#I will never live in England for moral reasons

[imagopirateversion]

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales; Why It Shouldn’t Exist

Or how I invested time and energy into an analysis of a relatively dead franchise instead of doing it for my actual media analysis university course.

An essay by: a bitter and obsessed PotC fan since they were 7, with a lot of free time.

Lads, this is going to be long. You have been warned.

The Beginning

At the very beginning of the movie, we see a young Henry Turner looking for his dad.

Now, we're not talking about characterization problems or how likely it is that a ten-year-old child would risk his life to look for a man he technically only saw once; we're talking about plot problems, actual logical fallacies. My questions are:

How? The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ship, impossible to be found unless She wants to be found. The only reason we see Her in Dead Man's Chest is because Davy Jones himself is looking for Jack to collect his debt, and in that occasion the Dutchman's captain wasn't even doing what he was supposed to do, so he was most definitely in the living world. Will otherwise, he's doing the job Calypso gave him, so he's constantly in between. Is the movie trying to convince me that a kid was able to do something no one in the history of piracy was ever able to do? And even if he did, why hasn't anyone explained me how? He simply looks at a map and throws himself on the bottom of the ocean. How did he know The Dutchman was there? How did he know it would've come to surface?

Where is his mom? We got to know Elizabeth in the first three movies; we know she's a smart woman and we can assume she's an attentive mother. She didn't notice her son preparing himself for a trip in the middle of the ocean to go look for his dad? Was she distracted? Was she outsmarted by a 10ish-year-old? Or is she just not contemplated in this scenario?

Why does Will look like that? Will is doing his job, so... why does he look like he's slowly corrupting? That kind of corruption is the punishment Calypso reserves to The Dutchman's crew when the captain fails her, which isn't the case. Did they forget about it? Was the idea of putting algae on Orlando Bloom's face just impossible to resist to?

Alright, this isn't actually from this movie but it's bothering me, so I have to write it; also, it would make this whole movie unnecessary, so it's somehow related to it. Why (and I can't stress this enough) can't Elizabeth be on the Dutchman? Why can't they do the job together? Is it because she's not a pirate? I'm pretty sure se actually is. Is it because she's a woman? Last time I checked she was the KING. She wants to stay with Will forever, Will wants to stay with her forever, they can literally live forever on the same ship. Why aren't they?

Whatever the Hell Happened to Jack Sparrow

Imagine creating a character that is so iconic whenever you ask a person who was a kid in the early 2000 to imagine a pirate, they imagine said character.

Now imagine fourteen years pass and you decide to ruin that character by making him the most hideous, annoying, idiotic person in the whole saga, and we're talking about a saga that has Philip the Missionary in it. Why? Jack Sparrow is THE anti-hero. Never on the right side, but never on the wrong one. You can tell he's doing something morally questionable, but you still find yourself rooting for him. He's stupid enough to make you laugh, but he's secretly clever enough to always get away with it. Now he's just... drunk. And that's not even an excuse for this horrendous new characterization, because he was always drunk. The guy FORGOT HE WAS ROBBING A BANK, the same guy just one movie earlier was able to escape from the King of England's palace and steal a lady's earring (by pretending to be a literal slut) in the process. He just switched from the iconic drunk bi bestie everyone loves to my cringe uncle that drinks too much at Christmas parties and makes everyone uncomfortable. Please, if the risk is ruining an entire generation's beloved character, either don't make the movie or find a better explanation than "Bad luck dogs you day and night".

The Pearl in The Bottle

So... what you're telling me is that Jack Sparrow, the guy who was able to defeat Hector Barbossa, Davy Jones and Blackbeard thanks to his slyness, and who loves his Black Pearl more than anything else in the world, had said ship in a bottle in his pockets for FIVE YEARS... and he never thought about breaking the bottle to free Her. That's what you're telling me. This is the pivotal point upon which the entire Jack's plot hinges. I... I don't even know what to say. Was this supposed to be funny?

What an Incredibly Lucky Coincidence

A guy needs a treasure to save his father. To find it, he needs the help of a notorious and legendary pirate. He looks for him everywhere, sailing on dozens of ships just so he has the remote chance to stumble across the pirate. The last ship he's been on has sinked, he's the only survivor. He's been found in the middle of the ocean and someone brought him to the nearest city. Which city? I mean, the one that has both the pirate he was looking for and a lady who's the only person in the whole planet who's able to find the treasure he was looking for! And, oh my... he finds the both of them! In that same city! Without even LOOKING FOR THEM! A hell of a coincidence, if you ask me. Also known as lazy writing.

What's Wrong With the Guards?

Now, I know Pirates of the Caribbean isn't exactly known for its accurate historical reconstructions, but why are the guards in this movie acting like they're some sort of hellhounds ready to kill anyone in sight? Even pirates and traitors as Jack and Henry were supposed to stand trial before being sentenced to death. It would've probably been an unjust and barbaric trial, but there should've been one. We literally saw it, in the previous movie. Why's Jack been sentenced to death for simply existing here? He gave pirate vibes and they decided that was enough?

Paul McCartney

This is not an actual point of the analysis, I just wanted to remind people that Paul McCartney is in this movie and that's the only valid reason to watch it.

Salazar

I am confused. Once again, I have questions.

El Matador Del Mar was so good at his job he had almost defeated piracy. "The last ones joined together to try and defeat me". The last what? Pirates? There were no pirates left? This happened when Jack was young, so a lot of time before the first movie, right? Where were, I don't know... Blackbeard? Davy Jones? Barbossa? All the other Pirate Lords? I might be wrong, but I guess Salazar didn't kill them, did he? Why weren't they there during that "last battle" in which "the last ones joined together"?

The Devil's Triangle. I just don't understand what's the logic behind it. So, this is a cursed place. Whoever enters there, can't get out. One would think it means that if you get there, you die; and Salazar does die, but he somehow also becomes a ghost whose only purpose is to find Jack Sparrow and have his revenge. So, do people become ghosts when they get in The Devil's Triangle? We have to assume people have gotten stuck in there before; otherwise, there wouldn't be legends around the place. So why isn't it like full of spirits ready to haunt people? Why are Salazar and his crew the only ones?

Poseidon or Calypso?

What's the Trident of Poseidon? Does Poseidon exist? Isn't Calypso the Goddess of the sea? Breaking the Trident, you break all the curses of the sea, so the Trident must be more powerful than Calypso, which leads to a question. Where is she? She IS the sea, right? So she must have known someone was about to find the Trident and brake all curses, including her one. She just decided it was okay? It really feels like someone decided to suddenly change the world's mythology without giving explanations.

The Compass

This is possibly the most blatant plot hole in the whole saga. Probably the most blatant plot hole I've ever witnessed, and man, I watched all the Harry Potter movies. In Dead Man's Chest, Jack meets Tia Dalma in her "shop" and he tells her he's looking for the Davy Jones' key. She asks him "The compass you bartered from me, it cannot lead you to this?", making another pivotal point of Dead Men Tell No Tales factually senseless.

That man couldn't have given his compass to Jack, because that wasn't his compass.

So either Salazar is lying while telling his tale or they forgot about that line in the second movie. Anyway, let's pretend that line doesn't exist; even if that captain gave Jack his compass in that exact moment, why would it be the key to free Salazar, exactly? How is the compass in any way related to The Devil's Triangle or to Salazar? In the movie, they try to explain it with a sentence: “if you betray it, your greatest fear comes true”. So, is Salazar Jack's greatest fear? I really doesn't seem right, Jack almost didn't remember Salazar when Henry mentioned him. To Jack, he's only a guy he outsmarted decades earlier. Also, Jack technically already gave the compass away, twice: to Elizabeth in Dead Man's Chest, to make her find the chest, and to Beckett in At World's End, when they're negotiating.

That's... That's Just Body Shaming, Mate

Let's talk about her. So, the woman's ugly. It can happen that a woman is ugly. Was it necessary to build an entire scene around some blatant body shaming? This scene wants to mimic the similar scene in Dead Man's Chest: Jack's on an island, running from the main villain, and he's forced to do things he doesn't want to do until someone saves him, then it was Will, now it's Hector.

Except in Dead Man's Chest it was LITERAL CANNIBALISM he was facing, and yet he looked LESS TERRIFIED and DISGUSTED. What's exactly the message here? Lads, is marrying an ugly woman worse than cannibalism? I don't know... that was just bad.

Justice for Hector Barbossa

If you know me (you probably don't, but if you do) then you know about my obsession with Hector Barbossa. I truly believe he's the best written character in the saga, and he's in my top five of the characters I love the most in all media. I watched The Curse of the Black Pearl when I was seven and I am autistic, so I had all the time to develop a literal relationship with these characters in my head. As much as Geoffrey Rush's interpretation was impeccable, as always, it really hurt to watch Hector in this movie. He just doesn't sound like him. First of all, why isn't he on the Queen Anne's Revenge? Why's he letting someone else sail around on his ships? He would've never. Why's he just sitting on a throne and shooting musicians instead of, I don't know... being a pirate? Being a pirate is the only thing that matters to him. He says it at the end of On Stranger Tides, and he even says it in this movie, to the witch. "I'm a pirate. Always will be".

So, why isn't he pirating? What happened to him? And what about the pact with the witch? He made her curse all his enemies; that's honestly the most out-of-character thing he could've done.

Seriously, watch this movie, and then The Curse of the Black Pearl and tell me he sounds like he's the same character. Then there’s his death... was it necessary? And I don't mean if it was necessary to the plot (it wasn't), but the way he died, did it make sense? He takes the sword and sacrifices himself to kill Salazar, but WHY? Salazar was back a mortal. They could've brought him to surface and then shoot him. What was the point of his death, Disney? I will never forgive you.

I would've preferred if they never showed him again. He's alive and living his best life in Tortuga, if you ask me.

How does Carina Smyth exist?

Let's do the maths. Carina Smyth has approximately the same age as Henry Turner, who was born around nine moths after the end of At World's End. At the end of that movie, Barbossa once again stole the Black Pearl (he's iconic we stan a legend), so we have to assume it is during that time (between the At World's End and On Stranger Tides) that he conceives Carina. He stays with this woman during the whole pregnancy, bacause he says he was there when she died. So nine months, at least, right? Except; Jack makes it clear that he and Barbossa met Carina's mom, Margaret, together.

When, exactly, did this happen? It can't be between On Stranger Tides and Dead Men Tell No Tales, because Hector himself says only five years passed between the two, and Carina doesn't look like a five-year-old;

it can't be between At World's End and On Stranger Tides, because we know Jack and Barbossa weren't together, and Hector was too busy losing a leg and planning his revenge by working for the King of England; it can't be during At World's End, because Barbossa was too busy rescuing Jack and then slaying (literally and metaphorically) Beckett's men to save piracy; it can't be during Dead Man's Chest, because he was dead; it can't be during The Curse of the Black Pearl, nor during the ten years before it, because he was... he was a skeleton, I hardly believe he could reproduce, despite what’s written in some fanficions; it can't be before, of course, because Carina would be too old. The only chance, but it's a stretch, is that Hector and Jack met this Margaret Smyth years and years before, and that at a certain point (while he was still busy slaying, losing a leg or planning his revenge), for some reason he decided to come back to her and accidentally had a daughter. That would mean that Jack remembered Margaret Smyth's name DECADES after he met her.

The Post-Credit Scene: What?

WHY'S DAVY JONES BACK? The Trident technically broke all the curses of the sea. He is THE cursed man of the sea. AND HE'S DEAD. The only answer I was able to give me, is that the moment the Trident broke the curses, the curse that said if you stab his heart he dies was also broken, so he technically didn't die, but it makes even less sense, because if the curses just aren't real anymore, then a man shouldn't be able to... carve out his heart and put it in a chest, right? (Which by the way, makes Will Turner being alive senseless as well). Even if so, Davy should've come back as a human.

My conclusion is that this movie should not exist, and we, as a community, should pretend it was never made. Hector is alive. Bye.

Imago

[mikeepoo]

Judy, a purebred pointer, was the mascot of several ships in the Pacific, and was captured by the Japanese in 1942 and taken to a prison camp. There she met Aircraftsman Frank Williams, who shared his small portion of rice with her. Judy raised morale in the POW camp, and also barked when poisonous snakes, crocodiles or even tigers approached the prisoners. When the prisoners were shipped back to Singapore, she was smuggled out in a rice sack, never whimpering or betraying her presence to the guards. The next day, that ship was torpedoed. Williams pushed Judy out of a porthole in an attempt to save her life, even though there was a 15-foot drop to the sea. He made his own escape from the ship, but was then recaptured and sent to a new POW camp. He didn't know if Judy had survived, but soon he began hearing stories about a dog helping drowning men reach pieces of debris after the shipwreck. And when Williams arrived at the new camp, he said: "I couldn’t believe my eyes! As I walked through the gate, a scraggly dog hit me square between the shoulders and knocked me over. I’d never been so glad to see the old girl!" They spent a year together at that camp in Sumatra. "Judy saved my life in so many ways," said Williams. "But the greatest of all was giving me a reason to live. All I had to do was look into those weary, bloodshot eyes and ask myself: 'What would happen to her if I died?' I had to keep going." Once hostilities ceased, Judy was then smuggled aboard a troopship heading back to Liverpool. In England, she was awarded the Dickin Medal (the "Victoria Cross" for animals) in May 1946. Her citation reads: "For magnificent courage and endurance in Japanese prison camps, which helped to maintain morale among her fellow prisoners, and also for saving many lives through her intelligence and watchfulness". At the same time, Frank Williams was awarded the PDSA's White Cross of St. Giles for his devotion to Judy. Frank and Judy spent a year after the war visiting the relatives of English POWs who had not survived, and Frank said that Judy "always provided a comforting presence to the families." When Judy finally died at the age of 13, Frank spent two months building a granite and marble memorial in her memory, which included a plaque describing her life story.

Purloined in it’s entirety from GH85Carrera

[broadwaybalogna]

I was told I got the “nail on the head” with my refute to this take so I’ll share it on here too because I think people need to hear it.

The only way this person wouldn’t be in the wrong is if shipping Zutara was inherently racist, which it isn’t. Many people paint Zuko to be a “colonizer” since his nation had colonized parts of the earth kingdom (mind you, that’s the only place any form of fire nation colonization has taken place), but Zuko never colonized any place himself, he was too focused on capturing the avatar. So… not a colonizer. What people are doing is conflating Zuko with his nation even though in the years where it actually counted, he was exiled and had no voice in the nation.

This is essentially saying that anyone who was alive when America was a colony and got independence couldn’t date any English person simply because of the fact that they’re British. It doesn’t matter if said english person lived outside of England or lived in England during the war and maybe even one time agreed with them, it’d be morally wrong. But that’s up to the American to decide, not anyone else. If the English person joined America in the battle of Yorktown and single-handedly took down a solid quarter of the British troops, would that be enough for the American to date them? Trick question! It’s not up to you to decide. It’s up to whoever wants to date them.

Before I continue, I was told by woc specifically that this next point was accurate. I consulted them before posting on here.

I think this personally actually stems from a place of racism on the kat/angers side. They see Katara as this young, innocent woc who needs to be protected and can’t fend for herself. It’s a white savior kind of situation. Because she is a woc, she shouldn’t date Zuko but rather Aang since “he proved multiple times just how much he loved her”; “She’s too innocent for Zuko”; or they’ll steer in the completely opposite side of the racism spectrum and say that Katara “bullied” and “harassed” Zuko simply because she didn’t trust him after he betrayed her. They paint Katara to be this aggressive woc who can’t see reason and is rude to people to want to help her. Even if that’s not what they want to convey, it still comes from a place of deeply rooted internalized racism.

All of this to say it’s not racist to ship Zutara. It never was and it never will be. If you want to tag your shit takes with the wrong tags, fine, knock yourself out, but be aware that those actions will have consequences since your point is inherently wrong.

[olympeline]

Been thinking about why I found Arthur in the Dark so impressive and it made me realise something kinda significant. Something significant that I’m going to put under a read more because it revolves around a heavy subject. So I wouldn’t advise looking beyond the cut if you’re sensitive to that kind of thing.

Less important, but everything below is a big spoiler and, guys seriously. If you like USUK and can handle darker fiction - no pun intended - give AitD a try. Don’t spoil yourself here. Go try it first and then come back if you’re interested. Try it if you’re neutral on USUK. Or, heck, even if USUK is a ship you dislike but isn’t an outright NOTP. I’d still recommend checking out this comic. Arthur in the Dark is still worth a read in my opinion. It’s that good. But enough gushing. Read on for the meat of this post.

Ready? Here we go: Arthur in the Dark has one of the best depictions of rape I’ve ever seen in a piece of media. “Best” as in most skillfully crafted for narrative purposes. Honestly and truly. Not even kidding. Which is kind of amazing considering it’s a depiction that came from a fan comic based on a jokey, anime gag series. Why do I feel this way? A couple of reasons:

Firstly, the rape in AitD is frighteningly, tragically realistic. Something the majority of fictional rapes are not. We tend to think of rape as taking place in a dark alley in the inner city. Stereotyping up a scene of a bottom feeder, criminal man dragging a (young, attractive) woman away to violate her. They’re usually total strangers and it’s always violent. These kind of rapes do happen, but statistics tell us they’re the minority. The majority of rapes happen like the one in AitD did: between two people who know each other well. Friends, romantic couples, even family members, make up the bulk of rapists and their victims.

Most narratives prefer the less common type of rape. Usually because the creator doesn’t want to tell a story about rape. Not really. What they want is a gut-punch to add easy drama and darkness to their creation. The sliding scale of “irredeemable bad guy” roughly goes: murderer → cold blooded torturer → rapist → child rapist. Making a villain a rapist is one of the worst things he - because 99% of the time it’s a he - can be. Conversely having a character be raped gains them instant sympathy because people are moral and empathetic creatures at heart. Most creators know this and throw in a rape for the shorthand: “Look how evil our villain is!” Which often makes the rape and its aftermath feel artificial. In no small part because the rapist characters, by virtue of being written to be the worst of the worst, don’t come off as very human. They can’t be when their main purpose is to be loathed by the audience. I could go on because there’s tons more to unpack about rape in fiction, but you get the point.

The rape in AitD isn’t like that. America and England know and love each other. Their relationship is complicated (oh boy, is it ever!) but that part of it is never in doubt. They’re each other’s most treasured person and have been for centuries. They’re not a duo made up of a flat, hate bait, villain on a collision course with their victim. Who’s doomed to suffer and be pitied until the creator decides the audience has had enough of their trauma and shuts it away so the story can move on. America and England are two people living together, going through a period of immense change and stress, trying to manage as best they can, and sometimes getting it very wrong. From a narrative point of view, this makes what happens between them so much better and so much more upsetting at the same time.

Which brings me nicely to reason number two of why this particular rape works: the build up. Like everything else in AitD, America raping England is carefully planned out and set up. The chocolate bar scene, man. Brilliant, I have to say. Alarming, uncomfortable, and brilliant. The scene in the garden is not just sprung on the reader for a jarring “Oh no! Oh shit-!” moment. If your typical under written rape is a cheap jump scare, the rape in AitD is a carefully crafted slowburn dread. Early on we start to become aware we’re building to something bad. From the foreshadowing, the art, the atmosphere, etc. We just know a storm is coming. It’s done without America acting OOC too, which is very important. It’s how he can come back from what he did. Something that would be impossible if the author didn’t handle this setup well. America’s actions aren’t right, but they are understandable. That’s the crucial distinction. The psychology of the whole thing is so very well done. America was in love with England and had been for a long time. The guilt he felt tormented him because of what their relationship was in the past. Caught between his human side and his immortal one. The guilt helped keep America in check because he didn’t want England seeing the lustful way he’d begun to look at him. Then they started living together and England was suddenly vulnerable. Vulnerable in more ways than America was aware. Which is another vital detail of how the creator keeps America sympathetic, but more on that in a moment. England willingly went blind so he wouldn’t have to see when America - the man grown from the child he raised - looked at him with lust. The guilt America felt peaked, only to clash with the realisation that he could freely indulge in his fantasies. Indulge and push (again, chocolate bar scene) now the usual moral restraint - England seeing his desire - was removed.

Meanwhile, England himself felt that same guilt but his was also laced with panic and despair. He didn’t want to lose or strain his relationship with the most important person of his centuries long life. Pulled between human standards of morality and the very inhuman existence of nation-people. Incidentally the clash between their existence as humans, while also being something more than human, is brilliantly done in AitD. It’s something that’s hard to get right - especially involving such taboo topics - but Hotama nails it. USUK usually handwaves the implications around England raising America, but here it’s made part of the narrative. Part of the tragedy, part of the resolution. Good stuff. Anyway, England begged Arthur to take his sight away so he wouldn’t have to see the way America looked at him. Then banished Arthur back into the dark in an attempt to run away from his problems. But without Arthur - without his strength - England couldn’t stand up to America when he needed to. Not that America was aware of any of this because he never knew about Arthur. Which brings me to point three: nuance of blame.

“Blame” is a very loaded word in this context, so I’ll do my best to talk about this carefully. Rape in the media is almost always black and white. Absolutely evil, irredeemable rapist. Absolutely blameless, sympathetic victim. But real life isn’t always that simple. Obviously the rapist is always the perpetrator and the one most in the wrong. I need to make that very clear. But the scene in AitD illustrates that sometimes a victim could have done more to help themselves. Not always, but sometimes. This is a delicate subject so I hope you understand I’m not trying to victim blame. Just saying that rape, like all crimes, doesn’t always deal in absolutes. Unlike media, real life is often complicated and tragic. Good people can give in to temptation. Be weak, do bad things, or allow those bad things to happen. England told America to stop, but failed to follow it up when needed. When America pushed for more and used England’s own words to argue he’d already been given consent, that was when England needed to push back. Interpretation comes in here but, personally, I think if England had told America to stop when prompted, America would have. But England didn’t and he gave in instead. Something America took as a tacit “yes.” Again, not right, but understandable in how it could happen. Their power imbalance had grown extreme, stress and feelings were running high, they were struggling to connect as they used to, England’s prior cowardice and separation from Arthur prevented him from being strong when he needed to be, America was ignorant of his problem, and it all came together in a horrible, tragic mistake. All throughout, the rape continued to be brilliantly, awfully realistic. America not noticing - either genuinely or from denial - that England was not enjoying what was happening. England quickly becoming too distracted by the pain to do anything other than focus on enduring it. Then the aftermath where America didn’t realise what he’d just done due to coming down from a post-sex, post-stress euphoria. Awful, miserable, horrifying, tragic, perfectly crafted scene.

Which brings me to my final reason why this comic impressed me in its depiction of rape: where the story goes from there. Where it goes and how the narrative builds from the rape instead of trying to move on because the “shocking” part is over and now we’re in diminishing returns. Going back to my first point, too many stories see rape as something that happens in an isolated part of the narrative. It happened, it was shocking and brutal, now it’s done and we can move on because we didn’t plan to interweve the rape with the rest of the story. So we won’t give it the weight it needs. At best the victim might get a few scenes expressing their trauma later on - maybe a callback or two - but that’s it. It’s shallow. Plenty of fictional rapes could be replaced with a savage beating and nothing would change. In the worst cases you could remove the rape, not replace it with anything, then run the story with minimal problems. Not so in AitD. There, the rape isn’t just another semi-important plot point. It’s a crucial one which couldn’t be replaced with anything else. The whole first part of the story, the engine of the narrative, is built around America and England failing to deal with their changing relationship. A relationship between a pair of humans who also happen to be strange, immortal beings that ordinary humans can’t understand. Changing from platonic/familial to romantic over hundreds of years. With romance comes lust. Lust can be perfectly healthy just like any other bodily appetite. In this case it became twisted by circumstance, and the only “suitable” narrative payoff was rape. Nothing else would have had the necessary impact.

Then there’s how the rape compares to the final sex scene in some classic narrative juxtaposition. The final sex scene which happens to be the only one in the comic that’s fully consensual on both sides. The one that goes beyond sex and becomes real, honest to goodness lovemaking. It’s a perfect contrast. The rape scene had all the trappings of a classic romance. Right down to it being their first time and taking place in a rose garden. But it’s tragic, horrifying, and deeply unsexy. Then, near the end of their story, America and Arthur get lost on their road trip and have sex in their car. Their crappy, cramped car, where they’re surrounded by ordinary luggage, both of them sweaty and a little cranky with each other after a long day. It’s awkward, ordinary, imperfect and gorgeous. If we didn’t have the rape before to show us the nadir of this relationship, the healing and the dawn that came after wouldn’t be half so meaningful. A very strange thing to say without context, but it was a perfectly done rape that gave the audience the payoff of perfectly done lovemaking. It’s no small feat to get a reader to cheer for a romantic resolution after all of the above. Kind of in awe of Hotama’s skills, I tell you what.

Up to this point and I don’t know what else there is to say other than, geez. This comic, man. Blew me away. I’m so happy I rediscovered my interest in Hetalia if for no other reason than I got to read Arthur in the Dark. I’m a bit of a bookworm in my spare time and I’ve read quite a lot of classic literature over the years. Classic literature with rape scenes not crafted half so well as AitD did. Really think about that. An amateur fan comic based on a jokey gag series about national personifications being silly with each other. Did better at something than the books we hold up as the best of the best. Can’t really say anything else than that is genuinely bloody amazing

[breelandwalker]

@sonnabug reblogged your post:

#is myth the right word if they were the ones who felt they were being persecuted? #not siding with them just wondering about word choice and technicalities #because its true our history was founded on what they decided to tell us but is it an outright lie or did they truely feel persecuted

Oo oo oo, a teaching opportunity!

Okay, so the Puritans came to power during the First English Civil War - the one where they axed Charles I afterward and abolished the monarchy. Their whole beef was that the new Anglican church wasn't STRICT enough and still had too many Catholic trappings (and way too much tolerance for the remaining Roman Catholics in the country). So they kept pushing for Purity and Piety, in personal and business spheres, basically insisting that a strict Protestant moral doctrine should govern every aspect of life, from the management of the home to the running of businesses to interpersonal relationships to the governing of the country and its' policies abroad.

Sound familiar? Their whole rhetoric puts me in mind of a particular line from Elvira: Mistress of the Dark: "The local council is horrified if someone in Fallwell, wherever or whatever, is having a good time."

Anyway, all this religious kerfluffle (plus a couple of other factors) eventually led to the complete destabilization of the English government and the execution of Charles I. And then when the monarchy was restored under Charles II and the country was like, "Oh thank goodness, we can have things like beer and Christmas again and maybe a little less religious conservatism," the Puritans promptly went, "Well this won't do at ALL." Most Puritan clergy with separatist leanings resigned from the Church of England and many Puritans packed up to move to the colonies, where they could "practice their religion in peace." (Read: "Where they could be as stodgy and strict and bigoted as they wished and created a system of laws based on religion instead of common good.")

There's a lot more to it than that and I'm simplifying and glossing over quite a bit, but that's the nuts and bolts.

The mess the Puritans made both in England and in America was one of the reasons the vaunted Founding Fathers insisted on Separation of Church and State, as well as why Freedom of Religion is part of the First Amendment. They'd seen England tearing itself apart over a Wabbit Season / Duck Season tug of war between Catholicism and Protestantism for a good century and more, and they did NOT want to repeat those mistakes in the new country they were trying to build. (They got a lot of stuff wrong, but at least they had the sense to be like, "Yeah maybe religion shouldn't run the government.")

So while it's true that the Puritans may have felt persecuted, it was for basically the same reasons that conservatives and fundamentalists claims to be oppressed today - people generally don't like it when their stodgy uptight neighbors try to beat them over the head with a Bible and demand that one particular interpretation of a single religion should be the driving force behind the running of every aspect of an entire country.

But since they got to write the earliest chapters of American history with no one to provide a strong counterargument, we get this pervasive self-created myth that the Puritans were these poor ragged refugees, fleeing religious persecution for a new land where they could live in peace and harmony and...decimate the local indigenous population and murder their own neighbors in the name of piety. The Pilgrims were assholes and we've been fed pretty lies in our schoolbooks for decades.

(For modern context, religion wasn't a strong part of American politics until McCarthyism happened, at which point we got the God references in the Pledge of Allegiance and on our currency. Then the Moral Majority movement got Reagan elected in 1980 and we've been fighting modern Puritans in government ever since. America has never been a Christian nation, but conservatives keep doing their damnedest to try and turn it into one.)

Hope this helps to clarify things! 😊

[eretzyisrael]

by Terry Glavin

For Sarah Rugheimer, a professor of astronomy at York University in Toronto, the first sign of the virulent strain of antisemitism now embedded in Justin Trudeau’s Canada appeared on a lamppost.

It was a few weeks after the Hamas massacre of last October 7. Rugheimer, 41, was walking in a park near her home in the city’s quiet Cedarvale neighborhood when she saw a poster of the Israeli hostage Elad Katzir, a 47-year-old farmer from Kibbutz Nir Oz, covered with swastikas.

In the days that followed, as the war raged in Gaza, swastikas turned up all over Cedarvale. They also started appearing on the York campus, where Rugheimer serves as the Allan I. Carswell Chair for the Public Understanding of Astronomy. As fall turned to winter, a swastika showed up in the snow outside the campus building where she works.

An astrophysicist with a particular interest in the origins of life on Earth and the possibility of life on other planets, Rugheimer tended to confine her worldly concerns to scientific matters. So the swastikas came as a shock. But worse was to come.

She grew up in Montana, and her academic career took her around the world—from a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics at Harvard University to Scotland, England, and now Canada. But until taking up her post at York University two years ago, Rugheimer said she’d never encountered any overt antisemitism. Nor had she given much thought to her identity as a Zionist: Like the vast majority of Jews around the world, Rugheimer believes in Israel’s right to exist.

A broken window at the Kehillat Shaarei Torah synagogue in Toronto on May 17, 2024. It was vandalized again last week. (via David Jacobs/X)

Jew-hatred was a phenomenon of the fringes, she reckoned. “It wasn’t on my radar,” she told me. Now, it’s everywhere. “Every week there is a major incident in Canada, and multiple minor ones every day in my neighborhood.”

It was what was happening inside her university that disturbed her the most.

York’s student unions issued a declaration just after the attack calling the barbarism of October 7 a “justified and necessary” act of resistance against settler colonialism, genocide, and apartheid. The student groups found widespread support among York’s professors—some of whom Rugheimer considered friends.

A politics department faculty committee demanded the university enforce a definition of “anti-Palestinian racism” that encompassed any expression of sympathy for the right of Israelis to exist within their own state: “Zionism is a settler colonial project and ethno-religious ideology in service of a system of Western imperialism that upholds global white supremacy.”

She was shocked by the declarations, and the defaced posters, and the swastikas. But for Rugheimer there was something worse. “The denial is what’s painful,” Rugheimer said. The denial of the rapes and savagery of October 7, 2023. The denial of the pervasive antisemitism in “anti-Zionist” polemics. The denial of Jewish history itself. “Reasonable people can disagree about what to do in an intractable conflict, but the denying of what should be uncontroversial facts makes it impossible to have hope.”

This sort of despair has become a feature of everyday life for Jews across Canada who are experiencing open hatred—and yet are living under a government that appears either blind to it, paralyzed by it, or indifferent to it. Law enforcement in Canada is not blind. Quite the opposite. Officers want to do their jobs. What they say is that they lack the moral support from the political class to enforce the law. And that they cannot keep up with the volume of hate crimes—crimes that arise from a widespread ideology that has normalized the idea that “Zionists” anywhere are a fair target for attack.

Police at Bais Chaya Mushka elementary school in Toronto on May 25, 2024 after two people fired shots outside. (Andrew Francis Wallace via Getty Images)

Perhaps nothing captured Canada’s dark new reality better than a split-screen story from late last month.

On November 22 in Montreal, at the 70th annual session of the NATO parliamentary assembly, rioters organized by the organizations Divest for Palestine and the Convergence of Anti-Capitalist Struggles wreaked havoc on the city. They ignited smoke bombs, threw metal barriers into the street, and smashed windows of businesses and the convention center where the NATO delegates were meeting. The rioters torched cars. They also burned an effigy of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While Montreal burned, Trudeau was dancing and handing out friendship bracelets at a Taylor Swift concert in Toronto. It took 24 hours for him to weigh in with a single tweet.

‘It Was Like a Dam Burst’

The impression that the violence unfolding around them is somehow invisible to the state responsible for their protection has overwhelmed not only relative newcomers to Canada like Rugheimer, but also Jews who have lived in Canada for decades. People like Robert Krell, 84, the former director of postgraduate education in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia.

A pioneer of Holocaust education in Canada and a specialist in survivor trauma, Krell immigrated to Canada at the age of 11, after having been hidden by a Catholic family during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Krell was not as shocked by the unspeakable barbarism of the Hamas massacre of October 7 last year as by the jubilation the atrocities elicited from within the “progressive” milieu across Canada—and by the total silence from the “social justice” scene.

Police respond to a dispute between an Israel supporter and pro-Palestinian supporters in Toronto on June 9, 2024. (Nick Lachance via Getty Images)

On Sunday, October 8, activists affiliated with the terrorist-designated Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine were already shouting their happiness into megaphones to a crowd at the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, only a few minutes’ drive from Krell’s home. “We are calling on those in so-called Vancouver to uplift and honor the resistance,” they said. “Show solidarity and celebrate the steps towards liberation!”

Scenes like these repeated themselves in cities across Canada—all the way to St. John’s, Newfoundland.

[ierotits]

Tell us more about why you want to beat up Charles Dickens please?

ABSOLUTELY

it all boils down to the Franklin Expedition, and the way he treated Inuit testimony.

long story short if you are unaware: 1845 2 ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus went into the arctic to search for the northwest passage, among other things, commanded by Sir John Franklin. both ships promptly disappeared, never to be seen by white people again. many expeditions were sent to search for them, never with any luck. the ships really had just disappeared.

UNTIL

in 1854 a man named John Rae was leading one of these overland expeditions to try find the (by now long dead) Franklin Expedition. along the way he met with and spoke with groups of Inuit living and hunting in the area. they told him of a group of white men they had seen a few years back, traveling in a group of about 45. they spoke of the men starving to death, slowly dying off. they also (most importantly) they spoke of a camp site where they had later found the bodies of about 30 men the next spring, with evidence they had cannibalized each other, bones with cut marks, in cooking pots, etc.

John Rae correctly took this as testimony that the members of the Franklin Expedition had all starved to death, and the last living men had resorted to eating each other, a very normal solution in those sorts of situations. he returned to England and shared this news with the admiralty, who tried to keep the information secret but it ended up in the press. this, of course, caused a huge scandal. the men had been lauded as heroes in the press, so the idea that they had resorted to eating each other really put a dampener on the idea.

there was a lot of upcry about it, not least from Lady Jane Franklin, Sir John Franklin's wife who had been insistent that they could still be alive and be saved. she accused John Rae and the Inuit who had shared the testimony of lying.

Lady Jane had a very significant friend's ear at this time. our darling Charles Dickens. he then wrote a section in his popular magazine decrying John Rae's testimony, saying it was all slander made up by the "wild savages" and John Rae was naive to believe it at all. Dickens said that Englishmen were too civilized and would never resort to cannibalism, and only the lowest most savage races of people cold ever consider it.

Charles Dickens, all in all, was one of the main factors in 1. John Rae being ridiculed and not getting any credit for his discoveries until after his death and 2. encouraging the public to think of native people's as savages, not believing any of their other valuable testimony, and paving the way for other ridiculous theories such as "actually the Inuit people killed them all and ate them, then blamed it on our wonderful morally pure white sailors".

the information provided to Rae by the Inuit has been proven time and time again since then, and there is no denying that the last of the expedition resorted to eating each other. the Inuit testimony has typically been relatively reliable with some inconsistency as time went on, and it was pure racism that motivated Charles Dickens in his defense of the men of the expedition.

if you're interested in any of this aside from my brain spew from memory, for further reading on the Inuit testimony and a full analysis of every piece of testimony I recommend "Unraveling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony" by David C Woodman. for more info on John Rae's expeditions and discoveries (and how much Lady Jane Franklin sucked so so bad) I recommend "After the Lost Franklin Expedition: Lady Jane Franklin and John Rae" by Peter Baxter.

and if you've got other recommendations or extra reasons to hate Charles Dickens (other than his books just sucking but that might be personal opinion) please let me know!!! most of my reading is just based on whats available at the library lmao.

[dross-the-fish]

What were the gangs childhoods like? (Well… minus Adam… cuz yknow)

Watson-pretty normal, he had parents and an older brother, all of which were deceased by the time he met Sherlock upon his return to England from the battlefield. Selma Morris- was very close to her mother and her Abuela. Her father and brothers did the bulk of the monster hunting when she was young and she didn't join them until two of her brothers were killed. Most of Uncle Quincey Morris's fortune was divided between his living relatives so she was comfortable enough though not exceptionally wealthy as much of the money went to supplies and training. Her upbringing was very strict and her mother was a devout catholic which lead to frequent tension in Selma's teen and young adult years. Overall though she loves and misses her family and grieves that she can't return to them. Quincey Harker- had a happy childhood with is parents and siblings. His parents doted on him and instilled in him a strong sense of morality and the importance of good manners so he is a polite young man and always eager to be helpful. Lawrence Talbot- Had an excellent childhood. He traveled a lot with is parents to America and was adored by his mother's family in Boston. As an only child he did end up a little spoiled but very good natured and his parents were kind people. He often thinks of his childhood and misses them. Henry Jekyll- His father came into wealth when Henry was young and the family was moved from Scotland to England when his father was made partner of a profitable shipping business. The sudden change in social class and the expectation to blend in with upper-class English society was hard on Henry and his father was often very harsh with him telling him that the rest of the upper class wanted him to fail and were looking for any reason to ridicule them so no mistakes could be tolerated. As he grew up he struggled with the burden of expectation that came with being new money in a world of old money and fading aristocrats. It wasn't enough to have wealth if he didn't have the breeding so he needed a good reputation and a respectable career. Erik- Rejected by his own mother from an early age he left home very young and traveled. As a teenager he found his way to Persia and made a name for himself there as an assassin. The closet thing he had to a family was the Daroga, a kind man who often gave him a place to stay, comfort and food and who has shaped Erik more than he'd care to admit. Though not ethnically Persian Erik has adopted a lot of the culture into his daily life and while not religious he prefers to eat and prepare Halal food just in case the Daroga wants to eat with him. Theo- Raised by an Irish mother and grandmother and English father she grew up in poverty but wasn't unhappy in her early childhood. Her grandmother often told her stories about the fairfolk and what to do if she were to meet a member of The Gentry. Theo is easily the most superstitious of the crew and never stopped believing in fairies, even sometimes leaving out a little milk as an offering. When it was proven in the AU that they did exist she shelled out a few "I told you so!"s to some of the more skeptical crew members. Theo's childhood was short lived, when she was 9 her father was arrested and sent to prison for petty theft where he died. She lived in a London poorhouse for a time but the conditions proved to harsh for her mother and grandmother, both of whom died a year later. She was sent to an orphanage and then at twelve she started work in a factory. Things improved when she auditioned at 14 to play a role with a theater troupe and once she became a proper actress she never looked back.

[orphetoon]

Different person, I desire info on the ace attorney au

HI SORRY THIS IS LIKE A MONTH OLD AT THIS POINT

idk if i'll ever do more art bc when will i ever be interested in jjba AND aa at the same time again but just for you. the rough timeline of the entire au

PART 1: PHANTOM ATTORNEY

basically phantom blood but without vampires. jonathan is a defense attorney, the assistant switches between erina and speedwagon; first case is probably defending speedwagon. zeppeli isn't a hamon user here, but rather a spirit medium who gives jonathan some training. jonathan can't actually talk to ghosts, his ability is probably more similar to apollo's; maybe he can sense someones spirit 'wavering', aka when they're unsure.

main antagonist is dio, who is the opposing attorney. he's done a lot of shit he's never gotten caught for, but jonathan manages to reveal his crimes in the final case. dio gets sentenced to death, rip king.

PART 2: uh. battle tendency doesn't happen here.

idk how long it would've taken someone to get executed back in ye olde england times but for this au its long enough for jonathan to have at least two kids. one of these is george ii (joseph's dad), the other will create a branch family (aka giornos gotta exist somehow)

shortly after dio's execution, he forms as a vengeful spirit and is able to forcibly possess jonathan and kill him. dio's a bitch tho and continues to possess joestars whenever possible, but due to uh. reasons? he's not able to kill the next generation of joestars until they have had their own kids. deciding that going after the whole lineage would be tiring, dio just decides to focus on joseph and his descendants.

PART 3: jotaro fucks up

joseph manages to spirit train well enough that dio can't possess him or whatever, and lives a long life. holly manages to avoid him as well. jotaro was on the track to be strong enough to shut dio out, but decided to be an idiot 17 year old and try to banish dio for good. by some means both he and dio fail at their goals, and jotaro is stuck with dio...not really possessing him, but giving running commentary 24/7. joots tries to live with it for awhile, but the thought that dio could eventually succeed in possessing him and hurting those around him (aka baby jolyne) causes him to distance himself from everyone.

PART 4: AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

apologies to josuke for stealing his part number.

anyway. almost completely unrelated to all that, pannacotta fugo is a prodigy prosecuting attorney who has one of the highest success rates in the country. he has a found family sort of thing with the rest of bucci's gang, who he's all advised on legal matters at some point. they (sans fugo) run a restaurant; this isn't important at all to the au, i just like the idea. anyway, fugo's life is pretty good, until.

giorno fucking giovanna.

he arrives out of nowhere and quickly becomes the best defense in the country, even tho he's younger than fugo (both of them are too young to be attorneys, but this is aa). doesn't matter if his client is clearly guilty, giorno can get them off the hook (he only takes clients he believes should be seen as innocent, but giorno has his own interesting moral system). these two idiots battle it out in the courtroom, until bucciarati is framed for a murder.

unable to defend him, fugo turns to the only person he can, giorno. giorno completely clears bucci's name, unraveling the truth of the case - aka taking down diavolo, who's organized most of the crimes in this 'game'. since trish is the assistant for this game, she becomes kinda the main character during the final case lol. either way diavolo goes to jail, and both gio and trish are sort of folded into the bucci gang.

PART 5: GHOSTS ARE REAL

the second 'game' would be giorno with jolyne as an assistant; he clears her from the vehicular manslaughter and both of them resolve to solve the conspiracy behind it (it's pucci. pucci's behind it). josuke is here as a side character, being a police detective

the final case involves revealing pucci's crimes and jolyne finding a way to free her father from dio's spirit. no universe reset here lads :)

50/50 onto whether giorno finds out he's actually related to the joestars or not. he still bills them either way

PART 6: feedback investigations

fugo gets his own games but idk a whole lot about the investigations games so uh! lets just say its normal aa shenanigans with the purple haze feedback characters in there as well

[dreamcubed]

i did something bad | tom riddle x reader

song; i did something bad [taylor swift] pairing; tom riddle x fem!slytherin!half-blood!eastern european!reader genre; s2l, angst, hurt comfort(ish) word count; 6,5k timeline; tom riddle's last year at hogwarts warnings; referenced child abuse (physical/psychological/verbal), discrimination (muggle-borns), minor character deaths, minor character murders, swearing, extreme manipulation, toxic/unhealthy relationship, srsly tom is so manipulative to y/n, blackmail summary; an orphaned boy with sinister plans for the future, and a new girl who is about to discover she may be just as bad as her parents. what happens when they meet?

fyi i do mix up the order that tom makes the horcruxes a bit :)

PSA | Please Read | y/n is EXTREMELY morally unethical by the end of this. i do not condone such a moral compass, this is a work of fiction and should be treated as such.

masterlist

"you say i did something bad, then why's it feel so good?"

———————————

Hogwarts had a friendlier presence than Durmstrang - but maybe you just had bad memories associated with the latter.

The flashbacks of backstabbing friends and relentless bullying, with you not even getting a break from physical and mental torture during the holidays.

Why?

Well, that was a story.

As like many magic families from the Durmstrang catchment zone, pure-blood supremacist idealism was strong, coupled with the muggle-born hatred that came as a result. Your father's family was no exception: the purest of the pure when it came to blood, or so they claimed.

A stark difference from your mother: a muggle-born.

Only, she didn't tell him that, she lied and told your father (and everyone else for that matter) that she was a pure-blood witch, and the reason they didn't know of her family is because she was from Western Europe (which she was) and fed into Beauxbatons instead. After all, she didn't meet your father until post-education at a European wizarding event.

It wasn't until after marrying and falling pregnant with your father's child did she reveal the truth, burning your father's reputation on the spot. Evidently, your mother had thought that locking down a pregnancy with your father would prevent him from divorcing her - she was dead wrong. Literally, dead wrong.

You would never be sure, but you suspected that your father's family had something to do with your mother dying during childbirth. After all, magic medicine meant there were rarely fatalities around labour.

After you were born and your mother was dead, you were kept as hushed child, hidden away in the corners as your father remarried a woman of a well-known Swedish pure-blood family and continued on to have pure-blood heirs to your family's estate. In all fairness, your stepmother wasn't horrible to you.

But your father was.

The physical and mental abuse you endured for years chipped away at your sanity, and your siblings grew to mirror your father's behaviour. They were younger than you, but there were more of them, and your friendships fell apart at Durmstrang after they enrolled and told everyone of the circumstances of your conception.

Your stepmother never particularly abused you, but she didn't do anything to stop the abuse either. She simply acted indifferent towards you, which given how everyone else was, made her your favourite person by default.

You hated your father and everything he had done to you.

You resented your mother and the situation she had put you in.

When your stepmother fell terribly sick, your father decided to send you away. Which, honestly, was the nicest thing he had ever done for you.

He sent you to live with another hushed secret of his family - even more hushed than you - his squib sister. After she was discovered to be magicless, she had been essentially banished to England where she then was put through all-year muggle boarding schools until she aged out of the system. You had never even heard her mentioned before, yet she welcomed you more warmly than anyone had before, and under your father's orders, you transferred to Hogwarts - the magic school closest to your aunt's residence.

So, there you were, at the beginning of seventh year in an entirely new school. The certified new girl.

Hogwarts was more welcoming, sure, but you didn't think the idea of friends appealed to you anymore. You had been a lone wolf for so long that being anything but seemed unnatural, you were just looking forward to not being bullied like you used to be.

You were sorted into Slytherin: the green house. Unfortunately, it seemed to be the one house that had a similar vibe to Durmstrang. Well, beggars can't be choosers, you thought.

The people in Slytherin gave you curious looks as you sat down, making you scowl.

"What?" you snapped.

They all mumbled, "Nothing," and looked back down at their plates, all apart from one.

The one boy that remained gazing at you curiously had a piercing stare, accompanied by his strong jaw and perfectly gelled hair.

You raised an eyebrow at him, "Can I help you?"

He cleared his throat, "Tom, Tom Riddle. As head boy, I am more than capable of answering any questions you have." His words came across as kind, but the sinister glint in his eye told you every sentence he spoke was just for show.

So, you rolled your eyes, and began eating your food.

***

Your very presence pissed Tom Riddle off.

Everything from the way your lips moved when you spoke to the colour of your eyes irritated him.

The way you answered shortly and curtly towards him, the way you didn't give him the time of day, the way you didn't hang off his every word.

The way you saw through his façade.

Tom Riddle hated it when things didn't go his way, despised it, even. He had learned to perfectly craft his words in such a silky smooth manner that both men and women fell at his feet. He could talk anyone around, fall into anyone's good graces.

But you didn't even give him a chance to build a positive rapport. It was like you smelled his true intentions on him the very second his cologne entered your nostrils. Which was an exaggeration: you were naturally mistrusting of people given your childhood, so you clung to any reason to dislike someone in order to give yourself a reason to avoid them and not risk exposing yourself to another betrayal.

Tom Riddle was too arrogant to realise you treated everybody the exact same way as you did him. He was but another face that could potentially harm you, like every other person in Hogwarts.

Your dorm mates had given up on trying to bond with you, so why wouldn't he?

"Miss L/N," Tom Riddle called to you after a potions lesson. Glances from other students came and went - Tom Riddle was not known for speaking to girls alone all that much.

You exhaled slowly through your nose, turning towards the head boy to raise your eyebrow at him.

"I feel as though we may have gotten off on the wrong foot," his words were calculated, "Perhaps I can amend that?"

His question - if it could be even called a question - was left open ended, leaving the ball in your court. You narrowed your eyes at him. "Amend what exactly?"

"The impression I have made upon you."

"Tom Riddle, I do not think about you outside of whenever you speak to me. There was nothing between us to be broken, and thus nothing to amend."

You picked up your bag and began leaving the classroom, only for the boy to quickly catch up to you. "But your responses have been so curt and... rude."

"Have you ever considered that maybe it's not personal? Maybe my attitude isn't a vendetta against you specifically?" you countered, refusing to even look in his direction.

"Yes, but-"

You stopped in your tracks and turned to him, "The world doesn't revolve around you, Tom Riddle. I treat everyone like this and I have no interest in a positive relationship with anybody here. Please leave me be like everyone else is doing."

And then you departed, only this time, Tom Riddle didn't follow you. He stood, stunned at your words.

Unfortunately, as big of an impact as your words had on him, they had the opposite effect of what you wanted.

Instead of him abandoning all thoughts of you and ignoring your existence, you became a person of incredible interest to the orphaned boy.

***

Tom Riddle moved to sit next to you in every single lesson you shared.

Tom Riddle would always sit next to you during meals.

And Tom Riddle would follow you around a significant amount of the time, always trying to make conversation with you. The conversations were very one-sided, and he didn't lose the arrogant aspect to his personality, nor ever show that he actually cared about you. He would just talk. Talk and talk.

Apart from during lessons when a teacher was talking: he was a studious boy and aimed to master every subject. You cherished those moments of silence.

"Great question, Mr Parkinson," your history of magic professor spoke as you came back to reality from your thoughts, "How does a man as evil as Grindelwald come to be?"

You glanced at Riddle's notebook which was full of notes.

"Bad people come from bad people," your professor stated, making your grip around your quill tighten to the point you snapped it.

Riddle observed your reaction curiously.

"Grindelwald was likely abused as a child, giving him an intense desire for power to make up for the lack of power he had while receiving the abuse."

Your English may not have been perfect, but you understood what the professor was saying all too well.

You couldn't be your father, you simply couldn't.

"We all have skeletons, L/N," arrived a whisper from Riddle in your ear. You turned to him in mild horror, feeling as if he could read you to your core as he gazed into your eyes.

That was when you felt him in your mind. You weren't all that familiar with legilimency, but you were almost entirely sure that Tom Riddle was using it on you.

You broke eye contact with him, but it was too late. He knew.

"Fascinating," he muttered, "Absolutely fascinating."

It felt like you couldn't keep up the cold exterior around Riddle anymore as you shrank in your seat, wishing the ground would swallow you whole.

"Don't worry, I won't tell anyone," he said simply, "As long as you do a few things for me."

Fuck, blackmail.

***

Now you were the one who followed Tom Riddle around instead of him you. Despite maintaining a cold nature towards everyone else, you trailed behind the head boy like a scared little lamb - because you were. You didn't want people to know of your past in fear of being bullied again. You could no longer speak to him brashly, your voice would crack and quiver as you avoided eye contact with him, not wanting to feel so vulnerable with his presence in your mind again.

He hadn't even given you anything to do yet like he said he would, and it had been a week. Was it an empty threat?

No, that wasn't it. It fuelled his ego to have you following him around and maybe that was enough for him to keep your secret - for now.

***

"How do you feel about mudbloods?" he asked you one time, sat in the library together as you worked on your respective homework assignments.

You looked up at him and frowned. You had come to understand that 'mudblood' was an English insult for muggle-borns. "My mother was muggle-born."

"I am aware." Right, he had been in your mind. "But you're upset with her, yes? Her faking her blood status to your father ultimately led to your life being the way it is."

"What are you suggesting?"

"That she is an example of why mudbloods should not be allowed in this world. Her greed and selfishness is what killed her in the end."

"What caused you to be so hateful?" you asked - a bold question on your part. Your voice was timid as you spoke.

"Well, growing up in an orphanage doesn't help," he said, sitting back in his seat, "My mother was a pure-blood and my father was a muggle, and look what happened. Muggle culture should stay separate from the wizarding world. But that's only possible if mudbloods are eradicated."

You cast your eyes down to your work laid before you. Tom Riddle scared you. He scared you because he had the eyes of a cold-hearted man, and you knew what came from people with those kinds of eyes.

Riddle observed you as you zoned out, attempting to piece together your thoughts, which was difficult as your eyes weren't locked with his.

"You and I are not so different, Miss L/N," he spoke, "Relations between someone from muggle society and a pure-blood is what caused our childhoods to be so unfair. We have the right to retaliate."

"How do we know it wasn't the pure-blood's fault?"

"It doesn't matter whose fault it is, it simply proves that the two societies should not mix. Mudbloods are the bridge between them, and so we must break that bridge."

You exhaled slowly, daring to look up at Riddle but without looking in his eyes.

"Are you not angry? Angry for what has happened to you?"

"Of course I am, I-"

"Whose fault is it you ended up in an abusive situation?"

"Technically my mother's, but-"

"No, no buts. There's your answer, L/N."

You finally locked your eyes with his, but he didn't push into your mind like he did before.

"You think I'm going to abuse you like your father did, don't you?" he had drawn that conclusion without even using legilimency - was it that obvious?

At your lack of response, he hummed.

"I understand you are distrusting, but I do not wish to hurt you, Miss L/N. I am here to help you."

You stared at him blankly.

"Look, everyone else avoids you, thinks you are strange. But not me, I understand you. I'm the only person who understands you."

Considering his childhood, that was a fair observation, you thought.

"You need to learn to trust me," he said simply, "Because I am all you have."

"But, Riddle, I-"

"Tom," he corrected, "Call me Tom. You will never trust me if we continue to be so formal. May I call you by Y/N?"

You feebly nodded, unsure of what was happening to you in that moment.

"Perfect," he smiled a gorgeous yet uncanny smile that made you feel queasy, "If you are ever in dilemma, don't hesitate to come to me. I'm your only option, after all, but I'm a good option. I'm here for you."

You again nodded.

"I'm going to need you to verbally agree, Y/N."

"Y- yes, Tom," you words almost caught in your throat.

He smiled the eery smile again, "Glad to hear you're willing to build trust with me."

***

When he said to do some things for him you had thought he meant do his homework for him or something along those lines - apparently he meant join his muggle-born hate group. You didn't know where your life was heading, but you did know that you were becoming increasingly trapped.

With the amount of time you spent with Tom Riddle, rumours were beginning to flood around the castle that the head boy and the new girl were dating. He never corrected the rumours, not even once.

In fact, you were pretty sure it made him feel as if he had even more ownership of you.

"Students, it is with great sadness that I inform you today that a student by the name of Myrtle Warren has passed," the headmaster said during dinner, "Due to the circumstances of her death, the girls' toilets on the second floor will be shut until further notice, and an investigation into the cause of her death will be opened."

Although he didn't say the word 'murder', everybody knew, but they didn't know who. You, however, had a sneaking suspicion that was confirmed when your eyes met Tom's and he smirked at you.

Myrtle had been a muggle-born.

With an increased amount of fear you followed Tom as he departed from the table, as you usually did on your way back to the dungeons. He hardly acknowledged your presence, but you still heard mutters of how cute it was that you were always together as you passed the tables. Well, at least you weren't being bullied, you supposed.

And it wasn't like Tom ever harmed you - he was true to his word in that sense. So, maybe your fear was unwarranted.

In fact, this was the safest you had ever felt.

Was it Tom that made you feel this way? You glanced up at his stern expression as he walked, feeling your stomach twist when you heard someone in the corridor say, "Look, it's Riddle and his girlfriend." Girlfriend?

You continued to look at Tom, trying to fit the word boyfriend to him: he was handsome, that was for sure. And he cared about you, in a strange way, but cared nonetheless.

He was truthful about wanting to eradicate muggle-borns, as proven through Myrtle, so he must be truthful about not wanting to harm you as well. After all, if he had proved such an extreme thing about himself, a much milder thing such as caring for someone else's wellbeing was basically a given.

"Are you alright, Y/N?" his voice brought you out your thoughts, "You are staring off into space."

"Sorry," you mumbled, taking a deep breath before asking, "Are you my boyfriend?"

Tom stilled in his movements, turning to properly look at you, "What makes you ask?"

"Well, everyone says because we spend so much time together we must be dating," you said nervously, "And you don't correct them."

"If that's how you would like to describe our agreement, then so be it."

Agreement was a strong word.

"I don't correct rumours because I don't care for them," he added, "But if me being your boyfriend makes you more inclined to trust me, then I suppose I should thank the rumours."

"I don't... not trust you," you found yourself saying, which made Tom smile.

"Then all that's left is trust," he held out his hand to you, and you stared at it pensively for a few moments before taking it.

***

"Salazar, I sound just like my mother," a girl sat nearby you at dinner laughed in reference to her previous statement, her surrounding friends joining in with the giggling.

"Well, that's what they say. We become our parents," one of the friends added, which was a passing remark - but one that stuck with you.

You couldn't be like your father... you simply couldn't.

"Tom," you asked quietly after you were tucked away in the corner of the Slytherin common room together, "Do you think I am like my father?"

The boy looked up from his essay, "In terms of what? Appearance?"

You shook your head, "Personality."

He paused, "You are not entirely different."

That struck a chord in you, "But- but I'm not abusing anyone!"

"You are not pleasant to anyone who speaks with you," he said, "I assume the manner in which you talk is learnt from your father."

"No, I- I'm like that because I don't trust people!" your voice was exasperated, but not loud.

"Did your father trust you?"

At your lack of response, he continued talking.

"Darling-" that was new, "-when you are raised by bad people, you know more of how to be a bad person than somebody raised by good people. In fact, you know more of how to be a bad person than a good person in general. It can't be helped."

"Why not?" all the insecurities and self-doubt you had built over the years were now amplifying.

"Because it's your default learned behaviour."

"I- I..." honestly you felt like crying, "No, I can't be..."

Tom shushed you softly, "Don't fret. I understand you, remember? The others don't accept your flaws, but I do, because I have the same flaws."

"You just called me a bad person," you mumbled.

"Bad was perhaps the wrong word to use. Misunderstood or socialised differently are perhaps more fitting terms."

"We really can't change ourselves?"

"No, but we can find like-minded people and grow in numbers in order to change the structure of society. Make it a place for us and not them."

"That just seems so extreme."

Tom traced his fingers along your exposed arm, sending shivers up your spine, "Don't you think it's our time? The so-called good people have had their way for so long. We didn't choose to be 'bad', we were unlucky with who we were born to - we deserve compensation not societal neglect."

"I mean, I- I guess."

The head boy smiled at you: that uncanny yet charming smile he had equipped in his inventory for moments like these. Still, you hadn't been smiled at in such a way ever before, and couldn't help the fact it gave you butterflies.

You let the silence sit for a few moments, noticing how the common room was now practically empty because of how late it was. It hadn't been Tom's turn to do the prefect rounds that night.

With the absence of people, you felt safe enough to state, "It was you."

"It was me what?"

You let your eyes meet his for a brief few seconds, but he didn't attempt to enter your mind. "You know what. Who else would it have been?"

He hummed softly, "She would have just gone on to traumatise her future children with her muggle ways in some way or other."

"You don't know that."

"Yes, I do. I was raised in a muggle orphanage. Muggles are cruel and horrible, and they cannot plague wizarding society."

You stared at him, no words coming to mind.

"Besides, her death was not without cause. I needed someone to die in order to ensure my immortality."

"What?"

Tom gave that smile again, before explaining something that only made you further aware of how twisted his mind was.

***

That night you lay awake in bed, thinking over everything Tom had told you about horcruxes and the basilisk that lived in a chamber beneath the school. You knew you weren't the only one that knew, as you weren't the only one who hung around him. Avery, Lestrange and Malfoy were also a part of Tom's 'movement', as he called it.

You didn't know what to do. You felt trapped within a relationship with Tom, since you now knew he was fully capable of murder and you knew too much about him to be able to distance yourself safely.

At the same time, a lot of what he said made sense, and maybe you were just harbouring more and more resentment for your mother, but you found yourself beginning to agree with him. I mean, you were sorted into a house that didn't allow muggle-borns into it, just like Durmstrang didn't allow muggle-borns at all. At this point, it was written in the stars that you weren't supposed to be fond of 'mudbloods', since you always wound up in spaces that despised them: your family, Durmstrang, Slytherin... and Tom Riddle.

It's not that you even had a choice anymore.

***

The Christmas holidays arrived, and you didn't think twice about signing yourself up to stay at Hogwarts for the two week period - Tom was obviously staying as well. It was weird, as you weren't sure if you should be getting him a gift for the day.

Despite the fact you had never kissed or even hugged, he was technically your boyfriend, so you reasoned that you should be getting him something. But what do you buy for a man whose only interests are world domination? On top of that, you had no money.

You could make him something.

And that was how you found yourself sat at your desk in your dormitory (which you had all to yourself until the next term), carving a snake out of a bit of wood you had (magically) cut from a part of your bed. It wasn't a large amount, just enough to make a small figurine, but you intended to charm it to create some sort of snake hologram that would erupt out of the wooden snake's mouth. Wood carving had been a common activity in your family growing up, although you always had to use the scraps of wood and blunt knives while your siblings got the good quality stuff.

Once you had completed the final step of perfecting the charm, you smiled proudly to yourself at your work and wrapped it up carefully.

***

Your routine since the Christmas holidays began was pretty simple: you, Tom and a second year were the only Slytherins staying, and there was only a handful from the other houses too. Every morning you would meet Tom in the common room at 8am and head to breakfast together, where you would eat plenty before heading to the library to study. Tom's studies were almost exclusively directed towards dark magic, meanwhile you worked to improve in your subjects, which you struggled more with due to English not being your first language.

Being head boy, Tom had basically permanent access to the restricted section, especially because he could get Professor Slughorn to sign off on anything. Everyday he learned darker and darker wizarding secrets, which scared you more than you would ever admit.

After morning studies, you would return to the Great Hall for lunch, and then Tom would insist on a walk around the castle grounds after a morning of mostly sitting down. Afternoon would be when he would have his meetings with Slughorn, whatever they were about, whilst you took the time to relax and decompress in the Slytherin common room with a good book.

Then it would be back again to the Great Hall for dinner, and then, since Tom didn't have prefect rounds to worry about, he would sit with you in the common room for a couple hours. Sometimes you chatted, sometimes you didn't.

"Y/N, darling," he spoke as he sat down next to you, the two of you having just returned from dinner. The second year was nowhere in sight.

You hummed, turning to look at him.

"Slughorn is starting to suspect my interest in dark magic is more than just curiosity."

"It is, isn't it?" you replied nonchalantly.

"Yes, but it is making him stop answering the questions I ask so easily. It is most frustrating."

"Maybe you should back off for a while then, build up trust again."

That was when Tom surprised you by dropping his head on to your shoulder, exhaling as he felt your warmth touch his cheek. "I'll have to. I just hate that it will cause a delay in my learning."

You nervously let your head rest against his as you pushed back the butterflies swarming in your stomach, wondering desperately how a man with such violent thoughts had only ever been so kind to you. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn't so bad being trapped with him.

Tom's eyes fluttered shut as his body began relaxing, and you took the moment to work up the courage to initiate more affection. You reached out and took his thumb into your hand, since the rest of it was balled up and not easy to hold. He acknowledged the gesture by rubbing the back of your hand with his forefinger, without opening his eyes.

You were probably the first to see this soft side of Tom.

***

Christmas Day quickly rolled around, not that the day had ever particularly meant much to you. So many years had been spent with you watching your half-siblings open their luxurious gifts, meanwhile you got a new pair of socks if you were lucky. That was until you were at Durmstrang, where you always stayed behind for the holidays while your half-siblings went home to loving parents that you never got.

Tom's Christmases had probably been even worse when they were spent at an orphanage. At least you were allowed a small portion of the grand Christmas meal at your childhood home. Orphans likely got the usual everyday food.

Regardless, you weren't expecting anything when you left your dormitory and entered the Slytherin common room. The Durmstrang Christmas feasts had made the traditional food your favourite part of the day, and you were simply hoping Hogwarts could top the delicacies. You were pleasantly surprised to see Tom already in the common room on the sofa by the tree, holding a neatly wrapped gift.

You couldn't help but smile at him as he noticed your presence, and clutched your gift for him behind your back as you approached his location.

"Merry Christmas, darling," he said to you, rising in order to greet you properly.

"Merry Christmas, Tom," you replied, standing still in front of him.

"I got you something," he said, holding out the box.

You accepted it and presented your gift to him, "And I got you something."

He smiled a small smile and accepted your present, moving in sync with you as you sat down to eagerly open the parcels.

You were absolutely shocked to uncover an absolutely gorgeous white gold ring with a snake design wrapping around, and two large emeralds in place of the snake's eyes. You had seen many expensive things in your life, but you had never had the privilege of touching one - let alone owning one. Looking over at Tom to search for some sort of answer, you received none as he was too busy gazing at the illusion you had spent ages charming.

"It's beautiful, darling."

"Thank you," you couldn't help but be shy, "I don't have any money so I could only make you something."

He smiled, "What do you think of my gift?"

"Oh, Tom, it's- it's gorgeous," you were speechless, "I- I don't know what to say. Thank you. Thank you so much."

"It's to your taste, then?"

You didn't hesitate to nod.

"Lovely, I was hoping it would be. I had to resist using legilimency to confirm."

"Why didn't you?"

"I want you to trust me, doll, and invading your mind won't get you there, will it?"

You softly shook your head, shifting closer to him so you could embrace him in a side hug. He turned his body to hold you properly, and as you buried your face in his chest, you smelled a scent that you had never had the privilege of smelling before: the scent of home.

Tom was your home - he had to be. He was the safest place for you to be in all regards, and that was what a home was, right?

"But what's the ring for?" you asked as you pulled away from the embrace.

"It's for my darling," he said simply, and he didn't elaborate.

But as you tried it on all your fingers, you found that the only one it fit perfectly snug on was your ring finger.

Perhaps that was a coincidence.

***

You had taken to wearing the ring at all times, and you could tell Tom liked it that way, having that mark of ownership on you. Due to the finger on which you wore the piece of jewellery, you received many comments from students and teachers when they returned after New Year's.

"Is congratulations due?" Professor Slughorn had asked during the first potions class of the new year, to which you had merely smiled as you didn't know what to say.

It didn't matter, though, because the rumour spread through the castle quick enough to be considered a well-known fact. Tom Riddle and Y/N L/N being engaged was simply a fact at Hogwarts, and no one had ever debated it.

It wasn't unusual for seventh year couples to get engaged: in fact, it seemed that your 'engagement' had triggered a domino effect of more proposals.

You supposed this probably happened every year after there was a first couple to announce their engagement. Girls pushing more hints towards their boyfriends to get them to ask to tie the knot, probably somewhat out of jealousy and not wanting to be left behind.

"How many kids are you going to have?" one of your dorm mates asked at lunch - the first time she had bothered speaking to you in a while.

"I- I don't know," you had never felt safe enough to even consider if you wanted kids. It's not like you even had a good role model to base your parenting off of. Her question had caught you so off guard you failed to even put up the cold exterior you held for everyone except Tom.

"I think I want four," the girl continued, "I want a kinda big family but not overwhelmingly big, you know?"

You nodded absently.

"But if my husband wants more then I guess I would consider it," she said pensively, "How many does Riddle want?"

"I haven't asked Tom," your cold tone finally caught up to you.

"Asked me what?" your 'fiancé' arrived at the table and sat next to you, greeting you with a kiss on the cheek - which he had never done before. The girls opposite you awed at his behaviour.

"How many kids you want," the same girl reiterated.

You watched as Tom chewed on his cheek a bit before saying, "As many as my wife wants, it's her body that has to go through the turmoil after all."

Your dorm mates began murmuring about how considerate that was of Tom, and how one of the girl's boyfriends was insistent on at least three kids with no room for negotiation.

"Salazar, L/N, now we all want your man," one of the girls joked.

You turned to look at Tom to see that he wasn't even looking in their direction, and instead looking at you.

***

"This diary is my first horcrux," Tom explained to you, handing the book over. He had surprised you by showing you the Chamber of Salazar Slytherin, where the basilisk who killed Myrtle under Tom's orders (as you learned) resided. Despite the fact you hadn't seen the giant snake, you were nervous. "This is what Warren died for."

"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" you asked, flicking through the pages of the diary.

"You weren't ready to think too much about my plans, as you were still processing the motive," he said, handing you a quill and ink pot, "Write in the diary."

You frowned, but took the quill and dipped it in ink, before writing a simple message of 'hello'.

You nearly jumped out your skin when the diary replied to you.

"What is this?"

"I've charmed the part of my soul in the diary to be able to interact with whoever's writing in it, and in the case I lose the body I currently have, drain the life force of this hypothetical person to create a new body for me."

Regardless of your feelings about the matter, you had to give it to Tom that he was incredibly intelligent.

"So, I suggest you don't write anymore in it," he said, taking the diary back, "I quite like you alive."

"You're immortal now."

He hummed, "After we leave Hogwarts, I would like to continue making more. I want them to be grand, meaningful items, like the valuable objects of each house here."

"Like the sword of Gryffindor?"

"Yes, but that one wouldn't be very wise to pick. It's kept in the headmaster's office."

You nodded, "What are the others?"

"Ravenclaw's diadem, Slytherin's locket and Hufflepuff's cup."

"And which one do you want to use?"

He sighed, looking around the gloomy chamber, "Ideally, all three of them."

***

APPROX. SIX YEARS LATER.

***

You returned home with bags of food weighing your hands down, a playful song replaying in your mind in a loop. This was a normal day for you, thus far, as you entered the household that you shared with your husband, Tom Riddle. It was a house in the middle of nowhere, as he preferred it.

As you walked into the kitchen, you couldn't help but notice that it seemed way too quiet - normally you could feel Tom's presence from his work study, but today you couldn't. After checking the office to confirm he wasn't there, you turned back towards the kitchen to unpack the shopping (presuming he was simply out somewhere and forgot to mention) when you noticed that the door to the cellar was slightly open.

Ensuring your wand was definitely on your person, you entered through the door of rotting wood and slowly made your way down the stone slab stairs. You peered around the corner to see Tom stood across from a slumped figure in the corner, and between them stood a small table with Slytherin's locket set on it. Next to the locket was a wand, but it wasn't Tom's since he was holding his.

You had never witnessed Tom during his... dark magic... before.

You observed as Tom slightly turned his back to the captive person, reading carefully a page of the dusty book he was holding. It was then, to your horror, that the person got up and rushed to grab their wand from the table, beginning to say the fatal killing curse, "Avada kedav-"

"Avada kedavra!"

Tom turned around in shock, looking between you with your wand extended, and the now-corpse on the cold stone floor. All you could do was stare in horror at what you had done.

Only, the horror didn't come from the fact you had just killed someone for the first time - no, the horror came from the fire pumping in your veins and making you feel alive. Why did something so bad make you feel so good? It was like a drug - unholy but godly all the same.

"Darling?" Tom snapped you out of your thoughts, and you finally lowered your wand, "Darling, are you okay?"

You nodded, finding yourself breathless as your husband embraced you.

"You saved my life."

"You're immortal, my love."

"You saved me the hassle of creating a new body," he corrected, parting from you to look down at your face, "How do you feel?"

You exhaled slowly, "Exhilarated."

He raised an eyebrow at you.

"Were they a mudblood?"

Tom's face displayed even more surprise: you had never referred to muggle-borns in such a way before. "Yes, doll, but I'll need a new one now to finish this horcrux."

"Sorry."

"Don't be," he chuckled, pecking your lips, "Never apologise for the death of mudbloods."

You gave him a small smile, "I'm apologising for the kidnapping hassle you now have to go through again, not the death."

"I'm in love with you," he said quickly, staring at you with his piercing eyes.

You beamed up at Tom: your lover, your devil, your rock.

"I'm in love with you too."

———————————————

masterlist

written; 08/03/2023 —> 19/03/2023 published; 20/03/2023 edited; —/—/——

taglist ; @workinatdapyramid

[existential-life-crisis]

☆ Get to know me :) (updated)☆

Hi! A bit of info to start with: I'm a minor; a lesbian; and a cis girl (she/her).

Ethnicity and language

I live in England and currently only speak English fluently however I am currently studying both French and German! (German is definitely my favourite of the 2)

Subjects and Interests

My favourite subjects are Maths and Classical Civilisation but I enjoy most subjects. (Lessons can still suck tho bc dam some teachers can be boring)

I enjoy drawing, playing games, reading (books and fics), listening to music and watching youtube.

Video games

I have a few favourite games at the minute:

• Hades

• Horizon: Zero Dawn and Forbidden West

• Genshin Impact

Finished games I still love:

• Astro Bot (its a vr game abt a little robot)

• Spiderman PS4

• Spiderman PS5 Miles Morales

• Portal 1 and 2 ♡♡♡

I am also 100% a completionist so if I finish a game I probably have 100% on it.

Reading

My fav books are everything Rick Riordan but i plan to read some other stuff as well soon.

My fav characters from the main series are Nico, Leo, Frank and Lester/Apollo but I do love pretty much all of the main cast. I haven't read Magnus Chase or Kane Chronicles since I was a kid so I'm gonna reread those before deciding favourites but I think they were Alex and Carter. Also, in love with all of the side characters even if they are 90% hc.

My fav canon ships/friendships are

• solangelo (Will x Nico)

• percabeth (Percy x Annabeth)

• frazel (Frank x Hazel) (But I do hc that either Frank was younger or Hazel was older bc the age gap was a bit strange in canon, being 13 and 16. Its a bit inconsistent , as all ages are in PJO, but if time works normally Hazel should be 14 and therefore definitely older than Nico too but thats a topic for another time)

• shelper (or shipper as I like to call them) (Shel x Piper)

• Lost trio (platonic)

• PJO trio (platonic) (Grover my baby, why must they always forget you)

• Lester and Meg (I dont think i have to say this but platonic) (please say I don't have to say that. No one ships that right)

• Reyna and Thalia (platonic) (omg let aroace characters exist in peace) (no hate if u ship it but my gods)

Fanon ships/friendships

• Valgrace (Leo x Jason) (but aroace Leo is still amazing)

• Pollen (Apollo x Darren) (Is this entirely about Dear Reader by wrongcaitlyn? Yes. Do I care? Nope. Am I insanly invested in their relationship? Oh absolutely.)

• Nico and Leo (platonic) (This had no reason to not be canon and had every reason to be and I will never forgive Rick for this until he fixes it)

• Frank and Leo (platonic) (I swear every book they would fix their relationship and then as soonas the next one starts they would hate each other again)

• Nico and evey side character ever (platonic) (especially year round campers) (bc hes genuinely just a nice guy)

• Will and Clarrise (platonic) (this is kinda canon but all we really know is that he can calm her down)

Feel free to ask for fic recs if u want them.

Music

My fav music artist is 'Grandson'. (He writes rock/alternative/indie/rap (?) music often about political/social/personal issues.)

But I listen to tons of other kinds of music too from metal to pop to instrumentals by a ton of different artists:

• Måneskin (italian rock band)

• Polyphia (instumental, primarily guitar, math rock)

• Chappell Roan (yk who that is)

• Chase Atlantic (u have probably heard at least 1 of their songs, pop/alternative/indie/r&b)

• Dutch Melrose (alternative/indie/pop)

• Mother Mother (yk who that is right?)

• Eminem (right?)

• MSI (punk/alternative/rock)

And a whole lot more

I also play guitar (acoustic and electic).

TV

Loveeee Spiderman: Into and Across the spider verse.

My fav characters are Miles, Hobie, Pavitr, Spidernoir and Gwen but I love all of them.

Shows:

• Avatar the Last Airbender

• The Legend of Korra

• Batman: the animated series

• Voltron :)

Beliefs

Im an atheist but I support people of all religions. I support Palestine. I am left liberal (again I'm British so keep that in mind, I know nothing abt US politics besides the basic/well known stuff). I believe in equal rights for all groups and am open to other ideas and perspectives.

If you cant respect that then please get of my page. You don't have to agree with me but you do have to respect me and others.

Thats all for now.

Byeee ♡♡♡

[qqueenofhades]

One of the most surprising things I learned recently is that Bernie doesn’t do well with Black voters, and I was wondering if you knew why that is? I feel like his platform is fairly popular so I just wonder why he fails to win their votes?

It's because Black Democrats a) like actual Democrats, and b) also don't have time to waste with empty moral posturing when they are intimately aware of how public policy and progressive (or reactive/reactionary) politics affect their everyday life, in a way that a lot of privileged white Bernie Bros were utterly unequipped to consider (and indeed, attacked the Black Democrats for "not knowing what's best for them," which is not paternalistic or racist at all!) Black Democrats also know how important voting is, because of the obvious fact that they were disenfranchised, had their political accomplishments totally dismantled at the end of Reconstruction, had to literally fight through dogs, gas, guns, and screaming white supremacists to exercise their vote and win their civil rights in the 1960s, and are consistently targeted today by white Republicans attempting to gerrymander, restrict, penalize, or otherwise eradicate their rights. Black Democrats don't vote for empty performative politics, they vote for results. Bernie is great at one, and very bad at the other. Three guesses which.

Elderly Black Democrats in South Carolina allegedly "saved" Biden's 2020 campaign (after Bernie had done well in the EXTREMELY white Iowa and New Hampshire primaries; the ordering of the primaries and the excessive prognostications attached to Uber White Midwestern/New England Results is dumb, but anyway). And that was because Black Democrats have good reason to like Biden. He spent eight years willingly supporting and never upstaging the first Black president, he picked the first Black/Asian woman as his vice president, he put the first Black woman on SCOTUS, he has spent years championing their concerns at an actual tangible and legislative level, and they know that they can trust him. By contrast, Bernie is one of those leftists who dismisses all other kinds of oppression as secondary to the class struggle and thinks that racism, sexism, misogyny, etc. are all inferior injustices to economic injustice. And yes! Economic injustice is very much a thing! But if you go around telling marginalized communities to their faces that their many, many years of lived experience with racial oppression isn't as "real" as economic injustice, and/or that racism will magically be solved by economic redress and you don't need to do anything else about it, don't be surprised when that is not a winning message.

Besides, and as noted: Bernie has spent fifty years in politics and achieved nothing really meaningful (unlike Biden, who has also been in politics for fifty years and has real and significant legislative accomplishments as senator, vice president, and president). His policies are on-paper progressive, but Black Democrats and Black people in general aren't a monolithically progressive voting bloc, and have other concerns and issues that intersect with their support (or lack thereof) for him. There are very few Black people who can afford to take their vote for granted, or to vote for somebody who hasn't demonstrated any interest in going through the legislative process to achieve real results, and instead spends most of his time talking loudly to left-leaning white progressives and cultivating a "Only I, Great Bernie, Can Solve Your Problems" political mentality, which then spills into sore loserdom and was an issue in both 2008 and (most visibly and unforgivably) in 2016.

Basically, in my view, Bernie mostly exists to be the totem for a certain subset of privileged white leftists to club the Democratic Party over the head and set impossible standards of what they "should" be doing, which in turn actively undermines support for the Democrats and helps nakedly fascist Republicans win more elections. And despite nominally running as a Democrat, he in fact is not a Democrat (he sits as an independent) and makes no effort to court central Democratic constituencies. Of which, and obviously, African-Americans are one of the greatest parts, due to consistently voting to get this country out of the mess that fascist white people keep trying to plunge it into. Any candidate who does not understand that, and does not make serious efforts to do so, likewise should not be taken seriously. Therefore, no matter how mad it makes his frothing internet stans (who likewise are not serious people with actual political opinions), the Democratic party apparatus has no real need to humor him and his self-aggrandizing constant talking about things that he never, ever actually does shit about.

[my-deer-history]

Francis Kinloch in Müller's letters to his family

These extracts are from Johannes von Müller: Sämmtliche Werke, volume 7 (1810).

My translations here, original German and French transcriptions below the cut. I have added some paragraph breaks for legibility.

From the introductory Lebensgeschichte, von ihm selbst beschrieben (Biography, as described by himself)

Meanwhile, at the home of Charles Bonnet, for whom and whose wife he [Müller] developed the tender attachment of a son and who was treated as such by them, he met a young man from South Carolina, Francis Kinloch. He had an extraordinary thirst for knowledge, a great fire, many fine qualities and very pleasant morals. 

They determined a plan to live together; every day, for several hours in the morning, they would study Tacitus and Montesquieu, or any other authors found worthy enough to stand beside them, and in the rest of the time, the one friend would read Blackstone and other English or American books, and the other would study Swiss documents, and on top of that, between spending time in the company of Bonnet and others, they would alternate between Roman, French and English classics. 

Tronchin was too much Müller’s friend to keep him from this plan, and even more pleased was Kinloch’s guardian, Thomas Boone - the former governor of South Carolina, and at the time the director of the large London Custom-house, a man in whom, in thirty years of acquaintance, Müller never found fault, though he always found exemplary reason, firmness and generosity. 

The friends lived for a year and a half in a modest country house on the hill of Chambeisy, surrounded by the highest mountains in the old world, the majesty of Lac Leman*, the incomparable culture of the shore, enjoying the masterworks of the human spirit, in daily association with Bonnet, but also with Voltaire, and brought together for a while with Mr Alleyne Fitzherbert, who was already developing the talents with which he later shone as Lord St Helens. After that, the storms of the North American revolution tore them apart.

*Also known as Lake Geneva.

Undated, 1775, Müller to his sister

After this little introduction, I ask you to take a map of the Geneva region to hand. Here, on the Swiss side of the lake on the border of Geneva on French land, lies the town of Chambesis – on a hill that overlooks the lake, all of the estates, the entire republic and the glaciers. Now take the map of America. Here is Charlestown, the capital of Carolina. And here on the third map is Scotland; in the middle of which lives an ancient family called Kinloch; one of these left Europe at the time of the civil war of the Stuart kings, and found with many others there a beautiful country and freedom. One of these Kinlochs now commands 1200 negroes, and is a gentleman of great standing and much greater spirit and character; he is twenty years old. 

He came to Geneva; in the last 5 to 6 months, we have seen each other for 23 hours each day and read the most profound writers together. Through this, we got to know and love each other’s characters. 

Mr Kinloch has rented a small country house with six rooms in Chambesis, and is paying 12 new Louis d’or a month for this and table, breakfast and supper, for the next five summer months. In this solitude, he wants to study. He has such a noble character that he is highly estimated by everyone. Lord North, the prime minister of the king of England, is very fond of him; K risked his life for his son and saved him from mortal danger. 

He has invited me to move in with him, and to spend this summer in the lap of scholarship and friendship. We would read and study together, occasionally go into the mountains, occasionally to Pays de Vaud. [...] And [Tronchin*], who loves me, and wants to see and promote my happiness, gave his permission, and his two children will spend this half of the year in a boarding house in the city and learn there. Thus, Mr Tronchin and they and I and Nassau and Bonnet and Kinloch are all content, and I will still see Mr Tronchin at Bessinge once every eight days.

*Müller was employed as a tutor to Tronchin’s two young children at the time.

Undated, 1775, Tronchin to Müller’s father

Have no concern, sir, about your son; everybody loves him, he is lively and good, his conduct has always been very wise, and all of our men of letters would vouch for him. The choice that he makes, to go and live with Mr Kinlock [sic] shall not, I hope, be without utility for him. He is a young man who has lived here for a long time, and who is generally and singularly esteemed both by his compatriots and by the Genevese, whether for his morals or for his character. The desire that he has to benefit from your son’s knowledge must be a guarantee of what I have told you.

From the introductory Lebensgeschichte, von ihm selbst beschrieben (biography, as described by himself)

Indeß lernte Müller bei Karl Bonnet, für den und dessen Gemahlin er die zärtliche Anhänglichkeit eines Sohnes faßte, und von welchen er ganz wie ein solcher behandelt wurde, einen Jüngling aus Süd - Carolina, Francis Kinloch, kennen. Dieser hatte eine ungemeine Wißbegier, viel Feuer, viele Güte und sehr angenehme Sitten. Es entstand ein Plan des Beisammenlebens; täglich sollten in ein paar Morgenstunden Tacitus und Montesquieu, und wenn etwa noch einer würdig erfunden würde neben diesen zu stehen, in den übrigen von dem einen Freunde Blackstone und andere englische oder amerikanische Bücher, von dem andern die schweizerischen Urkunden studiert, und hierauf zwischen Bonnets und anderer Gesellschaft, und Durchlesung römischer, französischer und englischer Klassiker abgewechselt werden. Zu sehr war Tronchin Müller's Freund, um ihn hievon abzuhalten, und noch mehr freute sich Kinloch's Vormund, Thomas Boone, gewesener Gouverneur von Süd- Carolina, noch jetzt Director des großen Londner Custom-house's, ein Mann, an welchem in dreißigjährigem Verhältniß Müller nie einen Fehler, wohl aber vortreflichen Verstand, Festigkeit und Edelmuth immer gleich gefunden hat. Auf dem Hügel von Chambeisy in einem bescheidenen Landhause, dem aber die höchsten Gebürge der alten Welt, die Pracht des lemanischen Sees, die unvergleichliche Cultur der Ufer entgegenlagen, im Genuß der Meisterstücke des menschlichen Geistes, im tåglichen Umgange Bonnets, auch mit Voltaire, und eine Zeitlang vereiniget mit Herrn Alleyne Fitzherbert, welcher die Talente schon entwickelte, durch welche er nach diesem als Lord St. Helens in den größten Geschäften geglänzt, so lebten die Freunde bei anderthalb Jahre. Hierauf rissen die Stürme der nordamerikanischen Revolution sie auseinander.

Undated, 1775, Müller to his sister

Nach dieser kleinen Einleitung bitte ich dich, eine Karte vom Genfergebiet zur Hand zu nehmen. Hier auf der Schweizerseite des Sees an den Genfergränzen auf französischem Boden liegt das Dorf Chambesis, auf einer Höhe, welche den See, alle Landgüter, die ganze Republik und die Eisberge übersieht. Nun nimm die Karte von Amerika. Hier ist Charlestown, die Hauptstadt von Karolina. Und hier auf der dritten Karte ist Scotland; in der Mitte desselben wohnt ein altes Geschlecht, genannt Kinloch; einer aus demselben verließ Europa zur Zeit der innerlichen Kriege der Könige Stuart, und fand mit vielen andern daselbst ein schönes Land und die Freiheit. Einer von diesen Kinlochs gebeut nun 1200 Négern, und ist ein Herr von Stand und noch weit größerm Geist und Charakter; er ist zwanzig Jahre alt. Er kam nach Genf; letzte 5—6 Monate haben wir uns alle Tage 23 Stunden gesehen und mit einander die tiefsinnigsten Schriftsteller gelesen. Hiedurch haben wir einer des andern Charakter kennen gelernt und lieb gewonnen. Herr Kinloch hat in Chambesis ein kleines Landhaus mit sechs Zimmern gemiethet, und zahlt hiefür und Tafel, Morgens und Abendessen, künftige fünf Sommermonate hindurch monatlich 12 neue Louis d'ors. In dieser Einsamkeit will er studieren. Er hat einen so edlen Charakter, daß er von jedermann hochgeschätzt wird. Er ist sehr beliebt bei Lord North, erstem Staatsminister des Königs von England; dessen Sohn hat K. einst aus Todesgefahr gerettet und sein eignes Leben für ihn gewagt. Er hat mich eingeladen zu ihm zu ziehen, und diesen Sommer im Schooß der Wissenschaften und der Freundschaft zuzubringen. Wir würden mit einander lesen und studieren, bisweilen in die Berge gehen, bisweilen ins Pays de Vaud. [...] Und [Tronchin], welcher mich liebt und mein Glück gern sieht und befördert, gab seinen Willen, und seine zwei Kinder werden dies halbe Jahr in einer Pension in der Stadt bleiben und daselbst lernen. So daß also Herr Tronchin und sie und ich und Nassau und Bonnet und Kinloch, wir alle zusammen zufrieden sind, und ich Herrn Tronchin dennoch alle acht Tage einmal zu Bessinge sehe.

Undated, 1775, Tronchin to Müller’s father

Ne soyez, Monsieur, d'ailleurs point en peine de Mr. Votre fils; tout le monde l'aime, il est vif et bon, sa conduite a toujours été très sage, et tous nos gens de lettres en font le plus grand cas. Le parti qu'il prend, d'aller vivre avec Mr. Kinlock ne sera pas, j'espère, sans utilité pour lui. C'est un jeune homme qui demeure ici depuis long tems, et qui y est généralement et singulièrement estimé tant par ses compatriotes que par les Genevois, soit pour ses moeurs, soit pour son caractère. Le désir qu'il a de profiter des lumières de Mr. Votre fils, Vous doit être un garant de ce que je Vous dis.

[lyledebeast]

Social Mobility

Obviously, there are a lot of problems with The Patriot's representation of slavery, but the fact that so many discussions of this center on Benjamin Martin overlooks an interesting possibility concerning this character. That Martin not only hires free men to work his land instead of using slave labor but also does heavy farm work himself is often read through a Doylian lens of making the hero more sympathetic to a modern audience. But what if we consider this choice through a Watsonian lens? What would that say about Martin?

First, he clearly does not hire free men to help him out of any moral distaste for the practice of slavery . If he felt that way, it is unlikely he would have married into a slave-owning family once, let alone twice. In the one moment where he does seem to support racial equality, his insistence that Occam sign for himself could be more about assuring the loyalty of this lone Black man who will be fighting alongside White volunteers. Perhaps, for the moment, Martin is stepping outside the White fantasyland of The Patriot where Black people simply do not escape from their enslavers when the opportunity arises. And maybe this reality is also behind Martin's choice to use free laborers for his own farm. Notice that not only he but also his sons play a role in planting, as we see when he asks Nathan and Samuel about the progress on their chores at the start of the movie. Most often, people parent in the ways they were parented, which raises an interesting possibility. Martin chose not to have slaves because he does not come from an enslaver family and has been used to doing his own labor, but now he has more land than he can manage himself even with the aid of four work-aged sons.

How on earth did this occur?

Well, it could have something to do with his being a war hero. That could also explain how a man who farmed his own land was able to marry into a family wealthy enough to afford slaves in the first place. Perhaps his marriage to Elizabeth was as much a reward for his wartime service as his marriage to Charlotte many years later. Women did not buy slaves for themselves in the colonial South, so Charlotte's are likely part of her inheritance from either her father or late husband (mentioned in some versions of the film/script, but not all). It would have been very unlikely for a woman to marry above her class, but a man could do so if he chose the right means of advancing himself. Looked at in this light, Martin's actions at Fort Wilderness, that made him a "hero" and for which he claims to feel such deep regret, gave him not only the land he owns but also the mother of his children, the gift that kept on giving (and giving and giving and . . .)

"I advance myself only through victory." "The honor is found in the ends, not the means." If my reading holds merit, these words from the villain's mouth actually describe the hero's trajectory far more accurately than Colonel Tavington's. As despicable as Tavington's actions are, he is only seeking upward mobility through tried and true methods, as Martin's experience attests. I've always found it funny that Tavington insists he can never return to England with honor but expresses no concerns that having committed war-time atrocities against Americans could impede his thriving in America. People in London for whom Tavington's victims are merely a newspaper headline will be appalled, but their flesh-and-blood Loyalist neighbors ? They'll get it!

Tavington's claim to his second James Wilkins that their burning a church filled with Patriot civilians will be forgotten is dubious at best. Most likely he knows better and is only saying that to ease Wilkins' conscience. But the reason such an action would live in infamy is not because it was particularly brutal by colonial standards. It's because the victims were White. The British Empire was a deeply White supremacist institution, and as movies like The Patriot show, that is a holdover from imperialism that we have yet to part ways with.

[sins-of-the-sea]

-The Voyage of the Devil's Eye-

This is mostly a plotting aid for anyone who wishes to find the Devil's Eye and defeat the Master. Or however you want to do with the Eye yourself.

-To Start the Voyage-

You will need to find The Compass (La Brújula), once held in possession by the Montego Family from Manila, Philippines, though it is said there is no one left of St. Emilio's lineage after 1711.

If you are to go by the Main Story, the Compass will be located in Kingston, Jamaica.

Appearance-wise, this doesn't look any different from any other old rusted compass, though it lacks a face.

However, as this is no ordinary compass, as it will "track" whatever you ask for, no matter where it is in the world, no matter how far or far removed. With that said, it can't point to you the direction of something as vague as "my true love" or "the greatest wealth in the world"; it has to be something specific, such as "my missing car keys" or "my deadbeat father". Brújula won't HAVE to know what those keys look like or who that deadbeat father is; what matters is that the object being tracked is concrete and real.

Brújula is capable of moving her needle should the target move as well, so if one is searching for a living bounty, it is possible for her to change directions as the target is on the move.

Do note, however, as this is a compass, the object cannot talk, tell you the distance of the object tracked, nor give you directions via map or charts. You have to be on foot and follow where the needle points at all times.

From here, to find the Eye, you must find the Seven Keys of St. Emilio. Skipping this step will not allow you to get the Devil's Eye, though feel free to try. You'll regret it.

-Seven Seas, Seven Keys-

To properly get to the Devil's Eye, you will need to get the Seven Keys of St. Emilio. Without them, you will not be able to access the Eye itself.

Each Key has different 'steps' in reaching them, usually entailing the following:

Identifying the location in the globe first.

Entering the location and getting past guards, security, etc., if the place is a nationally guarded area.

Getting past the Keys' personal guardians, if applicable

Touching the case holding the Key, or the Key itself

Enter a pocket dimension which your muse must pass a trial. What kind of Trial? I ain't tellin you shit.

If you pass, the Key is yours to take and carry with you for the rest of the voyage.

If you fail, the Key will be untoucheable for you and you must rely on someone else to pass the Trial. Usually a buddy, partner, a Crewmate, etc.

Rinse and repeat six more times.

During this Voyage, your muse will be traveling in different parts of the world. In the Main Story, these include England, Rome, the Levant, China, and so forth. In the Modern Day or even Far Future AU, the locations can be up in the air and we can plot where they can be, if they are still split up at all by that point.

-Reaching the Devil's Eye-

Once you have the 7 Keys, you'll be able to reach the Devil's Eye, which in itself can be its own Trial (hence why you need the Keys). The Locker containing the Eye is a puzzle box in itself which requires solving in addition to needing the complete set to open.

And once you open the Locker, the Devil's Eye will be within your grasp.

What will you do with it? Keep it? Put it in a museum? Gift it to someone else? Replace your own Eye and use it? Purify it? Give it to the Master? Or destroy it once and for all?

It's imperative you make a decision and stick with it--the longer you keep the Eye in your grasp, the more you'll feel your own darkest desires, impulses, and vices rise up without any inhibition or moral fiber to temper it all down. While it doesn't literally "whisper" to you or force you to go 'My preeeecioooous', it can compel you do to things you'd never think you would. Intrusive thoughts become harder to escape. The idea of murdering someone for any reason at all starts to feel easier and easier to fulfill. And the worst part--you can gain your own powers to which no holy man, priest, or shaman can defeat.

Though be wary. The longer you hold onto the Eye and not destroy it, the closer the Master and his Seven Sins may come....

[semper-legens]

72. As Meat Loves Salt, by Maria McCann

Owned?: No, library Page count: 532 My summary: Jacob Cullen is a man out of sorts. Of aristocratic birth, yet reduced to the life of a manservant, he spreads anti-monarchist pamphlets among his fellow servants and supports Cromwell in the civil war. But when trouble comes knocking, he is forced to flee, carrying nothing but a few pilfered jewels and the clothes on his back. From there, the New Model Army looks to be his saviour - but a chance meeting with a young man named Christopher Ferris proves to alter his destiny forever… My rating: 3.5/5 My commentary:

This is an interesting book. I wasn't sure I liked it at first - even up to about page 100, I was ready to come on here and give it the most scathing review. And yet. There was something about it - something complex, something gripping, something I'm not entirely sure that I can give name to - that held me back. By about halfway, I confess, I was meeting this book and this story more on its own terms. It had first come on my radar when I was researching books for a Pride month display; although I didn't ultimately use it on said display, the idea of a couple of gay men meeting and falling in love in England around the time of the Civil War intrigued me. This book was more than that, though. It was about class, about violence, about community, about secrets, about God…I'm glad I didn't just give up with it and gave it a fair shake, in the end. It was intriguing, and I am ultimately glad that I read it.

First, we should talk about this book's protagonist, Jacob. I have to admit that he was a lot of the reason I disliked this book early on. The problem is that he comes out of the gate as rude, brash, argumentative, and also a literal murderer and rapist. Now, I'm not gonna say that your protagonist needs to be morally pure and never do anything wrong at all, but starting the book with Jacob being generally quite unlikeable meant that, funnily enough, I didn't much like him. A large part of Jacob's arc involves his anger and how he deals with it, but I wish there had been more to Jacob than that rage to start with so we get a fuller picture, because the scene where he rapes his new wife Caro while on the run was hard to read.

He is, however, a more interesting protagonist for not being perfect; in the part where he is in the New Model Army onwards, his possessiveness towards Ferris and his desires to drive away any other people interested in Ferris, even while not necessarily being conscious of the reasons why he feels this way, makes for an engaging conflict alongside their deepening relationship. And, of course, I really like the idea of seeing historical LGBT+ people struggling with their sexuality in a way that feels historically authentic. Jacob believes he is going to hell for sleeping with Ferris. He believes that what he is doing is sinful, and while it's heartbreaking, it's also reasonable for what someone of this era might think. And I have to admire that, honestly. He's also an interesting figure in that he's a formerly wealthy man forced to live the life of (initially) a servant, and there's some interesting class dynamics going on. The wealth he grew up in goes a way to explain his arrogance and selfishness, as well as his resentment of authority. And when he runs away with Ferris and there is a conflict between Ferris' desire to live on a commune on the Commons and his desire to stay in London and be a printer, there's a class element to that as much as anything else. He wants to be a free man, but he wants to be a free man on his own terms, never beholden to anyone, which is hard for someone living in the era he is in.

Ferris, meanwhile, is Jacob's polar opposite. Smaller, fair, and idealistic, Ferris is the golden-haired golden boy of this book. A tragic past, a questionable relationship with Jacob, dreams of living free on the land among brothers and equals, and of course an atheistic outlook, Ferris brings a lot of the spark to the narrative. I found him compelling, particularly as (due to the first-person narration) we only ever see him through Jacob's eyes, meaning we can never tell what he is thinking the same way that we can Jacob. His gentle courting of Jacob, coupled with his obvious affection for him and wariness of his more violent outbursts, are engaging, and I really like his more radical (for the time) views on the world. He is the thinker and the artist while Jacob is brute strength. They make for a good pair of narrative foils.

And finally, history. One thing that initially put me off this book was its insistence in using a cod-17th century dialect for the dialogue and narration. I don't think that sort of thing is necessarily bad, but you have to be very careful about how you use it to avoid alienating the modern reader, and the early examples of dialogue felt very stilted and old-fashioned in an unappealing way. I will admit, however, that I got more in pace with it as the book progressed, so that might just be a reflection of me acclimating to the text rather than a downside of this device. I'm no expert on the English Civil War, but the history as presented in this book seemed pretty plausible. Jacob joins the New Model Army, is trained as a pikeman, sees a few battles, then flees the army with Ferris to make a new life on the commons near London. It feels authentic, from what I know of the 17th century this is a perfectly plausible life to have led, so I have to give credit there. The one thing I will criticise is that the author seems to just ramble a little from historical idea to historical idea - once Jacob and Ferris have left the army, it doesn't really factor into the plot any more, and the 'setting up a commune' thing takes precedence. To be fair, though, I didn't really feel like the army parts were needless, just that the royalist-versus-parliamentary angle on the book's politics wasn't picked up again, which is odd given that it provides the inciting incident for the plot.

Next up, two young women fight the risen dead.