#I’m not against raising kids with religion… I’m against religions that REQUIRE raising a child to have the parents’ religion

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

After two days of eating barely anything, I just had a calzone. Let’s hope the anxiety doesn’t forcibly eject it from whence it came

[vvatchword]

So I debated replying to this for a number of reasons: first, it’s a good sentiment; second, it makes people happy; and third, OP is correct: religion will always be around. Religion absolutely makes some people’s lives better and adds to the color of human experience and not acknowledging that would be a blatant lie. But OP is also doing some sleight of hand here: ritual is being conflated with religion, and while religion requires ritual, ritual does not require religion.

So, personally speaking: I fucking despise religion. I fucking loathe it. I have an automatic nervousness around religious people--I don’t fucking care what it is, my hackles go up. Now, there are many reasons for this--not the least of which is me waiting for the other shoe to drop (the religious person inevitably turning off their brain and doing something Religiously Shitty to me). See, I was raised evangelical fundamentalist. I escaped about twelve years ago. In the process of escaping, I began researching religion in general. I wondered if there were true faiths or if ours just got it that fucking wrong. In the process, I found a story about a religious tourist who went to a southeastern Asian country and stayed with a woman who was taking care of a disabled boy.

“You are so good, taking care of this child,” said the tourist.

“He must have done something terrible in his past life to be born this way,” said the woman.

I suddenly realized this kid was going to grow up thinking they were suffering for something that they had never done. They were going to carry the burden of some accident of nature’s all their lives. In addition to the suffering that their disability had caused them, they were going to suffer internally for NO REASON AT ALL.

Buddhism had been on my short list for “least shitty faiths.” It immediately evaporated. And that’s when I realized faith needed to get its fucking ass kicked. It needs to be deconstructed, as any human construct must be deconstructed. It must be acknowledged not only as a bringer of the good, but a bringer of the bad. This isn’t bigotry, it’s just true, and it should be done because people are more important than religion. You think all that anti-trans bullshit in my country is coming from a void? I can go point at the verses in the Bible that they’re whipping out right the fuck now.

The problem with religion is multifold. If it could stay in its fucking lane, that would be one thing. But the problems are that religion is a worldview and an ideal, and religion cannot be proven or disproven.

The ideal cannot survive in an imperfect world. It perishes the minute it’s born. Life is just too complex and there are too many contexts all grinding up against one another. Too many ingredients, too many different environments, too many different kinds of people. Just one problem: what happens when your worldview doesn’t actually apply to the world? That means it’s relative to you and not a worldview at all, really. And how can it be ideal if it doesn’t apply perfectly to every situation?

With this comes cognitive dissonance. With this comes puritanism: moral performativism (for there is no way to PROVE you’re in-the-know, only a way to show it) and the urge to control other people. That control inevitably takes the form of punishment: guilt, shame, social approbation--all the way to imprisonment, suicide, and murder. Why? idk some invisible power somewhere thinks I’m fucking up. They’ve said nothing to me about it, but y’all seem real nervous. Shit what do you mean you’re throwing me out of the house

Now, the ideal is not only religion’s; it’s also present in political and other non-religious ideologies. But the difference is that those political and non-religious ideologies can be debated to some extent. You can use real-life experiences and data and change your mind accordingly. But religion doesn’t work this way. Religion does not problem-solve according to data: it problem-solves according to authority. Authority tends to be static; authority tends to demand a strange inaccessible world where nothing changes. Authority is the domain of the old looking back with rose-colored glasses.

Because that’s the next problem: nobody can get ahold of the Powers That Be. What they say cannot be proven. Their existences can’t even be proven. And while there were multiple ways that I personally coped with this (constant Bible reading and praying, looking for signs, paying attention to how I felt), the inevitable next best thing is Authorities. Other human beings. That’s how you end up with an ancient text from the goddamn bronze age informing modern politics in my goddamn country. It’s an authority. Is it correct? I mean it’s an authority. Oh you know who else is an authority? My parents--the preachers--the law--the President--

Never you. Never, ever you.

In direct contrast, science is great because you can say, at some point: “Aw, we got something wrong! Now we need to change how we approach things.” But in religion, change is anathema. This is what the olds said. Which olds? They fucking died they are so old. When did they die? The stone age? Okay great let me interpret my modern problems by the words of this guy who thought their king was established by the will of god and that diseases were caused by devil worship. Oh and those themes are still in the book by the way. Which is how you end up with religious fascists and my sister telling me that my mom’s Parkinsons was caused by devil possession.

Problem-solving also suffers as a result. I have had a big problem asking questions my entire life because my religion made kids the tools of their parents. They weren’t individuals; they needed to be seen and not heard; they were being groomed for a lifetime of religious service. Authority said it was so, and so it was so. The problem is that asking probing questions is an important part of learning, intelligence, self-reliance, and resiliency. For example, I tried to pretend that Santa was real up until I was about 12. I saw no difference between my parents telling me God was real and Santa was real, and I wanted to honor them. I mean, they’re old, they know what’s up, right?

This also means it fucks with how you interpret the right actions to take in any given situation. If I’m looking for signs from God to solve my problems, and I think it’s God who told me to go to the principal to tattle on other students for doing something that ultimately doesn’t matter, guess what I’m going to do even if all the facts point toward some fundamentally better solution.

Religion will always be around, regardless of what assholes like me think about it. I will never harass anybody for it, I will never judge anyone for it--I’ve been there, I got the t-shirt, I intimately understand why people want it. But I also know what it does. I’ve been the furthest it can go. It’s a fucking curse.

God will have to ask me for forgiveness.

Listen, I know it's very much a thing that utopian leftists think that religions will simply stop existing once all of our material needs are met, but that is just not the case.

Human beings need ritual. If we are deprived of ritual, we make new ritual. It does not matter if you call it religion or state or whatever it is you call it, human beings will keep making up new rituals.

You cannot stop us, and saying 'this ritual which I like and doesn't hurt anyone else is fine, but that ritual which you like and doesn't hurt anyone else is bad' is just bigotry.

When I say 'you cannot stop us,' I literally mean you cannot stop human beings from making up rituals and religions. Leave a group of six year old girls alone near a mud pit for an hour and you will come back to a newly-minted faith. We make ritual. We make culture. That is what we do.

No, Judaism will not 'naturally cease to exist' when all of our material needs are met. What will happen then is that the Jews will get Jewier, because we will have all the time in the world to study Torah and write stories and make Jewish art. If you met all of my material needs tomorrow, two days from now there would be six more hamsas, a complete bound copy of all the volumes of the Talmud, and a shit-ton of giant Jewish art prints in my house.

You cannot stop people from making up culture and religion. It is, arguably, the thing which makes us human, one of the defining features of our collective humanity. We will always make up silly songs and new religions, and the idea that we'll just give all of that up for some vanilla yogurt and taupe jumpsuits utopian existence is absurd and beyond belief.

[writingwithcolor]

Desexualized Mammy & Strong Black Woman, too busy for “frivolous love”

“Alyse” (Anon Submission) asked:

My science fiction story includes a black woman (Talia) who raises two children that aren’t her own and takes on two young adults as apprentices. One of the children she is raises has Arabic background and was taken into her home upon his father’s death (his mother’s whereabouts are unknown). She was a close friend of his father and the closest thing he had to a relative. The second child has mixed French-Latinx background and was taken in after becoming shipwrecked with no means by which to contact her people. Talia was the first non-hostile individual she encountered and one of the few who would so openly embrace a stranger. Since Talia is Master Medic (the highest medical authority in her community) she is training two apprentices (think residency) and eventually mentors the second child as well. She was once married and passionately in love but lost her husband to illness. In this setting, some technology we take for granted is inaccessible and violence against their people is commonplace. Most have experienced sudden loss. This particular loss was the catalyst that drove Talia into medicine- a desire to protect her loved ones and prevent others from experiencing similar tragedy. She is usually kind (though businesslike) but sometimes succumbs to a frigid, furious depression when, despite all her knowledge and determination, she can’t save someone. 

I worry that her maternal association with the two children (one of whom is an outsider) mires her in the mammy trope. On top of that, she hasn’t pursued romance since the death of her husband. I’ve considered giving her a romantic subplot but there are already so many characters to keep track of. Furthermore, I just can’t see her engaging in the frivolous pursuits of new love when she’s dealing with kids, students, and an extremely taxing career. 

In terms of race and culture in this story, practically every character can trace their ancestry back to populations displaced through war. Even Talia’s second child was shipwrecked during a botched evacuation from a military science lab. The people who live here have been isolated for generations and no longer have a real concept of their ancestry. Cultures have blended, new religions have formed, and many of our familiar racial/ethnic issues are forgotten. However, new and different but equally toxic ones have replaced them. In this way, Talia’s blackness doesn’t carry the same associations in her world as it would in ours. However, readers may still make these associations. Do you see any issues with her character that I could amend? 

So! You have:

A highly educated Black-coded woman (the highest medical authority in the community)

She raises two kids alone 

She also looks after two apprentices

She is widowed (not sure the race of the husband, was he Black?)

Having experienced heartbreaking love, Talia's drive to look after, protect and save people through medicine is a great motivation for the way she is. Her experiencing depression and taking losses seriously is also very human and is dynamic characterization. 

However, such characterization with Black women is prone to brush across several tropes. You have a Black woman who gives and protects, but what does she get in return? Who cares for her? 

Prioritize your Black character’s happiness

"I’ve considered giving her a romantic subplot but there are already so many characters to keep track of. Furthermore, I just can’t see her engaging in the frivolous pursuits of new love when she’s dealing with kids, students, and an extremely taxing career." 

Priorities, priorities. Is love a frivolous pursuit in her eyes, or yours? Because I strongly disagree. You probably don't mean to but you, as the author, having an excuse to NOT give the Black woman romance is showing that you do not think she's worth being loved. TV viewers and stans who are uncomfortable when Black women characters have relationships find similar excuses to explain away not wanting BW in relationships.

"She's too strong and independent for a man/relationship" 

"I liked her better alone." 

"It'll take away from her character."

“A romance doesn’t feel right for her”

These sorts of statements above are grounded in racialized misogyny. 

Relationships do not lessen the woman.

Relationships does not lessen Black women. 

Love

Whether that love is romantic, familial, or friendship, it can come in many forms. Give Talia love. Because Black women characters deserve it! Either one or all! 

Let her have a loyal best friend, a cat, and a girlfriend. Because why not? And not to downplay the love of children to parents, but please provide her love beyond what she gets on a maternal level from the children she looks after. 

The stories that Black women are in today severely lack love for us, so why add to the narrative of Black women being all work and no play, and too [insert excuse here] to be loved? 

Of course, you didn't provide all the details from your story, but I'm not seeing much of a balance from the struggle. She is a caretaker, teacher, doctor (or doctor-like figure). 

Her position and background in itself is okay. It's the Strong Black Woman being presented with seemingly no commentary that strikes me. 

Where is her team to help balance the weight of the world? 

Who takes care of her when she's depressed from another loss? 

What does she get in return from taking an emotional and physical toll to heal her community? 

Do those around her recognize all she does for them and offer their friendship? 

When does she get to relax and turn off the need to be everything for everybody?

Fitting love into a book with many characters

There are many books with several characters to keep track of. People tend to manage. Also, I'm sure some of those characters are in and/or out of relationships. Even stories that couldn’t be classified as romances have relationships of some sort. It’s unrealistic to have a ton of characters and none of them be in relationship(s) of some sort. Not when there’s so many forms of it and many sexualities. 

Friends, frenemies, enemies, romance, affairs.. Relationships make stories (and life) interesting. By no means do I think adding these dynamics harm your tale. And what’s one more for a hard-working Black woman who sacrifices a lot and clearly deserves a shoulder to lean on? And, if you use an existing character to be that friend, family, or lover, then you won’t need to pencil in another character.

For romance specifically - I think a misconception when it comes to including romance in stories is that they have to somehow take over the story. Romance does not have to bombard the plot nor be described in lavish detail. Not every story is a romance and those sort of details aren’t everyone’s style or things they’re comfortable with. A sentence or two establishing relationships does not take away from the story.And how those relationships look and affections expressed will vary based on the characters, sexuality, etc.

Not every character needs to have a deep level of detail. 

“Katie and Lisa, a newly engaged couple, walked into the meeting.”

“Jack and Jamie are a married couple in their 40s.” 

“The two met in college. After two months of blissful courtship, they eloped, eager to start their happily ever afters. Twenty years together, they were still blissfully in love and never too far from one another.”

Sentences like the above are enough for some characters. You don’t always need to put in paragraphs worth of relationship-establishing details or plot. 

When it comes to the characters whose love you would like to highlight, at least a bit, you still don’t have to go over the top.

Use subtle details. 

“As soon as Talia’s back was turned, he gave her a longing look before shaking his head and getting back to the patient.”

“He squeezed her hand before taking hold of the stethoscope.”

“She kissed her wife goodbye before racing out the door.”

“You mean the world to me.” he had said, holding her face. Those words stayed with her all day, making her heavy load light as a sack of feathers.

“She soaked his shirt with her tears and he just held her tight, saying nothing, silently holding her together.”

As for Talia specifically…

Talia having the mindset you described, as love being frivolous and not a priority, is understandable knowing her background (I just don't agree with you as the creator using this as a means to keep her alone. Whether she’s romantically alone or without close friendships). She has lost so much, and continues to experience loss with patients. This can be extremely traumatizing. I gave some examples of being subtle, so perhaps that will help with the burden of feeling a thick subplot of romance doesn’t fit in your story. 

And as Talia doesn’t strike me as someone who would go looking for companionship, what if she stumbles upon it without trying? Is there someone on the medical team that can offer her friendship? Someone who admires her and feels the urge to care for her that she feels the same for, or has pushed feelings down for? What happens when she can’t hold those feelings down anymore?

Takeaway

Talia deserves healthy love, even if she doesn’t believe it or feel she has time for it. That love can come in any and many forms, not necessarily romantically required, although it is a plus. A struggle-ridden novel is balanced by love, support and rest for characters that hold the weight of the world. If you do not, evaluate why you want to write Black characters in these struggle roles without at least a social commentary. 

~Mod Colette

[yodawgiherd]

Incantation of Incineration

>>>Read on AO3<<<

Ok so this work is inspired by an INCREDIBLE fanart I've been blessed to see, do yourself a favor and check it out too - > https://twitter.com/NxngOna/status/1386048795595743239 Mwah, perfection Anyway, rating is M, so beware.

(It's also quickly cobbled together because its a heat-of-the-moment thing, so forgive me if you find mistakes :> I'm far from perfect.)

This had to work.

No, who was she kidding, this wouldn’t work.

It never did, no matter how hard Mikasa tried, how deeply she dug in the library, how much she searched on the internet. Magic was a myth, and it would never work, which saddened the goth girl to no end.

She was fascinated by the supernatural ever since she could remember, devouring magazines, tv-shows or books dedicated to the topic with unhealthy speed. Maybe she was a tiny bit obsessed, but that was okay. Her parents didn’t mind, as long as she kept her grades up, and because Mikasa was very bright that was not hard to achieve. In her free time she kept experimenting, she kept trying, she kept searching for a way to make it work.

To no avail.

No ritual worked. No spell changed anything. No incantation had any effect. Still, she wouldn’t give up. It carried her through high school and it stuck with her in college too. To Mikasa it didn’t matter that goth went out of style, that magic was a forgotten thing for all of her classmates. It was an ethereal thing, bigger than life, something that enhanced the mundane and boring existence.

And today, her faith was rewarded.

Mikasa was studying in a library by herself, having an exam coming up, when her session was interrupted. A small girl appeared, hair shadowing her eyes and an enigmatic smile on the youthful face.

“Hello,”, she said, “Do you like black magic?”

“I.. Uh…”, nervous, the goth pushed an unruly bang that escaped her pigtails behind one pierced ear, “Why do you ask?”

A frown entered her features when Mikasa realized that this was a college library, no place for a small girl.

“Wait, who are you? Where are your parents?”

The girl ignored all this, rudely.

“If you do like magic…”, she leaned closer, “Check the “Worlds Religions” section, the third row.”

“What are you talking about? H-hey!”

Not answering, the girl turned and walked away, disappearing between the bookshelves. Completely dumbfounded,  Mikasa sat for a while, wondering what kind of strange experience this was. Honestly, she should ignore that. It was a child, probably making fun of her because of the way Mikasa dressed. It meant nothing.

Maybe.

Most likely.

But what if…

“Screw it.”, two words that fell from between the goth’s lips and she was putting her stuff back in the bag, throwing it over her shoulder, and walking towards the religion section.

Deftly, her fingers ran along the covers as she searched, taking care that none of her rings scratched the books. Third row, was it? Eyes sliding over one book and then the next, Mikasa felt an uneasiness in her stomach upon finding nothing. It was a joke then. The girl….

Here.

This book didn’t belong here. Sure, it had a cross on the front, but that was the only marking. No title, no text, no explanation, only black leather and silver cross imprinted into it. Looking left and right, Mikasa made sure that she’s alone before grabbing the book and opening it, eyes widening immediately.

There were spells scribbled on the pages, strange words that made sense to her only because of the life-long obsession with the occult. Not that Mikasa didn’t see books like these before, but none of the spells in those worked. Yet this one – it appeared so suddenly, and the girl was so mysterious…..

Biting her bottom lip, Mikasa quickly stuffed the book in her bag, leaving the library right after. Studying could wait, her pursuit of magic could not. Nobody noticed her little thievery, nobody called out for her, and when she was walking home, a new hope was blooming in Mikasa’s chest.

Turning the key in its lock, she wasn’t surprised to see that her parents weren’t home. They worked long hours, days sometimes, and Mikasa was used to being alone. Kicking off her heavy leather boots she beelined towards the bedroom, shutting the door after herself. Bag dumped at the foot of the bed, Mikasa pulled out the book and sat cross-legged on the floor, truly studying it.

There were so many spells in the book, so many rituals, it made her head swim. Some were amazing, some terrible, some made her shiver, and other gasp in excitement.

“No point in getting worked up over nothing.”, she calmed herself, “If none of these work….”

A test then, a trial run of one of these, to see if this was real or yet another hoax. Randomly opening the book, her grey eyes slid over the text, taking in the chosen pages.

“A demon summoning ritual.”, she read out loud.

Okay, fine.

It was a fairly basic spell, and Mikasa had everything required. Chalk to draw a pentagram on the floor. Candles in each corner of the star. In the middle, a small bowl waited for her offering. Mikasa kneeled above it, as described in the book, a knife in one hand. Going by the instructions, she was supposed to cut herself, deep enough to bleed. That was fine, but the placement of the required cut was strange. Not a hand, as she usually did, this one had to be on her face beneath the right eye.

Well, Mikasa was determined.

Reading from the book, she began the ritual. The strange words made no sense to her, but it wasn’t the first time that she chanted something without understanding what. The spell was long and tedious to pronounce, luckily she had plenty of experience with speaking tongue-twisting words. Higher and higher her voice climbed until it was the time for the climax of the ritual. Gritting her teeth, Mikasa dragged the knife over her face, catching a few drops of blood into the bowl. Planting it back in the middle of the pentagram, she waited with bated breath, waited and….

Nothing happened.

Satan damn it.

A wave of sadness washed over her as Mikasa sat back on her heels, clutching the book to her chest. This was her best shot by far, and it didn’t do anything. Maybe it was finally time to accept that black magic simply didn’t ex…

A sudden explosion followed by black and red smoke threw her and Mikasa landed on her back, knocking her head against the floor. Her vision was swimming, but she could see that someone was standing in the middle of the pentagram now, a tall figure that angled its head back, a breathy chuckle coming.

“Damn, it's good to breathe air again.”

That voice. That damn voice. So deep, it rumbled through her entire being, tingled some parts that Mikasa didn’t even know existed. Pushing herself up on the elbows, Mikasa was about to ask what is going on when the being looked straight at her.

And she was lost.

Those green eyes pierced her, went right through any sort of mental strength, and dug into the deepest parts of her being. Not even giving her time to think the being moved, fast as a shadow, and suddenly her body was covered by someone. Falling back from the sudden assault with a yelp, Mikasa turned on her hip, still clutching that stupid book to her chest. Fearfully, she raised her eyes and finally saw what the hell did she just summon.

It was a demon all right. A man no doubt, naked from the waist up but (luckily) wearing black pants with multiple leather belts. Nothing strange on his body, at least from what Mikasa saw, but his head was quite a different story. There were horns on the top of his head, black and curved. Strange markings ran down from his emerald eyes, a bit like cuts, heading down the cheeks. Studying it, studying him, Mikasa realized one thing.

Their faces were damn close.

“So you are the one who summoned me?”, the demon asked, a smug smile crossing his admittedly very handsome features, “A girl?”

Mikasa’s throat was dry, so dry that she couldn’t even answer, but the demon didn’t seem to mind. He was looking at her too, eyes roaming all over her face and a certain satisfaction appearing. A strange ringing sound to her left, and suddenly there was a hand touching her, sweeping away hair that fell into her eyes.

He had claws, she realized, claws and torn shackles at his wrists. And while the claws did look sharp his touch was gentle, not hurting her in the slightest.

“A pretty girl at that.”, the demon continued his monologue, “Very pretty…. Beautiful …”

There was hunger in his words now, a primal one that made Mikasa shiver. She had to do something, otherwise this demon would devour her. Gathering all her mental strength, she clutched the book tighter and spoke.

More like squeaked.

“I-I am y-your master now! You c-came because of my c-calling, that ma-makes you mine!”

“Is that so?”, the demon wasn’t bothered by these words in the slightest, more like pleased if she read his face correctly, “Tell me, beautiful…”

Closer, closer he moved and now their faces were practically touching.

“Do you feel in power?”

Unable to speak, Mikasa shook her head as her lips trembled in fear. A single tear rolled from her eye, realizing that while she may have conducted the ritual, she had no idea how to control the demon. Yet before the tear could splash against the floor the demon caught it, a gentle claw swiping across her slightly bleeding cheek.

“There is no need to cry, pretty girl, I have no intention of hurting you.”

“Y-You don’t?”

“No, you are way too beautiful for that, I wouldn’t dream of tainting that. And…”, his nostrils flared as he took a lungful, “you smell wonderful.”

His head dipped low and suddenly it was on Mikasa’s neck. Lips parted and sharp teeth grazed the skin, making her think that despite the earlier words he might still hurt her. Instead of pain a soft kiss was planted on her neck, forcing a gasp from her throat. That sound pleased the demon.

“W-What are you doing?”, Mikasa choked out.

“I’m not going to hurt you, but you can’t expect me to come all this way from hell and want nothing in return….”, claws appeared again, this time on her upper thighs, dancing around the lace of her stockings, “There is an ocean of pleasure I could drown you in, my beauty, and I’m feeling generous tonight…”

Retreating from her neck the demon faced her again, the green eyes scorching with intensity.

“What do you say, mortal, want a taste?”

No! – her rational half screamed.

But…

He was so beautiful, so unreal, he was everything Mikasa dreamed about. Dark magic was real, it summoned a demon for her, one that was offering her pleasure. Those damn claws on her sensitive skin, the aftertaste of his lips on her neck, the delicious heat his body produced, pressed so close to her….

“Y-Yes.”, Mikasa found herself saying, unable to stop it, “I do.”

The smile that appeared on the demon’s lips, that was the epitome of smugness.

“Good.”

Without further ado, he crashed his lips into hers, finally kissing her. Mikasa was taken aback by this, head lolling back and jaw wrenched helplessly open. The demon’s tongue slipped into her mouth, abnormally long and dexterous, wrapping around her own in one slick motion. At the same time the claws moved, repositioning from her thighs to between them, pressing against her heat. Overcome at several places, Mikasa moaned out loud.

Black panties nudged aside, now the tip of the claw was teasing her wetness directly, building her frustration up. She couldn’t do anything, hands uselessly hanging on the side, the book cluttering on the floor. His tongue was everywhere in her mouth, taking it as its own home, even brushing against Mikasa’s throat. How long was that damn thing?

By the time he finally allowed her to breathe Mikasa was panting, eyes wide and cheeks boiling red. Observing the fruits of his labor, the demon noticed the blood still trickling down, his tongue sweeping out to lick at it.

“Delicious…”, he purred, gently caressing the tiny cut that was already healing, thanks to his tongue, “You taste wonderfully too.”

“P-Please…”, was all Mikasa could say, begging with her eyes more than with her words.

“Oh? Is there something you want?”, the rubbing grew even faster, forcing her to arch her hips and moan again.

“Please!”, she practically screamed, tilting her hips for a better angle.

Deciding that he had tortured her enough, the demon slipped a single finger inside her, exploring the fluttering walls. The penetration made her gasp wonderfully, eyes sliding shut from the intensity.  She was tight, tighter than he expected, making him frown.

“I don’t think that I can go all the way with you tonight, my beauty.”, he sighed, “It would hurt you too much.”

Summoning a single braincell to work, Mikasa cracked an eye open.

“W-What?”

The demon’s answer was a grin.

“Not to worry, I have many more weapons at my disposal.”

A second claw joined the first one, scissoring her open, and Mikasa lost control of her voice. With her mouth occupied by frantic breathing, the demon attacked the neck again, biting into the skin. She was so pale and colored beautifully beneath his teeth, and he chuckled inwardly imagining all the bruises that were sure to bloom on her.

There were wet sounds in the room, squelching as he fingered her, her body being such an amazingly reacting toy. Pulling his fingers out, the demon admired the trail of wetness that connected them to her twitching womanhood. Mikasa’s blood tasted wonderful, so how about….

The long tongue was back in action, she realized, watching as the demon licked his fingers clean from her essence, an expression of pure joy appearing on his features.

“Now this… This is something else.”, his eyes found hers, a wicked grin on the demon’s face, “I need to taste you properly.”

Faster than a snake he was gone, head appearing between her stockinged legs. With a quick swipe of his claw the demon snapped the waistband of her panties open, throwing the ruined underwear away. Grabbing Mikasa’s asscheeks he spread her open for him, planting his face exactly where she wanted it to be. Right against her throbbing sex.

If the abnormal demon tongue felt amazing in her mouth, having it down there was indescribable. Licking at her glistening outer lips first, he glided everywhere on the wet skin, cleaning it. And then he was inside. The long muscle slid into her, writhing around and Mikasa clasped her hands over her mouth just in time before a loud scream ripped its way from her throat. This was incredible.

Nothing ever came close to how the demon’s tongue made her feel. Never in her life did Mikasa experience this much pleasure because the tongue reached everywhere stimulating the entirety of her sex in long strokes and vibrations that she had no idea how he produced. Her eyes rolled back, her chest contracted, her legs clenched around his head. Relentless in his pursuit of Mikasa’s sweetness, the demon kept tongue-fucking her with a clear purpose in mind. To speed it up, to reach his feast faster, a single claw dragged over her swollen clit, pressing and rubbing and….

Mikasa lost it.

Complete whiteness washed over her vision as she came, her inner walls contracting wildly around the demonic tongue. She pulsed and pulsed and produced more of that delicious nectar that he eagerly drank in, not letting even a drop go to waste. Mikasa’s blood was delicious but this was beyond delicious, it was the best thing that he ever tasted and the demon couldn’t get enough.

When her body began to calm, a frown entered his handsome features.

“Oh no, this won’t do, I need more.”

Mikasa didn’t even get a chance to talk before the tongue slid inside her again and she screamed, eyes shutting and features contorting. Apparently once was not enough, and the demon was intent on making her come on his face again.

This was going to be a long night.

In the end, Mikasa lost count on how many times the demon made her cum. Not tiring, not needing a break, he kept pleasuring her, toying with her clit and abusing her sex. She was lost in an unending stream of happy hormones, drowning in that ocean of pleasure the demon promised her. His grip on her was firm and Mikasa’s hips were grounded, the demon didn’t allow her to move away from him, holding his prize close. Only when she was truly done and couldn’t do it anymore, when she whined in discomfort instead of pleasure did he pull back, sated.

For now.

Completely done and spent Mikasa was practically passed out, body unresponsive and eyes closed. Hands circled her, easily picking her up and carrying her a short distance. She was gently deposited in the bed and someone pulled the covers over her before a kiss was planted on her forehead. And then a heated whisper entered her ears, pushing its way into the brain even through the curtain of absolute exhaustion.

“If you want more, my beauty, you know where to find me.”, another kiss, this time on her lips, “I’ll be waiting.”

Finally, the darkness overcame her completely.

When Mikasa woke up, hours later, she thought that it all must have been a dream. That delusion lasted for only about a second before the rest of her body woke up, the ache in her lower regions demanding that she accepts the reality. Lifting the covers, Mikasa’s eyes shot open.

Her body was still fully clothed, as the demon didn’t bother with disrobing her, only her panties were gone. There were bruises, so many bruises on her upper thighs, the small part left uncovered by the stockings littered with bites. Her neck received a similar treatment, judging from the ache.

The pentagram was there, albeit the candles were snuffed out, the book lying innocently in the middle. Mikasa tried standing up to get it, only to realize that her legs refused to carry her and she fell back into the bed. Despite all this ache, despite all the unknown, Mikasa’s lips spread into a smile as she eyed the book.

The goth girl and her green-eyed demon are going to have so much fun together.

[purplesurveys]

1279

Are you and the last person you kissed in a relationship or just friends?  I don’t keep contact.

Has anyone ever pointed out that your laugh was unusual?  Hmmmm, I don’t think so. I feel like that would be the type of comment that would get to me so I definitely would’ve remembered it.

Would you get a lip piercing?  I don’t plan on getting any piercings.

Nose piercing?  Nopes.

What are you currently waiting for?  For this fucking day to end so I can be closer to Thursday and to the weekend.

Do you have feelings for anyone?  Nah.

Have you ever run over an animal?  Nope. I’ve had extremely close calls with animals who suddenly dart into the road, but fortunately these have all been situations wherein I got to hit the brakes with nobody behind me.

Have you chewed gum after someone else already has?  That’s disgusting, no.

When people sneeze do you say ‘bless you’?  Sure, out of habit and just to be polite.

When was the last time you were on a bouncy castle?  I don’t think I’ve ever been on a bouncy castle, but I’ve been on a lot of bouncy other things haha, like inflatable slides, soccer balls, Anpanmans, etc. The last time would probably be a nearly a decade ago; I definitely haven’t been near one in a while.

Have you ever went on a bouncy castle whilst drunk?  Well no, because the ones I’ve been on were situated in school fairs, which is the last place I would want to be drunk in.

Have you ever entered an art competition?  No, I have no justification to join one haha.

What is one thing you will never do? Try hardcore drugs. < Same. 

What is one food that you detest?  Pineapples.

Did you have a rebellious phase growing up?  Yeah I was a bit of a handful to raise, but I’m in firm in my stance that it had a lot to do with the way I was raised. I grew up mostly without a father figure because my dad worked abroad and I felt neglected by my mom who had her own shit to deal with. There was no stable support system to lean on, so I ended up lashing out a lot in my puberty years. Unfortunately everyone else just saw a rebellious child and not a plea for help.

These days when I show off my achievements on social media, I’ll see congratulatory comments from my mom’s friends and she’ll usually go on about some “late bloomers grow with time” narrative and it pisses me off because nobody knows how much I’ve had to grow and mature and learn how to be happier all by myself, all from scratch. If I had just received the proper care and attention early on, I wouldn’t have had to do any catching up to begin with.

What religion were you brought up with? Roman Catholic.

Are you still that religion?  Jesus no. I darted out of there as soon as I gained the consciousness to think about these sorts of things.

Do you often find yourself questioning your future?  Sometimes, but I do my best to not let it get to me.

How many friends do you have on Facebook?  Over 670.

What sort of music did you listen to when you were in high school?  I started with punk rock in the first half of high school, so I had my Rancids, H2Os, Against Me!s, Cro-Mags, etc on my iPod. It evolved a little bit towards more indie, folksy sounds towards the latter half - Banks, alt-J, Hozier, Twenty One Pilots - which I largely attribute to the crowd I was part of at the time.

What pet names do you use with your significant other?  I’m pretty straightforward so baby works out for me. Other, more specific pet names just grow naturally with the relationship, I think.

What’s the name of the store you usually get your groceries?  S&R.

Have you ever seen a theatre show?  Yeah. Most of them have been required.

What’s your favourite vegetable?  Broccoli or bell peppers.

Have you ever missed a flight?  Never. I’ve experienced several delayed flights, though, which is always such a hassle especially if the delays happen in provincial airports since they never have any recreational offers to keep passengers from getting bored other than TVs that run the same damn five ads.

Do your neighbours have any pets? Have you ever met them?  Yeah, a lot of have dogs. I’ve met some.

What color is your bedroom door?  Brown.

If you were ever to become famous, would you grow annoyed at fans?  Only towards obsessive ones who wouldn’t give me time to breathe or would go so far so as to stalk me or my loved ones. But I am a fan too, so I imagine I would actually be understanding of those who would ask for pictures or whatever as long as they were polite and not at all intrusive.

Have you ever met your favourite band/singer?  Nah. I am terrified of meeting celebrities HAHA so I’ve always shut down the chance. I’m pretty sure I would actually turn down the chance to meet BTS if I hypothetically suddenly got the magic keys to that door.

Are you embarrassed by any of the songs/singers/bands you like?  No. I feel like that sort of thing just happens in like high school, when your friends are still a bit judgmental. Nowadays I don’t see why I should be embarrassed of anything I like, especially if it’s not hurting anyone.

Have you ever written a story?  I’ve made attempts but was always terrible.

Think of the last poem you wrote: What inspired you to write it?  My homework that required me to write said poem hahaha.

Do you have a chance with the person you like right now? 

What’s the weirdest thing you were scared of as a child?  Watching commercials at night. It’s still a slight fear of mine but it’s mostly dissipated now.

Are there any embarrassing stories your family tells about you?  About me? No. I don’t have a lot of those since I was a really shy kid who barely moved a finger anyway.

In your opinion, what is the funniest TV show?  I have a *really* soft spot for Perfect Strangers, which I actually revisited yesterday :) The show was never super popular so it’s near impossible to find clips online, but when I checked YouTube I did see a slight increase in short snippets from the show so I had a really fun time binge-watching yesterday.

What is the maximum number of children you’d ever have?  Three, but that’s pushing it. Ideally, I’d have two so my first would have company.

Have you ever been concerned you had a serious illness?  Mental ones, yes.

Are you comfortable with who you are?  For the most part, yes.

Would you date someone even if you knew you’d get made fun of for it?  No. Why would it be any of their business?

Does popularity matter to you at all?  I mean, yeah in the sense that I honestly aspire to be well-liked by as many people as possible. But I don’t necessarily want to rub shoulders with popular kids.

Would you ever consider homeschooling your children?  Continued from sometime this week ider. No. I don’t think I’m capable of teaching, and generally I’d want them to be able to learn in a more open environment where they can have regular contact with different kinds of people.

Who told you about the band/singer you are currently listening to?  Well Angela got into them first and since we’re best friends, there was a certain point where she just decided to loop me into conversations that involved them. I was impossible to sway for a long time, but then one day a video compilation of them showed up on my feed, and for some reason I actually watched it, and I watched all the way through, and I was immediately intrigued – particularly by J-Hope haha. I then asked Angela to tell me more about them and the rest was...financially irresponsible history HAHAHAHA

Do you ever read fanfiction?  OMG yes. Funny you should mention that because my favorite author uploaded a brand new fic this morning, which I obviously couldn’t get to all day because I had to go to work. I’ll be reading it in all its 44,000-word glory tonight :D

Would you rather die in a plane crash, ship wreck or fire?  Plane crash. Instant and mostly painless.

What are your top five favourite TV shows?  Breaking Bad, BoJack Horseman, Friends, The Crown even though I was never able to continue it since...andddd that’s all I got.

What is your favorite superhero movie?  Not a fan of superhero movies.

If you died next week, what would be the cause of death?  Stress from overworking. I’ve FINALLY started to consider taking a leave for the first time this year because I’ve just realized just how fucking exhausted, burned out, and overwhelmed I actually already am from having no rest at all in the last 13 months.

Have you ever taken a break from Facebook or other social media? Why?  Yes, I do mass deactivations when I’m severely depressed. These days I can’t really afford to that anymore, though, since my work is closely tied to social media.

Who is the most talented person you know?  Probably Andi.

Are you currently platonic friends with anyone you’ve had sex with?  No.

Where did you and your current interest go on your first date? 

Have you ever experienced two people fighting over you (physically or mentally)? What happened?  Nah. I’ve had two people like me at the same time, but there was never any tension to watch out for since they mostly didn’t know each other.

Have your parents ever thought you were gay? What happened?  I think they know I dated Gabie and that we broke up because they’ve stopped asking about her. Everyone knew we were best friends, so the fact that they’ve avoided her as a topic for a whole year is able to tell me something.

Are your parents more liberal or conservative?  Dad’s on the liberal side, mom dances around on the spectrum a little bit. I know she’s fine with things like tattoos and having LGBTQ+ co-workers, but she’s also conservative especially towards matters like religion.

What year are you going into at the beginning of the next academic year?  No longer in school.

How far away does your closest family member live?  A few footsteps away.

If you’ve seen both, did you prefer the Disney version or the Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland?  It’s not my type of movie/genre to begin with.

Would you have sex before marriage? Why or why not?  Yes. I don’t see the big deal; I’ve already done it anyway.

Are you more liberal or conservative?  Liberal.

Who is your favorite Harry Potter character?  Ooh not sure. I haven’t gone back to the books in a while, so I don’t remember if there was anyone I had an attachment to.

What’s the worst that could come out of letting gays marry?  Nothing.

What’s the most sexual thing you’ve done?  Had sex...I guess? And a bunch of stuff that comes with it.

Name something that you are against.  Racial discrimination.

Why are you against it?  Because it is infuriating to see, and it shows me the very same treatment can happen to me or my family as well and that scares me, especially since some people turn particularly violent towards people of color.

Have you ever played the Tomb Raider games?  No.

Do you like it or hate it when your partner is clingy?  I imagine I wouldn’t enjoy it if I’m not as into whoever my next partner would be.

Beatles or Rolling Stones?  I don’t listen to either.

When was the last time you changed your opinion on somebody?  Not so sure about a whole change in opinion because that hasn’t happened in a while, but I grew more grateful for my manager today because I finally mustered the strength to tell her that I’m begin to struggle mentally with work and she not only encouraged (read: begged) me to file a damn leave for once, but she also got sushi delivered to my place.

What was the last thing that made you feel proud and why?  Andi was telling me about their day today and how they handled being misgendered by a prof, who then proceeded to throw a fit when he got corrected, and how they, again, maturely handled said fit. I was proud of them because there are a million ways that incident could’ve turned out, but they dealt with it in an extremely mature and calm manner considering they were the one who was wronged.

Do you feel uncomfortable when people you hardly know confide in you?  If it was about an extremely personal problem I would probably be taken aback at first, but I still would definitely make some time for them and help in however way I can, since they apparently trust me enough to confide.

What was the last thing to fascinate you?  The music video for My Universe! Super cool to watch and I love that they made a short film out of it too.

Is there a certain noise/sound which scares you?  Doors being slammed shut, because that’s what my mom does when she’s furious. She did that when I was a kid and she does it to this day, so I get extremely nervous when I hear the sound, even if it happens by accident.

Do you have a favourite microorganism? Nope.

Out of the people you know, whose birthday is next?  My cousin Bree.

If you have pet fish do you bother to name them?  I did when I had them as a kid.

Do you keep your eggs in the fridge?  Yes?

Have you ever owned chickens?  Nope.

When did you last listen to music?  Like five minutes ago. I tried to have a jazz playlist on but I realized I wasn’t in the mood for music so I changed my background noise to have a random VLive on instead. 

[kiarcheo]

It’s All Coming Back to Me Now    5/?

To read on  Ao3 click here

You can read the previous parts on Tumblr click here

‘Does this mean that I’m finally going to see you at home again?’ Catalina asks as they are once again walking back home.

‘Ehh,’ Kat grimaces a bit, ‘I’m helping Anna.’

She knows from their previous life together that Anna never learnt how to play any instrument. She could dance well enough and Kat had fond memories of that, and she had a lovely voice albeit clearly not trained, since she had been raised with the concept that music education was not proper for a noblewoman. Anna didn’t even have to say anything out loud. She just asked her when she was free to meet, the reason implicit yet understood by both.

‘That’s fine.’ Catalina bumps her hip against Kat’s. She doesn’t want her to feel bad for spending time with her friend. Friends. Family. Fellow queens. Whatever. But she misses having her around the house. ‘Just don’t forget about your old mother.’

‘You’re not old!’

Catalina would lie if she said that her heart didn’t skip a beat, dreading the last word would be two instead...my mother.

‘Anyway!’ Catalina knows from the tone that Kat is trying to distract her, probably having noticed her mood falling slightly. Perceptive kids these days!

‘I was talking with Cathy...do you think that us getting a PhD in history, Tudor history, would be cheating?’

‘Cathy, uh?’ Probably not the part Kat wanted her to focus on, but a mother has to take her fun where she can.

‘What?’ Kat is confused at first, before turning her head and seeing the look on the older woman’s face. ‘It's not like that.’

‘Okay.’ Catalina immediately accepts the answer. Not being believed is something that at best deeply upsets Kat and at worst triggers panic attacks. She doesn’t have all the details, Kat is reticent to talk about her life after Catalina’s death if not in broad general terms and Catalina has never forced the issue. She knows Kat would tell her, Kat said it herself. But every time she offers, she looks so dejected that she always refuses. But it doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots and blame Henry. It had been on her mind a lot, especially after Anne’s song and her talk with her. Whether Kat’s experience had been similar to her cousin, besides the ending, or not. Catalina isn’t sure she wants to know, to be honest. ‘But if it was...it’d be okay, you know.’

Kat shrugs, a subtle hunch in her shoulder. That won’t do. Catalina puts an arm around her shoulders and draws her in, kissing her temple. ‘Want to get a slice of cake to celebrate you writing yet another brilliant song?’ She said her piece. Short, sure, but that’s all she wants Kat to know. All the rest doesn’t matter. She’ll be there if Kat will ever want to revisit the topic again.

 .

Right from the start it’s clear that Anna has decided to go for a modern take too. Music is once again streaming from Kat’s laptop, the young queen snapping her fingers as her predecessor sings.

Where my hounds at? Release the bitches (Woof)

Anne claps her hands, howling with laughter at Kat’s first venture into the song, which will also be all the other queens’ part. Jane shakes her head, rolling her eyes. Say one thing once and they will forever use it against you. She is ready to bet that Kat’s song will also include a swear word, just disguised enough that you can argue it’s not really swearing.

Lookin’ cute,

(Das ist gut)

All eyes on me,

(No criticism)

I look more rad than

(Lutheranism)

Dance so hard that I’m causing a sensation.

Okay, ladies, let’s get in reformation.

Anne is hollering, quickly followed by Cathy and, to everyone’s surprise but Kat’s, Catalina. Religion puns and Beyonce reference deserve a holler, queenly composure be damned.

Kat shoots a beaming smile at Anna. The fourth queen had been worried about her song not measuring up to the others, but the reactions are proving her wrong. She actually gets a standing ovation as the last ‘I’m the queen of the castle’ fades away.

‘Have you thought about choreography?’

‘Not really.’

‘Can I?’ Catalina exchanges a look with Anne. ‘Can we?’

Anna looks at the first two queens, both almost vibrating for the excitement. ‘Sure.’

Anne whoops and Catalina looks like she is one step away from doing the same. ‘It’s going to be glorious.’

‘Before we lose those two,’ they do look like they are ready to bolt, eager to start working on Anna’s song, ‘can I point out the,’ Cathy stops to look for the right word, ‘whiplash of going from Jane’s song to this. Both songs are amazing just…quite a different vibe?’

‘What about having an interlude? We would have three songs, well four with the intro. Interlude. Other three songs. Conclusion.’ Catalina proposes, her head seemingly back in the game and not on the dance anymore.

Cathy looks at Kat. They had sort of taken the lead on how to structure the musical…and Kat on writing the songs, having a hand in all of them so far. ‘We can give it a try.’

‘Also,’ Anne seems to be back among them too, ‘was that a Tinder reference?’

‘What’s Tinder?’ Jane sees the mirth on Anne’s face. ‘Wait. Do I actually want to know?’

 .

The whole process is going surprisingly smoothly. Sure, it has been months, but considering they have no experience whatsoever with writing musicals, having 4 songs (out of 8 planned) mostly hashed out is impressive, in Cathy’s humble opinion. And that’s not even taking into consideration them being 16th-century queens reincarnated in the 21st century figuring out the modern world...and how to get along.

Unexpectedly, since she has been the one moving everything along, it’s with Kat’s turn that the smooth process comes to a halt.

‘Why the change? Not that I mind.’ Catalina specifies. Katherine had requested them to show up at a different location instead of the usual one. This one is more like a proper recording studio, with a live room with mics and instruments and a separate control room. ‘You know we have no idea how to use all of this, right?’ she jokes, gesturing to the mixing equipment. She frowns when Kat doesn’t even attempt to give her a smile at that.

‘I need you to be in another room. I know you will hate the song and-’

‘Impossible.’ Catalina scoffs.

‘I’m sure we will love it.’  All the others have joined them, and they chime in, agreeing with Jane. She has helped them all, whether with music or lyrics or both, and it is evident to everyone, even to Cathy, the only who still hasn’t worked with her, that she has a way with music.

‘No, you won’t.’ Kat is not looking for reassurance. She has no doubt about it. ‘It’s already going to be hard. If I have to worry about your reactions too...I can’t do it with you in the room. All of you.’ She had just recently managed to go through the whole song without having a major breakdown before the end.

While the first three queens appear confused, Cathy and Anna share a look. Having lived through Katherine’s reign as queen, they are the only ones with some knowledge about her past. They even had a brief conversation about it, not wanting to betray Kat’s confidence or their ‘vow’ not to look into each other’s past, but also needing to share their thoughts with someone who could understand them. Their conclusion had been easy: even if the charges levied against her had been true, which is not a given, as Anne’s example shows, considering her age she would have been a victim and not the temptress she had been portraited as.

‘Kat.’ Cathy takes a step towards her.

‘Please.’ Kat raises her hands in front of her. ‘Don’t.’

Cathy stops, nodding, slightly dejected, Anna laying a hand on her shoulder.

Catalina had noticed Kat was worried, but she didn’t think it had reached this point. And she doesn’t know what to make of Anna and Cathy’s solemn expressions. ‘Why don’t you show us and let us decide?’ She tries to encourage her daughter with a smile.

So that’s what she does.

All you wanna do All you wanna do, baby And ever since I was a child, I'd make the boys go wild

Kat had decided to use a backing track while playing the keyboard. She hopes that having to focus on playing and singing at the same time (and actually breathing, if things go as they went during her previous practices), she will be physically unable to think about the other queens being on the other side of the glass listening to her song (she angles herself so that her back is to the window and she is also physically unable to see them, even if she were tempted to look).

He just cares so much, he's devoted He says we have a connection

Her voice breaks and by the time she reaches the last chorus she is sobbing and hyperventilating. The effort required to finish the song definitely takes her mind off the others’ reactions…but everything comes crashing down as soon as the last note resonates.

She bows her head, shoulder shaking, hands frozen on the keys. She takes deep breaths, trying to calm down. Once she has it under control, or as much as possible in the situation, she pushes herself up. Time to face the music. Or not. What if she opens the door and they had left? They wouldn’t do that...right? Her...Catalina would not do that, right? She told her she would never be disappointed in Kat…but she never knew the truth...

But what if they are still there and are...disappointed? Angry? Ashamed of her? Would that be better? Or worse? One way or another, she has to know. And regardless, she has to leave the room sooner or later. It would only be delaying the inevitable.

[pertinax--loculos]

[WIP Introduction: Hellbent]

Finally! Just one thing to note: I’m struggling with terminology, so a lot of the words I use in this intro are subject to change.

Working Title: Hellbent

Status: planning/first draft

POV: close third limited (alternating)

Featuring/Themes: acceptance | addiction | religion and spirituality | transformation | growth | self-love and self-esteem | relationships | grief | LGBTQ+

Content Warnings: drug use/addiction | violence | abuse | character death/s | potential suicidal ideation | (all excerpts will be marked)

Synopsis:

Raleigh Lukas’s life is privileged, predictable, and placid. As a member of the Church, he knows exactly what comes next; he’ll finish college, marry his girlfriend, Kennedy, and have kids. Probably a few of them, to satisfy the Church’s requirements that the true humans increase their numbers.

Dash is homeless, hopeless, and haunted by his past. He’d be happy to just numb himself with drugs and let life pass him by, except that his friend-with-benefits Alec is obsessed with the Partners, an underground movement that supports the brainbent - humans born with extraordinary mental abilities. Whilst most of the brainbent are imprisoned, in hiding, or dead, a small handful work alongside sympathetic humans to overthrow the Church’s stranglehold on the upper echelons of society.

A chance meeting of these two very different lives leads to a tentative friendship that is challenged by the arrival of someone claiming to be the nigh-mythical Dantalion - a figure of brainbent legend, said to be powerful enough to turn the tide of the nascent resistance. It’s a bold claim, and one that Dash dismisses with a certainty that only makes Raleigh more curious about his mysterious past.

As tensions rise Raleigh finds himself in the middle of a struggle he didn’t want any part of - drawn on one side to his family, friends, and blind belief, and on the other to a movement with principles that just keep making more and more sense - and the broken addict who makes him question everything he thought he knew.

Criminally expository excerpt under the cut. Brief character intro masterpost to follow.

[Excerpt]

“So what’s a Dantalion?”

Dash snorted. “It’s nothing. It’s a myth.”

“Well, tell me the myth then. I’ve heard you and Alec talking about it…” Raleigh trailed off as Dash cut his eyes to him. He felt heat start to spread across his cheekbones. “Sorry.”

Dash huffed, shifting a little against the wall. “S’alright. Doubt you’re gonna overhear anything worse than what you already have.” He quirked an eyebrow at him, just slightly, and Raleigh felt the heat in his face intensify. “Thought you would’ve learned not to eavesdrop.”

“It wasn’t on purpose!” The protest was probably a little too strident; Raleigh looked down in the vain hope of hiding his embarrassment.

Dash just chuckled, leaning forward to swipe his cigarettes off the table. “You really wanna know?”

Raleigh nodded, looking back at him. “I’m curious.”

“Alright then.” Dash paused, took a long drag, then nodded slightly. “So, I know that your cult has been feeding you lies for your entire life, but to really understand, you have to realise that that’s what they are – lies. The vast majority of people that are brainbent, as you put it, are telekinetic, prophecisors, or empaths. Telepaths are exceedingly rare, and manips – short for manipulators, those who can control minds – are even rarer. It’s statistically probable that you’ll go through your entire life without ever meeting a telepath, let alone a manip.” He glanced down as he tapped ash off the end of his cigarette. “Even if you live a life like me, where you’re not actively avoiding them.

“So not only are manips rare, but for most of the ones that do exist, their abilities have been insanely overblown. Even the term ‘manipulator’ is a bit of a misnomer; they don’t so much overtly manipulate as kinda nudge you in a certain direction. Like, if you were on a train, a manip could get you to get off at any station they chose, but they wouldn’t be able to get you on the train in the first place, not unless you were already planning to do it. As far as getting you to kill yourself or something drastic, it’s completely out of the question. A manip could come in here and tell you to go jump off a cliff, but you wouldn’t do it. It’s more like influencing, not outright control.”

“For most of them.” Raleigh hadn’t missed that little tidbit.

The corner of Dash’s mouth quirked up. “For most of them. There are manips that are more powerful. That’s where most of your stories come from. Those manips can – or could – get you to do whatever they wanted. Your classic mind control, if you like. They say walk, you walk. They say jump, you jump. They say go stand in front of that train…” He shrugged, taking another drag. “You’re a stain on the tracks.

“Now, two of these… Coercers, they were called, were really well known during the War. Married couple, Michael and Sarah Johns. They had a child together. Mind manipulation is actually a recessive trait, same as telepathy – that’s part of the reason they’re so rare. No matter what your cult may have you believe, the brainbent really aren’t that big on eugenics, so it wasn’t like telepaths only married telepaths or whatever. The fact that Michael and Sarah were together was mostly just luck – they just happened to both be Coercers. I assume you know how genetics work?”

Raleigh frowned a little, trying to recall his high school biology classes. “For a recessive trait to be present in the child, it has to be present in both parents, right?”

“Right. Like blue eyes.” Dash grinned, tilting his head so his eyes caught the light. Raleigh had to bite the inside of his cheek to stop himself reacting. They really were very blue. “And if the parent has one dominant allele and one recessive, they’ll exhibit the dominant trait – I could’ve had one parent with brown eyes and still ended up with blue. You need two recessive alleles to exhibit the recessive trait.

“Upshot being, the kid was gonna be a Coercer. If one of the parents had been telekinetic, there was a chance it wouldn’t happen, but it was guaranteed with two Coercer parents.

“Anyway, Sarah and Michael were killed towards the end of the War. I don’t really know the details, just that it was a bomb. Blew up the whole building. And this is where the myth comes in – some people, especially a lot of the Partners, believe that the kid survived. They think he was taken in by some fundie family, and raised without knowing about his past. So they think that kid’s out there, either unaware of who he is and his abilities, or hiding for whatever reason. They wanna find him, get him onside, use him as a weapon or whatever.” Dash shrugged again, carefully crushing his cigarette out on the floor beside him.

Raleigh waited a few moments, but it seemed although that was the end of the story. He cocked his head to the side a little, narrowing his eyes in thought. “But, then… isn’t it possible? That he is actually alive, I mean?”

Dash arched an eyebrow at him. “You tell me. You think a fundie family would be willing to take in some brainbent trash? What for?”

Raleigh shifted uncomfortably. If Dash really wasn’t aware of this, being the person to enlighten him wasn’t a pleasant prospect. “Well… I mean, um, I heard, or I know, that after the War, instead of sending young kids to prison, there was a program, which had families take them in, foster them basically, in the hope that they could be… re-educated, I guess, that being raised in the- in a different environment might help to, y’know… suppress the… abilities, I guess.”

Dash’s gaze was steady, a smirk playing over his lips. “Oh yeah? And how’d that work out?”

“Well… not great, from what I’ve heard. They discovered it was, uh, more innate than they originally thought. Weren’t able to stop the, uh, abilities from manifesting.”

“Exactly.” Dash leaned forward a little, resting his elbows on his knees. “So, if the kid survived – and, recall, that requires him to either a, survive a bombing that killed his parents, or two, be forcibly taken away from his parents, both of whom could control fucking minds – he’d be in Carcerum. I mean, I’m of the opinion that he died with his parents, but hell, what would I know?” He sat back again, rolling his eyes a little.

When he put it like that, Raleigh had to admit that it seemed improbable at best. And he was right; even if, by some miracle, the child had survived the murder of his parents, odds were that he’d just ended up imprisoned.

“So then, why do so many people believe that he’s out there?” he said eventually.

Dash shrugged, nonchalant. “Why do people believe in God? They’ve gotta have faith in something, no matter how improbable.”

Raleigh winced, but only a little. He was getting more accustomed to Dash’s lack of faith and casual blasphemy, but comparing some brainbent myth to God was still a little disconcerting.

Rolling the story over in his head again, another question occurred to him. “So why’s he called Dantalion? Was that his name, or…?”

A small line appeared between Dash’s eyebrows. “I actually have no idea. I don’t even know if the kid was a boy or a girl, actually – I don’t think there’s any proof either way, it was Wartime and not a lot of stuff got documented.” He raised a hand to his mouth, chewing on a nail as he thought. “Most likely it’s just a name someone invented and it caught on. I mean, it’s a bit too perfect, isn’t it? A demon against the followers of God, and he ‘reaches in and changes the thoughts of everyone’ or whatever it is.”

“‘For he knoweth the thoughts of all men and women, and can change them at his will’,” Raleigh murmured. For some reason that line had stuck in his head; it was part of what had made him so curious about Dantalion in the first place.

Dash raised an eyebrow at him. “Done your research, huh?”

Raleigh glanced down. “I looked it up after I heard Alec mention it the first time. It made an impression.”

Dash snorted again, stretching his arms out in front of him and then rolling to his feet. “Well, now you know. Don’t worry about it too much. It’s a myth. It helps some of the Partners get through their day. That’s all there is to it.” He stretched a hand down to Raleigh. “C’mon, let’s go get something to eat.”

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THERE'S AN EVEN BETTER WAY TO DESCRIBE THIS SITUATION IS ALSO TEMPORARY

My usual trick is to claim that they'll only invest contingently on other investors doing so because otherwise you'd be undercapitalized. In fact, it's just as well not exist. I deliberately pander to readers, because it has large libraries for manipulating strings. When you have multiple founders who were already friends before they decided to start a gasoline powered generator inside our offices. 2 months during which the company is actually more valuable.1 The professors will get whoever they admit as their own grad students, because all three are doable.2 The golden age of economic equality in the mid 20th century.

How do you break the connection between nerds and technology? Investors are rich enough to be sure signs of bad algorithms.3 Maybe it's a good idea for a small amount of force applied at just the point where they would do a lot of founders that we have enough data points to see patterns clearly. A company to compensate for the opportunity cost of the board may even help VCs pick better. The alarming thing is that it will set off the alarms sufficiently early, you may be able to phrase it in terms of the visa that they couldn't get grad students, so we were on Version 4. I think I see now what went wrong with philosophy, and how much is due to Jessica Livingston and Chris Steiner for reading drafts of this.4 Bad Programmers I forgot to include this in the early stages.5 So if you want to discover great new things often come from outsiders. Y18. Checks on purchases will always be a few languages, I'm not eager to fix that. It was striking how old fashioned this sounded.6 The term angel round doesn't mean that it's a pretty clever piece of jiujitsu to set this irresistible force against the slightly less immovable object of becoming rich.

Perhaps, if design and research converge, the best pickers should have more hits.7 Libraries are one place Common Lisp falls short.8 Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come with tougher terms. Six weeks is fast. This group says one thing. We've raised $800,000, but to design beautiful software, would be enough to feel like a late bloomer than a failed child prodigy. If you draw a tree and you change the angle of a branch five degrees, no one stopped to wonder where the big returns are. Here are the alternatives considered if the filter sees FREE!9 Appendix: Examples of Filtering Here is an example of applied empathy. I happened to get hold of a copy of something they made, e. In software, it means you don't have to pay for Facebook. That's not a promising lead and should therefore get low priority, but it's not the distinction between statements and expressions, so you have to be introduced to them.

Startups So these, I think in the coming century is a huge one. They just can't make up their minds.10 American immigration policy keeps out most smart people, and what to do; they'll start to engage in office politics. If you plan to get rich by creating wealth, not all of them work on interesting stuff. The melon seed model is more like architecture. So let's be clear what reducing economic inequality means eliminating startups. We can see this on a small scale: in thoughts of a sentence or two. The reason credentials have such prestige is that for most of Octopart's life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same kind of stock representing the total pool of companies they fund. Incidentally, the switch in the 1920s to financing growth with retained earnings till the 1920s. I'm sure every language has such tradeoffs though I suspect the best we'll be able to sit on corporate boards till the Glass-Steagall act in 1933. We still don't require it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a more fluid medium like pencil or ink wash or oil paint.

And when you agree there's less to say. I've described. Here are the terms: a $2 million investment, make five $400k investments. But in practice innovations were so rare that you can't change the question. Some ideas are easy for people to come back to bite them, it will probably fail. A few ideas from it turned out I was 450 years too late.11 This is a controversial view. One of the reasons I like being part of this talk. 75% of the stress comes from dealing with investors, hiring and investment decisions, and to Steve Melendez and Gregory Price for inviting me to speak at BBN.

Money September 2013 Most startups that raise money. Was it their religion?12 The immense value of the company. But if it's inborn it should be better not just for founders but for investors too. This is just as lumpy and idiosyncratic as the human body. Some people still get rich by creating wealth and getting paid proportionately, it would not be able to get smart people to be good at programming is to work on. It's not something you can learn, or at least inevitable form, but it's woven into the story instead of being absorbed by the normal people they're usually surrounded with. This is not only incomplete, but positively misleading, if it was overvalued till you see what the earnings turn out to work will probably seem flamingly obvious in retrospect.13

Notes

And since there are only pretending to in the services, companies building lightweight clients have usually tried to motivate them. Add water as specified on rice cooker. They assumed that their prices stabilize. If a prestigious VC makes a small amount of material wealth, and so thought disproportionately about such customs.

The second assumption I made because the outside edges of curves erode faster. In effect they were only partly joking. Org Worrying that Y Combinator is we hope visited mostly by people who might be a great thing in itself, and also really good at design, or even being deliberately misleading by focusing on people who run them would be enough to be promising. Which in turn forces Digg to respond with extreme countermeasures.

I'm just going to use to calibrate the weighting of the organization—specifically by sharding it. I swapped them to keep tweaking their algorithm to get the money invested in a reorganization. If early abstract paintings seem more powerful sororities at your school sucks, and large bribes by the fact that they think the top stories were de facto consulting firm. The situation we face here, which has been decreasing globally.

Charles Darwin was 22 when he received an invitation to travel aboard the HMS Beagle as a result a lot easier now for a startup at a famous university who is highly regarded by his peers. But that doesn't mean easy, of S P 500 CEOs in 2002 was 35,560. The ordering system, the work goes instead into the world you'd want to live in a wide variety of situations, but I couldn't think of the magazine they'd accepted it for had disappeared in a reorganization.

World War II had disappeared.

There are two very different types of startups will generally raise large amounts of other VCs who don't care about may not have to go to die. A rounds from top VC funds whether it was spontaneous. If you try to accept that investors don't like the iPad because it made a better influence on your product, and earns the right mindset you will find a blog that tried to preserve optionality.

I mean type I startups. In fact, we met Rajat Suri.

It's not a VC is interested in each type of thing. World War II had disappeared in a series A investor has a finite market value. Technology has always been accelerating.

But there are no false negatives.

But it's a bad idea the way to avoid sticking.

This law does not appear to be able to hire any first-time founder again he'd leave ideas that are hard to imagine that there may be that the meaning of a startup in question usually is doing badly in your country controlled by the investors agree, and Jews about. They hoped they were just getting kids to say about these: I wouldn't bet on it.

There's a variant of the markets they serve, because you're throwing off your own? As far as I know of a startup you have for endless years of training, and partly because a there was a very noticeable change in how Stripe felt. We may never do that.

The second biggest regret was caring so much attention. Users dislike their new operating system so much to generalize. Do College English Departments Come From?

[artificialqueens]

Follow Every Rainbow ('Til You Find Your Dream), chapter 1: Prelude (branjie) - writworm42

A/N: Sound of Music AU for the AQ musical theatre challenge! I really hope y'all like it. TW for religion (specifically Catholicism) and war. Also, you may notice a few things are different. I have chosen not to explore faith/queerness too much in this fic bc I could write a whole fic just about that. I also have changed the setting; it is no longer set in Austria, nor in WWII, bc I didn’t want to write Nazis into the story. So the war is a generic one and the country is just a non-descript one. Sorry @ all purists out there.

Thank you thank you thank you Holtzmanns for beta-ing for me and always supporting me, I’m Soft and I love you.

Vanessa hadn’t grown up with the war, not necessarily. She’d grown up with it around her, but never with her own home involved. It was carried in the crackle of the radio, shouted during family dinners. Exposed and documented in the pictures and print of the daily newspaper. But it stayed far away, a concept instead of a reality—until suddenly, it wasn’t.

The talk on the radio was becoming more serious. Family dinners suddenly became quiet. There were fewer wreckages and more pictures of government officials in the papers. Movies became focused on military glory, on the strength of men and triumph in conflict. There was no doubt about it–something was on the horizon, something big.

But women weren’t meant for war. Women weren’t meant for politics. Women weren’t meant for rebellion or labour. Weren’t meant for jumping in to stop a crisis before it started. So Vanessa stayed out of it.

Until she didn’t.

It was often said that the road to Hell was paved with good intentions. Vanessa wasn’t sure where the country was going, but on the day that the war spilled over into her town, the road to church was paved with nuns. Some of them sold rosaries and carnations to raise money for peace advocacy initiatives and the Red Cross. Some sat stony-faced with signs reminding passersby that every soldier was somebody’s child. Still others wailed in the streets, crying out prayers for the dissolution of borders, for countries to disarm and dissolve their militaries.

Those words weren’t meant for women, but they were spoken anyway.

And Vanessa wanted to speak them, too.

She passed by the nuns every day for months, multiple times a day, back and forth from home to church and home again. Sometimes she prayed the rosary; other times she joined a prayer intentions group; most of the time, she listened to the daily Mass and vespers, mouthing along with the priest’s words like she knew every blessing by heart. No matter what, the image of the nuns stuck in her mind, and soon, prayers for the nuns morphed into prayers to be one.

Vanessa had never been the type to dwell on decisions. For her, everything was simple; want or don’t want. Support or be against.

Do, or don’t.

She was walking home from Eucharistic adoration when she took her chance.

“Sign our petition for armistice to the government, my child?” The large, kind-looking woman smiled as she walked up, extending her clipboard and pen.

“Thank you, reverend Mother.” Vanessa smiled as she took the pen. “Now, if you have a minute, can I talk to you real quick?”

Vanessa started her aspirancy the day after she took Mother Nina aside. As Nina had explained it, aspirancy was a period of prayer, introspection, and counselling, requiring no less than three hours a day with the sisters, including an hour of talking things out with Nina herself. It was interesting–growing up, Vanessa had experienced nuns as surly, overly-disciplined, punitive in their desire for asceticism and obedience from everyone around them. Nina, on the other hand, was warm and inviting, someone who Vanessa found incredibly easy to talk to. So she did, her daily sessions flying by easily and almost as if they were too short.

You need to quiet down. You need to be disciplined. You need to watch yourself and your mouth. Vanessa had heard it over and over; but Nina never told her those things. Instead, it was almost as if she was even more appreciative of Vanessa for all of the things that the other nuns thought were weaknesses; loudness became spirit, stubbornness became conviction, rashness became childlike whimsy. And Nina never used the words eliminate or discourage either, words that Vanessa had grown used to hearing and used to hating; instead, Nina promised to refine and shape Vanessa, to productively harness her gifts. And Vanessa tried, she really did. She went with the sisters to morning prayers and cried with them in the streets. She did community service with them and volunteered in their kitchen to make their meals. By the six month mark, Vanessa was more than ready to say yes to postulancy, to commit herself wholeheartedly to the convent.

Unfortunately, as supportive as Nina was, she could also be stern, and so she held Vanessa off.

“It’s not just about what you want,” Nina would warn, “It’s about what God wants, too.” So Vanessa prayed, prayed without ceasing, prayed over every thought that came to her mind or feeling that came in her heart. And then the prayers melted away–meditations became recitations, hollow words spread above the swelling lightness in Vanessa’s chest. She got through fewer and fewer passages of the Bible every day, because she would zone out and get lost picturing the scenes of the very first lines to hit her eyes. And every prayer, every act of Grace, became less and less somber, until finally, Vanessa felt God the most when she was playing with the neighbourhood kids, smiling back at them over games of house and babbling conversations.

“Are there other aspirants working with you and the sisters right now, reverend Mother?” Vanessa asked during a session, when a pause in the conversation filled the room for the first time since Vanessa came to know the convent.

Nina smiled. “Why do you ask, Vanessa?”

“Because I’d like to meet them. I wanna get to know them, get to be friends with ‘em.”

It wasn’t something out of character for Vanessa to say–it wasn’t something even remotely new to her to want. In fact, it was something she’d wanted to ask since the very first day of her aspirancy, but had thought might make her seem immature, like a schoolgirl who just wanted to gossip instead of seriously considering her faith.

Nina paused for a moment, her smile unwavering, before nodding, her eyes gleaming with pride.

“Yes, I think you’re ready. In fact, I think I could do you one better–how would you like to enter postulancy with us?”

[afsanaas]

𝑰𝒏𝒕𝒓𝒐𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑺𝒂𝒏𝒂 𝑬𝒉𝒔𝒂𝒏...

Hello everyone, I’ve reached out to a lot of guys to plot so I figured it would be best to provide from background on Sana! Here is her very much extended bio (I had to force myself to condense things down for my application cause I realized just how long it was considering I’m adapting her from a previous character of mine). ALSO quick apology for the use of gif icons, there are not a lot of resources for Kriti available so I made a bunch of her gifs a while back and they are all icons so I’m a little stuck in that regard!

tw: emotional abuse, miscarriage, mention of death in the family

UPBRINGING

The daughter of two Muslim Indian immigrants, Sana was four years old when she came to the US. Chasing the American dream in hopes of building a better life her father had already been in Jersey when he married her mother, working on putting down roots, and gaining citizenship before he was able to have his wife and daughter move over with him. Though they made a home in the US, her parents never quite embraced America, or it’s culture. They kept themselves closed off from integration in the community they lived in, opting to only associate with other Indian muslims they either knew from back home or shared some kind of distant connection with.

The cultural barriers aside, they saw their religion as something that set them apart from others we well, never realizing that they have come to this country for the chance to gain acceptance, and to escape religious persecution. It wasn’t that they never experience bigotry, but the fact that they also experiences immense love and support from their neighbors but yet refused to embrace these positives that always bothered Sana.

It was because of this her life was always a struggle between who she was becoming, and who her parents wanted her to be. They failed to see that while they may not consider themselves to be American, she did. English was her first language, all her friends at school were people from different ethnic backgrounds, her diverse education meant she understood the fundamental need for acceptance.

As she grew older and really began to understand herself, she realized that she didn’t believe in their god, she simply didn’t believe in any god. She found the cultural norms her family followed to be oppressive, and at times suffocating yet there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Her family, and extended family, and family friends were so deeply entangled in her life that were she to say anything at all, just like that everyone she knew and cared for would distance themselves from her. She’d be ostracized, so really the only choice she has as a young adult was to keep on pretending.

No matter how much of herself she had to hide from those who were the closest to her, no matter how much doing so hurt her. She didn’t realize it at the time but she was spiraling into this endless pit of depression and anxiety.

EDUCATION

One thing her parents did value highly like most parents was the value of education. Her parents were not given the opportunities to be well educated and that’s why they brought their kids to America so that they would have those opportunities. So doing well was an expected, and school was after all her only reprieve so she put her all into it. She was a natural leader in school, involved in many extracurriculars, academic related as well as track and field, she was the first person to raise her hand in class if she knew something, and also if she required clarification not letting anyones opinion of her get in the way of her learning. As well as she did in high school it wasn’t a surprise she was able to get nearly a full ride to the college of her choice. However her choice did have to be within the approved radius of her parents choosing. Northwestern, up in Evanston was a stretch for them, but after weeks of pleading, and bargaining they agreed but only after getting her to agree to allow them to start looking for marriage prospects for her. This was something she knew was coming and had been dreading but at the time she figured it was just a matter of saying yes to get to go to the school of her dreams.

ARRANGED MARRIAGE

Never had she thought saying yes would mean they’d find someone for her in less than a year of her starting college. He was a friend of a friends son, a computer software engineer doing well for himself, living in Lincoln Park. For her parents it was perfect match, it was a family they knew well, and a guy who was financially stable, not more than a decade older than her even just twenty seven while she was barely twenty. He and his family seemed open minded, and were willing to allow her to continue to pursue her degree even after marriage, how could it be anymore perfect? And like every other thing she’s ever wanted in her life, the choice was out of her hands because it was a choice of choosing herself and her own happiness over her family. Not able to leave behind her family she reluctantly agreed after meeting the guy a couple of times. He seemed fine, there was no spark there but he seemed kind, and understanding she could definitely do worse she told herself.

Unfortunately what she failed to realized before agreeing to it all was a marriage among her community was not between a man and a woman but the two families, so very intimately involved in all their business. The plan had been to live with his parents for one year before finding their own place and building their own home, however a couple months in she could tell that was not happening. Slowly everything became harder, she felt suffocated in her relationship and under the burden of responsibilities that had fallen on her shoulders all while she was desperately trying to keep up with college, already having had to take a three quarter sabbatical. Everyday was a struggle, whether that be with her husband, her mother in law, or her bratty sister in law. She was emotionally and soon physically becoming so strained that it showed on her face, something her mother in law never failed to point out to her.

The worst thing to have happened at that point in her life was for her to become pregnant. And even worst for her husband under the instance of his mother to have tampered with her birth control (that his mother had never been happy she was taking). The pregnancy was they last straw for her however, she could not get an abortion or rather they would not let her. It was like she was trapped in a sick soap opera a cycle of abuse she had no way of escaping. It really shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone when she miscarried, from how stressed and unhealthy she’d become in this period, no joy in her at all from the child growing inside of her. Of course she was tormented endlessly for it, her MIL having succeeded in placing a permanent wedge in her marriage, and leaving her completely isolated in her own home.

DIVORCE

Slowly she mustered up the courage then to return to college after the two years that had been wasted, it was this act of reclaiming control of her life that eventually gave her courage to get out of that toxic marriage against the will of everyone in her life. They all wanted her to compromise, give it time, try harder, but she was done trying to suppress herself for the benefit of others. She not only got her divorce but also dragged his ass to court, something no woman in her community had ever done. She get penance for her emotional trauma she suffered while in the marriage, the court ruling in her favor and ordering him to pay for the rest of her college expenses. This gave her some peace to focus her energy in earning a livable wage to support herself, she was not going to be returning to her parents home, or depending on anyone else for that matter. Soon everything was back on track she was living by herself in the city completing her bachelors and then going on to law school.

PLANS DERAILED ONCE AGAIN

Finally living her life on her own terms deciding what kind of person she wanted to be, figuring out what she believed in. College was fairly easy without any distractions holding her back. What she didn’t expect two years into law school was that her father would get a heart attack caused by her little sister getting pregnant out of wedlock. Already a heart patient who’d suffered from two minor strokes prior to this incident his heart gave out when this happened. And she found herself picking up the pieces of a family that had caused her so much pain and set her on a path of misery. After fathers passing she not only assumed the responsibility of caring after her mother and two sisters, but also the financial burden he left behind in the form of the money he’d borrowed from a crime family. 

ENTER RAFAL KOVALI

The stress of the thousands of dollars she’d inherited in debt was crippling for her, she was barely making ends meet and finishing school. It was a point in life when she was quite done with being in constant struggle to stay afloat, she wanted nothing more than a reprieve from it all. She wanted to get ahead of it, not someday, not in a few years, but now. It was then that she met Rafal Kovali, not a knight in shining armour by any stretch of the imagination but a king in his own right with midas’ touch, someone with more than enough means to lift her out of the toxic cycle of debt and despair she was trapped in.

Even despite her less than gracious introduction to him when she hadn’t a clue who he was by some miracle he seemed to be drawn to her, her beauty a factor but also her spirited nature.  She was tough, she’d had to be growing up against the odds with no one in her corner, she’d done the whole demure dignified thing and it had gotten her nowhere, she was done letting life fuck her. She knew he was a powerful man, and once she learned to what extent she decided to make her bed and sleep in it, metaphorically speaking. Her association with the Kovali has provided her for the first time some sense of security and stability, and though she realizes what a fine line she’s walking for the time being she’s willing to gamble with the odds if it means staying afloat, and staying ahead one more day.

Sana does not love the man, sleeping with him is as transactional for her as it was sleeping with her ex-husband. She realizes what that might make her, but growing up with little to no ownership of her body or her own self worth, her current situation is almost empowering. She’s given up on notions of romance she might have had as a teenage girl, she’d put those sentiments to rest the moment she signed her marriage contract years ago. Nor does she feel entirely awful about sleeping with a married man, was it anyone else she most likely would have. As pragmatic as she is she did her research and she knows enough about him and his wife to know they are not good people, in some screwed up way she’s rationalized with herself that their morally reproachable deeds obsolve her from holding any guilt for what she’s doing.

PUTTING UP HIGH WALLS

Given her struggles with herself and nearly every close relationship she’s ever had, Sana has now put up some very high walls around herself. Not allowing anything or anyone to penetrate them and bring her back to the places she’s worked so hard to escape from. She refuses to feel that lost and helpless against another person ever again. While being guarded and protecting herself is something that’s keeping her safe, it’s also holding her back from truly enjoying the freedom she finally has to be herself unapologetically, and keeping her closed off from anyone that might want to get close to her for the right reasons.

ADDITIONAL PLOTS FOR EXPLORATION

No Stopping The Heart -  Sana is very practical about most things, especially so after the end of emotionally trying marriage she’s given up on any notions of romance and a picture perfect life. While her relationship with Rafal is simply advantageous to her, she is not a disloyal person even in a relationship such as theirs. I would be interesting for her to fall for someone else. Currently she is gambling with her life something she is well aware and accepting of. Gambling with her heart however is going to be a much hard pill for her to swallow.

$470.000 Down  -  The precise amount of debt her father had collected, being uninsured and having a major surgery the first time around had been a huge burden and he’d had no choice but to borrow the money to pay for it when the debt collectors began to get particularly nasty, though it was trading one evil for another. And while Rafal may have settled that for her, she very much still sees herself indebted to him.

[cathrineteague]

Condo by the Lake of Fire

A personal essay - originally written in 2012

God help me, but I think I want to talk about religion. Christianity, specifically, but not Christianity as it’s written in the Holy Bible itself. The Bible is hardly the root of the problem.

There is a place down South called the Bible Belt, where Church is the wheel on which everything turns. You know as soon as you’ve crossed into this strange, alternate world because suddenly one church per town won’t suffice, and Sunday morning just isn’t enough time for preaching.

You’ll see billboards in the big cities (Don’t make me come down there. – God). And on those otherwise beautiful stretches of highway through miles of green farmland, you’ll come upon the occasional massive, ominous white cross, looming over the highway as if to remind all who pass through whose country they’re traversing.

Don’t stop. Don’t get out of the car, not even to take a picture. Everyone you meet will be vying for a chance at your soul. Evangelical Christians—terrifying creatures bred on generations of threats of hellfire and brimstone—don’t know how to meet a living thing without inquiring about its status with regards to God.

“Hi! Nice to meetcha. Where ya come from? Where ya headed? Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior and if not, would you like to do so this very day? For we are living in the End Times! None of us is promised tomorrow, brothers and sisters, and God is not willing that any one of His children should be lost, say amen.”

More frightening for an outside observer than the prospect of crossing this land—to get to some more desirable locale where they don’t try to walk you into such a long-term commitment right away—is the idea of what it must be like to grow up in it.

Don’t weep for the little children, though, you heathen Yankees! They do just fine. They learn all the lessons they need to know at school, at Church and at home. And if one of these places tends to bleed into the others, well…hallelujah, that’s consistency! Sometimes it’s hard and painful of course, but what good, worthy things are there in life that don’t require some work? We have to purge our children of their sins before the Devil gets a foothold!

It’s violence, really. Emotional terrorism, praise the Lord and give God the glory. See the little girl sitting in the third pew, in an itchy pink dress she had to be wrestled into earlier that morning? Teach her Your ways, O Lord.

Teach her that when she gets older holding hands with the little blonde girl next to her won’t be okay anymore, to say nothing of all the other things she’s going to want to do. Teach her that her body and her mind are great betrayers, teach her to shut them down and ignore what they tell her. She must suffer as Christ suffered.

When Jesus was a little kid, did he want to hold hands with the other boys? Teach her not to ask such sacrilegious questions.

Teach her to be ashamed of having questions at all. A good Christian with a healthy relationship with God doesn’t have doubts or questions, and never-you-mind that Jeremiah prophet. He was a prophet, after all, and you’re just a girl. The Bible says women ought not to speak in Church.

Send your children to summer “youth camps” and winter “retreats.” Let them spend all day at the water park in some perpetually sunny Southern city, shrieking with laughter and not a care in the world. Send them, sunburned and still smelling like chlorine and the sunscreen they put on in the morning, to the dimly-lit interior of a hotel conference room. Show them how to raise their hands and sing at the top of their lungs to God, all the more joyful abandon, so the rocks don’t cry out.

Sit them down and bring out a fat, happy guest preacher who says he is their friend. He dresses like they do. He talks the way they do. He knows who their favorite musicians are, knows how to play the saxophone. They are all in agreement: he’s a pretty cool guy, and in the space of half an hour they trust him like they’ve known him all their lives.

Let him talk to them for another sixty minutes. By the end of it they’ll all be on their knees in the altar, sobbing. They’ll cling to each other as they gasp out those prayers, begging God to forgive them for those seconds of the day when they forget themselves and are human. For that single unkind thought, for that dirty joke at lunch three weeks ago, for these offenses and a million more. They will beg forgiveness for everything they’ve done in their lives between Monday mornings and Saturday nights.

And no matter how hard they try, there will always be new seconds of imperfection to cry over come next Wednesday, when their young, handsome youth pastor gets up to remind them of the commitment that he’s sure “some of y’all have already forgotten.”

The battle begins on the first day of school, after all. When you’re walking through the overcrowded hallways, trying to get to your locker across the building in the five-minute break, trying to absorb useless details about ancient Mesopotamia that you’re sure you covered last year, and the year before, trying to understand what’s so great about A House on Mango Street anyway…don’t forget the commitment you made at winter retreat, and renewed on Wednesday night, and Sunday morning, and again on Sunday night.

They all forget, of course. Maybe not habitually, maybe only for a second, but it’s enough. Every single second out of the day they don’t spend in awe of Almighty God is fodder for their guilt-ridden prayers at the Sunday evening service.

The bass-voiced, solemn-faced preachers all says that Christianity is more than fire insurance, but I’ll be damned if they don’t use the eternal torment of Hell--and a shot at skipping it--as a selling point at every turn.

“Do you have a relationship with God? Are you ready? If you died this very minute, where would you go?”

“You with the heavy eyeliner, the black bondage pants and the heavy metal t-shirt, repent of your sins and come back next week in jeans and this hoodie with the youth group’s logo on it, only $25.”

“You in the low-cut blouse, stop tempting your Brothers in Christ to sinful thoughts. Cover yourself from neck to ankles and be forgiven for the sin of being a pretty girl.”

Your body is a temple; your body is a temptation. Your body is the place all sins originate, so divorce yourself from it as much as possible, praise Jesus.

It starts almost at birth and it never really ends. Even if you escape, drag yourself across the invisible border into a place where towns with populations under a thousand only have one church and no one defaces the highway with terrifying symbols of pre-medieval execution methods…even if you manage to run from the voices all around you telling you that you’re Lost, you’re a Sinner, you’re Backslidden, you’re Going To Hell...you’re not really safe. You can’t escape the voices in your head that tell you the exact same things.

So what if logic says it’s crazy? So what if every rational thought you have screams against the majority of what you’ve been taught since before you could talk? Those teachings took root long before some high school English teacher or college professor took pity and taught you to think, before some song on the radio ignited the tiny fire of rebellion that grew and eventually prompted you to run in the first place.

Your mama says rebellion is like witchcraft in the eyes of God. You shall not suffer a witch to live; it says so in the Bible.

Spend every day for the rest of your life telling yourself that God is love, that God forgives, that God shows mercy to His children. Read the Bible if you want to, highlight all those passages that prove your point. Live your life by day as if you believe it, but say your prayers at night the way you always have: searching frantically in your mind for that one damning little sin, some slip-up that you forgot to beg forgiveness for that’s going to plunge you into Hell if you die in your sleep.

Call home; listen to the voices of your past in a chorus of agreement.

“I’m praying for you, child,” says the elderly aunt before you hang up, every time. You feel her prayers; they prickle the back of your neck every time you pass a church, make you walk a little faster and keep your eyes to the ground.

And what if they’re right? That’s the question you can’t get away from, the one that logic can’t dispel because it’s not a logical adult asking it, but that scared, brow-beaten little girl in the itchy dress.

What if they’re right about everything?

You had a friend once, an anomaly living fun and fancy free among his religious brethren, a jolly-faced man you met at the community theatre who served on the deacon’s board at his church and went home every night to Jerry, his sweet-smiling house husband of more than a dozen years. They threw Christmas parties and pool parties, and welcomed you at the door with warmth and joy and homemade lemonade.

He used to joke that in Hell he’d be a VIP.

“When we all get there, you guys can just join me in my luxury condo, right beside the lake of fire.”

A small, sacrilegious voice inside you hopes that if they’re right, then he is, too.

[irigoddess]

Incomplete Kyuzo/Phatrong Masterpost

Apparently this post didn’t work once I changed URLs so... yeah. Here you go. 

Kyuzoni biology:

The Kyuzo are an omnivorous reptilian species; while they are reptilian, they are warm blooded and do not lay eggs. They evolved this way because of the sometimes violent weather on Phatrong. It turned out that the weather was not suitable for eggs - thus they evolved to give birth…even if the process is awkward and painful.

Kyuzo skin is rough, but not scaly like Trandoshans. Skin colors can range anywhere from green, to yellow, to blue and in between. However, those who are purely yellow or blue have a common pigmentation disorder. Their health is not negatively affected because of this, although people might treat them differently depending on where they live.

All Phatrongi Kyuzo are born with honeycomb eyes, that can be any color. Their eyes tend to glow in the dark, and they can see in the dark better than most humanoids. (I’ll be honest, I’m not really sure where that one writer was going with when he said most Kyuzo had poor eye sight. I tend to ignore it.)

Other than having slightly wider hips, cis females are very similar to cis males. They do not have breasts or any noticeable secondary sex traits. While cis males tend to be a bit taller and wider framed, its not uncommon for cis females to have those traits, and vice versa. Intersex Kyuzo are common. Gender is very fluid among the Kyuzo, as parents tend to raise their children without a defined gender; when the child is of age, they get to decided what their gender is. Thus, being trans or nonbinary is prevalent.

The Kyuzo can be up to 7′6″ tall, with most falling in the 6′ to 6′6″ range. They tend to be a little larger than humans, body wise, but are considerably more agile.

The weakest part of the Kyuzo is their lungs; if there is too much moisture in the air, they can easily contract pneumonia. Too much oxygen in the air and they’ll suffocate. Thus the reason they wear masks off planet.  (Those who were involved with making Constable Zuvio also said that they wear bandages over their mouths but I’m still trying to figure out…..how that works exactly…)

Kyuzo, beyond that, are an incredibly hearty species that can live upward of three hundred years. After reaching sexual maturity at around young adulthood, their aging slows down. Whatever kills them before old age is usually attributed to their lungs or more physical means. They can contract other diseases, but they are usually nonfatal. Usually.

They have an amazing amount of stamina and can run at speeds that are hard for most humanoids to attain. They, unfortunately, have high pain tolerances and a hard time receiving fatigue messages to the brain, and this generally spells out problems. Kyuzos have been known to run themselves to death - literally. It’s not uncommon for families to find the bodies of missing members hundreds of miles away from where they were last seen. They have to make a very conscious effort to stop, or they won’t.

Kyuzo are much stronger than humanoids, and can jump higher. Most outsiders confuse them as force sensitives for this reason. Though Kyuzo are commonly Force-sensitive, they fight tooth and nail to keep their kids from the Jedi.

Culture:

Clothing:

Most feminine presenting Kyuzo wear headwraps/headdresses. Other than displaying wealth and covering cold heads, there isn’t much of a reason that they wear the headdresses. It’s not required, but most feminine presenting people wear them because they grew up seeing other feminine presenting people wearing them. If one is wealthy, their headdresses will tend to be large and elaborate; it’s not uncommon for one to wear a headdress that is pounds upon pounds of metals, jewels, and cloth. Poorer feminine presenting people generally just wear cloth, or nothing at all.

Kyuzoni clothing is colorful and flowy; people wear very similar clothing, no matter what gender they are. Dresses and skirts are very common, and people will generally go topless. While most colors are okay to use, there are certain colors that are not used in everyday clothing, such as purple, light blue, gold, and white; the Kyuzo place sacred meaning in some colors, so they are only supposed to be used for special events.

Phatrong’s army/police force wear loose, non-restricting clothing with a leather-like armor covering their chests. Their family’s crest is painted upon the armor, in case that the warrior is killed in action. Their clothing is trimmed in gold, which represents bravery and wisdom.

Light blue cloth, specifically headwraps or shirts, signify that a wedding is approaching. Purple is a wedding color, as it signifies prosperity and commitment; wedding clothes are trimmed with silver. White is only used for funerals or births, as it signifies both death and the innocence of new life.

Music/Art:

Music on Phatrong generally revolves around stringed instruments and percussion instruments; they don’t generally listen to music for leisure. Music is only played at festivals, and generally tells the stories of ancient heroes and gods. The Kyuzo also create dances to these story-songs, to make things more dramatic.

Art varies around Phatrong. By the oceans, it’s mostly glass-work like beads and giant stained glass windows. Those Kyuzo that live by the rivers create pottery. Richer families will paint large murals that will cover the walls of their homes. These murals tell tales of their gods, but more often than not they are used almost like photographs that capture small moments in the lives of the family. Jewelry making is also common.

Religion:

The Kyuzo believe in a polytheistic system; the most prominent goddess is Vohaoya (Vo-ha-oy-ah), the mother of the gods and creator of worlds. She represents women, fertility, life, and nature; she is described as having a mostly Kyuzoni appearance, with three eyes and four arms. Often, she is shown in art or statues sitting cross-legged, cradling Phatrong in her lap; her arms are either pointing toward the sky, or she is making gestures with her hands. Her bottom arms are often portrayed as laying flat against her legs with palms upturned - this relays openness. Her left top arm is often resting on the planet, which portrays her protective nature. And her right top arm is often pointed upward, her pointer finger curling in toward her palm while the rest of her fingers are outstretched; this is a symbol of love for the Kyuzo. Her statues are mostly made out of gold, but are painted with the likeness of galaxies; some people swear that the stars shift in the right light.

Other more minor deities include Ixpi, the goddess of peace, and her brother Echting, the god of war. Because the Kyuzo like to believe that they are a peaceful race, Echting is often described as a villain. Ixpi is described as a small, rainbow-colored being that floats rather than walks; besides being the goddess of peace, she is also a patron of happiness, sunrise, and the LGBT community on Phatrong. Echting is also the god of destruction, mayhem, and storms; he is often described as a fiery being too bright to look at. He is surrounded by lightning and is easily angered.

The Kyuzo have many other gods, but they are not nearly as important as the three mentioned above.

Legend has it that Vohaoya created the Warriors of old to protect the gods from those that wished to harm them. They were created from the rich soil, and they were considered divine beings. In the modern era of Phatrong, it is still considered one of the highest honors to be a Warrior.

General cultural headcanons:

The Kyuzo tend to live in large villages or the few small cities around the planet; those who are born into the more obscure villages often never leave the villages.

Villages are generally comprised of thousands of people, all of which are extended family members. Separate families can have more than twenty-five members, all living in one house. Villagers take turns tending to the communal farm, which produces most of their food and fibers for clothing; to supplement the farm, they also forage, hunt, and fish.

Village born Kyuzo are very secluded, only working with neighboring villages to marry off their children. Because of their seclusion, they are the more suspicious and less educated than their city counterparts. Knowledge is passed down through the generations as those born in the villages don’t have access to teachers. At most, they know Kyuzoni and basic math: they are instead taught more practical skills, like sewing, cooking, cleaning, and animal husbandry.

There are two ‘real’ cities on Phatrong, Shutalo and Shouji; Shutalo (Shoo-tah-loh) is the capital city, to the north. Shouji (Show-zhee) is a large industrial city in the southern hemisphere. Any outside trade is limited to these two areas.

Kyuzo that live in the city tend to have smaller families, with about six members at the most. The Kyuzo in the cities have actual jobs, but they don’t make money; they are given items of use instead. (Think of bartering, almost. If they work at a textile store, they are given cloth, which can then be traded for food, etc.) Villages that have produced too much food or are in need of other items will sell food to the city folk.

City Kyuzo have better access to education, although it’s still not the best in the galaxy. Most city Kyuzo learn things like writing, higher levels of math, and an objective look on the planet’s history. Kyuzo that wish to learn beyond that must travel off planet.

It’s extremely difficult for Kyuzos to speak Basic, just because Kyuzoni and Basic are so different. It can take years and years just to get the verbal language down, and that doesn’t count how long it takes for them to learn to read Aurebesh. If the Kyuzo do manage to figure out how to speak Basic, they have thick accents that are often hard to understand, thus making them vulnerable to mockery.

Politics on Phatrong are strange as the government actually doesn’t do much. The senate, located in Shutalo, is a group of Kyuzo (and a few Kataline) from various villages and cities that are there to set basic laws so that they can have a seat in the Council of Neutral Systems. Really, the various villages will set their own rules, and as long as it doesn’t interfere with the senate, they’re generally alright with it. (A law would include: Murder is punishable by death. But their definition of murder is loose and up to interpretation.)

Kyuzo children (generally young men but it’s not limited to males) learn to fight from the moment they can understand. The Kyuzo, although a generally ‘peaceful’ race, train their children to become a quasi-army/police force. The most promising fighters are then shipped off to various academies around Phatrong to train with masters to hone their skills. Many children, as a result of poor quality of life at the academies and dangerous fighting practices, end up dying. It is rare that the academies are punished. The children that make it then must complete a three-year stint as an active warrior; those who passed but are not necessarily promising are sent to protect sacred temples. Those who show a certain level of finesse can continue to climb the ranks until they are high-ranking military officials. They act more like a police force than a military, but they have the training just in case.

Kyuzo children are often promised to each other at birth; throughout their childhoods, they get to meet and connect with their betrothed. They generally marry at eighteen, with a week-long festival preceding it. Wives are considered sacred embodiments of the Goddess Vohaoya, and are limited to bearing five children; superstition says that having too many children will thin out the wife’s existence. Daughters are vitally important to carry on their mother’s bloodline.

Because Kyuzo value large family, a husband will take a wetzandi as well; a wetzandi, or birth maid, is a younger woman who births the rest of a man’s children. A wetzandi is someone who is generally caught bedding out of wedlock, or has committed some other small crime against the goddesses. Unfortunately, they are not valued by most, and are treated as little more than breeding stock.

[automatismoateo]

In response to a question in a recent thread where someone asked me to go in-depth, here's a description of my experience in Education and teaching Science in Arkansas and why I finally quit. via /r/atheism

Submitted July 11, 2021 at 11:22PM by paxinfernum (Via reddit https://ift.tt/3ALPxPr) In response to a question in a recent thread where someone asked me to go in-depth, here's a description of my experience in Education and teaching Science in Arkansas and why I finally quit.

The only thing that matters

Here's something you need to understand first. In most rural districts, pretty much any idiot can get hired to a position and stay there as long as they don't piss off parents too much. The people hiring you don't really understand what you teach, and the parents don't understand or care what quality teaching is, but they care if you say something that offends their backward sensibilities. What that effectively means is that your ability to teach and stay on has more to do with being in sync with the community, who are usually racist and batshit paranoid. If you aren't in sync with that, you either have to keep your head down, or you will eventually get harassed into leaving due to vague complaints.

Abusive parenting is normal here

Okay. So starting with my student teaching. The woman I worked under was a total fucking psychopath. She bragged in the teachers' lounge about how she disciplined her daughter and people don't discipline their kids like that now. By discipline, I mean she told a story about how she chased her daughter down a hallway, dragged her by the hair of her head, and spanked her until she was raw. This was part of a story where she was bragging about how well behaved her daughter was due to her parenting.

If you're wondering if anyone pushed back against this, the answer is that they didn't. They were nodding their heads in affirmation. That's the problem with rural schools in a nutshell. The community hires from the community, and the community is backward as shit and filled with people who were raised in abusive conservative fundie homes. The parents, by the way, loved that teacher because she wasn't one of those soft "liberal" teachers. Parents, more than anyone else, wanted us to hit their kids and were always disappointed when they didn't get spanked. Child abuse is a way of life down here.

Teachers who are fearful of knowledge

Okay, so this woman was a science teacher. That's what I trained to teach. Science. I did so because I wasn't just one of those "science is awesome" Sagan-heads. I genuinely cared about teaching science as more than just fun facts, but as a methodology for uncovering the truth. I naively went into the field thinking that's what most science teachers would be like. I kind of hoped that I'd at least find a community of like-minded individuals in this ignorant state.

Over my entire teaching career, I literally never met another science teacher like me who was pro-science and pro-skepticism. They were overwhelmingly either just dumb and teaching rotely, or they were conspiratorial and fearful of science. This is exactly what an Arkansas school board wants out of a science teacher. They know they have to teach science, but they are afraid of science and see it as the most dangerous subject to teach in their little fundagelical minds. So they hire people who are afraid of science.

That crazy woman I trained under? She ranted about drones being used to spy on us. She told the kids GMOs were dangerous, and she told them homeopathic medicines were something she'd researched to help her friend with cancer. She wasn't unique in that regard. Every other science teacher I met in Arkansas was terrified of GMOs and had some conspiracy they wanted to rant about. One teacher's bugaboo was allergies and how he thought more people were getting allergies because of chemicals being put in the water. He brushed it off when I said it was probably due to more sensitive testing. Another teacher told their students the most horrendous and completely inaccurate facts about nuclear energy.

They're not sending us their best people

The point is these people weren't the best and brightest. Often, they weren't even adequate. One guy I worked with became a science teacher because he needed something to teach alongside coaching. He was dumb as a box of rocks and just barely passed his praxis exams after three tries. I know most people weren't going to ace these tests like I did, but the cutoff for a passing score in Arkansas is hilariously low. Yet, when he finally passed, it was only by a single point, and he recounted it to me like it was only by the grace of god.

Another teacher, a math teacher who was probably the worst speller I'd ever met, got certified in Texas, which has a lower standard for math, and he transferred his certification to Arkansas. So he only was able to teach math in Arkansas on a technicality. The way it works is that you only have to be recertified if you let your certification lapse. All that's required to recertify is doing 30 hours of PD per year, and then, every couple of years, you have to do the recertification process. But this idiot was too stupid to do that, and he let his certification expire. So then, he was teaching math without a license because he couldn't pass the Arkansas tests. (You're allowed to teach for so long as long as you're pursuing certification.)

Propaganda and Indoctrination

Half of the teachers I met might as well have been missionaries. It's illegal to push your religion or politics on students, but fuck if anyone will actually enforce that. Actually, let me step back there. Fuck if anyone will actually enforce that unless you're liberal or non-Christian. The state is an unofficial conservative theocracy so if the teacher wants to rant about gays or Jesus, there's very little chance any parent will even bother to complain. (Even liberals around here know they're outnumbered and won't win.) Even if the parent complains to the Principal, they'll only "have a word" with the teacher in question, most likely to have a chummy conversation where they eye roll about the parent and discuss ways they can continue to evangelize more subtly.

Even if the Principal is the type who takes this seriously, the teacher will only get a vague note in their file because no school board around here is going to fire a teacher for proselytizing children. They don't want the school to get burned down by an angry mob of Fox News zombies. Even if it makes it to the state ethics board, I've seen the state ethics board literally do nothing about a counselor who ignored a suicidal student, a teacher who was caught drunk driving, a superintendent who was manipulating the system to siphon more money into the school, and so many other things. The only thing the ethics board actually takes a license away for is cheating on standardized testing (got to keep our corporate donors happy) and actually fucking a student. Even if you bring a teacher up on proselytizing, they'll get a warning and be back in the classroom the next day.

So if you're a kid in a rural school, get ready for your teacher to unsubtly tell you about how Jesus is such an important part of their life or straight-up rant about the Democrats. When I was a student in Arkansas schools, I had teachers tell me: 1) All gay people should be thrown in prison 2) HIV-positive patients should be shipped to an island or burned (it was the 90s) 3) the Jews brought the holocaust on to themselves by rejecting Jesus 4) the teacher was boycotting Levis jeans because they supported gay people. That's just a sampling of shit I heard as a kid in Arkansas from freaking teachers.

While working as a teacher, I knew of teachers who latched onto kids with poor home lives and invited them over to their homes so they could do "prayer studies" with them. The kids went because they were kind to them and offered food. In case you're wondering, they got away with this because it was a husband and wife, so parents allowed it. (I'm just going to say that I'm actually quite certain this was entirely above board sex-wise. I knew the individuals, and while I despised what they were doing, I knew they were entirely sincere.)

Another teacher, a Trump supporter, went into a rant about how they needed to give all the teachers guns to fight off school shooters (because restricting guns in any way was tOtAlItArIaNiSm.) I nodded along because I was smart enough to know disagreeing publicly will get you shunned or harassed. All I could think in my head was "Dude, if they ever give you nutters guns, that's the day I quit. There will be 10 dead kids within a week." On that topic, one teacher I know of grabbed a student by the throat because they were pissed at them, and they didn't lose their job.

The history teacher, the one who wanted us to all have guns was teaching that the Civil War was about tariffs. You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen. Hundreds of thousands of people went to war over tariffs that were at their lowest point in decades. It had nothing to do with the people they owned and shackled up like a Saw movie. The Civics teacher pushed Trump election conspiracies.

Another teacher, who had a family member who had a terminal illness and was literally only getting their medical treatment paid through Obamacare would go off on rants about Obama and transgender students.

Harassment

At one point, I was harassed by the campus cop. He found out I was in support of BLM, and literally screamed at me. Later, he transitioned to simply refusing to acknowledge my existence. Like, if I said anything to him, he would pretend he couldn't hear me. The dude was fucking insane and filled with hate. I'm pretty sure his domestic situation with his wife was abusive due to things he said. He was so angry and radicalized that it was never the students I worried would be a mass shooter. It was him. I was literally afraid he would come in one day and shoot the place up. He wasn't an oddity though. Every one of our resource officers was racist and unethical. One was running a vaping ring with students. Another took special joy in cracking down on Latino students.

Eventually, I started getting harassment from students though, and that's what led to me leaving. There are two things that led to increasing harassment. First, I had one conservative student who hated me and surmised that I must be a Clinton supporter. I never said that, but because I was one of the few teachers who didn't violate the rules about discussing religion or politics, they guess that I was a liberal atheist. So they started working to get me fired.

The second thing is that the Arkansas standards changed so that teaching evolution became part of my classroom standards. Just so you know, most schools in Arkansas don't actually teach evolution, even though they're supposed to. The way it works is teachers put it last on their things to teach, and oopsie, I just ran out of time at the end of the year. Some teachers know evolution is real, but they don't teach it because the backlash is too much to take. Others don't teach it because they're fundagelicals themselves, so they go along with the informal conspiracy to not teach evolution. I say informal conspiracy because it's not like they all get together in a back room and decide this. It's just the culture and incentives are all there to not teach it.

I actually taught evolution, and while I had always dealt with some degree of negativity, looking back, I have to say that was the point where I started getting a lot more. I can't emphasize enough how brainwashed these kids were. I'm not saying all of them because there were absolutely kids who believed in evolution, but they were in a minority and knew to keep their mouths shut. But it's sort of staggering to try to teach the history of the Earth and have a kid repeatedly try to prove to you that there was a global flood.

How harassment actually works in the real world

This is the thing I want people to understand. Harassment in the real world isn't usually as obvious as in a movie. No one drives by your house and throws a brick through your window. No one calls you up and leaves threatening messages. No one will ever fire you for being liberal or an atheist. Because these people are dumb as fuck, but they're also very clever at being shitty people. They know they can't walk up and say to the school board, "Fire so and so because they're teaching evolution." They know that's illegal technically.

So they just start making up vague complaints. Principals, even ones who were supportive like my last Principal, are reactive. If a parent comes to them to complain about a teacher, they're going to assume the teacher did something wrong and needs to be talked to. So the girl who found out I was a Hillary Clinton supporter suddenly decided I "made her uncomfortable" and "looked her weird." The great thing about these types of innuendos and character assaults is that you don't have to provide any real facts. It's all about how you just don't like that person. Remember that teachers are one of the few professions where you can actually be fired simply because the community doesn't like you.

So that fell flat because, like I said, my Principal was actually decent and understood how flimsy that was. So then, that girls boyfriend made a complaint about how I'd yelled at him in front of all the students. Unfortunately for him, this supposed incident happened while we were in a part of the school with cameras so it was obviously bullshit. However, parents calling in upset is still a big deal so I was told that I should try to be nicer to him in the future and win the parents over.

The point is that it's basically death by a thousand cuts from little gripes and exaggerated concerns. Another student flat-out lied and said I cussed them out in class. I know that some of this was actually instigated by a staff member who didn't like me. So they encourage students to complain about me. At one point, I know they actually set up a kid's parents to lodge a complaint against me. I know this because the language of the complaint was obviously written by them, and when I was having the parent conference, they actually stayed behind work (something they never did) and didn't leave our adjoining rooms until it was over. They apparently wanted to listen in and see how it went. This conservative teacher at various times: told me the wrong place for a meeting, got kids to say they would show up for an after school event and then not show up, convinced an entire group of students to quit a club I was sponsoring, spread rumors about me to parents.

I'm done

The final straw was covid. I tried to stick it out, but the day a kid told me he wasn't going to wear a mask because "Biden isn't the real President" was the point where I decided I was done. This came from teachers too. The biology teacher wore a mask below their nose. The staff refused to stop having potlucks throughout the entire pandemic. Some people can't be saved.

edit: I forgot to mention the English teacher I met while I was doing my student-teacher training. She was forcing her class to write essays on how Obama wasn't a real US Citizen. All throughout my teacher program, I'd been told over and over that you could get fired for talking politics in the classroom, and this bitch was literally forcing kids to write essays about how Obama was a secret Muslim. And nothing was done about it. She could get away with it because Arkansas is so white and racist. To put it into context, the county she was teaching in was 94% white and voted for Trump by 78% in 2020.

[its8simplejulesblog]

Ever Since I Can Remember

I have been surrounded by ridiculously independent, confident women. My mother was/is a chemist, my grandmother’s took charge of their households, my aunts are all working jobs that they love while simultaneously raising children. My research bosses are both women, my managers at Disney were often women, my economics professor (and hopefully future mentor) is a woman and so many of my favorite language professors were women. It’s easy to see why I am the way I am haha. I truly believe that these women have shaped me in immeasurable ways across all aspect of life. However, when I found Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir on our bookshelf, I was a little bit intimidated to learn what my fate would be as a woman but let me tell you I was not disappointed. 

Second Sex was written in the 1950s by feminist Simone De Beauvoir in France. It was roughly translated into English and is commonly referred to as required reading in both women studies and existentialism courses. The topics discussed follow womanhood through Destiny (biology), History, Myths, The Formative Years, Situation, Justifications, and Liberations. 

The Destiny section, in my humble opinion, was the most boring (although still necessary). It essentially delves into the differentiations between the male and female sex biologically as well as how these biological factors are often apparent in animals as well. I was very pleased with her writing because she truly did not sugar coat anything at all and her opinions were very minimal in comparison to fact. In that regard, De Beauvoir compares the obligations of the male and female in terms of perpetuating a species. As i’m sure you’ve all learned in an intro either history or biology class, the intents and purpose of the male are to protect while the purpose of the female is to maintain. The female is the passive vessel and the man is the active instigator. That’s just how it is. I found it interesting that she discusses that it was actually commonly believed that the male had less of an active role in sexual reproduction than we know now, meaning that many people thought the sperm weren’t even necessary for reproduction. Anyyyway, 

Historically accepted, these biological responsibilities contributed to what we’ve studied as the hunter-gatherer societies. It’s a biologically known fact that a higher percentage of a man’s body weight is attributed to muscle mass, therefore they were always out hunting. Women, on the other hand were left to their own devices at home. In fact, we know that the sole purpose of the woman at the time was to be a distraction for her husband. Her kids were often encouraged to “grow up” and “help out” but she was often doomed to a sedentary life. Not only that, but the nomads of patriarchal societies very seriously viewed women as sexual objects of pleasure, always giving and never taking. That’s why polyamorous relations were so common. They had no right to argue against at that point. There were some societies however, that had different views. In matriarchal societies the woman’s running of the household was more highly respected. The reasoning for this bleeds into the Myths section of the book. 

Since ancient civilizations and the creation of the domestic community, both myth and religion have attributed the characteristics of the woman to that of nature. A theme commonly referred back to in this book is that woman is immanence while man is transcendence. This means that the woman represents “the divine” she is nature and the uncontrollable. This is an interesting view because as a pipeline debate, this has been seen as both a good and bad thing. The woman can represent beauty in the form of mother nature, or inherent evil if she is left to her own devices, and will therefore resort to black magic and witchcraft. It’s kind of like...wait what? But at the time it made sense. Males, on the other-hand transcend the universe. They operate entirely outside of what is natural. If you think about it, in school we always talk about how the creation of the first tools of cavemen were so important because they represented a control over that which was previously unable to be controlled. In essence, that is what the man represents. The ability to lasso and reign the chaos of the universe. Woman, contrastingly, IS that chaos. She is emotional and flighty and confused. She doesn’t know if she should be proud of her womanhood or ashamed and that is all due to the psychology of the formative years. 

As a young girl, and I’ll be pretty blunt here, there is psychological debate about the concept of penis envy. What this means is that at a young age a young girl may see her brother..I don’t know...peeing in the woods or something and think “wait, why can’t I do that” and this is often subconscious in the sense that there is known to be internal dread and shame associated with not being able to see and control female genitalia as easily as males can. Along with this, puberty is like a slap in the face. We’re (females) are always encouraged and supported in “becoming a woman” but it’s a horribly inconvenient process. In fact, De Beauvoir even concludes that this stigma in a girl getting her period for the first time often leads to an inferiority complex because for the first time she tangibly recognizes her societal insubordination and passivity. Pessimistically said, she realizes that she will be a prisoner to her body for the rest of her life (yay!) This kind of confusion continues into adolescence where the entirety of a girls life (most of the time, not all of the time..of course there are exceptions) is spent thinking about catching the attention of some guy. This is ingrained in us whether we like it or not and god FORBID you grow too old for a guy to be attracted to you anymore before you get married..it’ll be seen as you abandoning your life’s purpose. 

There’s a section about sexual initiation that honestly made me a little bit sad. Mainly because it really drilled home the concept of passivity. There used to be such a huge stigma about sex and what it represents and a lot of that was often biologically incorrect anyway. For example, historically, if you have sex and a woman’s hymen breaks it means she was previously a virgin and there should be blood to prove this case. However, it’s been widely known in recent years that some women don’t even have a hymen or it broke doing some sort of remedial task like riding a bike and they don’t even realize it. In simple terms, it’s really not that deep haha. In some cultures, it can be though. There are cultures that actually PREFER that a woman has had sex multiple times before she gets married because it means that the husband will have a more enjoyable time with someone who is experienced rather than having to carefully operate. 

The stigma of the virgin was a big thing too. Naturally, this has a lot to do with religious preferences (but I guess in their eyes it’s obligation) to remain chaste until your wedding night. Personally, (not always) I think this can be a toxic mindset. When sex is viewed on a pedestal, a lot of women are unfamiliar with their bodies and often become frigid and afraid of having sex for the first time. And if I know anything it’s that in life there are so many times where body and mind operate in tandem. If you are afraid of something that you’re naturally created to do then there is a higher chance of your body rebelling against you (I should know lmao). 

Simone also talks about sexual preference, because even in the FIFTIES they knew that sex and gender and sexual preferences were all different things *ahem*. Anyway, a man is often viewed as superior due to their virile temperaments, which if you don’t know, means that they naturally are stronger, have more energy, and have a more dominate and regular sex drive. These are all things that very clearly are not biological in my eyes, meaning that women can adopt this temperament as well in the form of being more energetic and a more dominate and strong personality which often leads to becoming a lesbian. I don’t want to be too detailed about this topic because I don’t want to say anything ignorant, but a lot of it is related to how you were reared as a child. Determinants include either having a positive or negative relationships with your mother, having deep relationships with women mentors etc etc. She makes the claim that the opposite is true of homosexual men. There’s a lot going on there. I was pleased to see, however, that again, she was very factual and it was surprising to me that she did not exert as much of an opinion as I would have thought. She did, however, claim that sexual preference was a choice and in that regard I disagree. While temperament is SWAYED by environment, it is not entirely determined by such. In every scientific/psychological etc debate, nature and nurture are coexistent. You can’t pick and choose when that’s true and when it’s not. 

I could easily go on and on and on about this book. She talks about the origins of prostitution and what it means to be a mother and what happens to women when they mature etc, BUT, I must narrow the rest down because I’m getting tired :) 

A very interesting point to me was the concept of ego and narcissism in terms of romantic relationships. She says that in (heterosexual) relationships, the man is often looking to condition and mirror/ learn more about himself through the woman while the woman was subconsciously looking to validate herself through the affections of the man. Damn, that’s definitely a statement. I’ll be honest I was a little bit pissed because it felt like she was saying we have no coherent thoughts of our own when in reality what she was saying was that this is what the sexes are CONDITIONED for, and in every relationship I’m sure there is an ounce of truth to this. However, she also said that it’s important to adopt both tendencies if you want a functioning relationship. By this she means that the male, while recognizing the femininity of the woman must also allow her to become independent and transcend. She must be able to learn just as much about herself through her relationship with him as he does with her. In the same way, guys want to be validated too. For a lot of them, if they’re sincere and genuine then the validation of their lover or wife or whatever would be enough. That represents a sense of maturity that a lot of guys don’t have (that’s why their relationships don’t work). 

A big part of maintaining a relationship, in tandem with maturity levels, seem to be a sense of obligation. It’s likely that sex drive will die down and as the bodies of individuals deteriorate there are other things that keep couples together. Obviously it’s scary thinking about losing the novelty in a relationship and having someone get bored of you, but optimistically every day is a new day and if you’re going through it with someone you truly love then you shouldn’t get bored. In fact, the mundaneness of everyday life often brings people closer in the weirdest ways. 

I skipped a lot, but the last section is about a woman’s liberation. It’s about the balance between accepting her femininity and bracing a man’s world. It’s about being prepared to not be taken seriously, to be ignored, to constantly have to prove her worth in the business world. Again, I love how blunt Simone is. She really says that there is cause and reason for societal change, but don’t be naive...and she was so right. Considering the fact that it has been 70 years since this book was written and so many of her points still hold true is proof enough of her pragmatic way of analyzing the world. She said that it would be difficult for the intellectual woman to succeed because she would constantly be at odds between her goals and her womanly obligations. 

This sentiment bummed me out a little bit but when I read it again I realized that while she said it would be difficult, she never said it would be impossible ;) 

-Julia 

[toongrrl-blog]

The Mommy Myth: Threats from Within (Part One)

Okay time to see the Moms “gone bad” and other Moms who required a lot of empathy but only got vilified on the media or were given anxiety inducing media. 

This was the era of the tabloid show like A Current Affair and America’s Most Wanted, “the crack baby epidemic”, depraved maternal figures, teen moms, smothering mothers, Lifetime movies where shit goes wrong, surrogacy, and the news that no you cannot let your kids go walking to the park by themselves. The era of sensationalism made no care for maternal ambivalence nor for the nuances of individual mother’s lives, only for black and white. Heroes or villains. No grey area. 

The “deviant mothers” featured were vilified for being supposedly narcissist and self-indulgent, odd given that I previously covered celebrity moms. But the celeb mom is portrayed as self-indulgent and narcissist on behalf of her kids and everyone who looks at her. Throwing money on diets, spa treatments, workouts, beauty treatments, and clothes were “necessary” as it was so someone had something pretty to look at. But have needs or desires that had nothing to do with your family, you were so bad! 

Scene: Suburban New Jersey, 1985. Dr. Elizabeth and Mr. William Stern wanted a baby but Dr. Elizabeth Stern was in her late thirties and had multiple sclerosis and they went to the New York Infertility Institute and were approved for surrogacy and hooked up with Mary Beth Whitehead, a homemaker and high school dropout with two children and a husband who was a sanitation worker. As she said:

I don’t have an education. I don’t have a skill. The only skill I know I do well is being a mother.

A contract was signed where Mary Beth would be paid $10,000 upon the Sterns receiving the baby, where she’d be impregnated with William Stern’s sperm and the Sterns would pay her medical expenses and a $7,500 finders fee to the Institute. On March 27, 1986 Mary Beth gave birth to a baby she named Sara and she had a change of heart and decided to keep the baby. The Sterns wanted the baby and the judge awarded temporary custody to the Sterns, who named the baby Melissa. When William came to pick up Baby M, the Whiteheads bailed for Florida with the baby, leaving their two older kids with the grandparents there and lived on the run (BTW this is a perfect scenario for a movie, I think Raising Arizona was loosely inspired by this).

Mary Beth’s actions flew in the face of what “surrogate moms were supposed to do”, they were supposed to be like Elizabeth Kane in 1980 and kiss the baby goodbye to a more affluent life (Kane eventually testified on behalf of Mary Beth). Or get pregnant and give the baby away to your infertile sister or be like Glenn Close in The Big Chill where she let her single friend sleep with her husband so she can have a baby of her own. Like Susan J. Douglas and Meredith Michaels, I subscribe to Mo’Nique’s school of thought regarding your friends and your man (maybe the Smug Marrieds should watch this and think twice about flaunting their rings to Bridget Jones):

People had a lot of shit to say about the Baby M situation, it involved issues like classism and sexism, who deserved the baby? The woman who carried her for nine months but was lower middle class and married to the garbageman or the biochemist who donated the sperm and paid the money? The trial started in the New Jersey Superior Court on January 5, 1987 where Whitehead was hit with several old-fashioned stereotypes about women: they can’t make up their minds and they are hysterical. Gary N. Skoloff, attorney to the Sterns, went Maddy Perez like the Whiteheads were a pot of chili. Skoloff listed 35 reasons why Mary Beth shouldn’t get the kid, amongst them was her mental health and her marriage to the garbageman with a alky problem. Also Mr. Stern recorded a phone conversation with Mary Beth unbeknownst to her. She was frantic: the Sterns had a judge freeze her family’s assets (which included the home, furnishings inside, car, and bank accounts). The media didn’t hear that or report it but they did on the desperate Mary Beth saying “I’m going to do it Bill....I’m going to do it; you’ve pushed me to it...I gave her life. I can take her life away”. The subtext also that being under educated and working class were not factors in making a good parent.

Honestly if your assets were frozen by someone who had the means and connections, wouldn’t you be unhinged? I think that Mary Beth needed to be treated for postpartum psychological issues rather than reviled as “The Crazy Woman” and don’t we make the worst arguments, imagine if you appeared saying and doing dumb shit like Bridget Jones and it was played on TV? Also on the tapes she was recorded as saying “I’ve been breastfeeding her for four months. Don’t you think she’s bonded to me? Bill, I sleep in the same bed with her. She won’t even sleep by herself...she knows my smell, she knows who I am--don’t I count for anything?” The media didn’t show that. More judgments came as her background opened up: her husband is an alcoholic, she and her husband separated for a while and she was on welfare in the past, her son had school issues (imagine how many affluent parents have kids with that problem), daughter Tuesday had frostbite when the furnace broke down (I’m not hating, winter in the East Coast sounds rough), and they went to the slut-shaming route when they got Mary Beth to admit she worked as a “barroom dancer”. 

And now it got really nasty: she didn’t play patty cake right (!), took pots and pans away from the baby and gave her a stuffed panda (uh I don’t know what kind of pots and pans they were around but I’m Latina), she dyed her prematurely gray hair brown (oh the horrors!)...a word from Karen Wheeler for now:

All these made her not an ideal mother. Okay am I getting some pissed off women in this post? Unicorn colored haired girls? Bottle blondes? Fake redheads? Anyone covering the grey? Henna heads? Well soon feminists and celebs like Our Queen Meryl Streep, Gloria Steinem, Carly Simon (one of our reigning Ladies of shady breakup songs), Lois Gould, and Betty Friedan all issued a statement of solidarity with Mary Beth Whitehead reading “By these standards, we are all unfit mothers”.  Thank Jesus for this action of solidarity because the media was playing one of it’s favorite games: pit women against each other. Dr. Elizabeth and Mary Beth were represented as doctor vs. housewife, barren vs. fertile, educated vs. under educated; so far the media was on Dr. Elizabeth’s and her husband’s side, which was okay for her but while the media cut her slack for being a quiet ride-along who was professional and educated and “of the right class” she got away with things that the media wouldn’t be kind with. While the media covered Mary Beth’s deteriorating mental health, they didn’t cover her testimony which read like a list of things that would normally get moms judged:

She wasn’t going to cut back on her work because “I didn’t realize how much time is required to raise a child.”

She claimed she was the “psychological mother” and therefore the true mom.

Her husband’s testimony said they’d have the kid in full-time day care (probably a nice day care like the academy in Daddy Day Care).

Activities with Baby M were trips to Bloomingdales.

During a cross-examination, Dr. Stern said she wouldn’t want to see the baby if Mary Beth was awarded custody

So what of Mr. Stern? He was basically cosplaying Ted Wheeler.

And he said “Fathers have feeling, too” which made him appear like the victim to the public when he had the means and access to a lawyer who went savage on Mary Beth. On April 1st (haven’t you heard, irony is dead), Judge Harvey Sorkow awarded custody to the Stern family on grounds that they provide better care than Mary Beth could (or afford). Mary Beth Whitehead was denied visitation rights by the judge, enabled the Sterns to adopt Baby M who was officially named Melissa Stern. Later that month it got bittersweet for Mary Beth: she regained brief visitation rights but got divorced and she remarried and had two more children, which the Sterns’ lawyer said was proof of “her personality problems” (wow imagine if the Duggars were tarred with that brush) while she tried to fight for longer visits. The next year saw Sorkow’s ruling thrown out by the appeals court on grounds of condoning baby selling, the adoption invalidated, and Mary Beth’s standing as mother restored. She got visitation rights, years later Mary Beth and older daughter Tuesday went on Dr. Phil where they talked about the case. Tuesday said the case contributed to the divorce and the strain was too much for the late Mr. Whitehead, who died from cancer years before their appearance. Mary Beth said she wouldn’t recommend this and if she had the chance, she’d never do it again, being a surrogate mother. At that time, Melissa was 16 and according to Mary Beth their relationship wasn’t good and she did attend Tuesday’s wedding though but claimed the Sterns made it difficult for the two half-sisters to have a relationship. Then five years later, Melissa was a junior at George Washington University as a sorority member and religion major and found it strange when the case was brought up in her Bioethics class, she hoped to become a minister and a mother and at 18 she allowed the Sterns to fully adopt her, terminating Mary Beth’s rights. 

And those fixing their lips to say that the Sterns had more rights because they could afford a “good life” for her? I leave this for you to watch.

So the media savaged Mary Beth Whitehead, a working-class white mother who gave birth to a healthy and chubby baby, how did the media treat poor, drug-addicted black mothers and their “crack babies”? (TL;DR, it was bad, very bad, you know it’s bad bad really really bad!). 

Up next...and for all you moms dealing with the judgements from an unhelpful world, here are words from Lois Foutley

[randomthingsthatilike1]

me @ supergirl writers at least let this be an episode where kara reveals that her entire world died to maggie and have maggie reveal to kara that she was kicked out as a kid and have that be what turns the fucking pissing contest into a place of understanding because it’s different but both of them were in a way just “sent on their way” by their parents, possibly with nothing but the clothes on their backs and alex may have lost her father but she didn’t lose her mother, didn’t lose her home and she helped both of them heal so much, she’s their touchstone when everything is just too much

Especially since they had Maggie figure out Kara was Supergirl and never showed us Kara’s reaction to that either. And Kara’s not Clark--I’ve written before that Kara’s secret isn’t that she’s Supergirl. It’s that she’s not human, that when she was 13 years old she was strapped into a spaceship and jettison’d across the universe and spent over twenty years in a dream-like state, that she isn’t half human, or raised on Earth--any kind of human.

She has a completely different way of thinking, a different culture, that she is Kryptonian a survivor and a refugee, and there isn’t a day that goes by that she has to choose not to let her grief consume everything and swallow her whole and make sure everyone she’s ever met on earth even realize that she is anything but a “normal” human, that it even exists, even her friends--this is the secret she shares when she actually gets the choice to tell people she’s Supergirl.

Because at this point? I’m not sure Maggie really knows, or understands that--and that’s not Maggie’s fault. She can’t be expected to know if she’s never told.

Sure, she knows that Kara is Alex’s adopted sister, but does she know that Clark just left Kara at the Danver’s door, that Kara was supposed to take care of baby him at just 13 years but she got caught in the phantom zone and instead he had very little contact with her and abandoned her and made Alex, a teenager, do his job, even after Jeremiah died because they would not let them have Kara, how much Alex has spent of her life keeping Kara safe, that she lied to Kara for years about being in the DEO

How Kara was not born on Earth, that her parents didn’t escape and have her on Earth she was born and raised on Krypton, a completely different culture and religion and technology and mindset, how English isn’t Kara’s first language (hell it’s probably not even her first ten languages), that Kara was practically royalty on Krypton, that she was considered a genius among Kryptonians and the amount of effort and calculations she constantly goes through so that she doesn’t hurt anyone, or inflict any more property than absolutely necessary as Supergirl and how she doesn’t just go off willy-nilly doing whatever she wants without consequences--she calculates the speed which she can land without destroying everything, the proper angle and speed to catch someone without causing whiplash, how much Kara thinks, always, about what she is doing because she’s not clark, this isn’t something she’s dealt with her entire life, something that is just instinctive--it’s constant work for her.

Does Maggie Know Kara watched her world be consumed by flames and that Kara knows dozens of languages but there are no words to describe the sound of a planet as it dies, that Kara lost literally everything she’s ever known except for the clothes on her back and she will do anything to protect Alex , because for 10 years she hid her powers, because that was what she was told to do, that’s what would keep both herself and the Danvers safe, but losing Alex is above all unacceptable

Does she know that the reason Kara revealed herself to the world was because Alex was on that flight?

Does she know that the crest on Kara’s chest is not an S--that it is the crest of her house and means “el mayarah” --stronger together?

Does she know anything about Red Kryptonite? Maggie’s a cop--she definitely saw the aftermath but does she know that this wasn’t just Kara having a bad day this was Kara forcibly drugged, without literally any kind of control of her actions. Or what about Alura’s AI, how Kara is confronted by the phantom of her mother constantly but she just can’t seem to keep away (oh, Kara introducing Maggie to Alura’s AI) or hell, that the virus that killed so many of her friends at the bar was created by Kara’s father?

Does she know about the Black Mercy (both what Kara went through, and “I come back with my sister, or not at all“)?

Does she know about Rao?

Does she know about Non, and how Kara put the last of her people in stasis and sent them out to space?

Does she know that Kara hasn’t heard Kryptonian music since she was a child? (and if anyone could get a copy of such music, it’s probably maggie “i have alien friends and work in the ncpd science division” sawyer)

Does she know about Astra?

Or what the government did to her, and how she died (just reminder that they tortured her on US soil, in front of Kara’s eyes as she begged them not to, Alex having to pull her out of the room. Which yes, is very much against the Geneva Convention and anything that Maggie believes in as an honest cop)?

Does she know that Kara was fully willing to die to save everyone, and that she flew into space and that the only reason she didn’t is because alex went in a broken tin can and flew into space to get her back

because Kara being Supergirl isn’t her secret, not really--it’s that she’s Kryptonian. This is what Maggie won’t be able to guess on her own. This is what Kara would have to tell her, the conversations that they would need to have.

Basically, sure Maggie knows Kara is Supergirl, but does she know anything else? Does Maggie have any kind of idea they extent of Kara’s pain, her grief?

and maybe in season 1 I’d be able to see at least some of this, hell maybe even in early season 2, when we had conversations between kara and alex like how Clark abandoned her, or with Kara and J’onn about how alura and zor-el’s legacy is Kara, or Kara telling J’onn about the first time she let Eliza hug her (and god i miss them actually remembering that J’onn is a)a season regular and b) integral to Supergirl--both the show and the person we’ve talked about racism with James lmao what about J’onn)

but l o l that would require the writers have a better sense of object permanence of a baby and that’s not Supergirl anymore, and I’m in agony