yeah. I've been saying that he's been in a downward spiral since Colors. And then it just kinda kept getting worse and worse. In Colors (this isn't really supported by the text of the game), it feels like Sonic and Tails are going on an adventure together like the old times, and Tails blows it. He opts to work on the translator instead of fighting, and then Sonic makes a quip about it, and while I don't think it really got to him at the moment, it might have felt worse looking back at it. Then he also gets mindcontrolled, which probably puts Sonic on edge so he pushes him out of the final battle, (when Tails is finally ready to fight).

And you can see Tails is still smarting from it in Lost World. (I did skip over Generations, but it doesn't really go into Tails. Plus, it's Sonic's birthday) His insecurity is turned up to eleven. He keeps talking himself up, trying to prove himself, and reacts very strongly when he thinks Sonic doesn't find him reliable, but in the end he kinda does manage to prove himself so it's all fine, right?

But then Forces comes in and it's like. You are unreliable. You did cause Sonic's death. You did run away instead of stepping up to protect the world afterwards. (He does step up later on but you can see in Frontiers that the initial events still deeply affect him).

It's not just Frontiers, it's all been building up. (But also kinda weird because Tails needs support, not go off on his own. Well maybe it'll help him clear his head. It is still good to take a break from Sonic specifically, because lately he's been basing too much of his self-worth on his opinion, so Sonic can't really help here no matter how hard he tries.)

So yeah I do definitely think Tails is going through some things if you look at it from the in-universe perspective. Though I don't think the writers meant to write it that way, it just kinda happened.

[cuntylouis]

I'm getting tired of hearing the sentiment that Louis doesn't care about Armand's trauma or have any sympathy for him. In the museum scene his expressions and body language were almost exactly similar to the scenes where Claudia and Lestat talk about their respective assaults. And in all these scenes he's mostly quiet. So does it mean Louis doesn't care about Claudia's or Lestat's traumas either? Of course not. It's just how he outwardly reacts in situations like this. He tends to shut down and doesn't know how to express his empathy and distress. Dreamstat represents Louis' hidden thoughts, but at the museum he's actually next to Louis listening quietly for the most of the scene. It's only at the end when Armand compares Marius, Magnus and Lestat to each other that dreamstat reacts angrily. And it's not mocking what happened to Armand, it's a manifestation of Louis' discomfort, him fearing that he's being manipulated and being uncomfortable that Lestat is brought up and that his relationship with Lestat is compared to Armand and Lestat's disturbing relationships with their own makers.

What Louis says to Armand in San Francisco is incredibly cruel. He's on drugs and extremely upset and intentionally trying come up with the most hurtful words he can think of, they both are. He very obviously deeply regrets it later. When he wakes up after the sun scene and remembers what he did and what kind of things he said before it he's ashamed and distressed. He's crying (though partially because of pain) and immediately tries to apologize to Armand and reach out for him. He's not angry when Armand leaves him in pain, probably thinking that he deserves it. When Armand later says "after what you put me through here i deserve this" Louis agrees. That's not someone who doesn't care or have empathy.

As often with Louis, i think the things he says to Armand are as much about Louis himself as they're about Armand. He sees himself in Daniel, and his entire speech to Claudia in 2.01 is directed also at himself, and he's projecting his own self-hatred and insecurities onto Armand. Louis fears that he is boring and dull. His husband repeatedly cheated on him and laughed in his face when Louis asked isn't he enough. During his depression years Lestat complained about Louis just reading and not leaving the house and how he was drawing Lestat into his gloom. He felt his sister-daughter was more interested in the theater and the coven than spending time with him. The coven mocked him and his passions and didn't find him that interesting after he stopped being a novelty. He was told that he didn't have much artistic talent. In the 70s his life seems to be repetitive and meaningless.

Louis subconsciously detests the qualities he recognizes in Armand that he recognizes and detests in himself - including being a victim. The interview was interrupted when Daniel criticized Louis for going back to Lestat and for his passivity and suicidal ideation. When he's fighting with Armand that all is on his mind. What he says about Armand's "daddy vampire grooming him into a little bitch" actually brings to my mind such scenes as how he derisively said in the second interview that he had become an unhappy housewife living with Lestat, and how dreamstat called him a "little whore". The shame of having experienced abuse and all the feelings of emasculation and degradation that came with it have never left him. Even in the second interview Louis firmly says to Daniel that he doesn't consider himself abused and that he isn't a victim. I don't think Louis consciously thinks that being abused makes someone a bad or weak person, but on some subconsious level he probably feels like that - at least if it's about himself. Again, in this same episode we see Louis acting like he deserves how Armand treats him after their fight and his suicide attempt

[arcticdementor]

Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart.

DeBoer starts with the standard narrative of The Failing State Of American Education. Students aren't learning. The country is falling behind. Only tough no-excuses policies, standardization, and innovative reforms like charter schools can save it, as shown by their stellar performance improving test scores and graduation rates.

He argues that every word of it is a lie. American education isn't getting worse by absolute standards: students match or outperform their peers from 20 or 50 years ago. It's not getting worse by international standards: America's PISA rankings are mediocre, but the country has always scored near the bottom of international rankings, even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon. Race and gender gaps are stable or decreasing. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood.

…

For decades, politicians of both parties have thought of education as "the great leveller" and the key to solving poverty. If people are stuck in boring McJobs, it's because they're not well-educated enough to be surgeons and rocket scientists. Give them the education they need, and they can join the knowledge economy and rise into the upper-middle class. For lack of any better politically-palatable way to solve poverty, this has kind of become a totem: get better schools, and all those unemployed Appalachian coal miners can move to Silicon Valley and start tech companies. But you can't do that. Not everyone is intellectually capable of doing a high-paying knowledge economy job. Schools can change your intellectual potential a limited amount. Ending child hunger, removing lead from the environment, and similar humanitarian programs can do a little more, but only a little. In the end, a lot of people aren't going to make it.

So what can you do? DeBoer doesn't think there's an answer within the existing system. Instead, we need to dismantle meritocracy.

DeBoer is skeptical of "equality of opportunity". Even if you solve racism, sexism, poverty, and many other things that DeBoer repeatedly reminds us have not been solved, you'll just get people succeeding or failing based on natural talent. DeBoer agrees conservatives can be satisfied with this, but thinks leftists shouldn't be. Natural talent is just as unearned as class, race, or any other unfair advantage.

One one level, the titular Cult Of Smart is just the belief that enough education can solve any problem. But more fundamentally it's also the troubling belief that after we jettison unfair theories of superiority based on skin color, sex, and whatever else, we're finally left with what really determines your value as a human being - how smart you are. DeBoer recalls hearing an immigrant mother proudly describe her older kid's achievements in math, science, etc, "and then her younger son ran by, and she said, offhand, 'This one, he is maybe not so smart.'" DeBoer was originally shocked to hear someone describe her own son that way, then realized that he wouldn't have thought twice if she'd dismissed him as unathletic, or bad at music. Intelligence is considered such a basic measure of human worth that to dismiss someone as unintelligent seems like consigning them into the outer darkness. So DeBoer describes how early readers of his book were scandalized by the insistence on genetic differences in intelligence - isn't this denying the equality of Man, declaring some people inherently superior to others? Only if you conflate intelligence with worth, which DeBoer argues our society does constantly. It starts with parents buying Baby Einstein tapes and trying to send their kids to the best preschool, continues through the "meat grinder" of the college admissions process when everyone knows that whoever gets into Harvard is better than whoever gets into State U, and continues when the meritocracy rewards the straight-A Harvard student with a high-paying powerful job and the high school dropout with drudgery or unemployment. Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".

DeBoer isn't convinced this is an honest mistake. He draws attention to a sort of meta-class-war - a war among class warriors over whether the true enemy is the top 1% (this is the majority position) or the top 20% (this is DeBoer's position; if you've read Staying Classy, you'll immediately recognize this disagreement as the same one that divided the Church and UR models of class). The 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world; the 20% are the "managerial" class of well-off urban professionals, bureaucrats, creative types, and other mandarins. Opposition to the 20% is usually right-coded; describe them as "woke coastal elites who dominate academia and the media", and the Trump campaign ad almost writes itself. But some Marxists flirt with it too; the book references Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's Theory Of The Aspirational Class, and you can hear echoes of this every time Twitter socialists criticize "Vox liberals" or something. Access to the 20% is gated by college degree, and their legitimizing myth is that their education makes them more qualified and humane than the rest of us. DeBoer thinks the deification of school-achievement-compatible intelligence as highest good serves their class interest; "equality of opportunity" means we should ignore all other human distinctions in favor of the one that our ruling class happens to excel at.

So maybe equality of opportunity is a stupid goal. DeBoer argues for equality of results. This is a pretty extreme demand, but he's a Marxist and he means what he says. He wants a world where smart people and dull people have equally comfortable lives, and where intelligence can take its rightful place as one of many virtues which are nice to have but not the sole measure of your worth.

…

I'm Freddie's ideological enemy, which means I have to respect him. And there's a lot to like about this book. I think its two major theses - that intelligence is mostly innate, and that this is incompatible with equating it to human value - are true, important, and poorly appreciated by the general population. I tried to make a somewhat similar argument in my Parable Of The Talents, which DeBoer graciously quotes in his introduction. Some of the book's peripheral theses - that a lot of education science is based on fraud, that US schools are not declining in quality, etc - are also true, fascinating, and worth spreading. Overall, I think this book does more good than harm.

It's also rambling, self-contradictory in places, and contains a lot of arguments I think are misguided or bizarre.

…

At the time, I noted that meritocracy has nothing to do with this. The intuition behind meritocracy is: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.

The above does away with any notions of "desert", but I worry it's still accepting too many of DeBoer's assumptions. A better description might be: Your life depends on a difficult surgery. You can hire whatever surgeon you want to perform it. You are willing to pay more money for a surgeon who aced medical school than for a surgeon who failed it. So higher intelligence leads to more money.

This not only does away with "desert", but also with reified Society deciding who should prosper. More meritorious surgeons get richer not because "Society" has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn't an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.

…

I think DeBoer would argue he's not against improving schools. He just thinks all attempts to do it so far have been crooks and liars pillaging the commons, so much so that we need a moratorium on this kind of thing until we can figure out what's going on. But I'm worried that his arguments against existing school reform are in some cases kind of weak.

DeBoer does make things hard for himself by focusing on two of the most successful charter school experiments. If he'd been a little less honest, he could have passed over these and instead mentioned the many charter schools that fail, or just sort of plod onward doing about as well as public schools do. I think the closest thing to a consensus right now is that most charter schools do about the same as public schools for white/advantaged students, and slightly better than public schools for minority/disadvantaged students. But DeBoer very virtuously thinks it's important to confront his opponents' strongest cases, so these are the ones I'll focus on here.

…

These are good points, and I would accept them from anyone other than DeBoer, who will go on to say in a few chapters that the solution to our education issues is a Marxist revolution that overthrows capitalism and dispenses with the very concept of economic value. If he's willing to accept a massive overhaul of everything, that's failed every time it's tried, why not accept a much smaller overhaul-of-everything, that's succeeded at least once? There are plenty of billionaires willing to pour fortunes into reforming various cities - DeBoer will go on to criticize them as deluded do-gooders a few chapters later. If billions of dollars plus a serious commitment to ground-up reform are what we need, let's just spend billions of dollars and have a serious commitment to ground-up reform! If more hurricanes is what it takes to fix education, I'm willing to do my part by leaving my air conditioner on 'high' all the time.

…

DeBoer spends several impassioned sections explaining how opposed he is to scientific racism, and arguing that the belief that individual-level IQ differences are partly genetic doesn't imply a belief that group-level IQ differences are partly genetic. Some reviewers of this book are still suspicious, wondering if he might be hiding his real position. I can assure you he is not. Seriously, he talks about how much he hates belief in genetic group-level IQ differences about thirty times per page. Also, sometimes when I write posts about race, he sends me angry emails ranting about how much he hates that some people believe in genetic group-level IQ differences - totally private emails nobody else will ever see. I have no reason to doubt that his hatred of this is as deep as he claims.

But I understand why some reviewers aren't convinced. This book can't stop tripping over itself when it tries to discuss these topics. DeBoer grants X, he grants X -> Y, then goes on ten-page rants about how absolutely loathsome and abominable anyone who believes Y is.

Remember, one of the theses of this book is that individual differences in intelligence are mostly genetic. But DeBoer spends only a little time citing the studies that prove this is true. He (correctly) decides that most of his readers will object not on the scientific ground that they haven't seen enough studies, but on the moral ground that this seems to challenge the basic equality of humankind. He (correctly) points out that this is balderdash, that innate differences in intelligence don't imply differences in moral value, any more than innate differences in height or athletic ability or anything like that imply differences in moral value. His goal is not just to convince you about the science, but to convince you that you can believe the science and still be an okay person who respects everyone and wants them to be happy.

He could have written a chapter about race that reinforced this message. He could have reviewed studies about whether racial differences in intelligence are genetic or environmental, come to some conclusion or not, but emphasized that it doesn't matter, and even if it's 100% genetic it has no bearing at all on the need for racial equality and racial justice, that one race having a slightly higher IQ than another doesn't make them "superior" any more than Pygmies' genetic short stature makes them "inferior".

Instead he - well, I'm not really sure what he's doing. He starts by says racial differences must be environmental. Then he says that studies have shown that racial IQ gaps are not due to differences in income/poverty, because the gaps remain even after controlling for these. But, he says, there could be other environmental factors aside from poverty that cause racial IQ gaps. After tossing out some possibilities, he concludes that he doesn't really need to be able to identify a plausible mechanism, because "white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it's irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it", no matter how many studies we do or how many confounders we eliminate. His argument, as far as I can tell, is that it's always possible that racial IQ differences are environmental, therefore they must be environmental. Then he goes on to, at great length, denounce as loathsome and villainous anyone who might suspect these gaps of being genetic. Such people are "noxious", "bigoted", "ugly", "pseudoscientific" "bad people" who peddle "propaganda" to "advance their racist and sexist agenda". (But tell us what you really think!)

…

This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.

…

That last sentence about the basic principle is the thesis of The Cult Of Smart, so it would have been a reasonable position for DeBoer to take too. DeBoer doesn't take it. He acknowledges the existence of expert scientists who believe the differences are genetic (he names Linda Gottfredson in particular), but only to condemn them as morally flawed for asserting this.

But this is exactly the worldview he is, at this very moment, trying to write a book arguing against! His thesis is that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among individuals, because that would make some people fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - but those voices are wrong, because differences in intelligence don't affect moral equality. Then he adds that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among ethnic groups, because that would make some groups fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - and those voices are right; we must deny the differences lest we accept the morally repugnant thing.

Normally I would cut DeBoer some slack and assume this was some kind of Straussian manuever he needed to do to get the book published, or to prevent giving ammunition to bad people. But no, he has definitely believed this for years, consistently, even while being willing to offend basically anybody about basically anything else at any time. So I'm convinced this is his true belief. I'm just not sure how he squares it with the rest of his book.

…

"Smart" equivocates over two concepts - high-IQ and successful-at-formal-education. These concepts are related; in general, high-IQ people get better grades, graduate from better colleges, etc. But they're not exactly the same.

There is a cult of successful-at-formal-education. Society obsesses over how important formal education is, how it can do anything, how it's going to save the world. If you get gold stars on your homework, become the teacher's pet, earn good grades in high school, and get into an Ivy League, the world will love you for it.

But the opposite is true of high-IQ. Society obsessively denies that IQ can possibly matter. Admit to being a member of Mensa, and you'll get a fusillade of "IQ is just a number!" and "people who care about their IQ are just overcompensating for never succeeding at anything real!" and "IQ doesn't matter, what about emotional IQ or grit or whatever else, huh? Bet you didn't think of that!" Science writers and Psychology Today columnists vomit out a steady stream of bizarre attempts to deny the statistical validity of IQ.

These are two sides of the same phenomenon. Some people are smarter than others as adults, and the more you deny innate ability, the more weight you have to put on education. Society wants to put a lot of weight on formal education, and compensates by denying innate ability a lot. DeBoer is aware of this and his book argues against it adeptly.

Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true. But I guess The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education sounds less snappy, so whatever.

…

I try to review books in an unbiased way, without letting myself succumb to fits of emotion. So be warned: I'm going to fail with this one. I am going to get angry and write whole sentences in capital letters. This is one of the most enraging passages I've ever read.

School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the "Burrito Test" - if a place won't let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it's an institution. Doesn't matter if the name is "Center For Flourishing" or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs - if it doesn't pass the Burrito Test, it's an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.

I don't like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them - people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT SENDING PEOPLE TO SCHOOL FOR THE SAME REASON.

I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists' case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There's the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can't drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids' parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.

I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it's perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.

School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of vital social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn't, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.

If I have children, I hope to be able to homeschool them. But if I can't homeschool them, I am incredibly grateful that the option exists to send them to a charter school that might not have all of these problems. I'm not as impressed with Montessori schools as some of my friends are, but at least as far as I can tell they let kids wander around free-range, and don't make them use bathroom passes. DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time.

When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn't want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the "neoliberal reformers" (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be.

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!

[chrysalispen]

lycoris (minor divergence AU, 5.0 spoilers)

in response to the prompt “what if Hythlodaeus had accepted the title of emet-selch, and the WoL instead met Hades?”

I wrote this in three days (mostly while heavily drugged LMAO) so it’s not.... my best work ever but I like it for what it is. Fic is beneath the cut.

=======================

Nestled within a seemingly fathomless expanse amidst the fringes of the western seas, the Tempest is not exactly what one would call a comforting locale. Its depths are rife with sailor's tales: stories of sirens and storms and ships called to their deaths, even in the days before the Flood brought deadlier creatures to Kholusia's shores.

For a creature like Emet-Selch, a man relegated to furthering his god's work within the myriad hidden places of the Source and its reflections for long years, it will do.

Of course, his choice of abode upon the First is not wholly based upon sentimentality. Sometimes he fancies he has all but forgotten what it is like for the touch of light not to sting his skin; he can bear it when he must but sees little point in deliberately exposing himself to discomfort.

Amber eyes track the rippling ribbons of refracted light that shimmer several fulms overhead, fingers of stark white softened into a glow by the water like knives dulled from use. It is just enough that the seafloor wherein he has rebuilt his most abiding memory does not lie completely shrouded in the darkness of the trench. By its dim illumination does Emet-Selch study the skyline he has built with the critical lens of a master sculptor, seeking any perceived flaws and carefully setting any misgivings aside. For better or worse, the die is cast and his choices made. This final act of creation: completed.

It wants now only for a single soul to darken its doorsteps.

~*~

She is glad to have parted ways with the others briefly, even for investigation's sake.

Although not inclined to lie by nature, she is nonetheless quite aware that her condition has deteriorated farther than any of the other Scions are like to have realized. The corona of light that had flickered at the periphery of her vision has all but overtaken her sight. Blinding white and gold accompanies the pain in her stiffening limbs which has been a constant companion since awakening in the Crystarium.

She pushes herself to a sitting position, then with a supreme act of will regains her feet. Her stance wobbles- perilously close to overcorrecting- but with time and care she is able to keep her balance, and in short order, the Warrior of Darkness finds herself once more stumbling down the vast and near-empty paved streets of an alien city: a city populated only with a single man’s memories of the dead. It is a lonely, lonely path. But that loneliness carries, in itself, a sort of bleak comfort.

Wandering up and down the paved streets of Amaurot’s neat, gridlike layout- or at least the bits that fit into the ocean trench with such suspicious seamlessness- she does not realize her feet have carried her off the beaten path until a bone-deep fatigue gives her cause to grip the cool metal of a fancifully wrought archway for support.

There is, to her surprise, still beauty to be found in this place upon further inspection. The public park she has stumbled upon is a welcome sight and a well-appointed affair at that. Mazes of green painstakingly curated and compelled into obeisance, framing the abstraction of metal sculpture. Flowers of every conceivable color, tall and comfortable-looking trees planted for shade as well as aesthetic.

For the first time since they had rounded the continental shelf and glimpsed the tall spires rising like bony fingers from the darkest depths of the ocean trench, the Warrior feels calm. Something about this place imparts a certain measure of serenity. There is a particular sort of love that has gone into its recreation, a love that is very nearly tangible.

And, somehow, also very familiar.

Fingers trailing through hawthorn and salvia- and a good dozen varieties of flowers her eyes have never seen, on the Source or elsewhere- she meanders in an aimless amble, plagued not only by the Light leaking into her vision but also the feeling that she is searching for something indefinable.

The massive tree in the center of the park brings her to a halt.

There is no other of its kind to be seen anywhere nearby. It stands aloof from the other greenery, silent and ancient and proud--its boughs bent, upon closer inspection, with the weight of many years--much like a certain Ascian of her acquaintance. The Warrior of Darkness finds herself drawn to it in a way that defies understanding.

Gently she reaches for the tree and places one palm upon its enormous trunk. Caresses the roughness of its bark with her fingertips--

-----Mortal agony warps its way through her bones and the sound of fracturing glass rings in her ears as the Light surges.

Biting back a cry of agony she convulses around it, crumpling to the ground, head in her twitching hands as the pain becomes her world. Amaurot fades, distant and unimportant, into her periphery, and upon her tongue, she tastes copper and ozone.

No no no no, not here, not now, not like this--

*I beg your pardon? That’s my tree.*

The resonant chime of the ancients’ tongue, edged with just the slightest hint of annoyance, pierces the cacophony of ravenous hunger and the spasms of her limbs so thoroughly that she… is distracted.

The pain fades and her vision, nearly white, is almost clear.

The figure is as indistinct as all the others -- tall, translucent, almost intimidating -- but something about this one is different. The other shades she has encountered acknowledged her only in the broadest of senses, treating her more as an interruption to the tasks they were set, rather like watching worker mammets forced to move aside an obstacle.

No, this shade seems more present than the others somehow. She can feel something more substantial behind the black holes of the mask peering down at her- something, that is, beyond initial surprise and a sort of mild, rather tolerant annoyance.

“It’s a very large tree,” she manages a weak smile and pats a bottom-sized dip in the root system at her side. “I think there should be plenty of room for both of us.”

The shade tilts its chin to one side, almost like a bird. She fancies she can feel the weight of a stare upon her, silently judging her appearance alongside her words-- but at length, it sits, albeit with abrupt movements that lack the artless grace she had observed among the other figures.

For a long time, they do not speak but simply accept each other’s company with varying degrees of amiability. The Warrior looks out upon the streets beyond the hedges and watches the blurred outlines of the city's shades going about what she can only assume would have once been their daily business, although a keen eye would note that there is not much change in their behavior over time. They are in a perpetual loop of the same discussions, the same paths, the same tasks, over and over.

At length, she hears the soft chiming once more, the words unfolding within her mind in the same instant. Terribly polite of Emet-Selch, she thinks with a hysterical sort of good humor, to at least provide a means of translating his people’s speech.

*So, you've come from out of time - apropos, all things considered. I don’t believe I’ve seen you before,* the shade muses. *...Not in this form, at least.*

The statement is as confusing as it is disarming.

“This… form?” she echoes, but her only answer is another question.

*You’ve come to see Emet-Selch, I take it?*

She tenses. That is all the answer that seems to be necessary.

*Ah.* With a noise that seems to translate as a laboring sigh, the shade’s cowled head comes to rest against the tree trunk. *Your timing is unfortunate. The city is deep in preparations to face the Doom. You’ll be lucky to see him before all is said and done.*

“So I’ve heard.” There is no change in what she can see of the giant’s expression, but she can sense that it was the expected response. “...If I may ask, how did you know I was here to see Emet-Selch?”

*Oh, come now, you needn’t worry about me,* the shade shrugs. *I’m not really here, you know. Well, I’m here but I’m not -present,- as it were. Nor are any of these others.*

“Are you... I mean, you’re not a spirit, are you?”

*Am I to assume you mean a wandering soul? Certainly not. We’re all just memories; naught of real substance, I’m afraid.* An amused titter as the shade stretches, catlike, before rolling its head towards her. *This is an Amaurot upon which the Doom has yet to descend- if it ever does.*

She leans forward and wraps her arms about her knees, hugging them to her chest. The only person - so to speak - in the entire city that actually seems capable of a real conversation and she has no real idea what to ask.

Might as well start with the pleasantries. “What’s your name?”

The black sockets of the mask seem to bore through her flesh and straight into her soul, and although it should make no difference she feels strangely exposed. *...Asking the important questions at last, are we? You can call me Hades. Don’t bother asking any of these others; they’d not be able to give an answer at all.*

“None of the others can really talk about anything beyond superficial matters,” she agreed. “Though I’m curious as to what makes you different. You certainly look the same as they do.”

*Knowing Emet-Selch, he likely had me on the mind while he was creating this overwrought simulacrum of his.* One large hand lifts in a lazy, flippant, and startlingly familiar wave before tucking itself behind Hades’ head. *He always was tediously sentimental. Although I suppose I should be flattered.*

“I’m not sure I follow.”

*Doubtless he thought I would see through the illusion--my sight pales in comparison to his, mind you. But he would know that. We were good friends once, he and I.* A familiar, rueful half-smile tilts the shade's lips. *Although I am no less ephemeral than anything else he’s summoned from his memory. I assume he told you what happened?*

“After a fashion, yes.” She plucks at a blade of grass. “He spoke of a calamity, and how the brightest of his number - yours, that is - came together to summon Zodiark.”

*Not the most accurate summary, in truth, but I suppose it will suffice,* Hades sniffs.

The Warrior listens, with all of the patience for which she is so famous upon the Source, as he speaks. The burning pain of the Light is almost nonexistent in this odd man's presence, and that alone is sweet comfort.

Emet-Selch must have thought highly of this Hades. He is wholly unlike the kind and gentle giants seeming content to drift through empty streets, unaware of the fate that awaits them; he recounts the Ascian’s lecture with an air that could be generously termed sardonic: brusque and laden with quipped observations about how ‘tiresome’ the other man could be, yet in a way that makes obvious their long years of acquaintance. Affection lies just beneath his exasperation, and she finds herself warming to Hades quickly, sour as he seems.

He is blunt-tongued and eccentric, but still kind in his way. She cannot help but like him.

*Needless to say, there were those who didn’t take kindly to the suggestion that we ought to continue sacrificing souls to Zodiark’s appetites, and felt that we ought to make our peace with the new lives we’d created. They summoned Hydaelyn to counter Him. So for the first time in anyone’s memory, we were divided on our course of action---*

“And you fought,” she says, sadly. Sorrow burns in her breast for this man and his fellows, a gentle people who had never known strife if Emet-Selch were to be believed. “He told me.”

*Then you know how it ends.* Hades’ smile fades, and though she half-expects another testy remark, there is none forthcoming. The shade's head shakes slowly, side to side. *So he continues to labor in Zodiark’s name, then.*

“Not for any lack of attempts to thwart him, I assure you.”

*Don't apologize. I should hardly expect otherwise. He’s an obstinate ass,* Hades says flatly, *and that’s only one of his many flaws. Though I imagine it serves him well in this regard-- if none other.*

Despite herself, she laughs.

“I would say it doesn’t even begin to describe him. You can’t imagine-- well, no, I guess you can if you knew him well. Although…”

*Although...?*

She stares at her hands, only able to see a blinding white outline, and does not answer. She does not trust herself to answer.

Sometimes I see a glimpse of a kinder, gentler man, beneath it all. And now- now I find myself mourning the loss of a person I never knew.

If he senses her hesitation, he gives no outward indication of it.

*I’m sure he still intends to carry out his plan.* His eyes might be hidden in the depths of that mask, but she doesn’t need to see them. There is a certain degree of sorrow in his words, blunt as they are. *Mind you, he can commit all manner of cruelties when it suits him to do so now, but he was very different once. Friendly. Compassionate. Very willing to admit his mistakes and seek counsel where warranted. He would take the burdens of other souls upon his own shoulders without a second thought if he felt his aid necessary. Occasionally I found him infuriating, but always he had the purest of intentions.* Each word falls upon her ears with a heavier weight. Hades sighs. *This is a terrible burden he has chosen for himself, make no mistake- and it is all the worse for knowing his temperament is so ill-suited to carry it.*

The quality of the filtered light through the water has changed - the color, the angle, albeit only slightly. It is one of the few ways anyone has in Norvrandt of tracking the time. Evening has fallen.

As if realizing it himself, Hades seems to stir from a sort of reverie, as though their chat is a dream and she is the shade.

*It’s starting to get very late, you know,* he says, rather briskly. *Shouldn’t you be off to get your permit? I’m certain he’s waiting on you.*

“I… yes. Yes, of course.”

Slowly and carefully the Warrior stands, bracing her weight against the tree. It is a nigh-herculean effort to regain her footing; she is desperate to lie down somewhere and try to sleep, but sleep despite her exhausted state has brought neither rest nor peace. The Light lurks just beneath her mortal shell, a predator waiting for its prey to falter.

Time is shorter than she had hoped it would be.

Still, she smiles.

“Thank you for speaking with me, Hades.”

That impatient flip of a wave again, and now she is quite certain she has seen Emet-Selch make that precise gesture a time or two. *If answering your questions assures me a peaceful nap, count me happy to oblige.*

She has almost made it on her slow, staggering feet to the hedgerow when Hades’ voice chimes once more at her back.

*Before you go---there is one more thing. One… minor thing.*

The sadness underscoring his words gives her pause. She turns around.

Hades is not lazing beneath the tree with his back propped against its trunk as she had left him. He too is standing. The giant's gait lists to one side beneath the heavy boughs, and he seems to be looking at something beyond her.

*Who... is that standing next to you?*

She blinks. A glance backwards and to her left shows Ardbert, watching but still keeping a discreet and carefully polite distance, waiting for her to finish her rest and catch up with him. “I... that’s...”

*...Never mind. I suppose it hardly matters, does it? ‘Tis a soul, if a faint impression of one--and the same shade as your own.* That birdlike tilt of the chin. *The color of it… I would know it anywhere. And so, I imagine, would he.*

Her gaze sharpens. The note of longing in the shade’s voice is unmistakable.

*Well, don’t let me keep you.*

His arms fold into the sleeves of his robe, and there is something soft there in the slackened bow of his lips, something that makes her breath catch. They curve upwards, in the faintest and most self-deprecating of smiles. It is the expression of a man that has any number of things to say, and no time to say them.

In the end, he says nothing, and the moment passes. She turns away.

She is met with Ardbert’s stare of open confusion upon reaching the elaborate masonry of the park walkway. “Who were you talking to?”

“Oh, I--”

There is nothing and no one under the tree. It stands a lone sentinel in the center of its clearing just as before, quiet and undisturbed.

The Warrior of Darkness exhales.

“Just an old friend,” she says.

[gellavonhamster]

beneath the music from a farther room

gen || R the Duchess of Winnipeg, Beatrice Baudelaire, Lemony Snicket,  Beatrice Baudelaire Jr. || R/Beatrice, mentions of R/Sally Sebald || pre-canon, missing scene, post-canon  

ao3 link || originally posted in Russian

(title taken from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot)  

I.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that balls were part of her life as long as she could remember.

At first, of course, she didn’t take part in them. At first, she treaded carefully down the corridors barefoot on the shining cold parquet and soft carpet runners, trying not to make a sound, ready to flee at once to some corner as soon as any adult heaved into sight. Moving in quick, quick dashes down the stairs to the mezzanine, where the walls were lined with paintings and antique weapons and the flowerpots were crowding the space by the balustrade. She used to find a hideaway among the plants – a four-year old, she felt like a knight wandering in a fairy-tale forest among those rubber figs and palm-trees – and breathlessly observed the grownups in the hall below. One day, she would think, I won’t be sitting here anymore. I’ll go down to the hall too, in a long dress gleaming with all the colours of the rainbow and in elbow-length gloves. My face will be covered with a mask of feathers and lace but everyone will know it’s me because I’ll be the lady of the house, because they all will have come to present their compliments to me (she didn’t know such expressions back then, naturally, but she was already aware that one day she would become very, very important, and that awareness filled her with happiness and dread at the same time). Everyone will joke and have fun, and the waiters in white suit jackets will serve out champagne, and I will drink champagne too, and no one will forbid me to. And the music will be playing, and everyone will be dancing. For what’s the use dressing up and coming together if nobody’s dancing?          

She could have sat like that the whole night, staring at the dancing couples, but every time her disappearance was discovered quickly – far too quickly. The nanny would come – Nelly or Ellie, or perhaps Millie, some simple and sweet name. At one point, when Ramona was already grown-up, it occurred to her that the nanny could have quite possibly had some different name, but she, being a little kid, was allowed to call her by whatever name she could pronounce. Ramona did not remember Nelly’s, or Ellie’s, face, only the way her hands used to smell of jasmine because earlier she bathed Ramona and washed her with jasmine soap. The nanny used to take an already half-asleep Ramona out of her hiding-place, also trying to move as quietly as possible so as not to draw the attention of the people who had gathered below, and carry her back to the nursery, repeating that it was not allowed, miss, you’ve already been told the previous time, your mother won’t be happy.      

Ramona would put her head on the nanny’s shoulder, close her eyes, and see men in black tailcoats and women in sparkling veils, and behind her eyelids they would dance and dance and dance.

II.

Ramona was fifteen when she discovered that balls weren’t as much fun as they used to seem from the mezzanine.

She hadn’t been home for about four years and knew that she shouldn’t complain about that: she saw her family much more often than most of the other apprentices anyway. Every time she came home, she felt like the mansion had become smaller, as if after every time she left it was washed and shrunk. First and foremost, that must have been because she was growing (even at the time she was just a little shorter than her mother), but it also might have had something to do with the fact that since one evening in the garden a strange man grabbed her by her ankles and dragged her away from home, she had visited and seen a great many places. And even though hardly anywhere she encountered the same grandeur as at home, Ramona already knew that there were many old mansions in the world, many ballrooms with high ceilings and huge chandeliers, many winter gardens that looked like isles of jungle under a big crystal bowl. The air of magic that once enveloped her home had dissipated. It turned out that the lighting on the first floor was too bright, while on the second floor it was too dim, and that she didn’t even like half of the paintings hanging on the walls.        

It also turned out that balls were something completely mundane, and most people did not even really have fun there, just pretended they did. Ramona wove her way between the small groups of guests, nodding cordially to some of them, curtsying a little to the other, and pondered over how all these rich people had arrived here in all their finery not because they wanted to dance or converse, but because they had to discuss one deal or another, find a good match for their children, or suck up to her mother so that she would put in a word for them here and there or agree to finance some project. They made a show of laughing at each other’s jokes but there was no laughter in their eyes. They discussed the opening nights at the theatre, croquet, and politics, but mostly did it to form an opinion of their interlocutors and see if it appeared possible to use them somehow later. The women bore themselves ramrod straight and spoke in unnaturally high-pitched voices. The men uttered each phrase as if they were the only ones in the entire hall who possessed any critical thinking skills, and cast sticky glances at the women. Occasionally Ramona noticed some of them looking at her, which made her feel disgusted and, for some reason, ashamed.  

Even champagne was nasty! It was so sour, and made her stomach ache. Truth be told, the beer that she and Lemony and Beatrice sometimes bought using fake documents and drank straight from the bottle passing it around was more to her taste.

Suddenly, someone touched her arm.

“Hey,” a conspiratorial voice whispered right into her ear. “Are you all right?”

Speaking of Beatrice.

Ramona felt herself blush. Beatrice had always had a penchant for invading her friends’ personal space as long as they didn’t object, and the older they got, the more discomfort it posed to Ramona. Fair enough, the word ‘discomfort’ didn’t represent her feelings quite precisely. Part of her revelled in each embrace, each kiss on the cheek, each tangling of fingers. Part of her screamed that it was unbearable because if it kept on happening, Ramona would either fall victim to heart attack or do something that would ruin her friendship with Beatrice once and for all. Or her friendship with Lemony, who was so devotedly, stupidly, and awkwardly in love with Beatrice that it was hardly possible to surpass it.    

Just about as stupidly and awkwardly as Ramona was in love with her, too.

“I’m fine,” Ramona assured her. Beatrice frowned. Her long tight dress was sequined, making fabric look like scales, and her loose dark hair was interwoven with green and silver threads. That evening, she was a mermaid. “Not the kind of mermaid to give up her voice for a prince,” she declared to Ramona while Olaf’s parents were taking off their coats and Olaf himself looked over the entrance hall, his face bored and his hands in his pockets. “I’m a proper mermaid that drives the sailors mad with her singing and drags them underwater. Like that!” At this, she leaped at Olaf from the back. He yelled, “You piece of shit!” and tried to shake her off, and his father shouted at the both of them to calm down. Ramona laughed loudly then. Now she looked at how closely the mermaid dress fit Beatrice, her figure already much more feminine than Ramona’s, realized that many of those pompous old pigs must have been ogling her too, and felt an even more helpless kind of rage than when she caught them looking at herself.  

“Are you? You’ve got a long face. Are you having a headache?”

“No, it’s just that…” Ramona winced in frustration. She knew that if she tried to explain what was wrong, it would come out as some non-issue rubbish. “It’s so boring! Everyone’s pretending they’re enjoying themselves, but they actually aren’t. As a child, I used to come up there,” she gestured at the mezzanine with a nod, “every time my parents hosted a reception, used to sit there and dream of taking part in all this one day, but in practice…”  

“Nothing turned out to be the way you expected it,” Beatrice finished for her.

“Well, yeah.”

The orchestra started playing The Blue Danube. A smile lit up Beatrice’s face.

“You know what,” she spoke slowly. “If they don’t know how to have fun, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. Do you want to dance?”

“With you?” Ramona asked, confused. She was not sure if it was appropriate for two ladies to dance together when there were potential male partners galore. Not that even a single one of those partners appealed to her.

“With me! I mean…” Beatrice looked a little shy, which was unusual for her, and suddenly Ramona wondered if Beatrice ever noticed the way Ramona blushes and freezes at her touch, if Beatrice assumed that Ramona must have started to feel burdened by her friendship for some reason. “If you want to, of course.”    

Ramona looked around. A number of couples went dancing, but there still were more of the guests who continued standing and discussing dull topics. A single look at them was enough to make her want to hang herself.

And here, against all that, was Beatrice. Bright and fearless Beatrice, who watched her questioningly, and the question seemed to be not only and not so much about the dance.  

Ramona thought about Lemony, but the first thing to cross her mind was the following: he wasn’t there.

“I do,” she said resolutely, and held out her hand to Beatrice. “Let’s show them how it’s done.”

They began to waltz, and for a short while, the magic that once had filled that hall came back.  

 III.

It was curious how it went with scandals, both at the balls and in general. Scandals were not tolerated, yet at the same time they were desired. No one wanted to be caught in the middle of a scandal, but everyone enjoyed watching a scandal involving others. At the balls, scandals were a much more entertaining treat than the performances of the specially invited opera singers or the fireworks in the garden, but no one would dare to admit it out loud.    

That evening, the highlight of the ball organized by the Duchess of Winnipeg became her nineteen-year-old daughter, who had a quarrel with her mother in front of everybody – not a very heated quarrel, unfortunately, but still something – and who left the ballroom almost running to disappear on the second floor.      

Ramona knew her mother wouldn’t go looking for her anytime soon. She wouldn’t leave the guests for fear of losing her face to an even greater extent; at least one lady of the house ought to stay with them. Officially, Ramona was not the lady of that house yet, not at all, and she was not sure she’d be able to feel like one when the time came. Over the last few years, the ducal mansion had more than shrunk for her – it ceased to be her home. When she heard someone say ‘home’, she thought of a studio apartment she was renting in the City; it was small, but it was her own. And she barely ever thought of herself as of Ramona, the future Duchess of Winnipeg – only as of R, volunteer firefighter, part-time employee of the City Meteorological Centre, and journalist of Daily Punctilio.      

The quarrel started exactly with her mother reminding R who she was. At least that was the way it could have seemed to onlookers. In truth, the tension between them emerged already two days before, when R came home – or, rather, to her mother’s residence – for back then R was sincerely happy to finally see her, and allowed herself the kind of candour that was proven to be undue.  

“Father would have understood,” she thought wistfully, and pressed the handle of a heavy mahogany door. Clearly, she could not be sure about that. Father died of apoplexy when she was sixteen. Ramona had spent most of her life far from home and, frankly speaking, she knew neither of her parents well. Yet her father had always been gentler than her mother, listened more attentively, let her feel like just a girl (as far as any VFD member was able to feel like just someone) more often than her mother did, and less often – like a heiress of an old family. Moreover, Father himself was an outlier of sorts in the high society: his family was new money, which was openly disdained by many aristocrats, and the only reason they concealed their disdain for his skin colour must have been the fact that racism and xenophobia had come to be considered bad form. Ramona was certain that many of them were hoping that would not last.        

With Father, it was… cosy. Calm. Ramona always used to miss him more than Mother, and she cried her eyes out when he passed away, hating herself for not being close to him at that moment. It was his study that Ramona came to when she happened to feel heavy-hearted during her rare visits to Winnipeg. Mother, in most respects practical, forbade changing anything in the study after Father’s death. Every day the help cleaned the dust off the books he would never reread, and off the paperweight and notebooks he would never use again. The telephone on the desk was not disconnected either. Ramona sat down in the armchair with her legs tucked under her, and spent some time sitting at the desk motionlessly, her face hidden in her palms. Then she moved the telephone closer to her, and dialled the number from memory.      

After the third dial tone, the answer followed.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Mr. Snicket,” Ramona said. She didn’t hope it was not clear from her voice that she had been crying. To be honest, she was not planning to hide that. At least there was something she didn’t have to hide, and someone she didn’t have to hide it from. “Got a minute?”

“Even more than one,” Lemony replied. “How are you?”

“Everything sucks. How are you?”

“Better than could have been, I believe. What’s the matter? If you want to talk about it, of course.”

“L, why would I call you if I didn’t want to talk about it?”

“Sometimes having other people share silence with you is enough. Though this is obviously not an option for a phone call.”

“Obviously,” Ramona agreed. At the other end of the line, her best friend was waiting for her to tell what was plaguing her. She closed her eyes. “It’s no big deal, really. I had a row with maman. Too bad it happened right at the ball, though. We surely use our best efforts to entertain our dear guests, but not to such an extent.”

“She talked to you about marriage again, didn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Ramona gave a pull at the phone wire, wrapped it around her finger, and released it again. It was weird talking about all that, as it was always weird talking about her problems. She was rich, young – heck, she was good-looking, too, she had a lot of friends, and her childhood had been a tiniest bit more trouble-free than that of most of her volunteer peers. Complaining about her life meant admitting her weakness, just as running away from the ball nearly in tears did. “I know I am actually lucky. Take that boy, for instance, the one Kit is keeping in touch with, what’s his name…”

“Charles?”

“Right. She loves me, L, I know she does. She loves me as much as she can. She told me: I don’t care who you’re having affairs with, that’s just your business, but be so kind as to marry and to bear an heir because that’s the business of the entire duchy. But I don’t want to, you see?” She felt a lump in her throat again. She swallowed hard. “She never cared if I want this title, if I want to become her successor, if I want to join the VFD… I mean, it’s not that I don’t want to…” She stopped short, having caught herself thinking of a crazy thing yet again: what if the phones were being wiretapped? By their side of the Schism, or by the other one? “Can I do the thing I want to once in a lifetime? And could she not start this conversation in the midst of the ball? This time I wasn’t even bored! This time some of the guests even bothered to prepare full-scale fancy-dresses instead of throwing on the first mask they found and a regular evening dress!”    

“When you’re back in the City, we’ll host a ball on our own,” Lemony promised. “Everyone shall be wearing fancy-dresses. There will be live music featuring all instruments we find lying around. Ernest will mix some cocktails. Someone will puke from the balcony…”  

Ramona giggled.

“I would prefer to avoid the latter.”

“So would I, yet the experience shows that it is sadly impossible to guarantee the absence of this circumstance. By the way, I am totally serious. When are you coming back?”

“On Friday,” Ramona sighed. Two more days in the company of her mother awaited her.  

“Excellent. Then we’ll organize a soiree on Saturday. Beatrice and I shall take care of everything.”

“Poor, poor Mr. Snicket,” Ramona said and smiled. “Forced to socialize, sing, and dance for my sake.”

“I have given no promises related to singing,” Lemony pointed out.

“But you’ll have to,” she grinned. She still wanted to cry, but she also wanted to smile. At that moment, in the study still smelling faintly of her father’s cologne, with her friend’s voice on the phone, she felt invincible. “Now tell me what’s new at the office.”

 IV.

They must have really thrown a party upon her arrival then. As the years went by, all parties with other volunteers blended in her memory, making up a single endless one. Not the Groundhog Day – more like the Groundhog Night. It was not often that they could gather everyone they wanted to meet in the same place, so when such an opportunity presented itself, they went wild. They used to drink a lot back then, because every single one of them must have already had something they wanted to forget entirely. Ramona suspected that some of them didn’t stop at drinking – it would have been naïve to expect that, taking into account that some departments of their organization experimented with cultivation and use of hallucinogenic mushrooms – but she was not interested in such amusements. Alcohol was enough for her – that, and Father’s old pipe, the only thing she smoked. Besides, in a good company it seemed that even air itself was intoxicating, making one laugh and speak too loudly and do stupid yet harmless things.        

And they did have a good company. God, how she loved all of them – not everyone the same, naturally, but each of them at least a bit. The ducal mansion with its jungles of rubber figs and its bad lighting receded into the past, surrendered the title of her home, and passed it not so much to her apartment in the City as to the people she used to spend time with. The balls in the hall with high ceilings paled in comparison to the parties in rented apartments, occasionally at the headquarters, at times – in some shady abandoned buildings. Oh, they were a damn good company indeed, with their shared memories and shared secrets, their diverse talents and confusing relationships. The Bloomsbury Group with daggers under their coats. The Bright Young Things with tattoos on their ankles.        

There was a moment that stuck in her mind clearly: it was a very warm May, the smell of bird cherry was hanging in the air, and it was about half past two in the morning. She and Lemony were smoking on the balcony of Monty and Bertrand’s apartment. More precisely, she was smoking Father’s pipe (no matter how many years passed, she always kept thinking of it as of her father’s pipe not her own) while Lemony was standing by and looking at the few stars that were visible in the City. Back then, he didn’t smoke yet – back then, not enough had already happened to make him start smoking, although at times, when someone would mention a town called Stain’d-by-the-Sea, his face would look like he had already seen everything he could in this life, and much more than he ever wished to. The music was already muffled, replaced by conversations. R was feeling dreadfully tired and at the same time full of energy. She wanted to sleep, but she also wanted to dance some more.          

“Do you realize that right now, by the way, we’re living the best years of our lives?” she asked Lemony, and he turned around to glance into the room where their friends were. One of the Denouement brothers, Gustav, and Sally were discussing something on the couch, pouring wine from the last remaining bottle into the glasses. Ike and Josephine, who was basically hanging on his neck, were talking about something with Jacques in the doorway. A group consisting of the second Denouement, Monty, and Widdershins were having some lively discussion in the other corner of the room. Olivia was doing a Tarot reading for a drowsily blinking Hector. Bertrand and Beatrice were the only ones still dancing – at the very centre of the room, very slowly, not so much actually dancing as swaying in each other’s arms. Kit, Olaf, Haruki, and Gregor were not in sight; some of them must have been in the kitchen and some in the bathroom. It has been a long time since they’d gathered in such large numbers, and suddenly R thought “And we won’t anymore”, and felt a shiver running down her spine.      

“Yes,” Lemony replied pensively. Then the same thought that scared her must have crossed his mind too, because he added, “What shall we do when they’re over?”  

She didn’t know the answer to that question then, and later, when those best years were left behind and their company got scattered across the country and on the opposite sides of the barricades, she didn’t know it all the more.

 V.

Some things did not change as time went by. The sun kept shining, water was wet, and there were balls being held regularly at the mansion of the Dukes of Winnipeg – the balls that all the neighbourhood elite assembled at and even guests from abroad arrived to, and if one Duchess was replaced by another, that did not mean a discontinuation of the tradition at all. The balls continued to be organized, remaining, as before, a pretty screen to cover the making of deals, hunting for future spouses, striking up an acquaintance with the right people, and, since the title of the Duchess was passed on to Ramona, some other business that half of the guests had no clue about. The other half, which made use of the cluelessness of that one, was the members of the same secret society as the hostess of the party.            

The last ball organized by Ramona was marked by an arrest.

Barons and bankers, philanthropists and politicians were staring indignantly, though also with an ill-concealed curiosity, at a man dressed as a bullfighter and at the two policemen holding him down. Two more policemen were standing by. One of them was wearing large sunglasses, which looked absurd even among the people dressed in the most fanciful costumes possible. That was taken much more seriously now than during the times of the previous Duchess, when it used to be enough just to add a half-mask to a regular suit or dress. The current Duchess appreciated creativity, art, and showmanship.      

The current Duchess was standing in front of the policemen, a folded fan clasped in her hands.

“Your Grace,” said the inspector, pulling the mask off the person under arrest. “Do you recognize this man?”

She wanted to say yes I do, how could I not recognize him if we first met when we were four years old and have been best friends ever since? What are you doing, let him go immediately, all the accusations against him are fabricated and we can prove it, does it matter who ‘we’ are, soon you’ll know. The real criminal might still be here in the building, he tried to kill the man you’ve captured, he tried to kill the woman this man came to see, he killed her husband, he tried to marry her underage daughter, you got the wrong guy! Let him go immediately and go catch the real one while he hadn’t disappeared into the night!  

Lemony Snicket – tired, pale, with a black eye, and a dark drop of blood dried on his lip – met her gaze and shook his head subtly.

“No,” said Ramona, the Duchess of Winnipeg. She did not wince, it was only that her fingers clutched the fan more tightly – it even seemed to her that it cracked. “It’s the first time I see this man.”

“It follows that he arrived to your party without an invitation.”

“It follows that he did.”

“So you deny that this person is Lemony Snicket?”

“Lemony Snicket is dead. I went to his funeral. With all due respect, Inspector,” she let herself smile – benevolently, yet condescendingly, “I’m afraid you are on the wrong track.”

“A further investigation shall indicate whether the track was wrong or not, Your Grace,” Inspector replied. He also let himself smile – respectfully, yet without bothering to hide that he thought her in the wrong. “James, Prescott, search the building. Madison,” he told the officer in sunglasses, “take the suspect away.”

“Yes, Sir,” the officer replied. He handcuffed Lemony and escorted him to the exit. Having walked a considerable distance, the policeman suddenly turned around. He took off his glasses, and Ramona grew cold: she recognized him as one of the volunteers whose photos she was shown a while ago by poor Gustav. It was one of those who had recently defected to the fire-starting side.

Everything, all and everything was going down the tubes.

She saw Mother in her mind’s eye – impeccably looking, regal, calm and icy as ever. It was not that R had never loved her; she just couldn’t find anything in common with her. R didn’t mourn her the way she had mourned her father; she just could not sleep for many nights in a row after her death. R would have given anything for her mother to be there at that moment.    

Compose yourself, Mother said in her head. You are facing a problem, so solve it. And make sure everything is proper, I beg you.

Ramona, the Duchess of Winnipeg, took a deep breath and smiled.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she began. “Due to obvious circumstances I am bound to proclaim this evening’s party to be over…”

 VI.

“And who’s that?” the girl asked, tapping with a tip of her finger on a cheery young face in a black-and-white picture. The girl’s name was Beatrice Baudelaire, and Ramona kept telling herself that one day she would get used to it. Used to the name of a dead woman that meant so much to her becoming someone else’s. No, it did not rub her the wrong way at all, there was no feeling that this Beatrice was a pretender. It is only in the days of one’s childhood and youth that the whole world seems to be your story only, yours and that of the people surrounding you. As a forty-something you see that you are just one of the multitude of equally background characters, and that there are hundreds and thousands of people sharing your name, your habits, your wounds, and your pain.

She took a closer look at the face that Beatrice was pointing at.

“Oh, that’s Monty. Dr. Montgomery. He was in some of the previous pictures, remember?”

“That’s him? I didn’t recognize him without the moustache.”

“He must be about seventeen here. He didn’t have a moustache then yet,” Ramona smiled nostalgically, looking at the photograph, and through the years young Monty returned her a smile frozen for eternity. She still missed him. There were a lot of people she still missed. “He stopped shaving it… at nineteen, probably. By the time he was twenty, he already had his legendary snake moustache. We keep meaning to put the photos in the right order but we just can’t get around to it.”  

Technically, all photos in the album belonged to Sally. The only surviving pictures from R’s personal photo archive were the ones that Olaf enclosed with the letter he made her write as he was pressing her own grandfather’s hunting knife to her throat. “Snicket escaped from the cop shop,” he told her then. Beatrice – that other Beatrice, Beatrice-in-italics – died that night, really died that time, and there seemed to be tears in his eyes though he would have definitely killed Ramona if she so much as mentioned that. “So we’ll lure him over here.” His plan fell through: he underestimated both her inventiveness in terms of experimenting with VFD codes and her hand-to-hand combat skills. Still, the letter reached Lemony together with the photographs, which he gave to his niece, Beatrice the Second, years later. Ramona had already decided to give her a couple more photos that Beatrice would find the most interesting – for example, those of her mother as a child, or of her uncle Jacques, but first they had to wait for Sally to ask which photos it was all right to give away, and Sally was to be back only the day after.      

“I take photographs, too,” Beatrice told her, a little shy. “Would you allow me to make a portrait of you, Your Grace?”

“Sure. And please call me Ramona. Or Aunt Ramona, if you wish,” R winked at her.

Beatrice beamed with joy.

“Okay, Aunt Ramona. I was thinking I could take a picture of you in the yard, among the trees.”

“Do not forget that the landscape in the photo must not be easily recognizable, Beatrice,” Lemony commented. He was sitting in an armchair facing them, with a heap of newspapers in his lap. In each paper, R had underlined the headlines and even individual sentences in some articles that she thought to be possible clues in the search for the Baudelaires. “Otherwise, if the pictures get into the wrong hands…”

“Snicket, I am begging you,” Ramona waved him aside. “This kind of trees grows all over the country.”

“No, Mr. Snicket’s right,” Beatrice joined in. “If we take the photo in the yard, then walls or windows or something might get into the frame. We could find some place nearby with no buildings.”

“We will,” Ramona promised, and gripped the girl’s shoulder briefly and lightly. ‘Listen, you stay here for a while, and your uncle and I shall go fetch something, all right? If you have any questions about any other photos, just bookmark the page, and I’ll explain everything when I’m back.”

“Okay,” the girl nodded.

“Great. Snicket, let’s go.”

“Please don’t hit me,” Lemony asked nonchalantly, putting the papers aside. Beatrice giggled, and Lemony smiled a little – faintly, with the very corner of his lips.  

“Does she still call you ‘Mr. Snicket’?” Ramona asked him quietly as soon as they went out into the hallway. Lemony shrugged.

“We met relatively recently,” he remarked. “I am not going to hurry her, especially since it has no crucial significance for me how she calls me.”  

Liar, Ramona thought. It was literally yesterday that Beatrice met her, and she had no difficulty switching to calling her ‘Aunt’. On the other hand, there was a difference between simply addressing a person in a less official manner and completely accepting a relative who had been evading contact purposefully and for a long time. Lemony was right not to hurry her. The important thing was that they were together.  

“If you say so,” Ramona opened the door leading to her and Sally’s bedroom. Their house had nothing on the mansion of the Dukes of Winnipeg that was destroyed by the fire; it was humble, not too spacious, and they got it in such condition that they were already thinking of doing some renovation even though they had only lived in it for a little more than a month. Ramona adored it. “Come in, I have a gift for you.”  

“A gift?” Lemony asked. The gift was in plain view – on a stool by the bed, so Lemony noticed it as soon as he peered into the room, and rolled his eyes as if in disapproval, yet clearly only pretending to be dissatisfied. “R, you shouldn’t have…”    

“I should,” she interrupted him. “I do not have that many friends left, you know, and you had just mentioned that your favourite accordion had drowned in a swamp. By the way, how did it happen?”    

“It’s a long story. I can tell you over dinner, if you’d like,” Lemony ran his fingers over the keys. When he touched musical instruments, his face always became distant and dreamy, as if he was already hearing the music that could be extracted from them. “Really, R, I am grateful to you, but I won’t be able to carry it with me all the time, and we don’t stay anywhere for long these days…”  

“Then let it stay here, and you’ll play it when you visit us,” Ramona shrugged. “I am so used to having a whole room full of your stuff close at hand that I feel a little lonely without it.”

“A room for me and a room for Beatrice,” Lemony said, smiling into nowhere. “How long ago that was.”

“So long ago,” she agreed. “We have become museum pieces, Mr. Snicket.”

“Not you, Your Grace. You are alive.”

“So are you,” she reminded him. “Don’t forget it, would you? At least for me. And for her,” she nodded in the direction of the door, of the hallway leading to the room where a living Beatrice Baudelaire was looking at the photos of the people who were long gone.

He kissed her on the forehead – a chaste, brotherly kiss.

“I’ll try to,” he said softly.

They brought the accordion to the living room, and Beatrice put the album aside and ran her hand over the shining lacquered side of the instrument, enraptured.  

“Once I used to have a great big house, almost a castle,” Ramona told her, “and I used to give balls there for my acquaintances and associates like my mother before me, and before her my grandmother, and so all the way down to our ancestors who moved here from France.”    

Beatrice nodded.

“Mr. Snicket told me about this.”

“What do you think of giving a ball, Beatrice? A really small one, for our own circle. Tomorrow, my wife will be back,” she smiled, feeling the usual mad happiness at the possibility to say this word, ‘wife’. “It will be a surprise for her.”

The girl’s eyes lit up.

“But how do we prepare?”

“I believe we have everything we might need. There are some bottles of wine and lemonade in the cellar, and an ice cream cake in the fridge. As to the music, we have your uncle with his new accordion, and there’s also Sally’s and my record collection. Do you know how to dance, Beatrice?”

“I am not so good at it, to be honest.”

“I shall teach you,” Ramona promised, and took the girl’s hand. “Mr. Snicket, would you play something for us?”

The stately columns and the crystal chandeliers, the palm-tree pots and the carpet runners – all of that belonged to the past now. The present was hard-won, fragile, but despite that, or maybe for that very reason, it was lovely.  

The future was unpredictable – save for one thing, perhaps: there would certainly be dancing. 

[rose-lighters]

Time to rank every MCU film

Yes I am doing that oh so original thing of ranking every marvel film from worst to best. Criticisms and debates are welcome. (Disclaimer: I like all these films unless stated otherwise)

X. Incredible Hulk - I haven’t seen it. Sorry.

21. Guardians Of the Galaxy Vol. 2 - I can honestly say I hated this film. The only likeable part of the whole film was the soundtrack and the first few minutes with Groot dancing. Beyond that it was dull, cringy and oh so predictable. The second that Ego (???) appeared and said he was Quill’s dad I was just like “Oh so this guy’s the villain then” and noped out of there. I never saw past that point and don’t intend to.

20. Captain America: The Winter Soldier - People praise this film till kingdom come and I for one do not get it at all. Many say that it is unique in moving away from the typical superhero film and towards the spy genre. Maybe I just don’t like spy films but it is in no means a great Marvel film. I liked it enough but it’s so forgettable I had to google the plot for this review. I liked the characters and all but it just never stuck with me as anything special.

19. Guardians Of the Galaxy -  Maybe I just don’t like the guardians??? I don’t know but this was another film that just didn’t stick with me. I like Rocket and Groot but beyond that the Guardians themselves hold no interest with me. I don’t care for the humor particularly and whilst the music is great that really shouldn’t be the best part of a film unless it’s a musical.

18. Avengers: Age of Ultron - People hate this film, I however do not. It’s an okay Marvel film, I don’t care for it enough to hate it. I like that scene where they’re all trying to lift mjolnir and I think I liked the ending (I watched it like two years ago so I don’t remember that well) but I have to agree with a lot of the criticism of white washing the Maximoffs (despite how much I love Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor Johnson, it was still shady). I didn’t hate the ‘giving Hawkeye a family’ like a lot of people did because the already made it clear he wasn’t like comic Clint.

17. Thor: The Dark World - Now we’re moving into films I do like (I love Marvel films more than I dislike them, it's literally just GOTG2 that I don’t like). This was a good film from what I can remember (as I said it's been a while since I’ve seen a lot of these films). I liked the story arcs, I liked that it was set in places other than America and space (ok, so I’m from England, sue me), I loved Tom Hiddleston in this film and I like Darcy. All in all it was an enjoyable viewing, a little dull at times but generally harmless.

16. Doctor Strange - This would be further up if it wasn’t for how dull the first half hour or so is. I had to go back and watch this months after I had first tried just because the start was so boring. Once I moved past it however it was a great origin film. I liked the humour in it and I have always had a soft spot for magic so it was a brilliant film. The effects were absolutely stunning and on aesthetics alone it would place as the second or third best marvel film. I loved the good guys and was genuinely rooting for them despite Strange being a bit of a snarky arsehole.

15. Iron Man - Is this a very important film? Yes. Is it a great film? Also yes. Do I remember it? Not at all. Okay, so I remember some stuff and what I do remember was great but to say its a film that sticks out would be a lie. It’s THE origin story in as much as it’s a formulaic one: flawed character is traumatised and realises their flaws in the process, is influenced by important person, becomes a hero and is betrayed. It works though. That’s the thing, it works so damn well that its almost not in the formula. It's a great watch and honestly RDJ looks great in it (so not the point but I digress). That bit with Stane ripping out the arc reactor made me feel betrayed and I kinda knew it was coming. ( https://tonynatashas.tumblr.com/post/184375713429/that-scene-in-iron-man-where-obadiah-stane-is this post explains why this scene is so great important)

14. Captain America: The First Avenger - Another (enjoyable) origin story. If Sebastian Stan wasn’t in it it would probably be three places down but hey I have a type. No but seriously this was a great film because not only did it show off the brilliance of Roger’s transformation and gave us an idea of who he was and what motivates him but it also then gives us details of his waking in the 21st century and begins to expose his issues with this time travel (for want of a better phrase). This film shows you what you’re gonna get whilst still having pretty good effects, a good, solid storyline and a pretty badass comic book villain. The serum guy creeps me out though and there are so many ethical issues of that level of human experimentation on a person whose only friend went off to war, had Steve died they chose someone no one would really miss which is so concerning.

13. Captain Marvel - A lot of people may have a criticism of this film being so far down but for me it needs to be. I like superhero films where the main character overcomes a flaw and amnesia is not a character flaw. This is a good origin story but it is not a great marvel film. I like Carol but I don’t love her. I love the fact that we have a superhero film with a female main character and i liked that scene where she talks with biker guy but it felt like Samuel L Jackson was a more interesting character at times. I often rate characters on humor so there’s that. It was a good film but I’m mostly looking forward to what will be done with the character as she has so much potential. 

12. Spiderman: Homecoming - This is a weird one for me. It’s the only marvel film I own on DVD and it’s the only one I like where I skip scenes. I can not deal with cringy humour so I skip 80% of the jokes and awkward moments in this film however it’s a really good film. It’s funny and the music is great, I love Zendaya and Jacob Batalon probably more than Tom Holland, their roles are great and the film’s emphasis on friendship is one of the elements from the Iron Man and Captain America films that I love just further amplified. The references to Ferris Bueller and the fact that it is, at its core, a teen flick makes it a brilliant film. The vulture twist was also amazing. 

11. Ant-man and the Wasp - I feel like it isn’t talked about enough but I really bloody love Scott Lang. He is one superhero that I can really get behind because above all else he is just the nicest guy. He is probably one of the most human seeming characters in the MCU and it always makes for such an enjoyable viewing. This could probably draw with ant-man in terms of great films. I loved Ava Starr so much and my heart really went out to her and that FBI guy was a total joy to watch. The Ant man films are so funny and light hearted that they don’t have that sort of weariness that other MCU films have. If only Luis told more stories in the MCU.

10. Ant-man - Honestly just look above. Also I love Hank Pym and Hope Van Dyne so much. The villain was kind of eh but I loved the heist aspect.

9. Black Panther - I watched this film for Shuri and to an extent because I felt obligated to so I had low expectations. People were talking about it for the significance of fighting for equality (which I am all for, don’t worry) so I was expecting it to not live up to the hype and it didn’t. That being said it was a bloody great movie. The movie was beautiful, the use of colour and the CGI tech was so damn pretty. The plot was brilliant and for a while I wanted Erik Killmonger to win, he put forward a good argument and I like a ‘baddy’ so to speak. The fights were great and I was so here for their version of going under cover finally not being a hoodie and cap. Was it over hyped? Hell yeah. Was it still a great film? 100%

8. Iron Man 3 - This gets a hell of a load more crap than it deserves, mostly from comic book fans who can’t stand that their precious mandarin was a hoax but honestly I respect the fuck out of marvel for that. Rather than having a stereotypically asian terrorist they turned that stereotype on its head and made the white guy the actual terrorist. Ben Kingsley is one of my favourite actors and he was amazing. I, obviously, also loved the representation of PTSD as a serious issue and how it was displayed in all of its real ugliness. For once it didn’t just show a damaged person who was fixed with romance. So yeah, this film was a masterpiece.

7. Captain America: Civil War - Zemo may just be my favourite MCU villain to date, why? Because he fucking won. This was a film about a man who knew his victims and rather than stupidly trying to attack the big scary strong guys he exposed them and made the best of circumstance. He got under Captain America’s skin and played him like a puppet. This was more than just a villain, this was finally a smart villain. Not to mention that this film had some of the best action sequences and heart breaking moments whilst still having time for a laugh. It’s also the first film (in my opinion) that called out Steve’s morals and his obsession with the past. Bucky was hot used against him and it showed that above all else, even the little people, Steve’s loyalties are with his past.

6. Thor - Most people would disagree and rate this film far lower however for me this was the start. I didn’t grow up watching superhero films because I didn’t like watching TV as a kid so it wasn’t till I was 13 that I saw a superhero film and this was it. I honestly watched it because my friend had it on DVD and I thought Tom Hiddleston looked hot but from what I can remember this was one of the best films I ever saw. I wasn’t too bothered by Jane Foster but I absolutely loved Darcy, Loki and Thor. Whilst I’m not adopted I do know what it is like to be the younger and smarter sibling with an older thuggish brother who is still the favourite so I loved Loki with a passion and was so upset when he fell.

5. Iron Man 2 - This was the film that made me realise that I liked girls, Scarlet Johansson in a black cat suit and red ringlets was an amazing thing to little 13 year old me. Beyond that it was just a solid film, it had spies and daddy issues and sass and Samuel L Jackson. What more can you want?

4. Thor: Ragnarok - This is the peak of Thor, I’m calling it now. Never had a director before been able to capture the absolute chaos of Loki and the sweetheart-ness of Thor so brilliantly. As far as representations of characters this, Captain Marvel and Iron Man 3 may just be the best of all the MCU. This is the full completion of Thor’s arc, this is the film that the first Thor set up. Finally Thor is ready to be King. This film had so much humour but still set it all up so perfectly that it was more than just a comedy. Jeff Goldblum was amazing and honestly Taika Waititi should direct the whole of the MCU. He knows the characters better than anybody.

3. Avengers: Endgame - I cried three times. That scene with the portals was the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed and whilst many criticize much of the plot I don’t have too much I’d change, though in fairness I did like the cursed child so maybe I just have a soft spot for all things time travel. Dynamic timelines are not used in cinema enough and the three alternate timelines create have all sorts of implications for future films in the MCU. If Thor is not fat in the next film this may go down to 20th though.

2. Avengers Assemble - This is the film that I believe best represents what the MCU has to offer. It’s a light hearted superhero film with all the characters that were needed at this point in time. For its time it was ambitious and honestly it shows. I loved the dynamics between the characters, the plot was engaging and not overly complex and even if you haven’t seen any other MCU films it makes perfect sense. In some respects it probably is the best the MCU has to offer.

1. Avengers: Infinity War - Oh boy do I love this film. This isn’t just a film, this is the film. Did it have the same emotional impact as Endgame? Fuck no but it didn’t need to. It was serious. It was funny. It had just the right amount of just the right characters and may I just say that is the best that Captain America has ever looked in the MCU. I (controversially) really loved Gamora dying and most of the Guardians being dusted. The memes were great.This was the most ambitious cross over event since Wizards of deck with Hannah Montana. One thing that I can’t get out of my head though is Bruce’s comment of “broke up like the beatles?”. Does that make Bucky Yoko Ono?

[figuretealeavely]

IN THE LOOP - check yourselves

I recently had the chance to go to Skate Canada International in Montreal. It was a really wonderful experience and I feel grateful to have been able to enjoy it. The event was well-organized, the volunteers were incredibly nice, and the audience was supportive and friendly. It was therefore extremely dismaying to find that one of the newest and most popular journalism sources for figure skating had such a, frankly, inaccurate, skewed, and alarming perception of the event.

Let’s look at what In the Loop’s goals are:

When I first saw this I was really encouraged because I agree that this is what the sport needs. And I listened to a few early podcast episodes, which I thought were pretty enjoyable. However, last week, I tuned in again and found something rather uninformed in their tone about Russian skaters. 

In re: Tarasova/Morozov:

Red: Yeah. They always look like there’s skating to the formula and they don’t really care [about] anything else as long as they’re getting what they need to get the high score that..I don’t know, it’s just very formulaic there’s not a whole lot of emotion like all were saying.

Yogeeta: Hashtag skating while Russian.

...

Red: That’s how it is with most of the Russian pairs, I’ve noticed.  And sometimes even Russian Ice Dance, it’s just formulaic. It’s just there. It happens. They did really well technically, but you never really feel anything from it.

About Russians in general:

Yogeeta: Yeah. I think in general Romeo and Juliet programs - their music cut isn’t really good. I never want to hear a Romeo and Juliet voiceover that isn’t “Juliet” [Referring to Junhwan Cha’s voiceover] ever again.

Sam: Skaters out there, voiceover is for camp and very Russian programs. It’s not for you when you’re trying to be serious. It doesn’t work as well.

...

Red: I definitely liked her skating a lot more than some of the other Russian skaters I’ve seen in the past. You can tell that she really does enjoy what she does. She ended both of her performances with a huge smile, so that was really nice to see. But I still think there’s some of that in there, like what you usually see from a lot of these Russian skaters is just “We go out, we do our job, we get it done.” You know? It doesn’t feel as passionate. But I still think she did a really good job.

I was extremely shocked to read this blatantly UNEDUCATED take on pairs. Now, if someone decides that they don’t like “Russians” (whatever that means), I cannot stop you. But it is quite another thing to say that all Russians don’t show emotion, that you don't feel anything from it, and don’t enjoy what they do. Or that Russian pairs are “formulaic.” Perhaps they are not aware of the extensive, epic, and game-changing legacy of Russian pairs skaters. Or even worse, perhaps they are aware and choose to ignore it to write off the current pairs AND the entire history of the discipline in one go. Listen, if you don't know much about pairs, that’s totally fine. Not everyone likes every event. But don’t pretend to know what you’re talking about and spread this as the truth when it is clearly not steeped in any deep knowledge of the sport. Where is the “international perspective” or “in-depth historical data”?

I wish I could say things improved from there, but they did not. Again, the audience was VERY respectful at Skate Canada, did not boo anyone, cheered for all, and especially the home team skaters. By the way, for anyone who has ever attended a sporting event, this is normal behavior. I noticed I was sitting within viewing distance of the In the Loop crowd, but didn’t think much of it. But I want to emphasize this because I heard exactly what they heard in the same area of the rink. So when I read this:

Kite: I want to say I was not super impressed with some of the audience not really cheering for the non-Canadian skaters. It was something I noticed. I mean, it is an event in Canada, it’s called Skate Canada, of course you’re gonna be going all out for your home skaters. 

...

Kat: Yeah, Vanessa and Morgan got a huge standing ovation and they got a lot of cheer, and obviously, they deserved it. And also Evgenia got a lot of cheering as well, but I guess she’s been adopted into the Canadians, kind of?

Kite: Well she’s also just so well known and I think she has become a pretty beloved figure for a lot of fans post-Olympics.

Kat: Yeah, I guess so.

Kite: So yeah, it was either if you were a very well known skater, or if you were a Canadian/French skater.

Nina: I wish the well-known points would have counted towards some of the Men’s skaters.

Gina: Yeah, it was really obvious when streaming that the crowd was just so half-hearted who wasn’t either really well known or Canadian.

I was a bit irked because the audience cheered for EVERYONE. Perhaps they were more enthusiastic about the Canadians but guess what? You are in Canada. It’s not exactly shocking behavior, and I’m glad to see the home skaters got attention. A truly rude crowd is one that is salty to their own - what we should encourage is more casual fans becoming serious fans, and that starts with them cheering for a home team. It’s true that for others it may start with the fact that the skater is another nationality, but the majority of people are not this way. Just a reality check.

By the way, it is really stretch to tie everyone who got super loud cheers back to Canada, or to assume that ALL CANADIANS LOVE FRENCH PEOPLE. Excuse me, what kind of generalization is this? Certainly NOT a primer “on cross-disciplinary areas such as sociology, medicine, media, gender studies, and politics.” I was at the event with many people and none of them found the crowd half-hearted. And guess what, only one of us was Canadian (no, it is not me) (no, I am not a middle-aged Canadian white person, in fact I am none of the above).

And then this:

Gina: I am going to get banned from Canada, I’m never allowed to enter, I find Canadians so boring.

Kite: Go off!

Gina: I’m sorry! I found the performance-

Nina: I was trying to be diplomatic.

Gina: Really one-note and really dull. I think they rely, especially in their Free Program, they rely a bit too much on the music to provoke a response in the audience rather than working with the music to create something themselves.

Kat: I agree.

Gina: I just find them so dull.

Kat: A note on the music: So they skated to Pink Floyd in their Free Skate, and that is such… A lot of the Canadians, I’ve noticed, pick oldies to skate to-

Nina: So Canadian…

Kat: Yeah, they pick oldies to skate to. That elicits a response from a certain demographic.

Gina: I think I’m about 30 years too young for Canada.

On Keegan:

Nina: Oh, I’m very curious to see what his scores will look like at other locations.  

Kat: Yeah because our crowd obviously got really, really into his programs.  

Gina: I don’t understand Canadians. I will say that I was correct last time that his Short Program is much more enjoyable when I mute the music.                     

Nina: This just in, Gina doesn’t like oldies.

It is extremely unprofessional and rude to write off an ENTIRE COUNTRY based off a few figure skating performances you found uninspiring. By the way, if Pink Floyd is an “oldie” that you dislike, then what exactly is Shoma Uno’s Led Zeppelin cover SP? The bias is rather jarring and way worse than anything I hear on live tv. Which by the way, is already pretty bad, so if your goal is to encourage “critical, educated fans” with “sociology” and “politics” I’d say you are doing pretty much the exact opposite of that.

In fact, they seem to have a very poor understanding of why Canada is a country that produces a lot of skaters, whether for themselves or others. During the ice dance event they say:

Kat: The most enthusiastic crowds for sure, like most of the front row seats were pretty filled for ice dance considering it was - they were both like early evening events as well, like they started at around six or seven. It's not super late either, so a lot more people were able to attend their, you know, it's like off work hours. I guess Canadians come watch Ice Dance when that happens.

Actually, rather than Canadians all collectively deciding to watch ice dance after work, In the Loop might want to consider that Montreal is currently the global hub of Ice Dance with Gadbois, and many of their teams were at this event. And I believe there was a large contingent of affiliated skaters, families, and friends in the stands. Do your diligence.

And then, back to the Russians:

Nina: The Free Dance seemed like it was supposed to be clean, and glassy, and very elegant, but they didn't really have the tech to back it up-

Kite: No, they do, they have good tech, like their tech is fine. It was just boring, like it didn't connect to the audience.

Nina: I feel like this will make no sense but it felt like their program wanted to be very lyrical- not lyrical, but like balletic, almost? Like the vibe-

Kat: That’s very Russian.

Very Russian, is it?

Let’s remind ourselves again:

Don’t overextend yourself before you educate yourself on what you’re actually trying to do. Please, In the Loop, moderate your tone and biases. It is very clear to me that you guys have your favorites - we all do. But there is absolutely no need to sacrifice education, information, professionalism, and your raison d’être above in order to talk about other countries’ figure skating traditions, fans, and history.

By the way, the last thing I want to do is censor anyone. If you want to say these things, by all means go ahead. But please do not try to come across as serious, objective journalists who encourage varied discussion because new fans will be influenced to follow your reasoning. It is not hard to lay out the facts and THEN present your biases as your own. There is no need to conflate the latter with the former. 

As a final note, for fans who were so disappointed with the event and the people who attended, it seems they had no qualms about taking seats that they did not pay for and openly bragging about it on social media:

I am extremely disappointed in what was once a promising new journalism outlet losing credibility rather quickly via what appears to be unprofessional generalizations about culture, fandoms, and everything they purport to encourage discourse about. Do better, In the Loop. 

[weaarepawnation]

THREE NEGLECTED BUT CRUCIAL DOG BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION TECHNIQUES

When dealing with dogs who have behavioral issues, there are a few essential ideas that are crucial to understand. The three most significant of these are listed below. The things I describe below may appear straightforward, but in reality they aren't. When we are angry with our dog, it might be difficult to put these axioms into practice. Additionally, they may seem counter-intuitive.

What do these three ideas mean?

The quick response is: Calmness, Monotony, and Separation.

Let me go into more detail about these following.

TRANQUILITY

Working with dogs often doesn't go well for people who aren't calm and collected around them. How can we handle our dogs calmly?

As a reminder, dogs cannot hear spoken language from humans, therefore we must speak to them in relatively gentle tones and with few words. Dogs can become stressed out by harsh remarks and a constant barrage of stimuli (i.e., instructions).

Your relaxed, non-jerky body movements will also help to calm your dog. This is referred to as having a "soft body."

Dogs experience more stress when their leash is micromanaged by owners. In order to prevent stressing out your dog, it's crucial to only apply pressure to the leash when necessary and to never jerk the leash.

Finally, it's critical for the handler—the person holding the leash—to move purposefully and slowly in order to foster a calm environment for the dog. Note that I did not say hastily, angrily, or abruptly. A handler who is assured of his or her command of the leash communicates to the dog at the other end of the leash that the handler is assured and in control. Dogs enjoy it.

MONOTONY

The idea of tranquility described above is understood by the majority of people and is reasonable. Monotony is less visible, though. Dogs with behavioural problems frequently require desensitisation and counter conditioning as part of behaviour management. Desensitization is the practice of gradually exposing dogs to the things they are afraid of in an effort to lessen the anxiety the dog feels around the trigger.

Dogs with fear disorders may experience fear before fully processing what they are seeing when they only encounter a trigger. This is referred to as a conditioned reaction and is learned over time. In order to reduce this conditioned response, counterconditioning aims to shift dogs' associations with the things they dread to more positive ones.

Exercises for desensitisation and counter conditioning should be positive, absolutely uneventful, and plain boring when used with dogs. Even if these activities go smoothly, the dog and the handler will undoubtedly find them tedious and dull. The trigger starts to bore the dog to tears.

Consider this: the goal of this kind of behaviour change is to lessen fear. Similar to humans, dogs are not frightened by uninteresting things. Sometimes monotony is a good thing.

SEPARATION

A survey of 2,500 dogs revealed that nearly all agreed that being separated from frightening objects helps them become less frightened of them. Since we can't genuinely poll dogs, the survey is fictitious, but the section about separation is 100% accurate. Distance is how dogs respond to things they dread. They feel more at ease the further they are from things that frighten them. In fact, you can use the amount of space needed to keep a dog calm around a particular object to determine how scared they are of it.

Dogs get this distance by either using aggression to push the dangerous thing farther away or by utilizing avoidance by avoiding the trigger. Each of these actions causes the dog to move further away from the frightening object. These actions are referred to as distance-increasing behaviours as a whole.

When dogs face situations that make them anxious, separation or distance is a crucial strategy to use. One of the most crucial tools in the behaviour consultant's toolkit is separation, which can be used to gradually desensitise a dog to a trigger. By gradually reducing the distance, it enables us to gradually increase dogs' exposure to a trigger over time at a rate they can tolerate.

CALMNESS, CONSISTENCY, AND SEPARATION

These three ideas can help dogs with their behavioural issues in a big manner. If these methods aren't used, behaviour adjustment may be challenging or even impossible.

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[mado-science]

Excellent! I am a Christian. Up until reading "The Greatest Show On Earth", the only material by Dawkins that I was familiar with was The God Delusion, and a number of his speeches dealing with religion. On those subjects, I was none too impressed by his rhetoric. I found his argumentation skills extremely flawed, and was left wondering what was so influential about this man. Then I read this book, and I understood. As a science educator and writer, he really blew me away. His ability to explain evolution in such simplistic yet convincing ways was wonderful, and I have recommended this book to many friends because of it. I really enjoyed his writing style especially because he really engages the reader, and it comes across as not only passionate, but very personal. That right there hooked me immediately. I also liked how he touched on the fact that this book is not about God or religion: its about scientific education and preventing further scientific illiteracy. In it, he presents a note to the Prime Minister that he and several other academics, as well as religious figures, wrote stressing the importance scientific education and literacy in schools, and separating science classes from religious classes. If you are looking for an in depth, yet easy explanation of evolution in all of its beauty and genius forms, this book is for you. I simply cannot praise it enough! I highly recommend it! Go to Amazon

The writing style is just perfect if you are a layperson This book really changed my life. I was always challenged by creationist family asking me "you're not one of those evolutionists, are you?!" And I didn't really know anything about evolution. Finally, I decided to see what it was all about and I began with this book. I found it hard to put down. If you have an interest in the subject, you'll surely find it fascinating. I've since become a big fan of Dawkins, but let me not get too ahead of myself here. The writing style is just perfect if you are a layperson. Dawkins really has a way of guiding you by the hand through the concepts and you almost feel as though you are an expert on the subject after reading it. He MAKES you understand it. Dawkins seems to spend a lot of time on each section, really trying to explain things for the person that doesn't know anything. This takes time, and so the chapters and sections within the chapters can get a bit long, but never dull. You almost get a whole new perspective and appreciation for nature while reading it. I found it to be a great introduction and over-view of evolution. And maybe that isn't giving it enough credit because it's NOT merely an overview as I said he goes into great detail in much of it. I read a review here on Amazon that Jerry Coyne's "Why Evolution Is True" makes for a great companion piece to this. I couldn't agree more. Coyne's book is a little more difficult of a read, but is also shorter and more succinct. To my family and any other creationist that asks, I now proudly exclaim, "yes, I am one of those evolutionists"! I felt like this was one of the most important books I've read and the information in here is just truly amazing. Maybe if you've understood evolution for years, you'd be bored by this. But if you are genuinely curious and really don't know anything and wonder "why are monkeys still here?", this book is definitely for you. I truly felt that it was invaluable and one of the best books I've read. Give it a shot, and if your appetite for more information on this subject grows, check out Dawkins other great books or Coyne's book I mentioned. I hope it changes your life and ways of thinking in as much of a profound way as it has affected me. Go to Amazon

Elegantly provocative, and unbelievably convincing Knowing Richard Dawkin's resume', there's no question that he has a refined knowledge in the biological science spectrum. In The Greatest Show on Earth his broad scope of knowledge is on display. The author convincingly builds on his premise (i.e. why evolution is true) chapter by chapter. He explicates the main point of each chapter not by getting straight to it, but by priming the reader with a plethora of examples, schematic illustrations, and evidence before coming to a full fledged circle. This helped prepare [novice] readers grasp difficult (or hard to imagine) concepts and perhaps cope with the grand conclusion(s) that might be contrary to a popular belief (e.g. Noah's Ark). Despite the numerous and perhaps sometimes even gratuitous (didn't bother me, i'm a novice) examples, the author excels at much more than biology, ecology, and ethology. Dawkin's has a well-rounded knowledge in anthropology, chemistry, embryology, etc, and a talent for explaining as well. The author also considers evolution critics and their objections, even some that are ostensibly ridiculous. In interpolated Gallup results, a surprising 44 percent of Americans believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so", which is basically the denial of evolution . As the author put it; it's the equivalent to believing that the length of North America is less than 10 yards. There's a particularly good (and expedient) chapter that reinforces the ridiculousness of such assumptions. That chapter is called "Silence and Slow Time" and it's chapter 4. In the chapter the author goes through some of the most common dating methods, such as the tree rings method, radioactive clocks methods, carbon-dating and the molecular clock which he goes in chapter 10. Go to Amazon

I liked this book for how well it rounds up the ... Five Stars Five Stars Turns the understanding of evolution into concrete in the reader's mind. Four Stars READ THIS! Five Stars Five Stars It's not the audio book It is amazing how science continues to thwart religion

[bellatrixobsessed1]

The Fishbone and The Firelily (Part 14)

Sokka still had his arms around her when the others began to stir; none of them actually pulling themselves out of sleep though. He held her steady as the sun slowly inched up the sky with an occasional comment about how brilliant the colors were and how he was glad that she woke up in time to see it with him. “It’s nice to have some peace around here.” He added, “But I’m glad things were difficult up to now.”

 “Why would you be thankful for that?” Azula replied, forgetting her situation for a moment, she made an attempt to take his hand and added bitterly, “I for one could have done without.”

 “If they weren’t do you think we’d be here now?”

 “Sure.” Azula quirked an eyebrow. “There are plenty of things that could have us conversing under this tree.”

 “Would they have been good? Or would you have been fighting me? Maybe we would have you tied to the tree as our captive—or possibly you’d have me captured and bound. I don’t think we would have this…” he motioned to a campfire waiting to be reawakened and the rest of the group sleeping without worry. “You wouldn’t have let me hold you like this, would you have? You wouldn’t have helped us if you hadn’t tried to destroy the heart, would you have?”

  Azula took these comments in with a sort of fascination, she had never known him to become so immersed in such speculation, so philosophical. “I suppose not.” She confessed. Perhaps out of discomfort she chose not to dwell on it even to herself. For better or for worse she didn’t like to admit that she’d changed any. The firebender was decently happy with who she started as and was reluctant to let that go—to let her legacy of fear fade into obscurity. This level of deeper introspection was daunting; she never wanted it. Even with someone to help her though it…especially with someone to help her through it and see everything she thought to keep covered. Truth be told she was still weary of letting Sokka get so close to her—he’d already slipped far beneath her armor. His hold around her middle and his breaths on her neck were a potent reminder of just how unguarded she’d left her walls. More than anything, she was still dreading the moment he decided to bring up her last words to him in the cave before she fell away. It brought color to her cheeks to think about it.

Eventually it would come up. Sokka may act it sometimes, but he was no fool. He could put the pieces together, Azula imagined that he already had. And it brought a curious rift in her mind between the part of her that wanted him to ask if she loved him and the part of her that was content to stay well within what was left of her comfort zone. “You would have Suki if I wasn’t here.” She commented.

 “I don’t think I would have.” Sokka replied. “If you weren’t here I wouldn’t have a lover at all.”

 “Is that I am?” She asked as level as she could manage. She expected him to bring the cave up right then and there.

 Apparently, he was done with critical thinking and heavy topics for the day being as his only answer to her inquiry was, “You’re something, that’s for sure, I don’t really know what. I’m just happy you’re here.” She found herself relieved and dissatisfied all at once. “I think that I should get a start on breakfast. Do you want me to lean you against the tree or do you want to come with me?”

 “The tree is nice.” She answered.

 .oOo.

 Sokka watched the fire crackle and pop for a moment before it dawned on him that he had nothing to roast within it. “Can you let the others know that I went to go catch some fish.”

 “I’d like to come actually.” Azula declared.

 The look she fixed on him when he suggested that, that might not be practical was horrifying. So he yielded in an instant. In an attempt to prove that he wasn’t a complete pushover he slung her gracelessly over his shoulder.

 “This is not how you carry a princess.” She huffed. Her hair tumbled forward in a way that had her blowing every few minutes to keep it out of her eyes.

 “It’s how I carry you when you get pushy.” He shrugged.

 “I hate you.” She grumbled.

 “You aren’t as good at lying as I thought you were.”

 “I’m not trying to lie, you truly are the most aggravating person I’ve ever met.”

 Sokka quickly found that he was having no luck with hunting nor fishing that day. He managed to pluck a few bananas but nothing comparable to a real meal. The fish seemed to leap from his hand and wiggle out of the way of his spear and the hog-monkeys seemed to dart away extra fast. Azula remained where he propped her up; sitting cross-legged against a log. He could see her smiling smugly from where he stood. It didn’t matter that she wouldn’t be getting any food either, so long as she had the satisfaction of seeing him make an ass of himself. “Don’t you dare,” he muttered before she could make any critical commentary. He made another plunge for a salmon.  It was an amusing feat for her for a while but he could tell that she was growing bored. “Banana?” He offered.

 “Not right now, just hurry up and catch us some real food.” She waved him off with a yawn. Like that he was back in the water trying to coax a few stubborn fish to him. He was getting nowhere at all. Finally, after what seemed like an hour or so he had a fish in his hands. Unfortunately, he had no time to celebrate his tiny victory for two dull thuds startled the fish right out of his too lax grasp. He scowled and looked over at Azula. He was surprised at all, to find that she was the source of the ruckus. No, his shock came when saw her laying on her side, it doubled when he noticed the hog-monkey laying some feet away from her. “H-how?” He sputtered.

 Taking in a deep breath, Azula allowed a small burst of flames spill between her lips. “All I had to do was wait for the right moment. I figured that I should probably just do it, since you can’t seem to catch anything.”

 “I-I had one! You distracted me.” He accused.

 “Whoops.” Azula uttered half-heartedly. “I don’t like fish much anyways. This is better.” She gave him such a self-satisfied look that he couldn’t bring himself to even be annoyed. He was rather amazed really, that she could find a way to accomplish her desires despite all odds. The woman wasn’t born lucky—luck had nothing to do with it at all, she was clever by all means. Clever and determined, two of her many allures.

 “Alright, you win.” He relented. “Let’s head back.” He paused. “I’m going to need you to hold the hog-monkey.”  He first took her into his arms and the set the hog-monkey atop her. With such accomplished, he positioned her hands around it and hoped that everything would stay in place. The hog-monkey was a curse and a blessing; it was rather bulky—he could tell that Azula was growing uncomfortable under its crushing weight. If he wasn’t breathing so heavily and putting so much focus on carrying the damn thing he may have heard her puff out, “this thing is avenging itself in death.” And then, “I hope I can cause someone this much strife after I’m dead.” What he did hear, was her sigh of relief when the heft of the hog-monkey was taken from her. He carried it to the fire noting that it very well could weigh more than the princess herself, and perhaps he should have had Azula resting upon it rather than the reverse. He wouldn’t say it to Azula herself lest he be bombarded with a flurry of complaining.

 For all of the struggle; the creature had provided the most filling meal they’ve had in a while. Aang of course, took the remaining uncrushed bananas. Sokka took his first bite of the meat and then held some out for Azula.

 “Nice catch, Sokka.” Toph commented.

 “Thank you.” Azula replied.

 Sokka explaining how it was Azula who took the hog-monkey down did little to stop Toph from calling her Sokka for the rest of the day (and from calling him Azula, at that). As he had been doing, Sokka slung both of their packs over Azula’s shoulder and lifted her back into his arms. At least this time around she would make conversation with him, that is if she was in the mood. He was counting on it considering how talkative she’d been with him that morning.

 “You’re still carrying her?” Katara asked.

 “Yeah.” He replied simply.

 “Is she okay?” Aang asked, seeming to put a few pieces together. Between Sokka having to feed her and their current positioning, it couldn’t have possibly been lost on the Avatar that something was amiss. And then remembering that Azula was fully cognizant again he addressed her directly with the question.

 “I’m well enough, Avatar.” She replied languidly.

 For a moment, Aang seemed to study the dusting of bruises on her temple and the thin—still a rather dark hue of pink—slash on her cheek. Her nose, Sokka realized, was also still a good degree swollen. The assortment of injuries mirrored those that covered Suki’s face somewhat closely. “That looks like it hurt.” He noted.

 “Not too terribly.” She dismissed. Sokka questioned the sincerity of it. Regardless of what they’d been through, Azula still had a stubborn need to downplay her pain.

 “Katara has healed Suki really well.” Aang persisted. “The cut is almost gone, you should let her take a look.”

 “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.” Azula agreed. “She can look after we settle for the night.”

 Sokka drew in a breath of respite. It would be good for her to get at least some healing water on her cheek. He was beginning to worry that it would get infected. Not that Azula herself, seemed concerned. He supposed that she was probably more preoccupied with her paralysis.  

 “Is your foot hurt?” Aang inquired again.

 “If you’re trying to ask why I’m not walking myself, Avatar, it’s because I can’t.” Azula said. “Hogoseki…” a scowl graced her lips as she spat the name, “took that from me.” Her expression dimmed. “I was able to firebend once today—to catch the hog-monkey—I haven’t been able to since. I’ve been trying. It’s like I had one final burst of chi and now it’s gone.” Her smile came back some, “I don’t think I was supposed to have done even that.”

 “I’m sorry.” Aang replied lamely. “I can see if I can do anything.”

 “What can you do about it?”

 “If I can take your dad’s bending maybe I could give you yours back?” He considered.

 “Have you ever done anything of the sort?” Azula questioned.

 He hesitated. “Well, no.”

 “I don’t have much to lose.” She stated. “You may give it a try after Katara sees to me.” Something in her eyes let Sokka know that she had faith in Aang. At least a little of it.

 He loathed to see that it amounted to nothing. Later that night when they had their camp set up Aang gave it a try. He found that giving someone bending was a much different feat than taking it. It was, after all, easier to rip something apart than mend it back into one. Azula’s mood soured very quickly after that—a false mocking glimpse of hope seemed to be worse than anything else. She was furious too, that she had wasted the last of her ability to bend on such a petty task. Nothing he did seemed to calm a temper so fiery it rivaled the bending she mourned. He was thankful that she could cause little destruction to herself and the world around her.

 Sokka didn’t witness the height of it until she knew everyone else was asleep. “I should have died in that cave.” She hissed at last. “You should have let me…”

 He cut her off quicker than he ever had before. “That’s just not true. You know that you wouldn’t have wanted that.”

 “Sokka, I’m useless. What’s the point in being…” at his wince she spoke with more care “around, if I can’t do anything?”

 “You’ve already done a lot. You saved the Avatar, if you didn’t things would be chaotic right now. You can still do a lot; you don’t need your bending, you don’t even need to move, to help Zuko manage the Fire Nation. He’s great at it in many ways but he could use a firmer hand, and someone who knows the ins and outs of everything.”

 “Zu-Zu doesn’t want my help.” Azula declared. “And I don’t want to help him.”

 “That’s right.” He muttered more to himself. Zuko was going to have a lot of catching up to do. “He cares about you, you know? He’ll be happy to know that you’re okay.”

 “I’m not okay.” She finally admitted. “Whenever I think that I am.” She paused, “I’m just not.” She sniffed, something that was unaccompanied by tears.

 “I think that you will be.” Sokka smiled. “You don’t need your bending to be strong. You don’t need it at all. All you need to do is be here and that’ll help me. That’s useful, right?” When she didn’t answer he added, “we also still need your directions to get us home.” He ran his hand over the fading bruises at her temple. “You’ll be important to me.”

“I guess that, that counts for something.” Azula swallowed. He looked into her eyes and assessed that it counted for more than just something. “I want to hold your hand.” He took her hand and set it over his. Somehow, it counted for everything.

[skyland-logos]

Zodiacs; The Follow Up

This is the continuation for my previous post about the sides. Their Zodiacs.

In the last post, I finished it off by saying the following;

Patton; Libra

Roman; Leo

Logan; Capricorn

Virgil; Virgo

Now, I am going to talk about how these seem to fit the best, for me, with the sides. Let’s start off with Patton and go down the list that way.

I see Patton as a Libra because I have a friend who acts like a real-life Patton that is a Libra and references off of a few websites I researched off of. Libras love balance and peace.

They try to avoid any conflict and want balance in their lives. He apologizes to Thomas when he realizes that he and Logan were talking over each other and making it hard for him to make decisions. Always tries to help out whenever Thomas is having a dilemma and tries his best to add in what he can.

“ Libra signs can sometimes seem wishy-washy when they are asked to make a decision” which makes them seem like they’re absent-minded or lazy, but in the end their decision will benefit most people. Yet, a “Libra representative has to be careful when talking to other people, for when they are forced to decide about something that is coming their way, or to choose sides, they suddenly realize that they might be in the wrong place and surrounded by wrong people”. He somewhat freaks out under pressure when he is told to do something and slowly follows along because he usually follows his heart, so when he is told something to do, it slowly goes through him to do it

They only really seem unhappy when they are treated unfairly because of their likeliness of fairness. I see this more when he gets left out and joins back in randomly which happens a few times (”potato” and patty-cake with Valerie) where he just kind of does what he wants. 

 “Libra are often self-sacrificing for the good of the team or the family”. He keeps his own emotions, besides happiness, inside for the sake of everyone else and to keep them happy. Cares more for the others more than himself.

They also like to have a say in things, but don’t want to be in charge. This is what Patton do a lot of the time when he and Logan fight or when he joins bantering between the others. He mostly puts small inputs of his own thoughts into the group conversations.

They can be;  “Cooperative, diplomatic, gracious, fair-minded, social”, but they can also; “Indecisive, avoids confrontations, self-pity”. I think you can kind of see these in his personality a lot more since they are the strengths and weaknesses.

Next is Roman;

I see Roman as a Leo but there are other zodiacs that you could pick that would work for him.

“Leo likes the big picture, not the small details and fine print. Things that are too complicated, involved, or boring, they have no patience for.” He tends to push the others ideas out of the way when ever they are long and boring, but when he has the reigns on the project or dilemma, he usually tries to face the big picture than the smaller problems. 

“Leos, not unlike the lion of a pride, need to be adored. If they are ignored or go unrecognized for some contribution they will feel hurt. All Leos like to know that they have been seen and appreciated.” Hint to “Not talk about me?” and when he complains that he wasn’t in the latest video.

“They are dramatic, creative, self-confident, dominant and extremely difficult to resist, able to achieve anything they want to in any area of life they commit to.” Roman is very much so dramatic, creative and self-confident like Leos are and he tries to help Thomas so he can achieve his goals in life that he commits to.

“They are natural leaders and don’t often do well in situations where they have to take orders from others.”  “Able to use their mind to solve even the most difficult problems, they will easily take initiative in resolving various complicated situations.” “Self-confident and attractive, this is a Sun sign capable of uniting different groups of people and leading them as one towards a shared cause, and their healthy sense of humor makes collaboration with other people even easier.” He does try to help the group by finding out new ideas and different ways to go about a dilemma. He also has a great sense of humor, if you do find his name calling as humor, plus he also likes Patton’s jokes.

“They are in search for self-awareness and in constant growth of ego.” “As for love, I’m in between princes and princesses, I am on a solo quest to save...myself.”

Thirdly, Logan;

I changed up Logan’s a few times since he was hard to find one for, yet he seems more like a Capricorn.

“They are masters of self-control and have the ability to lead the way, make solid and realistic plans, and manage many people who work for them at any time.” “Highly intellectual, good with numbers and analysis, this sign is not often loud, but they are most definitely the muscle and the power behind the very successful machine.” “Capricorns are the superheroes when It comes to making realistic, logical decisions. Their ability to cut through the red tape and see the bottom line is what makes them a real asset to any relationship or occupation where teamwork is valued.” You can view “Losing My Motivation” for that where it does show all of these ideas in his personality.

“Capricorn people are the type that are goal oriented and driven to succeed despite all odds.” “They will work long and hard hours toward a purposeful goal. Achievement is everything to a Capricorn.” He tried to do these things in “MOVING ON, Part 1/2″ where he is mostly goal driven to figure out the best way to help Thomas move on. He also does this in “Losing My Motivation” and “The MIND VS. The HEART!”. 

“Unfortunately, this element also makes them stiff and sometimes too stubborn to move from one perspective or point in a relationship.” “Its influence makes these people practical and responsible, but also cold, distant and unforgiving...” He shows his stiff/stubbornness in “The MIND VS. The HEART!” when he tells Morality that, from a logical standpoint, he is fine though Morality says not to speak over Thomas, but continues to banter with him over this. Also, from the outlook of him, he seems cold and distant because he isn’t a feeling.

“For this reason they tend to take life very seriously and are not tolerant of those who do not.“ He seems to not like Roman and Patton’s outlooks on life because they are dream/fantasy-like shown in “Growing Up” and “Alone on VALENTINE’S DAY!”.

“They are natural born leaders, politicians, mathematicians, and diplomats. Capricorn people tend to guard their hearts closely and well. To get close to a Capricorn may take some time, but once achieved, well worth it.” “Because they are so dedicated to the big picture and the minute details, they can seem dull to others, who don’t understand the active internal nature of the Capricorn. While seeming almost emotionless on the surface, the Capricorn’s mind is always running on overdrive” Shown in “MOVING ON” parts one and two it shows all of these things that are told above. He gives Patton a new jacket since they have slowly become closer and he seemed emotionless to the others while he was actually running over things quickly to try and help Thomas’s loss

“Capricorn have a dry sense of humor and their sarcastic wit is only appreciated by those who find humor everywhere.” “-Because you’re an airhead” “-You  malodorous scent-urion,oh!”

“Often they can be the less imaginative of the signs and refuse to face the facts about a situation because it would signal that they were wrong about something (which they hate).” “They will learn from their mistakes and get to the top based solely on their experience and expertise.” Roman: Yes, You were completely right! Logan: I know. Roman: meaning you were right about initially being wrong. Logan: *sterner* I know. 

Finally, Virgil;

It was hard to figure out Virgil’s too! Yet, I found that Virgo fits him pretty well and...Virgil...Virgo. Pretty similar words.

“Virgos are always paying attention to the smallest details and their deep sense of humanity makes them one of the most careful signs of the zodiac.” “Constantly worried that they missed a detail that will be impossible to fix, they can get stuck in details, becoming overly critical and concerned about matters that nobody else seems to care much about.” “Virgo people are mild mannered on the surface, but underneath there is a flurry of activity. Their minds are never quiet; always thinking, calculating, assessing.” “They loves making something out of nothing.” This is what Anxiety mainly can be, an overthinking/worry in your mind that makes small things big. Virgil does that to Thomas a lot when he makes mistakes, going to parties, unstable sides, or sometimes...whenever. Remember “My NEGATIVE Thinking” and “Taking on ANXIETY”.

“This is a sign often misunderstood, not because they lack the ability to express, but because they won’t accept their feelings as valid, true, or even relevant when opposed to reason”. This seems the case when Virgil’s character was finally fully developed. He was often misunderstood as “The bad guy”. He was pointed out for many problems due to him causing Thomas anxiety. That’s why he hopped out of the group in “ACCEPTING ANXIETY”. He didn’t want himself to bother or get in the way of the sides and Thomas anymore. 

“This sign would do well to carefully consider the situation and the task before agreeing to take it on.” “Virgil: I've got a bad feeling about this Thomas;I've got a bad feeling about everything that's why we're doing this” he is usually forced into situations before he can agree on it because Thomas and some of the sides choose to just press on without giving Virgil a thought on how he’s feeling besides Logan, and sometimes he, too, also does that.

“They do not tend to be loud or bossy, but are brilliant strategists and an asset to any team.” In “Losing My Motivation”, he helps out Logan by giving him some ideas about who the culprit is. He can be very essential to the team when they aren’t forgetting about him and teasing him.

“They are not loud ‘look at me’ signs, but rather prefer to be the strong, silent type.” This shows up in “The Sanders Sides 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS!” where they go to sing and he doesn’t want to while his fight or flight acts up. Along with that, he thinks his gift for Patton is dump because its not as amazing as everyone else, yet it still has a nice compliment in it. (A misleading compliment)

“Virgo are opinionated and have no problem sharing their opinions, even when they should not.” Think of “My NEGATIVE Thinking”, “Am I ORIGINAL?”, “A New Year of Lying to Myself... In Song!! “, and a lot of other videos because he is one source of Thomas’s reasoning.

Now, that’s my own opinion on why they are those zodiacs personality wise not by date, so if you needed references for a fic or an idea for their personalities, I hope this helped. That’s all folks! Thanks for reading! This took longer than expected.

references are here and here.

[garrisonabel93]

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[landonho1993]

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[derrickperegrine]

@hpwritersnet august event: draco ships

lost and never found | a draco/blaise fic

... But Blaise somehow knew exactly how to get under someone’s skin; a talent that Draco both loathed and loved. It was as if no one else knew him better than Blaise did; yet, on the other hand, Blaise seemed hellbent on using this knowledge against him.

The first time Draco Malfoy felt intense apathy was when he first kissed Blaise Zabini.

Blaise Zabini was something of a fascinating figure to Draco Malfoy. He was one tall bloke, handsomer than the Devil, and did not even have a single fuck to give; Draco admired his satirical, irreverent humour, envied the nonchalance with which he carried himself, and craved the impossible calm that exuded from Zabini’s person.

How could someone remain so carefree and indifferent in this day and age? Draco thought; he himself was always on the verge of mental collapse, with the threats of the Dark Lord heavy against the back of his neck and the Dark Mark burning forebodingly on his forearm. He longed to be like Zabini, on whom worries seem to slide off like water on a duck’s back.

He fancied Zabini, in away. Amongst other boys. In a way.

But out of all the boys Zabini was particularly special to Draco. He was everything Draco was not -- a bright personality, charming and magnetic; confident in himself; comfortable with himself; a joker and a critic in one person. However they were also achingly similar -- well-off heirs, ambiguous figures, haughty personalities, dark princes ... it felt like they were on the same playing field.

Many of the other boys felt, on a certain level, alien -- Pucey was otherworldly in his exuberance, and Draco sometimes felt burnt by his bright, winsome grins; Montague had a statuesque air to him, seemingly cold and unmovable, a puzzle waiting to be solved; Derrick was all sharp points and glinting like metal, his lopsided smile often nicking at Draco in an instigative manner; and Potter.

He honestly shouldn’t even talk about Potter, with his hatefully green eyes stark against brown skin, unruly black hair crowning him as the Saviour. And who was Draco? Unworthy of even being termed a nemesis. Merely a pawn in the greater picture. He could never take out the queen in this game of chess.

But Blaise seemed more ... feasible. He was something familiar and ... nonthreatening, agenda-less. The thought of how the world was fitting together right now bothered Draco -- as much as he enjoyed the influence he had, the stress of all everyone demanded out of him gnawed at him disquietingly. He was always trying to figure out how he should next play the game in order to ensure his importance and continued survival; he appreciated that Blaise was brazenly refusing to play the game. When all the other boys fell on one side or the other of this conflict, Blaise firmly stated that he was perfectly happy with sitting on the fence.

And in that way he was more approachable than the other boys Draco half-fancied.

But perhaps this made Blaise Zabini the most dangerous of them all. Draco was not prepared to deal with anyone with a greater motivation in the approaching War; he would not fraternise with the enemy, and he didn’t trust any of the Dark Lord’s greedy supporters who would use his Malfoy influence to better their own lot. But Zabini was not interested in the War, and thus stood to gain nothing out of Draco; and because of this Draco was actually willing to take a gamble with Zabini. He was willing to let Zabini get close to him.

And it seemed to Draco that Zabini was very close. He and Zabini had been dancing around each other for a while.

But in a sense they all were, a nest of snakes that struck half-playfully, half-testingly at one another. You have to be prudent in choosing friends in this kind of conflict. They were all good at this game, out of necessity.

But Blaise knew exactly how to get under someone’s skin; a talent that Draco both loathed and loved. It was as if no one else knew him better than Blaise did; yet, on the other hand, Blaise seemed hellbent on using this knowledge against him.

Not maliciously or threateningly; only a symbol of trust wrapped up in a warning of sorts. I know how to make you uneasy, make you dance ... this power is mine, but I won’t use it. It warmed Draco up with some sick trepidation -- the only logical strategy to this was to just play along, some fucked up game of emotional politics that took Draco’s mind off of more tormenting obligations.

So he played his game with Zabini. Hands that lingered upon shoulders for a moment too long; eyes that settled on a wrong spot, or perhaps stared almost rudely; snide remarks that rode the fine line between friendly and predatory. It made Draco’s head pound when Zabini flashed those stark-white teeth at him and intoned, ‘Nice posture at practice today, Malfoy.’

Something that any other member of the Quidditch team could have said somehow niggled at Draco; the pleasant feeling of words weighing much more than they look, the potential of something enticing. Something simple that he could throw himself into; rather than a stressful, nearly cosmic conflict that he was beginning to feel more and more disillusioned with.

And just then his good mood soured, and he felt envy shoot up his heart like acid; would that his life were not centered around that blasted War. Would that he didn’t need to worry about his neck day in and day out, concern himself with the exact details of the plan that all depended on him; would that he were given a choice to say no, to say that he wasn’t his parents and just allowed to live like an ordinary boy like Zabini --

No, he stopped himself, and forced down the malice in his gullet. Even if he had a choice, he would have chosen to do the same bloody thing.

That’s just the kind of fucking idiot he was.

By November he could hardly stand it anymore. It was eating away at him, slowly, a carpenter ant chewing through a foundation until the house finally collapsed over him. The farther along he was with this enterprise, the more he feared its conclusion. He could not yet clearly see its significance for him, but he feared his ‘disposal’ as soon as his task was completed and his purpose -- served.

And he didn’t want to die just yet; Merlin, he was just sixteen, let him live. Let me live and let the whole world be damned, he thought, sour guilt building up his chest as his knuckles whitened around the book he was holding. He was filled with a sense of confused unease; the sort of aching knowingness of an outcome, but the refusal to contemplate its actuality.

‘You alright, Malfoy?’ Nott asked, his gaze hovering about Draco’s hand. Clever Nott, always quiet but observant, Draco thought with a sinking heart. Theo was always close to him, and he feared that perhaps Theo knew him to well. It troubled Draco that, this essentially meant that he could never hide anything from Theo. Regardless, he wouldn’t drag Nott into his ... business.

‘Yeah, I’m alright, Theo,’ he replied as he dropped his shoulders and loosened the death grip on his Transfigurations textbook. ‘Come on, let’s go to class.’

Draco wished that Theo would get out of his business. Unfortunately, Theo was a good friend, which meant that he was a terrible friend for someone like Draco Malfoy. After shooting concerned looks at him for two weeks and failing to evoke a response from Draco, Theo sent Draco’s next closest ‘friend’ to him -- he sent Blaise bloody Zabini.

Draco was half a metre into the blasted essay for Slughorn when Zabini entered the empty common room. Most of the other students had left for dinner, but Draco did not feel like eating recently. He felt as if everything were a sort of vague, bad illusion that he could sort of fade out of if he just acted like he wasn’t really there; wasn’t really a human being. But eventually people always notice when you’re starting to become a ghost.

‘Nott told me you weren’t yourself recently.’ Fuck Nott and his considerateness. Fuck Nott and his concern, Draco thought as Blaise settled down on the chaise beside his armchair and spoke in that cool, unruffled manner that ruffled Draco’s feathers in as many directions as possible, lately.

‘-- And I happen to agree,’ he continued, and Draco wanted to push him away for caring, to push all of his friends far, far away from himself, because he didn’t want them to see him at his weakest.

He glared at Zabini, composed and collected in his pressed Slytherin robes, his face kept artfully neutral -- just the way Draco liked it. Everything about Zabini was almost clinical, orderly, logical; and Draco was nothing like that now, with his crumpled robes, dull hair, and heavy eyes. And he desperately want to plunge into Zabini’s calm.

‘Really, mate, if there’s anything I can do --’ Zabini began to offer, but Draco had already begun to move.

He reached out and grabbed Zabini’s face -- and the other boy fell silent. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck -- ‘Just shut up, Zabini,’ he managed before he kissed Zabini furiously.

Zabini’s shock shattered his composure and Draco felt him jump beneath his touch. It disappointed him that his composed, ever-statuesque friend could be caught by so mundane an emotion as surprise. But on the other hand it pleased him in a terrible way to know that he had been the one to cause it.

After a moment of startled stillness Blaise kissed him back, his movements blurred still by bewilderment. But Draco kissed him like this was the surest thing in his life for months, like he desperately needed it, like if he didn’t, he would implode any moment. But he felt like he was imploding right now.

He kissed Blaise like he wanted to be sure of what he wanted.

And Blaise simply gave him what he wanted. He didn’t see a good enough reason to say no to Draco, and besides he was bored. That was the worst part of being Blaise Zabini -- the cost of his indifference to everything was his devotion towards anything. It wasn’t so bad a price to pay, in his opinion.

So he kissed Draco like he was killing time.

‘Fuck,’ Draco muttered when he came to a moment later. Now he’d mindlessly threw himself at Zabini, he can’t take that back again. Confusion chilled his bones like he had just leapt into the Black Lake, and shock clung to him like wet clothes.

He was not confused nor shocked regarding his emotions towards Zabini -- it was more so the manner that he had executed the idea he had been toying with for the past few months. He acted on impulse, without judging the circumstance and weighing the consequences before hand; he was fearful of what this lack of control reflected of himself.

‘What?’ Blaise drawled lazily, his eyes still hazy like a cat's, part-open in interest, part-narrowed in perplexity. Draco knew that now he owed Zabini an explanation. But he disliked all manners of explanation.

‘Why did I do that?’ He muttered aloud whilst kicking himself over mentally. He’s just thrown in all his cards in, and now he needed to back out of the game. He couldn’t maintain this whilst worrying about the Dark Lord’s orders, he didn’t have the energy -- but oh Merlin, did he need to find some sort of release, somewhere to pour all the human parts of himself into in order to survive the monstrous thing his life was becoming.

‘Shouldn’t I be the person asking that question?’ Blaise cocked an eyebrow cooly, and Draco tried his best to look apologetic; although he never got much practice in that department.

He wanted to say something but the words only floated disjointedly around his head, and Draco found it difficult to find an excuse that would not compromise his ... position. A silence stretched out between them like a spider’s web, except Draco felt more like the fly who flew into it than the spider who spun it.

Zabini merely looked at him with the same detached interest that Draco had come to find enthralling. The corner of his mouth was crooked in an easy smile, utterly blasé in a way that was comforting and insignificant. ‘Fuck it, who needs a reason, right?’ he hummed as he leaned towards Draco. ‘I’m too bored to care,’ the words dropped liltingly, lazily from his tongue.

‘That’s good enough for me if it’s good enough for you,’ Draco swallowed back the burning apprehension that had been sloshing within him for months. He reached out and gripped Blaise as if he were a lifeline.

‘I only need you to be here,’ he told Blaise, his demand heavy in the air, his meaning not exactly what it must have sounded like. No, Blaise was not a lifeline. He was merely the a piece of driftwood, something to keep him afloat but not help him find his way. Draco Malfoy was doomed to be lost, but at least that’s better than drowning.

‘I’d gladly oblige,’ Blaise slid a hand around the back of Draco’s neck. Draco looked into his eyes and found no emotion. It quelled the uneasy flame within him.

He lunged at Blaise; and the sinking feeling of insouciance spread within him, cool and opaque as stone.

Everything be damned. Let him have this before it all sinks.

[nedraggett]

Run ragged

It didn’t work.  And while I wasn’t surprised by that, I did want to tease out why, at least for myself.

I honestly was openly skeptical of Blade Runner 2049 for a while, so I can’t hide my bias there.  I wasn’t totally ‘salt the earth and never mention it again’ then and am certainly not saying that now.  But each new trailer left me feeling more ‘uh...really?’ and the explosion of immediate praise from many critics even more so.  I wasn’t contrarian, and neither did I think groupthink was at work, but I suspected a massive wish fulfillment was. 

So I generally avoided reactions after that and figured I’d wait for things to die down a bit -- even more quickly than I might have guessed, seeing its swiftly collapsing commercial performance over here. My Sunday early afternoon showing near here was about maybe 2/3 full on its third weekend, so it’s found an audience, but I’m in San Francisco -- I expected an audience there. Enough friends have posted theater shots where they were the only person in the room to know this is dying off as an across the board thing, and never probably was.

I’m not glad it failed, but I’m not surprised -- in fact, being more blunt, I think it deserved not to be a hit.  The key reason for me played itself out over its length -- it was boring.  It’s a very boring movie.  It’s not a successful movie except in intermittent moments.  

That said, of course not everyone agreed (I’ll recommend as an indirect counterpoint to my thoughts this piece by my friend Matt, which went up earlier today). And boredom is not the sole reason for me to crucify it -- there were a variety of things one can address.  I’ll note two at the start since they could be and in a couple of cases I’ve seen were particular breaking points for others:

* The sexual politics of the movie, however much meant to be in line with the original scenario as playing out a certain logic, were often at least confused or hesitant within a male gaze context, at most lazily vile beyond any (often flatly obvious) point-making.  I often got a mental sense of excuses that could be offered along the lines of ‘well...you know, it’s supposed to be like that in this world, it’s a commentary!,’ which is often what I’ve seen in positive criticism of, say, Game of Thrones. Maybe. That said: not that any sort of timing played into it, but the fact that Harvey Weinstein’s downfall began two days before release, and the resulting across-board exposure and on-the-record testimonials from many women against far too many men, couldn’t really be escaped.  Further, since the fallout was first felt, after all, in the film industry, seeing any film, new or old, through the lens of what’s acceptable and who gets through what hoops -- and who is broken by the experience -- is always important.  It’s not for nothing to note that the original film’s female lead Sean Young got shunted into the ‘she’s crazy’/’too much trouble’ file in later years where male actors might perhaps find redemption; the fact that she played a small part in the new film made me think a bit more on her fate than that of her character’s.  (Another point I saw a few women brought up as well -- having a key to the whole story be pregnancy and childbirth as opposed to infertility wasn’t warmly received.)

* It’s a very...white future. Not exclusively, certainly. But people of color barely get a look in, a quick scene here, a cameo there. A black female friend of mine just this morning said this over on FB about the one African American actor whose character got the most lines, saying: 

to have the only significant black character be this awful, creepy man who seemed to be an "overseer" type to the children, was really uncomfortable and another perfect example of scifi using an 'other' narratives or american slave narrative but within a white context. We all know what it's supposed to represent and so it's just straight up lazy writing at the end of the day and exploitative.

Meantime, another sharp series of comments elsewhere revolved around how a film perhaps even more obviously drenched than the original in an amalgamated East Asian imaginary setting for the Los Angeles sequences barely showcased anyone from such a background. Dave Bautista certainly makes an impact at the start, but after that? The fact that I can think of three speaking roles for actors of that (wide) background in the original, as in actually having an exchange with a lead character, and only one in this one, maybe two if you count the random shouting woman in K’s apartment building, is more than a little off.  Add in a ‘Los Angeles,’ or a wider SoCal if you like, that aside from Edward James Olmos’s short cameo apparently has nobody of Mexican background, let alone Central American, in it, and you gotta wonder.  My personal ‘oh really’ favorite was the one official sign that was written in English and, I believe, Sanskrit.  Great visual idea; can’t say I saw anyone of South Asian descent either.

Both these very wide issues, of course, tie in with the business and the society we’re all in -- but that’s no excuse. And there are plenty of other things I could delve into even more, not least my irritation over the generally flatly-framed dialogue shots in small offices that tended to undercut the grander vistas, or how the fact that Gosling’s character finding the horse carving had been telegraphed so far in advance that it was resolutely unremarkable despite all the loud music, etc. My key point remains: boring.  A sometimes beautifully shot and visually/sonically striking really dull, draggy, boring film.

The fair question though is why I think that.  A friend in response to that complaint as echoed by others joked what we would make of Bela Tarr films, to which I replied that I own and enjoy watching Tarkovsky movies. Slow pace and long shots aren’t attention killers for me per se; if something is gripping, it will be just that, and justify my attention. Meanwhile, the original film famously got dumped on for also being slow, boring, etc at the time, and plenty can still feel that way about it. Blade Runner’s reputation is now frightfully overburdened and certainly I’ve contributed to it mentally if not through formal written work; it succeeds but is a flawed creation, and strictly speaking the two big complaints I’ve outlined above apply to the predecessor as much as the current film, it’s just a matter of degrees otherwise. But if you told me I had to sit down and watch it, I’d be happy to. Tell me to do the same with this one, I would immediately ask for the ability to skip scenes.

I’ve turned it all over in my head and these are three elements where things fell apart for me, caused me to be disengaged -- not in any specific order, but I’m going to build outward a bit, from the specific to the general, and with specific contrast between the earlier film and the new one.  These discontinuities aren’t the sole faults, but they’re the ones I’ve been thinking about the most.

First: it’s worth noting that the new film brings in a lot of specific cultural elements beyond the famed advertising and signs. Nabokov’s Pale Fire is specifically singled out both as a visual cue and as an element in K’s two police station evaluations, for instance. Meanwhile, musically, I didn’t quite catch what song it was Joi was telling K about early in the film but a check later means it must have been Sinatra’s “Summer Wind,” featured on the soundtrack.  Sinatra himself of course shows up later as a small holographic performance in Vegas, specifically of “One For My Baby,” while prior to that K and Deckard fight it out while larger holographic displays of older Vegas style revues and featured performers appear glitchily -- showgirls, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis in his later pomp, Liberace complete with candleabra. All of this makes a certain sense and on the one hand I don’t object to it.

But on the other I do.  Something about all that rubbed me the wrong way and I honestly wasn’t sure why -- the Nabokov bit as well, even the quick Treasure Island moment between Deckard and K when they first talk to each other. The answer I think lies with the original film. It’s not devoid of references either, but note how two of the most famous are used:

* When Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty introduces himself to James Hong’s Hannibal Chew, he does so with a modified quote from William Blake’s America: A Prophecy. (This fuller discussion of that quote and how it was changed from the original is worth a read; it’s also worth noting that Hauer brought it to the table, and wasn’t planned otherwise.) But he doesn’t do so by spelling out to the audience, much less Chew, that it is Blake at all.  You either have to know it or you don’t. If, say, we saw Batty clearly holding a copy of the book -- or maybe more intriguing, a copy in Deckard’s apartment -- then that would be one thing...but it becomes a bit more ‘DO YOU SEE?’ as a result. Clunkier, a bit like how Pale Fire worked in the new film.

* Even in the original soundtrack’s compromised/rerecorded form, I always loved the one formally conventional song on the original soundtrack, “One More Kiss, Dear.” I just assumed as I did back in the mid to late 80s, when I first saw the film and heard its music, that it was a random oldie from somewhere mid-century repurposed, a bit of mood-setting. It is...but it isn’t.  It’s strictly pastiche, a creation of Vangelis himself in collaboration with Peter Skellern, an English singer-songwriter who had a thriving career in his home country. It just seemed real enough, with scratchy fidelity, a piano-bar sad elegance -- which was precisely the point. You couldn’t pin it down to anything, it wasn’t a specifically recognizable element. It wasn’t Elvis, or Liberace, or Sinatra. 

This careful hiding of concrete details -- even when the original film showcased other clear, concrete details of ‘our’ world culturally, but culturally via economics and ads -- is heavily to the original’s benefit, I’d argue.  There’s a certain trapped-in-baby-boomerland context of the elements in the new film that, perversely, almost feels too concrete, or forced is maybe a better word. It’s perverse because on the one hand it makes a clear sense, but on the other hand, by not being as tied to explicitly cultural identifiers -- whether ‘high’ literature or rough and ready ‘pop’ or whatever one would like to say -- the original film feels that much more intriguingly odd, dreamlike even. I would tease this out further if I could, but it quietly nags -- perhaps the best way I could describe it is this: by not knowing what, in general, the characters, ‘human’ or not, read, listen to, watch in the original, what everyone enjoys -- if they do -- becomes an unspoken mystery. Think about how we here now talk about what we read, listen to, watch as forms of connection with others; think about how the crowd scenes in the originals feature people all on their own trips or in groups or whatever without knowing what they might know. We know Deckard likes piano, sure, but that suggests something, it doesn’t limit it.  We know K likes Nabokov and Sinatra -- and that tells us something.  And it limits it.

My second big point would also have to do with limits versus possibilities, and hopefully is more easily explained.  Both films are of course amalgams, reflections of larger elements in the culture as well as within a specific culture of film. The first film is even more famously an amalgam of ‘film noir’ as broadly conceived, both in terms of actual Hollywood product and the homages and conceptions and projections of the term backwards and forwards into even more work. It is the point of familiar reference for an audience that at the time was a couple of decades removed from its perceived heyday, but common enough that it was the key hook in -- the weary detective called back for one last job, the corrupt policeman, the scheming businessman, the femme fatale, etc. etc. Set against the fantastic elements, it was the bedrock, the hook, and of course it could be and was repurposed from there, in its creation and in its reception. 

2049 is not a film noir amalgam.  Instead, it’s very clearly -- too clearly -- an amalgam of exactly the wrong place it should have gotten any influence from. By that I don’t mean the original film -- above and beyond the clear story connections, its impact was expected to be inescapable and as it turns out it was inescapable.  Instead it’s an amalgam of what followed in the original’s wake -- the idea of dystopia-as-genre -- and that’s poisonous.

Off the top of my head: Children of Men. The Matrix. Brazil. Her. Battlestar Galactica, the 2000s reboot. A bit of The Hunger Games, I’d say. A bit of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (not a direct descendant of the original at all, of course -- George Miller always had his own vibe going -- but I caught an echo still). The Walking Dead. A fleck of The Fifth Element. Demolition Man, even, if we want to go ‘low’ art.  But also so many of the knockoffs and revamps and churn. There could be elements, there could be explicit references, there could be just a certain miasma of feeling.  But this all fed into this film, and made it...just less interesting to me. 

Again, the first film is no less beholden to types and forebears.  But the palette wasn’t sf per se, it was something else, then transposed and heightened and made even uneasier due to what it was.  2049 has to not only chase down its predecessor, it has to live with what its predecessor created.  But did it have to take all that into itself as well? It becomes a wink and a nod over and again, and a tiring one, a smaller palette, a feeding on itself. And it’s very frustrating as a result, and whatever spell was in the film kept being constantly rebroken, and the scenes kept dragging on.

This all fed into the third and final point for me -- the key element, the thing that makes the original not ‘just’ noir, the stroke of genius from Philip K Dick turned into tangible creations: the replicants, and the question of what it is to be human. Humanity itself has assayed this question time and time over -- let’s use Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a start if we must for the modern era, it’s as good as any. We as a species -- if we individual members can afford the time and reflection at least -- seem to enjoy questions of what makes us ‘us,’ and what we are and what we have in this universe.  This much is axiomatic, so take that as read.

The replicants in the original film -- famously thought of differently by Dick and Ridley Scott, to the former’s bemusement when they met and talked for their only meeting before the latter’s death -- set up questions in that universe that are grappled with as they are by the characters in different ways. Between humans, between replicants, between each other, lines always slipping and shading. Their existences are celebrated, questioned, protested against. But we don’t live in these conversations for the most part, we tend to experience the characters instead; it’s often what’s unsaid that has the greatest impact. And if the idea of a successful story-teller is to show rather than tell, then I would argue that, again, flawed as it can be, the original film succeeds there be only telling just enough, and letting the viewer be immersed otherwise. (Thus of course the famous after the fact narration in the original release insisted upon by the studio, and removed from later cuts to Scott’s thorough relief.)

By default, that level of quiet...I would almost call it ‘awe’...in the original can’t be repeated with the same impact. The bell cannot be unrung, but that’s not crippling. What was crippling was how, again, bored I was with the plight of the characters in 2049. How unengaged in their concerns I generally was. One key exception aside, I never bought K’s particular angst outside of plot-driven functionality, and frankly they often felt like manikins all the way down from there. Robin Wright’s police chief had some great line deliveries but the lines were most often banal generalities that sounded ridiculous. Jared Leto’s corporate overlord, good god, don’t ask. As for Joi and Luv, Ana de Armas and Sylvia Hoeks did their best, and yet the characters felt...functional.  Which given the characters as such would seem to be appropriate, but their fates were functional too. Of course one would do that, of course the other would do that, of course one would die the one way, of course the other would die that way, and...fine. Shrug. 

So, then, Deckard? Honestly Harrison Ford had the best part in the film and while I found him maybe a bit more garrulous than I would have expected from the character, he did paranoid, wounded and withdrawn pretty damn well. Not to mention comedy -- the dog and whisky combo can’t be beat, and it’s worth remembering his nebbishy ‘undercover’ turn in the original -- and, in the Rachel scene, an actual sense of pathos and outrage. I bought him pretty easily, and it made everyone else seem pretty shallow. When K learns about the underground replicant resistance and all, the bit about everyone hopes they are the one was nice enough, but the rest of it, clearly meant to be a ‘big moment,’ was...again, dull, per my second point about the limited palette. A whole lot of telling, not much showing, and such was the case throughout. It was honestly a bit shocking -- but also very clear -- to myself when I realized how little I cared about humans or replicants or any of it at all towards the end. It all felt pat and played out, increasingly unfascinating, philosophy that was rote. It could just be me, of course -- maybe this is an issue where the stand-ins of replicants versus realities of robots and AI, along with the cruelties we’re happy to inflict on each other, means the stand-ins simply don’t have much of an imaginative or intellectual grip now.

Still, though, I’ll give the film one full scene, without Ford. As part of his work, and to answer the questions in his own head, K visits Ana Stelline, a designer of replicant memories. This, more than anything else in the film outside of certain design and musical elements, felt like the original, or something that could be there. It introduced a wholly new facet -- how are memories created for replicants? -- while extending the idea that instead of one sole creator of replicants there are multiple parts makers with their specialized fields in an unexplained (and unnecessary to be explained) economy. Stelline’s literal isolation allows for space and the limits of communication to be played out in a way that makes satisfying artistic sense, and Carla Juri plays her well. It builds up to an emotional moment that sends K into an explosive overdrive that is actually earned, and Juri’s own reaction of awe and horror is equally good.  But -- even better -- the scene ends up taking a wholly new cast later in the film, when more information reveals what was actually at play, and what K didn’t know at the time, and makes the final scene a good one to end on in turn (and by that I mean back in her office, specifically).

The problem though remains -- one scene can’t make a film. One can argue that it’s better to reach and fail than not at all, but it’s also easily argued that one gets far more frustrated with something that could have worked but didn’t. I don’t think an edit for time would have fixed the film but it would have made it less of a slog while not sacrificing those visual/sonic elements that did work; it still would leave a lot of these points I’ve raised standing, but it would have gone down a little more smoothly, at least. But sometimes you’re just bored in a theater, waiting for something to end.

[is-osana-here-yet]

Comparing Lunar Scythe and Yandere Simulator 1/? : Character Design

This is Luna, her backstory as written by Dev is:

The main character is a girl in her late teens named Luna. Luna is obsessed with an idea; the idea that this world is full of people who don't deserve to live. Murderers, thieves, kidnappers, human traffickers, drug dealers, arms dealers, arsonists, scam artists, identity thieves - Luna desperately wishes she could do something to rid the planet of such people, but she feels like there is nothing she could do that would ever make a difference. At the beginning of the game, Luna dies. As Luna's spirit looks down at her own body, she feels nothing but apathy. She didn't want to live in a world filled with human filth, anyway. That's when Death shows up. Death looks into her soul to determine which afterlife she belongs in, and he is surprised at what he finds within her. He learns that she is free of sin, yet her strongest desire is to take millions of lives. While examining this pale girl clad entirely in black who yearns to kill, Death feels as though he's looking at his own reflection for a moment. Death decides that Luna may be able to serve him a purpose. Instead of sending her soul to the afterlife, Death makes Luna an offer. "I'll bring you back to life, if you agree to bring me human souls." Luna is shocked by his offer. "But I don't want to kill innocent people!" "Then do not kill the innocent," Death replies. "Kill the guilty." "But who are the guilty?" She asks. "That's for you to decide," Death replies. Death is offering her the authority and the power to kill anyone she thinks deserves to die - and she thinks that a LOT of people deserve to die. She doesn't want to come back to life and return to a miserable world filled with criminals, sadists, and psychopaths...but if she had the power to purify this sinful world, she could create a world that she actually wants to live in. And so, Luna accepts the offer, not to become Death, but to become Justice. Death resurrects Luna, gives her a giant scythe, and grants her superhuman powers that become active at midnight. By day, Luna is an ordinary girl who works part-time jobs to scrape by...and by night, she is the judge, jury, and executioner of her city, an agent of death. If Luna does not bring him enough souls, Death will take her life. Luna asks Death how many souls he wants, and what her deadline is. Because Death does not perceive time the same way that mortals do - in terms of seconds, minutes, or hours - he cannot give her a specific date. As he looks upward in contemplation, he notices that the moon is full. And so, he decides that Luna must use the scythe to deliver a specific number of souls to him by the end of the lunar cycle. Hence the name of the game, "Lunar Scythe." (What do you think? Corny?) The game takes place over the course of a year. After each full moon, Death demands more souls by the next full moon. So, Luna has to kill more and more people to meet her quota each month. What Luna doesn't know is that she's not the only dead girl that Death has brought back to life! He has also resurrected other recently deceased girls who each have the capacity to take millions of lives. Every time there is a full moon, Luna will fight another resurrected dead chick wielding a giant energy weapon. The game takes place in 2015, and there are 13 full moons in 2015, meaning Luna will have to face 13 of these enemies in total.

What is Death plotting? Why does he want mortals to gather souls for him? What will happen once Luna has defeated all of the other dead girls?

You'll have to play the game to find out. ^.~

Alex has given her a fairly simple backstory that could easily be expanded on. In the forum he presented this in, he gets some good feedback on her character wise. The people pose questions such as “what is her goal?” and “well this bit doesn’t make sense because .....” 

We already know Dev made Ayano a blank slate, because when he presented Lunar Scythe, he was met with what he saw as “harsh criticism.” However in the forum no one is really that harsh. Most tend to clue in that Alex doesn’t take critique well, and pose their thoughts in ways such as “well think about why she does this, who made her like this...” One of the major problems fans have with Yandere Simulator, is the lack of personality/story for Ayano. One could say Ayano is meant to be a self insert for the player, but the problem is she is legit nothing. A self insert in other games typically has a base story, and the interpretations of a character are formed based on the choices that the player makes. In otome games, Persona 5, Fallout, you can choose dialogue options. It’s up to the player to pick the snarky comment, the kind comment ect... The only way a player could form an interpretation of Ayano is through elimination methods. Do they stab a person? Blackmail? Pair them up with someone else? Either way the only focus on these options is Ayano’s perspective on removing someone from Taro’s life. The player can’t decide why Ayano loves Taro. What kind of person Ayano is. 

I tried my best to make sure that Luna wasn't a Mary Sue. There are a lot of details about Luna that I left out... Luna's younger sister, Stella, was a child genius and a celebrity. Chess grandmaster, master of four instruments, wrote and published a best-selling novel, graduated college, performed surgery - all before the age of 12. Luna was never able to measure up to her little sister in any way, which left her with a horrible inferiority complex. As soon as Stella started pulling in tons of money and making the family famous, her parents practically forgot that Luna existed. Luna tried everything to get her parents' attention - causing trouble at school, wearing bizarre fashion, dying her hair crazy colors - but this only pushed her parents further away. She moved out at age 18, and she hasn't spoken to them since. She doesn't bother reading any news related to her younger sister, preferring to pretend that she doesn't even exist. The goth fashion and dyed hair became a part of her identity after so many years, so she still keeps a little bit of dye in her hair and wears gothic accessories from time to time. Luna started struggling immediately after moving out. She barely graduated high school, she can't make friends easily, she can't hold down a job, and can't afford to pay her rent. She's depressed, miserable, and desperate when she finally dies. Even after her resurrection, she still lacks the qualifications or experience for any full-time job, and has to keep doing lousy part-time jobs to scrape by. She literally has nothing going for her, other than the fact that she gets superpowers for a brief period of time at midnight...then it's back to being a failure at life.

Again, this is very underdeveloped. Why can’t she hold down a job? Doesn’t she learn? Is being depressed just part of her character? Alex refused to give Ayano a backstory, because he decided that if people didn’t like what he wrote for Luna, they wouldn’t like what he wrote for Ayano. Ayano has been given a few backstory prompts, sort of. The biggest being “Ayano can’t feel anything”, however people criticise Ayano’s character because it contradicts the very basis of her, she’s a yandere. It feels like Alex has just recycled the murderous intent from Luna, removed her backstory and stuck it into Ayano. There is no “deredere” to contrast the “yan” side of her, making her boring and dull.

People began saying Luna looks too generic, looks like Ryuko from Kill La Kill, Ruby Rose from RWBY, and Cassie Hack from Hack/Slash. People also though she looked too “edgy”, typical busty goth anime girl. When met with this criticism, Alex went around commissioning different artist to come up with a different design for his character. He asked the forum what they liked best. The designs presented were:

And this, is Ayano’s concept art.

Ayano’s first design shares some similarities to Luna. The red/black palette. Short hair. It seems as though Alex abandoned the original “having a distinct silhouette” and opted for having a plain design. Ayano is not easily recognisable, as she looks like any other Japanese middle school student. In the forum, he is constantly asking for harsh criticism. He says he want to improve the character. He often asks what other people would suggest instead. 

As he’s met continuously with criticism about the practicality of this all, he states:

I'm totally aware of how ridiculously impractical it would be to use a scythe as a weapon...in real life. But this is a video game, where the Rule of Cool is the only rule I need. I'm willing to throw realism and practicality out the window for the sake of having the coolest weapon possible, and to me, that's got to be an energy scythe. An umbrella isn't a practical weapon to use in a fight, either, but that doesn't stop Parasoul. You can argue that Parasoul is using a special fantasy umbrella that shoots projectiles - and, likewise, my character is using a special sci-fi scythe with an energy blade rather than a solid blade, which opens up combat options that a grass-cutting tool does not.

I agree that the costume is impractical, but that doesn't matter to me very much. Once again, I'm willing to completely suspend my disbelief as long as something looks cool enough...or sexy enough. I'd rather have an impractical and cool-looking character than a completely realistic, practical, boring character. With that said, it may be entirely possible for her to be wearing a much more cool-looking outfit than her current corset / skirt combo...but whatever outfit I eventually decide on will definitely not be restrained by practicality. So, what would you suggest for the outfit?

It seems like this is what fuelled Alex to make Ayano so boring. Ayano seems like she’s just a huge “fuck you” to the people that criticised Luna. Ayano is very practical. Very realistic. To the point of boredom. People continually state Luna’s character is boring and too simple, his response:

The reason I wanted to give the protagonist a simple hairstyle is because I haven't been able to get cloth physics or long hair physics working in my game engine. But, of course, that's a personal failing, and shouldn't restrict the character's appearance. So, what would you suggest for the hairstyle?

Having short hair fits with the first design of Ayano. Perhaps his engine still was that bad that he couldn’t get physics working. Personally, I feel like Alex continuing to ask people for suggestions when met with any criticism becomes very passive aggressive. Every single comment is met with that. It comes off as “well if you think it sucks, tell me how I should do it then.” You cannot saying the hair is generic without giving an alternate suggestion according to Alex.

He also gets upset over someone stating there was no reason for having a young white female protagonist. Keep in mind Ayano too, is a young white female protagonist.

What's wrong with having a young, white, female protagonist? If this is a "social justice warrior" thing, I'm definitely not going to argue about that subject in this thread. The costume is my primary concern here.

Alex quickly abandons is old “please critique my work!” rhetoric and writes this rant defending his choices.

About the cleavage, midriff, and legs...well, there is a story-related reason why she desires to dress up in a sexy outfit when she fights, but even if there wasn't a plot-related reason, I'm going to fall back on the Rule of Sexy. I absolutely love sexy-looking femme fatale characters. ...aren't we on...the Skullgirls forum...?...

This goes back to Alex is making a game for himself. A character for himself. He is sexualizing this girl and is lying about having a story related reason for the sexy outfit. He does the same thing with the characters of Yandere Simulator. 

I really hate over-designed characters with too many belts and zippers and random useless accessories hanging off of every limb...but I really don't think my character suffers from that problem. She's got a pretty simple outfit. There are some details, sure, but I don't feel the design approaches the DeviantArt level of ridiculous over-design. Everything about the character's design, however implausible it might seem at first glance, does have a justification. The reason she dyes her hair, the reason Death thought a scythe would suit her best, the reason she wears a sexy outfit - it's all worked into her backstory. Is that what you're talking about? I didn't really purposefully make the game's storyline dark for the sake of being dark - I just made it a story that appeals to me, and dark things happen to appeal to me, so the story came out really, really dark. I guess you could say that my over-abundant enthusiasm for impractical weapons, sexy outfits, and super dark-and-edgy plot elements is totally steering the design and direction of this game. (However, because the game takes place predominantly in LITERALLY dark environments, it may be a good idea to give her a brighter color scheme...) Maybe it's because all of these aspects of her design appeal 100% to my personal tastes, but I just can't imagine that choosing to go with this character design could actually result in "practically no revenue". Is that what you're really suggesting? Or are you just saying that every time I make a decision about a character's appearance, I should treat that decision, no matter how minor, as being a choice that could ruin the game financially? Because that doesn't seem realistic to me, either... Anyway, why even criticize the original design? I'm ready and willing to replace it with one of the new re-designs that I posted. So, please tell me what it is you like / dislike about the NEW designs.

The thread goes into gameplay a little more, and then Alex says this:

I'm starting to think I made this thread a little too soon. I mean, I'm TOTALLY aware that I could never, ever ship a game that plays exactly like that prototype you played. Obviously, the final game won't just be killing sets of 5 dudes over and over. Obviously, the final game won't have that lame death animation. Obviously, the final game won't have a special move that is just spinning in a circle. But since people are getting the wrong idea, I guess it was a mistake to post that prototype and call it a "demo". Maybe I should have called it a "proof of concept". Or maybe I should have called it a "programming test". Or maybe I shouldn't have posted anything at all just yet...

It’s quite similar to the pity party he threw himself when his game was critiqued by Mike Z. Alex posts more designs for his character at this point

We go back to Luna’s goal and backstory, and Alex just keeps stating that she hates bad people and wants to rid the world of them. He states a few times “you have to play the game to find out” A similar tactic used with core plot points in Yandere Simulator.

What I’ve gathered from looking at Luna and Ayano together, Ayano is Luna. Same sadistic side. Lack of empathy. Similar beta designs and motifs. Ayano just had Luna’s backstory removed because Alex didn’t want to face criticism again.