#I hate living through historical events too

[sp-growingpains]

A quick reminder for my lovelies doomscrolling, you are okay. You will be okay. We will survive this just as we have many times before. The voice of the people should not be crushed under the weight of the people in power who want to inflict that despair.

It's love that makes us. Whoever holds this seat does not change you. Does not take away the sunrise. It does not take away the tired touch of a lover, no matter what the media may tell you. Your right to love should never be questioned, and I stand with you. I'll carry you if you can't walk right now so that you're here and you can do the same for another.

I wish I had the ability to write something with stronger words, but these come from the heart. This comes from a woman who is so fucking tired of watching their friends live in fear. It comes from a human who loves her fellow man. I truly believe in the good of people. We as humans have something that nothing else in this world has. We have such a beautiful ability to love. To express it and accept it in such a way that no other creature can.

Call me naive for this. Ignore this post if you must. But nothing has ever been achieved by being silent. No lives can be saved and told they're cared for by sitting on the sidelines.

Fight. Struggle. Breathe.

I love you.

[icarusredwings]

I dont CARE that it's November 9th and "Halloweens over" ITS MY BIRTHDAY MONTH ILL POST IF I WANT TOO

Anyway.

Thinking about apocolpse au.

Wade getting bitten by a zombie, Logan freaking out, Wade dying, and him coming back (Again)

"Didn't you just die?? I literally fucking burried you!!"

And wades like:

"Of course. Man, God REALLY hates you dosn't he?"

And he's bassically the same person except just saying, "Rahhah har ran re" (translation: I think the devil doesn't want me either)

"What?? Oh for fucks sake... tell me you're kidding.."

"Rah?" 🤔

"Great so now you stink more and you can't talk. Fucking lovely."

"Mmmmh..." 🥺 (would you still love me if I was a zombie?)

"*sighs, blushes and grumbles how insane this is and how much of a bad idea this is* Fine! Come on...."

"Raah!!" 😄

And sometimes his limbs fall off because I think it would be funny if you just saw him stop, turn around, pick up his arm and shove it back into place like a dislocated shoulder. (Marvel Magic)

But its very obvious that Wade is still consious and so logan leads him around, puts a leash on him, ties him up when he goes to sleep the first few nights so wade dosn't eat him, sometimes luring him with a piece of his thigh or telling him he'll feed him soon to make him behave.

The only thing about this resource wise is that it seems Wade is a bottomless pit, not ever able to get enough. It's like all the nutrients just pass right through him, so he can't get fed meals daily, but Logan will share at least one bite of his food. It makes Wade so happy and way more "wade like" than zombie.

Logan has learned that the hungrier Wade gets the worse it would be, snapping at logan a few times.

"Grr-"

"Aye! That's enough outta ya"

"GggRah!"

"Hey!! I said no! Bad! Bad wade!"

"Mmmh??"

"Bad!!"

"Mmh....rahah.."

"I forgive you. But stop trying to bite me. I feed you, don't I? I hold your hand and tell you that I love you?"

Wade is actually extremely friendly for a zombie (duh) and still yaps at logan except its nonsense. Logan tries hard to understand him and talk back.

He holds his hand sometimes, even lays next to him only to scold him if he gets too bitey. This is hard because wade already had a biting issue and seeing as he practically ate anything or anybody now it was more difficult.

"...aahh-"

"Wade- No."

"Ggr.. raahh"

"Wade! No! Bad."

"Mmmh..."

"Ill feed you tomarrow. Don't bite me mkay? You wanna hurt me?"

He shakes his head like a dog shaking off from a bath, or that ate a bee.

"Then don't bite me."

"Mmh? Mrah?"

"No. No kisses right now. Im still not even sure if thats safe.."

"Mmmh...🥺 ahrrah?"

"No, not even a tiny one."

"Mm...😔"

Until Logan grunts and pecks his hand. "There. Happy?"

"🙂‍↕️mh"

"Good."

Honestly Logan felt bad, pitited him. No matter what food he ate it wasnt enough substance to sustain him and sometimes Logan would wake up to find him eating a different zombie that made the mistake of trying to eat Logan.

You ever wake up in the morning, lose your zombie boyfriend, call for him only to walk outside and see him knawing on some poor chaps arm like a happy puppy who found a chicken leg? Logan has. Many times. And he wishes his phone would charge so he could take a picture of it but unfortunately theres no electricity in the post apocalypse world.

This being said Logan is like- THE perfect guy for apocalypse au because he can smell everything and hear anyone before they even get to you, he has better wilderness survival skills then anyone I know and he'll never NOT have a weapon on him because of his claws. The only downside is that he's tired easily, needs a lot of food, and would lowkey be withdrawing from his tabccao and alchool, therefore very moody.

"Stupid fucking apocalypse having to happen when im fucking alive!! Why can't I just NOT live through ONE major historical event! Is that too fucking much to ask? One damn decade where everything is fine and dandy and- WADE! Get your ass away from that!! It's radioactive!! For fucks sake!"

"Rahahrah?"

"NO!! You can not become Spiderman! That's not how that works!"

"Aawr..😔"

The whole thing is they're on a quest to find Laura and Gabby, because when everything went to shit, they were on a cabin trip and now Logans brain is itching because he dosn't know where his babies are and its driving him insane. Once he finds them, they're gonna shack up somewhere with food and animals to hunt, and hes gonna make a little shed outside for Wade to sleep because he'll kill him if he bites one of the girls.

He dosnt care that much about himself really and he hates himself deep down for not being able to trust wade anymore but even wade dosnt trust wade, sometimes wandering off on purpose, staying about 30 feet away from him at all times, growling and giving Logan that glazed over look of unconsiousness. The only good thing about this, though, is after he removes himself from the idea of hurting Logan (because if logaj were to become infected - HA! Your all fucked. Utterly fucked. The whole humanoid species would go extinct because he'd kill anything that moved) he feels more trusting of him and it's not uncommon for them to hug after either. Afterall Wade- Some how???- is still wade and is very affectionate and sensitive when its not returned.

This whole thing also makes him think worse about himself, kicking reflective objects or staring at himself in a shop window in utter shock and disgust with a face of 'thats me..?' While logans raiding the place for supplies.

Did you know zombies can cry? Well, Wade could. Not a lot, only able to get a bit of liquid from dehydration, but sometimes Logan will catch him just... sitting there.. crying. Upset with himself for being bit. Upset with himself for trying to bite logan all the time. Upset at how ugly he is. Upset that he's starving all the time. Upset that he can't even talk to anyone, and Logan just has to guess what he's saying 90% of the time. Bro is literally

When they DO find Laura and Gabby, the girls are doing great. Laura was going to blow wades head off until Gabby ran in the shot, hugging him instantly, only to be ripped away.

"Of course my dad is the weirdo married to a zombie." Laura grunts, but is secrelty happy that wade is still 'alive'

Gabby, being as young as she is, thinks it's so SICK that her dad is a zombie now, giggling when he talks to her and holding his hand. She's not allowed near him for long, and not at all by herself, but Gabby bassically becomes Wades number one supporter, defending him when he messes up and snaps at laura.

"He's just hungry!! He's not bad! It's not bad to be hungry!" She'll say. "You wouldn't kill me if I was hungry.." she tells her bigger, more survival oriented sister whos suggested putting wade out of his misery, for his own sake. "I tried that... he found me again 3 days later." Logan tells her with a pang in his chest. It had taken everything in him to kill him the first time, and sobbed himself to sleep the next 2 days. By the third when he noticed Wade following him from a distance he couldn't believe it.

Not even the apocalypse could keep them away from each other..

[cinnbar-bun]

Hello ~

Is it possible to request some general SFW/NSFW headcanons for Robin ? Your writing is so good and overall so wholesome it makes my heart melt. 🥺🥺

Have a nice day/night. ❤️

Nico Robin SFW + NSFW HCs

A/n: Aw, thank you for the lovely compliment dear. I hope you enjoy these <3

Note: Reader is GN. The hcs start off kinda angsty at first but gets nicer and happier (since we are dealing with Robin here). We as a society do not deserve Robin.

SFW

Robin is a very elegant and classy woman, and it’s no different when it comes to relationships.

She doesn’t like to push boundaries and often tries not to make too many “bold” moves in the beginning. She prefers to tread carefully when it comes to you, and she’d hate for her to be the one who hurts you.

Honestly it’s kinda difficult for her to express her insecurities in the beginning because she’s grown with the crew, but she feels as if she’s starting from scratch when you two are official. She worries she’ll mess up and hurt you, and then everything she’s done with the Straw Hats will have meant nothing and she was always the trouble everyone was warned about.

Please be kind to her, eventually she’ll fully realize just how much she has grown and that she’s not a devil. Just be verbal with her and tell her what you feel, and she’ll take note of your feelings and preferences.

Robin never really thought of romance in her life, always assuming it was a silly fantasy that would just end up getting her killed. Thus, she can get caught off guard when you do romantic things for her.

She prefers sentimental gifts for this reason. If you write her a poem, no matter how bad it is, she’s treasuring it. Give her an album of memories together? She looks through it almost every night and might decorate it more. When it’s handcrafted, it’s proof that YOU took the time to make something for HER. It’s proof that YOU did this and that YOU really are hers and a part of her life. Something that is so “you” makes her heart beat faster.

Surprise her with random dates or taking the initiative. Yes, I know Robin is the mom figure, and just like a mom, sometimes she needs a mental (and physical) break. If you go to her and say you have dinner reservations at a restaurant or want to take her shopping or to a cafe- the happiness and shock on her face is immense.

She's so used to doing things for others that “princess treatment” is so foreign to her and admittedly, she finds it’s very nice to be taken care of. Surprise dates every once in a while keep her on her toes and are another confirmation to her that you really love her.

But sometimes, it’s nice to just relax beside you. Robin is not too talkative in general, so often you two might spend time reading/doing something in the same room silently or cuddling each other. Robin really lets her guard down with you and it’s such a treat to see her smile so softly and that adoring look in her eyes too-

Side note: can you imagine Robin being so comfortable with you that she may just infodump about history or whatever she’s reading? Oh my god, the way she’s excitedly discussing a historical event or plant or something out loud because you just make her feel so safe until she realizes oops she’s rambling to you then looks up at you only to see you looking and listening at her because you love how happy she looks and how much she loves her job??? She just melts. (I’m melting too I love my wife)

Robin often tilts your chin to her and gives you a peck on your cheek then winks as she walks away.

NSFW

Y’all knew this Robin is ON TOP!!!

I don’t think she’d specifically have a mommy kink but if you called her that she’d chuckle and find it humorous and play along. It does grow on her after a while.

A tease. Truly, she will live up to her moniker of Devil Child with the way she teases you. Whether it’s whispering she’s not wearing any panties or is wearing a certain lingerie you like, or bending down to show off her assets to you, or straight up summoning a hand to touch you discreetly- she’s evil.

But, she is a very rewarding lover, and she, after hours (or what feels like hours) of hell, will finally give you the touches you so crave.

Loves adding sex toys to the mix. Her many hands are wonderful in teasing you further. She admittedly wanders into the sex shops to get something new for you guys to experiment with.

Lingerie isn’t something she wears often, so when she does, that’s a sign she really wants to fuck you or has something special planned for you.

Not a particularly hard dom. She prefers to spoil or at least just use some power dynamics. She won’t beat you black and blue or choke the life outta you- I doubt she would consider doing such a thing. It would take a lot to convince her to get “harder” on you if you are a big masochist.

She tends to leave plenty of hickies on you. But sometimes she leaves one that’s a bit more exposed to others. If you complain about it, she’ll apologize with a smile and say she just didn’t realize- but with the way she’s standing so proudly, it’s more likely she did it on purpose just to tease you again. She’s more possessive than she lets on.

So, we all know she uses her Devil Fruit to tease you. Extra hands and stuff to maybe hold you down or touch you elsewhere- it’s to be expected. Sometimes, though, she gets a bit experimental and (after the time skip) will summon another full clone of herself to get involved in your bedroom activities.

Doesn’t mind threesomes (beyond the ones with a clone of herself), and is willing to try them. Only thing is that they need to be a close confidant of hers, otherwise she’d feel rather awkward or uncertain about their motivations. (Who you want that third person to be is up to your imagination, dear <3)

Aftercare is lovely, and often consists of you two sitting in a bath together. She can’t use her powers in the bath, so this is another way of letting her guard down with you and showing you how much she trusts you.

[ofoceansandtombsanew]

👉🏽👈🏽 spare any jjk faerie au headcanons you have cooked up for a desperate lass?

of course because man do i have some thoughts as a lover of faeries. i could probably go on about this for hours

gojou satoru | elf

a prince hailing from a seelie court

his very birth shook faerieland as foretold by the stars red, blue and purple stars that soared through the sky the night of his birth and his eyes are ones that can see mana and the shape of the soul among other things

presents himself as a revel-loving fool he simply enjoys games, but he is a lot more observant and calculating than he lets on

in his youth he often toted on and on about the stupidity of love, likening it to more of a curse and an ailment that turned the sane into fools so outside of the obligation of having heirs, he doesn't desire love in the slightest

until he meets falls in love at first sight with you, a banshee who saved his life when you coincidentally happened to be passing by after he found himself in a bloody situation

causes the entire court to go into an uproar when he immediately announces his intentions to make you his queen never mind the fact you haven't even accepted his proposal yet

his mother doesn't like you in the slightest. she gave birth to one whose very birth has shaken the earth and if her son is going to marry anyone it is going to be someone more fitting of that position

satoru ignores all that in favor of doing his best to woo you now that you're stuck living in his palace until a revel thrown in your honor passes

yes he knows this very much so makes him a hypocrite but he doesn't want anyone else

asks you all sorts of question about being a banshee. how your cries work, if there are different wails for different situations, how long you've been heralding death

at least you know the man is nothing if not passionate. it's hard resisting his charms as he asks you gently each time to marry him. you think you just might say yes when you feel the ghost of his lips against yours

getou suguru | phouka

if he isn't being an advisor to seelie prince satoru, suguru is a human-hating phouka who is, unfortunately, stuck living with one

unlike humans, the folk are creatures who keep their word so when you are able to best him in something for a favor he's inclined to keep his promise

and yes, he promises that he won't harm you or your loved ones after your deal has come to a close. yes, this includes things you personally consider harmful ranging from murder to physical attacks

for a human, you're quite clever in looking out for any loopholes. you apparently weren't lying when you said you were a faerie enthusiast

but that's the extent of suguru's praise when he learns why you were so adamant to find a faerie to help with your problems ー

apparently you took a botany elective thinking it would be an easy A only to now be just barely passing the class

yes, that's right. you want a member of the folk, a phouka, to be a glorified tutor until the end of the semester just to make sure you don't get a failing grade. apparently, suguru gave you far too much credit

still, you end up growing on him overtime with your sense of humor and you're way of looking at things. he hates to put it so simply but he supposes you aren't like other humans he has come across

(suguru later nearly destroys your textbook because he himself grows frustrated with your class. the human sciences are just as confusing to him as it is you. but your grade has technically improved since he began helping you so it's not entirely a loss is it?)

nanami kento | elf-kobold hybrid

an elf-kobold hybrid with horns that gently curve atop his head akin to an imperial demon

a record keeper often has work writing down events as they take place as well as organizing historical texts as he sees fit. it's a tiring and thankless job but it is something his family has been doing for generations and he sees no reason to break tradition now

the one saving grace he has are naps he enjoys taking between late afternoon and dusk, religiously, by a lake close to the palace

you're a swan maiden who calls the lake home and his quiet company. it's winter in the human realm and rather than fly south with your flock, you decided to spend the season in faerie and decided that particular lake would be home

you're a playful, impish thing who enjoys presenting nanami with riddles as he grows tired and you watch over him to keep him safe while he sleeps. a deal you've both made in favor of him bringing you delicious sweets from the palace

it's quite the favorable deal for you both

of course, inevitably you two get to talking and find yourselves having more and more in-depth conversations as the week goes by

what would nanami do if he decided to break family tradition?

where have you traveled in the human realm?

as a swan maiden, you seldom ever take off your cloak of feathers. there's no reason to ask, nanami knows the rules that swan maiden and selkies follow. should your cloak or coat be taken, you're forced to follow their will

as such, nanami never refers to your coat in the slightest. he never even asks about it

it's a great sign of trust among your kind to ever be vulnerable with your cloak. something nanami learns first hand when he wakes up one particular evening and finds that you have covered him with your cloak to make sure he stays warm

fushiguro toji | boggart

a lord in an unseelie court of faerie, who works in service to the high king as his sword

had a mortal wife who died centuries ago and together they had a half-human son

his son lives among humans presently and while they don't readily talk to one another, toji often has his men sent to the human realm to watch over his son and give him reports on his wellbeing

doesn't imagine himself ever loving someone he did his wife again until running across you a human who stumbled into the wrong mound

allows you to stay in his fief until it is otherwise safe for you to return home

you say you're a dancer so you dance for him and keep him entertained as a sort of thanks for not promptly killing you when you trespassed on his territory

the tension between you both is palpable to many. his staff who are forced to wait on your hand and foot as his guest and to the gentry you see at unseelie revels

the ones that gossip about how it isn't strange for toji to take human lovers

and yet despite that, no matter how close you get, toji keeps a distance between you both that. he fell in love with a human once, still remembers the sting of watching his beloved wife grow old and wither away in front of his very eyes

it's a pain he doesn't want to revisit ever again

okkotsu yuuta | human

unlike most stories of selkies and their evil human spouses, you're marriage with yuuta is quite the happy one in the seaside town you call home

yours was an accidental love story where he accidentally caught you in his net, only to release you

the next day, you brought piles of fresh fish and crabs and shrimp by his beachside home as thanks, much to his confusion as to where the catch came from

you usually followed his boat when he goes to fish and he learns how to recognize you, often laughing sheepishly when he saw you, warning you not to get too close so you don't end up in the net again

it isn't until a stormy night when yuuta fell overboard that you did anything drastic such as save his life, taking him to the shore and giving him cpr

you stayed with him all night until the storm passed keeping him warm

when yuuta woke up to seeing a beautiful, naked person by his side, he was understandably surprised. even more so when you transformed into a seal right in front of him. that was his introduction to the folk, to magic

now he's surrounded by you and your ocean-filled magic everyday in your little cottage by the sea

you come and go as you please, sometimes for weeks sometimes even for months at a time depending on the time of year

but you always come back and yuuta is happy to see you every time

[hestzhyen]

Chapter 52 Hype Posting

Hi void. I am going to vibrate out of my seat. Oh I'm going feral, absolutely feral. Another WSJ cover and lead colour page next week already! Promotion on TV during prime-time in Japan! The insanely good volume 4 PV! Hokazono-sensei judging for a manga award! Kagurabachi's getting the push to be the Next Big Thing at last- you love to see it.

Kind of.

I want Hokazono-sensei to get all the recognition he deserves, but I also don't want the fandom to explode and become yet another annoying dudebro space. The success of the series is more important though, so I'm happy to see Kagurabachi get so much support. Everyone needs to know about this manga! ANYWAY.

LOOK AT THIS TROLL.

It's Chihiro's turn to have a creepy parasocial admirer now.

Hiruhiko's not doing this just for kicks, however- he deliberately (and successfully) triggered Chihiro to orchestrate his dramatic fall. Given what happened at the end of this chapter, I would not be surprised if Chihiro's literal descent is foreshadowing a metaphorical one of some kind down the line.

And this just breaks my heart:

Triggers Chihiro's rage then fucks off only to do this? I will not be mourning Hiruhiko's death.

Chihiro's not built for being a murder bot and it pains him so much to be seen as equivalent to someone like Hiruhiko. But he was taught to see things through and uses his hatred for the Hishaku to keep going. Revenge is probably the only thing he wakes up every day for- he wasn't kidding about that "fresh hatred" line in chapter 1. And neither was Shiba when he said living like this would break him. This kid needs a hug and a safe place to cry out the pain so badly, man...

More than that, though... more than anything...

HIRUHIKO'S THE FUCKIN' ANTI-HAKURI.

"We're equals", he says. "I killed my family", he mentions. "Let's be friends," he asks as he forces his way into Chihiro's life. "I'm the only one who can understand you." The hell you aren't you rat bastard. Hakuri's the one whose soul resonates with Chihiro's. He's the one Chihiro acknowledged as an equal and a friend. BEGONE, FOUL DEMON.

God damn it. Hokazono, I love you for making my most hated villain archetype into a character I want to see more of. I've never understood why playful psychopaths are so beloved but I get it with this guy. Smooth move making him the evil version of my favourite character in all of fiction, Mr. Author. Now I need Hiruhiko and Hakuri to face off over their ideals about who Chihiro really is. It would be the perfect reprise to the Sojo arc! PLEEEEEEASE. There's so much HakuHiro potential in this setup... Hakuri being the one to pull Chihiro forward again would be amazing. But not for his own goals this time- just to help Chihiro as a true friend and partner. Not gonna get too attached to this since it's just one potential development out of many... I won't let myself... (too late).

(Psst... 昼チ or 昼チヒ will probably be the JP ship tag/name for Hiruhiko/Chihiro. Ain't no way Chihiro is the top in this pair for most Japanese fujin lol.)

The Show

The main character of the play's name is Sasuke and Hokazono-sensei is a huge Naruto fan. So much so that he's taken his own spin on Naruto and Sasuke three times now (Enten, Roku no Meiyaku, Kagurabachi). Chihiro is, in fact, his OC donut steel character inspired by the most annoying emo ninja boy ever. I see you, Hokazono-sensei.

The Battle of Soshima might be a made-up title to reference the real historical event The Battle of Tsushima, which fellow Golden Kamuy fans will recognize. At any rate, there aren't any famous Japanese stage plays with the same name, so there's no direct narrative parallels to draw insight from (sad trombone noises). Fortunately for us Hiruhiko is a yapper like I hoped and tells us the plan pretty plainly anyway:

I relate so hard right now, random audience guy.

Hiruhiko says the plan to kill Chihiro's not a bluff. But he's not acting like he's intends to make good on that statement. So that means...

Perception vs Intent

Chihiro looking his best: stressed and menacing

This is gonna be huge I think. Remember what Azami said back in the Sojo arc in ch. 9:

Azami, please come back soon. I need you carnally.

Then consider likes like this...

Local violent gang member still pretty tough after becoming human shishkebab through a moving train.

Chihiro could be set up to tarnish his father's legacy.

The public doesn't know the true strength or capabilities of the weapons that won the war- they just know that Rokuhira Kunishige made them and they were the key to winning. So Chihiro dropping in on a stage play to splatter the audience with a headless corpse's blood is not a great first impression. He looks downright villainous in this scene. Awesome, but villainous.

The Hishaku are going to metaphorically "kill" Chihiro somehow. For some reason, tormenting this poor guy is absolutely vital to John's plans... it's probably more along the lines of Chihiro being a useful pawn to move around to create conflict they can exploit, but still. They're going to try to break his spirit this arc for sure. Leave Chihiro alone! He's been through enough!

I've got a hell of a lot to say about this but I need some key details from the next few chapters before going off on lunatic tangents. Fuckin' hell though, this is great. This is exactly the type of development I was hoping we'd see after Samura's chapter. Chihiro's committed to the cause of killing the Hishaku, who so far have been wholly unsympathetic villains. But killing is a wrongful act. And this chapter sets up that Chihiro might not be the sympathetic avenging swordsman we love him as in the eyes of the public- he appears to be more of a menace like some of the members of the Kamunabi accused him of. He might be challenged on his murderous modus operandi via a Hishaku-backed smear campaign. Seriously, using Chihiro's brutality against them to ruin his father's legacy would be so evil and cruel. I love it.

We'll be able to count on Shiba and Hakuri to make sure Chihiro doesn't go off the deep end at least. I wouldn't be surprised if Hiyuki played a pivotal role in helping Chihiro out this arc too, but I don't want to commit when we've hardly seen anything of her so far (my spaghetti sovereign... please come back to the main story full-time soon).

Whether or not I'm right (I'm not, I never am), Chihiro's murder sprees fueled by Fresh Hatred are going to get looked at in a critical way. High time and I am definitely here for it. Tell me what you've got to say about violent revenge motivated by grief, Hokazono-sensei. You have more space to examine the topic now compared to Farewell! Cherry Boy.

Shorter than usual but that's not a bad thing. I can always come back and edit this (came back to do so twice now already) or make another addendum post, but...

... Just choose kindness, people. For yourself and others. See you later.

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Why do some fans of a French historical figure who died in 1793 hate Napoleon? Napoleon had great respect for him.

I thiiiiink you mean Robespierre? Though he died in '94.

(Or do you mean Marat? He was assassinated in '93... For the sake of the ask, I'm going assume Robespierre.)

If you are talking about Robespierre, well, I couldn't answer that as I am not them and I'm sure each person has their own reasons. I presume it has to do with seeing Napoleon as a figure who undid the Republic, rolled France back to monarchy, and whose actions resulted in the reinstatement of the Bourbons? But again, I can't be certain.

Another thought is that Napoleon is a deeply flawed man. Not that Robespierre wasn't, because of course he was, being that he was human like us all, but their foibles and flaws run in rather different directions so the people drawn to Robespierre are, not always but sometimes, different from those drawn to Napoleon.

Fundamentally, I'm not the person to ask as I find both figures, and the times they lived in, interesting!

--

Napoleon's views on Robespierre were nuanced. Which is natural, considering he lived through the revolution and his political leanings varied during that time.

I answered this previously, but I'll just copy/paste my answer from that old ask (a few minor tweaks made):

Napoleon as a young man admired Robespierre. He was friendly with Robiespierre’s younger brother Augustine and was, for a time, a Jacobin. Napoleon’s views of Robespierre shifted over time. As a young man he saw him as a moderate in the Revolution who was doing his best to end the rampant factionalism that plagued the early French Republic. He believed that Robespierre was the man best suited to controlling the Revolution and preventing its dissolution into extremism or royalist retribution. 

Napoleon as an older man had a slightly different take, although he still judged Robespierre more kindly than others who were big players in the 1790s. The nutshell is that Napoleon felt Robespierre was more moderate than the other revolutionaries at the time, but his fanatic dedication to the revolution and the Republic made him go too far.

I think Napoleon, like many (though certainly not all) who lived through major world-shattering events, developed a nuanced and complicated relationship to the players who he had known in person, or knew a great deal about/was contemporary to. Especially a player who he once admired, and to a certain degree still did. 

Napoleon’s takes on the Revolution are one of my favourite things to read so here, have a few. 

From an account from Napoleon in Exile, or a Voice from St. Helena volume I: 

Heard him express some opinions afterwards relative to a few of the characters who had figured in the revolution.  “Robespierre,” said he “though a blood thirsty monster was not so bad as Collot, d’Herbois, Billaud de Varennes, Hebert, Fouquier, Tinville and many others. Latterly Robespierre wished to be more moderate; and actually some time before his death said that he was tired of executions and suggested moderation. When Hebert accused the queen de contrarier la nature, Robespierre proposed that he should be denounced as having made such an improbable accusation purposely to excite a sympathy amongst the people, that they might rise and rescue her.  From the beginning of the revolution Louis had constantly the life of Charles the First before his eyes. The example of Charles who had come to extremities with the parliament and lost his head prevented Louis on many occasions from making the defence which he ought to have done against the revolutionists. When brought to trial he ought merely to have said that by the laws he could do no wrong and that his person was sacred. The queen ought to have done the same. It would have had no effect in saving their lives but they would have died with more dignity.  Robespierre was of opinion that the king ought to have been dispatched privately. ‘What is the use,’ said Robespierre, ‘of this mockery of forms when you go to the trial prepared to condemn him to death whether he deserves it or not.’  The queen went to the scaffold with some sensations of joy and truly it must have been a relief to her to depart from a life in which she was treated with such execrable barbarity. Had I been four or five years older I have no doubt that I should have been guillotined along with numbers of others.” 

and from Volume II: 

I [Barry O’Meara] asked his [Napoleon’s] opinion about Robespierre.  “Robespierre,” replied Napoleon “was by no means the worst character who figured in the revolution. He opposed trying the queen. He was not an Atheist; on the contrary he had publicly maintained the existence of a Supreme Being in opposition to many of his colleagues. Neither was he of opinion that it was necessary to exterminate all priests and nobles like many others. Marat, for example, maintained that to ensure the liberties of France it was necessary that six hundred thousand heads should fall. Robespierre wanted to proclaim the king hors de la roy and not to go through the ridiculous mockery of trying him. Robespierre was a fanatic, a monster, but he was incorruptible and incapable of robbing or of causing the deaths of others either from personal enmity or a desire of enriching himself.  “He was an enthusiast but one who really believed that he was acting right and died not worth a sous. In some respects Robespierre may be said to have been an honest man. All the crimes committed by Hebert, Chaumett,. Collot d’Herbois and others were imputed to him. Marat, Billaud de Varennes, Fouche, Hebert and several others were infinitely worse than Robespierre.  “It was truly astonishing to see those fanatics, who, bathed up to the elbows in blood, would not for the world have taken a piece of money, or a watch, belonging to the victims they were butchering. There was not an instance in which they had not brought the property of their victims to the Committee of Public Safety. Wading in blood at every step, they believed they were doing right and scrupled to commit the smallest act bordering upon dishonesty. Such was the power of fanaticism, that they conceived they were acting uprightly, at a time when a man’s life was no more regarded by them than that of a fly.  “At the very time that Marat and Robespierre were committing those massacres, if Pitt had offered them two hundred million, they would have refused it with indignation. They even tried and guillotined some of their own number, (such as Fabre d’Eglantine) who were guilty of plundering. Not so Talleyrand, Danton, Barras, Fouche: they were figurantes and would have espoused any side for money.”

---

Quick aside, I forgot about Napoleon's scathing assessment of how Louis and Antoinette comported themselves during the trial.

"It would have had no effect in saving their lives but they would have died with more dignity."

Napoleon "Look, your death is inevitable but at least have some goddamn personal pride and dignity" Bonaparte.

[asgardianhobbit98]

Four for Valentine: Week 2 "The Letter"

Fandom: The Hobbit

Pairing: Thorin Oakenshield / Reader

Characters: Dwalin, Thorin, Gender Neutral Reader

Important Tags: written from Dwalin's POV, romance, angst, death, alcohol consumption, grief, love, redemption, healing

Words: 1146

Summary: When Dwalin attempts to heal his grief after the Battle of Five Armies, his finds himself not just grieving Thorin but also his sibling. But in the depth of night, ghosts come to life, and Dwalin finds that the letters are more healing than he originally thought. (I really meant for this to be fluffy but then my brain made it bittersweet instead because apparently angst is all I can manage today)

Written for my "Four for Valentine" event 🩷

My dearest y/n.

They are calling it the Battle of Five Armies: a Historic event, it seems. I certainly won’t be forgetting it. And I will make damned sure no Dwarf ever forgets it either. Just like I am making sure that no Dwarf ever forgets Smaug’s taking of the Lonely Mountain. Two points of important Dwarven history… and two moments in my life I would rather forget than remember. But it is crucial I don’t forget. If people remember it feels like people also remember you. Both of you.

My brother said writing down feelings is better than cutting down Orc filth. I still disagree. But I can’t deny that it helped me greatly when I lost you. It will certainly help me greatly now that I have lost him.

I loved you. You were my sibling, how could I not? But even if you had not been my family, I think the two of us would have gotten along well. You were funny in a way I didn’t really get, but which others seemed to find endearing. Thorin certainly found it endearing. More than he dared admit.

You see, I found a letter of his in his belongings. I didn’t mean to rummage through his things. It fell out when I was moving it. So don’t come yelling at me from the rocks now! And I only read it because it was addressed to you.

I hadn’t read your name in so very long. Maybe it was the already present grief, but I suddenly grieved you once more. I had to. Because when I read his letter to you, I saw the life you could have had if I had just been quicker in getting to you. That damned dragon!

He is dead now. Smaug. Revenge didn’t taste as sweet as I thought.

You would have had a life with Thorin. I know it. Because he wrote so. He loved you. Dwarves only love once. He was more devastated than he admitted to any of us. I knew he slipped away from us for a long time after the fall of Erebor. I knew he grew quiet. Distant. I never in a million years thought it was because of you too. I thought his family, his people… And here I was grieving you in front of him, burdening him with my own shite.

Yet, he never once said a word. He simply supported me.

He loved you.

You could have been his. He could have been yours.

Maybe this is for the better after all. If you had been here, you would have had to grieve him. The loss of Thorin is one I do not know how to handle.

I wish you were here to help me.

Perhaps the two of you are there in the afterlife, living among the rocks of Erebor, reunited at last.

Stupid.

Dwalin put the pen down and crumpled the letter in his hands with a little more force than necessary. He threw it aside where he watched it land among all the other attempts. Alone in a room in Erebor, finally home, Dwalin thought he might find some solace in a successful quest. But everything felt wrong.

With a sigh, he moved over to his bed and simply… drank himself to sleep, like he usually did. It helped with the nightmares, it helped with the grief, and it put him right to sleep. It was a win win, really.

Balin hated watching him do it, but Balin wasn’t around at the moment. He was on his way to Moria to continue furthering their people’s wealth; to try and retake the mountain. Meanwhile, Dwalin was still stuck in the past, in his grief… doing nothing with his life… or so he thought, at least.

…

As the darkness engulfed him, a restless sleep devouring Dwalin, he found that the alcohol actually did very little to help him. Rather than steering him onto a path of just dark, dreamless sleep, Dwalin found himself suddenly standing in his room.

Actually, that wasn’t the best description on where Dwalin found himself. He was in his room, yes, but he was sort of… standing by his bed, watching himself sleep.

It was a weird position to be in, and for a long time, Dwalin did nothing but stare at himself.

Had he died?

Was this the afterlife?

But no, he was breathing… Snoring, actually. It was a rather pitiful sight.

There was a strange humming in the background. As if someone was singing, but it wasn’t one person. It was a vibration so loud it sounded like a thousand people humming. It was peaceful, almost recognizable. As if Dwalin had always heard it in the background whilst walking in the mountain, or out and about.

But he couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

The humming was interrupted by a little shuffle in the room behind him. He turned, finding it rather difficult and slow to do so, and watched…

You.

And Thorin.

Both of you looked ten times better than you’d ever done alive, warm peaceful looks on your faces at all times. The two of you were picking up Dwalin’s attempts at writing a letter to you, reading them with your heads held together, arms locked in a loving touch…

“Y/N?” Dwalin asked, staring at his sibling with pure… shock. And Thorin, his king… “Thorin?”

Both of you looked up at him. But it was you who answered Dwalin: “I like your letters. They make me happy.”

Dwalin must have looked quite dumb as he simply stared in shock, because suddenly you began to chuckle. That chuckle… He’d missed it.

“My dear Dwalin,” Thorin said, “you look as if you’ve seen a ghost.” Both of you chuckled a bit at this.

“You both are…”

“Dead,” you finished for him. “Yes, quite. But that doesn’t mean we’ve left you.”

Thorin nodded along. “We’re always with you. In the rocks that make up your home. In your memories. And we’ll be waiting. Until you’re ready.”

You smiled. Thorin smiled.

…

And far too soon did that ‘dream’ end because suddenly Dwalin woke up with a start in his bed, looking around the room, searching…

He pushed away the bottle of alcohol. His heart lighter, and went back over to the crumpled up drafts of a letter.

Okay… he thought to himself… I’ll keep writing if it makes you two so damn happy.

Chuckling for the first time in a long, long time, he wrote at least twenty long letters in the candlelight, telling the both of you everything that he wanted to. Because he missed you both, and he loved you. And if you two really did read his letters, then he was going to keep at it until he was sure you both knew just how much you meant to him.

tag list: @fizzyxcustard @middleearthpixie @glassgulls @evenstaredits @knittastically @heilith @lathalea @way-too-addicted-to-fandoms @nowandthane if you'd like to be added or removed from my tag list, please let me know!

reblog and comment = love and support 🥰

[the-sappho-of-lesbos]

hi, sorry if this isnt a good blog to send this to i just dont know where to turn atm (if this isnt a good blog to ask for help plz lmk where would be better, soz). im 22 and figuring out im sapphic & im trying to join online lesbian spaces but everyone seems so anti-babydyke and im starting to notice that being a lesbian is more about discourse and infighting than it is about wanting to kiss a lady. i thought it was about kissin ladies and thats what i want but how do i make other lesbians not hate me? i feel like all of the other lesbians expect me to have a PhD in lesbianism before i call myself that, before i consider a femme attractive, its like i have to pass thru all these hoops to prove myself even to other queers that im a real lesbian because i can name every lesbian historical figure. again super sorry if this is a bad blog to send this to i do not have a clue who to ask about this or anything im totally lost rn lol (genuinely sorry for literally being that annoying baby dyke ppl complain about rn. ignore me if you want im not gonna be tilted. thx for listening

This isn’t a bad blog to send this too. I’m just genuinely sorry you are going through this and I’m sorry if I don’t have a way to help. But I’ll try my best!! And maybe some more people in the comments will be able to help in ways I can’t.

But just know I’m sending you lots of love and that there isn’t anything wrong with you. At the end of the day, regardless of whatever else is happening, your sexuality really is just simply who you are attracted to. And that’s okay. You are enough ♥️♥️

(I’m also going into this assuming you are at least 18+, so I apologise if I’m wrong on that )

Firstly , you aren’t just seeing things. There is definitely a lot of infighting in the community. Like a lot. I would say it’s typically more intense and in your face online then it is IRL, but I’ve also seen IRL gay groups go really deep off the end with with this stuff.

From what I have read and from people I have talked to, this has sadly sort of always been a thing. We just have different waves of it and different things it might be focused on based on the time period and the world events affecting that at the time. I think in general it’s a very human thing that allllll groups do, but when you are in a marginalised, oppressed and small group of people it can feel a whole lot more concentrated and obvious because there is less room for it to go.

Again, this is just based on conversations I’ve had and things I’ve read, so take it with a grain of salt. But there has also been misunderstandings, disagreements and different beliefs on what things are , what they mean and who should do what in the community. Ranging from politics to fashion to marriage to sex to identities around butch/femme and what it means. For one piece saying something you have another saying something different.

This can cause a lot of confusion and infighting amongst people. A lot of tension at times. And because of trauma a lot of people tend to want to be around people with similar alignments in understanding and belief.

A lot of things can affect that like age , location etc.

But none of that is a reflection of you or your worth or your sexuality. And there ARE people in the same boat as you. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.

There have been waves in the past of some women using and or claiming lesbianism to be a response to sexism. We are currently living in the time after that. And because of that a lot of opinions and thoughts and actions taken place are in a response to that wave. Be it people trying to push it , denounce it , confused by it or hurt by it.

I think this has lead to some of the scaffolding of the current culture we have today.

I understand that need and drive for community and the horrible feeling that can come along when the said community feels like it is in shambles. I feel that way a lot too. And I’m sorry I can’t take that away.

I feel like I’m rambling at this point I’m sorry.

I just want to say though there is nothing you have to prove to anyone. We all figure this stuff out at our own pace. Anyone who treats you poorly for not knowing something or just genuinely not showing interest in it is on them. Your lesbianism doesn’t mean you owe anyone an opinion or a certain way of dressing or feeling. The only person you owe is yourself and that is to show kindness to yourself and be around people who respect you and love you for the wonderful lesbian that you are.

EDIT : I just re-read and you said you are 22 I’m so sorry I missed that 😩

[racefortheironthrone]

Are there any notable examples of anti-mutant prejudice towards the X-Men coming from within the superhero community?

This is a great question!

This gets to the complicated nature of how mutants fit into the Marvel Universe. I've always been a vocal proponent of the idea that, far from the mutant metaphor only making sense if it's in its own little bubble where mutants are the only people with superpowers, the mutant metaphor actually functions better in the context of the Marvel Universe, because it allows you to explore more complicated and more subtle ways that prejudice functions.

While there are plenty of super-villains who have quite blatant anti-mutant prejudice, you don't tend to get that same kind of overt bigotry towards mutants among super-heroes. Partly, this is because bigotry is a very unheroic character trait, but it also has to do with the way that the way that Marvel historically portrayed the spillover effects of anti-mutant prejudice.

Following in a kind of Niemöllerian logic, it's almost always the case that groups that hate and fear mutants also end up hating and fearing non-mutant superheroes. Thus, Days of Future Past starts with the Sentinels being turned on mutants, but it ends with the Sentinels wiping out the Avengers and the Fantastic Four too - because the same atavistic fear of "the great replacement" applies to both mutants and mutates. Likewise, the same forces that line up to push through the Mutant Registration Act inevitably end up proposing a Superhuman Registration Act, because once you've violated the precepts of equality under the law for one minority group, you establish a precedent to do it to another.

Instead, I would argue what you see in the case of anti-mutant prejudice among superheroes is explorations of liberal prejudice. This takes many different forms: in Civil War, you see Tony Stark insensitively try to wave the bloody shirt of Stamford in the face of a survivor of the Genoshan genocide or Carol playing the good liberal ally but ultimately trying to get mutants to set aside their own struggle in favor of her own political project. (For someone who's spent a good deal of time working, and living with, the X-Men, occasionally against the interests of the state, Carol does have a tendency to stick her foot in her mouth. Hence in Civil War II, you see Carol essentially goysplaining the dangers of creeping authoritarianism to Magneto.)

In Avengers vs X-Men, you see the Avengers acting like they know the Phoenix Force better than mutants and ultimately prioritizing the safety of mankind over the efforts of mutantkind to reverse their own extinction. This is where the "Avengers are cops" meme in the fandom comes from. (I would argue that Captain America is badly mischaracterized in the latter event - we know which side he's on when the interests of mutants and the interests of the state come into conflict.)

The common thread here is that anti-mutant prejudice among superheroes emerges as a kind of unthinking, unreflective callousness brought on by a worldview that thinks of humans as the universal default of lived experience - while thinking of mutants as a somewhat annoying special interest group that fixates on their particularist grievances rather than working for what the heroes consider to be the common good.

For a more intimate version of how this plays out, I think the Fantastic Four are a great exploration of how "well-meaning" liberals can massively fuck up when they don't do the work of examining their own biases. We've seen this since the very beginning: in Fantastic Four #21, Kirby goes out of his way to depict uber-WASP Reed Richards blithely assuming that the "free market of ideas" will take care of the Hatemonger, while the subtextually Jewish Ben Grimm knows that the way to deal with a mind-controlling Hitler clone wearing purple Klan robes is deplatforming-by-way-of-clobberin'.

Then later on, we see Reed Richards debate Congress out of passing a Superhuman Registration Act, while saying nothing about the Mutant Registration Act - even though he has a mutant son who is directly threatened by it. (See that adorable blond moppet with the slur scrawled across his face in the fictional advertisement above? That's Franklin Richards.) This is why I have a crack theory that Franklin's biological father is actually Namor rather than Reed, which is why Reed so consistently shows a passive-aggressive hostility to his son's mutancy.

At the same time, Sue also has her blindspots when it comes to mutant rights. In the underrated FF/X miniseries, Susan Storm acts like an understanding and supportive parent to Franklin - right up until someone suggests that Franklin might want to come to Krakoa and explore his mutant identity, at which point she goes full Karen and starts lashing out with her powers. Chip Zdarsky, the writer, explicitly compared Reed and Sue to liberal parents who support gay rights in the abstract until their kid comes out as trans and wants to spend time in LGBT+ spaces.

[jamtlandsarkiv]

It's hard to find densu enjoyers. What's your favorite dynamic? And during which era do you like to imagine them together? Some people who write this pairing in modern settings make Sweden cheating on Finland for instance. It's as if each historical period demands a different reason for this rare pair to be together.

Thank you Anon for sending this ask about my OTP! I'll write my answer under the cut as I have far too many thoughts about these two.

Please appreciate this new and improved GIGABJÖRN this DenSu Swednesday.

The part of your ask where you said that some people who write DenSu in modern settings make Sweden cheat on Finland surprised me, because I have never seen this before. The only reason why I think someone would write this is because they're a SuFin shipper who uses cheating DenSu to introduce some drama into SuFin's relationship. There's no real-life reason why Sweden has to cheat on Finland to be with Denmark in the modern day, because they're all independent nations. Besides, both Finns and Danes make fun of Swedes. If their personifications shared the attitudes of their people, neither of them would want to be in a relationship with Sweden.

My favorite time period and dynamic for DenSu is the most vanilla one possible: modern era, happy monogamous relationship. I'll admit that I'm very bitter towards the old fandom's dynamic for DenSu where they were only violent towards each other. I like to write DenSu as the ideal relationship, so I want them to live in a time period where their countries don't have an active conflict against each other, where they can be open about their relationship and raise children without facing a lot of discrimination. Also, I write Mathias (Denmark) and Björn (Sweden) as human-like characters with unique personalities and life stories that have lived through their countries' entire history, as opposed to humanized versions of the countries whose personalities and lives are analogies for the country's history. This means that the history of their relationship will be influenced by their countries' mutual history, but it won't be determined by that.

Mathias and Björn are immortal magical personifications in my Nationverse, which is different from Hetalia canon in many ways. One of the differences is that humans aren't aware about the existence of magic and immortal personifications, which means that the personifications are not important figures in human society. They don't have a political role and they're not obligated to participate in every war and historical event that their country experiences, although they will be affected by these events in the same way as their fellow citizens. Another difference is that their health and physical ages represents the "conservation status" of their people and culture. Because their people and culture are not threatened in the modern day, their bodies are frozen at the peak of a human's health and strength, in their mid to late 20s.

Mathias and Björn were born when the ancestors of modern Danes and Swedes began to inhabit the land that would become the modern countries. They lived in their respective countries with their people, and they only started spending time together as children, after they figured out how to use their magical powers to teleport to each others' lands. Björn had an intense crush on Mathias but was terrified of others finding out about it, so he tried to suppress his crush by being an asshole to Mathias. Mathias obviously had to retaliate against this stupid kid who was being an asshole to him (and who he couldn't kill because Björn was immortal too). This was the start of their thousands-of-years rivalry.

As their countries formed kingdoms and started to have more frequent conflicts with each other, they formed a genuine hate for each other and challenged each other to fatal duels (being immortals, the loser would respawn). Björn's crush on Mathias only became more intense as they grew older, and Mathias also became attracted to Björn whose muscles only got bigger with time. Their duels with weapons evolved to fights with a suspicious amount of physical contact, but neither of them were willing to admit their attraction to each other because of the social norms of the time.

DenSu's fights ended in the 19th century when both of their countries lost a lot of their power and territory. As their countries experienced famines and mass emigrations, their health began to decline, and they couldn't stop thinking about the possibility of death if their countries' population and economy wasn't able to recover. Finally, they put their rivalry aside to support each other through their common struggle. I haven't decided exactly when the turning point of their relationship from friends to lovers happened, but I like the idea of Mathias living in Björn's house during WW2 after the annexation of Denmark. Living under the same roof as "friends" with intense mutual crushes led them to explore each others' bodies, and then...

The greatest strength of DenSu's dynamic is the physical attraction and passion they feel for each other. After all, if they can keep up a rivalry for thousands of years, they can turn it into love too. Both of them are the types of people who bond to one person very strongly. That person will receive their full love and attention, but they are expected to reciprocate just as much. This is no problem for DenSu, as both of them feel greatly fulfilled when they make their other half happy. While the term "opposites attract" is usually applied to DenSu, they are only opposites on the surface. They have different - nearly opposing - skills, interests and preferences, but their ethics, values, communication and thinking styles, goals in life and sexual preferences are very similar. This means that there's almost no "resistance" or "wasted energy" when they work together and interact with each other, because they can quickly agree on a common goal, know what their roles are and how to achieve their common goal. Each of them helps to compensate for skills that the other is missing. DenSu operates like a finely tuned machine with all of the parts in perfect synergy.

Scandinavian culture is reserved, so to the casual observer, DenSu doesn't even appear to be a couple, as they don't do PDA or sappy romantic gestures. The way they show love to each other is through silently doing favors for each other, remembering what the other likes, accepting their (few) differences rather than nagging the other to change. They keep the romantic gestures in private, and when nobody's watching, they are very touchy and "filled with desires" (Tumblr may not like the actual word). They're physically frozen in their 20s and have healthy diets and frequent exercise, so they get these "desires" very often. Despite what their physiques and body language would imply, Björn has a higher sex drive than Mathias, and Björn is a bottom. Mathias is vers and Björn will oblige when Mathias asks him to top, but he doesn't get any pleasure from it directly. He only feels the emotional pleasure from seeing Mathias being pleasured.

Finally, something I don't see being talked about often enough is the way Mathias and Björn verbally communicate with each other! Swedish and Danish are mutually intelligible, but the average Swede is not trained to understand Danish and will hardly understand anything. Danish comprehension of Swedish is better, but it's not great either. Mathias and Björn are definitely better than the baseline because of their thousands of years together, but they weren't together for most of those years, and they cannot fluently speak each other's language. Because of this, they modify their normal ways of speaking to understand each other better. They have memorized the most common vocabulary differences and false friends. When they talk to each other, they'll insert these different words from the other person's language, and speak in a more neutral "TV big city" accent without noticing. Björn's natural accent is not a big city one (he's from coastal northern Sweden), and I like the idea of Mathias making a special effort to travel to his hometown and study his dialect early into their relationship (before the invention of the internet).

More DenSu headcanons and essays to come. I'm thinking about creating a wiki dedicated to writing about my OTPs...

[mywitchyblog]

I really need to rant rq cause this is just getting on my nerves but

I’m sick and tired of BIPOC acting like someone is evil just because they’re white. Calling them things like “Colonizer”, and stereotyping them all as bad or hating BIPOC.

Yes, there have been some very evil white people in the past, but saying that everyone who is white is evil is generalizing.

So just because someone’s ancestors were fucked up people, now someone else has to suffer for it? Instead of blaming it on the people who were actually bad?

BIPOC have literally been through this stuff before. They’ve been stereotyped as “evil” or “aggressive” because of their skin color, and now it’s happening to white people too?

Yes, BIPOC have every right to be wary of white people, but to generalize them just because of their skin color? That’s seriously ridiculous.

idk, it just gets on my nerves that people assume that someone is racist just because they’re white. It’s annoying honestly.

I completely get where you’re coming from, and it’s true that generalizations based on race can feel frustrating and unfair. At the same time, I think it’s worth exploring why some BIPOC individuals might feel this deep-seated mistrust or wariness toward white people. It’s more than just a social or cultural reaction; there are scientific explanations that help shed light on this, and understanding them might bring us closer to mutual empathy and respect.

Research has shown that trauma can actually be inherited across generations, a phenomenon known as intergenerational trauma or epigenetic inheritance. This isn’t just about stories or memories being passed down, but actual changes in genetic expression that affect how people react to the world. For example, descendants of Holocaust survivors have been found to exhibit higher levels of stress and anxiety, even though they themselves never lived through those traumatic events. This happens because trauma can leave biological imprints on DNA that impact fear responses and emotional processing.

For many BIPOC communities, there’s a collective history of colonization, slavery, and systemic racism, which are deeply traumatic experiences. These experiences aren’t confined to history books—they’ve left their mark on the DNA of descendants. This inherited trauma may manifest as a kind of instinctual mistrust or heightened fear response toward white people. So, when BIPOC individuals express discomfort or fear, it might not be a conscious bias or prejudice, but rather a response deeply ingrained in their biology as a means of survival.

Some experts even suggest that this response can function similarly to a phobia, where the fear is intense and visceral, often occurring without conscious thought. It’s an instinctive reaction that helped protect previous generations, and now it’s being passed on, whether or not it feels rational in today’s context. Inherited fear like this isn’t necessarily about hatred or anger—it’s about survival instincts that have been etched into a community’s collective memory through generations of trauma.

This perspective doesn’t excuse generalizing or treating all white people as inherently bad. Generalizing is problematic because it doesn’t recognize individuals for who they are today. But by understanding that there might be a deep-seated biological basis for these reactions, we can start to see that this isn’t just about unfair assumptions or stereotypes. Instead, it’s a response that has roots in real, historical suffering.

In terms of the science behind it, intergenerational trauma shows how traumatic experiences can alter gene expression without changing the DNA sequence itself. These are known as epigenetic changes—markers that affect how genes are expressed. In the case of BIPOC communities, the legacy of slavery, colonization, and ongoing systemic oppression has likely led to biological adaptations. These adaptations can influence emotional responses, so fear or mistrust toward white people can be amplified, even if a particular individual hasn’t personally experienced overt racism. It’s a biological imprint passed down through generations.

To sum it up, while it’s true that generalizations aren’t fair, there is a deeper reason why some BIPOC individuals may harbor mistrust toward white people, and that reason is rooted in inherited trauma. This isn’t about blaming individuals today for the actions of their ancestors, but rather about understanding that this mistrust has been shaped by real, deeply painful histories. Recognizing this can help us approach these conversations with more empathy and understanding on both sides. When we acknowledge the impact of intergenerational trauma, we can work toward healing together, rather than falling into cycles of judgment or misunderstanding.

[ash-and-books]

Rating: 4.5/5

Book Blurb: June Hur, bestselling author of The Red Palace, crafts a devastating and pulse-pounding tale that will feel all-too-relevant in today’s world, based on a true story from Korean history. Hope is dangerous. Love is deadly.

1506, Joseon. The people suffer under the cruel reign of the tyrant King Yeonsan, powerless to stop him from commandeering their land for his recreational use, banning and burning books, and kidnapping and horrifically abusing women and girls as his personal playthings.

Seventeen-year-old Iseul has lived a sheltered, privileged life despite the kingdom’s turmoil. When her older sister, Suyeon, becomes the king’s latest prey, Iseul leaves the relative safety of her village, traveling through forbidden territory to reach the capital in hopes of stealing her sister back. But she soon discovers the king’s power is absolute, and to challenge his rule is to court certain death.

Prince Daehyun has lived his whole life in the terrifying shadow of his despicable half-brother, the king. Forced to watch King Yeonsan flaunt his predation through executions and rampant abuse of the common folk, Daehyun aches to find a way to dethrone his half-brother once and for all. When staging a coup, failure is fatal, and he’ll need help to pull it off—but there’s no way to know who he can trust.

When Iseul's and Daehyun's fates collide, their contempt for each other is transcended only by their mutual hate for the king. Armed with Iseul’s family connections and Daehyun’s royal access, they reluctantly join forces to launch the riskiest gamble the kingdom has ever seen:

Save her sister. Free the people. Destroy a tyrant.

Review:

A girl willing to go to great lengths to rescue her sister from an evil king soon finds herself working together with the king's half brother in order to stage a coup and destroy the king. Based and inspired on real historical events/figures, the story is set in 1506, Josean, in which the evil tyrant King Yeonsan rules. Known for his cruelty and horrific abuse of women and girls, King Yeonsan will kidnap married women and young girls to abuse, traffic, and use as playthings. When seventeen year old Iseul's older sister is taken to become the king's latest prey, Iseul will do anything to get her back. The king's power is absolute and to challenge him would mean certain death. Prince Daehyun has not only witnessed but committed many horrifying acts in order to simply survive in his half brother's rule. He has been forced to shut his emotions off in order to just survive... having to watch King Yeonsan's rampant executions and abuse of people... and Daehyun has been bidding his time, patiently waiting to stage a coup and dethrone his brother. Daehyun and Iseul's path cross and despite their dislike for one another, their deeper hatred for the king will bond them together as they seek to free themselves of this monster. All the while a different monster is on the loose, a killer known as Nameless Flower, prowls the street, leaving behind dead bodies and messages to the king. Can Daehyun and Iseul make it out alive or were their chances impossible to begin with? This was such a heart wrenching and brutal read, especially since it is based on real history and on real atrocities committed. I cannot even begin to imagine the horrors that had occurred. The story was a fantastic look into this moment in history and despite how hard it was to read at some points, I was absolutely gripped until the very end and was so happy with how things turned out. I would absolutely recommend this for anyone who enjoys stories based on history, heart wrenching stories, and just a good read!

*Thanks Netgalley and Macmillan Children's Publishing Group | Feiwel & Friends for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*

[koskela-knights]

Random Koskela HCs

Headcanons partially based on what I've seen in the game so far, which includes some of the manuscript pages & the commercials (*Some spoilers ahead thus*)

Ilmo is the younger twin with an age difference of 3 solid minutes

Ilmo's entrepreneur & creative spirit is balanced out by Jaakko's no-nonsense attitude.

However, I like to think that Jaakko has had his share of wacky, wild ideas but happily gives Ilmo the credit for them since most residents already view Jaakko as the less quirky brother.

It was actually Jaakko who came up with the floats they can't show on television.

The Koskelas are inseparable from each other and also from their baseball cap and beanie.

They probably lived in Watery their whole life.

Ilmo looks up to his brother, even though he doesn't always say this out loud.

The brothers have a bunch of tapes with bloopers from their commercials that they watch when drinking beers together after a long day of work.

Every now and then, when the weather's good, they like to race each other on their motorcycles. It got them in trouble more than once with the deputies, but fuck the government and police!

They also like to make long tours on their bikes, taking in the views of the landscape.

Extended Family

Jaakko met his wife who was a tourist visiting Bright Falls. They had kids but in the end it didn't work out with them because his wife was a city woman, plus Jaakko's involvement with so many Koskela businesses left him with little to no time for her.

Still, he has an okay bond with his ex and a good relationship with his kids. They mainly keep contact through e-mail and occasional phone calls. During some holidays, the kids visit Jaakko in Watery.

When the kids were young, Jaakko's built them some toys and mini attractions (like a mini moose spring rider)

Ilmo tried his best to be The Cool Uncle but didn't always succeed where he wanted to. Being a smalltown resident, he was often out of touch with the big city customs and cultures.

Other random stuff

Although the local government isn't always too happy about so many things being owned by the Koskelas, it gives the town their fair share of income and it helps locals get jobs and keep a community feel.

Ilmo took evening classes to become an entrepreneur

He had to grow into his more extroverted persona.

Ilmo hates it when tourists pronounce or write his name wrong. No his name is not Elmo and he doesn't know who that furry red thing is. (There have been instances where Jaakko told naive tourists that 'Elmo' is the correct English version they could use instead)

Ilmo once considered doing tour guides on his motorcycle but Jaakko talked him out of it.

Angsty

Ilmo sometimes feels he has to overcompensate in his achievements. Since he looks up to Jaakko, who is his business partner and has a family, Ilmo fears he will fall behind.

Jaakko wishes his kids would stay in Watery, but knowing how shady the place is, he is glad they live far away from their hometown.

Jaakko was initially afraid to become a dad, but Ilmo hyped him up and supported him through the process.

No matter how many Taken they've killed, it hurts each time. Especially if they've known the person who got transformed.

Jaakko was the first one to kill a Taken, which he did after Ilmo initially hesitated which almost got him heavily injured.

Ilmo isn't superstitious, but there always remained a lingering fear that one day he would turn out like the historical figure Illmari. After the events of AW2, he blames himself heavily for Jaakko's death.

Ilmo has survivor's guilt.

After Jaakko's death, Ilmo can't immediately grieve, because there is still an evil to defeat, plus he still has all his responsibilities for the multiple businesses he runs. But keeping up a facade isn't easy.

Ilmo doesn't know what to tell Jaako's kids. How is he supposed to explain what happened to their father? The only "consolation" is that Jaakko's death was quick, he didn't have to bleed out or anything. Still, it was super messed up and Ilmo has nightmares.

[1863-project]

hi! i recently went to visit NYC with my friend (it was fun!! veeery crowded but fun) and she mentioned that 1) there are a lot of abandoned rail lines around NYC, some of which have been reopened and 2) there's apparently an event in grand central where they put a lot of the old trains out on display???

i didn't have time but i'd love to check both of those out if i ever visit again - i was wondering if you knew any more about them? + also if you have any other recommendations for what else to see around the city 👉👈 tysm!!!

Hey, I'm so glad you had a great time in my city! NYC is really a wonderful place, even though we're packed like sardines in here.

There are definitely a lot of rail lines that aren't currently in use in and around NYC, as well as some that are only used for freight. We used to be a pretty dense railroad hub (before cars fully took over). The proposed Interborough Express would run on the Bay Ridge Branch of the LIRR, which hasn't carried passengers since 1924 and has been exclusively used for freight since. If you go into neighborhoods that once contained shipping warehouses, like Industry City in Brooklyn, you can find railroad infrastructure if you know where to look still. A bit further afield, they're looking to hopefully someday return rail service to the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western's old Lackawanna Cutoff, which would allow New Jersey Transit trains to go non-stop between Hoboken, New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania. And of course, we have a myriad of abandoned subway stations, which you can look for as you pass through on your way to other destinations! (City Hall is the one I recommend trying to see the most - just stay on the 6 Train until it loops around after its last stop and you'll pass through as it gets set up to go back uptown. Or you can become a member of the New York Transit Museum and go on a tour, like I did.)

Actually, visiting the aforementioned New York Transit Museum makes getting into an abandoned station easy as pie. You pay $10 to get in and you're in the old Court Street Station. If you like trains (or trolleys or busses!) on any level I highly recommend it.

RE: Grand Central, that was an old event done for National Train Day, and I don't know if they still do it but it would generally be in early May if they bring it back. I know they've been known to roll out the Hickory Creek for that - it's an observation car that used to be on the 20th Century Limited, the New York Central's flagship service between NYC and Chicago. The Hickory Creek is maintained by the United Railroad Historical Society of New Jersey and it tends to be in their yard in Boonton, NJ when it's not running on private charters.

For other recommendations - oh my God, if you haven't been to the American Museum of Natural History, you have to go. It's my favorite place in the entire world. I'll also recommend the Bronx Zoo, the Wildlife Conservation Society's headquarters, as they do a lot of work towards the conservation of endangered species and education. If you like baseball, Citi Field (where my useless Mets play) has significantly better food options than Yankee Stadium, and I'm not saying this out of bias - Yankees fans agree with me.

Avoid Times Square. It may be geared towards tourists, but everyone who actually lives here hates it because it's too crowded and you can't get where you're trying to go. If you really have to go to Raising Cane's or Junior's Cheesecake there are locations in Brooklyn that are so much less crowded.

If you have questions on anything specific I'm happy to help! I love sharing my city with other people!

[chronic-ghost]

Chapter 9 of Recovery Road

chapter rating: E (18+)

pairing: dieter bravo x f!reader

word count: 11845

chapter summary: if you thought you knew the full story of natalie lorraine, you were myth-taken

chapter warnings/tags: non-consensual touching, implied sexual assault, emotionally abusive parents, drug/alcohol use, underaged drug/alcohol use, women existing in the male gaze, putting too much of myself into characters as per yooshg

a/n: Header comes from the “Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses” by John William Waterhouse. Song for this chapter is Gold Dust Woman by Fleetwood Mac – watch me make a fic playlist after the fact lmao. Bear with me while I wax embarrassingly poetic about my favorite oc blorbo. Remember this does end well!!!

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There are many different types of myth but, essentially, they can be grouped into three: etiological myths, historical myths, psychological myths. Etiological myths can offer explanations for why the world is the way it is. Historical myths retell an event from the past but elevate it with greater meaning than the actual event (if it even happened). [Lastly] psychological myths present one with a journey from the known to the unknown which, according to both Jung and Campbell, represents a psychological need to balance the external world with one's internal consciousness of it. – Mythology, Joshua Mark

“in front of my mother and my sisters, 

i pretend love is cheap and vulgar.

 i act like it’s a sin– 

i pretend that love is for women on a dark path. 

but at night i dream of a love so heavy 

it makes my spine throb–

i dream up a lover who makes love like he is 

separating salt from water.”

— Salma Deera, “salt” 

Natalie Lorraine is a myth.

And like in all the great myths, birth is a painful, violent emergence. 

Slowly, labored across years and many heartbeats, what remains is the inevitable conclusion of being fucked over, of being lazy and careless, of innocence taken too soon. Careless children grow up to be careless mothers, careless fathers. 

The titans of the world leave to make their mark on history and, in doing so, mark their children in a way more powerful, more regretful than any legend could possibly make them out to be. 

Medea is brutalized in legends and in verse for the most heinous a mother can commit.

Odysseys forgets what being a father means.

Oedipus Rex curses his children with an unforgivable sin by way of their mother, their grandmother, and that staggering failure is felt through to Antigone, a generation removed. Antigone dies. Haemon and Eurydice die too. Pain and grief are family heirlooms passed through pale fingers at the stroke of midnight. 

But despite all that. Before all that. 

Myths begin when the heroes are forced to make a choice, choose a direction in the way their lives end up. It might not always be obvious, and the gods might have things in store for them. But there is a choice and the fallen hero always chooses.

But they were all children once. You have to remember that. You have to believe that.

(Aetiologic)

I hate these socks, you think to yourself, they’re itchy and they hurt my toes. Every time you swing your legs over the edge of that leather couch, your legs too short to touch the ground, the toe of your shoe pinches you. You really, really want to take off your shoes, but Mom said you had to keep them on all day, especially in the office. In his office. You think your dress looks like one of your baby dolls and you don’t like it.

So you stop kicking, even though the sound of your heel against the leather made a funny noise. You can move too, and make the leather squeak, and that is pretty fun too. Grinning, you bounce like you aren’t supposed to on your bed back home, the cushions chirping – it sounds like they’re farting – you giggle, rocking back on your hands from left to right, squealing along with the leather as you made it –

“Enough!”

You freeze, tears immediately welling in your eyes, fear almost painful in your chest. 

But he’s not talking to you. Your father is still in his office, with the door barely shut, and he’s talking to someone on the phone. Yelling, actually. He’s been in there since the little hand was on the fifteen and now it’s on the thirty. He told you to wait there while he called your mom. You tried to sit still, but it was boring and all the toys were back in the other room. 

He never yelled at you, your dad, but he did yell at your mom. 

When you talked to the other kids in your preschool class, their mommies and daddies lived in the same house together, slept in the same bed, talked nicely to each other. Yours didn’t. 

“Well, what am I supposed to do with her, LeAnne? I told you I have a meeting at four today and she could be here for three hours. I told you! I can’t have her here! You need to come pick up your daughter!”

Your foot kicks up and down. You didn’t like it when they talked about you like you weren’t there. 

“Hey there.” A woman with blonde hair and big eyes sits down next to you. She was always around your dad, and always handled his papers and briefcase and sometimes his coffee. She is younger than your mom but way older than you are. You think she’s really, really pretty. None of her dresses look like baby doll dresses. “I’m sorry your dad is taking so long. Do you want something to eat, or drink?”

You shake your head. Your mom said not to talk to strangers, so you didn’t open your mouth. 

“Are you bored? Do you wanna watch some TV?”

TVs were everywhere in your dad’s office building. Down near the elevators, and then more when you got out. It always seemed like people were watching a tv and the actors on the tv. Actors were people whose job it was to be on the tv or in the movies, your dad told you. He told you he knew a lot of famous actors, but when you told the kids in your class about it, they said they didn’t know any of those people. 

“You’re just making things up!”

“You’re a liar!”

You really wanted your dad to introduce you to an actor, just to prove them wrong. You thought it was pretty cool how everyone was always watching them. Like they couldn’t look away. 

You nod at the pretty lady. She smiles and picks up the skinny black tv remote on the table in front of the couch. 

The tv in the corner of the room pops on. The size of it doesn’t take up the wall like some of the tvs in the office do, but it’s still bigger than the one you have at home. 

The nice lady taps the button a few times, the channels changing, until she comes to the kids channel. It’s a little old for you – all of the shows at preschool are cartoons and this one has real people in it – but you want this woman to like you. 

“Do you like this one? Friends in the Family? It’s so funny!” 

She turns and leans back against the couch with you. You hear people laughing on the screen, even though you don’t see anyone. There’s a young girl, older than you but younger than this nice lady, and she has a boy with her on her parents’ couch. The boy leans in and kisses her cheek and the invisible people go ‘oooooh’. 

“Ooooh!” You mimic and the nice woman laughs, grinning at you. Something warm and tight goes up your chest, and you pinch your lip with your teeth, toes curling in your stupid shoes. You liked making her laugh.

On the screen, a little girl – maybe the other girl’s sister – pushes through the kitchen door. You gasp in surprise. She looks like she could be in your preschool class. She’s all mad and she crosses her arms, pouting.

“Someone’s gonna get it!” 

The invisible people laugh and the nice lady giggles so hard she leans forward and you’re giggling too, even though you don’t quite get it. That warm feeling reminds you of when you drink soda too fast, but it’s good. 

You frown too, put your hands on your hips, parroting the little girl on tv, “someone’s gonna get it!”

Her pretty mouth opens in surprise, her eyes sparkling.

“Oh my God, that was so good! You sound just like her!” You giggle, your face hot. “Have you ever asked your dad about acting?”

You shake your head. You, an actor? On tv? No way!

“Well, you should! You could be really good!”

You don’t know what to say, you want to keep making the same faces that little girl is, when your dad’s door opens. The young woman next to you lurches forward and shuts off the tv. He comes out and you can’t tell if he’s angry or upset or if that’s just how he looks. You’re not around him enough to know. But he stands in front of you, thinking something.

“Judy, would you get us two juice boxes from the fridge downstairs?”

“Of course, Mr. Milken.”

The young woman leaves and you’re a little afraid. You don’t want him to yell at you for watching that show for older kids. You twist your little fingers. 

“That was your mom on the phone. She’s going to be a little late.” 

You nod. “Okay.” 

“Did you have fun today at my office? Did you like meeting all my friends?”

You nod, this time quicker. “Yes! I would like to meet an actor one day!”

At that, he smiles and you relax. People who are angry don’t smile. 

“While we wait for your mom, do you wanna play paper football?”

“What’s that?”

“C’mon. I’ll show you.”

So the myth begins. All it takes is a single idea. A single want. A single desire. An innately human desire. We build myths and we tell stories and we fill them with the things we want to hear.

You’re turning fourteen next month. It’s circled on your calendar in your bedroom. It’s not like it’s that big of a deal, but at least now you could start the emancipation process. If you wanted to. You laid awake at night, thinking about what you’d call yourself if you ever changed your name. Something vaguely French-sounding. European for sure. But they were just fantasies to get you through the day. 

It’s early in the morning. You haven’t heard anything from Mom’s room in a while so you figure it’s just the two of you in the house again. You totter out of your room, blinking sleep from your eyes – it was a very late night on set last night and probably would be again, given how the production of this made-for-tv movie was going and especially with the extra homework you’ve been doing to make up for the time off you’ve taken – as you wander across the small, sun-streaked living room, and around the corner to the kitchen. You hear something from the fridge and just as you are about to ask your mom if she’s cooking (which is never a good idea), a man stands up. He’s older than you but younger than your mom and he has the last piece of your sourdough bread in his mouth. He smirks and you unconsciously tug down the hem of your sleep shorts.

This has been happening more and more lately. The way men, older men, look at you, it’s different now. Has been for a while, but now there’s more of them, their gazes sit on your bare skin longer, the light in their eyes changing, the lines around their mouths tightening. You don’t really know what it is they want, but it’s baffling to you that they think looking at you like that will convince you to give anything to them. 

It's the way your mom’s new boyfriend is looking at you. Your cheeks heat up without your consent and you hate it. 

He’s hungry and he’s scrounging around in the fridge and now he’s looking at you. Still hungry.

“Hey, you must be LeAnne’s daughter,” he says, taking the bread slice out of his mouth and propping his hairy arm on the top of the refrigerator door, his gaze sweeping you from head to toe as if deciding whether or not to make a sandwich out of you. Who likes this kind of shit? Oh, that’s right. Your mom. 

You narrow your eyes at him. “Yeah. That’s me. Is she here?”

His eyes follow the backs of your thighs as you walk over to the coffee pot and take out week-old coffee grounds. They’ve turned blue, started to mold, but you dump them out into the trash with three good smacks.

“Uh, she’s still in bed. She said you could get to school on your own.” 

Behind you, the fridge door slams shut and you curl your toes, begging yourself not to flinch. There’s something inside of you demanding you to not show weakness. Steadying your own hand, you dig into the jar holding the coffee grounds. It’s halfway empty, you make a note to pick up some later, the thought pressed up against the swell of panic that’s growing at the edge of your awareness. 

“I’m Alan.” He leans up against the counter out of the corner of your eye. “I know we just met, but I could take you, to school . . . if you want.” 

His thick middle has nothing to do with age, only poor health. Evident further by his off-yellow teeth and bad breath. 

“I’m o-okay. Thank you.” 

There’s three minutes left on the coffee timer. His gaze is like open palms on your skin. You hate it. He sidles up closer and your nails dig half-moon crescents into your skin. The lovely smell of coffee brewing is overwhelmed by his cheap cologne. He’s big. Bigger than you. Bigger than any of the boys in your class, or any of the men on set. You’ve never really noticed the men on set, they’ve never been this close before, but you’re sure he’s bigger than all of them.

You’ve never felt quite so small. 

“You were in that movie, right? ‘Those ain’t your average space-invaders’, that was you right?” You nod, the back of your throat drying out. He chuckles. “You were good. Really good. You were so pretty.” 

“I was ten.” 

He shrugs. “Yeah. Ten outta ten.”

Your stomach clenches and it’s like he can tell. Alan reaches the two inches across the linoleum and gently strokes your forearm. A light, smelly panic sweat breaks out over your forehead, under your armpits. 

You want him away from you, want him gone, to run back to your room, but where would that get you? 

Roll over, play dead, show your under belly. You don’t know what else to do to make him go away.

“Well, if you see my mom,” you ease around him, your forearm sliding from his grasp just as his fingers tighten, making sure you don’t seem offended, “tell her I’ve got a ride to–,”

“Hey, wait, where ya going?” 

You all but run back to your room, the coffee pot beeping behind you. You throw open your bedroom door and leap inside, locking it behind you. You don’t realize you’re panting until you feel light-headed, dizzy – you feel sticky all of a sudden and rush into your bathroom. Steam pours from the scalding hot water, the red handle all the way to the right, as you stand over it, watching it rush down the drain. With your lips pinched between your teeth, you run your hands under it and muffle a scream. It hurts. It burns but it’s like his touch is evaporating off your skin and there’s relief in that. It’s the first time you realize that the pain you give yourself is different from the pain that they give you. 

Not all of them are like that. 

Some of them are actually kind of okay. 

You’re fifteen and dressed as a pumpkin for the Halloween party hosted by the studio, the suit baggy and oversized, and for once, your mom’s friends don’t stare at you. No one really has all night and it’s nice. You feel like you can ease into the wall and no one would notice. There’s a long black couch on the other side of a plant with glowing lights in the shape of ghosts wrapped around its trunk. You stepside around a few directors, one of your other actors, and head straight for the couch. 

You don’t realize Jim, your mom’s current boyfriend is already there until you sit down and groan. He laughs from the opposite end and you jump. 

He’s more her age, thankfully, and doesn’t really seem to notice if you’re at home or not. In fact, you can’t really remember another conversation with him that lasted longer than a few minutes.

“You liking the party?” He asks.

You shrug – never show your actual feelings. “It’s kinda late. I’ve got classes on Monday, so I’m hoping to make it an early night.”

He nods, slowly, distracted. There’s something about his eyes that isn’t right. Not in the way that he looks at you, but at everything, like he’s trying to look through a dense fog.

Your mother is nowhere to be found, which isn’t entirely out of the ordinary for this sort of thing. She’d either show up and be the life of the party or show up so trashed she had to be escorted out of the building. 

But it is odd for her to just leave one of her toys lying around. 

“Do you know where my mom is?” You ask Jim and he shakes his head, as though it takes a considerable amount of effort just to hold himself upright. There’s definitely something wrong with him.

And then you see the smoke coming from his fingers and you finally realize that skunky smell is coming from him. 

He sees your gaze fall. “You want a hit?” He asks, either not remembering your question or not wanting to answer.

You’d never tried it before, not really having time between shooting schedules and school and your mom wanting to take you out to meet new casting directors and writers. You sit there, staring and realize Jim is probably one of the only consistent people you see in your life, everyone else a revolving door of names and faces and elbows to rub. A tiredness breaks over you like the push of a wave and you sway, wanting nothing more than to be at home under the covers. You wish you’d brought your walkman, so you could have hid out on the soundstage until the party was over.

You’d grown skinny over the past year. Rewarded and praised for it by producers and studio execs, you saw that people listened to you more, looked you in the eye when you were beautiful, made more beautiful by the thinness of your cheeks, your narrow thighs. Your mother was convinced you were taking pills, but couldn’t find anything in the house. And yet, the real reason behind it all was sometimes you were just too tired to eat. Too tired to move. Happy to curl up wherever you found yourself and sleep until the next person needed something from you.

But this is what you wanted, after all. You asked for a life of movies and revolving doors and fake people and men staring at your ass. You are reminded of this all the time. 

You nod at Jim, curiosity getting the better of you and wondering if other girls did this sort of thing in basements or with their friends or boyfriends. You portray a teenage girl on television, but sometimes you don’t feel like one at all. 

He reaches out to you and you take it. You’d smoke a cigarette once, with a few of the kids from that one time you guest-starred on that sitcom, so you think this’ll be the same.

“What’s it going to feel like?” You ask, the white paper inches from your lips. Jim looked at you and his eyes sort of crinkled. 

“It’s good. Real good. Like there’s a cloud between you and the rest of the world.”

That did sound nice.

You put your lips and inhale – it burns in a way you weren’t expecting – and you cough. Jim laughs in a way that makes you feel like you’ve done something wrong, that you’re silly.

“You’ll get it,” he says, “you’ll get it.”

You try again and remember that he held his breath before exhaling. You do the same, but the scratch makes your eyes water, your chest tighten, but you hold on, until you feel smoke cauterizing the back of your throat close and you cough again, less this time.

Jim laughs again and takes back the skunky cigarette. “Hey, look at that, your first joint and you handled it like a champ.” 

He smokes more, losing interest in you, so he turns and watches the party. Your heart beats roughly in your chest, but that might be more of the nerves than anything else. You fidget on the couch, waiting for something to happen, but it never does.

“I think I need another h-hit. I don’t feel anything.”

Jim frowns at you, shaking his head. “Hell no. You took two giant puffs on your first go. I’m not babysitting you when you’re puking in the toilet with the spins.”

“The spins?”

“When you drink while you’re high. Can be a real bad mix.” 

You blush, wondering if he saw you take sips from the flask in your purse or he just assumes you’re always drinking because you’re LeAnne’s daughter. 

“Just sit back, relax, you’ll feel it. In a bit.”

So you try his approach, nonchalantly watching people dressed in devil costumes, in white vampire fangs and cloaks, little skimpy bunny outfits, as the party rages on. You watch, and slowly, the whole thing feels distant. Like you’re in the far back of a theater and everything in front of you is some sort of stage.

You find you like it in the back row, in the quiet and the darkness. It’s warm, sort of like you’re dizzy but you sway with the movement and you don’t get sick. You find that you are rolling your head back and forth and you giggle.

Jim smirks at you, that joint almost gone. “Yeah, there it is.”

You’d never been high like this before. Buzzed a little bit from the beer in your flask, but this was new. This was . . .

“It’s nice,” you smile widely to the ceiling. “Does it always feel this way?”

“Like I said, you can mix with alcohol and get really fucked up.” Jim shrugs. “And different strains do different things. This is gonna relax your brain, but there’s others that’ll give you a body high.”

Body, this thing you’re in that doesn’t feel like it belongs to you.

“But a mental high from weed and a mental high from glue are like two totally different things.”

Your bones feel like they weigh a thousand pounds and you could just melt into the leather. But you turn your head, dropping it against the back of the couch.

“You can get high from glue?”

“You can get high from just about anything.”

“Oh.”

The needle-like feeling that pricks your heart every time you come to one of these parties is gone. The sloshy oozy feeling in your stomach when you go into public with your mother is gone. There is nothing left inside of you except weight and heat and air that comes in through your nose and out through your mouth. 

You giggle again. What if this is how a pumpkin feels all the time?

“Will it always feel like this?”

He doesn’t understand your question, doesn’t care enough to think about it, so he answers the only way he can. “Nah, should only last for a few hours. Then you’re good. No hangover, which is a plus.” 

“But I always want it to feel this way.”

He grins again and pulls out a small plastic baggy with some fuzzy brussel-sprout-looking vegetable inside. 

“Got twenty bucks on you?” 

You’re sixteen and you’ve just started in your first major motion picture. Offers are rolling in, you no longer have to seek them out. The brand new telephone for your brand new house is constantly ringing. You have to unplug it to sleep at night. But that usually makes your mother yell at you. 

She wants to answer every call that comes through. As if this house was hers.

You sit cross-legged on your bed, grinding up the weed you bought off a sound-stage guy earlier today in your silver grinder, your headphones in to drown out the noises coming from the other side of the house as well as the ones in your head.

This boyfriend was not so nice and in a drunken stupor grabbed your ass in front of LeAnne. She raged and yelled and blamed you. 

Get out, she told you. Leave. Get out. We don’t want you here. Leave. 

This is my house, you old bitch.

Licking the paper gently, you finish rolling the joint and press pause on your walkman. Stevie Nicks pauses in her crooning, and is it over now, do you know how? pick up the pieces and go home, and you remind yourself to find a purply drape at the next flee market. Reaching to the end of the bed, you plug in your headphones to the hot pink tv and flip to the right station.

Henry had sent in a new tv for your birthday, and you had that promptly thrown out. You bought this with your first check from residuals. 

It’s almost eleven. It’s about to start. 

You light the joint, inhaling smoothly, as the credits for Twenty-Three and Fun start up. 

The joint quivers at the end of your knee, your toes curling. It wasn’t produced by your father’s company, but it was all anyone talked about at school, in the gossip mags. You thought about buying Tiger Beat just for the pictures . . . of one specific cast member.

You bite your nail as the theme song plays and the credits roll through all the gorgeous, young actors smiling as they go about their perfectly average lives in the big city. 

And then his name shows up and you inhale smoke quickly to stifle the thing expanding in your chest.

Dieter Bravo. 

His smooth soft hair, dark sweet eyes. God, he is so cute. 

Your hand clenches the sheets. You’ve never had a boyfriend, only been kissed once while at dance in between shooting schedules that you’d begged your mom to let you attend. It was bad, it tasted bad, his lips were rubbery and wet, and you didn’t feel anything. 

Not like when you imagine what it would be like to be kissed by him.

Twenty-Three and Fun is out of your demographic, but maybe you could convince someone to let you try out for the part of someone’s little sister who comes in for the weekend. You’d just love the chance to meet him. He makes you feel like nothing you’ve ever felt before, nothing you know what to do with, but you tingle all over with it.

You’re at the tail end of sixteen when the spiral starts. 

When you don’t know where to put this loneliness that’s been dragging you down. 

Men stare at you but not in the way you want. Girls your own age won’t look at you, and women glare at you while their husbands stare. And boys, God, boys your own age –

You wipe the tears from your eyes, the wind snarling through your hair, the heat of the summer night sinking into your skin like wet clay. You know you’re driving too fast, but you don’t care.

Every day you go to work and put on someone else’s skin. Their clothes. Their face. For a while, it’s been freeing, to pretend to have normal problems, a normal family, a normal life. Because you knew even if you had never chosen to go into your father’s industry – which was now just as much yours – you knew your life wasn’t ever going to be normal. Not in the way it mattered anyway. 

But there is something there when you step in front of a camera. A feeling that doesn’t come from a dark place, from feelings of abandonment and loneliness – it comes from a place inside of you that still feels like you own, still is yours to hold and keep safe, despite everyone taking things from you without asking. Instead of taking, it gives. It builds. It grows, despite the salted earth of your soul. 

You like becoming someone else for a while, thinking as they do. Dancing, laughing, eating, playing as someone other than yourself. You like to create. You crave it. You create life for someone else that doesn’t exist and you love it. It feels right, imagining something if not for you, for someone else. Someone who looks like you but isn’t you. It feels good to dream. 

But lately. 

Lately, this job is no longer an act of creation. It’s fake smiles and ad campaigns and commercials and it feels rotten. Hollow. Like you’re under the eyes of a thousand leering men instead of just one. It feels cheap. You feel cheap, for wanting it to be something more. This desire for life itself dies in your hands, choked out, aborted before it had the chance to breathe.

Your body, yourself, is being twisted, molded into something you don’t want it to become and the only time, the only time you feel as though you have even some slight control is when you have none at all. When you detach from your corporeal form, so high or drunk you can’t feel your fingers. 

It began with the beer your mom’s boyfriends left in the fridge, then the pills in her medicine cabinet. Then the mini bottles of Crown Royal and Jim Beam in the mini-fridges at your dad’s office. No one ever seemed to care when you swiped the whole row into your backpack. Maybe others had done the exact same thing. 

You didn’t know how or why these things made you feel better but they did. You didn’t care about the tears on your face, the hot flood of anger beating in your chest, and you didn’t care about the speed limit, not even when you saw the flashing red and blue lights.

But you started to care when they put you in lock up and then you definitely did when your father’s lawyer bailed you out. 

You went home and threw up for six hours. No one came to check on you, no one came to find you when you yanked the phone cord out of the wall. You clutched the porcelain basin of the toilet for what felt like days. Years. You aged decades that night.

When you woke up, you showered, ate, and called back your father’s lawyer.

You had decided on a name, a new name to put on the emancipation papers. 

You told the lawyer very clearly and seriously over the phone: “I want my name to be Natalie Lorraine.”

It was the emancipation that finally did it. The final chop from the parental vine. The day she kicked you out, you came home from school, in between shoots for a new film with Gerard Butler and in talks for something with Helen Miram, and you find your mother curled up on the kitchen table. At first, you legitimately thought she was dead; the top half of her body was crumpled against the wood, her feet tangled with the rungs of the chair. She faced away from you, her right hand curled around an empty crystal tumbler and a three-fourths empty bottle of Belvedere inches from her fingertips. 

You stare, dumb-founded, your heart so slow you could hear it pound like a drum in your ears. And then she twitches. 

And then she wails.

“How could you? How could you do this to me? I’m your mother. You owe me. You owe me you owe me you owe me.”

She heaves boneless to the floor, the glass and bottle slipping out of her hand and shattering like droplets of rain. You can’t move, transfixed, as your mother, hands split open, knees carving bloody trails across the tile, drags herself towards your feet, like a freshly dug-up corpse. 

She’s muttering, spitting, snarling – she’s a starved, beaten beast, ready to make its last stand. 

You were a mistake

You ruined me

You ruined your father for me

Her sentences are blurred, notched together, overlapping, and intertwining. The only thing you remember is the vitriol and hatred more palpable than her own breath. 

Someone older, someone more separated from their pink, flushed girlhood would have the callouses to ease the burn, dull the cut. But at sixteen, you didn’t. At sixteen, with a burgeoning substance abuse problem and at the mercy of the first of many instances where adulthood begins to rob you of the small pleasures of life, you watch your mother crumble and it scares you.

In that moment you want nothing more than to be taken care of, in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s asking too much but it clearly is. You want to be safe in a way that is primal, the animal fear of the dark and unknown. You’ve seen your mother drunk before but not this drunk, never heard the sounds she’s making — the wailing, the disappointment, the sorrow and rage. It scares you so badly you want to cry.

The gap between girlhood and womanhood is closed when you understand your mother is only human. Nothing less. And nothing more. 

She’s still muttering hateful, horrible things as you take her to her feet and ease her onto the couch. 

She’s silent when you throw a blanket over her. 

She’s pale, shaking, green. 

Go away. I don’t want you here. I don’t want you around me. Leave me alone.

Leave me.

Leave me.

Leave me. 

Go away. 

You leave her, not knowing if it's serious enough to call 911, if you can actually die from drinking too much, but that fear, that vice-grip around your chest, it’s squeezing your lungs so tightly, tears leak out of the corner of your eyes. But then it sinks. Sinks into your bones, your blood, your muscles. Watching your mother folded up like a broken doll, you experience fear like you’ve never felt before. 

Blink and you’re in your room.

Blink and you’re under your bed, curled up, knees to your chin, and you’re crying. You can’t stop crying. It’s the only thing that seems to appease the fear, the sense that nothing is real and everything is going to turn out badly and it makes your stomach twist. You gag on your own spit and you shake and you tremble and you experience your first panic attack without anyone to tell you what’s going on. How to survive something like that. You grow up thinking this is how everyone lives and you’re just too pathetic to take it. You let that shame and embarrassment fester and grow because it has no way of stopping. 

Your father is also served with the papers. 

Two weeks later, the production for your upcoming movie was suddenly put on hold. The role with Helen Miriam went to someone else.

He never helped you get ahead in the industry, but he absolutely blocked you from it. He never called you again.

Someone, someone else, might have been hurt by the fact that your father cut you off without so much as a goodbye. But it’s not like you could miss what you never had.

You take the hint and enroll in UC Santa Barbara under your new name.

The myth of your maidenhood ended in much of the same way it began: at the behest of someone else and exiled as an afterthought.

You tried the whole sleep-around-to-fill-a-need thing for the freshmen year of college. It didn’t take. You liked sex but you liked the chase more. You liked the hunt, the thrill, the unconscious desire to touch, when the desire to do something first emerges in their heads. You like to watch the basic urge emerge in their darkened eyes before the other shoe drops. Drops and splatters coherent and rational thought like a bug on a windshield. 

You liked sex, even if more often you had to get yourself off while your partner had fallen asleep, their needs met. But you liked being wanted more. The drugs helped bridge the gap and given that you had no idea how to make friends because you'd never had one your own age before, the puddles of bodies that dripped onto couches and floors at parties seemed to be as good a social circle as any. They all started to recognize you at parties, in lecture halls, at bars. They nodded, you nodded back, and you sat down. 

No longer alone.

But not entirely wanted either. 

It was enough though. 

By your third year, you were known more for your party provisions (with your old contacts from the industry) than your ex-boyfriends. 

You meet Heidi Morgan through one of your production management professors. 

You’d gone in to speak with your professor, a man notorious for sleeping with his students, and believed you to be next in line (men were so much better at doing what you asked when they thought you’d sleep with them), so you were hoping that you could convince him that it was actually your lab partner who stole the paper from you, not the other way around, when you see him with someone else. 

Blonde, small, feisty. 

Heidi Morgan takes one look at the grotesque ogling in his eyes and promptly introduces herself. 

In her own fire and take-no-shit attitude, you find kindred spirits. 

She later asks you out for drinks, you think it’s been too long since you went down on a girl, and you completely misread the situation. 

She clears things up and then asks you to read for a part. The whiplash makes your head spin, but given that she’s not calling you a giant slut, it’s probably good news.

She knows who you are. Suspected because you looked familiar and because she has friends in some truly weird places, she confirms her suspicions by the end of the day. So she gives you a call, you show up, flirt too much, and maybe end up with a job. 

She gives you the script. It’s good.

Really good.

Why me? You ask her. You graduate in two weeks. You’re turning twenty-two in a few days. There’s nothing you’ve done in recent years to make her have this kind of faith in you. All digital memories of you reflect a knobby-kneed, round-cheeked little girl then that same little girl with tits and a smirk well beyond her years. 

She didn’t think she might find her lead in a dingy auditorium, she says, but crazier things have happened. It’s not a guarantee, or a promise, just an offer. Try out, see what happens. 

Crazier things have happened.

The rest is less myth and more old history.

(Historic)

The day you meet him is not unlike any other. Except in the little things. Your bra strap breaks when you go to put it on. Your belt loop gets caught in a door handle and nearly shucks your pants to the floor. You somehow get lost on the way to the studio even though you have your phone mapping the route. It takes you around and around and around until you get out and ask a very confused gas station attendant where the fuck the sound stage is. 

It’s not momentous. Annoying, perhaps, so annoying that all these little things pester your brain like flies gorging on rotten fruit. You’re distracted, one eye always glancing over your shoulder. Trouble, trouble, trouble, your problems seem to whisper, you’re in trouble.

A PA comes to find you, saying Heidi specifically asked for your presence but she’s gone missing. He thinks he knows where to find her, if you’d come with him. You eye him up from the black leather couch you’re draped across, irritated at the day and at him for his shameless staring. You nod, and immediately he starts running his mouth about his own Hollywood dreams. He’s a writer, you know, maybe you’ve heard of some of his smaller indie work, it’s not very much, but folks who know say it's good so maybe he’ll be able to sell it if –

The door to the back of the lot opens and it’s like god snapped his fingers in your ear. It’s not momentous, or earth-shattering, but holy shit does it fuck you up.

He’s broad. Tall. Forearms, thick and veiny, stocky thumbs and tense fingers. His hair is just on the edge of being long, but combed back in some attempt to tame it, to fold it into submission. His right earlobe is puckered, pierced, but no earring. His beard and mustache are trimmed, clean shaven elsewhere. Despite how he’s built out adult male muscle from his days on Twenty-Three and Fun, he still has those boyish eyes, a dimple that would drive anyone up a wall, and eyelashes you’d pay a thousand dollars for. You knew this was coming but it still feels like a kick in the chest. 

That kick burns when you realize something.

He’s fucking pissed. He’s beautiful, carved from your very dreams of what the most gorgeous man on earth would look like, but he’s fucking pissed.

Surprisingly, at you. 

Well, that’s disappointing. 

He comes at you with his claws drawn and you’ve never, ever been one to back down. You swipe back and hope you draw blood.

You discover other things about Dieter Bravo, the boy who you used to have a heart-stopping crush on when you didn’t know anything better. Fantasy will always be better than reality, and this isn’t exactly how you’d thought your first meeting would go.

And yet, you discover something else, something very, very curious. Something soft and impressionable, bruised purple and green. Something you want to lean on with your entire weight until he chokes. It’s ugly, but it’s amusing. Maybe this is how you hoped your first meeting would go, albeit with some tricky obstacles and a ticking clock. 

You want to press and see what spills out. 

Dieter Bravo cannot and does not look away from you. 

The day you meet Dieter Bravo is also the day you meet The Sixers, the day you meet Marie. She’s small, mousy, but apparently a fucking rock star on the drums. You like the irony; quiet and unassuming until she bangs through your head with percussion. Where the rest of her bandmates are wide-eyed and eager and come with more drugs than a pharmacy, there’s something about Marie that you find so tenderly earnest you kind of wish you didn’t come dressed like you were going out to eat the fleshly hearts of men everywhere. You want to approach her on her level. You don’t want to scare her away. There’s something redemptive about a kind, sweet girl like Marie striking up a friendship with you. 

If you could ever figure out how to start one. 

“Excited for the filming to start?” You ask her after nearly everyone’s picked up their things and left after the reading. She glances at you, then over her shoulder, as if you were talking to someone else. You instantly feel insanely protective of her. 

She blinks a few times before distractedly shaking her head. “No. I’m actually terrified.” 

“About being in a movie?”

She cringes, as if it’s the most shameful thing in the world. 

“Yeah. I love playing in front of crowds, but something about being on camera scares me.” 

You make a note to find out the next time they’re playing live.

“It’s honestly not that bad. It feels a little weird, like some unblinking eye staring at you, but then it just kind of fades away.” 

She bites her lip, tucking that short brown hair over her ear. “Have you done this before?”

You’re not exactly hiding your childhood movie star past, but you don’t really want it broadcasted.

“Here and there.” 

The rest of her bandmates are chatting amongst themselves, perhaps not yet aware you’re trying to befriend one of them. You’re not quite sure how it’s going.

“If you ever want, we could talk and I could give you some pointers.”

Fuck, why did that sound like a line? It shouldn’t. You didn’t want it to. Where was the line between asking someone to be your friend and asking someone for a fuck?

If she notices your embarrassment, she doesn't show it. She grins brightly, unashamed. “Yes! Oh my god, yes, please. I’d love that!”

Normally, when giving someone your number, you’d grab their hand and write it in Sharpie, giving them a good wink. Now you tear off a corner of the call sheet and write down your number in shaking hands. It’s a small piece of paper, easily lost. That’s okay, if she does lose it. No need to freak out.

She’s grinning, smile expanding across that round face of hers as she takes your number when someone calls her name.

Roxie, the one with bright-red flaming hair and gorgeously thick eyebrows, takes a glance at the piece of paper in Marie’s fingers. One eyebrow arches, and she says nothing.

Roxie looks at you like she wants to devour you whole. You think you’ll let her. 

You decide to ignore him.

Whatever his problem with you is, it doesn’t have to be dealt with immediately. Maybe he’ll come around and if not, no skin off your nose. It’s none of your business what happens off camera, what he thinks about you as a person. All that matters is giving a good performance and you know you can do that. 

You just sort of wish you had known more about the role before Heidi offered it. You really sort of wish you had known Dieter was going to be your co-star. That night, after approaching him in the parking lot, you had two glasses of wine to settle your trembling nerves, and you flipped through the script.

He was so calm and collected at the table read today. Cool, relaxed, at ease with himself and the world. Everyone knew him, everyone talked about him, either directly to you or in snatches of conversation.

Dieter Bravo – you could not ask for a better scene partner!

Dieter Bravo – he’s so, so nice. He always stops for fans!

Dieter Bravo – this shoot is going to be so much fun with him!

You’d never been particularly star-struck, but for the first time in your life, the idea of working with your co-star was daunting. When you were up against Gerard Butler, you’d been in the game for a while, knew the industry, showed up in the trades. Now, you felt like any other Santa Barbara graduate stumbling out in front of the camera for the first time. Where was that all-knowing smirk you had perfected at fifteen? God, had you always been so transparent?

You felt like you had to prove yourself at that table read. You know you were going a bit overboard, but they watched you, transfixed, and it empowered you. Mark Bronson, Marie, the rest of The Sixers, they watched you like Taylor had possessed your body and you instantly became a rockstar. 

Only, he didn’t. He watched you and didn’t look away, but he looked so uninterested in your performance, the tears that filled your eyes were partially real.

And then he touched you and in that moment, you knew he was mocking you. Laughing at you, you fucking child. He was the legendary star here, not you, and to think you ever had a chance was laughable. The heat of disgust in his eyes hurt, more than you wanted to admit. 

It was day one and he hated you.

Things escalate. 

He caught you high on set and it felt like you were being scolded by your older brother. He didn’t get it. He never did. All that shit about how he knows what it’s like – bullshit. All fucking bullshit. He was somehow always in the corner of your eye, watching you, begging you to fuck up so he could expose you like the fraud you are. 

And a pathetic fraud you are at that. He touches you and it’s like algae, hot and dense, spreading across your skin. You fight the feeling that strokes your cunt and you grit your teeth. Stop touching me, go away, stay back – please. 

You’re twenty-two and still harboring that fucking crush you had when you were sixteen. It’s embarrassing. It’s pathetic. It’s so, so, so wrong.

You try to ignore him. Try to exorcize him from your every waking thought. It doesn’t take. You get drunk at the pool party and you want his eyes, anyone’s eyes, on you. 

Marie is shy, you try to sober up around her, but you’re too far gone and you don’t want her to see you like this.

So you find Roxie. And Samuel. They give you something that makes your pupils dilate to the size of quarters and you feel like you’re made of cosmic dust. When they touch you, beauty and awe and the atoms of the universe bloom across your skin. You like kissing them, you decide. The water dripping off you from the pool feels like bad lovers and broken kingdoms up for sale.

You end up at his door. You don’t mean to. You genuinely forgot what room you were in. 

Consciously, you know he’s married. Consciously, you know he hates you. But that doesn’t stop you from asking anyway. 

“You could join us, you know.” 

You want so badly to be his theatrical equal that it hurts, it burns hotter for a moment than your desire for him, and he just stares at you. Consciousness somewhere in a nearby galaxy, you can’t read the look on his face. And then it blurs, he closes the door, and the entire hallway grows thick, heavy leaves.

Disappointment is a physical object and it burrows into your chest. You think you can feel your ribs moving to make room.

Sam and Roxie fuck on your bed while you’re curled up on the futon. You don’t even change out of your suit. You kick them out as soon as they are done, not wanting their hungry gazes to turn to you. 

This is always the worst part. When the emotions and memories that you’ve managed to pry off you as you coat yourself in a protective layer of LSD, finally come back. They wrap around you like a vice and you can feel the beginnings of a panic attack start in the tremble of your fingers. You stay there in the armchair, damp and cold and shivering and trying not to choke on your own throat, until the early hours of the morning. You think you could die like this but you don’t. You never actually do.

He doesn’t bring it up and neither do you. You sort of wish he would, just for a chance to . . . no, that’s fucked up and, if not legally, morally wrong. You can’t wish for anything when it comes to him.

It’s easier to hate him. To pretend like he was some over-involved, self-obsessed diva who stepped on your lines on purpose and flat-out refused to run scenes with you. It was easier as a whole for a while.

Marie started talking to you on her own now and that made you forget Dieter for a bit. The rest of the group was hesitant in their welcome, despite what had almost happened between you, Sam, and Roxie. But they all came around when you gave them the cleanest Molly they’d had in years.

It was like college all over again, but the faces were consistent this time. Five of them. You smoked in their van, fuzzy orange carpet fibers tickling your ear as you looked up at the glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the roof. 

“Why are you called The Sixers if there are five of you?” You ask suddenly. 

There’s a pause and then a collective chuckle. You watch it like lightning spark between them.

Nick finally speaks up: “Because it sounds like the sex-ers.”

“Sixty-nine n’ feeling fine.”

You laugh with them this time and you feel your breath mix with theirs. 

While meeting him wasn’t a particularly momentous occasion, the drive up to his AirBnB was. Maybe it was the lack of air this high up, but around every turn, your chest got a little tighter. The Sixers had shown you The Labyrinth with David Bowie last weekend (“how have you never seen that movie? Did you grow up under a rock?”) and you can’t help but think of the Goblin King coming to whisk you away. At the very least, the amount of rings they wore were the same. 

You try desperately to not look at his white-knuckles around the steering wheel and fail tremendously.

The thing is, you don’t really want to fight with him. You don’t want to have to interact with him through this hazy, distant, drugged out wall, but that seems like the only way he’ll talk to you. He’s always scowling at you, like you’d done something wrong, and you hadn’t. Sure, you thought about it and fucked yourself on the biggest dildo you had about it, but you hadn’t actually done anything. You hadn’t even made a move on him, not even bat an eyelash. But it seems like you just breathe in his direction and that sets him off. 

You still don’t understand why his past drug problem is now your problem too. In your absence from Hollywood, you’d somehow missed his ups-and-downs as he transitioned out of a teenage heartthrob into a fully adult hot mess. You’d certainly missed his marriage announcement until you googled it in the bathroom after lunch one day to see if what you’d heard the two techs talk about was true.

She’s so fucking hot.

Yeah, she was a model, right? Dude fucking scored big.

Fuck, she was a model. Even if she wasn’t, she certainly looked it, from all the red-carpet photos of the two of them. He looked at her with complete and total adoration.

Hollywood party boy settles down with recent marriage to cubist painter’s daughter

The headline was wordy but got the point across. He was off-limits. 

You didn’t know how to make someone like you if you couldn’t offer them sex or drugs. What the fuck were you supposed to do with the sober and married Dieter Bravo?

And yet, there were times. Moments. Fragments. Bursts of light in a mirror, where you thought he looked too long. How his eyes flickered black when you talked about your bra, or your tits, or your ass. But that’s all they were – fleeting instances of your own insanity bleeding into reality. He would never look at you like that. He hated you. 

It scared you, the way he expected you to act when you couldn’t hide behind being high, when you couldn’t flirt your way out of a particularly tense situation. He wanted you raw, exposed, your face revealed to the light you had spent years hiding from.

And then he did the darndest thing.

He was nice about it. In the kitchen, and then on the patio, he asked you questions about your start in the industry, what you’d like to do with your life, how you saw your career going. He cooked for you and made you laugh. He invoked the holy saint Sister Heidi as a bargaining chip and it was all the excuse you needed to drop the boxing gloves. You didn’t want to fight with him. You wanted to be his friend. You wanted him to like you.

Scratch that.

You wanted him to fuck you within an inch of your life and, sure, it was stupid to finger-fuck yourself to him, on the same couch as him, but maybe you wanted to get a little caught. Okay, a lot caught because then he’d tell you to fuck off and he’d draw the line in the goddamn sand and, sure, it’d be embarrassing and, sure, it’d hurt like hell but you’d get over it. You’d nurse your heart but you’d get back on that fucking bike because you really, really wanted this movie to work – but –

He fucking doesn’t. 

He doesn’t kiss you but he wants to. He looks at you like he wants to suck the marrow from your bones, drink the blood from your heart through your cunt.

Dieter Bravo wants to kiss you desperately, but because he is a good man, he doesn’t. And because you’re a shit person, you make it hard on him. You make it hurt because it hurts you and just for once, for a second, you want someone to understand how you feel. How you hurt. How you ache. 

That house in New Mexico changed everything. For you. For him.

Friends didn’t make time with each other because they were trying to plug up the moans in their head. Friends didn’t keep busy to keep their hands off each other. You weren’t friends with him, but you did get along. You learned a lot about him. You’d never had a real friend before but you sure this isn’t how it’s supposed to feel. 

Instead of a myth, your relationship is built in handprints. Red blotches on cave walls, their original meaning lost to time, a dead language no one speaks any more. Sometimes the prints overlap, sometimes they don’t. There are no words spoken, but the feeling is there all the same.

You think, if you could just take your aching heart out of your body, you could actually be Dieter Bravo’s friend. He fills in holes you didn’t realize were empty. Chasms for art, for acting, for food that didn’t come in a can or delivered on your front door. He knows about wine, and whiskey, and needs help dressing himself. He never made you feel like your asks were too much, your need to connect too great. He took your hand and told you what you wanted was normal. He’s funny, patient, and loves Shirley MaClaine movies. He did her entire monologue from The Apartment one night after hours of begging and it brought you to tears. You had a scene partner in Dieter Bravo, you had someone to challenge you, to rethink scenes and pull back deeper and deeper character layers. He’d taken a course online about psychology to have a new perspective on analyzing characters and you thought it was fucking genius. 

Marie filled certain relationship needs – a girl to talk about drama with, a fellow fan of live music, someone to make you look up to – but Dieter fulfilled more, if not all of them. Despite working in an artistic industry for years, you’d never once talked trade with someone and certainly not someone who knew it so well. You were awestruck by him. 

Call it infatuation, call it being horny, but there is a connection, a red through line that connects you both. And for a while, that’s enough. 

Until it isn’t. 

The mark of his blotchy handprints on your heart stop when you fuck some guy you barely know because Dieter hurt you. 

When he won’t look at you while he’s pretending to fuck you, you feel self-conscious again, like he’s going to think you’re some inexperienced little nepo baby. But he does his duty and you do yours and you’ve never felt so empty. 

Your handprint stays, while his blurs away. 

(Psychologic)

After production ends, you exist in the margins. No more mythologizing. No more cave drawings. 

And then Marie shows up.

She takes you to get your nails done like it's the most normal thing in the world. What is wrong with her? Doesn’t she know what you are?

You get smoothies and see some live music and she keeps you from spiraling. There is no possible way she knew about the lines of coke upstairs in your bedroom, but she takes you out into the light all the same. 

You go out to shows with The Sixers. They love having a groupie who’s a Hollywood star. Marie seems embarrassed when they show-case you, but you find you don’t mind waving a bit on stage and introducing the band. You think you see a pair of deep brown eyes in the crowd occasionally but you know it’s not. You have to accept your fate. He might not like you and he doesn’t hate you, but he certainly doesn’t want anything to do with you.

Not friends, not lovers, but something else. Something almost.

You and the Sixers swim in the ocean off the Santa Barbara coast. You go to parties and you play the bongo drums in a treehouse in South Los Angeles. You bring the good drugs and everyone loves you. 

You don’t want to go to the wrap party, but Marie insists. You think she likes being famous just for all the opportunities to get dressed up and do your make up. She told you once that you are the prettiest girl she’d ever seen without any motive behind it. She wasn’t trying to fuck you or fuck with your head. It was just the truth in her eyes and it made you nauseous.

You go to the wrap party because it’s something better to do than get high on shrooms for the fourth time this week and as a reward, Cooper shares his blunt with you in the car. You laugh easily and often and loudly and Cooper keeps you steady with a hand on your waist. You’re nervous, you want to drink more, but you already feel like you’re carrying too many cups and plates and the noise it’s going to make when you drop them all is going to be deafening. 

He’s here. He’s here with his fucking gorgeous wife and you stand behind Cooper so you have something blocking your line of sight.

Just as you are about to order your first vodka soda of the night, Dieter rushes back into the house. The weed and coke in you switch the plugs in your brain and suddenly you are very, very angry. 

But the Dieter you find is fragile, beaten down, vulnerable. He talks to you like he did in New Mexico and it dulls the edges around the hole in your chest. He looks at you like you’re his saving grace, his last hope. 

Myths lie. They blur the truth to make a better story. They build up a man larger than life, they make goddesses out of women, and they sanctify, canonize love. They make you ache with the wanting of the fantasy of it, and that’s on purpose. Myths are the human experience on fire.

Kissing him, you feel on fucking fire.

Meeting him didn’t feel momentous. But fucking him certainly was. 

The settlement of your mythology burns to the ground, flames licking the sky. He has crystalized in your veins and, in an instant, you’re hopelessly addicted.

With Dieter Bravo, you come to like sex. You come to love it actually. It’s an itch, a fluttering, warm feeling that makes you twitch and tense when his hands aren’t on you. There’s some part of you that knows the inherent danger of giving one man, much less this man, that much power over you, but fuck, you can’t help it. 

You’re too young, too inexperienced in the world to know the difference between when a man wants you for sex and when a man loves you. In your mind, the two are the same and cannot be separated. You know what it feels like to be wanted to be fucked, but in your nativity you assume that’s how a man looks at you when he wants to love you — and this time you’d welcome it. 

There isn’t much to say about New Orleans, except for three things:

One, you’ve successfully confused yourself into thinking this is what being in a relationship with him would be like.

Two, you’ve never felt safer and more wanted and more complete than you ever have when you take drugs with Dieter. (that primal animal fear is gone for the first time in what feels like years)

And three, you’re so fucking in love with him you’re sick with it.

In the sickness, you grow weak. You burn with fever. Your bones ache and your mind races. His touch is simultaneously a balm and a contagion. 

You love him. You love him. You love him.

You love him unlike anything or anyone. 

Marie is actually the only one who ventures a guess. Who catches you, wings pinned to the corkboard, and asks you point-blank, “are you fucking Dieter Bravo?” 

Maybe she’s braver because it’s over text, permanent traces of your infidelity, but you stare at her message for hours. You think about it in the hotel shower after the plane lands in Los Angeles. You haven’t seen her in weeks and you’ve stopped returning her phone calls. 

Your high falters at the idea that you might have (and probably did) lose a friend over him. But what did that matter, in the grand scheme of things, your sickness asks you, now that you have him?

Now that he’s the only thing that matters. Now that he is everything. 

He goes back to his wife. 

After everything. After what you did for him. After what you gave up. How you prostrated yourself for his love, for a moment of his time. He can’t see it, it’s eating you up. You think cancer has kinder teeth than his. 

The foundations of the core of your being are rocked. It doesn’t feel real because he’s still in this hotel with you, the same hotel where you fucked in the bathroom, where you flirted with him for the cameras to sell the movie, where he begged you to stay with him, you’re gonna stay, right? you’re gonna be with me, after this? And maybe it isn’t real because he only lasts being apart from you for twelve, maybe fourteen hours. Maybe he’s sick too. Maybe he’s fucked just as much as you are. 

In your dark, deep wretched heart, you hope he is. You hope he’d die without you. But you don’t know. You don’t know because he never says it. 

This time, it’s real, he promises. This time, he’s never going back. This time he’s going to say he loves you, his kisses pledge to you. 

This time he’s not going to leave you.

In the mornings after Chloe leaves and you kiss him E-tablets with your tongue and he fucks you in every way he knows how, he curls up next to you and you tell him. It doesn’t matter he doesn’t seem to hear you.

You tell him you love him, have always loved him. Dieter Bravo turned from an imaginary companion, to a friend you didn’t want, and now to a lover who makes you think you’re special. Something valuable, precious. Something that is worth keeping. 

Until you’re not.

Myths serve to answer questions about our place in the natural order of things. To ease tension. To provide guidance. 

Why does it rain?

Where do the seasons come from?

What is the sun, and why does it leave and return?

What is heartbreak?

What is grief? What is sorrow? How do we carry them with us?

How do we go on when the world is determined to break us?

When you’ve always had nothing, and now you still have nothing and no one – he doesn’t love you and he’s going back to his pregnant wife – you ask, what’s the fucking point?

Not even the myths can answer that one.

Later, when you wake up under the bright lights of a hospital room, your memory is cracked, broken into terracotta pieces on the ground. There are things missing from you.

You don’t remember calling Oliver, only that he was there and he was high out of his mind and he gave you whatever he had in his pockets. You don’t remember what you took, or if Oliver was kind to you when he watched you swallow pill after pill.

You don’t remember the shower, the ambulance ride, or being admitted.

You aren’t sure exactly what you’ve lost. But you feel the missing edges.

Dieter is missing from you.

If you close your eyes, still the movement of your body, block out the noises of the machines and the hospital around you, you think you remember hearing him say it.

You think he might have said it when he kissed your forehead, but it feels older than that. Like his words and his actions stem from two different memories but you’re so fucked up they blur together. You want to hold onto that new memory, as fabricated as it might be, for as long as you can.

But then sleep over takes you again and it flushes everything out. The next time you wake up, you don’t remember that he ever said, I love you. 

When you wake up, you know he’s gone. You don’t know how you know, or why, but it feels like a piece of you has been torn away in a bloody chunk. Like someone had taken pliers to your fingernails and tore them off until blood splattered onto the floor.

Like someone put a knee to your shoulder and wrenched white teeth out of your mouth. 

Until you are gummy and dripping.

You open your eyes not to Dieter, not Heidi, but Marie. Mousy, intelligent, thoughtful Marie curled up asleep in the chair next to you. 

The sound of your crying wakes her up. Wordless, judgement-less, she crawls into bed with you, takes you into her arms, and lets you sob like the heart-broken mess you’ve become. 

God, can you die from pain like this?

She strokes your forehead and tells you, no, you can’t. You might want to, but you can’t. 

For the first time in your life, you’re not a myth. 

You’re not a story of a little girl whose parents didn’t love her enough. 

You are not the story of an actress whose star burned too bright and hot and the cosmos punished her for her hubris. 

You’re not the story of a woman who fell in love too hard and too fast with drugs and a man much older than her and got shattered on the rocks. 

The book has closed, the final chapter has come. There are no more stories to tell, nothing left to make fantastic. 

You are a broken human body. 

Natalie Lorraine is a myth.

You were a child once. You have to remember that. 

[roxannepolice]

Outside the boundaries of the universes lie the raw realities, the couldhave-beens, the might-bes, the neverweres, the wild ideas, all being created and uncreated chaotically like elements in fermenting supernovas.

Just occasionally where the walls of the worlds have worn a bit thin, they can leak in.

And reality leaks out.

Thank you, sir Terry, for once again providing me with an excellent opening quote for a Doctor Who rambling. That probably has nothing to do with the fact that both DW and Discworld fall into the Gulliverian satire poetic.

So yeah, about what's grown to be called a Truman show theory, and I cannot stop making it clear, me critically poking at it is not me hating it especially if Ruby's story ends up throwing shade providing metatextual insight on the mystery baby extravaganza of 2010s (am I the only one who thought that Splice looks like Rey?).

But the problem is, how far would the revelation go? Is it just the endgame for the season? Did it start when Fourteen invoked a superstition at the end of the universe, as the text implies? Or does it go further back, as the Newton and apple story is unreal, too (HOT TAKE: THEY'RE IN VOLTAIRE'S BRAIN. THE CRITICISM OF ORGANISED RELIGIOM CONFIRMS THAT). Or was it already there when Fourteen regenerated in new clothes (he does talk of "canon" in the Dalek Mini-sode)? All of this is just digging deeper into figuring out just how clever the Cave is. But let's dig even deeper, shall we?

Ok, maybe it's Flux. Flux definitely messed up a lot of things, such as replacing Russia with Sontarans. Except...

There's Robin Hood in season 8. And not just a guy called Robin Hood, it's the Robin Hood of legend. Twelve is explicitly confused by that.

In fact, fourth wall breaking was probably most recurrent in Twelve's run.

Though let us not forget Thirteen looking straight into the camera to explain humans must recycle or else we'll turn into props.

Hey, remember how in Let's kill Hitler Eleven is like "The British are coming" and Hitler reacts with fear? In 1936? When the alliance between Third Reich and UK looked like a very realistic prospect? When the Windsors were enthusiastic over what was going on in Germany? PROPAGANDA MUCH?

Bashing on the royals will definitely go down better than my next point on this anarcho-communist coffeeshop AU website, but if you guys think the Red Army's involvement in WWII was fresh faced boys so filled with faith in equality for all people that they came to fight its eternal enemy of fascism then no. Nonononononono. No. NO. Go read about Ribbentrop-Molotov pact NOW. Sincerely, a person living east of the Berlin wall.

Seventh era is also when we get a hint there's a Doctor Who show on BBC.

I'm not going to go through every single time DW has leaned into a made up version of events (wonder if the Doctor ever changed their mind about Mao Zedong, though), but you're getting the drift, but there is one last point to be made.

Nero didn't start the great fire of Rome. The eternal city was a densely packed stack of wood and would go up in flames quite often, though the one from 64 CE was a particularly nasty one and putting it out could have been coordinated better. Still, the idea Nero intentionally started it is 100% made up.

Why should this be important? Well, The Romans are from the 2nd season of Classic Who, from 1965. While we're at it, season 1 historicals are also based more on simplified ideas about Marco Polo, the reign of terror, or Aztec human sacrifices (Barbara Wright Victorious, my love) than true facts (probably because documentary about everyday life of the Aztecs would work better as a way to get children to sleep than to get them hooked on history), but that's more a matter of how than what. In case you want to somehow reconcile this via the Pantheon, then the Toymaker first appeared in season 3, and that after the Doctor visited the Trojan war and Vicki stayed there with Troilus as actually faithful Cressida.

So. The thing about Truman show revelation is. It's either groundbreaking on a last episode ever, goodbye yellow brick road, level, or not meaningful at all. I just can't see it work as a seasonal endgame, because if the episode from 2023 is in unreality, then so is the one from 1965. Just, where do you go from here? It's either waking up in the crude reality or. y'know. acknowledging the convention, which is what the Truman show theory kinda set out to negate in the first place.

Again, I genuinely want to discuss! I myself am never sure if hot take posts are open to discussion, which is why I made a separate post, so I want to make it clear, I want to have the holes in my own rambling explained!