#I know he cannot ruin his public image without certain death

[problemduetest4life]

Okay the early 2000’s was PEAK celebrity’s going off the rails so part of me will always want Jean to go full Britney. Like fuck the media I’m going shave my head and attack the paparazzi with an umbrella. It’s what he deserves

[mikeshanlon]

i really enjoy the way young royals explores the theme of legacy and how detrimental it can be to have to live up to a legacy or be obsessed with reputation. (analysis and thoughts under the cut)

i think wilhelm resents the fact that he has to live up to the role of being in the royal family and yet is very afraid of ruining that legacy bc of all the pressure. before he was sent off to hillerska he went to a normal school and wanted normal people around him and was content with erik having to take on the responsibilities of crown prince. and when he does have to assume that role he says he can never be erik, that he’s always had to be compared to him and obviously doesn’t like that. but even before erik passed and he had to take on those duties he was afraid of fucking up the legacy of the crown, when he sees that sign in the hallway that says you are in charge of your own legacy after he holds hands with simon, his anxiety worsens. you can tell it’s been instilled in him for a long time that what is most important is the crown’s reputation rather than his own wants. in the scene where him and simon fight about alexander being caught, he obviously wants simon to stay, but he focuses on how him doing drugs will fuck up his family’s reputation if it gets leaked. as much as he cares for simon, his legacy and his duties are like this oppressive cloud hanging over him. 

i do think that wille cares for his family of course but to me it’s different that the sort of loyal unconditional care with simon and his sister/mom. erik and wille had unconditional love, erik understood how difficult being a prince in the public eye was, and wille obviously cared for him deeply and felt like he could to talk to him about issues. his relationship with the queen is much more strained, she wants a tailored, doctored representation of him in the media, he cannot be anxious and bite his nails, she makes all the decisions for him. family is important to wille partially because it has to be bc of how special his family is. he helps his family, he helps august pay his tuition, and then makes a point of disowning august after his betrayal as his new “brother”. but again, because of the royal status and expectations upon the family, that supersedes and colors all of their relationships with each other. it seems to be more a sense of “duty” than unconditional love. especially after erik’s death, wille always has to consider how the crown’s image will be impacted, even though he never wanted to have this responsibility, or even the responsibility of being the “regular” prince under erik. being a family unit that is under constant public scrutiny is going to strain relationships. the queen knows that the anxiety of fucking up his legacy will get to him, and she uses that to get wilhelm to back out of admitting it was him in the video and coming out. wilhelm has to choose between his own happiness and their reputation, is forced to think that denying it’s him in the video is the only way. he loves simon and wanted to live freely, but that pressure of legacy won out.

i don’t know if i think wille necessarily values the crown over his own personal happiness and relationships, like in the way maybe the queen does--i don’t think it comes from a place of “i’m lucky to be prince and owe my duty to the crown, so i do what i have to do to stay that way” (like how the queen said the crown is a privilege not a punishment), but from fear of destroying the legacy and his family. afterall, he still wanted to pursue a secret relationship with simon, i think if he fully valued the crown and uplifting legacy and fulfilling his duties he wouldn’t have tried that. he wouldn’t have made a point to tell simon he loves him. hopefully we get another season because i think with the iconic ending revolution rendition and him looking in the camera, which also parallels the shot of him being forced to apologize/go to hillerska, he is realizing that focusing on legacy is taking away what’s important to him, and he’s going to shake shit up.

august is definitely the most obsessed with legacy, wanting to carry on his father’s business, being persistent on befriending wilhelm and trying to social climb, wanting power and perfection with being prefect, rowing captain etcetera. he is so obsessed with perfection and reputation he gets addicted to drugs, he fucks with simon and makes him get stuff for parties he can’t afford because good parties will make him look better, he manipulates sara multiple times, he mostly wanted felice because of her nobility, he fucking films wilhelm and simon and OUTS him, his own cousin. he hates that wille has everything he wants but isn’t as interested in preserving and more importantly improving the legacy he’s inheriting. meanwhile august’s familial legacy is dwindling, and he holds on to the last bit of assets and names that he can.... v much sick and a weirdo that shows how harmful being obsessed with legacy is

the queen is of course v focused on legacy and it really breaks my heart and makes me angry that she doesn’t care about wilhelm’s happiness more than their reputation, and moreso doesn’t get august in trouble for literally leaking child p*rn of her kid for the sake of appearances?!?!?! like how is he even remotely trustworthy she is wrong for that! like i said earlier the obsession with legacy puts a strain on their mother/son relationship. she doesn’t even really say anything about wille’s sexuality or his relationship, and barely comforts him, mostly goes in with a plan she’s already concocted without him to fix everything. 

erik seemed to understand and accept his role as crown prince but obviously had issues with it as well, like when he makes the plan for him and wilhelm to run from the press, or when he tells wilhelm to enjoy himself while there aren’t so many eyes on him that care. erik shows someone who has more unconditional love and empathy but still has to focus on legacy and is much more inclined to continue his legacy, but we do see those glimpses over how even the most “ideal” attitude of preserving legacy causes issues.

felice is expected to live up to her mother’s legacy, of being an equestrian, of being the lucia, but she doesn’t want either of those things. her mother wants her to be thinner and straighten her hair, and find someone of nobility to be with. obviously she does find wilhelm attractive lol but i think the main reason she pursued him and definitely why she pursued august was because she was expected to social climb and have royal kids. felice feels the need to portray a false narrative of herself on social media to uphold a certain image of herself. it’s very fucked up that her mom wants those values instilled in her but i love that felice was putting up boundaries and pushing back against her mother and the narrative she’s supposed to live up to. her giving sara the role of lucia and focusing on supporting her friends more in the latter half of the season shows growth and i’m excited to see where her story goes. 

sara is interesting because she seems to want to reject the legacy of her family and being working class and to fit in with the elite of hillerska. sara hates micke, hates that simon contacted him because it’s bringing in this “shameful” and painful part of their past (which i mean is def fair). other than sara’s betrayal in 1.06, i think the scene where she tells her family that she wants to reside at hillerska really exemplifies where she’s at in her relation to legacy/class. after dining at hillerska and living amongst the elite she gets annoyed at eating around the TV, she blames her mother for not leaving micke sooner, she gets angry with simon for caring for her. she wants to lead her own life, be popular and wanted because people want her, not for pity (even though i think simon of course truly cares abt his sister she feels annoyed with his protection and care). felice says early on that she thinks sara doesn’t care what other’s think or having friends, and sara says she still wants friends though. i think sara’s biggest thing is she wants to belong, her and simon moved schools after she was bullied for being autistic so i think that definitely affected her even though she tries to act nonchalant about hillerska at first. we see sara’s longing to fit in in smaller ways at first, like her asking her mom for a better piece of her uniform because hers are “cheap” and already worn out. she gets annoyed at simon for chewing loudly, or her mother sitting casually at the table. as she gets closer to felice and madison and all the other students, the allure of the upper class and their lifestyle draws her in more. so much to the point where she gets very anxious and upset at the idea of her and simon leaving hillerska because he’s having his own crisis and doesn’t consider his pov. so much so that she effectively betrays simon and felice, the people she’s closest to, to make a deal (and make out lol) with august to room there and “be just like him”. personally i think sara’s attraction to august is mostly that allure of the elite and that he seemed to “desire” her when he kissed her because he was being a manipulative dickhead--again that want to fit in and be wanted. and  i think there is a really interesting angle of jealousy and competition in female friendships, even if it is really subtle or not intentionally insidious or anything, sara does slowly start to trying to assume all the roles/fashions/mannerisms of felice to live that life she wants. i do think felice and sara’s care for each other is genuine and one of my fave parts of the show, but i think a lot of people who experienced being a teen girl know how we are always pitted against each other even in our subconscious because of how society treats and values women.

simon seems to be the character that is least interested in upholding legacy and tradition or giving a fuck what anyone thinks (as omar said here lmao) and that makes him a really interesting foil to wilhelm. there could be something said about micke fearing that simon is following in his footsteps, but to me that plot more so reveals how the upper class (august) continually exploit the working class for their benefit, and the trappings of generational oppression. the other thing that can be said is simon signing up for private tutoring and rowing, but again i think that serves to further show that he is forced to “play” by the game of the elites because the school/society is corrupt, and also, that simon has further ambitions outside of where he’s at. he wants to get good grades because he wants to explore new places and avenues. to me simon’s biggest motivations are his passions, the things and people he loves--music, his family, wilhelm. he isn’t loyal to others just because he’s expected to be, or uphold a certain image but because he really cares. he doesn’t watch out for sara because that’s his expected role as her brother to do so, but because he cares. he wasn’t interested in knowing wilhelm because he’s a prince like everyone else, he makes it clear he thinks the royal family are privileged and exploitative, but he is interested because he saw the real wilhelm. he’s out and proud even though his elite classmates are more conservative, he doesn’t care about voicing his unpopular opinions, he has no problem walking away from august’s dickhead behavior or calling him out on his shit. simon doesn’t care if people don’t think of him in the best light. (the only exceptions ig are the drugs conflict and the video, though literally anyone would have a problem with that because it’s much deeper that public opinion and has ramifications and is deeply traumatic--but just adding that before someone is like “well actually!”) i also think it’s interesting that most of the songs simon sings has themes of pushing back against the societal norms, and being remembered in history, plus of course the revolution song motif, and how much those songs affect wilhelm, he seems to connect deeply, like he wishes he could do those things but simon is the one who gets to sing them and actually live them.

[five-rivers]

Reflection

Tucker passed in front of a mirror and stopped, did a double take. He'd been doing that a lot, lately, ever since what he and his friends referred to as the 'Egypt incident.' He raised one hand and traced a line under his eye, his lower eyelashes ruffling.

"You checking your eyeliner, Fol-ey?" asked Dash, bumping into him, rudely.

Tucker avoided stabbing himself in the eye and caught himself on the sink. He frowned at the reflection of the jocks in the mirror and scanned the locker room for Danny. Alas, his best friend must still be running punishment laps in the gym.

"Looking for Wimp-ton to save you? That's pretty pathetic," said Dash, jabbing Tucker again.

Tucker spun to face them and started to back away. He wondered if it would be okay to fight back under these circumstances, or if he would get in trouble. Because Tucker could fight. Maybe not as well as Sam and Danny, he was more the tech guy of their group, but all of them could throw a punch. Heck, Tucker could pull back a bow and put an arrow into the center of a target a hundred feet away. That took arm strength.

If he fought Dash, he'd probably win.

But fighting was generally frowned upon at school and with the other jocks as witnesses... Yeah, that wouldn't pan out well. His parents would take his side, but he didn't want to get a bad reputation with the teachers. One of the trio had to stay on their good side. Obviously it couldn't be Danny, and Sam was too argumentative, so it fell to him.

He sighed. Well, he could take a punch, too, if it came to that. He took off his glasses and put them on the back of the sink.

"What're you doing that for?" asked Dash.

"Good glasses are expensive, Dash," said Tucker, flatly, glaring up at the taller boy. "They're also made of glass. I don't want to be wearing them if you decide to hit me in the face."

Dash stared down at him, as though seeing him for the first time. He humphed. "You take all the fun out of it," he complained. "Come on, guys," he said to the other jocks, leading a parade out of the locker room. Tucker sighed and looked back at the mirror.

Eyeliner, huh? Dash probably would have been surprised to find out that Tucker had thought that he'd seen eye makeup on his face. Kohl. No. Not kohl. That was a recent word, and not completely accurate. Mesdemet for the black. Udju for the green. He blinked, unsure where the words had come from.

No, he knew where the words had come from. He just didn't want to think about it.

Danny stumbled into the room, banging the door behind him. "Hi," he said, waving at Tucker. He paused. "Are you okay? You look kind of..." Danny trailed off and shrugged.

"I'm fine," said Tucker. "Just talked my way out of getting beaten up by Dash."

"What, really?" asked Danny, his eyes flickering over Tucker. "Are you sure you're fine? He didn't hit you?"

"Nope. I'm really fine."

He hoped.

.

The archery club met right after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, regularly, contrasting with the computer club, which met 'whenever' and 'online.' Usually, meetings coincided with Danny getting detention and Sam's activist stuff. Tucker thought of these afternoons as their 'alone time.' Otherwise, they were, well, not quite joined at the hip, but...

It was a near thing.

Tucker wouldn't have minded if Sam and Danny did join the archery club (or the computer club, for that matter), but it could be nice to have some time away, so that he could sort through certain thoughts. Thoughts such as: What was happening to him?

Because he really had thought that he had thrown off the influence of Duulaman's ghost, or that weird staff, or Hotep-Ra, or whatever had been going on that week, and yet, here he was, over a week later, hallucinating himself wearing Egyptian makeup, of all things.

He squared himself on the edge of the archer range and checked that it was clear. The other members of the club were working with the closer targets. Tucker thought that he would challenge himself today. He pulled back.

The thing was, at the end, when Hotep-Ra was gone, and Tucker was back to himself, he had been able to use that staff, the Scarab Scepter, to return everything to normal. He wasn't sure he should have been. He had no idea how that staff worked. Yet, in that moment he had.

And he did look an awful lot like Duulaman.

"You're doing great today, Foley!" called the club advisor from across the range. "Are you sure you don't want to shoot competitively?"

Tucker rolled his eyes. "I'm sure!" Then he caught sight of his arrows. They were all clustered neatly in the bullseye.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Tucker was good. He wasn't, quite, that good. Not at this range. But, in the moment, as he was shooting, he hadn't registered anything as being unusual. He remembered looking at them as he was aiming, so he wasn't just spacing out.

Archery was practiced in Ancient Egypt, wasn't it? He remembered seeing murals. He remembered the sun shining down on his shoulders as his entourage...

... What?

Tucker frowned. This wasn't going to go away, was it?

.

The computer screen cast Tucker's dark bedroom in a blue light. The only sound was him typing away at the keyboard.

Tucker didn't want to worry Danny and Sam. Mostly Danny. He had enough to deal with without worrying that his best friends was going to go crazy and try to kill him. Again.

He cringed. He did not have the best track record when it came to that particular thing. Then again, neither did anyone else close to Danny.

Hence not wanting to worry Danny.

Maybe he should talk to Sam, though. Out of everyone he knew, she was the only one who'd been mind controlled in a similar way. She hadn't said anything about having hallucinations post-Undergrowth, but, then, she wouldn't, would she? Sam had the same reasons Tucker did for keeping quiet.

Tucker made a face at himself. It was probably a sign that their relationship wasn't as healthy as it looked, keeping secrets from each other like this. But... he knew Danny kept secrets. They all did, and they were fine with it. So, Tucker or Sam keeping secrets was fine, too.

As long as it didn't turn into murder attempts. That was not fine.

Tucker slipped his fingers under his glasses to rub his eyes and returned his attention to the screen. He was researching Duulaman, and had dived deep into the academic side of the internet. He'd come up against a dozen paywalls and dismissed them all with a few keystrokes.

Duulaman. Pharaoh of Kemet. A descendant of Hatshepsut and an ancestor of Tutankhamen. He had been a fairly progressive member of his family, restoring several of Hatshepsut's monuments after other of his ancestors had done their best to destroy them, making laws concerning the treatment of slaves and foreigners, and forging peace with neighboring countries. He had been well-liked, his popularity having been attested to even years after his death by inscriptions in other graves, praying that their inhabitants would find themselves under Duulaman's rule in the afterlife. He'd been famed for his athletic and magical abilities.

Sadly, academic publications were as skeptical about magic as they were about ghosts.

Tucker rubbed his eyes again.

Duulaman had been murdered. According to his brother, the pharaoh who had succeeded him, the deed had been done by an advisor whose name and image had been systematically removed from everything.

Probably Hotep-Ra. That fit with the ghost's whole thing, and the fact that Tucker couldn't find any information on him.

After another relatively fruitless hour, Tucker pried himself from the chair and went to bed.

.

He turned the fine silver mirror over in his hands, contemplating its polished surface. It had been a 'gift' from a Mitanni noble, and had carried a brutal curse into the heart of Kemet, but the curse was loose, now, wound around his very soul, and the mirror itself was merely a harmless, empty vessel.

One that Duulaman could learn from. He ran his fingers along the strange symbols scored on the outer edge of the mirror.

If his advisors would stop arguing for just a moment.

"We must attack at once!" said Hotep-Ra. "This insult against the person of god cannot be borne!"

"But it is harvest season," objected another. "We cannot afford to take the men from the fields. There would be famine!"

"Hotep-Ra," said Duulaman, softly, "brother of my heart, it was not even their king that sent this. Would you raze their whole kingdom and force a tragedy on their own for the sake of one man?"

"One who attacked you and our kingdom through dread magics?" asked Hotep-Ra. "Yes, my pharaoh."

"Then perhaps it is good that I am pharaoh. I know that you love me, but I have no desire for war. Even so," he said, raising his voice, "I have sent certain persons to correct the problem, and my brother has borne a letter to the Mitanni king, explaining the situation. It is true that this assault on our kingdom cannot be suffered quietly."

The advisors took that in. Duulaman turned to the Priestess of Mut and tried not to squint. She was just far enough away that he had trouble seeing her. Sadly, none of his magic had yet succeeded in giving him the eyes of a hawk, but he yet had hope.

"What say you about the curse?" he asked.

Duulaman was a powerful priest in his own right, favored by the gods and his ancestors, but he valued other opinions. Being the focus of the curse might have blinded him to certain aspects of its function.

The priestess bowed. "It is as we first feared," she said. "It binds your great soul, so that you may not pass into the green fields of the Duat when it is your time to do so. Instead, it decrees that, when you die, you must suffer to be born into a common line, far from your rightfully exalted place."

"And for Kemet? For my line?"

The priestess, an experienced woman who had served Duulaman's father, actually trembled. "That, whence your second life reaches the age of reason, you shall understand, and you shall see the last of the Pharaohs come to ruin, all our temples abandoned save for nonbelievers, your descendants crushed or cast into obscurity, your name stricken from history, and your tomb robbed by foreigners. She dooms you to watch the slow decay."

This was about what Duulaman had expected. He closed his eyes, pained. If only he had been more careful opening the box... but he had assumed it to be from Hotep-Ra, or his brother, or one of his sisters, for it had been among other, like gifts.

"I see. Fear not. I will take care of it. Kemet shall not fall within our lifetimes."

The relief in the room was palpable. They had faith in Duulaman's power.

Alas, that it might come to naught.

.

Tucker woke with a jolt, hand on his heart. He looked around wildly, relaxing when he saw the acid green numbers on his bedside clock. He was here. He was now. He was Tucker.

And it wasn't even time to wake up for school.

Wait. It was Saturday. He wouldn't have to wake up for school anyway.

Alright. So he might have, thousands of years ago, been Duulaman. Fine. He laid back down, breathing through his nose. He dealt with ghosts on a daily basis. He could deal with reincarnation. This was cool. This was fine.

He was definitely having a crisis.

Crap.

He fumbled for his phone, and hit the speed dial for Danny. Danny never slept anyway, it was fine. Besides, stuff like this was why Sam had bought him a phone (a Nokia brick, because ghost fights) in the first place. Dead people were Danny's specialty.

"What's wrong?" asked Danny, far too alert for the small hours of the morning.

"I think I might be Duulaman," said Tucker.

There was a beat of silence. "Yeah?" said Danny, confused.

"Like, I'm a reincarnation of him or something."

"Yeah?" repeated Danny. "I thought that was the whole reason you could use that staff and stuff?"

"Wait," said Tucker. "You mean, you knew all along, and you didn't say anything?"

"I thought you knew and didn't want to talk about it," said Danny. "I'm sorry. Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I'm just having weird Kem- Egypt flashbacks. I'm fine."

"Do you want me to fly over?"

"No," said Tucker. "I just- Am I still me?"

"I mean, you're you to begin with. You are yourself. That's like, definitional."

"Yeah, but..." Tucker gestured at his ceiling with his hand, even though Danny couldn't see it.

Danny chuckled. "You're still you, Tucker. I know Sam and I aren't always super sensitive, but... We do pay attention, you know? We'd know if you were being taken over. Maybe not right away, but..."

"Thanks," said Tucker, with only a little bit of sarcasm.

"Hey, I like to think we've all come a long way since the thing with Poindexter."

"True," said Tucker. "Hey, thanks, man. I'm sorry about waking you up."

"Don't worry," said Danny. "You didn't. I'd just caught Boxy when you called."

"Oh. That's good. Get some sleep, Danny."

"You, too. Tell me what Egypt was like tomorrow, okay?"

"Kemet," corrected Tucker. "And, yeah. Bye."

.

"What are you doing?" demanded Hotep-Ra.

Duulaman turned away from his ritual tools and fixed an un-amused eye on Hotep-Ra. "I may have made it your place to question me," said Duulaman, "but I thought I had made my decision on this matter clear. The method your faction proposed is too uncertain, too risky."

"I have made a mirror," said Hotep-Ra, "one that will recognize your soul in whatever body it should take. With it, we could search all of Kemet for you when you are reborn and then lay you properly to rest, as you deserve, before the curse comes to fruition."

"And if I should be born in lands beyond?"

"Then we should look there, too!"

"Starting all sorts of wars on the way, no doubt. Tell me, brother of my heart, what is the difference between the young man who falls in war, whose body is left for the crows, and the old man who is buried peacefully, and who will find joy in the Duat?"

"The devotion of his family!" responded Hotep-Ra instantly.

Duulaman shook his head sadly and looked back to his tools, touching them softly. He had already completed the ritual that would force the curse to carry his soul thousands of years into the future. By the time his next life reached the age of reason, there would be no pharaohs for the curse to affect. And if there were? Well, it would have been a good long time, and the curse would have weakened significantly. Perhaps even to the point of unraveling.

"No, Hotep-Ra. The difference between a tragedy and a happy ending is time. All kingdoms fall. All civilizations fade."

"Not this one."

"Even this one. The only questions are when and how."

"No," said Hotep-Ra. "No. Never!"

Duulaman felt, rather than heard, the scrape of metal against oiled leather and reached for his staff, which lay across from him, on the other side of his ritual. He was too late. He had trusted Hotep-Ra too much, let him get too close, and he felt the bronze knife slide between his ribs. His eyelids fluttered as his hands groped up his chest.

He was dying.

"I will see you, in the next life," he whispered, blood bubbling in his throat.

And then he was gone.

.

It was bright when Tucker woke again.

He felt... oddly calm. It was nice to know that he had succeeded in out-waiting the fall of Pharaonic Egypt, even though the fact that it was gone made his heart shiver.

Well. He pulled his phone over, and texted Danny. I know what it feels like to die, now, he said. Maybe they'd be able to bond over it. Or Danny would give him some coping pointers, since Tucker was pretty sure he'd have at least one breakdown over this. Either one would be good.

He stood up and walked to the bathroom. His reflection stared back, completely normal. No weird eye shadow, no Egyptian clothes, just Tucker and his pajamas.

Behind it stretched miles and miles of sand.

[kihyunswrath]

A masterpost about Wonho leaving and Starship being whiny wankers

It’s been a full day since the news came about Wonho leaving and I finally also decided to write a post of my own. So I came here to bring some logic to this thing because they haven’t cancelled the news yet and it looks like Starship has given up on literally every bit of sense they had. I’m still so fucking pissed off. I’m 10000% ready to fucking fight, as I always am, because I am true to my fucking username.

So away with the crying and missing Wonho, and wailing and lamenting because I think other fans have done their part with that. I’ll focus fully on just listing the things Starship should have automatically realized if they had even ONE fucking sensible person working in there. This will be fucking long but I don’t care, this needs to be said and heard. So tl;dr: Do they have the slightest idea how to run a business? This is most likely the end of Starship, too, so how can they be THAT dumb to not realize they decided to screw themselves over SUCH A SMALL ISSUE? 

__

1) First of all, Wonho loved his job. This is not about me being sentimental or pretending I don’t understand how pretentious idols can be about their actual working conditions, this is simply the truth. He loved communicating with fans, he loved improving his body, he loved making songs, he loved performing. No kpop companies are treating their idols perfectly, but Monsta X was in general doing very well. This means he with 99% certainty did not want to make things end like this, he just felt he had no other choice, and was panicking. 

2) Wonho thinking there will be a huge backlash against him because of his problematic past and there actually being a backlash against him are two separate things, and if he himself cannot distinguish this difference because of his anxiety, his company should at least be able to. They are the ones holding the money and the power. It’s not like their careers are not at stake, too. 

3) He was fucking popular. Like he had a LOT of fans, those that were specifically dedicating their money and attention to him, and then those who liked several members at the same time, but he was still among their most favourite. We can pretend all day we love all Monsta X members equally, but looking at it from a purely transactional perspective: there are members who are popular, and then members who are EXTREMELY popular. The more popular members bring more money to the table, and Wonho was clearly a part of that latter group. Him facing not one but two scandals in a very short time period did not change that yet, which can be proved by how much support he and the other members still got in the first days of their comeback. Which brings me to point number four:

4) We do not have evidence these scandals were ever going to affect Monsta X members careers in an indispensable way. We do not know whether Wonho’s reputation would have tarnished the group’s future for good, mainly because WE NEVER GOT TO SEE FOR GOOD. This all happened in one WEEK. What can be said about one week? If one comeback of theirs, after a string of VERY successful albums, singles, concerts and world tours, gets ruined because of this one thing, does it mean Starship should have torn their clothes and started throwing temper tantrums like little babies? After they STILL got a nice amount of money out of this comeback TOO? After not even waiting it out to find out if they could have still received number one positions in the comeback show, for at least one week? 

5) Follow the logic mentioned in point two and even the dumbest person in the universe should realize that Starship will end up losing a LOT of album sales, views and ticket revenue now. There was no way of proving that Wonho would actually damage the group long-term by deciding to stay there, and looking at the amount of support he’s now getting, that’s actually unlikely. BUT by kicking him out? DEFINITE LOSS OF REVENUE. People are all now saying we will continue supporting the other members, but the fact is this: many of us won’t. I probably will not. If this is how Starship decided to deal with things, kicking out a member three DAYS after a relatively harmless scandal, started by an absolute embarrassment of a person, I will not support such a company. Kihyun is my bias and I love him to death, but if he’s accepting how things are being handled in his own company, he’ll have to do without my support. That’s how simple it is. 

6) Monsta X is the moneymaker of Starship. They screwed everything with Boyfriend, they disbanded Sistar, and WSJN and Starship solo artists are all nugus compared to Monsta X. This is not to say they’re not good, but they do not bring even near the same amount of money to the company. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that Starship cannot afford to make dumb mistakes in relation to how they’re handling Monsta X. 

7) As a fan who has followed this industry closely for almost 13 years now, I have seen the rise and death of countless kpop groups. At this point I can say one thing for sure: groups can survive or return back to their old glory even when their members leave, but only on certain conditions. If members 1) leave because they want to change their career, 2) leave because they’re not satisfied with their company or 3) have health conditions that prevent them from continuing, the group might still manage to survive without them. If they are kicked out, there’s a smaller chance for continued success and support, but it might work anyway, if 4) they are kicked out relatively early during their career and 5) if they aren’t popular at all at that point. None of these cases apply to Monsta X’s situation. And if and when Monsta X falls, there is no other groups within Starship that could take their position.

8) Now, we don’t know the truth behind all this. Later on Wonho’s leave might turn out to have other motives we are not aware of yet. But as it is, this juvenile prison thing combined with the debt will be the scandals people will remember until forever. That will affect the reputation of Monsta X, YET that’s not how things needed to go. And why is that? Because those scandals actually caused Wonho to leave, unlike so many of the other things we keep hearing every single day because of twats like Han Seo Hee and other antifan wankers. Idols are under constant attacks, but most of the time these DON’T end their careers. Typically, when it hasn’t been about anyone actually getting hurt (rape, abuse, assault, harassment, murder, etc.) or about anything S. Korea specifically condemns idols for doing (drugs, promiscuous dating/sex life, being piss drunk and causing damage, DUI), people will forget things real quick and move on. There are a lot of scandals I will accidentally find out about years later they actually happened, and the idols in question are thriving. But now? People for certain are going to find out, because the consequence was so dire, and so fucking QUICK. 

9) Someone going to a hiatus to solve their private life issues is one thing. Idols canceling or postponing their comeback dates and events because of private life matters is, again, one thing. However, leaving in a matter of days after the scandal started? That’s suspicious, irresponsible, stupid and may make Wonho look much more guilty than he ever was. It may make people think there’s more to this than they know at this point. They may think Starship is partially responsible for hiding things, not checking Wonho’s background or that some of the scandals Wonho is involved in were actually happening while he was in Starship. Because, you know, someone holding a job and having his non-offensive past explored from over a decade ago should be two TOTALLY SEPARATE THINGS. That brings me to point number ten: 

10) Making someone all of a sudden, over all these years, face consequences for things that happened ages ago, with a punishment that is not relevant, fair or just? Yeah that does make people think Starship is unreliable, irresponsible, childish and acting in a rush. It’s not like they didn’t KNOW Wonho had been in juvie. It’s not like they hadn’t already decided to give Wonho another chance. It’s not like Wonho DID anything at this point to show he was no longer earning that trust. Actually, he did not do anything at all. Starship changing their mind about it so quick just revealed how vulnerable, spineless cowards they are and how they don’t want to carry responsibility over any of their actions. Not good for any business, let alone one whose LITERAL JOB is to gain profit from positive publicity and keep a close watch of their reputation. They do not survive without fans. They do not survive without Monsta X. They do not survive if they have THIS presumptuous and careless attitude, thinking they can quickly cover up all their “mistakes” by removing people out of their way.

11) The entire concept of Monsta X is revolving around the solid formation of the group. Every single member has a very steady role within the group, one that is not replaceable. Wonho’s position as the muscular, sexy dancer and soft-voiced vocalist was crucial to the image of Monsta X. People became interested in Monsta X because of their masculine energy, and Wonho was one of the key members in that. He was also very important in terms of how often he catered to the fans’ needs, how often he thanked us and sent messages to us and how frequently he wanted to hang out with us in vlive. He was a steady composer and had a plenty of potential, and all of his songs turned out to be popular. His role as a specifically health, bodybuilding and fitness -oriented idol was widely recognized and celebrated. His character as a cute, aegyo-filled, emotional and extremely kind “fake-maknae” was loved by literally everyone in this fandom. I don’t think I ever knew anyone who didn’t have a specific soft spot for him, even when he wasn’t their bias or even if people mainly followed other groups. Other members in Monsta X have their own, just as solid, roles that are irreplaceable, but it’d be stupid to not acknowledge Wonho has been among the first members people notice when they learn about Monsta X. Without him, it’s almost like not one but two members are missing.

12) There goes Starship’s good reputation among kpop companies when it comes to foreign record label deals as well. Did the company in Japan or the US like what happened? Would they have punished Wonho for this kind of a meaningless bullshit? Do they like the idea that they are now supposed to interact with a company that acts this recklessly, isn’t loyal to their employees and throws their hands in the air as soon as a problem occurs? I bet not. 

13) Why did no one in the company actually sum up together what damage Wonho had allegedly done, like, for real? 1) He made one non-malicious, absent-minded joke half a year ago not a single Monbebe present at that time complained about. This was brought up by a person who intentionally made him look bad. He apologized and people moved on. 2) He has been in a juvenile prison for a small thievery (or something about as stupid as that, according to the information I found about this) over a decade ago, and he most likely did not get a criminal record for this. Starship however, probably did know this when they took him in, so at least back then they thought he’s atoned for his errors and can fucking move on, right? Being in a prison means rehabilitation, especially if you’re there just once as a kid after committing a very minor crime that does not involve hurting people. Bringing this up now is totally irrelevant. 3) Him not paying back to his old friend (3 million won) has absolutely nothing to do with his career. Haven’t people ever been indebted to their friends? Is that a crime worth you ending up kicked out of your company that doesn’t have anything to do with, well, anything? When he accepted that money, he was still a child. For years afterwards, he didn’t have money to pay it back, and he could now handle that issue in privacy, because it’s no one else’s fucking business but theirs. Considering the people who brought this up and their reputation, there’s also a chance this entire thing was somehow fabricated. In conclusion, none of this means anything at all. These are not big enough reasons to make your entire company lose a substantial amount of money, followers and fans, plus a really good performer who had repeatedly proved he had grown up, changed and was capable of taking responsibility of his own life. However, by kicking him out Starship has now reinforced the idea these things were indeed a huge problem, their company can be attacked by these means in the future too, and that their idols’ wellbeing and career paths don’t mean shit to them.

14) All of these scandals, including the very first thing involving that Me Too -movement mistake, COULD HAVE BEEN TURNED INTO FUCKING STRENGTHS. The thing that was in common with all of them three things was that they have happened in the past. Sure, the debt is, I assume, still unpaid, but there’s a small chance Wonho did not remember it anymore, or that there was blackmailing or other kind of shady business going on with that. With clever strategy, Starship could have turned these “scandals” upside down, disclaim them, say they have happened long time ago and do not reflect the company’s current values. They could have accused Han Seo Hee and that another twitter wench of slander and point out to their decreased sales revenue as a proof of damage they caused them. They could have said they are fine with Wonho’s past because they are not merciless bastards but a good, forgiving company that is giving its workers second chances in life. They could have said they SAVED Wonho and his family from a dark path. They could have said they have learned from the Me Too -movement joke and that they are now strongly joining the feminists struggling against rape and sexual harassment. They could have proved they are a good, steady company with good moral values, a backbone and trust toward their employees. All this could have happened with a couple of announcements, a week-long hiatus from the promotions of Follow and a post about how Wonho has paid his debt with a big interest. JUST LIKE MANY OTHER COMPANIES, CELEBRITIES AND OTHER WORKERS HAVE HAD TO DO THROUGHOUT THEIR CAREERS. Not at all hard.

15) Most importantly: DID ANYONE AT ANY POINT, INCLUDING WONHO HIMSELF, CONSIDER HOW THIS MIGHT AFFECT THE MENTAL HEALTH OF THE OTHER MEMBERS? Did anyone at any point stop to think that they might not be just fine with this, after fighting to debut together, after they have become such a strong, unified group, after they have seen so much together, when they are now very well aware that this could happen to them at any second, too, considering how these accusations were torn from peoples’ dirty shitty anuses? That they might not accept this, that they might not be able to move on from here, that they might want to resign now too, that they know for sure earlier this year was the peak of their career and nothing they will ever produce without Wonho will receive the same amount of popularity.

__

So yeah. I actually do not hope Monsta X continues as a six-member group. There won’t be “many, exciting things” waiting for them, like those Starship announcers said. There will be depression, more hardships, flopped comebacks and members separating on their own ways, resigning from Starship. The chances of the fucking company itself collapsing are not nonexistent. 

I fucking do hope Monsta X members will refuse to cooperate with Starship until they can negotiate a new contract for Wonho. But if I’ll see them continue performing as a six-member group with these sad, depressed and angry faces I saw today in the comeback show, that’s the end then, for me, as a Monbebe. 

Fix your shit, Starship, or fuck off forever. That’s the deal. 

[triciaisonline]

A(N  ESTIMATED )  TIMELINE  FOR  SHERLOCK 

PLEASE NOTE: John’s Blog and the show contradict each other at times, in these cases, the show will be taken as canon. In times where the show contradicts itself, if other media cannot solve the mix up, then estimates based on what makes the most real world sense will be used to find an answer.

ADDITIONALLY: I don’t want to get flooded with everyone's headcanons for things where estimates had to be made; but i greatly welcome canon information that might have been missed or ( ie: The Game is Now Escape Room ) have been unable to experience. I also do not consider interviews with cast and crew as reliable sources for the most part, as these answers have also changed throughout the years. It will only be given consideration if nothing else contradicts it and was said without the air of taking the mickey out of us as many interactions with fans have. They like to say things just to get us going. So I consider this less of a word of god and more of a word of the clown.

BIRTHDATES

DATES OF MAJOR EVENTS

NOTES

TL;DR

SOURCES

THIS VERSION IS THE REBLOG FRIENDLY VERSION OF A TIMELINE MADE ON MY OTHER BLOG ( SEE TAGS )

BIRTHDATES:

SHERLOCK HOLMES: January 6th, 1981 ( stated in The Casebook ); making him younger than the actor playing him. However, this does conflict slightly as Sherlock states he was nine years old when Carl Powers drowned, and the article claims it was in 1989, which places his birth in 1980 instead. This was before they gave Sherlock a canonical birthdate in any media, however, and for the purposes of this, we’ll be using the casebook age, and claiming Sherlock was either rounding or misremembering due to the fact his childhood memories are not entirely factual. Additionally, the headstone image shown in The Sherlock Chronicles says 1977, but the previous date is the one considered to be Canon. ( See Notes )

JOHN WATSON: unknown, but somewhere in the 70′s. A popular fandate is March 30th. Judging off of the actor’s age, possibly around 1971, but maybe younger as many actors are playing younger than themselves.

MYCROFT HOLMES: Exact date unknown, but he is seven years older than Sherlock, which puts him to be born around 1973-1974. Which makes him canonically younger than the actor playing him.  02/25/19 EDIT: According to sources, Mycroft is given a birthdate in the Escape Room based on the series, October 20th, 1968. While the October date works fine, year for this doesn't fit the "Seven Years Older" claim on the show. The oldest birth date given for Sherlock is 1977 and that would make Mycroft nine years older than Sherlock, not seven. The year given falls closer to Mark Gatiss' actual age, and leaves me inclined to think that perhaps year for the game isn't entirely factual. That being said, there's still no reason he couldn't have been born October 20th. Based on the "Seven Years Older" claim, stated in show, the best guess is October 20th, 1974.

EURUS HOLMES: Exact date unknown, but she is a year younger than Sherlock, which makes her born somewhere in 1982-1983 depending on when she was conceived. 

MARY WATSON: Unknown, but based on the actress’ age, likely 1974;  but maybe younger as many actors are playing younger than themselves. 

ROSAMUND “ROSIE” WATSON: January 2015. We can infer this because based on how far along Mary was at her wedding, Rosie would have been conceived Mid-April, and if she was relatively ontime, she’d be born late January. 

DATES OF NOTE:

REDBEARD / THE MUSGRAVE FIRE: Between 1988-1989 roughly; there is no clear indication on the show as to when these events took place. We can only summarize based on what we know about other events. We know that Sherlock "began" solving crimes at age nine ( see below ) due to Carl Powers; and we know that Sherlock had to be younger than ten years old during the events told in The Final Problem. Assuming that the tragic events of Carl Powers triggered something in him, making him take extra notice due to his own past experiences with Eurus and Victor; but still allowing time for all the events to take place and enough time to have passed for Sherlock to have rewritten the story so completely in his head where he can be suspicious but not fully triggered; I'd place him as seven or eight during these events.

THE CARL POWERS DEATH: 1990

*see notes for Sherlock’s birthday

UNIVERSITY: Sherlock attended the same school as Sebastian Wilkes in the early 2000s. Exact years, and if they were at school for the same duration of time is unknown; but he last saw the man roughly eight years ( if Wilkes can be trusted for accuracy ) prior to The Blind Banker, which would be somewhere in 2002/2003

SHERLOCK AND JOHN’S FIRST MEETING: January 29, 2010

CASE: A STUDY IN PINK: January 30th, 2010

CASE: THE BLIND BANKER: March 23rd-March 27th; inferred by Sherlock deducting the incorrect date on Wilkes’ watch and the on-screen passage of time.

Sherlock traveled to and from Minsk sometime between the events of The Blind Banker and The Great Game; based on the dates given, as well as the close air dates of the two episodes, it’s to be believed that Sherlock left and returned from Minsk on March 28th. This is also made plausible due to the funding Sherlock seems to have for himself, his impatience and the fact that it is a three hour flight each way. 

BAKER STREET BOMBING: March 28th; evening

CASE: THE GREAT GAME: March 29 - April 1st; we know this based on both the blog posts and Sherlock updating his website with the case answers. However, the blog post was edited from the original date of April 6th after it’s initial publication. The reason for this is unknown.

DURATION OF SERIES ONE: January 29th, 2010 - March 29th, 2010: three months exactly.

MISC: John and Sarah go to New Zealand for a week and breakup ( April 2010 )

TRIP TO BUCKINGHAM PALACE ( A SCANDAL IN BELGRAVIA ): September 15th, 2010

IRENE MEETING: September 15, 2010

BAKER STREET CHRISTMAS PARTY: December 25th 2010  

IDENTIFYING IRENE’S BODY: December 25th, 2010 

IRENE REVEALS SHE’S ALIVE: December 31st, 2010

JOHN PUBLISHES THE CASE: March 12th, 2011;

We don’t know the exact amount of time transpiring between New Years Eve and this point. Based on his track record, it’s likely January 15th is meant to be the date that Sherlock is told Irene is in Witness protection ( John seems to publish immediately, regardless of how tasteful it might be to reveal details of recent cases ). This gap would cover everything from Irene arriving at Baker Street, Sherlock going to the airfield, him beating Irene at the game, and saving her in Karachi. It’s likely, considering how erratic Sherlock is by early March with no cases, that the day John tells Sherlock the lie, is around late January / early February. Allowing Sherlock enough time to have done all of this as well as get riled up in time for Baskerville, which had to have occured before March 16th

CASE: THE HOUNDS OF BASKERVILLE: Early March 2011; by best estimates given as John doesn’t take too long to post his accounts of the events, and he had already finished typing up the case prior.

BASKERVILLE CASE POSTED: March 16th, 2011. This is also the same date Moriarty hacks John’s blog with a video of him inside of their flat. Suggesting he’s already free from his interrogation shown at the end of The Hounds of Baskerville.

The dates surrounding Sherlock’s death and The Reichenbach Fall are highly questionable as the episode, the blog, and logistics for certain events all contradict each other. Joe Lidster, who wrote John’s real world blog, has comically said that Moriarty hacking the blog gave it a virus that messed with the dating system, as a tongue in cheek explanation. Meaning if we were to take that as fact, all the dates in the blog could be false. The newspapers shown in the episode, have dates that suggest different things. I’ve chosen the one which makes the most sense, based on the news reel clip on John’s blog, the statement that he went to therapy three months later, the school holiday schedule for the abduction of the Ambassador’s children and several other people’s attempts to sort this all out. An alternative version can be found here.

MORIARTY’S ROBBERIES: Late March, by best guess. Possibly a bit earlier.

MORIARTY’S TRIAL / RELEASE: April 2011

MORIARTY’S PLAN TO RUIN SHERLOCK: June 12-June 14th, 2011

MORIARTY COMMITS SUICIDE / SHERLOCK FAKES HIS: June 14th/15th; the 15th is the more commonly believed date.

JOHN CONFIRMS ON HIS BLOG: June 16th, 2011

JOHN VISITS SHERLOCK’S GRAVE: Mid/Late June 2011

TOTAL SERIES TWO DURATION: March 29th, 2010 ( The Pool ) - June 2011. Fifteen Months / One Year and Three Months

SHERLOCK DISMANTLES MORIARTY’S NETWORK: June 2011 - Late October / Early November 2013

MARY MAKES HER FIRST COMMENT ON JOHN’S BLOG: April 20th, 2013

JOHN POSTS OLD CASES: April 2013 - October 5th, 2013

WEBISODE ( MANY HAPPY RETURNS ): October 5th, 2013

SHERLOCK RETURNS: Late October / Early November 2013

JOHN ALMOST BURNED ALIVE: Guy Fawkes Day, November 5th, 2013

CASE: THE EMPTY HEARSE / #SHERLOCK LIVES: November 7th, 2013

JOHN AND SHERLOCK’S VARIOUS CASES: November 2013 - May 2014

Another case of Blog vs Screen; John and Mary’s wedding invites are shown throughout The Sign of Three with the date May 13th, while John’s blog states it was in August. The blog is deemed incorrect in this case, as well as his entries about the cases Sherlock reads at the Wedding

ROSIE WATSON IS CONCEIVED: Mid April 2014

JOHN AND MARY’S WEDDING: May 13th, 2014; ( see above note about The Sign of Three )

His Last Vow has the opposite problem as the series finale prior, in which next to no dates are given. We only know the dates at the end of the episode. Just that the events of John getting restless, Sherlock using again, Magnussen visiting, Sherlock being shot, Sherlock leaving early to confront Mary, Sherlock leaving to confront Magnussen, John confronting Mary, Sherlock being taken to Hospital again and being released all happen between May 13th and December 25th, 2014. It can take a couple months for gunshot victims to be released from Hospital, depending on the severity. Applying Mycroft Rules and Television Rules we know that Sherlock likely didn’t stay the time a regular patient would have. Knowing Sherlock he would have wanted out as soon as possible. We know John and Mary were at odds for a bit, reconciling on Christmas. Plus there needed to be time for Sherlock to fake date Janine, John to reach the level of restlessness there was and get Charles’ attention. So these next few dates are estimates. The majority of the scenes shown in episode are out of order and happen in two time periods, before Mary’s revealed and Christmas Day. 

JOHN BREAKS INTO THE DRUG DEN / MAGNUSSEN VISITING BAKER STREET: September / October 2014

SHERLOCK GETTING SHOT:  September / October 2014

SHERLOCK SNEAKING OUT OF HOSPITAL TO MEET MAGNUSSEN AND MARY:  Early/Mid October 2014; presuming based on deleted scenes depicting a Sherlock who was unable to move for a while in recovery that this was maybe days or weeks later when it was deemed safe to wake him up from medically induced coma.

JOHN CONFRONTING MARY: October 2014 ( same day as above )

SHERLOCK RELEASED FROM HOSPITAL: Mid-December 2014, inferred by how the family and friends act as if it was more recent while at the Holmes’ family home.

SHERLOCK SHOOTS MAGNUSSEN: December 25th, 2014

SHERLOCK BOARDS THE PLANE / MORIARTY’S VIDEO GOES LIVE: December 31st, 2014 / January 2nd, 2015; the show itself provides two different accounts of this. Mycroft states in His Last Vow, that Sherlock was in holding for a week, placing the scene at the tarmac in Early January 2015; however, the introduction to The Abominable Bride places the scene with onscreen text in 2014 still. The only way both can be remotely accurate is if Mycroft is rounding up, and it’s December 31st, 2014.

DURATION OF SERIES THREE: Fall 2013 - Winter 2014;  just over one calendar year.

CASE: THE ABOMINABLE BRIDE ( REAL WORLD ): December 31st, 2014 / January 2nd, 2015 ( see above )

The first scene of The Six Thatchers, along with the real world scenes of The Abominable Bride and the final scenes of His Last Vow are the same day.

SHERLOCK IS ACQUITTED OF CRIMES:  December 31st, 2014 / January 2nd, 2015 ( see above )

ROSIE WATSON IS BORN: Mid/Late January 2015, assuming she was relatively on time.

ROSIE WATSON’S BAPTISM: March / April 2015; based on many modern traditions, the baby’s age and the style of clothing worn by the attendees.

The Six Thatchers covers the majority of one calendar year, no exact dates are given but we can surmise things based on the shown development of Rosie Watson ( whom we know to be a year old by the end of The Final Problem ). Rosie is shown to have full head support and movement before Mary dies, which is something that happens around six months. This would mean Mary’s still alive around June 2015. Allowing for time in which Mary is on the lam, leading to the aquarium, the following are my best guesses for events.

MARY IS MISSING: Summer 2015 ( how long she was gone for is unclear )

MARY IS BACK IN LONDON: September 2015

NORBURY SHOOTS MARY: October 2015

SHERLOCK RECEIVES MARY’S VIDEO / JOHN’S LETTER: Late October. 2015 / Possibly Early November 2015 

CASE: THE LYING DETECTIVE: Possibly Mid-December 2015 / Early January 2016

Another case of ‘we don’t know how long’; we know Sherlock returns from hospital on his birthday, but the dates in between are unclear. Nor do we know how long John and Sherlock didn’t speak for. Sherlock would have needed a major detox, as well as treatment for his injuries. Based on the timeframe, it’s unlikely he attended any form of inpatient rehab outside of whatever the hospital had on location due to his injuries. Possibly due to either Mycroft pulling strings, or the more likely, Sherlock refusing and signing himself out when able.

We also know that the jump from The Lying Detective and The Final Problem can’t be too long. Even though Sherlock has had a magical recovery from all ailments between episodes, it’s extremely unlikely that John sat on the ‘I was almost killed by your secret sister’ tidbit for a few weeks. Meaning these episodes likely happen very shortly after one another. It also feels unlikely that Eurus would make herself known to John and then wait weeks/months to then begin acting out again once the secret was revealed.

JOHN AND SHERLOCK’S REUNITING: January 6th, 2016

JOHN’S FINAL THERAPY SESSION WITH EURUS: Somewhere between January 6th - January 13th 2016; assuming he went about once a week.

CASE: THE FINAL PROBLEM: January 13th, 2015 - January 20th, 2016; presuming John was able to tell Sherlock after ( not knowing how long he was knocked out for ); and allowing Sherlock and John some time to figure out their next move. This would also cover the attack on Baker Street and the entire event on Sherrinford Island.

ROSIE WATSON’S FIRST BIRTHDAY: Mid/Late January, 2016

OTHER NOTES:

The Entire Series spans six years.

The Sherlock Timeline runs one year behind real world time, with the show’s episodes in universe during 2016, aired in January 2017

Sherlock Holmes would be 29 in A Study In Pink, and 35 by The Final Problem based on the Casebook date. 30 and 36 by The Carl Powers age. and 33 and 39 by The Sherlock Chronicles age. All would make him younger than Benedict Cumberbatch, born 1976.

An incorrect headstone, as seen in The Sherlock Chronicles would make sense with the fact that until The Lying Detective, John states he never knew his birthdate. Which, had his tombstone had it, would make little sense. Providing an in universe reason for this odd lack of knowledge on John’s part. Perhaps John merely guessed? Maybe Mycroft knew he wouldn’t want it known, so they put a fake date? Especially as Mycroft knew he was alive. Otherwise, this is just another plot inconsistency  --- which, I’m getting quite tired of. 

We don’t know when Mary and John first met, but we can infer they’ve known each other about a year from dialogue in The Six Thatchers when John is attempting to propose.

Alternate timelines surrounding The Reichenbach Fall sometimes claim the following dates: Sherlock Testifies: May 9th, 2011; Moriarty is freed and visits 221B: September 20th, 2011; The Kidnapping: November 19th, 2011; Sherlock Falls: November 20th, 2011. This comes from a couple on screen newspaper clippings; but they are contradictory to the stated three month interval stated. It’s up to fans to decide which version they feel is more accurate.

More of a musing, but it’s kind of interesting how many times John immediately runs to the internet to share the details of really recent cases fresh in the public’s mind; in contrast to Watson’s monologue in The Abominable Bride about how careful he is to avoid doing that very thing. Which is even funnier if you view it through the long standing canon lens of John is an Unreliable Narrator

TL;DR:

SERIES ONE: January 29th, 2010 - March 29th, 2010

SERIES TWO: March 29th, 2010 - June 15th, 2011 

SERIES THREE: November 2013 - December 2014

SERIES FOUR: December 2014 - January 2016

WEBISODE: October 10th, 2013

SPECIAL: December 2014

SOURCES:

AO3 META  /  SHERLOCKOLOGY / JOHN’S BLOG / SHERLOCK ( WIKIPEDIA ) / THENORWOODBUILDER @ TUMBLR / BAKER STREET WIKIA / SHERLOCK FAN FORUMS /  THE CASEBOOK ( BUY / FACTS ) / THE SHERLOCK CHRONICLES  / MOLLY’S BLOG / SHERLOCK’S WEBSITE ( official site no longer live, information reposted from various sites listed above ) / CONNIE PRINCE WEBSITE / SHERLOCK: THE GAME IS NOW 

[lieselstark2-blog]

Gotleaker is fake. It’s an elaborate hoax, and I’m it’s victim. So are you.

@thelawyerthatwaspromised @reysbae @myrish-lace-love @wolfmaiden25 @wolfmaiden25 @tiny-little-bird 

Hello, my name is Liesel Stark and I am a Jonsa meta writer.

Or I was, but not too long ago something happened outside the fandom. Something very personal that nearly destroyed my life.

I had a roommate. We never got along, but I hoped it would remain civil and I would find a new place at the end of my lease.

However, this roommate wanted a guard dog. I didn’t want this, as I was bitten by a dog when I was a child and I’m scared of them. Pets are also not allowed in our lease. I thought that was the end of it when she brought it up, but a week later I came home and she had adopted a dog from the pound - it kind of looked like a Rottweiler, and I was scared to death.

So I informed our landlord. However, my roommate, who is the landlord’s cousin, called her and said I was lying. Our landlord came to investigate, but my roommate had taken her dog over to her friend’s house and pretended the dog didn’t exist.

I took pictures, but the roommate kept our landlord around her finger and said it was just visiting. It was all so awful.

Unfortunately, the dog was not well behaved, and while nothing ever happened, the lack of discipline and free reign the dog was given over the house meant there was fur and pee everywhere. I would come home at night from work and be greeted in the doorway by one of my worst fears.

One night I snapped and just left and slept over at my sister’s house. This would prove to be a terrible mistake.

It only took a few days and a broken lease before the landlord realized that her cousin lied. The landlord did pay for my grievance and is giving me a good reference, but she refused to kick out her cousin over a dog.

Bad, but not the point of this story.

When I left that night, my roommate went through all of my things. Like an idiot, my computer pass code is also my phone pass code, which she must have seen me tap hundreds of times whenever I unlocked my phone around the house, and she was able to get onto my computer and steal my identity.

She went through all my documents and accounts, and sent terrible things to my family and friends. I didn’t realize it at first until my parents asked why I posted that I never loved them on facebook and was cutting them out of my life that something was happening.

Everyone I ever met had been told some awful lie about me in the span of two days, and every account I had ever used was part of her campaign to ruin my life all because I didn’t want a dog for the remaining seven months of our lease!

She was always unhinged, but I never thought it would amount to this. Eventually I threatened legal action, and I thought it was over.

But I didn’t account for tumblr. I didn’t even think about it for awhile. When everything settled because I threatened legal action, I actually decided to come and log in and de-stress with fandom, but found that my tumblr was gone.

Okay, I thought. She deleted this account too.

I just kind of gave up after that. So much had happened that I figured I would cut my losses and move on with my life.

But that wasn’t the whole of it. Because my former roommate is a fucking psychopath.

I’m not ashamed of the fact that I ship Jonsa (it’s fiction), but she must have seen a possible opportunity to hurt me and took all the metas I wrote, the drafts in my account and computer, and the outline of a fan fiction I was writing to create an elaborate hoax in which she was planning to “out” me.

Seriously. What the hell.

I found out because I still browse the Jonsa tag on tumblr and saw mention of some new leaks, so I checked them out. They were suspiciously close to my metas and fan fiction outline, but when I saw the ending of episode two, I knew that it was one of her plots.

She must have been planning this for some time, and I don’t know exactly where she’s going with it, but if the past if anything to go by she plans to dox me and falsely incriminate me for something.

This is just ridiculous.

To prove that I am being framed, an outline to my fan fiction is included below. I expect @gotleaker to blow a gasket soon.

Now, I want to apologize to anyone who has been mislead by this maniac and to please stop believing her because she’s plotting against me simply because she’s upset she couldn’t get her way.

Please tag and reblog this so she’s discredited.

And FUCK you Kelsey.

A Time for Wolves

Episode 1 – Bat

Chapter 1

Daenerys and Jon arrive in Winterfell.

Chapter 2

Euron makes an agreement with the Golden Company to betray Cersei.

Chapter 3

Sansa is anxious over the prospect of Jon and Daenerys marrying for reasons she can’t describe, and is upset to learn from Tyrion that it appears to be happening.

Chapter 4

Jon is adamant that he will do what is necessary to protect the North and his family. However, Sansa doesn’t agree, because she feels the tension in the North better than he does.

Chapter 5

Although initially welcoming of Daenerys, their relationship sours over disagreements largely of Sansa’s making (due to her fears of losing Jon and the North).

Episode 2 – Eel

Chapter 6

Euron betrays Cersei, and in response to the Red Keep being overrun, she uses the wildfire, destroying the city and killing hundreds of thousands of people. She miscarries in the process.

Chapter 7

A settlement nearby is attacked (possibly the Dreadfort so they can reuse some of the sets and it make sense, considering their possible path), forcing Jon and Daenerys to prepare to depart. Sansa and Jon have a tender moment despite their current disagreement, and I think Tyrion is witness to sparks flying he didn’t see with Jon and Daenerys, causing his suspicions to be raised.

Chapter 8

Jon ends up showing these feelings because he has been informed by Sam and Bran about his parentage, and it’s eating him alive for so many reasons. Unfortunately, he hasn’t told Sansa and Arya yet, because he isn’t sure he wants to accept and go public with his parentage due to the political ramifications.

Chapter 9

However, the Dreadfort is lost (and destroyed), and the forces of the North are dealt a devastating blow. They return to Winterfell, licking their wounds, unaware that they accidentally are leading the Night King on path to Winterfell.

Chapter 10

Mid to the end of the episode, Jaime arrives and informs Daenerys that Cersei has betrayed them after a lost battle against the White Walkers. Daenerys, furious, rides off to take King’s Landing using Drogon as a threat in order to secure their manpower for the upcoming battle. She leaves Rhaegal to protect the North after a frustrating conversation with Jon who pleads with her not to leave because she is abandoning her people.

Chapter 11

Jon is frustrated by this, and isn’t too happy about Sansa’s smugness and seemingly glee (think about: Daenerys is gone, and also going to kill Cersei. That’s a win for her), but his anger is due to the fact he fears he cannot protect the North or Sansa, without Daenerys since he cannot control dragons. Bran offers to help. He also makes more cryptic comments to Sansa. I think Bran’s vision about her wedding may be of the future to Jon, like previous metas have stated, and Bran is starting to see dreams of spring and hoping to make them happen.

Chapter 12

Daenerys’s actions are not well received by anyone in the North, and when Daenerys leaves, all hell breaks loose politically. The Northerners fear that Daenerys will be a dictator like the Targaryens before her, reminding Jon of Torrhen and his uncle and grandfather’s deaths under the Mad King. This only further cements his desire to control Rhaegal. Episode 3 – Ghost

Chapter 13

The surviving Greyjoy siblings take an imprisoned Cersei Lannister North, narrowly missing Daenerys as she arrives to the destroyed King’s Landing. Since they go by ship and are one of the few survivors, the true perpetrator of King’s Landing fall is mistaken to be Daenerys when people outside the city arrive.

Chapter 14

They end up penning a raven that is received at Winterfell that blames Daenerys for the destruction. Her army leaves, no longer feeling welcomed, though Tyrion and Varys stay.

Chapter 15

Sansa is no longer so smug. She’s scared, and so is Jon and everyone else. Jon confers with Tyrion, who, knowing about the wildfire, erroneously believes it to be true not because Daenerys purposefully set the entire city on fire... but because Drogon was the spark that caused the wildfire to get out of control. Either way, Tyrion admits to losing faith, and switches support to Jon.

Chapter 16

But Jon sees his power waning, and now Sansa’s political power is on the rise. Tyrion sees an opportunity, but he is conflicted because he is starting to form feelngs for Sansa now and he believes Jon and Sansa are siblings. But he’s certain they have feelings for each other now, because Jon and Sansa are caught kissing after he gives her a blue rose and between all this hyper jealously as Tyrion spies and insinuates himself in Sansa’s company, fearing that Jon, Bran, and Sam are keeping something from him and hoping to use Sansa to figure it out (unaware she knows how the game works).

Chapter 17

But basically, political shit happens following this, and Jon tames Rhaegal. He then “comes clean” to the North. He initially thinks he will give up his claim to Sansa, but to his surprise he is hailed as King in the North and South.

Episode 4 – Owl

Chapter 18

Daenerys is trying to convince the people around King’s Landing of her worth, but news of Jon being a Targaryen reaches her. Remember in Daenerys’s vision that the first prominent image we see of the throne room is not the throne, but the Winter Rose on stained glass - a reminder of Starks and shade thrown at Daenerys that she doesn’t have Jon’s affections.  Daenerys decides to leave and head back to the North, and he meet her army in the Neck.

Chapter 19

But back in the North, it’s discovered the White Walkers are moving towards Winterfell just as Daenerys has departed for it. Fearing that they may be attacked on two sides, Jon decides to meet Daenerys at the Neck with Rhaegal and make a deal. Tyrion warns him that she won’t go for it. Jon mentions a political alliance, but Tyrion tells him Westeros would never go for two Targaryens on the throne, and jokingly tells him that Sansa would be the better wife. Tyrion realizes his mistake, because Jon appears to seriously consider it.

Chapter 20

However, Jon is determined to make an alliance with Daenerys by any means necessary, and though he has a tender moment with Sansa, he departs and arrives in the Neck for a parlay with Daenerys (who flew over land, instead of sea, and thus misses the Greyjoys).

Chapter 21

He initially believes she will threaten him when he mentions that his people wishes she bends the knee, but instead she does (reluctantly) for three reasons: 1, she sees Rhaegal bonding with Jon and is forced to reconcile that he may actually be a Targaryen and she will lose Rhaegal if they are not on good terms, and 2, she wants to be seen as a worthy ruler again and loves Jon... unaware about the Sansa situation.

But more than anything, Daenerys doesn’t want to be seen as a Mad Queen.

She proposes that they join themselves in marriage, knowing that is what Tyrion initially suggested, but Jon refuses. She initially thinks this is because she has to prove herself, but really Jon refuses despite initially planning to accept and even offer it himself first on an impulse when he sees winter roses around them.

Chapter 22

However, despite this positive turn of events of an alliance without conditions, the episode ends with combined army at the Neck learning that Winterfell has been attacked sooner than expected and is being sieged by White Walkers.

Episode 5 – Wolf

Chapter 23

Sansa, Arya, and Bran are desperately trying to protect Winterfell. They are being attacked by an advanced force, and not Viserion, but they know it is only a matter of time. Unfortunately, they are surrounded and unable to escape and flee even if they wanted to. Sansa stands at the battlements, wanting Jon to return.

Chapter 24

En route to Winterfell, Daenerys is desperate to prove herself worthy of being Queen and worthy of Jon, mistaking his earlier actions in season seven for love when really Jon was hoping to get an alliance (and stopped pursuing that after Sansa). She takes a risk, and heads off into battle despite Jon telling her not to.

Chapter 25

The scene switches, and FINALLY the Greyjoys arrive with an imprisoned Cersei at Winterfell, helping Daenerys stop the advance White Walker army besieging the castle with their forces and the remaining Golden Company. They inform Sansa of the truth, and Sansa apologizes (unfortunately, no one in the North is willing to take Theon’s words at face value).

Chapter 26

Jon and the others arrive. Jaime was with Jon, and he is shocked to see Cersei for so many reasons, but especially when he learns she was responsible for King’s Landing. She is put on trial, and found guilty.

Chapter 27

Despite the North rebuking Daenerys, she believes that Jon will warm up to her after her heroic save of his home and Theon informing Jon of what really happened in King’s Landing. But that is not the case, because Daenerys soon realizes that Jon and Sansa have a relationship when they are reunited in an affectionate way.

Chapter 28

However, before she can do something she’ll regret, the Night King attacks, and Daenerys and Jon takes their respective dragons to the sky. Rhaegal is killed in battle, and Jon falls to his death, the battle lost.

Episode 6 – Nightingale

Chapter 29

Starts with Jon surviving his fall like Sansa and Theon did by falling on a mound of snow. Unfortunately, the people of Winterfell need to flee as the Night King licks his wounds for the final assault.

Chapter 30

Cersei is in the broken tower after a cryptic discussion with Bran (he likes those). She wants to die where Bran told her it all began. Jaime and her get into a fight, and she manipulates him to choke her, thereby fulfilling the prophecy. Jaime is horrified, burns the tower with all his crimes, and goes into battle to protect the fleeing civilians and army alongside Brienne.

Chapter 31

He ends up encountering Jon Snow, and instead of going out in a blaze of glory, helps Jon to return to the retreating army. Jon and Sansa are reunited, and Daenerys feels alienated, and is still reeling from the death of Rhaegal knowing he too will be revived by the Night King. She is devastated by the loss of her children and lover. Cue another cryptic discussion with Bran; this time, Daenerys is his victim. He promises her that she will meet her son and husband again (referring to Drogo and Rhaego). Daenerys does not take that well, but nobody takes Branvisions well.

Chapter 32

The army is pushed back into the South in attritional warfare, not having the numbers. They make it all the way to Stokeworth before they are able to secure a castle long enough to defend it. It appears to be the last battle - they will either win the war and live, or lose the war and die.

Chapter 33

In order to secure succession, Jon marries Sansa and their wedding is the last feast before the battle. Jon promises to come home, and we get a repeat of Jon waving goodbye to Sansa with Daenerys looking on in Baelish’s place.

Chapter 34

The battle begins, and Daenerys prepares to square off against Viserion and Rhaegal who are now controlled by the Night King. She takes a risky move, and there is the biggest ball of flame in the sky.

Chapter 35

The three dragons are destroyed, but the Night King survives, seemingly impervious to fire. The dragons are gone, but the army lives on, and Jon prepares to lead the surviving soldiers in a final charge as the castle is sieged and those inside try to hold everyone off.

Chapter 36

But just as all appears lost, Bran wargs into the Night King, momentarily stupefying him, and Jon is able to get the upper hand and kill him, destroying the army. He feels victorious, but when he returns he sees that Bran is dead.

Chapter 37

The snows begins to recede, and Sansa becomes round with child. They return North to Winterfell together with their child.

[romanfive]

400 years without Cervantes or "What giants?"

by Roman Vučajnk

(First published on Versopolis in 2016, but the server crashed and things got lost)  This year, we commemorate the fourth centennial of the death of two giants: William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Multi-centennial reminders sometimes serve as an excuse to dust monuments and re-discover something everyone has already heard of, but few can really lay out without the help of the Wikipedia. I’m looking at you, last year’s Magna Charta. A smooth vellum surface carries a written decision that shaped a significant part of human society, no doubt about that, but by now so distant that we do not recognize our own image in it, nor any reason why we should, so we remain content to cherish it for its age and genealogy.

However, we may rest at ease knowing that the legacy of the bard, who was clever enough not "to take arms against a sea of troubles" the way poor Christopher Marlow did, and the Señor, who took a bullet to his chest at Lepanto before he found something mightier than the sword, remains alive in our common cultural tissue. Born in the age of discovery of the New World, they both tackled basic and fundamental drives of the human psyche; explored oceans of motives and causes; braved currents of Fate and persisted through jungles of self-reflection. By their effort, talent, and a nod from gods, they found a literary Fountain of Youth and gained immortality by genuinely being able to hold a conversation with each passing generation (with the eternal gratitude of all publishers of the world’s collections of quotes). Not only as a immobile relic of the literary Golden Age, which we have to climb up to, but as a modern partner in full understanding of our age and a willing assistant to our quest for the Truth.

 How about a date?

Shakespeare and Cervantes, laureates of two hostile households both alike in dignity, share the same date of death, 23 April 1616. As befits the highly pitched drama of the Elizabethan stage, it should come to no surprise that in truth they died whole eleven days apart. Not a comedy of errors, but a calculated plan to re-calibrate the calendar, proposed by an Italian fellow from fair Verona** (honestly, you can’t make this stuff up). Catholic Spain complied with the Pope’s instructions to switch to the Gregorian calendar in 1582, while England clung onto the Julian calendar until 1752. Thus, Shakespeare’s Julian 23 of April would translate to the Gregorian third of May, if anyone insisted on ruining the magic.

Add the feast of St George, the patron saint of England and chivalric soldiers, to the same day and Destiny can enjoy a well-deserved picnic.

Shakespeare and Cervantes have never seen each other in person, but we may still appreciate a cinematographic entertainment of the idea in Miguel and William (2007). If their meeting actually had taken place, it would have reflected the hostile attitude between the Spaniards and the English at the time, however, nothing two brilliant minds could not handle. What a pair they would make! Sadly, it was not meant to happen in our version of the universe.

Not all is lost, though, as one of the giants fathered a couple who bridged the inequality of their respective statuses and changed our perspective of windmills forever.

----

 **  He was called a Veronese by Jean-Étienne Montucla in Histoire des Mathématiques (1758-98), but we must serve the truth by admitting that was an error on Montucla’s part. Aloysius Lilius, who included astronomy among his fields of interests, was a Calabrian.

Complementing differences

The two nomadic natives of La Mancha are definitely not the first known literary couple, who pursued the Truth in their discourse, but in contrast to Platos’ Phaedo and Echecrates almost two millennia earlier, they presented us with a prototype of a costumed hero and his sidekick. Now, that is something we can connect with in full, especially, if it involves special powers.

We may speculate, if Don Quixote’s magic helmet, which for the rest of the world was a mere barber’s basin, has drawn similar reaction from his contemporary audience as a certain underpants-over-trousers style manages from us (even though Don Quixote elaborated on his decision, while I still have no clue in regard to the Gotham’s-finest choice of costume in his animated series). However, we are sure that, in time, his conduct, ambition, and persistence in pursuing a crystal-clear notion of the Truth and his role of a knight-errant rose from a ridicule to an inspiration.

Many thanks to the skeptical voice of another crystal-clear notion of reality, provided by Sancho Panza, a servant-turned-squire (a basic understanding of the feudal social structure might provide necessary grounds for this particular jest. To which we reply: “Thank you, Jeeves.”), which allows for the most important issues from Don Quixote’s LARP quests to stand out in the reader’s own environment.

The dialogue between the two notions challenges the readers to investigate their own aspect of reality, before they can fully appreciate the story. Perhaps this is a part of the secret of this particular literary success: the reader does not need to understand the frame of the narrative. The reader just needs to connect to the action.

 We Call Upon The Author 

While each of us is free to perceive Don Quixote as either a downright loony or a heroic fighter for justice and liberty for all, it might be interesting to peek at the author. A Castilian, soldier in one of the major battles of his time, captured by the Ottomans, a purchasing agent (which eventually led him to stay as a guest at the expense of the Crown in Seville for a while. Not what we would think, regardless of the aversion felt towards the profession. The banker, which kept the collected money, went bankrupt. Which, in a way, gratifies the aversion towards that profession), and, lastly, a successful author with an immense influence on the Spanish language. He even applied for an accountant’s position in one of the prosperous ports on the Spanish Main in the south Caribbean, but that change of scenery has never taken place.

His nickname El principe de los ingenios (The Prince of Wits) hits the spot for the author who skillfully mocked those who deserved it. I cannot say, whether his wit stems from a desire to lessen the impact his physical defect may have had on his self-image (he was wounded in battle and lost the ability to use his left arm). Yet he was as sharp and unyielding as Cyrano, a famous Gascon version of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, even if grown out of chivalric tales and more inclined to fight the system.

The main target of his mockery was not so much the lore of knightly tales, a remnant of medieval literature, but those who took excess pleasure in it. Especially, when they used the invented tales to propagate their view on how things should be run for everybody.

A conglomerate of myths and romances commanded an influence that reached far to the other side of the Atlantic ocean, as it was a companion to the conquistadors, motivated them and even inspired them, also in their topographical exercises (California was originally a name of an island in the sequel to Amadis de Gaul, a literary target in Cervantes’ masterpiece). A notion of honour, bravery, virtue and duty presented by those romances may have worked for conquistadors, whose minds fantasized about immense riches, while their bodies struggled for survival, but in the Old World, it was confined between hard covers of amusing entertainment.

They provided the Prince of Wits with the necessary cover for his satire. In the days of duels of honour, inquisitive religious tribunals of the true doctrine, and a strong-willed monarch, satire had to find its way to the audiences in a considerate way.

One time, Sancho Panza wonders about the glorified battle cry Santiago y cierra España!++ and comments whether Spain was perhaps opened, that it wants to be closed up. That battle cry preceded every military encounter of Spaniards from the times of the Reconquista and it called upon St. James, the patron saint of Spain and Matamoros, the Killer of Moors. Some of my Iberian friends snigger at the remark, much too contemporary for modern Spain to enjoy as a mere play of words. Some may even draw parallels to the EU.

Cervantes also made it to the infamous list of prohibited publications, run by the Holy Inquisition. The readership may gasp in the expectation of Cervantes being hauled by sneering Dominican monks to a damp cell, laden with devices of torture. Why, we do remember how he openly mocked the method of the Holy Office of dealing with heretics. In Don Quixote, when the Barber and the Priest want to burn several books of the Innkeeper that they found guilty of heresy by trial, he asks: “I hope, Sir, they are neither Hereticks nor Flegmaticks (herejes o flemáticos).” To which the Barber corrects him: “Schismaticks (cismáticos), you mean.”

No, the sentence purged from the same book reads: Works of charity done in a lukewarm and half-hearted way are without merit and of no avail. Apparently, a sensitive theological ear considered it a tad too Erasmian in favouring the inner human condition to the outer action.

Cervantes also poked the influence of invented stories over chronicles, expulsion of the Morisco population from Spain, governing administrations, and even mental abilities of the ruling classes. With a dash of ridiculing the Church authority over the common sense of an individual person (that particular dart is still not entirely settled by literary critics, though).

 -------

++ St. James and close, Spain! Interpretations of the unclear second part of the invocation vary from “Close your ranks before your enemies, Spain!” to “Let us close our ranks in the midst of our enemies, Spain!”, but we may be certain that it asks Spain to do harm to her enemies and let St. James play, too.

“There are many who are errant,” said Sancho. ”Many,” responded Don Quixote, “but few who deserve to be called knights.” 

On his deathbed, Don Quixote came to his senses and detached himself from knight-errantry. The moral of the story steps over boundaries of time, and could wear a ruff just as comfortably as a pair of jeans. It addresses us to stand out as individuals and pursue what we believe to be the Good in aversion from the corrupted, however, not by retiring to a constructed ideal, incompatible with the surroundings. Not to make that ideal an instrument of lamentation over some good-old-days that never have been, nor a cause for lamination of cherry-picked historical interpretations to parade as the Truth.

Let us rather make it a reminder of the human ability to better oneself.

Especially in times, when giants are not so easily recognizable. 

[porcileorg]

On the ‘Various Others’ initiative in Munich (2019-09-12 – 2019-10-13)

Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, September, 2019.

It was Munich Open Art last weekend, opening on Friday. Various Others, a much newer initiative ran alongside.

Various Others is, very simply, about collaboration and exchange. Each space - whether institution, gallery or off-space - belonging to the initiative partners with one from outside, in order to bring new art back to Munich.

For someone like myself, this is interesting. I feel that, in the spirit of Spinoza, anything increasing our power to act, is by large a good thing. And this collaboration certainly does: galleries become more active through working with new partners, the audience becomes more active by having more art to view, the artists are more active by having new exhibition opportunities in a different city. The efforts of everyone involved should be applauded and encouraged, so that this initiative may long continue. 

Content however is a different matter. Obviously no one expects nowadays the kind of complete enlightenment - the ultimate knowledge of a true God - Spinoza would wish for, but too often the conceptual aims behind the work are left unexamined. This has less to do with the art exhibited during the course of Open Art and Various Others, but more with the type of reviews this kind of event attracts. These focus almost entirely on the idea behind Various Others, that is, on how its exchange program functions, why such a program has come to being and how it might be beneficial to those involved. The few that do review the actual shows (Frieze selects five highlights) keep to a bare paragraph each.

Of course, it is not easy to review an event that comprises of, at the very least, fourteen openings on its first night, spread across a modestly sized city, with everything closing at 9 pm. On my walk on Friday I manage to see nine things, which is more than many: the performance by Gregor Hildebrand at the Ludwig Beck department store, the exhibitions at Jahn und Jahn, at Sperling, at Rudiger Schöttle and Knust und Kunz, at Jo van de Loo, at Barbara Gross, at Loggia and at Nir Altman. So what follows will be necessarily a flawed personal account.

Gregor Hildebrand @ Ludwig Beck [click here] At the first point of call, the Ludwig Beck department store, I did not see much of the performance, the store layout allowing a full view only to a privileged few. Those standing between the rows of hip-hop CDs could see more of the (admittedly very photogenic) band members on stage than what was going on with the painting in the corner. As far as I could see, Hildebrand was making one of his magnetic tape type paintings before a live audience. Which seemed to me both very brave and very obtuse, this being perhaps the point, to reveal to the buying public how simple his production process is, a magician who indeed only uses a couple of mirrors to perform his tricks. I could overhear behind me, I never thought it would be so quick and easy.”

‘Computer and Paper' @ Jahn und Jahn, with Galerie Conradi, Hamburg, and ​Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin [click here and here] Onwards south to 'Computer and Paper' at Jahn und Jahn, which despite its somewhat threadbare title is a potentially intriguing group exhibition of six artists. It is part of the Various Others initiative but need not be, the premise of the show strong enough to be expanded and shown in a different institutional context.

Taking an art historical approach, it gathers a small number of works - many, but not all, on paper - to explore the relation between the physical and the digital, as it stands in our post-internet world. At least two sets of paper works, Laura Owen’s small intimate collages and Albert Oehlen’s more formal abstractions, are from the 90s, both artists being some of the first to question their painterly practice in relation to developments in new digital technologies. The work recaptures that moment in time when photoshop was still rare and exotic, a wondrous tool just ready to be discovered. But it does not, indeed it cannot, anticipate the developments that followed: broadband, the rise of social media, smartphones, apps. This task is left to younger and equally prominent artists like Avery Singer. In the large airbrushed paintings she presents at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin, she considers the impact of new technologies and social media on her own artistic subjectivity. Here at Jahn und Jahn we are offered only small glimpse into her practice with two small early works on paper. A more considered investigation requiring a deeper engagement, comes from Hamburg artist, Thomas Baldischwyler, who presents one installation piece and two collages behind glass. One work uses the Victor Burgin poster, “What does possession mean to you?” together with its double message “7% of our population own 84% of our wealth;” another is inscribed with the graffiti-like slogans “We still control computers, when will computers control us?” and “Rehearsal war and peace. They calculate stock market prices and write poems.” The installation includes the short narrative of how the artist covered his laptop camera with a sticker, and is accompanied by a wooden panel made to look like an enlarged sheet of stickers, complete with its plastic hang tag. There are clearly other references at work, and you want to know how these might connect in some overall critique of capitalism through digital culture, but the work remains - despite repeated viewing - steadfastly opaque.  More accessible, but also simpler in aim, are the utopian/dystopian drawings of Soyon Jung, a mix of etching and Letraset type transfer depicting future ruins of corporate and political headquarters. Equally direct in his critique is Felix Thiele, who showed with Jung as part of the exhibition 'Death Hoax' at Hamburg’s Westwerk. He presents three shiny iPhones replicas with crudely painted apps, a desirable consumer object made useless, but equally desirable as art. 

Augustus Serapinas and Malte Zenses @ Sperling, hosting Emalin, London [click here and here] Up the road at Sperling is the two-person show of Augustas Serapinas, who shows with Emalin, London, and Malte Zenses from Berlin. Serapinas is an exciting young artist, who deals with displacement in a very literal and unambiguous way.  For this exhibition he transported an entire derelict greenhouse from Vilnus back to Munich, and reinstalled it in the Sperling gallery. There is a socio-political element to the work, its attempt to confront the growing gentrification of Vilnus, as well as the need to preserve an ongoing process of destruction, also visible in Serapinas’s smaller framed works, in which plants are preserved in glass at the moment of their turning into ash. In this, his Munich exhibition recalls his earlier one 'February 13th,' where he famously managed to transport several still-frozen snowmen, more or less intact, from Vilnus to Emalin’s London space. In this case too, the work was about the saving of snowmen from destruction, again acting out a kind of preservation by removal. However, the London show seemed more vivid, more visceral in its impact. It makes sense that the press release referred to Julia Kristeva’s definition of installation as something on the verge of the sacred, where it asks us “not to contemplate images but to communicate with beings.” Something is missing from the Munich installation that would allow us to make such a claim of communication with being and I am not sure if it is the lack of smell (surely the greenhouse should smell of weeds and wood rot?), the very uniform indoor lighting or the lack of isolation (the other exhibited work is very close by). In comparison, Zense’s paintings are more difficult to pin down, though their abstract language is also clearly a consequence of a similar process of transposition from one context to another. They trade in displacement, both in a linguistic and Freundian sense of the term, their marks harbouring only an arbitrary relation to what they might stand for as a sign, unconscious desires put to use in the  symbol. They also allude to the process of destruction. The work consists of many layers, each erasing and obscuring a previous one, their final state again preserved in glass. Taken together, the combination of the two practices works on a conceptual level. It is pleasing to consider how one idea, such as that of destruction, shifts from one context and medium, to another, very different one.

Rüdiger Schöttle [link], Jo van de Loo [link], Barbara Gross [link] More centrally, Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle cooperated with ShanghART to show the abstract paintings of Chinese artist, Ding Yi with their signature 'x' and '+' crosses. Jo van de Loo presented the work by one of its gallery artists, Lorenz Strassl together with Monika Michalko from Produzentengalerie in Berlin. Both artists share a certain surrealist, dreamlike sensibility. At Barbara Gross, there were woodcuts and etchings by Andrea Büttner, shown concurrently with the artist’s London gallery, Hollybush Gardens.

'Dark Latern' @ Knust x Kunz hosting Attercliffe™, Sheffield, UK [click here and here] Beautifully selected by Paul Morrison is group exhibition 'Dark Latern' at Knust x Kunz. Among the crowd, one could find the minimalist geometry of Jan van de Ploeg; a black and white graphic drawing by Riette Wanders; a long-exposed, bleak photograph by Dan Holdsworth; slick works by artists with a Goldsmiths connection, such as Glenn Brown, Gerald Hemsworth or Glasgow based Michael Stubbs; Koen Delaere’s texture heavy black canvas; Saul Fletcher’s intriguing little photograph of a row of sticks leaning against a roughly plastered wall; a playful abstraction of Caroline McCarthy; or baroque image of a candle flame by Ralf Brög. All of the work is small and simply hung at eye level, demonstrating that an exhibition could be interesting without any grand curatorial gestures. Tim Etchells slogan, placed centrally in the space, could be the title for the show, and very good title it is: “objects in nightmare arrangements.”

Tramaine de Senna and Nicholás Lamas @ Loggia hosting MÉLANGE, Köln, and Sabot, Cluj-Napoca [click here and here] Another intriguing show could be found close by at Loggia, one of the few off-spaces in Munich that is also part of the Various Others initiative. This too is a deceptively simple two-person exhibition, featuring the work of young sculptors Tramaine de Senna and Nicholás Lamas, in collaboration with Mélange from Cologne and Sabot, Cluj. On first glance the show is almost conventional in its arrangement, a tightly grouped collection of art objects on plinths, even if the plinths are not of the square, white variety. The design qualities of Senna’s work lends the exhibition an arty feel, so that it looks a little like an abandoned surrealist installation, but in combination with Lama’s objects and their mix of the natural and artificial, the overall impression is of a modernist cabinet of curiosities - if such a cabinet was run by a dyslexic alien with a moderate interest in art and a well-established shoe fetish. Objects lose their everyday meanings in the unusual combination produced by Lamas: what looks like fossilised coral, bursts out of a neon blue sneaker, carefully placed on a gently modulating, bent car radiator grill. Cutting across familiar systemic structures in a strongly dialectical way, nature seems to imitate the unnatural, human items, planetary processes.  Senna’s work is more artful in comparison, in that it references other art, design and fashion, with a high heeled shoe at the end of an epoxy clay pedestal or bright leopard print across shaped cardboard hanging on the wall. Hers is the more familiar strategy of recovering unfamiliar meanings from very familiar everyday.  

Eva Grubinger, Timo Seber and Johannes Tassilo Walter @ Nir Altman hosting Galerie Tobias Naehring, Leipzig [click here and here] The last event of the night is Nir Altman’s, another group exhibition where gallery artist, Johannes Tassilo Walter, is partnered with two artists from Leipzig’s Tobias Naering, Eva Grubinger and Timo Seber. Walter presents a new series of paintings, while Naering and Grubinger show older work: Seber, his Slave to the Biorhythm from the Not Fair, Warsaw, 2017 and Grubinger, one piece from her 2018 exhibition 'Steam,' Untitled (Petropawlowsk, Stepan Petrischenko). The combination of artists is clearly a challenging one, as the connections between them are not immediately apparent. Walter’s paintings are very formalist and process based, demanding careful scrutiny and deep engagement. Made with many layers, one has to pay attention to how the different gestures react and overlap each other and then reappear on different grounds. Grubinger’s sculptural work uses formalist devices, but has a much more pronounced conceptual, if not to say political aim. Untitled (Petropawlowsk, Stepan Petrischenko) is one work from a series of four, which imbues its seemingly modernist structures with industrial references to present little-known facts of nautical cultural history, a series of mutinies that resulted in the destruction of a dominant power, in a celebration of individual dissent. Known for his investigations into communication mechanisms of video game culture, Seber presents a set of mirrors suspended from ceiling by thick leather straps, our reflection obscured by prints of germinating seeds and block-like red marks. If there is a reference to mass culture, it is  an obscure one, this work seemingly focussing on the cultural, social and biological construction of the viewer’s self image. Together, the artists not only share a certain formalist sensibility - certainly some of the pairings of red, blue and yellow are very aesthetically  pleasing - but also an interest in the processes of construction, whether this is related to the cultural artefact (Walter), political engagement (Grubinger) or identity (Seber). 

The night ends abruptly, with everyone rushing to the Various Others dinner. I head home too, past the cemetery. 

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WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY’S VANITY FAIR calls itself “A Novel Without a Hero”; My Struggle has a hero, of sorts, but one who finds himself in a novel without a plot. Instead, the book has a project: to tell the truth about its author, and thereby reveal the deeper meaning of seemingly trivial events. Now, after more than a million words, Knausgaard says that his project was, in a sense, doomed: “It has been an experiment, and it has failed because I have never even been close to saying what I really mean.”

How could anyone write such a massive autobiographical novel or “autofiction” without saying what they mean? One reason might be internal: the difficulty of finding a true language to describe what goes on inside people. My Struggle is a philosophical novel in search of the right words, seeking help from Shakespeare, Proust, Heidegger, and many other masters of expression. Then, quite differently, there are the external constraints, which exist because the novel is a legal and public document. Book Six opens with a bitter conflict between Knausgaard and his uncle Gunnar, who claims that Book One, A Death in the Family, is a tissue of lies about the death of his brother, Knausgaard’s father. Gunnar threatens to file suit for defamation of the family’s honor, and thus prevent Book One from being published.

Novelists have often got into trouble for turning people they know into fictional characters. Their first line of defense has usually protected them — in giving their models a different name, then adding the disclaimer about “no resemblance to living persons.” So Lady Ottoline Morrell becomes “Hermione Roddice” in Lawrence’s Women in Love, or “Priscilla Wimbush” in Huxley’s Crome Yellow. The victims can only lick their wounds, and vow to never again make friends with a novelist.

When Knausgaard cowers under his uncle’s threatening emails, his wife tries to console him by saying: “But it’s a novel, Karl Ove.” “Yes,” he replies, “but the whole point is it’s meant to be true.” If it’s true, then his characters must be given the same names that they have in real life. They are not independent creations who exist only between the pages of a book; rather, real names are supposed to make My Struggle a more solid work than almost any other novel written before it. Yet, under the threat of legal action, Knausgaard does end up changing the first names, and suppressing the family names, of all his father’s relatives — those who had been outraged by his depiction of his father as an incontinent alcoholic. He goes further: the great villain of Book One no longer has a name at all. He is just referred to as “father,” as if no name is better than a false name. But this turns A Death in the Family into a myth, about any father who inspires hatred in his son and is punished with a sordid death.

Whether or not under a true name, Knausgaard’s characters would be easily identifiable in a small country like Norway. So, he must fall back on the Rashomon defense: this is the way I remember it, and I can’t help it if you remember things differently. Was Knausgaard’s father found in the bathroom, or in his armchair, surrounded by empty bottles? Was he still alive when the ambulance came, or already dead? Did Knausgaard and his brother, Yngve, spend days cleaning the house afterward? Or had their uncle done most of the work before they arrived, and found only a handful of bottles?

Knausgaard ‘s ambition is to tell “the truth” about his family, but uncertainty keeps creeping in. Even with brute facts, like how many bottles were in his dead father’s house, different observers come up with different numbers. Knausgaard spent the ’80s as a student of literature and art history, immersed in the theory world of that time. But the commonplaces about relativism and the social construction of reality are no longer part of his foundations as a writer. My Struggle presents the world as it appears after the theory wave has receded, leaving Knausgaard gasping on the shore.

My Struggle may not have a theory that determines its message, but it is still more of a philosophical novel than a traditionally realist one. Observing his children, Knausgaard sees that “[w]hat they had, and what I had lost, was a great and shiningly obvious place in their own lives.” As they grow up, though, “meaning diminishes, or […] at least becomes less self-evident.” Living with small children — making breakfasts, going to the park, refereeing their squabbles — does not confer authenticity on their caretakers. It generates boredom and frustration rather than existential insight. Small children are creatures of passion: they don’t worry about meaning because they are too busy trying to get what they want, in the moment. One of Knausgaard’s virtuoso set pieces, in Book Two, is a 60-page description of a birthday party for Swedish four-year-olds. The parents spout every imaginable cliché about healthy eating, sharing your toys, et cetera, while anarchy reigns. Knausgaard has to admit that only a dogged sense of duty keeps him engaged with his little ones.

Novels used to have a formula for what makes life meaningful: climbing the social ladder, acquiring wealth, marrying Mr. or Ms. Right. Novelists like Dickens, Balzac, or Zola examined how the great social machine works, and perhaps how it might be improved. But My Struggle does not send a message through some kind of standard plot, nor does it have much to say about social issues (except for the origins of Nazism, of which more later). The popularity of “Scandinavian Noir” rests on its exposure of the dark underside of the Nordic model, but Knausgaard keeps quiet about Norwegian politics. Nor does he say much about two of the standard motives that give shape to novels — money and sex.

Knausgaard admits that he is awkward and impulsive about money; when he doesn’t have it he borrows, when he does, he spends it rashly. In a traditional perspective, it might be said that the plot of My Struggle is “obscure provincial writer succeeds in becoming rich and internationally famous.” Yet Knausgaard’s battle with life continues, just as intractably as before. He is not one of “those ruined by success,” as Freud described them, because he was ruined before and stays ruined afterward.

The other zone of silence in My Struggle is about sex: from Augustine and Rousseau onward, any confessional autobiography is expected to reveal the author’s sexual misdeeds. Knausgaard refuses to offend former partners by saying what happened in the bedroom; alternatively, he sends them the manuscript and invites them to cut anything they want to keep secret. The end result in either case is the same: sex may be at the root of Knausgaard’s struggles, but it is largely excluded from his novel. Still, in a novel that sets out to “tell all,” the reader is tempted to fill in some gaps. In Book Four, Knausgaard describes his uneasy relations with the teenage students he taught for a year in Northern Norway. In Book Six, he confesses that he had a “strong and secret desire” to sleep with one of them, a girl of 13. He did nothing to put that desire into action; but what is action? In his first novel, Out of the World (1998), the protagonist does sleep with the girl. My Struggle says that this was “a simple act that never took place,” but in the earlier novel a place is given to it:

The novel is a place where that which cannot be thought elsewhere can be thought and where the reality we find ourselves in, which sometimes runs counter to the reality we talk about, can be manifest in images. The novel can describe the world as it is, as opposed to the world it ought to be.

Plausible enough, yet it follows that My Struggle is not a true novel in these terms, because in it Knausgaard does not feel free to describe certain things he did, or even thought about doing. What fills the gap, in the first third of Book Six, are two parallel narratives. One is about Knausgaard’s negotiations with family members who want to rewrite his book or suppress it altogether. The other is about his children, who might control every moment of his life except for the hours when he can steal away and write.

Why should huge chunks of this novel be devoted to the doings of three toddlers? For a justification, Knausgaard invokes the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky:

[W]hat the novel can do, and which perhaps is its most important property, is to penetrate our veils of habit and familiarity simply by describing things in a slightly different way, for example by being insistent with respect to some particular state of affairs, let’s say describing a child’s pacifier over a whole page, whereby the real child’s pacifier would subsequently present itself differently.

Shklovsky defines art as a technique of de-familiarization. The forces of habit, and our preconceptions about what might be going on, are always pulling us down into a state where we are only half-alive. Art exists to bring reality back into focus, or simply to wake us up. Starting with the raw materials of everyday life, art makes them seem new and fresh. It “makes the stone stony.”

A Rembrandt self-portrait may awaken us to the essence of old age, or a Kafka story to the essence of bureaucracy. But those effects are brought into being by style; and long stretches of Knausgaard’s novel seem to fall back on mere reporting of actions and reactions. “The novel is the form of the small life,” he says in Book Six. Yet it can be the form of the large life too; and even the story of a small life must offer more than mere documentation. In Knausgaard’s defense, one could say that he convinces us that, behind his small lives, something much bigger is hiding. From time to time, his plodding style changes gear, taking his readers up into the realm of the sublime:

I saw all this: people swarming on the long city beach and on the wide footpath behind it, with cyclists and roller skaters whizzing by, the row of concrete blocks from the 50s or perhaps the 60s, the city’s final bastion against the sea, that great light-catcher, which was in no way dramatic here in the strait facing Denmark. The couples and the families sitting all around us, summer-clad and tanned, the big sky above us whose blue had no end until evening, when it would fade to gray and the first stars would seem to emerge from the space beyond, making visible its enormous distances. My own children sitting on their chairs with their short legs sticking out in front, absorbed in their own little worlds; ice cream wrappers, dripping lollipops and ice cream cones. Linda, now and then wiping their mouths with tissues, her eyes almost hidden behind her sunglasses. I saw all of this, though as a film, something of which I myself was not a part, my thoughts and feelings being somewhere else.

Knausgaard mentions that this mundane evening at the beach takes place a few miles from Hamlet’s castle at Elsinore. It promises something beyond the deadly blankness of bourgeois life, even if it is impossible to escape that life completely.

¤

Another way to situate My Struggle is to recognize that there is something that stands above it. “I had always,” Knausgaard writes, “from when I was nineteen […] considered poetry to be the pinnacle. What poetry was in touch with was something I was not in touch with, and my respect for poetry was boundless.” In Book Six, the pinnacle is the poet Paul Celan, a Romanian who wrote in German. Until he comes on the scene, My Struggle has been preoccupied with the family conflicts over the appearance of the first two books. Now these squabbles are set aside as Knausgaard plunges into the darkness of the 20th century: first with Celan’s two great poems about the Holocaust (where both his parents perished), and then with the predecessor of Knausgaard’s novel, Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Celan, the victim, produced two poetic masterpieces: “Death Fugue” and “The Straightening.” Hitler, the perpetrator, produced a book that was, in literary terms, worthless. But Celan’s voicing of the sublime was not enough for his personal survival, and he drowned himself in the Seine in 1970. The noble man, poet, and genius, ended in despair. That prompts Knausgaard to seek understanding of Celan’s nemesis, the ignoble man who nonetheless set a nation on the march.

Is this turn in the novel a regrettable case of “Godwin’s Law”: that any protracted argument is bound to bring in the example of Hitler? Why should the middle third of My Struggle be a detailed examination of Hitler’s contribution to “autofiction,” set off by the incidental discovery that after one of Knausgaard’s grandfathers died a copy of Mein Kampf was found among his effects? Knausgaard says that the choice of My Struggle as a title was a friend’s idea. But once he had accepted it, he was under an obligation to explain the differences between his project and Hitler’s. Both might be considered obsessive egotists, but Knausgaard’s self-expression was an attempt at internal understanding, while Hitler wanted to recruit followers by exploiting “the longing to belong” and “the we’s need of a they.” Knausgaard makes a further claim: that it takes an artist to explain Hitler’s formative years, as opposed to a historian like Ian Kershaw, who simply sees Hitler as evil from the cradle.

Kershaw describes Hitler’s adolescence as an “indolent and purposeless existence […] [he] saw fit to do no more than dawdle away his time drawing and dreaming.” But Hitler did not lack for a purpose, Knausgaard argues: he wanted to be an artist, and he became embittered when he was twice rejected for admission to the Vienna Academy. European capitals were full of such maladjusted young men (and van Gogh was unusual only in that he belatedly succeeded). If not for World War I, and the chaos that followed, Hitler’s rise to power would have been inconceivable. Knausgaard does not say this to exonerate Hitler, but to show how a failed artist and homeless drifter managed to move to the very center of political life:

Only someone who stands outside the social world knows what the social world is; to those within it, it is like water to a fish. Hitler […] stands outside the we, and yet he longs for it, and it is this longing his audiences sense when he speaks, the longing for the we being the very foundation of the human. […] this is the truth of Hitler, his longing to be a part of the we touches something deep within that we itself. […] The simplest is the truest, and hatred of the Jews represents the simplest thing of all, the we’s need of a they, the basic mimetic structure of violence […] the sacrifice of a they in order that the we may prevail.

Hitler’s understanding of this dynamic came in part from Dietrich Eckart, an intellectual who became a mentor to him. Even before they met, Eckart knew the kind of person who could make Germany great again:

We need someone to lead us who is used to the sound of a machine gun. Someone who can scare the shit out of people. I don’t need an officer. The common people have lost all respect for them. The best would be a worker who knows how to talk. He doesn’t need to know much. Politics is the stupidest profession on earth.

Eckart wrote this a hundred years ago, and Knausgaard quotes him in 2011. Whether it might be relevant to populism in 2018 can be left to the reader to decide. What Eckart surely achieved was to make his rough diamond into someone acceptable in polite society, and to make Hitler’s dislike of Jews into an organizing principle for the coming Nazi regime. Knausgaard’s unwavering focus is on the emotional raw material that is exploited by politicians. Hitler explained it well, in 1922, walking home from one of his miniature rallies in Munich:

Herr Hanfstaengl, you must not feel disappointed if I limit myself in these evening talks to comparatively simple subjects. Political agitation must be primitive. That is the trouble with all the other parties. They have become too professorial, too academic. The ordinary man in the street cannot follow.

Hitler, Knausgaard suggests, was not just some sort of evil mutant. He grasped what millions of his countrymen wanted, and gave it a voice. Even paranoids have enemies, says the joke; what is not a joke is that even paranoids have friends — armies of them, in Hitler’s case. The longing for a “we,” a single body of authentically German “folk,” and the complementary need for a scapegoat, would have brought forward some other Führer if Hitler had not risen to the occasion.

¤

Knausgaard’s inclusion of a detachable essay on Hitler in his novel must stand or fall on its merits. If an artist can provide a deeper insight into Nazism than a historian or sociologist, then the attempt can be justified. But having made the attempt, Knausgaard reverts in the final third of Book Six to trying to justify the moral status of his own project. Here he must strike even closer to home, by revealing how the construction of My Struggle coincided with the demolition of his marriage to Linda Boström Knausgaard.

Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald began a thriving tradition of presenting the wives or partners of male writers as victims of their husbands’ success — and just as often, as the ones who made that success possible. Knausgaard wants to do justice to his wife, but he has also pledged himself to telling the truth as he sees it. To be true, but fair, when describing one’s own marriage, is always going to be a near-impossible standard to meet.

Knausgaard’s first attempt to narrow the conflict is to say nothing about his wife’s father, and only a few innocuous details about her mother. But that only puts more weight on the central duel, between husband and wife; and Linda Knausgaard is not a happy helpmate to her talented partner:

“There’s so much contempt in you,” she said. “I know you look down on me.”

“Look down on you? I certainly do not!” I said.

“Yes, you do. You think I do too little. I whine all the time. I’m not independent enough. You’re sick of this life of ours. And of me. You never tell me I’m beautiful anymore. Actually I don’t mean anything to you. I’m just someone you live with who happens to be the mother of your children.”

Knausgaard may contest the letter of his wife’s diatribe, but he has to agree with its spirit:

The truth was that when I sat down to write the novel I had nothing to lose. That was why I wrote it. I wasn’t only frustrated, the way you can become when you live as a parent with small children and have many duties and have to sacrifice yourself, I was unhappy, as unhappy as I have ever been, and I was all alone. […] I often thought about leaving, sometimes several times a day, but I couldn’t do it.

And how does My Struggle reach its conclusion? With Linda Knausgaard’s utter defeat: first taking to her bed with paralyzing depression, then agreeing that she needs to be hospitalized for bipolar disorder (and not for the first time). The novel’s endless wanderings and digressions are now seen to converge on a simpler narrative: it is a book that begins with the death of a father and ends with the death of a marriage. After that, Linda Knausgaard’s vindication, if it can be called that, comes from the publication of her own novel, The Helios Disaster, which seems to be a reckoning with her own father.

In 1930, Henry Miller began writing Tropic of Cancer, a vanguard work of “autofiction.” He called his book “[f]irst person, uncensored, formless.” Knausgaard may have started My Struggle with similar ideas. But he found himself inviting others to censor what he had first written about them, and, more importantly, censoring himself. The “first person” turns out to be accountable to the opinions of second persons: he has to tell you how many diapers he changed, and how often he washed the kitchen floor (and that his wife told him he was doing it wrong). Then, the narrative isn’t really “free form” when much of the book resembles either a counsel’s closing plea for the defense, or a confession about how he failed to be quite as politically correct as his Scandinavian peers. Knausgaard’s giant book does not make him into a giant personality. Yet that is part of the book’s fascination: we keep reading — if we do — because Knausgaard gives such a complete and heartfelt portrait of the beleaguered masculinity of our time.

¤

Paul Delany, emeritus professor at Simon Fraser University, has written previously for LARB about George Eliot and Svetlana Alexievich.

The post The Form of the Small Life: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle: Book Six” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Lessons Learned from 50 Cent’s Bankruptcy

A federal judge recently discharged the bankruptcy case of rapper 50 Cent after he paid more than $22 million of his debt.

50 Cent filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in 2015, with debts of $36 million and assets of less than $20 million. The “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” artist, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, paid off a five-year plan early with $8.7 million of his own money and $13.65 million he received in a settlement of a legal malpractice lawsuit.

Jackson’s bankruptcy case started when a woman won a $7 million settlement against him in 2015 for posting a sex tape. Soon after, he filed for bankruptcy to help with that debt, as well as his failed business ventures.

But late last year, Jackson nearly was in hot water when he posed with stacks of cash on Instagram. A judge questioned if he was really declaring all his assets, but Jackson said he was merely living up to his perceived image — a famous rapper with loads of money around him — and that the cash was a prop.

In his response to the judge, 50 Cent said: “Just because I am photographed in or next to a certain vehicle, wearing an article of clothing, holding a product, sitting next to what appears to be large sums of money or modeling expensive pieces of jewelry does not mean that I own everything in those photos.”

Here are four things everyday consumers can learn from 50 Cent’s high-profile bankruptcy case.

Chapter 11 Isn’t Just for Companies — People Can File, Too

Let’s face it — none of us are like 50 Cent. We’re not celebrities and we don’t have his life, grandioses or not. But what lessons can we take away from his very public proceedings?

For most of us, it’s to know your bankruptcy and the rules, inside out.

Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code usually involves a corporation or partnership, reorganizing to keep the business alive and pay creditors over time. But people in businesses or individuals also can seek relief in chapter 11.

For individuals, chapter 11 has some similarities to Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which is a reorganization of a consumer’s finances to pay creditors over 3-5 years. With the help of a bankruptcy attorney, chapter 13 filers work out a payment plan that allocates their disposable income into monthly payments.

Nearly anyone can file for chapter 11, whereas many small businesses are ineligible for chapter 13. Chapter 13 also is only available to debtors with regular income and subject to debt limitations — which, as of April 2016, were no more than $394,725 in unsecured debt (debt not backed by collateral, such as credit card debt) and $1,184,200 in secured debt (like mortgages and car loans).

Your Bankruptcy Case Can Last a Few Years, or a Few Months

A typical timeframe for a bankruptcy discharge varies depending on which chapter you file. For 50 Cent, he filed for bankruptcy in 2015 and had five years to pay off his debt, but paid up earlier this year.

Under Chapter 7, the debtor generally doesn’t pay back his or her creditors. Most people prefer to file under chapter 7, with common debts eliminated like medical bills or personal loans. Chapter 7 also is quicker than other bankruptcy proceedings, and typically lasts 4-5 months.

Chapter 13 filers who earn income that’s less than the state average for their family size enter a 3-year payment plan. Those who exceed the state average are bumped up to five years. The payment plan allocates consumers’ disposable income to make monthly, consolidated payments to creditors.

Chapter 11 can be a little more complex and expensive than chapter 13, and fewer types of debt are dischargeable. Special provisions do streamline these cases for small business debtors, though. Furthermore, Chapter 11 also does not require debtors to turn over their disposable income to a trustee, but the total value of his or her disposable income over a five-year period.

You Need to Be Completely Honest with the Court

If you try to game the system, as it initially appeared 50 Cent had when he posed with stacks of fake cash, you could be in big trouble. Luckily, he was in the clear.

However, people enter bankruptcy court to receive a discharge, and the biggest way to screw that up is to be dishonest. Other than having your bankruptcy case dismissed, you could be fined big time or end up in jail.

Section 727 of the Bankruptcy Code lists the various grounds for objecting to a bankruptcy discharge, including:

—lying under oath;

—destroying records or failing to keep adequate records;

—no good explanation for a loss of assets; and

—concealing or transferring property within one year before filing in an attempt to defraud a creditor.

You must tell the court about everything you own, plain and simple. If a bankruptcy trustee expects you may have left out assets, they’ll schedule a 2004 exam and ask questions under oath.

It probably goes without saying, but social media can ruin your chances at a successful bankruptcy if a bankruptcy trustee looks through your accounts and finds something unsavory. That includes posing on Facebook with assets, like a car that you own but haven’t told the court about.

Finally, if it’s found you have concealed or intentionally transferred property before your bankruptcy case, you can be sued. You can also lose all non-exempt assets without any debt relief.

You Can Recover After Bankruptcy

Say you’ve made it safely through your bankruptcy proceedings. You breathe a sigh of relief. (If you’re 50 Cent, you posted on social media immediately afterward.)

What next?

Outside of the impact of bankruptcy felt during proceedings, bankruptcy and debt solutions can impact your credit score, but not as largely as you might think. So don’t put off filing for bankruptcy. The sooner you get help with your debt, the better your credit score will be in the long run — which will help you be more likely to get a future loan for a house, car, or rebuild credit with a credit card.

Make sure to review your credit reports, as all credit card accounts should have zero balances after a bankruptcy discharge. When opening a new credit card account, put small balances on it and pay them off immediately. Also, make sure to live within your means.

And beware: those annoying collectors may still call. However, collectors who ignore the discharge order are violating federal law, under section 524 of Title 11 of the United States Code. A discharge effectively operates as an injunction against continuing to collect or recover from the debt.

Free Consultation with Bankruptcy Lawyer

If you have a bankruptcy question, or need to file a bankruptcy case, call Ascent Law now at (801) 676-5506. Attorneys in our office have filed over a thousand cases. We can help you now. Come in or call in for your free initial consultation.

Ascent Law LLC8833 S. Redwood Road, Suite CWest Jordan, Utah 84088 United StatesTelephone: (801) 676-5506

Ascent Law LLC

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Additional Bankruptcy Resources

Secured Debt in Bankruptcy

What is a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy?

Goin Public with Your Startup in Utah

Utah Bankruptcy Attorneys

Should Filing Bankruptcy be the Last Resort?

Bankruptcy Lawyer Salt Lake City

from Michael Anderson http://www.ascentlawfirm.com/lessons-learned-from-50-cents-bankruptcy/

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Lessons Learned from 50 Cent’s Bankruptcy

A federal judge recently discharged the bankruptcy case of rapper 50 Cent after he paid more than $22 million of his debt.

50 Cent filed for Chapter 11 reorganization in 2015, with debts of $36 million and assets of less than $20 million. The “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” artist, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, paid off a five-year plan early with $8.7 million of his own money and $13.65 million he received in a settlement of a legal malpractice lawsuit.

Jackson’s bankruptcy case started when a woman won a $7 million settlement against him in 2015 for posting a sex tape. Soon after, he filed for bankruptcy to help with that debt, as well as his failed business ventures.

But late last year, Jackson nearly was in hot water when he posed with stacks of cash on Instagram. A judge questioned if he was really declaring all his assets, but Jackson said he was merely living up to his perceived image — a famous rapper with loads of money around him — and that the cash was a prop.

In his response to the judge, 50 Cent said: “Just because I am photographed in or next to a certain vehicle, wearing an article of clothing, holding a product, sitting next to what appears to be large sums of money or modeling expensive pieces of jewelry does not mean that I own everything in those photos.”

Here are four things everyday consumers can learn from 50 Cent’s high-profile bankruptcy case.

Chapter 11 Isn’t Just for Companies — People Can File, Too

Let’s face it — none of us are like 50 Cent. We’re not celebrities and we don’t have his life, grandioses or not. But what lessons can we take away from his very public proceedings?

For most of us, it’s to know your bankruptcy and the rules, inside out.

Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code usually involves a corporation or partnership, reorganizing to keep the business alive and pay creditors over time. But people in businesses or individuals also can seek relief in chapter 11.

For individuals, chapter 11 has some similarities to Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which is a reorganization of a consumer’s finances to pay creditors over 3-5 years. With the help of a bankruptcy attorney, chapter 13 filers work out a payment plan that allocates their disposable income into monthly payments.

Nearly anyone can file for chapter 11, whereas many small businesses are ineligible for chapter 13. Chapter 13 also is only available to debtors with regular income and subject to debt limitations — which, as of April 2016, were no more than $394,725 in unsecured debt (debt not backed by collateral, such as credit card debt) and $1,184,200 in secured debt (like mortgages and car loans).

Your Bankruptcy Case Can Last a Few Years, or a Few Months

A typical timeframe for a bankruptcy discharge varies depending on which chapter you file. For 50 Cent, he filed for bankruptcy in 2015 and had five years to pay off his debt, but paid up earlier this year.

Under Chapter 7, the debtor generally doesn’t pay back his or her creditors. Most people prefer to file under chapter 7, with common debts eliminated like medical bills or personal loans. Chapter 7 also is quicker than other bankruptcy proceedings, and typically lasts 4-5 months.

Chapter 13 filers who earn income that’s less than the state average for their family size enter a 3-year payment plan. Those who exceed the state average are bumped up to five years. The payment plan allocates consumers’ disposable income to make monthly, consolidated payments to creditors.

Chapter 11 can be a little more complex and expensive than chapter 13, and fewer types of debt are dischargeable. Special provisions do streamline these cases for small business debtors, though. Furthermore, Chapter 11 also does not require debtors to turn over their disposable income to a trustee, but the total value of his or her disposable income over a five-year period.

You Need to Be Completely Honest with the Court

If you try to game the system, as it initially appeared 50 Cent had when he posed with stacks of fake cash, you could be in big trouble. Luckily, he was in the clear.

However, people enter bankruptcy court to receive a discharge, and the biggest way to screw that up is to be dishonest. Other than having your bankruptcy case dismissed, you could be fined big time or end up in jail.

Section 727 of the Bankruptcy Code lists the various grounds for objecting to a bankruptcy discharge, including:

—lying under oath;

—destroying records or failing to keep adequate records;

—no good explanation for a loss of assets; and

—concealing or transferring property within one year before filing in an attempt to defraud a creditor.

You must tell the court about everything you own, plain and simple. If a bankruptcy trustee expects you may have left out assets, they’ll schedule a 2004 exam and ask questions under oath.

It probably goes without saying, but social media can ruin your chances at a successful bankruptcy if a bankruptcy trustee looks through your accounts and finds something unsavory. That includes posing on Facebook with assets, like a car that you own but haven’t told the court about.

Finally, if it’s found you have concealed or intentionally transferred property before your bankruptcy case, you can be sued. You can also lose all non-exempt assets without any debt relief.

You Can Recover After Bankruptcy

Say you’ve made it safely through your bankruptcy proceedings. You breathe a sigh of relief. (If you’re 50 Cent, you posted on social media immediately afterward.)

What next?

Outside of the impact of bankruptcy felt during proceedings, bankruptcy and debt solutions can impact your credit score, but not as largely as you might think. So don’t put off filing for bankruptcy. The sooner you get help with your debt, the better your credit score will be in the long run — which will help you be more likely to get a future loan for a house, car, or rebuild credit with a credit card.

Make sure to review your credit reports, as all credit card accounts should have zero balances after a bankruptcy discharge. When opening a new credit card account, put small balances on it and pay them off immediately. Also, make sure to live within your means.

And beware: those annoying collectors may still call. However, collectors who ignore the discharge order are violating federal law, under section 524 of Title 11 of the United States Code. A discharge effectively operates as an injunction against continuing to collect or recover from the debt.

Free Consultation with Bankruptcy Lawyer

If you have a bankruptcy question, or need to file a bankruptcy case, call Ascent Law now at (801) 676-5506. Attorneys in our office have filed over a thousand cases. We can help you now. Come in or call in for your free initial consultation.

Ascent Law LLC8833 S. Redwood Road, Suite CWest Jordan, Utah 84088 United StatesTelephone: (801) 676-5506

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Additional Bankruptcy Resources

Secured Debt in Bankruptcy

What is a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy?

Goin Public with Your Startup in Utah

Utah Bankruptcy Attorneys

Should Filing Bankruptcy be the Last Resort?

Bankruptcy Lawyer Salt Lake City

from Michael Anderson http://www.ascentlawfirm.com/lessons-learned-from-50-cents-bankruptcy/

from Best Utah Attorneys https://bestutahattorneys.wordpress.com/2018/04/10/lessons-learned-from-50-cents-bankruptcy/

[kihyunswrath]

An essay on why I fight for Wonho

I think there has been too much of this “why do you even care that much?” bullshit lately and I’d like to make things clear, at least for my part. And I am assuming many other Monbebes can relate.

Indeed, why do I care? Wonho was never my bias, I have always liked other groups too, I have seen hundreds of groups come and go, it’s just one member in that group and although I want him to return, I actually want this entire industry to burn down to ashes even more and yes, that would mean death sentence to all idol groups. 

But first of all, let me ask this question in return: Why does it bother you that we care? Who gets to define what’s a useless endeavor? What makes you think I can’t simultaneously care for “more important” issues? Why the hell are you judging us for wasting time on this, when we all already know you wasted days watching that useless Youtube vine compilation, binge-watched that one Netflix series you didn’t seriously even care about, played that one stupid mobile phone game when you should have been sleeping, ate those two boxes of cookies that could’ve lasted you two whole weeks? Who are you to say things are useless just because it’s not your favorite idol group or whoever the fuck you care about, who’s under attack? Why do you think we have explaining to do, when literally none of this has anything to do with you personally and it’s literally you who fail to see the implications this incident had?

I don’t need to explain why I found a person inspiring as an idol and human being, why I found his background story motivating and moving and why I found his presence in Monsta X very important for the entire group’s mental health, group dynamics, success and happiness. I don’t need to explain why I find it upsetting that the people I cared about are torn apart because of no fucking reason, and that I can see that pain from their faces as they’re forced to pretend Wonho does no longer fucking exist?

I don’t fucking think I need to explain why I have empathy for a person who is under a police investigation just because. I don’t think I need to explain why I don’t find it fair that someone is under an attack for doing something that is not deemed as illegal in the most civilized, democratic countries. I don’t need to explain why I want to defend someone who’s kicked out of his group because of conservative internet trolls and a couple whose own background is about ten times more shady than Wonho’s. I don’t think I need to justify myself protesting for him, when he is fired from a job that has absolutely nothing to do with the things he’s being accused of. I don’t think I need to explain that unlike many others, I am indeed capable of reflecting this incident against the bigger context and see how flawed the entire Korean legislative system is. 

But let me do your homework for you asshats and explain what this bigger context is. It’s the context where simply having an allegation of whatever kind placed against you is enough to ruin your entire career. The context where people are literally lying about a person’s background and have been caught doing that, but can still continue with the investigation. The context where people can be punished again and again for things they did ages ago, apologized for, moved on and learned from. The context where literal rich drug dealers, convicted criminals sitting in prison, their minions and ENTIRE companies (cough pdx101 cough) might be able to escape from justice, but this one unfortunate person whose existence is only justified by the Korean population if he is superhumanly perfect and flawless, is brought down for allegedly committing a crime that was not harming anybody and was committed six fucking years ago. The context where you can be punished for something so meaningless that it feels like there is indeed space for a conspiracy theory or two. The context that paints idols as literal gods and goddesses who are not allowed to have pasts, backgrounds, redemption arcs or flaws to their character. The context that is taking idols from their hard-earned positions just because someone influential enough had a personal grudge against them. This context where Koreans are not protected by their own companies or labor unions but can be treated like non-human playthings, chess pieces and pawns just for having human traits.  

I don’t think I need to explain why I have empathy. I don’t think I need to explain why this bigger picture I see doesn’t only clash with my morals, but also potentially hurts hundreds of thousands of other people, because something like this could easily happen to them, too, especially if we now use this incident as an example of how things should be handled in similar situations. And if you as a person fail to connect the dots, if you personally fail to see why this is giving an ugly view into a ruthless society many of my friends and loved ones have no other options but to live in, I think that’s on you. That’s literally your personal problem, not mine.

Wonho was not inspiring because he was flawless, he was inspiring because he demonstrated character growth. He was not inspiring because he never did any mistakes, he was inspiring because he kept improving and kept sharing his love and gratitude toward his fans. He was not inspiring because he had wealth, connections and endless virtuosity, he was inspiring because he built his career from nothing and still remembered to explicitly thank his family, his friends, his loved ones and his fans every single day. That alone is something we can’t say from many other people.  

And if you think my argument is flawed because I was biased? Yes. I am biased. It’s not suspicious that people care about stuff more when it turns out to be personally relatable. Stop fucking pretending you are so virtuous, wise and pure that you already fought against bigotry, oppression, discrimination and bullshit in its all forms, way before you were even fucking born. That does not give you more social justice woke points, it just makes you annoying. Just because some Monbebes woke up to notice how flawed, ugly, embarrassing and pathetic the kpop industry can be now that their own favorite idol is attacked, is not a bad thing if it leads to them protesting against similar incidents in the future. Just because people cannot fully grasp issues before it has something to do with themselves doesn’t mean they can’t now use that realization as a boost to change the entire society. 

Yes, we intend to not bring only Wonho back, but also bring down the entire industry that made it possible for things like these to happen. Yes, we as human beings are capable of empathizing with people who we don’t have much to do with, but it’s not wrong if we fight even more fiercely when we try to protect our own. When was the last time you have done something similar? 

If our movement brings light to the fact how little protections workers have in Korea, if our movement makes people see how devastating consequences bullying and baseless accusations can have on people, if our movement continues talking about the same problem that caused a person to commit literal suicide a month earlier? If our movement makes it transparent to everybody how much power all these companies have over their idols and how they can not only treat them like shit after trusting and rooting for them for several years, but also silence all the remaining members and force them to continue even if they’re at a breaking point? If our movement brings light to the fact that maybe, just maybe it’s not fair to punish people for things that they might not only NOT have done, but also are literally meaningless even if he did them ALL, especially because they happened before he ever even was an idol? 

Well, I’ll call it a movement that exists for a good fucking reason.

One of my Korean friends, after being told about this, said that well, the only thing I now need to do is to change my favorite group and move on with my life, because I am literally just a customer and I can’t change things. And you know what? That is exactly the problem here. Without knowing it, she summarized the entire problem up perfectly with that one sentence. 

She and so many other Koreans (and non-Koreans) consider idols mere products. They think idols are here to sell us a certain image of a perfect, successful person who does not really exist as a human being. Idols just represent something the Korean society aspires to be, but if enough people get fed up with them for whatever reason, just to bolster their own feelings of revenge and jealousy like in this case, idols can be dumped and forgotten in a matter of minutes. That hurting one idol does not really matter, because there are people lining up behind him to do his job even better. That being an idol is an endless cycle of improving oneself, requiring less and less time for resting, recovery, privacy and human rights and asking less and less forgiveness from the audience. That if you get an important position in the society, it’s on you if you cannot handle the negative publicity that might follow. That if you have done one mistake once, it prevents you from ever moving on in your life, because it can come and bite you in the ass whenever, arbitrarily, just because, even if technically you had already been forgiven long time ago. That people who have gotten money and fame do not earn those positions because of hard work, but because they are supposed to be superhuman. And because there is no such thing as a superhuman, every and any idol can be brought down whenever they show the smallest sign of humanity. Even if that sign of humanity is just them showing open solidarity and empathy for a friend and colleague that was wrenched from them for no reason.

She and so many other Koreans think the only thing they can do as normal citizens is to pretend this one “flawed, miserable” individual never existed, because they are powerless against the decisions of the companies, press and rich conservative trolls?

And for some reason, somehow, these same Koreans fail to see how that reflects the state of their entire society and how it affects their own rights as workers, as human beings. They fail to see this very, very crucial factor: that idols are more similar to everyday Koreans than they are to the entertainment companies, wealthy chaebol CEOs and a couple of filthy rich drug dealers who escape their own punishment because of their even richer dad.

Idols are NOT extremely wealthy celebrities who have a freedom to choose their own paths, influential politicians who can escape from scandals after scandals or sons and daughters of the company leaders and estate owners of Korea. 

They are workers who have inhumane working conditions. They are faces to faceless, cruel companies who are intentionally hiding behind them to cover their own tracks. 

Idols have no real rights, freedom or future, and thus, they represent us normal people. What you do to one of these idols, you essentially do to every single one of his/her fans. You take our dreams away, you punish us unfairly for things we tried to learn from, you take away our voices that we used to express our own oppression and challenge the status quo.

Idols are not us, but they represent us more than any of these companies, leaders, rich heirs and heiresses and CEO’s could ever do. 

And that’s why I’m fighting for Wonho.

__

And please miss me with that cultural relativism bullshit. I know injustice when I see it. I can distinguish suffering and pain even in cultural contexts I am not born into. Also? Maybe if Koreans don’t want us to meddle with how they handle their own problems, maybe they should have really been thinking twice before trying to buy the entire world with the help of their idol industry. We can hold companies accountable. We can demand change. Companies and wealthy shitheads are not representatives of a culture. We know there are Koreans with us in this fight. 

And if this doesn’t change with us, right now, today... it will sit down with us until something like this happens again, and then the change will come in the shape of a fucking tsunami. 

And what are you going to do at that point, stand in the fucking way, or pretend your past mistakes can no longer hold you accountable?