#I never loved maven

[lilyharvord]

All you hoes claiming Maven is King Ruthless/Angst boy extraordinaire have clearly never met Prince Corrick “I have murdered and tortured many MANY people and have to physically hold myself back so I don’t make the woman I love hopelessly sad even when she’s not around but I will do those things if I have to at the expense of others because I love my brother and will do anything to keep him on the throne and will do vile things to save my skin and the skin of only those I care about” of Kandala and it fucking shows.

[snakerdoodlle]

Mare whenever Maven tries to play chess with her:

[aerticent]

the genuine pain Evangeline feels over standing complicit in her Father’s death destroys me. This man who has done nothing but strip her of her freedom and force her into (abusive) engagements and undermine her value within the Rift and she’s still haunted by his death. She realized early on that the Cygnets want him as well for Maven and chooses to stay silent and when that passes and she’s given a second chance to say stop his death she stands and simply watches it happen. She outright tells Cal she hopes Iris’s gods aren’t real because she doesn’t want to know what they have in store for her. She thinks that the act of her keeping this information from Volo is proof to everyone that she’s a terrible person GOD

[drewtanakagf]

yah so cain and abel parallels. everyone give it up for cain and abel parallels

[ball-of-butter]

im literally gonna start tweaking

guys this quote from Glass Sword gets me every time .

it literally makes me want to boil down into nothing but ash and dust IM SOBBINGHGGGG. it's so poetic I cant do this

[mavens-confessional]

Private School Confession… this might trigger some, might also make you cum…idk .., it’s a long read so buckle up

The same year that my step-brother did those things to me (see previous post), I went back school and found that my teacher was one of the nuns who had also taught me in elementary school. I was now 14 and in 9th grade. This nun always took an interest in me and I was teachers pet when she taught me as a child. She seemed delighted to have me in her class and commented about what a pretty young lass I was turning out to be. She was Irish, as most of the nuns were at this school.

One day, a boy in my class took me behind a building at recess and tried to French kiss me. I was so nervous, but I let him kiss me on the lips, but he pulled me closer and tried to put his tongue in my mouth and I literally ran away from him with my heart beating a mile a minute. Well, it was all over school in about 20 minutes. I was so embarrassed and one of the boys called me a tease.

The next day at lunch, Sister Margaret called me and asked me to come to her office. I was a straight A student and never got into any trouble, but I knew it was about the incident the day before.

She had me sitting in front of her desk, and she looked at me and asked “Did you kiss that boy yesterday?” My face was burning with shame. Because we were taught that only “bad girls” did things with boys. I looked down and said “Yes, Sr Margaret - but only a little, and then I ran away”. She came and stood in front of me and said “Now you know Maven, that was sinful. You are a good girl, and God wants you to be pure.” I nodded and felt tears welling up. She grabbed my chin and made me look at her and said “Did you let him touch you?” “What? I., um.. no Sister”

“Well, that’s a good lass, but I think we need to make sure the sin is gone from you”. I was petrified because our school still used corporal punishment. I knew I was going to be spanked and that had never happened in all my years going to this school. I couldn’t help crying. I felt so shamed.

“Stand up” she said. I did as I was told. She sat in the chair I had been in. “Now, I’m doing this for your own good, and I want to teach you how to cleanse your soul, so God will love you, and you’ll continue to be a good girl. If you learn your lesson, you’ll continue to be my favorite student and we will forget about this whole incident. Is that understood?” “Yes Sister”.

“Now, be a good girl and bend over my lap.” I thought this was odd because they usually made the boys bend over the desk and used the paddle. But I thought maybe I’m a girl and she will go easy on me. I laid across her lap. She told me to hold on to the chair legs. I did as told.

Next, she lifted up my plaid skirt. I was wearing just white cotton panties. She put her hands on my little ass and asked:

“Maven - did that boy touch you here?” “ No Sister!” “That’s a good girl,” she said, while she was massaging my right buttock. She suddenly spanked me over the panties. It wasn’t very hard, but I felt very strange because her other hand was grasping my thigh, very high up and close to my groin. I felt myself getting hot all over. She spanked me again and this time it was harder. “Maven, did you like it when that boy kissed you? Tell the truth.” I was crying freely now, because the spanking was so degrading, “um..,I…I did, but I was scared because I know it’s sinful to…to..” I stuttered. “It’s sinful to what?” She asked, while she rubbed her hand around on my buttocks. “It’s sinful to be lustful” My voice cracked. I felt so hot and embarrassed, and….my heart was racing. Her other hand suddenly cupped my crotch - I gasped. “Yes Maven - lust is a sin! Did you let him touch you here in your private parts? Don’t lie - God knows if you are lying!”

“No no, he didn’t Sister - I swear!”

I was panicking. She was still cupping my crotch and I knew how warm it felt because my whole body was burning up. She removed her hand from my buttock and began to stroke my hair, and pet my pussy with her other hand. I was breathing so hard, my head felt like it would explode hanging down over her lap. I was getting aroused and I didn’t know what to do.

“Now Maven, why do you feel so warm down here?” She was stroking me through my panties and I could not help it. I was aroused. “I..I don’t know Sister…please..” I felt so humiliated. She moved my panties and touched my little virgin pussy with my peach fuzz pubic hairs barely growing… I was in complete shock. I felt so helpless and I was mortified that she was looking at and touching my private parts! “Maven - I think you have lustful thoughts. And how to we repent from lustful thoughts?” She was actively stroking my clit now and I was getting hotter and wet, and I was paralyzed with fear? Pleasure? She held my prone body with her sturdy arms and I knew better than to squirm. “We confess Sister,” I said through a stream of tears. “Yes my good lass - we confess. Now tell me the truth - does this feel good” “Yes, Sister,” I stuttered with burning shame. “Do you want to be my good girl? And keep being teachers pet?” “Yes…Yes Sister”. I whimpered, as I succumbed to how good it felt to have someone else touch me. “God willing, I will get this lust out of you - and you will be forgiven. Do you understand?” “Yes Sister!” I cried. I didn’t understand, but I was too freaked out to know what was happening. She pulled my panties down and they fell to my ankles, falling onto my saddle Oxford shoes and my lacy socks. She spread my legs wider and continued to rub my clit. “Do you ever touch yourself like this when you’re alone at night Maven?” “Yes,” I sobbed. She spanked me “and do you bring yourself to orgasm?” I nodded, too ashamed to answer and crying uncontrollably. “You know this is a sin! Bad girl!” She spanked me while rubbing my clit faster. I was so wet and I started to moan and buck my hips onto her lap. I couldn’t help it. She felt the wetness and spanked me again. “That’s a good girl. Come on Maven - God is watching. Show him the lustful little whore you really are and he will forgive you.” I was so confused and so aroused l. No one but my mother had ever seen my vagina. Not even during PE class, not even my best friends. But she kept rubbing my little mound and knew exactly what rhythm was making me wet…and I couldn’t believe Sister Margaret was doing this to me. And my God - she was about to make me cum. She put her finger inside my tight little cunt and continued to rub my clit with her thumb - I bucked and moved my hips like a wild animal. I was feral in my need to climax and make her happy. She was really finger fucking me now - and I felt an inevitable orgasm building. “Oh My God!” I exploded on Sister Margaret’s finger and I writhed with waves of pleasure like I’d never had before. It was the most intense orgasm of my young life and I was still a virgin. I was panting and sweating and crying all at the same time. She pulled her finger from my cunt and turned me over. She held me like a child - and then she put her fingers in my mouth with all my wetness on them. She says “Taste your lustful sin! Clean my fingers and cleanse your dirty whore soul in front of me and God!” I sucked on her fingers and tasted my sweet and tart taste. She smiled and said “Now that’s my good lass Maven. You are now purified under God. You are forgiven.” She gave me a hug and patted my pussy which gave me little convulsions of pleasure. I didn’t want to leave her arms. She wasn’t even pretty but I didn’t care. She did something to me that made me want to please her. She stood me up and told me to put my panties on. I was in a daze, and did as I was told. I stood there in my wet sweaty white panties. My mouth tasting of my pussy. “Now go enjoy recess - and I’ll be watching you. If I see or think that you are being lustful, you will come back here and be cleansed whenever I think it’s necessary - do you understand?” “Yes Sister” “And this is private. This is only between you and God - and I am his intermediary - Do you understand?” “Yes Sister” She took my face in her hands and kissed my forehead and said “You were always my favorite lass. I will make sure you continue to be a very good girl!” And then she steered me out of her office.

I still can’t believe this happened to me, But this was the beginning of a four year education for me.

[ball-of-butter]

i love that red queen puts family as the chief unit of love even above true romantic love like that for some reason is SO overrated in ya media. i dont think of the characters within friendship or romantic groups first, i unconsciously catergorise them into their family.

cal loves mare but cal will put maven first always and he loves his dad and his image so much he’s willing to sacrifice his character and relationship with her to fulfil the expectations set by his family and its not until realising what his MOTHER wanted for him that he lets go. and mare loves cal but she will always put her siblings and parents first which is why everything started with gisa and shade’s loss and it ended with her sister and the loss of her brother too. maven loves mare but he loves elara more even if she twisted him and elara loves maven more than the entire kingdom and thats why she twisted him. and elara couldn’t enact her plan to make maven king without getting rid of his love for cal first!! when shade gets killed mare HAS to kill elara because that is the only way she can make sure her pain is even with at least one person.

cameron does everything for her brother’s safety, she was willing to abandon her morals and dehumanise anyone standing in her way if thats what needed to happen. and after morrey was safe she quit— nothing was worth losing herself over except him. farley and shade’s love was so pure that it brought life and family to the farleys who were already broken with the grief of being halved. their love brought a daughter named after the death of the woman that destroyed the family, and it was so healing.

and that is what KILLS me about the samos family!!! that compared to all this unconditional loyalty— the samos family is a continuous act of playing at love and loyalty, when in reality volos and larentia could not care less about their children because they dont know how to. silver society never showcases this love and so then you have so many parents fucking up their kid in so many ways but doing it out of love because thats how they see it— all except volo and larentia.

so the samos family is an exception. i cant think of evangeline without thinking of elane and ptolemus and i cant think of ptolemus without thinking of evangeline and wren. thats their family. and at least evangeline and ptolemus experienced real love with each other, even if they were never taught it (evangeline’s fear over shade’s death was proof that she could imagine a world without him and it was one of the few times she was genuinely scared in the series).

[married-to-google-translater]

Maven when Darling gets seriously hurt in an accident

Panic....

First comes panic, then comes worry and after that comes anger towards the person/thing that would have caused your suffering.

If it was someone who hurt you... well they'd be fucking dead. Maven should take care of that. He would do this because he loves you...

"If you're not ready to kill for the person you love, are you sure you really love them?" - Maven

Another person he would hate with a passion would be a doctor who has to deal with you. He would understand that they are taking care of you, but do they have to be that close? Do they have to touch you that much? Why are they staring at you for so long? Maven doesn't care about the doctor's gender.

Maven would like you to be transferred to a home care facility as soon as possible. He would like to take care of you. However, Maven does not want to risk missing something.

Maven would be there all the time to comfort you. "Ssssssh sssssh honey I know it hurts. Don't worry I'm here with you. No I'm not going anywhere... I'll never leave you alone again."

This man means what he says.

Maven would also become much more overprotective after this.

[mariacallous]

“Don’t mention the word ‘liberalism,’ ” the talk-show host says to the guy who’s written a book on it. “Liberalism,” he explains, might mean Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to his suspicious audience, alienating more people than it invites. Talk instead about “liberal democracy,” a more expansive term that includes John McCain and Ronald Reagan. When you cross the border to Canada, you are allowed to say “liberalism” but are asked never to praise “liberals,” since that means implicitly endorsing the ruling Trudeau government and the long-dominant Liberal Party. In England, you are warned off both words, since “liberals” suggests the membership of a quaintly failed political party and “liberalism” its dated program. In France, of course, the vagaries of language have made “liberalism” mean free-market fervor, doomed from the start in that country, while what we call liberalism is more hygienically referred to as “republicanism.” Say that.

Liberalism is, truly, the love that dare not speak its name. Liberal thinkers hardly improve matters, since the first thing they will say is that the thing called “liberalism” is not actually a thing. This discouraging reflection is, to be sure, usually followed by an explanation: liberalism is a practice, a set of institutions, a tradition, a temperament, even. A clear contrast can be made with its ideological competitors: both Marxism and Catholicism, for instance, have more or less explicable rules—call them, nonpejoratively, dogmas. You can’t really be a Marxist without believing that a revolution against the existing capitalist order would be a good thing, and that parliamentary government is something of a bourgeois trick played on the working class. You can’t really be a Catholic without believing that a crisis point in cosmic history came two millennia ago in the Middle East, when a dissident rabbi was crucified and mysteriously revived. You can push either of these beliefs to the edge of metaphor—maybe the rabbi was only believed to be resurrected, and the inner experience of that epiphany is what counts; maybe the revolution will take place peacefully within a parliament and without Molotov cocktails—but you can’t really discard them. Liberalism, on the other hand, can include both faith in free markets and skepticism of free markets, an embrace of social democracy and a rejection of its statism. Its greatest figure, the nineteenth-century British philosopher and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill, was a socialist but also the author of “On Liberty,” which is (to the leftist imagination, at least) a suspiciously libertarian manifesto.

Whatever liberalism is, we’re regularly assured that it’s dying—in need of those shock paddles they regularly take out in TV medical dramas. (“C’mon! Breathe, damn it! Breathe! ”) As on television, this is not guaranteed to work. (“We’ve lost him, Holly. Damn it, we’ve lost him.”) Later this year, a certain demagogue who hates all these terms—liberals, liberalism, liberal democracy—might be lifted to power again. So what is to be done? New books on the liberal crisis tend to divide into three kinds: the professional, the professorial, and the polemical—books by those with practical experience; books by academics, outlining, sometimes in dreamily abstract form, a reformed liberal democracy; and then a few wishing the whole damn thing over, and well rid of it.

The professional books tend to come from people whose lives have been spent as pundits and as advisers to politicians. Robert Kagan, a Brookings fellow and a former State Department maven who has made the brave journey from neoconservatism to resolute anti-Trumpism, has a new book on the subject, “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again” (Knopf). Kagan’s is a particular type of book—I have written one myself—that makes the case for liberalism mostly to other liberals, by trying to remind readers of what they have and what they stand to lose. For Kagan, that “again” in the title is the crucial word; instead of seeing Trumpism as a new danger, he recapitulates the long history of anti-liberalism in the U.S., characterizing the current crisis as an especially foul wave rising from otherwise predictable currents. Since the founding of the secular-liberal Republic—secular at least in declining to pick one faith over another as official, liberal at least in its faith in individualism—anti-liberal elements have been at war with it. Kagan details, mordantly, the anti-liberalism that emerged during and after the Civil War, a strain that, just as much as today’s version, insisted on a “Christian commonwealth” founded essentially on wounded white working-class pride.

The relevance of such books may be manifest, but their contemplative depth is, of necessity, limited. Not to worry. Two welcomely ambitious and professorial books are joining them: “Liberalism as a Way of Life” (Princeton), by Alexandre Lefebvre, who teaches politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, and “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society” (Knopf), by Daniel Chandler, an economist and a philosopher at the London School of Economics.

The two take slightly different tacks. Chandler emphasizes programs of reform, and toys with the many bells and whistles on the liberal busy box: he’s inclined to try more random advancements, like elevating ordinary people into temporary power, on an Athenian model that’s now restricted to jury service. But, on the whole, his is a sanely conventional vision of a state reformed in the direction of ever greater fairness and equity, one able to curb the excesses of capitalism and to accommodate the demands of diversity.

The program that Chandler recommends to save liberalism essentially represents the politics of the leftier edge of the British Labour Party—which historically has been unpopular with the very people he wants to appeal to, gaining power only after exhaustion with Tory governments. In the classic Fabian manner, though, Chandler tends to breeze past some formidable practical problems. While advocating for more aggressive government intervention in the market, he admits equably that there may be problems with state ownership of industry and infrastructure. Yet the problem with state ownership is not a theoretical one: Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister because of the widely felt failures of state ownership in the nineteen-seventies. The overreaction to those failures may have been destructive, but it was certainly democratic, and Tony Blair’s much criticized temporizing began in this recognition. Chandler is essentially arguing for an updated version of the social-democratic status quo—no bad place to be but not exactly a new place, either.

Lefebvre, on the other hand, wants to write about liberalism chiefly as a cultural phenomenon—as the water we swim in without knowing that it’s wet—and his book is packed, in the tradition of William James, with racy anecdotes and pop-culture references. He finds more truths about contemporary liberals in the earnest figures of the comedy series “Parks and Recreation” than in the words of any professional pundit. A lot of this is fun, and none of it is frivolous.

Yet, given that we may be months away from the greatest crisis the liberal state has known since the Civil War, both books seem curiously calm. Lefebvre suggests that liberalism may be passing away, but he doesn’t seem especially perturbed by the prospect, and at his book’s climax he recommends a permanent stance of “reflective equilibrium” as an antidote to all anxiety, a stance that seems not unlike Richard Rorty’s idea of irony—cultivating an ability both to hold to a position and to recognize its provisionality. “Reflective equilibrium trains us to see weakness and difference in ourselves,” Lefebvre writes, and to see “how singular each of us is in that any equilibrium we reach will be specific to us as individuals and our constellation of considered judgments.” However excellent as a spiritual exercise, a posture of reflective equilibrium seems scarcely more likely to get us through 2024 than smoking weed all day, though that, too, can certainly be calming in a crisis.

Both professors, significantly, are passionate evangelists for the great American philosopher John Rawls, and both books use Rawls as their fount of wisdom about the ideal liberal arrangement. Indeed, the dust-jacket sell line of Chandler’s book is a distillation of Rawls: “Imagine: You are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it—rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?” Lefebvre’s “reflective equilibrium” is borrowed from Rawls, too. Rawls’s classic “A Theory of Justice” (1971) was a theory about fairness, which revolved around the “liberty principle” (you’re entitled to the basic liberties you’d get from a scheme in which everyone got those same liberties) and the “difference principle” (any inequalities must benefit the worst off). The emphasis on “justice as fairness” presses both professors to stress equality; it’s not “A Theory of Liberty,” after all. “Free and equal” is not the same as “free and fair,” and the difference is where most of the arguing happens among people committed to a liberal society.

Indeed, readers may feel that the work of reconciling Rawls’s very abstract consideration of ideal justice and community with actual experience is more daunting than these books, written by professional philosophers who swim in this water, make it out to be. A confidence that our problems can be managed with the right adjustments to the right model helps explain why the tone of both books—richly erudite and thoughtful—is, for all their implication of crisis, so contemplative and even-humored. No doubt it is a good idea to tell people to keep cool in a fire, but that does not make the fire cooler.

Rawls devised one of the most powerful of all thought experiments: the idea of the “veil of ignorance,” behind which we must imagine the society we would want to live in without knowing which role in that society’s hierarchy we would occupy. Simple as it is, it has ever-arresting force, making it clear that, behind this veil, rational and self-interested people would never design a society like that of, say, the slave states of the American South, given that, dropped into it at random, they could very well be enslaved. It also suggests that Norway might be a fairly just place, because a person would almost certainly land in a comfortable and secure middle-class life, however boringly Norwegian.

Still, thought experiments may not translate well to the real world. Einstein’s similarly epoch-altering account of what it would be like to travel on a beam of light, and how it would affect the hands on one’s watch, is profound for what it reveals about the nature of time. Yet it isn’t much of a guide to setting the timer on the coffeemaker in the kitchen so that the pot will fill in time for breakfast. Actual politics is much more like setting the timer on the coffeemaker than like riding on a beam of light. Breakfast is part of the cosmos, but studying the cosmos won’t cook breakfast. It’s telling that in neither of these Rawlsian books is there any real study of the life and the working method of an actual, functioning liberal politician. No F.D.R. or Clement Attlee, Pierre Mendès France or François Mitterrand (a socialist who was such a master of coalition politics that he effectively killed off the French Communist Party). Not to mention Tony Blair or Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Biden’s name appears once in Chandler’s index; Obama’s, though he gets a passing mention, not at all.

The reason is that theirs are not ideal stories about the unimpeded pursuit of freedom and fairness but necessarily contingent tales of adjustments and amendments—compromised stories, in every sense. Both philosophers would, I think, accept this truth in principle, yet neither is drawn to it from the heart. Still, this is how the good work of governing gets done, by those who accept the weight of the world as they act to lighten it. Obama’s history—including the feints back and forth on national health insurance, which ended, amid all the compromises, with the closest thing America has had to a just health-care system—is uninspiring to the idealizing mind. But these compromises were not a result of neglecting to analyze the idea of justice adequately; they were the result of the pluralism of an open society marked by disagreement on fundamental values. The troubles of current American politics do not arise from a failure on the part of people in Ohio to have read Rawls; they are the consequence of the truth that, even if everybody in Ohio read Rawls, not everybody would agree with him.

Ideals can shape the real world. In some ultimate sense, Biden, like F.D.R. before him, has tried to build the sort of society we might design from behind the veil of ignorance—but, also like F.D.R., he has had to do so empirically, and often through tactics overloaded with contradictions. If your thought experiment is premised on a group of free and equal planners, it may not tell you what you need to know about a society marred by entrenched hierarchies. Ask Biden if he wants a free and fair society and he would say that he does. But Thatcher would have said so, too, and just as passionately. Oscillation of power and points of view within that common framework are what makes liberal democracies liberal. It has less to do with the ideally just plan than with the guarantee of the right to talk back to the planner. That is the great breakthrough in human affairs, as much as the far older search for social justice. Plato’s rulers wanted social justice, of a kind; what they didn’t want was back talk.

Both philosophers also seem to accept, at least by implication, the familiar idea that there is a natural tension between two aspects of the liberal project. One is the desire for social justice, the other the practice of individual freedom. Wanting to speak our minds is very different from wanting to feed our neighbors. An egalitarian society might seem inherently limited in liberty, while one that emphasizes individual rights might seem limited in its capacity for social fairness.

Yet the evidence suggests the opposite. Show me a society in which people are able to curse the king and I will show you a society more broadly equal than the one next door, if only because the ability to curse the king will make the king more likely to spread the royal wealth, for fear of the cursing. The rights of sexual minorities are uniquely protected in Western liberal democracies, but this gain in social equality is the result of a history of protected expression that allowed gay experience to be articulated and “normalized,” in high and popular culture. We want to live on common streets, not in fortified castles. It isn’t a paradox that John Stuart Mill and his partner, Harriet Taylor, threw themselves into both “On Liberty,” a testament to individual freedom, and “The Subjection of Women,” a program for social justice and mass emancipation through group action. The habit of seeking happiness for one through the fulfillment of many others was part of the habit of their liberalism. Mill wanted to be happy, and he couldn’t be if Taylor wasn’t.

Liberals are at a disadvantage when it comes to authoritarians, because liberals are committed to procedures and institutions, and persist in that commitment even when those things falter and let them down. The asymmetry between the Trumpite assault on the judiciary and Biden’s reluctance even to consider enlarging the Supreme Court is typical. Trumpites can and will say anything on earth about judges; liberals are far more reticent, since they don’t want to undermine the institutions that give reality to their ideals.

Where Kagan, Lefebvre, and Chandler are all more or less sympathetic to the liberal “project,” the British political philosopher John Gray deplores it, and his recent book, “The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is one long complaint. Gray is one of those leftists so repelled by the follies of the progressive party of the moment—to borrow a phrase of Orwell’s about Jonathan Swift—that, in a familiar horseshoe pattern, he has become hard to distinguish from a reactionary. He insists that liberalism is a product of Christianity (being in thrall to the notion of the world’s perfectibility) and that it has culminated in what he calls “hyper-liberalism,” which would emancipate individuals from history and historically shaped identities. Gray hates all things “woke”—a word that he seems to know secondhand from news reports about American universities. If “woke” points to anything except the rage of those who use it, however, it is a discourse directed against liberalism—Ibram X. Kendi is no ally of Bayard Rustin, nor Judith Butler of John Stuart Mill. So it is hard to see it as an expression of the same trends, any more than Trump is a product of Burke’s conservative philosophy, despite strenuous efforts on the progressive side to make it seem so.

Gray’s views are learned, and his targets are many and often deserved: he has sharp things to say about how certain left liberals have reclaimed the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his thesis that politics is a battle to the death between friends and foes. In the end, Gray turns to Dostoyevsky’s warning that (as Gray reads him) “the logic of limitless freedom is unlimited despotism.” Hyper-liberals, Gray tells us, think that we can compete with the authority of God, and what they leave behind is wild disorder and crazed egotism.

As for Dostoyevsky’s positive doctrines—authoritarian and mystical in nature—Gray waves them away as being “of no interest.” But they are of interest, exactly because they raise the central pragmatic issue: If you believe all this about liberal modernity, what do you propose to do about it? Given that the announced alternatives are obviously worse or just crazy (as is the idea of a Christian commonwealth, something that could be achieved only by a degree of social coercion that makes the worst of “woke” culture look benign), perhaps the evil might better be ameliorated than abolished.

Between authority and anarchy lies argument. The trick is not to have unified societies that “share values”—those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman’s axe—but to have societies that can get along nonviolently without shared values, aside from the shared value of trying to settle disputes nonviolently. Certainly, Americans were far more polarized in the nineteen-sixties than they are today—many favored permanent apartheid (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”)—and what happened was not that values changed on their own but that a form of rights-based liberalism of protest and free speech convinced just enough people that the old order wouldn’t work and that it wasn’t worth fighting for a clearly lost cause.

What’s curious about anti-liberal critics such as Gray is their evident belief that, after the institutions and the practices on which their working lives and welfare depend are destroyed, the features of the liberal state they like will somehow survive. After liberalism is over, the neat bits will be easily reassembled, and the nasty bits will be gone. Gray can revile what he perceives to be a ruling élite and call to burn it all down, and nothing impedes the dissemination of his views. Without the institutions and the practices that he despises, fear would prevent oppositional books from being published. Try publishing an anti-Communist book in China or a critique of theocracy in Iran. Liberal institutions are the reason that he is allowed to publish his views and to have the career that he and all the other authors here rightly have. Liberal values and practices allow their most fervent critics a livelihood and a life—which they believe will somehow magically be reconstituted “after liberalism.” They won’t be.

The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg. After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? “Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!” they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear—where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic, and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down. At least the band will be playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which they will take as some vindication. The rest of us may drown.

One turns back to Helena Rosenblatt’s 2018 book, “The Lost History of Liberalism,” which makes the case that liberalism is not a recent ideology but an age-old series of intuitions about existence. When the book appeared, it may have seemed unduly overgeneralized—depicting liberalism as a humane generosity that flared up at moments and then died down again. But, as the world picture darkens, her dark picture illuminates. There surely are a set of identifiable values that connect men and women of different times along a single golden thread: an aversion to fanaticism, a will toward the coexistence of different kinds and creeds, a readiness for reform, a belief in the public criticism of power without penalty, and perhaps, above all, a knowledge that institutions of civic peace are much harder to build than to destroy, being immeasurably more fragile than their complacent inheritors imagine. These values will persist no matter how evil the moment may become, and by whatever name we choose to whisper in the dark.

[words-of-wrath]

Conquered

Once upon a time there was a knight and a princess 😈

Enjoy 🖤

The city burned outside, as did the furnace. It blazed like the glory that was ignited in Lady Maven's heart when the siege began. She could not yet shake the exciting imagery of the battle, still raging outside though she was not part of it anymore. The trebuchet's flinging large boulders, the swords clanging and clashing. Lady Maven remembered dashing through the mud and dirt, scuffed and scorched. She remembered screeching as she drove her freshly sharpened blade into it's first heart. And soon it was dripping with the blood of the enemy, flecking droplets over the grass. And the bodies lay strewn around her, eyes hanging eternally open. Lady Maven rose a hammer up and brought it down upon the petite golden crown in front of her. She was a knight of the realm. Respectable, full of valor, loved by many. But now, oh now, she would let a more deviant side of herself out. 

She remembered what he had said to her. "I have a special job for you, Lady Maven. Oh, Maven, bravest and best of all knights!" Her commanding officer had said. She had smirked at that then and she was smirking now. Another strike on the crown, and it buckled under her force. Soon it would mold to her will, her specific desires. "Once the siege starts you are tasked with... taking care of the princess." Lady Maven struck the crown again and it nearly flattened. She dislodged the jewels from their homes and started to reshape the attire in the heat of the flaming furnace. While doing so, her eyes wandered over to the post just next to her. There she was, bound by the torso, arms behind her back, and gagged. "Do with her what you will," she remembered him saying.

The princess. The fair lady. What would they think of her if they saw her now? Lady Maven grinned deviously. Her auburn hair was spilling over her shoulders chaotically, her deep brown eyes filled to the brim with fear, wide as they could go. She watched Maven hammer away, twisting and contorting in her pretty pink dress. She was like to ruin it fussing like that. Maven cared not, however, she was nearly done. It would still be hot, but a snot-nose noble brat like this one deserved a good branding. Maven fastened the jewels back into place on the newly shaped collar. She smiled wickedly, turning in the Princess' direction. 

It was hot, but her knightly gauntlets protected her from most of the head. Princess shook her head from side to side quickly, mumbling against the pair of panties gagging her as Maven squatted down and opened up the scalding hot golden collar. Maven gripped a fistful of Princess' wavy auburn hair. She began to scream even before it was fastened around her neck. When the heated metal finally touched her bare neck, her eyes rolled to the back of her head as her skin singed. The collar cooled around her throat while tears streamed down her cheeks and drool dripped from her gagged mouth. 

"Come now, Princess," Lady Maven cooed sinisterly as she hooked a leash to her neck and started to unfasten her bonds. "Darling, a little pain never hurt anyone," she reassured as she tugged Princess toward her feet. The gag was taken off and her screams were freed from her mouth, spilling over the dirt ground. On her hands and knees, Princess could barely look up at Maven. The pain was still too much to bear. "Beg," Maven said plainly. "Beg for my mercy, Princess..."

A single sob caught in her throat as she gripped Maven's ankle with weak fingers, clutching and slightly digging her fingernails into the flesh. "Puh-puh-p-please, Lady Knight... I wish not for thine wrath... please..." she gurgled out, saliva dripping down from the corner of her mouth to the ground. "I've done n-nothing to deserve this..." Maven took a deep breath, and then a swift kick to the Princess' perfect ribs sent her careening across the ground in a heap. She tugged Princess back up, unfastening her belt and letting her trousers fall to her ankles. 

Princess watched, half awestruck, half in horror as Lady Maven's cock beat to life in the freshly heated air. Her lips pursed together and she shook her head as Maven grabbed another fistful of her hair and drew her close. Princess' nostrils were suddenly filled with Maven's scent as she nuzzled the base of her erect member. Lady Maven dragged her lips up and down her own shaft. Princess was forced to kiss up and down, coating her with a thin film of lip gloss. Finally, when she got to the tip, the knight shoved her halfway down her length. Princess hummed at the sudden filling of her cheeks, forced again to slide down to the base. She gagged. 

Tears welled up in her eyes once more as Lady Maven bucked her hips, gripping her face on both sides with her gauntlets and sliding her cock in and out. Down her throat it bored, hitting the back harshly. Maven rolled her eyes to the back of her head and let out a grunt as she continued to violate Princess' mouth. "You're no longer royalty, dear. Not when you're with me," Maven hissed through a moan. "Now, you're just a harlot. A dumb whore for my use." Princess looked up at her desperately, innocently taking Maven's cock between her lips. Finally, Lady Knight shoved her down to the base as she spilled down Princess' throat. 

Mouth dripping with seed, Princess was tugged off of Maven's half deflated cock. She was tugged up to her feet as their lips were drawn together. Lady Maven tasted herself from Princess' lips as her tongue snaked into the throat she had just gotten done violating. Princess was pushed up to the lip of the furnace. Palms extended, heat blasting over her, she winced as the leash was tugged from behind. Her back was forced to arch, and a gauntlet ripped at the skirt of her pretty pink dress. Maven's metal fingers massaged her slit. She was completely exposed underneath as Maven had ripped the panties off earlier to gag her. 

Princess had begun to sweat, the flames ever so close to her. Lady Maven squatted down, drawing her hips near with a firm grip and shoving her face into her cunt, dripping with anticipation. Princess shivered as her tongue snaked along the clit, flicking and spelling her name. M A V E N, each letter carefully drawn out with the tip of her tongue until Princess was a shivering and moaning wreck of a human being. Her tongue mercilessly invading her body, assaulting her pussy as Princess gripped the lip of the furnace, dripping with sweat. 

Maven stood soon after it was clear she couldn't take it anymore. Princess felt the tip of Maven's cock teasing her slit. She braced, back arching once more as the leash was tugged. One hand on her hip, the other gripping the leash, Lady Maven thrust into her. "Your body will be conquered like your kingdom," Maven said as she started to thrust in and out of her. "Sown like the farmlands we take, bred like the animals we raise." 

"A-ah!" was all Princess could muster as Lady Maven took her then and there, sheltered by the rickety stable. Heat spilled over her as her tits spilled from her pretty pink dress, bouncing up and down as Maven fucked her mercilessly. She was tensing, aching, body begging for more but too prideful a Princess to admit it openly. In that moment she was owned. And she may very well be for the rest of her life as Maven pumped in and out of her like a wild stallion. Maven reached around to grope her tits, tugging on the collar with one hand as she pounded Princess from behind. Her cheeks slammed against the knight's hips and jiggled as the rest of her body tensed. 

"G-good girl," Maven said with one final push, pumping loads of warm seed up into her womb. Maven could no longer hold it back, and she let out a deep cry of pleasure. A slap was planted on her ass and Maven tugged out. "You're not a noble now. You are nothing!" she said as she tossed Princess to the ground. Her pretty pink dress torn, her hair mussed, and her body aching, Princess fell to the ground. "A noble knight's toy. A slut!" Maven turned her onto her back with her boot and planted it into her chest. "Tell me you're mine," she said, cocking her head to the side and staring at Princess expectantly. The kingdom burned outside, the people screaming as they fell one by one by the sword. Princess turned her gaze onto Lady Maven and gulped. 

"I-I'm yours," she said.  

[aerticent]

girls when they remember that despite everything he did, Cal went to Maven first to check if he had a pulse, not because he was making sure he was dead but because he had hope his little brother was still alive

[nyrasbloodyclover]

when the lights go down (maven calore x reader)

cw: nightmares, hurt/comfort

a/n: this is my first ever fanfiction i think, originally posted on ao3

I got up, gasping for air, not being able to see clearly. The room spun in front of my eyes making me sick to the stomach. I desperatly needed to puke.

I was almost used to it by now. Waking up in sweat with fear that just behing my closed bedroom doors death is waiting. That's what years of terror did to a person. War was cruel and had no mercy towards anyone.

I brought shaky hands to my wet face- from sweat but now burning tears slid down my cheeks as i let out quiet sobs. It was so stupid but understandable at the same time. In front of my eyes—it was so real i couldn't breathe sometimes— i was losing everyone i loved all over again. Everyone i cared about on the verge of death. I saw him, barely breathing, silver blood sliding down his neck—dying—and i just stood there, not being able to do anything.

I had never even admitted that to him- my feelings or the nightmares because i knew his mother took all of it from him. He wouldn't understand so it was all pointless.

The memory, not real, and it will never be real, i swore to myself, made my chest hurt, i started sobbing even harder this time.

And it was desperation or need for comfort that made me get out of that haunted place i called my bedroom and walk out the door.

The marble floors were cold underneath my bare feet as i walked slowly still with tears in my eyes.

The palace was huge and anyone could get lost in it, even me, but there was one path i always knew- towards him. Maven's chambers stood out to the rest of the palace, at least to me. Anytime i was with him i felt as if no one could hurt me. Like i was safe from the rest of the world. In his head we probably weren't that close, but i could comfort myself by pretending.

I was still convinced this was one big mistake, but now that i found myself in front of big doors that led to his private rooms, i couldn't go back. Maybe he will toss me out, laugh at how weak i am, after all we lived through the same experience.

I didn't care. All i wanted is to at least see his face or hear his voice, no matter what he was saying to me. So i knocked once and secretly prayed that he wouldn't hear me. If he doesn't open i will have to suffer alone for the rest of the night, afraid to close my eyes. It was familiar to me that my sleep was cursed by nightmares. It would be easier than to appear weak in his eyes.

But no one heard my prayers as he opened the large woden doors. I tried to wipe my tears as much as i could.

His eyes were still half closed, soft white shirt crinkled from sleep and hair rustled. He didn't seem very happy that someone woke him up. He looked so unfamiliar to me in that moment because i was so used to his organized-put together self. If i hadn't been so miserable i would even laugh.

At the sight of me it was like someone had sobered him up.

"What are you doing here?"

"I couldn't sleep." My voice was weak. It was the longest explanation i could give him.

After studying m for a moment Maven crooked his head, "Are you okay?" He spoke gently, like i was some wounded animal that needed his saving. And in some way, i really was.The look on his face made me know that he was aware of my cursed dreams

That was it, i thought, my breaking point. Something really cracked in my chest as i practically threw myself at him.

He was caught off guard he froze for a moment. I didn't care if he's going to mock me for the rest of my excistance for this, i needed it, needed him.

Few seconds passed and he relaxed a bit wrapping his slender but strong arms around me. Then i started sobbing into his chest.

"Hey, what's wrong?" He whispered into my hair, "What happened?"

He closed the door behind me and guided me to the edge of his bed. I sat down and he kneeled beside me, looking up with his blue eyes, searching for the answer.

"I watched you die," my voice cracked mid-sentance making it sound even more painful. And when he realized what i said his eyes grew wide. I wasn't sure what was going through his head now, but i still continued, "I watched you die, and i wasn't able to do anything—"

Now was my time to feel caught off guard as he took me into his arms. I never saw Maven hug another human being, but he should do it more often because now, he held me so i don't break.

"I am alive," his hand brushed the back of my head, "I am alive because of you, don't ever doubt that." His words made me sob harder into his chest.

His scent consumed me as i closed my eyes against him.

Maven never broke the hug and we sat there, in the dark of his room, until i parted us and looked at his beautiful, beautiful face.  

"I hate nightmares," i said after minutes of silence. "Sometimes, i wish your mother took them from me too."

He frowned at that, still holding my hands, "She took my nightmares, yes, but with them she robbed me of my ability to love, to care."

His fingers traced invisible patterns on the back of my hand. He wasn't looking at me. "Sometimes, you make me forget that." And i felt as if my heart was beating again.

I didn't know what to do after that. Did i get the comfort i wanted? I wasn't sure, but his words did make me feel better, so i got up and started walking towards the door. I hope our relationship wouldn't change much after tonight. I knew i would feel stupid and even more miserable in the morning but i guess it was worth it.

Then suddenly i felt the burning hand around my wrist, "Why are you leaving?"

Did he want me to stay? "Well, i tho—"

"You thought wrong. Come here," he said as he pulled me closer to him, and under the red covers. 

I layed my head on the burner prince's chest that rose and fell with each of his breaths. The proof that he was alive. Alive and well and beside me.

After a while, when the lights completely went down, i wasn't sure if i was asleep yet but i heard him whisper, "I will take your nightmares if it means you'll sleep peacefully."

[minijenn]

Universe Falls Future Chapter Titles

I'm on a roll with planning today so have the never before seen UFF chapter title list!

Chapter 1: Happily Ever After

Chapter 2: Other Friends

Chapter 3: Your New Best Friend

Chapter 4: Who We Are

Chapter 5: No Matter What

Chapter 6: Independent Together

Chapter 7: Drift Away

Chapter 8: True Kinda Love

Chapter 9: Change

Chapter 10: Found

Chapter 11: Reset

Chapter 12: Reboot

Chapter 13: Little Homeschool

Chapter 14: Crushed

Chapter 15: Interdimensional Pen Pals

Chapter 16: Guidance

Chapter 17: Sunshine Gem

Chapter 18: Rose Buds

Chapter 19: Fashion Maven

Chapter 20: Pines Productions

Chapter 21: Volleyball

Chapter 22: Stepping Stone

Chapter 23: Bluebird

Chapter 24: Redemption Squad

Chapter 25: Snow Day

Chapter 26: Trifusion Traditions

Chapter 27: Why So Blue

Chapter 28: Little Graduation

Chapter 29: Artistically Challenged

Chapter 30: Prickly Pair

Chapter 31: Equilateral

Chapter 32: Bismuth Casual

Chapter 33: Upheaval

Chapter 34: Never Alone

Chapter 35: Never Forever

Chapter 36: Never Together

Chapter 37: Growing Pains

Chapter 38: Mr. Universe

Chapter 39: The Stan With a Plan

Chapter 40: Night Shift

Chapter 41: Fragments

Chapter 42: Homeworld Bound

Chapter 43: Everything's Fine

Chapter 44: I Am My Monster

Epilogue: The Future

[argisthebulwark]

Hold Onto Me, Dear. You're Too Far Away.

summary: Drabbles of how various Skyrim men would react to their partner passing away. gn reader, no pronouns or y/n used. feat: Brynjolf, Miraak, Erandur, Vilkas, Teldryn, Mercer, Arnbjorn warnings: Non graphic depiction of death/loss. Grief.

Brynjolf would be lost. His mind has no capacity for work, hardly managing to keep himself upright. The depression, grief, denial, the all-consuming anguish he cannot escape is more than he can take. Eyes full of pity and empty words of reassurance do nothing, he can do nothing other than miss you. He closes himself off. He is unwilling to become close to anyone else in fear of losing yet another person he loves. There has been too much loss already, surely loneliness is easier than this. "'Hope Nocturnal's treatin' you right, love. If there's somethin' after death you better be waitin' for me."

Miraak would tear the world to shreds. Without you, he sees no point in allowing the world continuing to exist. No corner of Nirn is spared from his rage. Refusing to appear weak he forges his sadness into a burning, bottomless anger. He allows no daedra to take your body nor honor you as their champion, fighting even Hermaeus Mora away from any attempt to claim you. All other titles fell second to the one you held most dear, the one he whispered against your skin every night before sleep. His beloved. "You gave me your word! You swore that should we go, we would go together. You lied."

Erandur would mourn you deeply and eternally. He ensures that you live on in every action he takes, your memory carried on in him. Each marriage he presides over and every couple he blesses is done in your name as much as Lady Mara’s. His first and last thoughts of the day reserved only for you. Your name features frequently in his prayers, never letting you go. "My dear, I know you are looking down on me. I hope you are proud that I continued our work mending this nation, but words cannot express how badly I wish we could do this hand in hand."

Vilkas throws himself into his work. Your work. Becoming the Harbinger in your stead is only natural as you were so close, sharing the workload for years. He works himself to exhaustion because it is easier than confronting the chasm of grief that’s opened deep in his chest. It is only in the wee hours of early morning when he finally thinks of you. When night is beginning to pass and the Sun plucks at the horizon, vision blurred with oncoming sleep. He's wrapped in blankets that still smell faintly of your favorite soap and wishes desperately that you would somehow come back to him. "Please, just one more night. I can't do it all on my own. I just need one more night with you."

Teldryn loses his laughter. Gone is the friendship, all clients becoming nothing more than that. His helmet remains firmly in place as a clear barrier that he will maintain. There are too many lost friends and stories he alone remembers. He keeps the same table at the Retching Netch and can almost imagine you next to him. He stares over the rim of his drink daring you to plop down into your usual spot, laughing at the idea of being apart. Other patrons learn quickly that despite it being an empty chair it is not to be touched. "Been thinking about heading to Skyrim, I've seen enough of Solstheim to last a lifetime. Sure wish you were comin' with me."

Mercer’s rage would tear through Riften like a storm. All sense of duty is forgotten in his thirst for revenge. Bloodlust is his saving grace, the thread that keeps him from barreling headfirst into grief. Brynjolf recruited you, Delvin and Vex trained you, Maven hired you - they are all at fault in his eyes. He will not rest until your death is paid back tenfold. He bottles up any thoughts of you until he lays face up in the Cistern, bloodied and beaten by people he'd once considered family. The rage fueling his rampage finally deflates, the dam broken and that horrible ache filling every inch of his body. He lost you and had no one else to blame but himself. "Never thought I'd see the day, never thought I'd be the one left here missing you."

Arnbjorn would depart from the Dark Brotherhood. Two loves, two Sanctuaries, two tragic losses. He can't remain stuck there, frozen in time surrounded by all those memories. He's skilled enough to forge his own way in the world, departing from Dawnstar without looking back. Metal working allows him the solitude he craves, somewhere far away from persistent questions and eyes filled with pity. He wants only to escape the onslaught of memories of those he’s lost, steeling his heart against ever loving again.  "This is all your fault. You're the one that made me care. Your fault for makin' me fall for you."

[rosystardust]

Yandere rottmnt

Rottmnt yandere writing (Romantic)

Warning: Mentions of violence, unhealthy relationships, manipulation, kidnapping. (Do not do any of this in real life, this is just for entertainment purposes)

(Notes: I’m changing Y/n to Mc or just saying you)

Sorry this took so long to post, but I had writers block and it took me a while to write.

Raph

Overprotective and clingy 

He just wants to keep Mc safe and protected, and the best way to do that is to always be around them

He loves hugging Mc because if they’re in his arms, nothing will hurt them, so he cuddles with Mc a lot

As the oldest, he feels responsible for his family's safety, and he includes you in that, so he absolutely loves when you depend on him for anything, it doesn’t matter what it is, it could be just getting something off a shelf, or helping you train

Is very careful around you, because of all his spikes and that he’s just so big and could hurt you so very easily, and he’ll always try to keep you away from his spikes, just in case

Raph wishes he didn’t have to deal with being a Hamato, and fighting villains, and almost dying a lot, because you spend less time together because of it, and you’re in danger cause you’re friends with him

He’ll try and find the courage to confess first, but if you do, he won’t have any issues with it 

If Raph confesses first, then it’ll be on accident, he just blurted it out while you two were cuddling or something

Loves to just be with you, you two don’t maven have to do anything, he just likes being around you

As much as he loves affection is private, he gets so embarrassed with PDA, and doesn’t like it that much

Leo

Manipulative, self-indulgent

Leo wants to be needed by Mc

He’s highly insecure about himself, and he wants to feel helpful to them because he associates his worth with what he can do for others

If Mc comes to Leo with their problems, Leo will feel so proud of himself, and he will do anything to help

Will try to isolate Mc from people, so he can be the only one they depend on

Very manipulative, he makes it seem like isolating you from everyone is a good thing because they “Never really cared about you” or “Are just using you” and other various excuses that he has come up with to keep you with him

The only people you’re allowed to communicate with other than him, are his brothers, Splinter, April, and Casey (he does not trust anyone else with you)

He gets jealous very easily and always wants attention and affirmation that he’s worth it, and that you love him

He seems very cocky and jokes around a lot, but he’s actually insecure and uses jokes to hide it

He’s very affectionate, and caring, but he can be overbearing a lot

Donnie

Impulsive, dependant 

Donnie has definitely hacked into the street cameras near your house, and the school cameras, so he can always watch you

Most likely has at least two trackers on you, and checks them every few hours

He craves your affirmation, and does so many things to impress you, like inventing things that would interest you, or being reckless to protect you

If Mc compliments him, he’ll be so very happy, because like Leo, he’s very insecure

Will try and get you to spend as much time with him as possible, but he's not that jealous, cause he knows you can never replace him

He does worry about it, but he's convinced himself you love him back, because why else would you give him, and only him, compliments

Donnie will only make a move, and ask you out if his brothers or April pressure him enough, or if you give him hints that you like him, however, hes extremely dense and doesn’t get social cues, so even if you flirted with him everyday, he’d never notice it

If you confess first, then he’ll automatically accept, but he’ll definitely try to hide his obsession with you, even more than before 

All he wants is a cute domestic relationship with you, but he’d never admit it

Mikey

Worshiping, obsessive 

Sees Mc as some sort of god, that must be worshiped and praised, and will do absolutely anything for them

Is either very shy around you, or ecstatic to see you, but either way he loves being around you, and he sees it as a gift from you, that he gets to spend the most time with you

Has a closet in his room that’s just filled with stuff you gave him, stuff he stole from you, photos of you, or just stuff that reminds him of you

He does somewhat try to hide his obsession, but he wouldn’t really care that much if you found out, unless you left him for it

Mikey is extremely energetic with his fighting style as is, but if / when he fight people for you (They’re either trying to hurt you or they already have) he’s even more energetic, and much more violent

If it means protecting you, he’ll do anything, even if it's morally wrong or illegal  

If you find out he’s obsessed and you do try and leave him he’ll be devastated, he sees you as a god like being, so clearly the only reason you left is because he’s not good enough for you, or he did something to offend you

He’ll try and get you back by any means necessary, even if you try and cut contact with him

But if you don’t then Mikey will be the happiest person ever, and will probably ask to marry you

[ball-of-butter]

youre like the only account i look at on here for red queen content (specifically maven) so please go full psychological analysis on maven please. i love your posts they itch my brain perfectly

omygosh anon 🤭 tyyyy tyyyy

theres so much to say about maven and its kinda crazy considering he doesn’t get that much actual page time. so keep in mind that many people could have different interpretations of his character, since he is quite elusive. and i may or may notttt be biassed idk.

the first thing i believe: he's a character that, for all his supposed motivations, had no ambition or dream of his own. he was a complete vessel of his mother’s spite, so he makes for a pretty interesting paradox. mare was haunted by a ‘false’ maven that didn't exist (debatable). cal was haunted by an ‘erased’ maven that used to exist. what is maven haunted by? everything and everyone? he’s a ghost himself, he’s the one who usually did the haunting, but even when you get his POV in the books, there’s a tragedy in the negative space you find. there are clear holes in his psyche that he also subconsciously attempts to fill (his memories always fight to bubble to the surface, but they invoke feelings he can’t feel anymore) and never can. despite how pissed off he is at everyone and everything, he so very clearly yearns for love and approval, to the point where he is absolutely delusional about it. there he was, shocked that mare would reject him after he imprisoned and betrayed her and the scarlet guard. here’s him outraged that anabel lerolan would side with cal after he plotted her son’s murder.

elara basically sculpted a monster, and i don’t think that can be debated since its pretty clearly stated in text. even maven knew what she took from him and the extent of the abuse— but he didn't care because she gave him the love he craved. she couldn’t fill it all, if maven’s obsession with mare was anything to go by. i do think elara genuinely loved and adored him, but i don’t know if i would use the word ‘enabler’ for her because it seems too soft a word. maven is elara. elara dies and maven can’t survive on his own for long without her. he was her iron fist in a way, but neither had much interest in norta as a country like most scheming for the throne usually do– which i find so interesting. it wasn’t political, only personal.

now then there lies the debate of choice— some maven fans are completely comfortable heaping all of the blame onto elara and calling it a day. but i think even elara was failed in a similar way maven was. red queen is cool because it shows how evil is encouraged and nurtured in oppressive societies, how certain individuals even in privileged positions will be abused and neglected, how vices are taught to be hidden rather than treated and how violence is perpetuated as the surest, most permanent decree. every character is affected by this system in some way, and i could talk about it for years but i’ll save you the time. my point is that this would apply to maven, but that doesn’t make him void of choice. it’s sort of predictable that he would make the terrible choices he did in the series considering he never had the chance to escape what predestined narrative was already planned for him, but no one was physically forcing him to burn his initial into mare. no one was physically forcing him to try slaughter a whole race of people. no one physically forced him to blow up naercey, or taunt cal after forcing him to murder his dad, or psychologically torture mare when he kept her as prisoner. yes, there’s nuance but maven is also much too comfortable with being a terrible person, because thats what ultimately earns him love, respect and approval.

i don’t think maven could’ve been saved, not because 'the damage was too bad,' but because he had no desire to be saved, and no one but cal had wanted to put in the effort to save him. i always find it interesting how cal secretly resented mare for killing maven, even though it was such a longtime coming, and he would never voice it because considering all maven had done to her, she had more than the right. but i don’t want to yap so much about maven’s relationship with cal because i’ll be here forever. nor do i want to talk too much about his relationship with mare. i'll only say that when i was talking about his death scene i did mention how much of an impact both of them had on each other, how maven was so scary to mare because he was a viable twisted path that represented the worst of her. i think mare could’ve been (my biassed interpretation) a path for him too, but he was so far gone by the second book and especially after elara’s death that he never considered it (would’ve been too late for him then anyway). i have some thoughts on the chances of maven rehabilitating if he had the tools and will to. some thoughts. they won’t go here though.

lastly i just want to link this post which had super interesting additions by @lucy-the-cat that delves into maven from a psychological perspective. its sooooo well written and i still think about it to this day.

last thing i wanna do is glaze a bit so im just gonna 😭 its refreshing to see this sort of villain be portrayed as an mmc who isn’t attractively suave and super misunderstood and depressed and supremely intelligent for what he does– maven is intelligent and sad, but he's presented as a floundering, insecure, delusional brat that the fmc understands entirely. something so refreshing in how he can only either be hated, and at best, pitied.