#I stand by my theory that the true villain of a story is its' author

[her-imperius-condessy]

The sun will go down, everybody knows it...

It's basic Astronomy.

Guys. Were we warned from the very beginning?

[bloodyopvs]

The Sanguinarch isn't a bad villain or a cliched one.

The only thing that his writing suffers from is the fact that a lot of the finer points in his characterisation were easily missed or flew over our heads due to Arknights's ambiguous writing — I also had to do some deep lore diving to the Arknights Terra Wiki to be able to piece a more coherent picture of him, something more profound than merely 'he's just a mindless psychopath and a remorseless war criminal'.

And it strikes me what he was actually meant to be, in Chapter 13, where he was the main villain.

He is, for lack of a better word, an inverted Jesus figure.

There's a lot of things supporting this.

First, we have the crown of thorns (actually the thing that got into this rabbit hole) that his chibi, boss sprite wore in his second phase. His artist, Chuzenji, also drew him with the same thing. The crown of thorns's symbolism is obvious. Jesus wears one, including his depiction in the famous movie, The Passion of the Christ. Though, it's probably not that special on its own; but it's only the tip of the iceberg.

Then we got the meaning of his name, a portmanteau of a Hebrew word and an angel's name —— 'Dook', meaning pierced, and Ariel, an angel whose name literally means 'Lion/Hero of God', at least according to the Terra Wiki —— and things are starting to get intriguing. Put together, 'Duq'arael' means 'Pierced Lion/Hero of God'. The angel's name aside, the lion is an animal that symbolised 'God's strength and command', one that was closely related to God, to the point where C.S Lewis, author of the famous Chronicles of Narnia, use Aslan, a lion, as a stand-in metaphor for God.

And yes, the deeper you go into Sarkaz lore, the more you discover that it was heavily inspired by the lore of Abrahamic religions in real life, although I won't delve too deeply into this or start drawing parallels to real life events, since it's an extremely sensitive issue. But my point is that Arknights has always been deeply influenced by religious mythology and symbolism, and Duq'arael's name goes deep. It hinted at us on his true character——how he views himself.

(Him killing his own elder brother, who was an 'ideal' King of Sarkaz, was also a clear allusion to the story of Cain and Abel, and ties in with the occult theory that Cain was the first vampire in history, but that's an aside. Though this also serves to strengthen the point that Arknights has always been deeply influenced by religious mythology and symbolisms.)

Back to the topic, I would also argue that his design cleverly reflected this hidden allusion. His uncanny colour palette—white, red and black—could be interpreted as a reversal, so to speak, of Jesus's darker robes and dark hair (as he was so often and popularly depicted to be). His entire design screams vampire nobility, but there's something uncanny about it, which was highlighted when we were first introduced to him in Chapter 10 (or was it 11?). He was described as an ordinary-seeming nobleman, one who wouldn't look out of place speaking about current politics in Victorian telly.

More than that, though...although he wears black and red, 'traditional' vampire colours, his main colour is obviously white. White hair, white clothes.

Both the absence of colour, and the colour of purity, innocence, and rebirth.

Duq'arael is also the 'Prince of Blood'. Amiya, during their confrontation in Chapter 13, asks him what does blood means to him. As a concept, as a symbol——a meaning. Now his answer here isn't that important (although it's curious that he equates it with suffering, especially that of the Sarkaz's), but there's a hidden symbolism bomb here: Blood symbolised passion. When someone angers us, for example, we say that it makes our 'blood boil'. When our lover arouses us, or when we were afraid during a horror movie, we say that it gets 'our blood racing'.

In line with this, Dukare's goal——what he hopes to achieve by sacrificing so many people, including his own people——is to give the Sarkaz, who had been robbed of not only their homes and lands but also their entire identity, who had been brutally dehumanised and discriminated against for centuries, salvation.

At least in his perspective. He spilled a single drop of blood for them, a drop of pure Teekaz blood, in order to give them this salvation as well as to once again summon their original sin in the form of the first Originium. He even goes so far that this is their curse——the curse of being a Sarkaz, the curse of Originium. The implication here is that he wanted to SAVE them. But because he's twisted, because he's 'inverted' Jesus, he accomplishes that by sacrificing others on the cross instead of himself. A selfish 'saviour'.

He also blesses the Sarkaz with his blood, granting them strength. Once more: misplaced salvation.

But wait, there's another layer to this.

Duq'arael's the ONLY one who saw himself as such. He has a saviour complex despite his pretenses to be indolent, and obviously, due to the crimes and sins he committed, others saw him merely as a murderer, a monster, and a blood purist. Someone who can't let go of the past, and is still heavily fettered by it——someone who blatantly refuses to let go.

He, after all, killed his elder brother out of disappointment. He also testifies that he saw several other Kings of Sarkaz come and go during his long life, and with each passing one, he grew more and more disappointed, more and more disillusioned. More and more jaded. That is why he wanted to kill Amiya too; obsessed with slaying her, even. Not because he's blindly obsessed with murder in itself (perhaps not only because), but because he's past the point of saving. Which was his tragedy, and one that Amiya and Logos mourned after they pushed him off the Feranmut.

This motivation of offering salvation is also likely why he agreed to help Theresis take Londinium. He had alluded to it himself; his ultimate goal or even his motivation wasn't to rebuild Kazdel, especially not as the shitty mobile city that most recent Sarkaz remembered it as.

No, he wanted to 'save' them. To offer them salvation; to return their birthright, which is the entire world of Terra, to them. Back from the hands of the Ancients and the Elders, outworlder races who once wrested it out of their grasp and then proceeded to give them misery for centuries. Millennias, even.

Again, that is his role——The False Saviour.

I don't get why Chapter 13's title was 'The Whirlpool That Is Passion' at first, but then I realised that HG was being sneaky. They couldn't possibly call it 'The Passion of the Vampire', which would be TOO on the nose, so that's why they call it that:

The Whirlpool (symbolising Dukare being twisted by his past and his disillusionment) That Is Passion (the Jesus symbolism). It's very clever.

In addition to all of the above, on their 4th Anniversary art, his artist drew him with a white lily. The flower of (you guessed it) purity, innocence, and most importantly, rebirth. It does work with his image as a vampire, plainly speaking, and the Master of the Crimson Court who's obsessed with the purity of the blood, but I'd say it's more than that, since the white lily is also Mary's flower. Mary, as in the Mother of Christ.

So, no, The Sanguinarch isn't a bad villain. While he is undoubtedly a war criminal (wouldn't say that he's misunderstood, since he's an absolute dipshit nonetheless), he's not 'just' a psychopath.

[waitingforsecretsouls]

Assorted Zahard thoughts & ramblings

Ever since I started reading Tower of God years ago, and before he even properly entered the story, the character I was undoubtedly most fascinated by was Zahard (or, reading the official translation on LINE, ‘Jahad’), the famous yet nebulous ‘King of the Tower’. A threatening and oppressive authority in the early story, introduced in its gravity through the RED member Lo Po Bia Ren and his attempted elimination of Anaak intermingled with the basics of the concept of the princesses’ of Zahard, introduced through Endorsi and Anaak (and to a smaller extend, Yuri).

What a welcoming and charming introduction to the guy (courtesy of Ren, of course)! Yet nonetheless, after binging the entirety of the released story and in keeping up with it since, in no small part due to my partialty to villains and anatgonists of most kinds, my initial fascination remained, even as many other sections of the fan community seemed to grow increasingly de-mystified and disillusioned with Zahard as an antagonistic force, or rather, a character. Partly a natural consequence of getting actual in-person appearances as the story moved into the wider world of the Tower and started involving its upper echolons in the plot, but in parts also seemingly caused by many readers misunderstandings of the small glimpses we were given into the Irregulars backstory, continuing on into (imo) misunderstandings about Zahard as a a character. While obviously every reader will have their own opinions and readings of events and characters, this subjectivety only stretches to a certain point, and sometimes reaches an extend at which the subjective starts to contradict what was actually depicted in the story. This wanna-be meta is not an attempt to attack fans who hold these opinions but simply my attempt to, mostly for myself, explain how I see Zahards character and how come it’s so very different from the popular fanon.

Guardian of the Rice Pot and the Floor of Death

While the story makes sure to introduce Zahard early by his reputation and influence, through the princesses and the Royal Enforcement Division (RED), Zahard the individual takes a backseat to the adventures of Bam and his shifting group of friends. While the beginning of season 2 certainly opens question with the introduction of the concept of the ‘Prince of Zahard’ the focus of these theories is the newly introduced Wangnan Ja and not potential character traits of Zahard.

The first glimpse given to us at Zahard the person comes from the artificial being residing in the Hell Train, the so-dubbed ‘God of Guardians’, as he oversees Bams training to find his true self and power. Tempted by said power within himself (dubbed as the ‘Blue Thryssa’ by the fandom) the Guardian silently warns him to ‘ not give in to the power inside of you...You must not become like ‘Jahad’...’ (Tower of God # 251). Given the conversation the reader is being shown between Bam and his inner power in the very same chapter, which consists of the latter trying to convince Bam that he has the power to stand above everyone else to prevent himself from being victimized by them, refuted by Bam himself as meaningless, since it’s based on hatred and trampling over others, the implication is that Zahard himself instead took his powers words at face value and gave in to it, in order to become king. And, as implied, in order to rule over others for his own self-satisfaction and desires.

However, when Bam visits the Guardian once more after his experiences in the Name Hunt Station, asking him to teach him ‘how to become a God’, how to better protect his companions, the Guardian rejects him and denies his request, revealing that the previously set up implication about Zahard does not ring true.

“Boy...Great Power cannot make everyone happy. Long ago, some child asked me something like that. To teach him how to become the ‘King of the Tower’. When I asked the child why he needed such power, this is how he replied.

‘I want to turn this Tower into a place where everyone can live happily.’ 

“I helped him grow stronger, and he really did get stronger. And ultimately, he became the King of the Tower...But in the end, that child failed to make everyone happy. I don’t know exactly what happened...But a lot of things changed after he left this place. I may not know everything in the world, but I’m sure of one thing.

Having tremendous power won’t make everyone around you happy.”

(God of Guardians, Tower of God, #310)

 This little speech both refutes the implication that Zahard (at the time the Guardian met him) sought power for its own sake, to oppress others, and introduces Zahard as the failed idealist: clearly something between sharing his dream with the guardian and its execution went awry, now to find out what happened, something the Guardian himself wonders about (as a side note, I can’t help but find the guardian calling him ‘child’ bittersweet. Yes, when Zahard met the Guardian he was a child and so obviously it’s normal to call him that, as he calls Bam ‘boy’, but the way he frames (and only has the experience to frame) his persona as the idealistic (and arguably naive) child, who ‘failed to make everyone happy’...Idk, it gets to me more than many of the grand and ‘epic’ yet remote revelations and tragedies). It’s with these new excpectations (Zahard used to be(?) a guy who genuinely cared about making as many people as possible happy) and questions (so wtf happened?) that the reader goes on into the next arc, the Floor of Death (FoD), where SIU unloads the most compact and revealing lore bomb to date, in the form of Garam Zahard and the diary of Arlene Grace. And, in many cases, the just a few chapters ago revealed idealistic young Zahard and his motivation seems to go out the window in many minds, overwritten by the new information instead of augmented by it, or serving as a foundation for receiving it.

To go chronologically, ie starting with the reveals about the journey of the Great Warriors instead of the backstory for the FoD, we learn that instead of eleven Irregulars there were thirteen, a man only known as ‘V’ and Arlene Grace, the founders of FUG, who were erased from official knowledge and history. We learn (from Arlenes diary itself, mind you, which to me always gave the information a probably unitended comedic side effect; in the best case through Garam filtering her knowledge about Zahards hidden love, as received from Eurasia Anne Zahard, through Arlenes diary with the benfit of hindsight and reckognizing early signs of that love/crush in her writing about Zahard) that apparently, ‘right from the start’, Zahard had a crush on Arlene, whereas Arlene had a crush on V. Sometime during their climb they began a relationship and then...I’m just going to quote the full thing, since it’s pretty vital to some of my biggest gripes with Zahards mischaracterisation:

“And at the end of their great journey, Jahad announced that he would stop climbing the Tower and become king. V and Arlene, who wanted to keep climbing the Tower, criticized Jahad. Arlene expressed Jahad in her records as being ‘blinded by falsehoods’.

“But Jahad didn’t stop. He made a deal with the administrator to become the King of this Tower and after that, he found Arlene and proposed to her. But Arlene was already engaged to V. Arlene refused Jahad’s marriage porposal and ran away with V. Then the two of them formed an organisation which opposed Jahad and started a war in order to steal the ‘key’ which Jahad had.

“Jahad was also enraged and fought them. In the process, there were many conflicts even among the 10 leaders...But there aren’t many details about this aspect in Arlene’s pocket. What I know for sure is that the 10 leaders sided with Jahad for some reason, and ultimately V and Arlene lost the war and became fugitives.”

“And as she ran away, within Arlene’s body, yet another life was waiting to be born.[...] That child...was murdered by Jahad. Having heard the rumours that she had a child, Jahad had tracked down the child and killed it right in front of Arlene’s eyes, not long after it was born”.

(Garam Zahard, Tower of God #320)

Since this is not (fully) an Arlene and V meta, I’ll cut off here for now, and examine this quote piece by piece. A common, but contradicting the actual text, interpretation of Zahard in this segment and time period is boiled down to ‘Possessive Zahard was on an ego trip, so he made himself king and sealed off the higher floors so no one could become a greater power than him, and high off his own ego he proposed Arlene. When she refused, he entered a blood rage and started a war against her and V over his hurt feelings, and once defeated tracked them down and killed her child because he’s such an incel that he couldn’t stand the thought of Arlene having a child with someone who wasn’t him.’ Safe to say, no part of the revealed information bears out this interpretation, all the more so taking into consideration later reveals. But, as I said, one piece at a time. The first thing that irks me when overlooked is that SIU was very careful not to reveal either sides motivations here: why do V and Arlene want to keep climbing (as the only ones we know of)? We don’t know. Why did Zahard suddenly decide to stop climbing, and not only that, but go so far as to literally seal off the higher floors? We don’t know. What we do know is that Arlene and V ‘criticized’ Zahard, ergo likely had some, at the very least one, big argument(s) about this (no other leaders are reported as siding/arguing with V and Arlene at this stage). Arlene claims that Zahards reasons don’t hold true, she literally describes him as ‘being blinded by falsehoods’, which to me always took the wind out of the sails of the ‘ego-trip’ argument by itself, and any potential malicious/egotistical tint to his motivation (at least if you believe Arlene to be averse to such), because it shows that Arlenes main gripes with Zahards reasoning is that she does not believe it actually applies, not that the reasons by themselves are ridiculous or narrow-minded. This is obviously only going by the English translation on LINE, which is notorious for the occasional slip-ups, but going by this formulation Zahard is depicted as ‘misled’ rather than ‘willfully obstructive to the truth’.

The next big thing is the proposal, which is mainly taken alongside the incel argument as Zahard wanting to have his cake and eat it too, to the point of delusion. However, this is ignoring the obvious and just narrated, dare I say, political divide between V and Arlene and Zahard’s faction (everyone else, apparently). While I’m not going to argue that it’s impossible that his feelings for Arlene played a part in it, I’m just going to point out that a very recent part of the Tower of God story has been about someone trying to bind Bam to his cause via marriage with someone from his ‘faction’, so to speak, as a political arrangement. And it has always been (yes, even before the recent arc) this perspective that informed my view of the proposal. Because Zahard knows that Arlene (and V) are opposed to his current course, we were just told that they ‘criticized’ Zahard, and given how important the issue was to Arlene, I daresay it would have been a harsh criticism indeed. For Zahard to think that would just magically go away, even if Arlene had agreed to his proposal...Sorry, but I don’t buy it, and it doesn’t gell with literally anything we see from Zahard. While he certainly has emotions, it is never these emotions that dictate his actions, or at the very least, he always has logical reasons to act the way he does, even if his emotions are in tune with them and one can’t argue that they don’t factor into his decision. So I always saw it as a last ditch attempt at a political compromise (plus splitting up the V and Arlene team-up): yes, I’ll still seal the higher floors but you (Arlene) are going to get an equal say in how everything is run in the floors up until now. And if you believe V and Arlene (though the one credited is only young!V...) to be interested in the Towers residents and their well-being it would certainly be a way for them to act on that conviction. But aside from Arlene maybe being able to represent V’s at this point of their journey premused still existing and presumed benign ‘interest’ in the normal Tower inhabitants, there’s not a lot of it in this for Arlene, plus she’s already engaged to V, so a no to the offer. Bully. So, what does she do? Runs away with V, forms FUG and starts a war for the key to the higher floors.

 I...sorry? To be clear, my goal here is not to argue something like ‘Zahard is not an antagonist’ or ‘V and Arlene are the true villains!’, but it is, simply put, extremely irritating when this canonical fact gets turned around and people argue and theorize as if Zahard had started the war, which, okay, some people have probably a lot going on and don’t re-read, have the time to-re-read, or the interest, and shouldn’t be blamed for that, but this is still an extremely...relevant part of the lore and how it reflects on the characters involved, and not to start with that again, but this reversal truly seems to feed into peoples perception of Zahard as ‘scorned lover’, so I do feel the need to harp on it a bit. Because if you argue, whether because you truly remember it like that, or because it seems right, since Zahard is the most prominently presented antagonist, that it was Zahard who escalated the disagreement into war-of course he’s going to come off as petty! And at the same time, V and Arlene are robbed of the strenght of their conviction, that made them go ‘fuck it, talking leads nowhere, we’re gonna abscond and build our forces, then attack.’ Which is what they do, and it’s then that ‘Jahad was [...] enraged and fought them.’ If you consider that Zahard was the acknowledged leader of their operation, plus the fact that they all used to be friends, of course he’s going to feel angry and betrayed, even leaving aside the much discussed love triangle. Especially considering that he was going to share the key (or at least the half of it that made the 13 month weapons) among the Great Warriors.

During the war there was conflict among the 10 leaders, which as of now seems to be the main reason he abandoned that avenue (most likely compounded by V and Arlene starting a civil war against him)- yes, eventually they all sided with Zahard, but not so from the start, and who knows how committed once they did? Then of course FUG started to kill their children for siding with Zahard and they all would have started to hate that unpleasant legacy of V and Arlene at least a little, but that’s long after the bits relevant here. So, once all the leaders side with Zahard, V and Arlene lose the war, and become fugitives. They lay low on the FoD and Arlene gives birth to Bam, and then Zahard ruins their newly formed family by coming in and killing Bam (while V was apparently...away? Would he not have felt Zahard coming? I don’t have a firm theory or anything, but we do know there was something suspect about BabyBam from the start, and afterwards V kills himself instead of trying to support Arlene...Hm.). Given everything I’ve written up to this point, safe to say I do not think Zahard killed Bam just because he was sooo overpowered by jealousy at V and Arlene that he entered a murderous rage. We’re not yet at the hidden floor arc, but even just looking at the above quote you can see some suspicious stuff. So, Zahard hears rumours that she has a child...specifically tracks down the child, almost as if he had been, say, on the lookout for news of that kind (and instead of tracking down V and Arlene, founders of FUG, the largest thorn in the side of his empire, who started a war against him and are fugitives, whom, it appears, he could have found whenever he liked, given how little difficulties he seems to have had tracking down BabyBam), kills it and then...again, leaves V and Arlene to their own devices, free to plot vengeance, even. I don’t have a coherent theory or anything, and again, my point is not that babymurder is cool just because there was something off about that baby and that Zahard is not an anatgonist, but to point out why I do not adhere to perhaps more poular interpretations of that chain of events. It’s only sometime after Arlene leaves that he builts himself a temple there, which is understandably seen as a dick move, but if you consider that V and Arlene are the founders of FUG, an organization that is compared at times to a religion (in its difficulty to be stamped out), how V and Arlene are venerated in FUG like Zahard is in the empire, how Sophia Tan considers  Seolhyangwyon sacred simply because Arlene once stayed there (Tower of God #549), it reads more as an attempt to supplant the floors spiritual and symbolic significance to FUG with his own symbol. Again, still a dick move, but easy to see as politicaly motivated. Because Arlene was not some random woman but a political figure of enormous significance in her own right.

Looking at Zahard, the obvious question the reader now has, going into the next arc, is: so why did Zahard decide to stop? Looking at the fallout of his decision, one certainly can’t help asking if it was worth it, what it would have cost him to just keep going? Wasn’t that his goal from the start?

Hidden Floor (and the puzzle’s starting to come together)

 And so we come to the Hidden Floor, and the debut of the young data of Zahard. Remembering the chapters coming out, it’s safe to say that most reactions to him were a mix of bemusement and perhaps even disappointment: who was this little kid that looked like it was playing dress-up? The entire point, I would argue, confirmed at the end of the arc: the entire point of data Zahards character is that he is a young boy playing dress-up, the play-pretend king. Who knows of his outside selfs power and influence, yet none of what it cost, who is proud of the empty glimmer and glamour of the title (yet even he knows something is not quite right, when he meets his older self) he had not yet earned himself. Who, I would argue, tries to rationalize what he learns of his outside selfs path with the discoveries he himself made within himself, of his true power and true self as revealed in the rice pot. Who does not want to be king.

“I also went inside myself with the help of a guardian on the train. It was inside myself that I found out that I have the destiny of a king. Whether I like it or not-I realized that I would become the peak of this Tower and rule over everyone.”

(Data Zahard, Tower of God # 379)

A small part of what can make data Zahard frustrating to analyze is that he was already tampered with by his older self, and so when Bam speaks Arlenes name, he reacts with intimidation and violence, set to start to forget. I personally tend to view, in particular his first encounter with Bam after Arlenes name falls, as reactions as the older data Zahard would have them, implanted in his younger self as an ‘averse reaction’, though unless I overlooked something glaring, it is certainly open to wider interpretation-perhaps beyond classifying Bam now as a potential threat, the young Zahard would have reacted in a similar way. However, his monologue on what it means to be a king, and transformation into a ‘monster’ certainly seem more fitting with the older Zahards total and absolute (arguably to the point of self-destruction, depending on what you believe the ‘princes’ are) identification with his (inescapable) fate as ‘King’.

Regardless of manipulations, we do very much also get to see the young Zahard true to himself: his friendly curiosity in Bam and the other ‘clowns’ that entered the data world, his wager with Edahn celebrated by the latter as a resurgence of the comrade he knew, his enjoyment of combat and others honest courage in facing him, at a good challenge and ultimately, at seeing something completely new in the climax of his battle with Bam after spending thousands of years, frozen, on the unchanging hidden floor: enough enjoyment that he freely concedes the battle and reveals his own plan, to show Bam to his older self to try to reignite the fire in his heart the same as it happened to him, only to be unceremoniously interrupted by said older self making his grand entrance. Zahard (older data Zahard?)  is quick to attempt to redress his errors and miscalculations: Data Zahard tries to give away the bracelet? Better take that into custody again. Bam somehow got resurrected? Welp, time to kill him again. And everyone else he knows, both as a funeral offering and just to be thorough this time around. While this older Zahard is certainly characterised by a certain cold-bloodedness, by itself this is not unpresent in his younger self, if anything the defining aspect of his short appearance is his preoccupation with fate (While data Zahard also mentioned it once or twice, most instances can be safely put down to meddling of his outside self or knowledge of his future occupation, and the other instances refer to the rice-pot, where one learns ones such fate). In reaction to Bams seeming resurrection:

“...Son of Arlene. I can tell just from looking at your eyes. I don’t know how you managed to come back to life...But fate is really toying with us...Son of the woman I loved more than anyone. I didn’t think I would get to kill you again with my own two hands...”

(Older Data Zahard, Tower of God #387)

(also, quite irrelevant to any sort of point, my two cents on the issue: I’m gonna maintain that he reckognizes Bams eyes, because...they’re Bams eyes, and he saw BabyBam when he killed him. Imo it gives the scene more gravitas, since it’s ‘remember how this guy had no issues killing a baby and remembers and is now (metaphorically) going to do that again’, instead of ‘side exposition about Arlene’s physical appearance’. I don’t think even the potential factor of a different soul would necessarily change his eye-colour. I do however certainly understand the alternative interpretation, that Bam could have inherited Arlenes eyes)

And more revealing of his general attittude, his conversation with his younger data self:

“Why are you helping that boy? Tell me, my data.”

“To help you start another adventure!”

“...Adventure?”

“Yeah!! When I first met my future self with the mirror, I was more flustered than happy. You became such a powerful and great king. That body overflowing with divine energy and eternal life. Eyes that penetrate everything. You were an unbelievably perfect being!! But in spite of how flawless you seemed, I sensed a small but massive feeling of anxiety in you. Fearing something in spite of having gotten so powerful. I couldn’t believe it. So on the one hand, I wanted to help you. That’s why I changed this hidden floor and even hid that bracelet for you!! But not anymore! If you really are a king, you have to accept a challenge! Because that’s who ‘King Jahad’ is!! Look!! That boy [Bam] is your new ‘adventure’!!”

“..An adventure, huh? That’s right, embarking on an eternal adventure- if that’s my fate, then I have to accept it. However. Since that day when I began to see all causes and effects from the same height as God...I found out how to play around with fate. Cruel fate.”

“You played around...with fate?”

“That’s right. Being an immature form of data, you wouldn’t be able to understand. But now, I seek to place even fate under my control.”

“What..?”

“You don’t know what ‘that boy’ is. Of course, I don’t fully understand either. When you find out the truth- you may regret your actions today. But I also want to respect your choice. I’m taking this [the bracelet] with me. If that boy is qualified to have this- he’ll appear before me again someday.”

(Older data Zahard and data Zahard, Tower of God #388 & #389)

What is abundantly clear is Zahards view of fate as an inescapable force, and his own helplessness against it- until he found a way to manipulate it. However, even in this manipulation-seeking to establish control of fate-he reaffirms his view of fate as the absolute force guiding ones destiny-you have to manipulate fate, you can’t escape it. We also learn that he discovered these means after a certain point in time, in which he gained a greater perspective over the flow of fate, or however one might call it, a perspective far outstriping the ‘paths’ guides see or even precognitive abilities of people such as Khel Hellam. It also makes clear that Zahard did see something fishy about BabyBam-at the same time his dialogue to Bam could certainly be taken as a certain enjoyment/emotional vindication in the deed, I’m perfectly fine with all perspectives on that one, it’s simpy important to me that it is acknowledges that it was likely Zahards broader perspective on fate that led him to kill BabyBam. Zahard also demonstrates a certain acceptance of the inevitability of Bams path intersecting with his once more, now that he failed to kill him again and for good. Despite his ‘divine’ powers, he certainly seems a far more resigned and exhausted personality than his young self. It seems certain that, quite in line with what the God of Guardians once said: ‘Having tremendous power won’t make everyone around you happy’, this is also the case for Zahard, including himself. What we do learn therefore is: why did Zahard stop climbing? Presumable because of his new ability to see (and manipulate) fate. Still unclear is why exactly Zahard gained this ability: not having reached the true top of the Tower, not a chosen boon granted upon fulfilling a certain challenge or reaching a certain floor, similar to the Great Warriors contracts of Immortality. And equally mystifying-if such was the case, how would Arlene have known his reasons/whatever he might have seen or intended to change to be false?

Zahard himself demonstrates a certain undeniable nostalgia for his youth-intending to have his younger self remain on the Hidden Floor, unaware of what occured between his companions and his own older self, even as he had him delete said comrades young selfs in turn. Intending to respect his younger selfs choice, even as he was in the process of being deleted. And most of all, both his younger self and his older self demonstrate a certain aversity to the concept of kingship, at the very least as applied to and enforced by themselves, that would dominate their later life.

Age of Genesis Zahard and Boo Boo the Fool (Khel Hellam)

Zahard, during the so-called age of Genesis, is gifted with being antagonist to one of FUGs affiliated fighting groups, the ‘Hidden Grove’. After the (voluntary) capture and sealing of its leaders in the Wall of Peaceful Coexistence, marking the decline of the great conflict between V and Arlene-less FUG and the Zahard Empire, Khel Hellam recruited this group for an attempt to assassinate Zahard, confident in the possibility of success due to his ability to see the future. However, Zahards grasp over such matters proved the greater and he confronts Khel Hellam and his allies.

To me what this little monologue does, rather than being some sort of arrogant waxing about his various accomplishments, or being an aggrandizing self-introduction, is to show, again, Zahards preoccupation with the role of King, his fate, his all roads lead to Kingship Rome. He lists his various accomplishments (regardless of how much you agree or disagree with them) in pointed contrast to the ‘But you probably know me best by a different word (regardless of the various other stuff I did)’. His question is not an arrogant ‘Who do you think I am, that you could catch me by surprise with a move like that?’ But an earnest question about how they, these people willing to risk their lives to kill him, perceive him. Of course, he doesn’t wait for them to answer, and instead answers for them in a sort of (bitter) resignation, and to be fair, his role as King is, in fact, why FUG rallied once more, and various kingdoms, to oppose him. It is his defining role in their lives. But it shows further struggle of Zahard with his role, what he was shown in the rice pot was his inevitable fate. When Khel Hellam does not belive him, he then goes on:

Is it just me or could this, perhaps, smell like a bit projection there? I mean, who knows, maybe it is just a little smack talk, I just think it could be likely that Zahard maybe did not immediately have a firm grasp on the new godly perspective over fate and may have made some miscalculations. But who knows!

Aaand more of Zahard tying his role as king to his combat prowess and fate-seeing ability. Good, healthy stuff. Anyway, this is definitely not all that managed to swirl around in my head about this guy, but I feel like this might be a nice place to end the rambling for now.

To sum up the main points of this post:

Basically, since I do very much enjoy Zahard as a character, it is somehwat disappointing when most people’s takeaway from the story seems to be a different guy entirely. No one is obligated to like him, of course, but I feel that disliking a character can coexist with acknowledging them as they’re written, meaning with certain characteristics and character traits and motivations that lead them to their actions. I’m not claiming that my view is the ‘one, true’ Zahard or anything like that either; simply tried writing down how I experience him and some frustrations with more blatant examples of readings that strain compatibility with canon.

[ignitification]

LoV Colour Analysis Part I: Shigaraki Tomura.

As this analysis would be quite too long to read in one go, I decided to split it into three parts, each covering one of the Three Main Villains of BNHA (Shigaraki Tomura, Himiko Toga and Dabi).

All three do denote a precise and powerful colour scheme, but on today’s episode I am going to focus on the Leader of the League of Villains aka Shigaraki Tomura or Shimura Tenko.

Shigaraki’s colour pattern variates from Red (shoes and eyes), Black (his usual outfits, his hair when younger) to Light Blue, Grey and White (colour of his hair, skin and hands).

The interesting fact is how Shimura’s colour evolve with his persona and Quirk. The third paragraph is dedicated to the colour Yellow, which is not part of the palette associated with Tenko, but I included it because it adds to the detailing of Shigaraki’s character.

(Spoilers ahead! & tw/: mentions of canon-compliant violence; death)

I.) From Black to Light Blue to White 

During his growth, evolution as a villain and person, not considering the one spurred from his Quirk, Tenko’s hair undergo a quite big development. While the colour of his clothes stays more or less stable (being black throughout the entire series), what differentiates his eras is the colour of his hair. In his childhood, before manifesting his Quirk, Tomura’s hair was dark (strikingly similar to the one both Touya and Izuku sported). This changed to light blue/grey in his years until last arc, where after being himself an experiment under the hands of Doctor Death (Kyudai Garaki is a very creepy man) to inherit the original AfO’s Quirk, his hair becomes snow white (as a result of the transformation, I would believe - but it might as well mean another thing which I will talk about later). 

Beginning with maybe the easiest association: the colour black. 

A little note of the fear association: in this case, I would like to interpret it as Shigaraki being aware of his decaying Quirk and freak people out because of that, and because of his external looks, which do look like the one of a decaying child.

Power refers definitely to both his position and his Quirk, in this case - which make him stand out even more. However, the strength in this case, in my opinion, is more a smoke screen: black is also worn as a protection from external damage, as in stress and emotional backlash. This creates a barrier between the subject and the world, protecting internal emotions, and hiding its vulnerabilities, insecurities and lack of self confidence. The emotional trauma, the ‘hands shield’ Shigaraki derived, in a way, from his trauma and from being confronted with something, has shaken him to the core since childhood, and in this case the clothes serve to protect him from himself and his ‘actions’. In this aspect, him wearing black as a child might also stand for him trying to shield himself away from his parent’s judgement and stare, while protecting his will to want to be a hero, despite their negative reaction to any hint of that. These meaning are, in conclusion a full circle: one calls for the other, especially in Shigaraki’s case.

Black is also associated with mystery, evil and aggression. Shigaraki is written as an enigmatic villain, cold-hearted, devoid of any humanity and the will to full front destroy everything in its path. And while the meaning perfectly fit to how Shigaraki should be, I do believe that this is a very superficial and banal description of such a complex character. 

One thing which I found particularly interesting about this colour and its relation to Shigaraki, it’s the rocky tie that appears between black and its meaning as in rebellion. This aspect might refer to two different conditions: it might suppose a certain degree of refusal and hate for authority (The society at large), and at the same time the rebellion from his own family/persona/mentor, which could entail a fundamental foreshadow for Tenko’s destiny.

The color black affects the mind and body by producing feelings of emptiness, gloom, or sadness.

 I think here again, this might just an extermination of the feeling that have been torturing Shigaraki from the inside since he was a child, and that he himself has not acknowledged, which also stands to explain how he tries to feel that void or to ‘eliminate the scratch’ that has been tormenting him, and that knows no peace.

Furthermore, In Japanese culture, the colour black mainly denotes non-being (apart from mourning) and evil-heartedness in a person. This meaning is consistent with the personality described to us by Horikoshi: Shigaraki Tomura ceases to be a person at one point, when his consciousness gets subdued by AfO for a while. It is important to note here, how White (on the other side of the spectrum) is also the colour of death and mourning.

Not entirely worth mentioning, is that black is the stereotypical colour worn by villains and bad guys in different fictional environments.

(Light) Blue/Grey.

Just a reminder: neither grey nor blue are explicit colour in Tenko’s palette as a character, but I think they are still important and since greyish blue (the precise colour oh his hair) has not its own meaning, I took the freedom to actually associate the two separate colour in association to describe this period of transition between black and white.

The phase in which Tomura has Greyish-Blue hair is the longest one (in terms of years), but also the phase of passage (which consequently is the phase he is exploring, and is in the ‘grey zone’, where things are just getting defined and there are no absolutes). Grey, in this sense, sports both characteristics from White and Black (depending on the shade used), and even if not explicitly used for Tenko, it still represents a landmine in his development.

The colour grey is an ‘unemotional’ colour. It is detached, neutral, impartial and indecisive - all traits that can be reconnected at Shigaraki. Indeed, it is after his encounter with Izuku at the mall where he recognises why exactly (or so he thinks) he rages and wants to bring destruction to the world as known. This indicates how he has been striving for a real purpose, like the one Stain has, in order to actually understand what he is doing and evolve from the child the Heroes define him as, to a Villain with the capital V. He does relate to reality in partial ways, while he tries to define his identity as something that has died inside of him, Shimura Tenko, and at the same time the part that has lived on through the memories he removed and the hands which accompany him. He does not know which part is stronger, and trying to figure it out he tries and fails, only to try again.  To confirm the shaping of Shigaraki, indeed grey is a conforming colour and most of all it struggles with identity, which is arguably the most prominent trait Shigaraki presents during the first arcs of the story.

On the other hand, Blue symbolises coolness, passivity, fidelity. Somehow it reverberates the meaning of grey, while at the same time enhancing its other effects (it being emotionless and calm, undecided but also flowing). Blue is also indicator of depth, wisdom, confidence, and intelligence (among others). This also confirms the precedent meanings (of especially white) and it adds another dimension to Tenko’s character. It is clear how he feels deeply, and is still very clever in its own way. Still, this development and phase serves for him to obtain the other characteristics proposed by blue, especially wisdom and confidence (refer to Black where I said how sometimes the clothes are a screen to hide his true feelings). 

Blue is a colour that’s constant and unchanging, which contrasts with grey and brings forwconstant struggle in Tenko. Blue is also nostalgic. Curious is how blue lives in the past, relating everything in the present and the future to experiences in the past. I think that this is what blue is about with Tenko: he struggles to look forward, to forgive and let go because he never forgot his dad, his grandma or even society for when they had brought upon him as an innocent child. His bringing up has been focused, after all, on his developing his constant feeling of sadness, rage and gloom and the necessary power to express them in confident ways, which could bring destruction forward. Tenko is a puppet in AfO’s hands since he has ‘saved’ him, so I think this is why the sentence in which Shigaraki tries to break free from AfO’s will is a break point for the story, and for Shigaraki as well. 

Blue is also known for being deceitful and spiteful, depressed and sad, passive, self-righteous, emotionally unstable, weak, unforgiving. It can also indicate manipulation, unfaithfulness and being untrustworthy.

Indeed, it is after that Izuku sees Tenko being kneeled over by AfO and his presence that he understands that Shigaraki too, is human and that maybe the reasons for his rage and absolute hate for everything he comes across have deep roots, which is why even if he cannot forgive him for all the pain he has brought, he wants to save him.  

Finally, the paler the blue the more freedom we feel - which brings me to my theory on what, throughout the years Tenko’s hair have been ‘decaying’ and bleaching out. I think that as a child, Tenko is caged and tries to break free of his cage, of his ‘itch’ but he cannot because he does not realise what it is, and there is no freedom for him to actually understand. The first time he uses his Quirk, he feels finally satisfied for the first time. He tasted freedom for the first time, and now he wants to do it again and again. Growing up, however his ideals become blurry and he does not understand what he actually wants. He does know that the hands on his body represent what he has lost and what is actually still there with him, giving him strength and will, but at the same time he does not know what is beyond there. Which is why, after he goes through the transformation by Garaki, his hair becomes white: he gets rid of the insecurities, of the shackles that have stopped him from actually achieving his goal, or rather to pursue it freely. His ultimate goal, after all, is to get rid of his ‘itch’, which, in its own way, it’s his language to say that Shimura Tenko wants freedom.

As a note, Blue is also the colour of the Throat chakra. It is located in the throat, but it is linked to the throat, neck, hands, and arms. This Chakra is linked to speech. 

Final remark on blue: this colour is one of the most important lucky colors in Japan ( together with yellow, white, purple, green and, red) - and all the colour associated with Tomura, except for black, is indeed considered lucky.

White 

White, is an inherently positive colour, is usually associated with purity, innocence, light, goodness, beginnings, possibility and perfection. However it is also described an dperceived as cold, impersonal and bland. Shigaraki after his ‘transformation’ is the perfect soldier: he is very powerful, to a fault, and represents a new chapter in not only his own life but as well in the one which has been conducted by AfO, as he sees him as his vessel. The fact is that the beginning of a new Shigaraki which is flawless, in appearance, is a very well constructed lie. While he should represent perfection, first of all his transformation has not been entirely completed and furthermore, while it does represent a clean slate in his check, is also the possibility, reality coming through for AfO to take advantage of the body new, which Tomura must preserve. As the new Shigaraki however, has his ideals very present and wants to fight for them, to protect his feelings and his ideas, it is anyway a struggle for both him and AfO to juggle through everything going on Tenko’s mind, and emerge victorious. This is also the most interesting aspect of this colour: the goodness and inherent purity which comes from this colour implies a purification process in Shigaraki’s character, who instead gets fixed even more on him not wanting to forgive society and insisting on going on his rampage, because at the same time he cannot let go of these feelings, because now they are the only thing which make him go forward.

White is usually used in contrast to black, and represents the dichotomy of good and bad.

The psychological meaning of white is wholeness and completion. This also refers to the meaning and falls into the category of ‘perfection’: it is a new beginning, but at the same time it represents the closure of a cycle and the beginning of a new one: a perfect one, which represents closure (‘The Circle’). Tomura is supposed to be the new complete weapon at AfO’s will, but as I states before this is a fought point (between the two of them).

White, in cultures that believe in reincarnation is held in high regard. Indeed, they sustain how white is a sign of rebirth. 

Technically, Shigaraki has been reborn. What I mean is that he has transformed himself into not a new person, but in a better version of himself, he upgraded - and now of course going back is not an option. He has been held in a womb, breeding his new potential and now he became an individual whose strength far surpasses normal, his quirk control is absolutely insane and as well his memories, ideas and feelings are heightened. The theme of rebirth, which I think fits both Shigaraki and Dabi, is used a few times in BNHA, but as for Shigaraki it is very literal and very clear (after all he has been asleep for a time, just to wake up and fight an entire war against the Heroes). It is clear however, how his personality has been rebirth too: while he was not insecure, but more hesitant, now he is sure of his objective and he thrives on achieving it. What distinguishes therefore the old Shigaraki from this new one is the knowledge of being powerful and therefore being able to accomplish what we wants.

Finally, white inherently denotes death and mourning too in the Japanese culture, as well as black. Here, we are mourning the old Shigaraki, and the loss of the traits that instead made him a little bit more human, and a little less like God himself.

II.) From Red Eyes to Red Shoes (in association with both Izuku and Katsuki) 

I already talked about the colour red in regard to Izuku here, but if we take the same meaning and apply it to Tomura instead, we get a different picture. It is no mystery how Izuku and Tenko are foils for each other, and that they resemble each other in different ways (starting from them sporting red shoes, to their characters, being ‘accepted’ and trained by a mentor, and so on).

Red is the colour of extremes. It appears clear how Izuku and Tenko represent the opposite extremes: where Izuku is enamoured of heroes and idolised them to an unhealthy point, even though he comes from a background where he has been discriminated by that same society because he was different, Tenko is disillusioned with the society they live in. He wants to destroy to the ground, because he cannot find it in himself to forgive anyone who could and did not extend him a hand when he needed it. At the same time, both Izuku and Tenko believe that to a certain extent what they had done has been ‘deserved’, and are not entirely focused on their own well being. 

Red is also an attention-bringer. As I already noticed for Izuku, it is very curious how both wear red shoes, as a way to try and separate themselves from the rest, trying to escape the opinions of other which have labelled them in a way, and of course at the same time trying to take control and wanting to be the best in their own ways (hero or villain, that is).  

Red is also the colour of blood, of rage, anger as well as desire, leadership and strength. I want to make a point which I do not know whether is important or not, however, a fact that struck me hard is how Shigaraki’s irises are very very small, and it somehow seems that he tries to compensate the little quantity of red of Shigaraki with wearing red shoes. This might be an indicator how Shigaraki strives to achieve these qualities, but at the same time he needs to put a lot of effort in it, and furthermore it somehow feels different from when we compare it to Izuku: even if both are charismatic leaders, Shigaraki is very dispassionate about it, while Izuku frequently denies how his influence might be fundamental when it comes to other people (Katsuki, All Might, 1A). However, Shigaraki does reflect in his personality, the venous desire to be angry, aggressive and destructive as it what his power entails, and after all what has been taught to him. I noticed as well a post (which unfortunately I cannot find) where it says that Shigaraki has a very high tolerance pain (again, the parallels with Izuku are insane), which also reconnects somehow to the colour red as we saw how Shigaraki himself even if tired (LoV vs Machia/LF) or absolutely bloody and at the brink of death is instead held up by his will to destroy (Shigaraki vs Heroes).

It relates to danger, power, determination and action. Well, Shigaraki and danger go to hand in hand as well as determination and action. After all, Shigaraki’s Modus Operandi is Trial and Error, which means he is not afraid to be wrong and to try things out, even if he is stubborn and ways things to go his way, every time (when that rarely happens in general). 

Red is indeed determined, powerful, impulsive and aggressive. It is also tied to self-preservation. Although true for the most part, the self-preservation is still a massive blank point. 

He is bloody, and even AfO is telling him to rest and preserve his energies (even if here, my counter argument would be that it would be easier for him to overtake Shigaraki’s body if he is weaker, so I do not know how reliable this is).

The color red in Japanese culture denotes strength, passion, self sacrifice and blood. It Also stands for good luck and happiness. Which is still very amusing to me, as Shigaraki feels like the farthest character away from achieving happiness, and his passions and strives are all useless unless he gets rid of his master puppeteer. However, Shigaraki embodies the self-sacrificing spirit. Even if it might sound strange, and he is not very willing to be himself in the front lines (at least not always), he does approach ReDestro himself and takes him on, while leaving the League to deal with the rest.

III.) Yellow

Surprise, surprise! Yellow, in the Japanese culture stands for Courage, while usually the Western culture associates it with Cowardice. It is a funny thing that it also stands for betrayal, sickness, egoism and madness on the negative side, however it is rather a holy colour, usually associated with deities on the other side.

Since I am not going to include yellow in the association paragraph, it is not a case that black reacts badly to yellow, and forms a very unpleasant colour, which means that the circumstances which follow either do not mix well together. However, it is also true how the most resonant contrast between yellow and another colour is given by black. 

Plus yellow is the colour of the Solar Plexus Chakra and it is the symbol of vitality and will. All these elements, however present in a very limited amount in regard to Tenko, are telling of the aspect of authority (reconfirmed and amplified by black) and somehow, the lack of bright colours of Tenko makes the little yellow details resonating of a sad picture, as it embodies more the negative sides (egoism, sickness - and in part sickness). 

Colours in Association.

Black used in contrast–particularly with white or yellow–does create energy (especially the contrast on shapes and just power that the image of waken up Shigaraki creates in the last arc is enough to send this message). It is as well true that black when used in opposition with white, symbolises the eternal struggle between day and night, good and evil, and right and wrong - a thing that for Shigaraki is somehow a metaphor and a literal representation of himself as a character. A perfect example would be the struggle he has with AfO for his body, where he struggles between his internal feelings and dreams and instead the evil will imposed by him by AfO, as well as in terms of consciousness where him being present and conscious is the day, while being subdued to AfO’s will in the Night.

Black usually represent the end, but the end always implies a new beginning. So when the light appears, and black transcends to white, it instead the colour of new beginnings. I already talked about how rebirth theme and the new beginning on new ideals and dreams is represented for Tenko by the colour white, however it is interesting also to note how his change in personality brings him from his childhood dream to being thankful to AfO who raised to him, but wanting to be even greater than AfO himself,- metaphor for Tomura’s life as being free from shackles of reality.

Bluish-Grey is also defined as ‘livid’, an adjective used to describe anger or decoloration of the skin (caused by bruising). This colour gives a sense of detachment - which also goes to review the colour grey and blue, in them being interpreted together as an entity, and how Tomura feels a detachment from his own memories, and past life, as well as his future (When Did We Ever Need A Future?) and instead seek meaning in everything that surrounds him. 

Red and white are prominent traditional colours in Japan. Both colours are used in decorations at events which represent happiness and joy.

On a non serious note, Shigaraki’s date of birth is 4th of April, and casually the colours associated with April are Burgundy (deep red) and White (according to the Japanese etiquette). 

And finally last remark for this post: it is very funny how Shigaraki’s palette is somehow almost the same as Bakugou’s (with the exception of green - which I would like to interpret as if Bakugou did not have Midoriya as his side, he could have ended in a far worse position, with no hope and no one to compare to).

Thank you for reading.

[manuscripts-dontburn]

Journal of a Russian Grand Duchess: Complete Annotated 1913 Diary of Olga Romanov, Eldest Daughter of the Last Tsar

Edited by Helen Azar

First published: 2015

Pages: 302

Rating: ★★★★★

Another excellent addition to the first-hand sources about the Romanovs. Just be aware that this really is a journal of daily events, not a novel, and may not be easy or super engaging to read unless you really are into the subject. Perfect if you want to do some serious research into the daily lives of the Imperial family

Only Plane in the Sky: The Oral History of 9/11

Author: Garrett M. Graff

First published: 2019

Pages: 512

Rating: ★★★★★

I read this book in record time partly because my human nature was fascinated with a new, intimate look into one of the greatest tragedies of my own lifetime, but partly also because I knew I did not want to spend any more time in the chaos and terror it represents so well than necessary. I was 14 when 9/11 happened and even though on the other side of the world, I watched live as that second plane hit and other hijacked planes were announced missing. I remember being numb all over and crying through the night, fearing that the Third World War was upon us and it was the end of everything I knew. The author himself makes you aware early on this is not a strictly structured narrative supported by the meticulous research of archives. This is a cry of those who lived it all.

The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps

Author: Edward Brooke-Hitching

First published: 2016

Pages: 256

Rating: ★★★★★

Gorgeously illustrated and engagingly written as a sort of encyclopedia - yet without being exhausting or dry - this is an utterly fascinating book. Read it if you are at all interested in old maps, discovery of the world, human obstinacy, shameless liars and pranksters.

If We Were Villains

Author: L.M. Rio

First published: 2017

Pages: 432

Rating: ★★★★☆

This is one of those books everybody knows about so I feel no review is needed from me. You either enjoy it or you find it pretentious. I personally enjoyed it. Certain parallels with The Secret History are inevitable, but even then the book stands the comparison more than well.

Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

Author: Donnie Eichar

First published: 2013

Pages: 288

Rating: ★★★★☆

Even though my curiosity was immense, I have abstained from reading anything about the recent discoveries and explanation of the Dyatlov Pass Incident precisely because I wanted to read this book first and judge it on its own merit. I am glad I did. (And I would advise anyone to do the same). Although some of the parts in which the author narrates his own personal journey and research may seem slow and even unnecessary, the rest of it is a terrifying, haunting and genuinely disturbing wild ride. I found myself almost reluctant to turn the next page in fear of what it would bring to the picture. I also have to acknowledge that the author really tries to introduce all of the possible theories that were available and suggest his own, trying to be as impartial as possible. In other words, he is not courting scandal, he just really wants to know the truth. Yet again this book proves that real life can top any fictional horror book. And now I´m off to read on what actually did happen.

The Haunting of Hill House

Edited by: Shirley Jackson

First published: 1959

Pages: 246

Rating: ★★★★☆

Fantastic. Creepy. Heart-breaking. Weird. And so, so beautifully written.

The Forest of Enchantments

Author: Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni

First published: 2019

Pages: 372

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

This is not a powerful feminist retelling of Ramayana. It is a simplified version of the great Hindu epic told from Sita´s point of view. Here and there an outcry over the injustices Sita suffers appears, but for the most part, the language the author uses feels impersonal and reduces what could have been a truly magnificent story full of contradicting emotions and passions into a bland fairytale. Even Sita´s arguably strongest, the most defining moment in the story - the trial by fire - is rushed, unexplained and simply "undercooked" if you pardon the expression. I am deeply disappointed. (Sidenote: I always found it curious how Ram - a literal God - is in a way the worst and most unlikeable character in the whole of Ramayana.)

The Fall of Gondolin

Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

First published: 2018

Pages: 304

Rating: ★★★★★

Every single sentence Tolkien has ever written sings. The dedication of Christopher Tolkien to his father´s legacy is nothing but awespiring. The illustrations by Alan Lee stunning and outworldly. These are the reasons why I am rating this much-welcomed addition to the Middle-Earth mythology so high.

Cinderella is Dead

Author:  Kalynn Bayron

First published: 2020

Pages: 389

Rating: ★★★☆☆

This was actually a lot of fun, once I stopped expecting something grand and subtle. A wonderfully original idea that is the basis for the story is worth notice and some of the action scenes are truly engaging. If you don´t mind being hit over the head with the injustices (though I wonder if the lack of subtlety was brilliant or the opposite of that still) heaped upon women in this world, and if you are not bothered by insta-love, this is a good book to spend an afternoon or two with.

Floriography: An Illustrated Guide to the Victorian Language of Flowers

Author: Jessica Roux

First published: 2020

Pages: 224

Rating: ★★★★★

Perfect coffee table book!

The Henna Artist

Author: Alka Joshi

First published: 2020

Pages: 366

Rating: ★★★☆☆

I enjoyed this book but... I have almost nothing to say? Somehow this is exactly the kind of book that is good.... but it is that "standard" kind of good. Like... sure. It was good. I have not had any super-strong feelings towards it.

Catherine House

Author: Elisabeth Thomas

First published: 2020

Pages: 320

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

It started with a promise, turned into a boring slog and fizzled out without anything resembling a satisfying climax. I may have enjoyed it more had it not been for other books centred around weird and creepy campuses (namely Vita Nostra and If We Were Villains) I have read this year, which were simply better in every way. I believe the author might win me over in the future, her writing was good and the premise itself interesting. Unfortunately what this whole thing misses are an actual plot and a finale. I did not feel scared or creeped out... I was just bored.

[themangaguide]

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Leading warm manga referrals!

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The Animation The animation for this particular program is perfect and really good. Theory of generating a non human for the primary lead is likewise one-of-a-kind scene when once in awhile. Candidly, I like Momonga. The fashion He frame a robust magic strike or a simple magic method make it as reasonable as it was most certainly actual. To put it in different ways, without a too much amount of reasoning, we can approve it readily with a brief recap of his power works.

Audio The read manga opening program is rather catchy with a verse that is rather appealing. Eds as well as both of these Op is truly rather an excellent song. Truly such an astounding attempt by the voice actors, Eds and also Op singer to keep up the leading efficiency to day. An additional one additional factor is considered by the show songs area.

Pleasure and Total Nevertheless, what makes it so remarkable is the story of the video game. In my sight, the storyline, adding with artwork computer animation as well as the audio jointly were producing this kind of work of art. The single trouble is our hero doesn't have some human body organs, blood or skin. He's absolutely undead beings. The skeletal system body is type of fashionable, however our primary lead will be given by tremendously no fan girls. Luckily, our primary lead beam of lights brilliant via the ugliness. I am not rather particular why he was the sole male I does not mind. Amazingly, I am supporting him. For my second concerns with this certain collection is the amount of each episode. This is just one of my favorites as well as I simply wan na share it to everybody who checked out manga online. Farewell guys! You might also want to check https://sorelldifilippout1.wixsite.com/healthandwellness/post/x4gxkn8uu6y5wsi46z0ifw1620492657 for related stories and information

[dappercritter]

ATOM Vol.1: Tyrantis Walks Among Us! An Honest Review

I have long waited for the chance to read William Cope’s (AKA @tyrantisterror​) giant monster mash passion project, and as of last Christmas I finally had my chance. The first volume of The Atomic Time of Monsters (AKA A.T.O.M.), Tyrantis Walks Among Us! is every bit the big fun love letter to classic giant monster movies from across both sides of the Pacific that the author has touted on his blog many times. However, although there is a lot of love that evidently went into this story, and plenty of fun to be read, I would not say it’s the best kaiju story I have ever seen, in print or otherwise. Of course, to expect perfection from anything is unfair, but it’s not perfection I’m looking for: it’s consistency. Consistency, particularly of ideas and presentation, has been one of the kaiju (the ever popular Japanese name for “strange/giant monster”) genre’s biggest problems since it first began—be it keeping worldbuilding consistent with themes, or keeping the quality of one shot of the giant juxtaposed monsters consistent with another. Sadly, readers will find that Tyrantis Walks Among Us, for all it’s charms and bravado, suffers from similar inconsistencies.

 The premise of the first entry in the A.T.O.M. series follows many well-worn tropes from the standard giant-size creature: set in an offshoot of postwar 50’s world, a mysterious earthquake linked to nuclear testing has revealed a subterranean lost world filled with mysterious radioactive crystals and (what else) giant monsters to the world. As the menagerie of prehistoric creatures make their way across the surface, gobbling up and/or stomping on the unlucky extras in their path, the government scrambles to gain control of the unprecedented situation, sending in scientists, men in black, and the military. The heroes of the story are the sole scientist smart enough to understand the gravity of the situation, their intrepid band of friends, and the good giant monsters who befriend the humans while fighting off the bad monsters to protect their world. Opposing them are crooked government men who refuse to listen to reason and more menacing monsters driven by hunger or simple malevolence. What follows is a mash-up of almost everything giant monster movies prior are made of: giant monster fights, quirky humans bouncing off each other while trying to stop corrupt governments from worsening the situation, discovering strange lost worlds and encountering the creatures that inhabit them, and even encounters with alien and robot monsters.

 What makes the seemingly formulaic Tyrantis Walks Among Us! stand out is it’s personality. The first volume of ATOM is an affectionate homage, but it’s also a something of a send-up and evolution of the giant monster movie. Not only is every giant monster trope treated with a mix of earnest excitement and tongue-in-cheek wit, embracing both the inherent impressiveness and absurdity of the subgenre in the same breadth (including more than a few references to a selection of giant monster films past, some more subtle than others), with a heaping helping of satirical edge in it’s depiction on atomic era America. Elevating this satirical edge is the colourful human cast, whose personalities, talents, and backstories make them some of the most memorable civilians you’ll ever see in a kaiju series while also giving the story its political punch. Dr. Mina Lerna, the human protagonist and paleontologist turned local giant monster expert, who grapples with sexism and ignorance in her quest to make her voice heard—a voice which is telling everyone to stop trying to kill every monster they see and listen to reason—and come out of her shell; Henry Robertson, an African-American reporter for the United Nations News Organization (a cheeky homage to the oft-maligned American cut of the original King Kong vs. Godzilla) who, with Dr. Lerna’s help fights back against the racial bias trying to keep him quiet to offer current and true coverage of the protagonist’s quest to unlock the mysterious of the kaiju; as well as Gwen Valentine, a spunky homage to activist actresses such as Marylin Monroe in her prime, who after being rescued from certain death in a monster-inhabited cavern, offers some much-needed close friendship, good publicity, and funds to Dr. Lerna and their cause. The more villainous humans opposing them also present some amusement and self-awarness, such as the mysterious vindictive government agent J.C. Clark who prioritizes secret government agendas over transparency and honesty, or “Doctor Brick Rockwell,” a machismo meathead straight out of a camp American monster movie who barely passes for a scientist hired as a talking head to perpetuate willful ignorance—as well as sexism—for the government amidst the monster situation.

Of course, this IS a giant monster story and the kaiju side of the cast deserves special mention as well. Despite being deriving from the all-too familiar archetypes you could expect from giant monsters (i.e. dinosaurs, insects, spiders, and reptiles on a giant scale), the monsters A.T.O.M. stand out from the crowd thanks to their colourful characteristics. The majority of which are “Retrosaurs”: alternate history based dinosaurs that evolved from Loricata, a group of ancient reptiles that included the first crocodylians, as opposed to birds and more or less resemble the terrible lizards as they were depicted in older illustrations such as those created by Charles R. Knight. Chief among them is the star monster, Tyrantis, a standard giant green fire-breathing dinosaur but with an out-and-out heroic complex and a goofy side, showing compassion for his fellow monster and human companions, as well as having a tendency to greet new friends and foes by boisterously charging into battle. Joining him are Tyrantra, a even more impressive red-hued female of Tyrantis’s genus, the tyrannopyrodon (i.e. the fire-breath-enabled Retrosaur equivalent to tyrannosaurs); Gorgolisk, a gigantic frilled serpentine creature who serves as the steadfast guardian of the Earth and the mysterious inhabitants of its hollow earth; and Bobo, a big pink and blue quasi-arachnid with a soft heart and a surprisingly playful disposition. The monsters opposing them are no slouches either, such as Ahuul, a ravenous pterosaur-like Retrosaur who takes sadistic delight in swooping down on smaller prey; Myrmidants, a swarm of gigantic fire ants who fight for their colony with equal parts duty and ferocity; and The Terror, a blue-tinted rival Retro  Tyrant who—without giving anything away—only becomes more of a monster as the story continues. Special mention also goes to a giant scorpion, a giant mothman-themed invader, a deadly duo of a giant wasp and mantis, and an entire island of Retrosaurs of almost every species.

 However, as previously stated, for all it’s charming characters and progressive political statements, the first volume of A.T.O.M., like its forebearers, sadly falls prey to the issue of inconsistencies. Everything from the writing itself to the logic of this world suffers from occasional dips in quality to outright plot holes. The first and most noticeable is the abundance of grammatical errors, and while the majority of the novel is tightly written in very sense of the word, I couldn’t help but notice that every few pages there was incorrect punctuation or a misspelled word, which gave a somewhat rushed impression. Another oddity is the sexuality of Dr. Lerna who develops an affectionate attraction to Ms. Valentine, despite the author confirming in a post on the author’s blog made several years before the novels completion, claiming Lerna was aro-ace (found here)—this is more of a metatextual nitpick and if the author made her an asexual lesbian, it’s still quite a progressive choice in that it offers that minority some representation shows ace folk can still pursue romantic relationships—however, it still can’t help but think think it would have been just as valuable to give aro-ace people some representation as well, rather than seemingly backpedalling on a prior statement on a character’s sexuality. Another distraction is how the story seems to be at odds with itself over anthropomorphizing the monsters, where in some scenes they are written with fairly animalistic traits in mind, wherein others they treated as if they were almost cartoon characters. (e.g. Tyrantis breaks into caveman speak in a postscript picture to advertise some more other novels—relatively harmless but jarring nonetheless.) But the most bothersome inconsistencies by far are concerned with the science of the novel. Specifically, despite possessing a narrative that pushes for embracing science and learning, throughout the novel there are numerous instances where outdated biological and paleontological theories are treated as scientific truths, such as when Bobo’s inability to swim is chalked up to the old misconception that spiders breath through their skin and would drown when but in water. But the most damning example would have to be the Retrosaurs, who despite originating from a completely different evolutionary line, largely resemble past media depictions of dinosaurs more than anything else, inaccuracies at all. It could have been fascinating to explore how familiar species such as ornithopods and sauropods would appear if they were derived from ancient archosaurs (i.e. the grand group from which crocodilians originate). This discrepancies between artistic license and science makes it hard to tell just how much of the author’s intent for the origins of these alternative dinosaurs was driven more by a desire to replicate the aesthetic of prior depictions of prehistoric creatures and movie monsters than a wholly original exploration in speculative biology.

 As critical as may be, I do not want to completely discount the author’s efforts. I enjoyed the first entry in the adventures of the mighty Tyrantis and the impeccable Dr. Lerna from start to finish. As a wholly affectionate parody of the great giant monster subgenre, it’s almost everything I could have wanted it to be! What’s more, I would like to see the ATOM series reach its full potential. However, due the author’s attitudes towards modern science and tendency towards error, I don’t know if this series will ever reach that potential. Tyrantis Walks Among Us! is good as a creative comical take on the classic kaiju story with a progressive sociopolitical punch, but as a scientifically conscious evolution of the genre that birthed it, it falls as flat as the tail of a Retrosaur, and it seems it will stay that way—sticking close to the ground and only occasionally swinging upwards.

[ruminativerabbi]

Christchurch

There was something creepy and unsettling about settling into Purim this week as we were all still reeling from the news about the mass shooting last Friday at the mosques in New Zealand. Yes, it’s true that at the heart of Purim is the encouraging story of how a plot to murder innocents was thwarted by a combination of cleverness, bravery, and extreme chutzpah on the part of Mordechai and Queen Esther. But how could that happy outcome provide comfort for the Muslims of New Zealand (or, for that matter, for New Zealand’s Jews, who could surely just as easily have been the shooter’s victims) given that Haman’s plot failed utterly, while last week’s attack took the lives of fifty innocents at worship? There is something to learn from that comparison, though, but it has to do more with the villain’s motivation in both stories than with how either turned out in the end…because what motivated Haman to plan a nation-wide pogrom openly intended to annihilate the Jewish community in his time and place is more or less precisely what motivated the alleged shooter in New Zealand—at least judging by the so-called “manifesto” he emailed to more than thirty recipients, including the Prime Minister’s office in far-off Wellington, just minutes before the attack on the first mosque.

Assuming the authorities have the right man, which they seem certain they do, the shooter seems to have been motivated by a set of grim fantasies that society needs seriously to address. Admittedly, the seventy-four-page manifesto is a long read, although nowhere near as long as the 1,500-page screed penned by Anders Brevik, the man convicted of murdering seventy-seven people, mostly high school students, in a shooting rampage on the Norwegian island of Utoya in 2011 and whose writing covered many of the same topics covered in the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto. (Brevik’s unabashed motivation in undertaking his act of mass murder was to get his book read by the public, an incentive so real in his mind that he actually referred in public to the shooting as his personal “book launch.”)

At the heart of both documents is the deep-seated fear of replacement, a theme most Americans first heard about when the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville shocked the world back in 2017 by chanting “Jews will not replace us,” a slogan so foreign to most that even I, who consider myself more than knowledgeable about anti-Semitic tropes, did not understand it properly at first. (To revisit what I wrote last fall about eventually coming to understand what the slogan means to those who chant it, click here.)  Nor, I finally seized, was this just a creepy mantra intended solely to unnerve or to upset, but actually a slogan fully expressive of the idea that serves as the beating heart of white supremacist paranoia. The concept itself is simple enough: that the policies promoted by liberal Western democracies that permit immigration from third-world countries, encourage racial integration, promote (or at least permit) interracial marriage, justify ever-descending fertility rates as the result of personal decisions with which the state may never interfere, endorse access to abortion as a basic human right, and enact gun control laws intended to declaw the basic human right to bear arms—that these policies are all part of some mysterious global effort to replace “regular” white people (i.e., working-class whites who belong to Christian churches they either do or don’t attend) with people of color in general, but particularly with Muslims from third-world countries.

The white supremacists of different nations promote different versions of this theory—but they all derive at least to some extent from the 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, Le Camp des Saints, in which an ill-prepared host of Western nations, primarily France but others as well including the U.S., are at first slowly and then decisively overwhelmed by immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, Western Africa, and Southeast Asia. Eventually South Africa is overrun too, as is Russia, with the result that the world as we know it comes to a decisive end even before the book does. (The book is available in English in Norman Shapiro’s translation as The Camp of the Saints, published by Scribner’s in 1975 and still in print.)

And that specific fear—that faceless hordes of dark-skinned people of various ethnic and national origins are just biding their time on their own turf until the misguided members of the liberal establishment in eventually every First World country blindly and stupidly open the gates without caring who comes through them or what those people stand for—that is the underlying emotion that appears to have provoked the mosque bombings in New Zealand, the mass murder of high school students in Norway, and any number of violent incidents in our own country. When white supremacists talk about the fear of being “replaced,” that is what they mean.

It’s not entirely untrue, of course, that immigrants—and particularly in large numbers—alter the face of the host country that takes them in. That surely did happen in our own country after successive waves of immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fundamentally altered the face of American culture. But in the case of our own country, the overall effect was essentially salutary because those groups who came here en masse were composed of individuals, three of my four grandparents among them, who were for the most part eager to embrace American culture and who had no interest at all in attempting to impose the culture of their countries of origin on the citizens of the nation that granted them refuge and took them in.

The accused shooter is an Australian, which adds a strong dollop of irony to his fear of replacement given that both Australia and New Zealand are dominated by cultures brought to those places by imperialist immigrants from Europe who rode roughshod over the actual culture of the actual people they found living in those places when they arrived en masse in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But I’m thinking that the real issue isn’t whether cultures do or don’t, or should or shouldn’t, evolve as time moves forward and the ethnic or racial make-up of the populace alters. On a more fundamental level, the issue has to do with the ability to see strangers as individuals rather than as a faceless horde.

The fear of being overwhelmed is probably a natural response when newcomers are seen not as individual men and women—people with children, who need jobs, who want to play a useful and meaningful role in society, who like to swim or to paint or to make music or to cook, who have their own set of fears and anxieties—but solely as part of the groups to which they belong.  And there is irony in this anxiety-driven world view as well because, by refusing to see others as individuals, such people eventually start thinking of themselves in that way as well and end up retreating deeper and deeper into their own communities. This in turn leads to the phenomenon that Canadian author Hugh McLennan once famously called “two solitudes,” a baleful situation in which contiguously situated groups have almost so little contact with each other that they quickly forget that the people on the other side of the line are individuals with whom they could easily engage if they wished. And so the path is laid for once-great countries to become balkanized shadows of their former selves as the sense of national identity that once held the citizenry together slowly erodes and becomes ever more fragile. Eventually, the nation collapses in on itself and something else emerges from the ruins…but the chances of that new entity somehow not facing the same issues of mutually antagonistic solitudes within its borders is nil. And so begins the spiral down towards dissolution and disunity born of fear. It does not—perhaps even cannot—end well!

In the history of the West, the Jews have played the role of the perennial other, of the tolerated alien. The outpouring of sympathy in the Jewish community over the last week for the Muslims of New Zealand—a community that I seriously doubt more than half a dozen Jewish Americans even knew existed before last week—derives directly from that sense that, in the end, what drives the kind of violent animus against Muslims gathering for prayer that exploded last Friday in Christchurch is different only in cosmetic terms from the kind of explosive violence so often directed at Jews. So we add Christchurch to the list of gun-violent massacres in religious settings that already includes (to reference only attacks within the last decade) Charleston, Pittsburgh, Sutherland Springs, and Oak Creek. And we brace for the next attack, which will surely come unless we can find a way to force the haters to look directly at the objects of their antipathy and see, not a faceless horde, but men and women made in the image of God. That sounds so simple when put that way, and so obvious. But you cannot make blind people see merely by forcing them to open their eyes and face in the right direction….

[sabine-leo]

Solid chaos

Note: I got a request from @drakesfiance for a fic 

Summary: Living in a world were The Avengers exist and save the world repeatedly you find yourself one morning with inhuman abilities of your own. How will your boyfriend Tom react when he get´s back from his audition?

Author: @sabine-leo 

Idea of: @drakesfiance

Part: 1 /5

Genre: Angst, Humor, Fluff, Uncertainty

Pairing: Tom Hiddleston / Reader / Loki 

Part 1 

As a passionate fiction reader yourself you haven´t had much trouble accepting that there was more to the world then “just” humans and the same old same old every day. At first it was fun to think about what could be and what was possible as the first mentioning’s on TV appeared about extra-terrestrial findings. Soon there were never ending stories about heroes who saved the world….a lot.

An organisation named SHIELD had made it their mission to release some Information they deemed fit for the people and help to get them to accept that there was more to some humans then most of the world wanted to see. Secrecy was not an option anymore, SHIELD had to accept that at first and adjust to the new world as Thor and some other heroes had called it. Working closely now with a group called The Avengers had helped putting them on the good side of the human eyes again after first being eyed suspiciously. Iron Man, Doctor Strange, The Hulk and Thor just to name a few had an ever growing fanbase.

 Finding out that there had been a heck of a lot more going on right under the normal citizens nose over a long period of time now was somewhat exciting. It was interesting to get to know the heroes and the extraordinary people who worked and fought for you in stories they wanted to share with the wider world.

 The myths your grandmother had told you as a child about North Mythologies and other realms seemed to be mostly true. She always taught you…yeah even exhorted you to keep an open mind and an open heart for everything which seemed impossible at first. You loved her dearly and were very sad as she passed into the fate (how she called it) at an age of 110 six month ago.

Your boyfriend Tom had been your rock in the last 6 months of grief. As the news of your grandmothers passing got to him on set of a film he was acting in he got the director to push his remaining scenes forward so that he could be with you just 1 day later. He was by your side through the whole process and made it as bearable as he could for you. He was the kindest human being you knew and your grandmother had loved him dearly too.

Sitting on the sofa of your Livingroom you were engulfed in a book again. Tom came out of the kitchen with a cup of tea for you and himself, smiling at you. “Sweetheart, what are you reading again?” he sat the cups down, kissed your head and sat down next to you tucking you close.

“Just a story my gran used to read to me when I was little. I can´t believe there actually IS a God of Thunder.” Tom laughed a quiet laugh and answered.

“I know how you feel, but isn´t it exciting to know that there are other realms, other realities besides ours?!” he took a breath. “I mean, all those possibilities…there are actual Gods …Odin, Thor, Loki…all that sense the most random things like thunder and lightning now have…” He played with a strand of your hair and continued “…The theory of Chaos and Order always fascinated me for example…one can´t exist without the other.”

 You smiled at him and closed the book. “You are the most ordered person I know.”

Cuddling into him you grinned.

“I´m the chaos in your live!” Tom laughed and turned you to straddle him.

“Yes darling, and I can´t exist without you!” His lips touched yours in a sweet, slow and lazy kiss.

“I´m the Loki to your Thor…as you light up my world” You giggled about your cheesiness and wiggled your eyebrows. Tom laughed his big boyish laugh that reached his eyes in an instant.

“I always had a thing for Loki…” he said grinning and kissed you again deeper and full of the love you both had nourished for the last 3 years.  

 Stroking his neck, you smiled near his lips “Yes, I know…Loki is no villain he is misunderstood! And he has redeemed himself after trying to enslave earth.” Tom and you had whole evenings of conversations about this special God. Tom had taken a liking on him, trying to solve the puzzle that the god of mischief was to everybody.

 Tom took the closed book from the sofa and put it back on the table without letting go of you.

“I love you, you know that?” he asked you softly. You smiled a very happy smile and kissed him.

“And I love you! Bring me to bed, will you?”

Tom grinned and stood up lifting you to close your legs around his hips.

“As you wish!”  

 3 weeks later Tom had persuaded you to fly with him to New York. He had to be there for an audition and wanted to show you the city as you had never been three before. After checking in at the Hotel you fell face first onto the big bed. “Ufff, I don´t know how you cope with the jet-lags all the time.” Dizziness had taken its toll on you for the last hours of the flight and your head seemed to spin the whole way to the hotel.

 Tom came over to you and stroked your back. “Rest darling, take a nap, I will wake you in an hour.” He kissed your neck and stood up again to unpack your suitcase. You didn´t need more then 2 minutes to fall asleep. Tom made good on his promise to wake you. He had ordered something to eat for the two of you and brought it to bed on a tray.

“Rise and shine darling…” he kissed you and then the two of you ate together.

Deciding to stay in this evening you choose a movie and cuddled up in bed. This weird feeling inside your head never leaving you fully. Grounding yourself with touching Tom and stroking his beautiful chiselled chest you made it through the movie without unsettling him. He truly was your anchor.

Falling asleep in his arms you hoped the next day would be a better one.

 In the morning Tom had his audition, you kissed him goodbye and wished him luck before you went into the shower.  The hot spray helped to clean your mind for a moment, but then a sharp pain brought you to your knees. Clutching your head, you felt sick for a moment. Trying to breathe through the pain you fumbled for the wall to give you footing. Ah there it was. The marble was cold to the touch at first…and then…it was gone. Losing your balance, you saw the wall coming nearer and nearer. Oh shit, this will probably give you a laceration.

 Bracing yourself for the inexorable hit you would take you closed your eyes and… with arms stretched out you landed on the floor…outside of the shower. How on earth?!

Blinking you stared at your hands for a moment before looking back. Your…your chest was INSIDE the wall. The water still hitting your rear.

Ok, that was weird.

Lifting yourself up slowly you went THROUGH the wall back inside the shower. Standing under the hot spray again you faced the wall, which apparently was a mirage? How could you otherwise explain what just had happened? Your hand lifted and tentative touched the stone in front of you. If this was a mirage it was a hell of a good one. Your fingertips felt the marble, the cold marble, the solid marble. But just seconds before there had been only air. “What the fuck…I went THROUGH it…this wasn´t solid!” you shook your head and just by thinking it your hand tingled and went through the stone again…and back.. and through again.

 You were going mad, or that was a totally weird dream. Solid stone, air, solid stone, air. It must have looked like a pantomime mimicking a wall in front of him. You turned of the water and had a little panic attack. This was impossible. You couldn´t…or could you?

Engulfing yourself in a towel you went to the wall that separated the bedroom from the bathroom. You were SURE that this one was solid. Touching it you knocked against it. Wood and stone.

The voice of your grandmother resonated inside your head. “Keep an open mind (Y/N)…the word impossible still has POSSIBLE in it. Never let someone other than yourself dictate the rules you live by.”

 Talking to yourself you faced the wall. “Ok, either I will walk right through it into the bedroom or I will hit my head trying.” You took a deep breath and looked at the wall. Your vision went blurry for a second. Taking a step, you felt a tingling sensation and stood inside the bedroom the next second.

A startled laugh escaped you. You turned to face the wall. Knocked on it again and laughed sort of hysterical.

 Could it be that you were able to walk through solid things just by thinking you could? The closed bathroom door out of glass caught your eye. You still had to finish that shower. Shrugging you took a step and…hit your head on the glass. “Ouch! Damn!” Concentrating again and narrowing your eyes you tried again…and it worked. A snort escaped you. You didn´t know how you could be so calm about what you just discovered, but you sort of still thought you were dreaming.

 Finishing your shower, you dressed and sat on the bed afterwards. With every passing hour the possibility of this being a dream seemed to get more unlikely. Three hours after your encounter with the glass door you heard the lock snap open. Looking up you saw a smiling Tom come in and you discarded of the book you had started to get your mind of what had happened.

“Hello love, feeling better?” he asked and jumped onto the bed near you, hugging you close.

“Yes, I do…but tell me…how was your audition?”

“I think it went well, we had a good talk after I showed them what I had prepared…they want to call me in the next days.”

You cuddled up to Tom and rested your head above his heart. “They will, I know they will!”

Tom smiled and kissed your head. “Ready to go on a sight seeing tour?”

You nodded but craned your neck to get a kiss from the person that held your heart in his hands.

How would he react if he knew what you did today? Would he freak out?

New York was a gorgeous city. Tom got you to do a hop on hop off Bus tour, like the ones you had in London. He had the ability to blend in to the general people so you two were mostly unrecognised by the other tourists around you. Sweet as your boyfriend was, he didn´t decline questions about an autograph or a picture when they came sporadically. Getting of the bus your hand went through the railing for a second which made you lose your footing and tumble outside. Damn, had Tom seen it?

 “Darling? Are you ok?” he came to you and touched your back.

“Yes, I was a bit clumsy…missed the last step.” Tom smiled and took your hand in his.

“I know why you hold onto me so often then…” You snorted.

“Yes, purely because of my clumsiness…not because I like to touch my hot as hell boyfriend…or because I love you…” you retorted what made Tom laugh and kiss you.

 “Plaster yourself to me anytime you want, but know that one thing can lead to another very quickly!”

His voice dropped into bedroom territory in that last sentence. You shivered and bit your lip but said:

“Keep your pants on for at least another hour… I´m starving!”  

Tom chuckled and kissed you softly. “Tonight, you are mine to do with as I please!”

 The rest of the day was fun and relaxing. The things Tom showed you in this beautiful big city were interesting and astonishing. Laying down on the grass in central park after having an ice cream you closed your eyes a moment. Tom lay down next to you breezing kisses on your eyelids, your nose and your lips.

 “Tom…?” you started after he had made himself comfortable next to you.

“Yes darling?”

“If you would develop a somewhat unusual ability…what would you like it to be?”

Tom smiled and thought about it for a moment. You loved him for giving it a real thought without discarding it as nonsense even more.

“I don´t know… reading minds seems to be a to obvious choice. I think it would get rather disturbing very quickly. Let me think about that for a while darling.”

 Wrestling with yourself for a moment you came to a conclusion. You had to tell him. He was your other half, he held your heart…having a secret as big as this wasn´t an option. You had to trust the love he had for you not to get scared or leaving you because of it. “Can we go back?” you asked him and sat up. “There is something I have to show you.”

There, out it was. Tom sat up and looked at you. “Of course, love. It´s getting dark soon anyway.”

 Back inside the hotelroom you closed the door behind the both of you and didn´t know how to start.

“Love, what´s up? You look all intense.” Tom walked you over to the bed and sat down with you.

“I…I have to show you something. It…happened this morning, I can´t explain it. Please don´t get scared!” Tom looked confused and said.

“What´s scaring me is you talking like that. You can tell me anything sweetheart!”

 You stood up and stood in front of the closed glass door. “This…” you explained how you felt sick this morning and how your vision got all blurry for a second. “…when I concentrate real hard I… can walk through that closed door.. even this wall.”

 Tom looked even more confused if that was possible. “(Y/N) are you pulling my leg?” he asked and stood up. But before he could reach you you took a step THROUGH the closed door.

“BALLS!” you heard him yell. “How is this..” his voice got closer…and he hit the door walking against it. “Bloddy hell!” If you weren’t that strained about his reaction you would have laughed at his swearing. The door opened and Tom looked at you. “How? Why? When?”

 Excellent questions…

“Do it again!” he demanded and touched the wall next to him. You took a deep breath, concentrated and walked right through the wall into the bedroom again.

“Awesome!” Tom declared. You could´ve thought about a million other things he could´ve said, but awesome was not on that list. You faced him and asked. “Awesome? Aren´t you freaked out a bit…I walked through a freakin wall in front of you…”  

 Tom grinned a bit and ruffled his hair. “Yes, No…I mean…” He took your hand in his.

“You walked through a solid wall in front of me!!!” His voice was a bit higher than usual.

“Since when?” He had so many questions but through the whole process of explaining what had happened this morning and how overwhelmed you felt at first, he held your hand. Somehow you ended up on the bed laying there cuddled up to each other talking about the whole event over and over. The more you thought about it the more you asked yourself how you could have gotten that ability. “I couldn´t do that as a child…I always wished for it because gran always beat me when we raced inside the ….house…” You sat up abruptly. “Bugger me blind! GRAN!”

Tom looked at you. “You mean…I always thought your gran was special and being as fit as she was with a 110…you think she was more than an ordinary human?”  

 The whole night went by with Tom and you trying to analyse the situation and talking about your possible partly inhuman heritage. Coming to the conclusion you wouldn´t find your answers here you decided to search further when you were home again, going threw all the stuff your gran left behind for you.  Tom reassured you time after time he loved you and that this fact wouldn´t change only because you could beat him to the shower now. He really had the ability to make you feel loved and cherished no matter what. He could bend the most absurd situation into something good.

Looking into his peaceful sleeping face in the morning hours you smiled and whispered.

“I love you Thomas William Hiddleston. More and more each second that passes..”

Finally sleep also got a hold of you.

 The next 3 days went by and with every passing day you were feeling better and better again. Tom was his normal self around you, he had not changed a bit. The love he gave you was true and unchanged. But on day 4 you felt uneasy outside the hotel. You couldn´t shake the feeling someone was watching you. Following you. Talking about it with Tom helped, but even he had a gut feeling something wasn´t quite right.

Inside a restaurant after having diner you went to the bathroom before Tom and you wanted to leave to find someone waiting for you.

“(Y/N) you need to come with me. There are things we need you to know. Things you need to do for us.” This man opposite you looked shady. His eyes unsettled you, his black clothes with a scary looking emblem made you walk backwards.

 Eying Tom as you beelined back to your table followed casually by the strange man Tom stood directly taking your hand and tucking you outside whistling for a cab. Jumping inside a free one he just shouted “Drive!” before he turned to you. “Are you ok?” he took your face into his hands and kissed you desperately. “Yes, I´m fine.” You answered between kisses.

 “Excuse me…” the driver said. “I´m driving, but where too?”

“Avengers Facility!” Tom said and your eyes went wide.

“I can´t go near there. Security is heavy.”

Tom sounded annoyed. “Just bring us as close as possible then!”

There was no way of changing Toms mind, he was hellbent on getting you to a saver place then the hotel. The drive to the facility took almost 30 minutes and the walk to the gate took another 10. Almost instantly a camera zoomed in on you. Tom looked directly into it.

“Excuse me for showing up unannounced…” Even angry and exasperated he was a gentleman.

“…My girlfriend was stalked in a restaurant and I think it´s because of her newfound abilities.”

The Camera switched to you, scanning you.

“Entrance denied.” Said a mechanical voice. Tom growled a little.

“Open that damn door or she will walk right through it!”

“Tom, love.. it´s ok.. let´s just go.. please..” You took his hand but he wouldn´t budge.

“I´m Tom Hiddleston and this is (Y/N & Y/L/N) please, open up and we will explain.”

Inside the building behind the camera sat Bruce Banner and Tony Stark.

“This is him… this is Tom fucking Hiddleston.” Tony looked at Banner.

“Are you fangirling in front of me Bruce. Keep your pants on buddy!”  

“Shut it Tony, open the door!”

Tony rolled his eyes but hit the button and the gate opened.

“What´s all that ghastly noise about?” Peter Parker came into the control room,

“Oh my god, is this Tom Hiddleston?”

“You too?” Tony asked and stood up and walked out to meet the both of you.

Tom held your hand tight as he walked with you to the entrance of a fancy looking building.

The door opened and Iron Man himself emerged, behind him Bruce Banner and Peter Parker.

“You threaten to walk THROUGH my gate?” Tony started and stood in front of you.

“Excuse him Mr. Hiddleston…welcome at our compound.” Banner shoved Tony aside and shook Toms hand. “Yeah, excuse him…Hi I´m Peter, or if we use our made-up names I´m Spiderman…it´s so good to meet you”

You watched that scene as if you weren´t involved in any kind. If you weren´t that flabbergasted yourself you´d say 2 of 3 man were fangirling over your boyfriend. Aaaand your boyfriend over meeting Spiderman, Ironman and The Hulk…

“For heavens sake, get inside I´m embarrassed for all of you!”  Tony said whilst shaking his head.

“Do I need to hold the door for you or do you walk right through?!” he challenged you.

 You eyed him a second and fixed your gaze on the door. Vison blurring you walked…right through it.

“Huh…here I was thinking it was just a made-up story to get in my house!” Tony opened the door to follow you inside.

Directing you to a conference room the 5 of you sat down and the interrogation started. Mostly it was Tony at first who asked all the questions. The other men to occupied being star struck. Some minutes into it Banner shook himself out of his inner fangirl and got interested in your story. They made you walk through various things and discussed the possibilities where the sudden change in your abilities originated from.

Talking to each other Banner said “It´s most alike to a certain person’s ability to project himself.

(Y/N) do me a favour. Concentrate real hard on your shirt…it´s red now, think about changing it´s colour.” At first you didn´t know how that fit with your ability to walk through stuff but you gave it a try. Thinking hard about another colour your left arm turned green. Shocked you lost your concentration and it was red again.

 “Thor…” Tony said into an intercom on the table “…do me a favour, get your brother and meet us in the conference room.”

 Tom looked at you and his face lit up like it was Christmas morning.

 I hope i didn´t mess up your idea so far @drakesfiance 

[thebigpapilio]

An Eminent Dethroning: A Persona 5/Persona Q2 Fic!

SPOILERS FOR PERSONA 5 & PERSONA Q2: NEW CINEMA LABYRINTH!

My inspiration was a post from @write-it-motherfuckers. Give me a bit to find it!

AO3 Link

Featured Ships: Ann x Shiho, later Ann x Shiho x Ryuji, 

Minor Ships: Makoto x Haru, Yusuke x Futaba

"The greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel. " -Florence Nightingale

________________________________________________________________

The trouble had started when Ann’s best friend had been caught up in a battle between Kamoshidaman, his sidekick Inazuma, and the villain Akuyaku. She was an innocent bystander, and a blow from the “hero” sent the criminal flying right into Shiho from outside the building. Ann’s best friend was sent through the window with the criminal, and while both of them landed on a nearby building, the far less durable girl barely survived.

Weeks passed, and Ann did not learn of any sign of Kamoshidaman apologizing. It seemed like life went on as usual, as if Shiho’s hospitalization didn’t matter anymore.

Sure, Shiho had eventually returned to consciousness about half a month ago, but the scars of the event would stay for the rest of her life.

Ann felt powerless every time she stared at Shiho or the so-called hero of Kamo City. She wanted to confront Kamoshidaman, but what was anyone supposed to do against the superhuman superstar?

She knew that if she worked upfront against Kamoshidaman he would shut her down easily; all he had to do was frame her as a villain and in less than a week, she would be driven out of the city at best.

That was when Carmen came to her. Her fury had been sensed by the powerful spirit, and she had been henceforth blessed with the ability to turn into a superpowered form of her own - not in the same way that Kamoshida did.

With the dancer spirit on her side, she now had the power to do something.

________________________________________________________________

Kamoshida had heard about a bank robbery ongoing a while away from where he was. Transforming into his alter ego, he flew off into the night in preparation for a brawl.

When he got there, though, he found the police taking the already defeated criminals into custody.

Flying down, he asked the officers how they had stopped the criminal scum before he even got there. Nobody could give him a good answer, but they all agreed that it had started with a lean red figure bursting into the bank in the middle of a stand-down between the officers and the offenders. Like a firecracker whizzing through the air, all the would-be robbers suddenly had their guns knocked out of their hands, followed by attacks that knocked them unconscious. Other than that, no one could give him good enough details, and the security feeds had been taken out by the robbers earlier, making them obsolete.

After ensuring everything was settled, a disgruntled Kamoshidaman left back for his house. A few days later, he and his sidekick Inazuma were battling a villainess called Lilen, a woman with the power to grow plants anywhere. It had culminated when after Inazuma had been swatted away from the battle and knocked unconscious, Kamoshida had been snatched and held by all four limbs by her monstrous “Plutonian Death Trap,” most likely with intentions of ripping him apart limb by limb. Lilen’s command to do so, however, was interrupted by the giant plant releasing an ear-shattering squeal in pain as some of its other leafy appendages had suddenly been caught ablaze. Confused as he was, Kamoshidaman took the opportunity and knocked out Lilen while she tried to put out the flames. This time, though, Kamoshidaman noticed something left at the remains of the fallen plant.

Upon further inspection, it appeared to be a card. It stated:

“To Kamoshidaman, the so-called protector of Kamo City,

I know the evils you have committed. You hold this place under your thumb, and if anyone so much as slightly displeases you , they are branded evil by you, and the rest of Kamo City follows suit like lemmings off a cliff.

I will not fight you, you monster. Instead, I will steal all that you truly desire from your heroic actions – your glory and your power.

Yours truly,

Panther & Carmen”

Kamoshidaman took it to the police, in the hopes they might track the writer down. Oddly enough, the police saw no problem with it, for when it was returned to Kamoshidaman, not only was the signature missing but also the text had changed entirely into words of adoration and gratitude from a fan called Tomo P.

Infuriated, Kamoshidaman took his frustration out on “Inazuma” that night. That punk was the only one who knew his identity, and after being beaten down despite the electrokinetic powers he’d mysteriously acquired, the little hooligan had been given an option; join him against evil at his beck and call, or have him and his family driven out of the city… if not worse .

Storming off, Kamoshida did not think that the abuse would be the last straw for Ryuji. He had heard about the card from the perverted powerhouse, so he decided that the mysterious saviors and this Tomo P. from the last two moments of crime needed to be looked into.

________________________________________________________________

Time passed, as it always does, but now, results were slowly starting to show up. As soon as the story of Panther and Carmen had reached the public, Kamoshidaman began to fade into obscurity.

The older and more experienced superhero always seemed to be too slow to get to minor battles, and for major villains and villainesses it was presumed that if Panther showed up, it was only to save Kamoshidaman at the last moment. The protector of Kamo City would have been spending more time looking for the mysterious person, but Inazuma had offered to do all the research in exchange for less actual fighting.

Other than that, he was considering something to himself. Once I’ve found and beaten Panther and her ally senseless, he would ponder, should I give them a second chance like I’ve graciously done for that brat or just brand them villains and kick them out of my place ? After all, this was his city - he and only he was supposed to have true power and authority, and no one was going to challenge that!

Ryuji Sakamoto, despite his intense hatred of the leverage-holding loser, really was doing some looking for the elusive figure. However, he had been keeping info from his barbaric boss; the giant-jawed jerk thought he was a lot further away from the truth then he actually was.

In fact, he was pretty sure he at least had a theory to the answer. Soon, he was going to go and find out for himself.

By now, Ann had long graduated high school, and would soon be a freshman in college. Shiho had fully healed from the incident, and knew about her acts as Panther. Her best friend kept it secret, but the civilian had asked her to ensure that she would kill none of the bad guys during her “extracurricular activities.”

Shiho had not needed to ask Ann the question - such was the plan, anyway - but she assured Shiho that would happen. Sadly, there were those public executions that Kamoshidaman held, but those were only for the people he managed to catch, and considering that crime rates dropped like a blimp filled with iron since Panther showed up, the executions almost never happened. Things were slowly looking up.

But because the world takes a pleasure sicker and more twisted than Kamoshidaman himself in hurting others, it was about then when Inazuma showed up at her apartment.

She had been sitting on the rooftops as Panther when he arrived. It was clear he had been looking for something, but she didn’t know if the villain’s sidekick was looking for her . Honestly, he always looked uncomfortable when no one else was looking, he would always leave the scene as quickly as he could, and she was quite sure that not all the marks she saw him with were from superpowered evildoers. With all the famous superheroes in Kamo City, attackers didn’t show up often enough for Inazuma to get as many scars and whatnot as he had.

If someone were to fashion the energy from such a staredown into a blade, chances are it could cleave Kamoshidaman in two.

“... I’m guessing you’re Panther?” Kamoshidaman’s electrokinetic colleague asked her.

She didn’t respond, but that was all Inazuma needed to know.

“Listen,” he asked, “I’ll keep this secret-”

“But what?” Panther spoke, breaking her silence and releasing the pent-up fury she had held for… what now, five years? “I have to stop taking that jerk’s spotlight? I have to idolize him no matter what he does?”

Raising his arms in mock surrender, the sidekick nervously replied, “Cool it, Catgirl! I don’t have any blackmail-based intentions!”

At Panther’s shocked silence, Inazuma continued. “If anything, I want your help in something instead.”

________________________________________________________________

After Inazuma explained the abuse and blackmail Kamoshidaman held over him, and Ann explained the story of Shiho’s hospitalization and forward, the two had jokingly reintroduced themselves. As it turned out, Ann and Inazuma - whom she now knew as Ryuji Sakamoto - went to the same university. Sure, Ryuji was on the path to being a physical therapist - where was this guy about five years ago, Ann would lament - and she was looking towards the path of acting, but they were still close enough to see each other often.

One of the first things Ann did was introduce Ryuji to Shiho and explain everything. It was better now than for the more “normal” one of the three to discover this suddenly close relationship and grow suspicious on her own. Thankfully, Shiho agreed to keep his secret too - but for whatever reason, there was teasing about her liking him.

The whole world seemed to think the same thing about their heroic forms.  One of the first things Ryuji did upon settling into his work with Ann was to get the one who gave him his power - a pirate spirit called Captain Kidd - to give him a new look when he fought with Panther so Kamoshidaman couldn't figure out he was betraying him.

He had renamed himself Skull in this form, and anyone who asked him why would hear that he and his feline-themed counterpart planned to “get this city to stop running around like headless idiots.”

Skull was the one who made public appearances, but Panther still kept herself hidden. There was still plenty of clamor about the two, and what was even more awkward for them was that many people for whatever reason shipped them.

Some people had written fanfics about the duo. Most of them featured something called a “Love Square,” featuring made-up versions of their civilian identities. Ryuji was usually portrayed as either a try-hard kid trying to be a thug or a wealthy and debonair yet unhappily restrained young man, while Ann was either portrayed as the type who was completely “normal” outwardly but incredibly odd as Panther or the class clown who turned into an incredibly aloof superheroine in secret. No fanfic was even close to the truth. Shiho had written a fic once that was quite inaccurate but still closer than anything she had read. She didn’t post it on any websites, of course, but she did safely send it to Ryuji and Ann in the hopes of teasing them.

Kamoshidaman, through all of the popularity given to the supposed trio of upstarts, was practically old news, and he was livid about it. As the amount of attention the public paid to Panther slowly grew, his fury did the same, and while it took a boost with the appearance of Skull, it was only on the day that in a passing discussion he overheard someone forget who Kamoshidaman was - even though they remembered a second later - that he lost the last of his patience for the hidden heroine.

________________________________________________________________

The tension between the heroes and the “hero” peaked almost 6.5 years after Panther beat Kamoshidaman to that bank, and at some point, she had obtained a nasty crush on her filter-less friend and partner Skull. She and Shiho had been dating for about 3-4 months after Shiho’s release from the hospital, and many a time they had talked about adding the “boneheaded” boy to their relationship. The agreement that they would both be okay with it was unanimous, but they both had yet to ask him as of then.

It seemed as if the universe itself was waiting on them to start dating, and to push them along, it sent them other spirit-powered heroes that would also aid them in battle on occasion.

They had made a group from all the heroes in their team, although the others were seldom brought in unless needed for backup and/or against specific villains. Consisting of the artistic yet socially awkward Fox, the antihero-turned-villain-turned-fully-hero Crow, the slowly less antisocial tech expert Oracle (who was most commonly asked for due to her ability with both technology and battle), and the deadly duo of the brutal yet kind Queen & the cordial yet intimidating Noir (the two of which had started dating after meeting up one battle), the heroes nicknamed the Spirit Guardians were feared and loved by Kamo City depending on who you would be to them.

One fateful day, it was both Kamoshidaman and not Kamoshidaman who took action. He knew that he no longer had the power to brand the Spirit Guardians as villains and let the city do the work for him, so he decided to take more dramatic measures.

Dākumasuku K immediately threw Kamo City into panic, the reportedly-possessed superhero demanding a battle between both him and the duo of Panther and Carmen, claiming only those two could save him by breaking the dark mask he wore. A date was set, and if they would not show up and fight him in person, he would destroy something or someone every day they didn’t appear.

Inazuma had overheard this plan from him, and Skull sent it to the woman in charge. Sadly, it was only Panther and Skull in town, as the other Spirit Guardians either lived in other areas and had been nearby during their appearances or would not be able to make it without arousing suspicion as to their identities. They had been planning this final attack on not only Kamoshidaman but also his reputation almost since their partnership began, and now they could use it!

Kamoshidaman had hurt many people, and there were many who had plenty of negative things to say about him but did not on fear of ostracism, banishment, execution, or some combination of the three. Silently, they went around and collected those people’s stories, stating that when the information was broadcasted it would be unclear who each story was from.

________________________________________________________________

Panther really hated Kamoshidaman, but she hated the idea of people getting hurt even more, so for the first time known to Kamo City, she showed up in broad daylight on her lonesome. Dākumasuku K had been waiting for her, and when asked where the person known as Carmen was, she claimed that Carmen was nonexistent, having merely been a red herring of sorts. Dākumasuku K growled, and the battle began.

When the smoke cleared, things darkened as a well-weakened Dākumasuku K stood over the beaten superheroine, with his mask broken but still on.

“You’re supposed to be freed!” Panther barely cried out, gasping and gaping at the supervillain.

Leaning in, Kamoshidaman whispered to her, “I was free to do as I pleased, you *****. You, however, are about to lose your freedom for attempting to shackle my justice.”

At her angered scowl, Kamoshidaman laughed to himself. Turning away from the platinum blonde, he snarked, “Never meet your heroes, kid. Now stay there while I-”

“It’s funny how you talked about meeting heroes…”

Kamoshidaman whipped around to stare at the superheroine, who was slowly getting up from the ground.

“All the superpowered people in this city that I know of are either me, the Spirit Guardians, or supervillains. You aren’t me, and you sure as **** aren’t joining the team, so by process of elimination…”

“Bold words for someone not entirely off the ground, you stupid girl.” Kamoshidaman grated, his voice like a rubber band stretched to its limits, as if Panther pushing him any further would send him rocketing away.

Knowing she had him angry, the feline-themed superheroine smirked. “Bolder words for someone who’s about to be floored .”

Now that she was standing - albeit barely - she suddenly let out a shrill whistle, and almost right after, every big screen and TV in the city shut off for a few seconds. When they returned, a singular video played on all of them.

It was an elegant reading by a robotic voice, detailing each and every one of the offenses that all of the interviewees had given to the true heroes. As promised, not one of the victims were named or recorded - their words had been written down instead, so Kamoshidaman wouldn’t know who to track down, as all the victims picked out were all innocent bystanders that the anti-villain had ignored while trampling on his climb to fame and power. Kamoshidaman simultaneously turned white as an albino cat and red as a ladybug as he watched his cruel actions be exposed to the entirety of Kamo City.

Even if people were unsure of whom to trust then, the last reading and only named victim would still have set Kamo City into an outrage.

Inazuma , who had been unseen since the last fight against Crow during his villainous days as The Prince, was shown at the end, looking like a husk of what the world had seen the brash but quiet sidekick to be. He revealed all the pain Kamoshida had brought upon him, and at the end of his statements, he began with some information that closed the casket on not only any possible remains of Kamoshidaman’s respect but those of his civilian identity.

“You’re a special kind of ******, you know? Most evildoers have the decency to appear as good people outside of the mask. You were abusive to me as a ‘hero’ and as my former sports teacher. People of Kamo City, if you want to take your anger out on this guy, you’ll find him at…”

Inazuma proceeded to blab the information of the high school where the one named Kamoshida (who other than Inazuma had never been figured out despite both of his names being horrifyingly similar) worked and any other way to reach him, Inazuma ended the video with the nastiest scowl anyone had seen and a goodbye. You could tell he wanted to give Kamoshida the middle finger and say certain words following that goodbye, but Panther had decided that it would not be a good idea to show that stuff on live TV broadcasted to the whole city.

As it turned out, Kamoshidaman was literally empowered by the people. The more that trusted him, the more that bowed to his power and authority, the more powerful he would be. Even as Kamoshida, he’d been abusing some of his students and offering rewards for others in exchange for… favors . Ugh.

That was in the past, thankfully; as of the aftermath, the vexing villain was barely stronger than his normal self, and although he tried to escape after the video ended, it turned out Skull and the other heroes had been waiting for him, all of them but Oracle (who had no weapon) complete with painful surprises. Despite many of the public’s opinion that Kamoshida should be publicly executed like he had done to some decent people, Kamo City and its true heroes refused, pointing out that doing that was stooping to the worst of Kamoshida’s levels. Instead, they decided to give him a choice on his fate based on his “nicer punishments.”

Option 1 was simple – he could stay in the city, but he would be rotting in their prisons for the rest of his days, forced to move prisons every few years in order to keep him from plotting with others. Option 2 was more complicated – he would leave the city and never come back, and if he tried to begin superhero work once more somewhere else, no matter how well he meant, he would be tracked, struck down, dragged back to Kamo City (who despite the surprising lack of link to its former “protector” was in dire need of a new name) and would be forced into taking Option 1 from there.

He chose Option 2 – he still believed he had done no wrong, but he was smart enough to not go against those who were once his power source. Kamoshida was kicked out of the city, and other than his worst fans - who either left as well or became quickly evicted supervillains - that was the last anyone wanted to see of him. Every other city they could access was warned about him, and those cities forwarded the information until the rest of the world knew not to trust Kamoshidaman.

________________________________________________________________

A few nights after Kamoshida’s banishment, Ann and Shiho confessed to Ryuji, and the morning after the three woke up as a happy triad.

Soon after, they and the other Spirit Guardians - who revealed themselves to each other soon after the initial victory – pooled their money with the cash reward for their work and bought a big house for their leisure.

Queen and Noir, who were revealed as two girls named Makoto and Haru (and the only ones who knew another Spirit Guardian’s identity other than Ann & Ryuji, who had however intentionally initiated the awakening of the others’ powers and therefore knew everyone’s identities from the start) married about 1.75 years later, and not too long after that they were finalizing adoption papers. The twin brothers named Akira & Ren were so similar in both personality and looks you could easily get which was which wrong all day if they were clothed the same.

Fox and Oracle – who were revealed to be named Yusuke and Futaba - started dating after even more dancing than Ann and Shiho had done with Ryuji, and the only ones who did not know both of them planned to propose soon were each other.

Crow, who they learned had the name of Goro, was aro ace, but unless he trusted you with the truth, it was believed he had a fake relationship with two girls called Caroline & Justine. In the meantime, he spent his days rehabilitating ex-criminals with an old friend who apparently responded to the name Morgana.

After the Spirit Guardians’ hiatus grew long enough, Kamoshidaman eventually grew stupid enough to try pretending to be a hero again. By then, however, he was also much too old and far weaker than he was to have much success; coupled with the fact that everyone knew better than to trust him, the now-rabbit themed “superhero” King Hare was taken down as soon as folks figured out it was him. With the help of some of the Spirit Guardians, three new heroes calling themselves the Phantom Hearts – two near-lookalike young gents called Joker & Wildcard and their sneaky scout Mona – ensured that Kamoshidaman finally made #1.

Sadly for him, that #1 was the number of the path he now takes. At last, Kamoshida finally achieved absolute justice.

[kiritenyas]

this art of hawks, made by horikoshi, always kind of interested me. i wrote this meta/theory to kind of explain why.

i believe that this official art of hawks is very intriguing in particular because the first thing it reminds me of is the famous saying “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil”. this art specifically has a little twist on the saying that is special to hawks’ character:

hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

before i get into hawks’ part, i’ll explain the background of the saying a bit. the saying “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” was first popularized in the 17th century- in the toushou-gu shrine that was in nikkou, japan (popularized in japan but believed to originate in china). a carving on the door to the shrine showed the three wise monkeys (also known as mizaru, kikazaru and iwazaru, that have a few other miscellaneous names) who each represent a part of the saying; mizaru sees no evil, kikazaru hears no evil, and iwazaru speaks no evil. the carvings that included these three monkeys spread the saying in the first place. some versions also have a forth monkey that i’m not going to talk about here.

these three monkeys represent an approach to life; some interpret them as guidelines that show what not to do (and that sometimes includes the forth monkey that mainly represents “do no evil”) the three are believed to be observers/messengers, meant to testify the good of humanity. these messengers were granted a defect: kikazaru who couldn’t hear watched the humans commit the bad deeds, and communicated them to the blink monkey, mizaru. mizaru would transmit the messages to the mute monkey, iwazaru. iwazaru was the one who received the messages and watched the fulfillment of the punishments that were cast on the humans, since he was the one to decide the punishments they should receive from the gods.

iwazaru who decides the punishment the humans will receive and watches it come true represents the “speak no evil” part of the saying, which is also what i personally think horikoshi tried to convey in this official art, both literally and figuratively. literally, the situation hawks is in physically stops him from “speaking evil” since he sort of plays the role of a double spy (for both the heroes and the villains) and is sworn to secrecy by both. figuratively, hawks is a hero known for his pure ideals and his youthful approach to the hero industry, and he is good in his core which stops him from “speaking evil”/using his powers for bad instead of good. but it goes deeper than that.

i think this art is super fascinating especially because of how hawks' nature is questioned in the manga at the moment. the last time we saw him (as of right now 238 chapters came out) he was talking to the best jeanist, after promising dabi he’d prove himself by killing a pro hero. the lesson the three monkeys come to teach is keeping a pure spirit; avoid listening to things that cause us to act badly, avoid speaking without reason and with ill intent, and don’t stand by/tolerate evildoings. hawks’ introduction to the story perfectly portrays this lesson, except for one aspect of it. he would fly around, assist civilians, and act freely for the good of the people, but he’d run his mouth and like to sass people/is very talkative. interesting that the lesson learned from “speak no evil”, which is talk with thought behind your words and respect others isn’t one that hawks’ initial introduction highlighted. he comes off as spontaneous, unpredictable, and his greed for popularity is seen as shallow. 

then, we learn that he just believes a hero should be loved and adored by the people, which is his main reason for seeking public approval rather than official acknowledgment. and after he shows his attitude of “strive for what you long for”, we start to see him as young, idealist and noble.

what makes his character so good is the fact that his biggest dream is pure and happy in its concept, but hawks’ means to achieve it are not. he understands that to achieve a good future, sacrifices have to be made. that aspect of his character is a little heartbreaking, considering he’s the youngest pro hero out there and is still being thrown into the thick of things.

hawks is the heroes’ main connection to the league of villains right now, which is also very interesting since his whole schtick is wanting to have it easy and make a world where heroes can put themselves amongst their priorities. tragically, he's trapped in the spying job he took on in order to achieve those desires. 

now, theory time.

the official art i showed above shows hawks covering his mouth but he’s not shown covering his mouth or eyes-- what leads me to believe that hawks won’t hurt best jeanist/kill him even if it is for the greater good/ideal future he wants. the pose in the picture represents iwazaru who spoke no evil and watched the humans go through the punishments he decided for them, but if i was to apply hawks to the three monkeys story, the humans are not civilians, but the villains in the story (this theory is also supported by the latest chapters/arc who begin to humanize the villains and make us sympathize with them). if the story of the monkeys does apply to bnha, the villains will receive the punishment for the sins they committed. i’m not under any impression hawks is going to decide the villains’ fate, but i do think he’ll “punish” them; at some point of the story, i believe hawks will battle the villains. whether he got found out, or the villains escaped after getting captured, or hawks is told to abandon the mission, i believe he’ll face them and inflict some sort of loss/punishment on them, even if the heroes won’t defeat them.

so, in this theory hawks represents “speak no evil”, but who represents see/hear no evil?

i personally think that toshinori represents “see no evil”. right now, he’s being protected by everyone, and the narrative drove him to be a mentor (a character meant to help develop other characters) rather than a hero (a character meant to help develop the plot). he’s not working as a hero anymore, so he’s now shielded from the actions of the villains by the hero society. but, the blind moneky, mizaru, delivers the message of the evil deeds to iwazaru who can’t speak, which leads me to believe all might and hawks will interact when hawks’ arc is further explored.

“hear no evil” in my opinion is almost definitely endeavor. i have problems with some aspects of his character but for the sake of the theory, i’ll only go over his relevance to hawks’ arc. now, at first, i thought “hear no evil” was aizawa, since kikazaru who can’t hear communicates what he observed to mizaru, and i thought a conversation between aizawa and toshinori made more sense than any other combination. but if i ignore the story of the monkeys and focus on their role in judging humanity/the villains, endeavor makes more sense. endeavor experienced first-hand the force of the villains’ attacks physically (just as kikazaru watched the human’s sins), but also his new role as the number one hero is now to be a reassurance to the public who lost their symbol of peace, so he “sees” the evil and “speaks” evil (communicating with other heroes/authorities about the things he sees) but he doesn’t “hear” the evil-- hawks can’t share the plan with him and endeavor remains in the dark, not “hearing” the evil because hawks can’t “speak” it. 

to fully bring judgment to the humans, the monkeys need the blind monkey to act as a messenger and connect the dots for the mute and deaf ones. so, if my theory is not a reach and isn’t too far fetched, toshinori will be the key to endeavor’s knowledge about the mission; especially considering endeavor’s change of heart (which is... for me at least, bad, but let’s ignore that for the sake of the theory), it’s not too unlikely that endeavor and toshinori will hold a conversation again in the near future, as they already did. the only missing piece in that puzzle is hawks. maybe endeavor would come to toshinori with information/need for advice, and then toshinori would dig into things by himself and uncover the secret spying mission hawks is a part of. or maybe not, and maybe this is very far from what will actually happen, but seeing the importance  of the monkeys to japan and the similarities between stories and most importantly this official art, i think it’s safe to say that even tiny details of the story of the three monkeys will come into play in hawks’ arc. but i guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

[samstiels-deactivated20201212]

The Entire Article Under The Cut

Game of Thrones, in its eighth and final season, is as big as television gets these days. More than 17 million people watched the season’s opening. Judging by the fan and critic reaction though, it seems that a substantial portion of those millions are loathing the season. Indeed, most of the reviews and fan discussions seem to be pondering where the acclaimed series went wrong, with many theories on exactly why it went downhill.

The show did indeed take a turn for the worse, but the reasons for that downturn go way deeper than the usual suspects that have been identified (new and inferior writers, shortened season, too many plot holes). It’s not that these are incorrect, but they’re just superficial shifts. In fact, the souring of Game of Thrones exposes a fundamental shortcoming of our storytelling culture in general: we don’t really know how to tell sociological stories.

At its best, GOT was a beast as rare as a friendly dragon in King’s Landing: it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual. This structural storytelling era of the show lasted through the seasons when it was based on the novels by George R. R. Martin, who seemed to specialize in having characters evolve in response to the broader institutional settings, incentives and norms that surround them.

After the show ran ahead of the novels, however, it was taken over by powerful Hollywood showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Some fans and critics have been assuming that the duo changed the narrative to fit Hollywood tropes or to speed things up, but that’s unlikely. In fact, they probably stuck to the narrative points that were given to them, if only in outline form, by the original author. What they did is something different, but in many ways more fundamental: Benioff and Weiss steer the narrative lane away from the sociological and shifted to the psychological. That’s the main, and often only, way Hollywood and most television writers tell stories.

This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter.

I encounter this shortcoming a lot in my own area of writing—technology and society. Our inability to understand and tell sociological stories is one of the key reasons we’re struggling with how to respond to the historic technological transition we’re currently experiencing with digital technology and machine intelligence—but more on all that later. Let’s first go over what happened to Game of Thrones.

WHAT STORYTELLING IT WAS AND WHAT IT BECAME IN GOT

It’s easy to miss this fundamental narrative lane change and blame the series’ downturn on plain old bad writing by Benioff and Weiss—partly because they are genuinely bad at it. They didn’t just switch the explanatory dynamics of the story, they did a terrible job in the new lane as well.

One could, for example, easily focus on the abundance of plot holes. The dragons, for example seem to switch between comic-book indestructible to vulnerable from one episode to another. And it was hard to keep a straight face when Jaime Lannister ended up on a tiny cove along a vast, vast shoreline at the exact moment the villain Euron Greyjoy swam to that very point from his sinking ship to confront him. How convenient!

Similarly, character arcs meticulously drawn over many seasons seem to have been abandoned on a whim, turning the players into caricatures instead of personalities. Brienne of Tarth seems to exist for no reason, for example; Tyrion Lannister is all of a sudden turned into a murderous snitch while also losing all his intellectual gifts (he hasn’t made a single correct decision the entire season). And who knows what on earth is up with Bran Stark, except that he seems to be kept on as some sort of extra Stark?

But all that is surface stuff. Even if the new season had managed to minimize plot holes and avoid clunky coincidences and a clumsy Arya ex machina as a storytelling device, they couldn’t persist in the narrative lane of the past seasons. For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job.

To understand the narrative lane shift, let’s go back to a key question: Why did so many love Game of Thrones in the first place? What makes it stand out from so many other shows during an era critics call the Second Golden Age of Television because there are so many high-quality productions out there?

The initial fan interest and ensuing loyalty wasn’t just about the brilliant acting and superb cinematography, sound, editing and directing. None of those are that unique to GOT, and all of them remain excellent through this otherwise terrible last season.

One clue is clearly the show’s willingness to kill off major characters, early and often, without losing the thread of the story. TV shows that travel in the psychological lane rarely do that because they depend on viewers identifying with the characters and becoming invested in them to carry the story, rather than looking at the bigger picture of the society, institutions and norms that we interact with and which shape us. They can’t just kill major characters because those are the key tools with which they’re building the story and using as hooks to hold viewers.

In contrast, Game of Thrones killed Ned Stark abruptly at the end of the first season, after building the whole season and, by implication, the entire series around him. The second season developed a replacement Stark heir, which appeared like a more traditional continuation of the narrative. The third season, however, had him and his pregnant wife murdered in a particularly bloody way. And so it went. The story moved on; many characters did not.

The appeal of a show that routinely kills major characters signals a different kind of storytelling, where a single charismatic and/or powerful individual, along with his or her internal dynamics, doesn’t carry the whole narrative and explanatory burden. Given the dearth of such narratives in fiction and in TV, this approach clearly resonated with a large fan base that latched on to the show.

In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.

People then fit their internal narrative to align with their incentives, justifying and rationalizing their behavior along the way. (Thus the famous Upton Sinclair quip: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)

The overly personal mode of storytelling or analysis leaves us bereft of deeper comprehension of events and history. Understanding Hitler’s personality alone will not tell us much about rise of fascism, for example. Not that it didn’t matter, but a different demagogue would probably have appeared to take his place in Germany in between the two bloody world wars in the 20th century. Hence, the answer to “would you kill baby Hitler?,” sometimes presented as an ethical time-travel challenge, should be “no,” because it would very likely not matter much. It is not a true dilemma.

We also have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the fundamental attribution error.

When someone wrongs us, we tend to think they are evil, misguided or selfish: a personalized explanation. But when we misbehave, we are better at recognizing the external pressures on us that shape our actions: a situational understanding. If you snap at a coworker, for example, you may rationalize your behavior by remembering that you had difficulty sleeping last night and had financial struggles this month. You’re not evil, just stressed! The coworker who snaps at you, however, is more likely to be interpreted as a jerk, without going through the same kind of rationalization. This is convenient for our peace of mind, and fits with our domain of knowledge, too. We know what pressures us, but not necessarily others.

That tension between internal stories and desires, psychology and external pressures, institutions, norms and events was exactly what Game of Thrones showed us for many of its characters, creating rich tapestries of psychology but also behavior that was neither saintly nor fully evil at any one point. It was something more than that: you could understand why even the characters undertaking evil acts were doing what they did, how their good intentions got subverted, and how incentives structured behavior. The complexity made it much richer than a simplistic morality tale, where unadulterated good fights with evil.

The hallmark of sociological storytelling is if it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character, not just the main hero/heroine, and imagine ourselves making similar choices. “Yeah, I can see myself doing that under such circumstances” is a way into a broader, deeper understanding. It’s not just empathy: we of course empathize with victims and good people, not with evildoers.

But if we can better understand how and why characters make their choices, we can also think about how to structure our world that encourages better choices for everyone. The alternative is an often futile appeal to the better angels of our nature. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they exist along with baser and lesser motives. The question isn’t to identify the few angels but to make it easier for everyone to make the choices that, collectively, would lead us all to a better place.

Another example of sociological TV drama with a similarly enthusiastic fan following is David Simon’s The Wire, which followed the trajectory of a variety of actors in Baltimore, ranging from African-Americans in the impoverished and neglected inner city trying to survive, to police officers to journalists to unionized dock workers to city officials and teachers. That show, too, killed off its main characters regularly, without losing its audience. Interestingly, the star of each season was an institution more than a person. The second season, for example, focused on the demise of the unionized working class in the U.S.; the fourth highlighted schools; and the final season focused on the role of journalism and mass media.

Luckily for The Wire, creative control never shifted to the standard Hollywood narrative writers who would have given us individuals to root for or hate without being able to fully understand the circumstances that shape them. One thing that’s striking about The Wire is how one could understand all the characters, not just the good ones (and in fact, none of them were just good or bad). When that’s the case, you know you’re watching a sociological story.

WHY GOT PAUSED KILLING MAJOR CHARACTERS

Tellingly, season eight shocked many viewers by … not initially killing off the main characters. It was the first big indicator of their shift—that they were putting the weight of the story on the individual and abandoning the sociological. In that vein, they had fan-favorite characters pull off stunts we could root and cheer for, like Arya Stark killing the Night King in a somewhat improbable fashion.

For seven seasons, the show had focused on the sociology of what an external, otherized threat—such as the Night King, the Army of the Undead and the Winter to Come—would do to competing rivalries within the opposing camp. Having killed one of the main sociological tensions that had animated the whole series with one well-placed knife-stab, Benioff and Weiss then turned to ruining the other sociological tension: the story of the corruption of power.

This corruption of power was crucially illustrated in Cersei Lannister’s rise and evolution from victim (if a selfish one) to evil actor, and this was clearly meant also to be the story of her main challenger, Daenerys Targaryen. Dany had started out wanting to be the breaker of chains, with moral choices weighing heavily on her, and season by season, we have witnessed her, however reluctantly, being shaped by the tools that were available to her and that she embraced: war, dragons, fire.

Done right, it would have been a fascinating and dynamic story: rivals transforming into each other as they seek absolute power with murderous tools, one starting from a selfish perspective (her desire to have her children rule) and the other from an altruistic one (her desire to free slaves and captive people, of which she was once one).

The corruption of power is one of the most important psychosocial dynamics behind many important turning points in history, and in how the ills of society arise. In response, we have created elections, checks and balances, and laws and mechanisms that constrain the executive.

Destructive historical figures often believe that they must stay in power because it is they, and only they, who can lead the people—and that any alternative would be calamitous. Leaders tend to get isolated, become surrounded by sycophants and succumb easily to the human tendency to self-rationalize. There are several examples in history of a leader who starts in opposition with the best of intentions, like Dany, and ends up acting brutally and turning into a tyrant if they take power.

Told sociologically, Dany’s descent into a cruel mass-murderer would have been a strong and riveting story. Yet in the hands of two writers who do not understand how to advance the narrative in that lane, it became ridiculous. She attacks King’s Landing with Drogon, her dragon, and wins, with the bells of the city ringing in surrender. Then, suddenly, she goes on a rampage because, somehow, her tyrannical genes turn on.

Varys, the advisor who will die for trying to stop Dany, says to Tyrion that “every time a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.” That is straight-up and simplistic genetic determinism, rather than what we had been witnessing for the past seven seasons. Again, sociological stories don’t discount the personal, psychological and even the genetic, but the key point is that they are more than “coin tosses”—they are complex interactions with emergent consequences: the way the world actually works.

In interviews after that episode, Benioff and Weiss confess that they turned it into a spontaneous moment. Weiss says, “ I don’t think she decided ahead of time that she was going to do what she did. And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It’s in that moment, on the walls of King’s Landing, when she’s looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to make this personal.”

Benioff and Weiss were almost certainly given the “Mad Queen” ending to Game of Thrones by the original writer, George R. R. Martin. For them, however, this was the eating-ice-cream-with-a-fork problem I mentioned above. They could keep the story, but not the storytelling method. They could only make it into a momentary turn that is part spontaneous psychology and part deterministic genetics.

WHY SOCIOLOGICAL STORYTELLING MATTERS

Whether done well or badly, the psychological/internal genre leaves us unable to understand and react to social change. Arguably, the dominance of the psychological and hero/antihero narrative is also the reason we are having such a difficult time dealing with the current historic technology transition. So this essay is more than about one TV show with dragons.

In my own area of research and writing, the impact of digital technology and machine intelligence on society, I encounter this obstacle all the time. There are a significant number of stories, books, narratives and journalistic accounts that focus on the personalities of key players such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos. Of course, their personalities matter, but only in the context of business models, technological advances, the political environment, (lack of) meaningful regulation, the existing economic and political forces that fuel wealth inequality and lack of accountability for powerful actors, geopolitical dynamics, societal characteristics and more.

It’s reasonable, for example, for a corporation to ponder who would be the best CEO or COO, but it’s not reasonable for us to expect that we could take any one of those actors and replace them with another person and get dramatically different results without changing the structures, incentives and forces that shape how they and their companies act in this world.

The preference for the individual and psychological narrative is understandable: the story is easier to tell as we gravitate toward identifying with the hero or hating the antihero, at the personal level. We are, after all, also persons!

In German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s classic play, Life of Galileo, Andrea, a former pupil of Galileo, visits him after he recants his seminal findings under pressure from the Catholic Church. Galileo gives Andrea his notebooks, asking him to spread the knowledge they contain. Andrea celebrates this, saying “unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo corrects him: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

Well-run societies don’t need heroes, and the way to keep terrible impulses in check isn’t to dethrone antiheros and replace them with good people. Unfortunately, most of our storytelling—in fiction and also in mass media nonfiction—remains stuck in the hero/antihero narrative. It’s a pity Game of Thrones did not manage to conclude its last season in its original vein. In a historic moment that requires a lot of institution building and incentive changing (technological challenges, climate change, inequality and accountability) we need all the sociological imagination we can get, and fantasy dragons or not, it was nice to have a show that encouraged just that while it lasted.

[meggannn]

(based on your previous ask) do you mind if I ask how you feel about lok? is there a general consensus if it's good or bad? youre really insightful and just wanted to know if there were any major issues you had with it

yeah sure, i’ll do my best. if you want a quick answer to your question, here is a link to some of my other korra posts where i say pretty much the same thing as i do here, just in fewer words. cause this post will be mostly an unhappy summary of my experience watching the show. this post will contain spoilers, and disclaimer, i am a really biased, disappointed asshole, so i’ll just admit that now. 

short answer: i liked the concept of lok more than the product we got. a lot of that is because you had a physically buff brown wlw protagonist written mostly by cishet white men and, as you can imagine, it wasn’t handled great. when i think of lok now i tend to fluctuate between bittersweet nostalgia and quiet, simmering rage.

if you don’t care about the show summary, skip at the middle paragraph break down to my tldr.

so for those who don’t know, LOK was really my first “big” fandom on tumblr. when it was announced, a bunch of ATLA purists were already hating on it because 1) brown woman, 2) it was unrealistic to go from ATLA’s technology to streampunk in 70 years, and 3) it wasn’t ATLA, basically. it was my first big interest that i got to participate in as it was airing, and i was really excited about it. i defended it, i wrote meta, i liveblogged, i wrote tons of fic and spammed theories/wants before the damn show even had a release date. all that is to say, i was Invested, and i believed in it before i even saw it. people called me a bnf, i’m not sure if that’s true, but i did gain a lot my followers in my first few years on tumblr by posting korra stuff. a lot of them – hello – i think are still around today (i’m not certain how all the video games hasn’t scared them off yet)

i should say at this point that my opinion of LOK the show has been really wrapped up in the ugly stain left by the fanbase. korra the character has been the subject of tons of racist, misogynistic criticism since the moment we saw her back; when she showed up on screen as a proud young woman who fought with authority and stood up for herself, that was the nail in the coffin for her reputation. i agreed that she had a bit of growing up to do, because ATLA/LOK have always been stories about coming of age and maturing, but i disagreed strongly with this notion that she deserved to be “humbled,” which is what a lot of fans were looking for.

the overall consensus on if it’s “good” depends on who you ask. most people agree that ATLA is better overall: it was better plotted because it benefited from more writers in the room and more episodes to flesh out the world. opinions on LOK specifically range based a lot on their opinions of the K/orra/sami pairing, if they were involved in or what side they were on in any of the fandom wank, and also just complete random chance.

i’ll go more in depth into my ‘history’ with the show below, but i just wanted to mention that all the while the show was airing, korra was being hit with waves of criticism by so-called fans for basically being a confident brown woman who were calling for her to learn her place, respect her elders, etc. another common theme was fandom’s brilliant fucking idea that asami, a light-skinned feminine non-bending woman who was more polite and reserved than korra, would’ve made a better avatar. because you know why. (korra was often described as brutal, rough, unsophisticated, next to pretty, perfect asami. and asami is a fine character, to be clear, but that’s what she was – fine. nothing really stands out about her, which is a fault of the writing, because she had a lot of potential too.) so anyway all of this did sour my mood toward engaging with other fans outside my friend circle.

–

it was around maybe the middle of book 1 that i realized the writing for the show was simpler than what i was expecting – not that it was childish, which it was (because it was written for children, i understood that), but i felt like the plot meandered and the twists came out of nowhere. it felt like they were making it up as they were going, and it opened threads it didn’t answer. one of the biggest threads was the equalist revolution, which was a very sensitive topic that got jettisoned when the leader was revealed to be a fraud, and that devalued the entire movement in an instant. really disappointing, because i was looking forward to seeing that addressed. for a lot of people, this was a dealbreaker, and they started walking. i stuck with it, but loosely.

book 2 aired, focusing on the spiritual world and some really cool history. it still suffered a lot from awkward b-plots and loose threads it didn’t know how to tackle. korra lost her memory and then regained it 2 episodes later with no consequences, mako flip-flopped between korra and asami because bryke don’t know how to write teenage romances without making it a love triangle, and at some point bolin kissed a girl against her will and they didnt acknowledge that at all? i honestly don’t remember. anyway at the end of book 2, even though korra saves the day and prevents the world from descending into darkness for ten thousand years, due to events beyond her control, korra loses the spiritual connection that ties her to all of the previous avatars – aang, roku, kyoshi, wan, everyone. and people hit the fucking ceiling. “korra’s not a real avatar if she lost her connection to the old ones! that’s the entire point of the cycle! this show is bullshit, it’s not canon anymore!” (the entire point that finale demonstrated that korra’s power alone was enough to save the world and she didn’t need anyone else. but people found that ~unrealistic~ i guess). as you can imagine, being a fan of LOK is starting to get a little tiring by now.

books 3-4 is where the korra haters got to love the show again, because they were both straight-up torture porn. after everything she did saving the world, this is the arc where korra got beat down, tortured, dragged into the dirt, swallowed and spat back out. book 3 is a lot of people’s favorites because it was the first book that felt fully plotted out before it was put on air, which is why i enjoyed it too. but for me it was difficult to see a girl, whose identity revolved around being the avatar after being raised and sheltered to think it was all she was good for, effectively abandon her life and even her name by the beginning of book 4 because the events of book 3 were that traumatizing for her. somehow this was character development. we were encouraged to stick with it because we hoped korra would find herself again. and she did, sorta.

but it makes me furious that people who had quit in books 1-2 came back during 3 because they heard these books were better – aka book 3, the book that featured korra the least, and books 3-4 in which korra got her ass handed to her in some of the hardest fights vs some of the cruelest villains of the series. (nevermind that the book 3 villains suffer from the anime villain curse: they quickly went from “cool character design” to “wait, how does this rando group of villains show up with powers literally no one in the universe has ever heard before?” – questions no one ever answers)

anyway book 4 is a mish-mash of… i’m not sure. i’ve rewatched all the books but i don’t know if i’ll ever touch this one again. the culturally appropriating airbender wannabe, zaheer (a complete rando who somehow masters airbending enough to fly, which was a huge middle finger to airbending masters aang and tenzin for no reason) a guy who literally tortured korra one season before and put her in a wheelchair, is the one who the writers send korra to for her spiritual awakening that lets her save the day. not tenzin or jinora, her spiritual teachers with whom she has positive, healthy relationships – they send her back to her abuser who terrifies and degrades her a bit more before deciding to help. this was a pattern: the writers made both korra and asami face their abusers (in asami’s case, her father) for catharsis instead of gaining peace over their trauma another, healthier way because…. i’m not sure why. there is no reason why. and then there’s the guilt tripping nonsense of asami feeling as if she had to forgive her father, who tried to kill her, because he said he was sorry and sacrificed himself for her in the finale. it’s angst galore, if you like that kind of thing, which i normally do, except this is less angst and more just the writers trying to hammer in torture porn, grimdark, and poor attempts at morally gray nonsense into their finale season.

anyway at the end of her journey, korra, our buff brown woc, learns that she had to suffer to learn how to be compassionate and relate to her enemy. i’m not exaggerating, she literally says that. which is lovely.

–

tldr: i wasted a lot of emotional time and energy into this show and was extremely disappointed when some of the ending’s notes were “you had to suffer to become a better person” and “forgive your abusers/villains because aren’t we all the same in the end?”

but also on a strictly narrative level, LOK also bit off way more than it could chew both emotionally and thematically. it had an amazing premise, but it was not committed to

utilizing the steampunk genre to its best potential in the bending world (after the creativity in the rest of the worldbuilding, the LOK series finale was literally fighting a giant robot – seriously?)

giving its hero the respect and character arc she deserved. and i don’t say that because i think korra had no growing up to do in b1, she did, but she didn’t deserve for it to happen like that.

so basically i realized that a lot of the writers that made ATLA great weren’t brought back for LOK, and it showed. i realized that the LOK writers, when they listened to fans, were listening to the fans that whined the loudest, or (more likely, since they plan seasons years before we see them) they thought from the beginning that it was a good idea for korra to go through years’ worth of pain just to be spat out a humbler, “better” person

the reason i told you all that about me defending LOK in the beginning is because i need you to understand that i believed in LOK longer than i probably should’ve. i wanted it to be everything i was expecting in a diverse children’s show with an unorthodox female protaganist. but just because they had a brown wlw heroine doesn’t mean that they deserved to be praised for it when they treated her like garbage.

and korra and asami walk into a beam of light together in the last second of the show and i’m supposed to applaud the writers for their bravery or something

[theamazingsallyhogan]

Game of Thrones, in its eighth and final season, is as big as television gets these days. More than 17 million people watched the season’s opening. Judging by the fan and critic reaction though, it seems that a substantial portion of those millions are loathing the season. Indeed, most of the reviews and fan discussions seem to be pondering where the acclaimed series went wrong, with many theories on exactly why it went downhill.

The show did indeed take a turn for the worse, but the reasons for that downturn goes way deeper than the usual suspects that have been identified (new and inferior writers, shortened season, too many plot holes). It’s not that these are incorrect, but they’re just superficial shifts. In fact, the souring of Game of Thrones exposes a fundamental shortcoming of our storytelling culture in general: we don’t really know how to tell sociological stories.

At its best, GOT was a beast as rare as a friendly dragon in King’s Landing: it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual. This structural storytelling era of the show lasted through the seasons when it was based on the novels by George R. R. Martin, who seemed to specialize in having characters evolve in response to the broader institutional settings, incentives and norms that surround them.

After the show ran ahead of the novels, however, it was taken over by powerful Hollywood showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Some fans and critics have been assuming that the duo changed the narrative to fit Hollywood tropes or to speed things up, but that’s unlikely. In fact, they probably stuck to the narrative points that were given to them, if only in outline form, by the original author. What they did is something different, but in many ways more fundamental: Benioff and Weiss steer the narrative lane away from the sociological and shifted to the psychological. That’s the main, and often only, way Hollywood and most television writers tell stories.

This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter.

I encounter this shortcoming a lot in my own area of writing—technology and society. Our inability to understand and tell sociological stories is one of the key reasons we’re struggling with how to respond to the historic technological transition we’re currently experiencing with digital technology and machine intelligence—but more on all that later. Let’s first go over what happened to Game of Thrones.

WHAT STORYTELLING IT WAS AND WHAT IT BECAME IN GOT

It’s easy to miss this fundamental narrative lane change and blame the series’ downturn on plain old bad writing by Benioff and Weiss—partly because they are genuinely bad at it. They didn’t just switch the explanatory dynamics of the story, they did a terrible job in the new lane as well.

One could, for example, easily focus on the abundance of plot holes. The dragons, for example seem to switch between comic-book indestructible to vulnerable from one episode to another. And it was hard to keep a straight face when Jaime Lannister ended up on a tiny cove along a vast, vast shoreline at the exact moment the villain Euron Greyjoy swam to that very point from his sinking ship to confront him. How convenient!

Similarly, character arcs meticulously drawn over many seasons seem to have been abandoned on a whim, turning the players into caricatures instead of personalities. Brienne of Tarth seems to exist for no reason, for example; Tyrion Lannister is all of a sudden turned into a murderous snitch while also losing all his intellectual gifts (he hasn’t made a single correct decision the entire season). And who knows what on earth is up with Bran Stark, except that he seems to be kept on as some sort of extra Stark?

But all that is surface stuff. Even if the new season had managed to minimize plot holes and avoid clunky coincidences and a clumsy Arya ex machina as a storytelling device, they couldn’t persist in the narrative lane of the past seasons. For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job.

To understand the narrative lane shift, let’s go back to a key question: Why did so many love Game of Thrones in the first place? What makes it stand out from so many other shows during an era critics call the Second Golden Age of Television because there are so many high-quality productions out there?

The initial fan interest and ensuing loyalty wasn’t just about the brilliant acting and superb cinematography, sound, editing and directing. None of those are that unique to GOT, and all of them remain excellent through this otherwise terrible last season.

One clue is clearly the show’s willingness to kill off major characters, early and often, without losing the thread of the story. TV shows that travel in the psychological lane rarely do that because they depend on viewers identifying with the characters and becoming invested in them to carry the story, rather than looking at the bigger picture of the society, institutions and norms that we interact with and which shape us. They can’t just kill major characters because those are the key tools with which they’re building the story and using as hooks to hold viewers.

In contrast, Game of Thrones killed Ned Stark abruptly at the end of the first season, after building the whole season and, by implication, the entire series around him. The second season developed a replacement Stark heir, which appeared like a more traditional continuation of the narrative. The third season, however, had him and his pregnant wife murdered in a particularly bloody way. And so it went. The story moved on; many characters did not.

The appeal of a show that routinely kills major characters signals a different kind of storytelling, where a single charismatic and/or powerful individual, along with his or her internal dynamics, doesn’t carry the whole narrative and explanatory burden. Given the dearth of such narratives in fiction and in TV, this approach clearly resonated with a large fan base that latched on to the show.

In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.

People then fit their internal narrative to align with their incentives, justifying and rationalizing their behavior along the way. (Thus the famous Upton Sinclair quip: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)

The overly personal mode of storytelling or analysis leaves us bereft of deeper comprehension of events and history. Understanding Hitler’s personality alone will not tell us much about rise of fascism, for example. Not that it didn’t matter, but a different demagogue would probably have appeared to take his place in Germany in between the two bloody world wars in the 20th century. Hence, the answer to “would you kill baby Hitler?,” sometimes presented as an ethical time-travel challenge, should be “no,” because it would very likely not matter much. It is not a true dilemma.

We also have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the fundamental attribution error.

When someone wrongs us, we tend to think they are evil, misguided or selfish: a personalized explanation. But when we misbehave, we are better at recognizing the external pressures on us that shape our actions: a situational understanding. If you snap at a coworker, for example, you may rationalize your behavior by remembering that you had difficulty sleeping last night and had financial struggles this month. You’re not evil, just stressed! The coworker who snaps at you, however, is more likely to be interpreted as a jerk, without going through the same kind of rationalization. This is convenient for our peace of mind, and fits with our domain of knowledge, too. We know what pressures us, but not necessarily others.

That tension between internal stories and desires, psychology and external pressures, institutions, norms and events was exactly what Game of Thrones showed us for many of its characters, creating rich tapestries of psychology but also behavior that was neither saintly nor fully evil at any one point. It was something more than that: you could understand why even the characters undertaking evil acts were doing what they did, how their good intentions got subverted, and how incentives structured behavior. The complexity made it much richer than a simplistic morality tale, where unadulterated good fights with evil.

The hallmark of sociological storytelling is if it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character, not just the main hero/heroine, and imagine ourselves making similar choices. “Yeah, I can see myself doing that under such circumstances” is a way into a broader, deeper understanding. It’s not just empathy: we of course empathize with victims and good people, not with evildoers.

But if we can better understand how and why characters make their choices, we can also think about how to structure our world that encourages better choices for everyone. The alternative is an often futile appeal to the better angels of our nature. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they exist along with baser and lesser motives. The question isn’t to identify the few angels but to make it easier for everyone to make the choices that, collectively, would lead us all to a better place.

Another example of sociological TV drama with a similarly enthusiastic fan following is David Simon’s The Wire, which followed the trajectory of a variety of actors in Baltimore, ranging from African-Americans in the impoverished and neglected inner city trying to survive, to police officers to journalists to unionized dock workers to city officials and teachers. That show, too, killed off its main characters regularly, without losing its audience. Interestingly, the star of each season was an institution more than a person. The second season, for example, focused on the demise of the unionized working class in the U.S.; the fourth highlighted schools; and the final season focused on the role of journalism and mass media.

Luckily for The Wire, creative control never shifted to the standard Hollywood narrative writers who would have given us individuals to root for or hate without being able to fully understand the circumstances that shape them. One thing that’s striking about The Wire is how one could understand all the characters, not just the good ones (and in fact, none of them were just good or bad). When that’s the case, you know you’re watching a sociological story.

WHY GOT PAUSED KILLING MAJOR CHARACTERS

Tellingly, season eight shocked many viewers by … not initially killing off the main characters. It was the first big indicator of their shift—that they were putting the weight of the story on the individual and abandoning the sociological. In that vein, they had fan-favorite characters pull off stunts we could root and cheer for, like Arya Stark killing the Night King in a somewhat improbable fashion.

For seven seasons, the show had focused on the sociology of what an external, otherized threat—such as the Night King, the Army of the Undead and the Winter to Come—would do to competing rivalries within the opposing camp. Having killed one of the main sociological tensions that had animated the whole series with one well-placed knife-stab, Benioff and Weiss then turned to ruining the other sociological tension: the story of the corruption of power.

This corruption of power was crucially illustrated in Cersei Lannister’s rise and evolution from victim (if a selfish one) to evil actor, and this was clearly meant also to be the story of her main challenger, Daenerys Targaryen. Dany had started out wanting to be the breaker of chains, with moral choices weighing heavily on her, and season by season, we have witnessed her, however reluctantly, being shaped by the tools that were available to her and that she embraced: war, dragons, fire.

Done right, it would have been a fascinating and dynamic story: rivals transforming into each other as they seek absolute power with murderous tools, one starting from a selfish perspective (her desire to have her children rule) and the other from an altruistic one (her desire to free slaves and captive people, of which she was once one).

The corruption of power is one of the most important psychosocial dynamics behind many important turning points in history, and in how the ills of society arise. In response, we have created elections, checks and balances, and laws and mechanisms that constrain the executive.

Destructive historical figures often believe that they must stay in power because it is they, and only they, who can lead the people—and that any alternative would be calamitous. Leaders tend to get isolated, become surrounded by sycophants and succumb easily to the human tendency to self-rationalize. There are several examples in history of a leader who starts in opposition with the best of intentions, like Dany, and ends up acting brutally and turning into a tyrant if they take power.

Told sociologically, Dany’s descent into a cruel mass-murderer would have been a strong and riveting story. Yet in the hands of two writers who do not understand how to advance the narrative in that lane, it became ridiculous. She attacks King’s Landing with Drogon, her dragon, and wins, with the bells of the city ringing in surrender. Then, suddenly, she goes on a rampage because, somehow, her tyrannical genes turn on.

Varys, the advisor who will die for trying to stop Dany, says to Tyrion that “every time a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.” That is straight-up and simplistic genetic determinism, rather than what we had been witnessing for the past seven seasons. Again, sociological stories don’t discount the personal, psychological and even the genetic, but the key point is that they are more than “coin tosses”—they are complex interactions with emergent consequences: the way the world actually works.

In interviews after that episode, Benioff and Weiss confess that they turned it into a spontaneous moment. Weiss says, “ I don’t think she decided ahead of time that she was going to do what she did. And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It’s in that moment, on the walls of King’s Landing, when she’s looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to make this personal.”

Benioff and Weiss were almost certainly given the “Mad Queen” ending to Game of Thrones by the original writer, George R. R. Martin. For them, however, this was the eating-ice-cream-with-a-fork problem I mentioned above. They could keep the story, but not the storytelling method. They could only make it into a momentary turn that is part spontaneous psychology and part deterministic genetics.

WHY SOCIOLOGICAL STORYTELLING MATTERS

Whether done well or badly, the psychological/internal genre leaves us unable to understand and react to social change. Arguably, the dominance of the psychological and hero/antihero narrative is also the reason we are having such a difficult time dealing with the current historic technology transition. So this essay is more than about one TV show with dragons.

In my own area of research and writing, the impact of digital technology and machine intelligence on society, I encounter this obstacle all the time. There are a significant number of stories, books, narratives and journalistic accounts that focus on the personalities of key players such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos. Of course, their personalities matter, but only in the context of business models, technological advances, the political environment, (lack of) meaningful regulation, the existing economic and political forces that fuel wealth inequality and lack of accountability for powerful actors, geopolitical dynamics, societal characteristics and more.

It’s reasonable, for example, for a corporation to ponder who would be the best CEO or COO, but it’s not reasonable for us to expect that we could take any one of those actors and replace them with another person and get dramatically different results without changing the structures, incentives and forces that shape how they and their companies act in this world.

The preference for the individual and psychological narrative is understandable: the story is easier to tell as we gravitate toward identifying with the hero or hating the antihero, at the personal level. We are, after all, also persons!

In German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s classic play, Life of Galileo,Andrea, a former pupil of Galileo, visits him after he recants his seminal findings under pressure from the Catholic Church. Galileo gives Andrea his notebooks, asking him to spread the knowledge they contain. Andrea celebrates this, saying “unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo corrects him: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

Well-run societies don’t need heroes, and the way to keep terrible impulses in check isn’t to dethrone antiheros and replace them with good people. Unfortunately, most of our storytelling—in fiction and also in mass media nonfiction—remains stuck in the hero/antihero narrative. It’s a pity Game of Thrones did not manage to conclude its last season in its original vein. In a historic moment that requires a lot of institution building and incentive changing (technological challenges, climate change, inequality and accountability) we need all the sociological imagination we can get, and fantasy dragons or not, it was nice to have a show that encouraged just that while it lasted.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

[vmheadquarters]

Twelve years ago today, UPN (RIP!) premiered a cult-classic neo-noir about murder, class warfare, sexual assault, and forbidden love. It was quippy and campy and smart as hell—and it just happened to center on a pint-sized blonde who looked like a cheerleader but thought like Sherlock Holmes. The show was Veronica Mars, and even if the last decade has muddled its legacy with a much-hyped but ultimately disappointing fan-funded follow-up film and, of course, the extremely meh third season, the high school years remain an unparalleled success. Veronica Mars seasons one and two were better than anything that had come before, far surpassed its competition in quality, and set a high bar for future shows that has only barely been met by a few episodes of television here and there. So give my regards to Friday Night Lights (a family show, not a teen show) and Degrassi (please), but Veronica Mars is the best teen show of all time*. 

1. Nuanced Class Conflict

Gossip Girl and The OC did it well, but Veronica Mars did it better. Even though Neptune, CA, is technically fictional, it's as real a place as has ever been portrayed on television. Its particular problems and reputation informed everything from law enforcement (the question of whether or not to incorporate the town into a city and make the sheriff's office into a police department) to the biker gangs riding through on their way up and down the PCH. The levels of privilege/lack thereof were so nuanced and specific. Other shows divide people into the Haves and the Have Nots; on Veronica Mars, everyone has something a little different. At the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder is Weevil, whose background is not only impoverished but criminal; the only community he can "afford" is a gang (though his crew isn't all bad—you'll find nary a broad stroke or generalization in the world of Veronica Mars). In the center of things are Veronica and Keith, who lived comfortably when Keith was sheriff, but have buckled their belts since he became a private eye. On the one hand, they own a small business! On the other, they live in a pretty crap apartment complex and have nowhere near enough saved to send Veronica to college. Then there's the nouveau-riche Echolls', who have all the glamorous trappings of wealth (cars, booze, mansion) and pretty much none of the cultural capital. At the top of the heap are the Kanes; while the Echolls' have enough money to "get away" with murder, the Kanes have enough money to get away with it, cover it up, frame someone else for it, and get the sheriff fired for looking into it. Money problems are basically the least-juicy of TV plots, but by using wealth disparity as a way to develop the characters, essentially building it into the DNA of the show, Veronica Mars created a TV universe just as interesting and complicated as that of Friday Night Lights or Parks and Recreation.

2. Lianne Mars

A girl with a missing mom is a fairy tale trope as old as time, rooted in a deification-of-the-female version of misogyny that I don't have time to get into right now. Suffice it to say, a dead or absentee mother is usually a sign of lazy writing. It's a way to reduce the character count and set a heroine adrift while, not coincidentally, making it so the (usually male) writer doesn't have to think of what a grown woman would think or talk or act like. At first, this is the fate of Veronica's mother, Lianne Mars. She was just conveniently...gone, another casualty of the fallout from the Lilly Kane murder investigation. Her absence lets Veronica be angsty and ill-supervised even as Keith Mars entered the canon of Bestest TV Dads of All Time (which he is! Love Keith forever and ever). But then she came back, with baggage, and the trope was, if not redeemed, at least put to good use. Lianne is an alcoholic who couldn't deal with the disappointing turns life took, and she finally cracked when her husband ran directly into conflict with her lost love Jake Kane, for whom she still pined. Even when she decides she wants to be a mom again, she can't quit being an alcoholic. And as heartbreaking as it is to watch Veronica play the parent, it's also a moment of growth. Veronica realizes—or rather, decides—that she isn't doomed to repeat her mother's mistakes. She is a stronger, better person than Lianne. A person big enough to love her flawed mother, even strong enough to forgive her. In the third episode, Veronica says, "The hero is the one that stays, and the villain is the one that splits." By the end of the series, Veronica has learned what true villainy looks like, and it ain't her mom. Showrunners, take note: This is how you do a realistic redemption story.

3. The Guest Stars and Bit Players

The casting department at Veronica Mars did flawless work. Obviously, the core cast is great, but the semi-regulars and guests are also amazing. There's an entire season devoted to Steve fucking Guttenberg. Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin play the negaverse versions of themselves. Ryan Hansen and Ken Marino do their Ryan Hansen/Ken Marino Shtick, and why shouldn't they? Max Greenfield (a.k.a. Schmidt on New Girl) and Tessa Thompson (from Dear White People and Creed) both had recurring roles long before they were famous, and even Tina Majorino (Mac) and Michael Muhney (Lamb), who didn't really "break out" in a major way after the show, are perfect in their roles. The second (SECOND) IMDb credit for one Jessica Chastain is an episode of Veronica Mars, and of course, Leighton Meester appears in two episodes. Yes, there are other teen shows that feature young actors who went on to bigger, better things, but I maintain that Veronica Mars is notable for encouraging real actors to do real work.

4. The Mysteries Were Smart AF

The show trusted its audience to keep up and pay attention. Maybe even a little too much. In the era before binge-watching and old episodes being able on demand, Veronica Mars suffered from the same issue that plagues the first few seasons of The X Files: Viewers who weren't "caught up" on the season-long mystery arc found it difficult to get into. VM had low ratings throughout its run, and when it used the shift from high school to college to introduce shorter, quicker mysteries, well, we all know how season three went. But looking back, it's clear that the show was ahead of its time, telling smart, twist-y weekly stories while teasing out a longer mystery that deeply impacted the main characters' lives. (Can't you just imagine how they'd advertise the show now? Moody teaser trailers with the tag line "Who Killed Lilly Kane?" and fansites and podcasts devoted to all the clues and hints and easter eggs from every episode?) There are other teen mystery/crime-fighter shows, sure, but they tend to put their characters in immediate peril, which makes the audience ask, "What's going to happen?" Instead, Veronica Mars is an intellectual exercise, evidence and theory based, and the question becomes, "What has already happened, and what does it mean?" That's the kind of meaty writing that inspires, if not legions of fans, a loyal audience to sing its praises. Veronica Mars was so smart it was niche. I'm not making a case for VM as overlooked prestige television, but then again I totally am. WHY didn't it win any Emmys?

5. They Didn't Explain Every Little Thing

See: above "trusting the audience smartness" factor. They didn't explain why sleeping with a "consenting" teenager is still wrong, or why Logan and Veronica went from adversaries to lovers in the space of like, a week, or why money equals power. They got that the audience got it. So, the exact opposite of a show like, say, Secret Life of the American Teenager. There were episodes that touched on privilege and entitlement and infidelity and the abuse of power by law enforcement, but it was subtle and real instead of, you know...Degrassi.

6. The Humor

It wasn't dark and humorous, it was darkly humorous and humorously dark. (Think combining the creepy weirdness of Twin Peaks with the banter of Moonlighting.) Logan's poignant answering machine messages, Veronica's epic takedowns, even Lamb got to be withering and snarky while he systematically fucked over the whole town.The humor kept us invested even when stories dipped into sentimental, Dawson's Creek-esque territory and deflected the romance-y moments that might have turned it into a mystery-style Felicity. Veronica's and Logan's jokes, in particular, also serve a psychological purpose: mask their pain at any cost. Unlike in Gilmore Girls, where every character speaks like a hyper-intelligent stand-up comic and not at all like a teenager or real human being, Veronica and the residents of Neptune make comments that feel true to their characters and relevant to their circumstances. If you watched any episode of Scream Queens and thought, "I guess they're trying to imitate...Scream? Heathers? Clueless? With the smart/bitchy blondes and the snappy comebacks and the eye rolls?" I understand. But actually, they were trying (and failing. Hard.) to do Veronica Mars. Smart sassy cute mean heart of gold flirty clever repartee? Yeah, that's Veronica Mars, and Ryan Murphy, bless his soul, is not Rob Thomas.

7. The Rape Plot(s)

From the very first episode when, in a flashback, golden-haired, white dress-clad Veronica walks, almost in a stupor (have you ever seen a more "perfect" victim?) into the sheriff's office to tell Lamb that she was raped—because she is a good girl and good girls go to the authorities—only to have him, basically, shrug it off, rape and sexual assault were core themes of the show, central to its purpose and story engine. Creator Rob Thomas initially envisioned the story as a YA novel with a male protagonist, and changing the lead's gender to female is arguably the best and most important decision he ever made. Veronica's sexuality is everything. How she flirts her way out of scrapes, plays innocent when it can help her, distrusts it when she's attracted to the "wrong" person, is allowed to enjoy it with Logan and, of course, how her virginity was taken from her one night she can't quite remember. The show takes Veronica's rape seriously as not just a plot point or easy motivation, but as a defining part of her character. She cleans obsessively and looks over her shoulder. She's sensitive to the potential aggressors—and victims—at her school. She knows that her rapist was someone she knew, and she has to live with that mystery every day. But it's complicated. That night she can't remember might have been semi-consensual, but then we learn, no it wasn't. Yes, there's a story about a false rape accusation (against Adam Scott!), but the truth only makes the situation murkier. And in an unfortunately rare move, Veronica Mars also depicts the aftermath of the sexual abuse of boys, including an exploration of how the stigma against male assault survivors re-traumatizes them. (The third season is, in my opinion, a missed opportunity to tackle the campus rape epidemic. By blaming the rapes on a psychological experiment gone awry, the show unfortunately ignores the fact that toxic masculinity isn't a role-playing aberration but a pervasive national issue. But its heart is in the right place, if not its logic.)

8. Veronica

Choker-wearing, dog-owning, private-detectiving blonde badass Veronica Mars. She's most often compared to Buffy, that other crime-fighting cutie with a ragtag army of friends and a ne'er do well love interest, and the comparison is apt. Both possess skills their peers do not and use those skills to solve problems both thrust upon them and sought. But the difference is that in the space that Buffy uses to explore the supernatural, Veronica Mars plays with loyalty and ethics. Is it wrong to snitch on your friends? Is a rumor evidence? Can you break the law to serve a higher good? These are issues Buffy doesn't wrestle with; it's pretty much a given that evil vampires are worth defeating (yes, there are definitely instances when Buffy is tested because she's fallen for a vamp or one of her friends is possessed or whatever, but that's not like, the thing of the show). And while so many other "outsider/observer/new kid" teen show protagonists (Ryan, Dan, Dawson, Lindsay Weir) long to get "in," Veronica's been there. She's been popular, and (a little) wealthy. She's not exploring a new world, she's re-learning her old one. In that she has more in common with Angela Chase, but way less whiny. You watch My So-Called Life and think, I'm totally Angela. You watch VMand think, I wish I were Veronica. When people talk about the strong but vulnerable but smart but flawed but cool but real but beautiful but relatable but empowered but conflicted but modern but iconic but a good role model but not unattainable with a job not defined by that job "interesting" female characters on television, a few names tend to come up again and again: Carrie, Murphy, Ally, Roseanne, Olivia, Dana. To that (very white!) pantheon I humbly submit: Veronica.

*....except for Freaks and Geeks.

[yourhealthmattersblog]

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The Animation The animation for this particular program is ideal and also truly good. Theory of producing a non human for the major lead is likewise one-of-a-kind scene as soon as once in awhile. Candidly, I like Momonga. The way He mount a robust magic attack or a simple magic technique make it as realistic as it was definitely actual. To put it in different ways, without an excessive amount of thinking, we can accept it easily with a short summary of his power functions.

Noise The ubel blatt manga opening program is quite appealing with a lyric that is rather fascinating. Eds and both of these Op is actually rather a fantastic song. Absolutely such an astounding attempt by the voice actors, Eds and Op vocalist to keep up the leading performance to day. One more one extra point is regarded by the program songs section.

Enjoyment as well as Total Nonetheless, what makes it so impressive is the story of the game. In my view, the story, adding with artwork animation as well as the sound collectively were creating this type of masterpiece. The sole problem is our hero does not have some human body organs, blood or skin. He's absolutely undead beings. The skeletal system body is type of fashionable, but our main lead will certainly be offered by tremendously no lover ladies. Thankfully, our key lead light beams bright through the ugliness. I am not fairly particular why he was the sole man I doesn't mind. Amazingly, I am supporting him. For my second concerns with this certain collection is the quantity of each episode. This is just one of my favorites and I just wan na share it to everybody that read manga online. Farewell men! Please head over to https://findmangaonlinenow.wixsite.com/themangablog/post/eo5vu3kbj0vthst8nj561647790360 for other relevant information