#I’ve been trying to finish Dave but he’s not corporating with me

[wildemaven]

LAWKI Inspo

[thefandomlesbian]

WIP tag: thank you @scandinavian-punk for tagging me!!

Brace yourselves because I am about to word vomit on your screen—

(not including WIPs that are currently posted, since you can explore those at your leisure)

To Rule and Guide: The sequel to To Light and Guard, Lana and Mary Eunice go forward in their relationship, but they encounter hiccups along the way as old enemies rise, friends twist beyond recognition, and the church tries to call back the nun it released so recklessly.

Break Rank: John Laurens was shot down off of his horse and dragged away from the Battle of Combahee River, believed to be dead. A mutilated corpse was buried in his stead, but he awakens in a warm cabin to a middle-aged lesbian couple who nurse him back to health. Now disabled and with everyone believing he's dead, he has to try to make his way back up to New York, as there is only one person who will believe him.

Lead Me Astray: Spencer receives a diagnosis of malignant cancer behind his eyes, the first-line treatment being removal of both eyes. He quietly hands in his resignation to Strauss and earns a deal for medical retirement, and he intends to spend his remaining days setting things up to survive life alone as a blind man. However, when the team receives word of his decision to leave without telling any of them, Aaron hunts him down and demands answers. Convincing Spencer of his worth, both as a person and as a member of the BAU, is not easy, but it's necessary for the upcoming case they will face.

Like Minor Gods: Spencer lost a high-stakes bet with Derek. Now he's training for a triathlon. It's not exactly a fun time, seeing as his athleticism peaked when he was the basketball coach in high school, but with a little help from his unit chief, he may have a chance of crossing the finish line.

Shipwrecked Souls: After taking his leave from the BAU, Aaron struggles with Jack, who has developed increasingly concerning behavioral and psychological issues. Jack is riddled with anxiety and PTSD, and no matter what Aaron does to try to help, they wind up yelling at each other. Desperate for some help, he attends a seminar for parenting a troubled kid, where Spencer is surprisingly guest lecturing after earning his PhD in adolescent psychology. Aaron asks if Spencer will help tutor Jack—though Jack's failing grades are just the tip of the iceberg in regards to his current string of issues—and happily, Spencer agrees.

Singing While Rome Burns: After Foyet's escape from prison, Aaron has lost all of his coping skills. His family fell apart for his job, and he's apparently not even good at that anymore. He gets blackout drunk and wanders around lost in Rock Creek Park until he intends to call Rossi to come get him. Inadvertently, he calls Spencer instead. Spencer rescues him, and this act of mercy ignites a spark between them. But they walk a path ripe with trepidations, as Foyet is still on the move, Haley is busy settling the divorce, Strauss battles corporate challenges, and Spencer struggles to find where he fits in all of it with his new role in Aaron's life.

Spencer & Aaron: Dharma and Greg AU. Hotshot federal prosecutor Aaron Hotchner sees the most beautiful man he's ever met on the subway on his way to the office. He tries to go after him, but the doors slide closed, and he's left with a sense of longing—until he arrives at work to find the same man sitting on his desk. "You're Aaron Hotchner," he says. "You appeared in the Washington Post five months ago for putting away the Freeway Butcher. Your building security is weak. I was able to guess the passcode in two tries. I'm Spencer. I remember everything I read." On an impromptu first date, they recklessly decide to get married. On the days after, they bring together two incredibly different families and groups of friends, slowly teaching everyone that any relationship can work if there's enough love and compassion involved.

The Good Place: The Good Place AU. Corporate lawyer Aaron Hotchner was an asshole in life. In death, he awakens to find he's been placed in the Good Place by mistake. Partnered with his "soulmate," Spencer; a former nun, Emily, and her soulmate, Penelope; a spiritual vessel of knowledge, JJ; and two so-called angel-men, Dave and Derek, they find themselves dragged into a war which could challenge the very foundation the afterlife is built upon.

The Landscape After Cruelty: Spencer drives Aaron home from Quantico the day of Haley's death. Over the following days, he orchestrates everything from behind the scenes. He works with Jessica to care for Jack; he cooks meals for Aaron; he calls funeral homes to arrange services; he makes Aaron's appointments and then drags him to them by force. He makes himself indispensable. It only leaves Aaron wondering—why?

Insects in Amber: inspired by @ablogofthecriminalmindsvariety Whumptober prompt, infection. The team has split to handle two different cases. Spencer finds a breakthrough in the case he works with Aaron, but Garcia is busy with the rest of the team, so they go with no coordinates and no warning. When Aaron gets into combat with the unsub and they both fall down the stairs, the chamber doors seal behind them, trapping them inside. The unsub is dead, his neck broken in the fall, and Aaron's femur is protruding from his body where he landed. He's in an agonizing amount of pain, and Spencer knows the statistics for infection of an open fracture are bleak at best. No one knows where they are. They only have the hope that the team will find them soon—or else there will only be one of them to rescue.

Call Me Home: Cordelia Goode has finally escaped the oppressive home of her mother and has landed a job at the local animal rescue, Starfish, where she becomes fast friends with the quirky woman who works dog side, Misty. As shelter drama picks up, they learn together how difficult saving lives can really be.

Minor Bird: Acclaimed pianist, Misty Day, has decided to step away from her career and take an early retirement. Amateur Cordelia Goode wants to find out why. When her teacher makes arrangements for her to meet Misty in person, she learns that soon, Misty will not be able to perform any longer. In a crunch for time and desperate to learn more, Cordelia begs for Misty to teach her. In the process, they grow closer together than either of them ever dreamed.

The Sister Act: Lana Winters witnessed a horrible crime and has been placed in witness protection in an abbey for her own safety. She repeatedly butts heads with the Mother Superior, Jude, as she struggles to survive the trauma of what she witnessed. With the help of Sister Mary Eunice, she begins to appreciate the quiet spirituality of the place. But criminals are still pursuing her, eager to silence her before she can testify.

I've Got Your Demons (They're Crying Out for Love): Lana Winters aids Briarcliff in the exorcism of Sister Mary Eunice. Both are pregnant from crimes committed against them and against God. Lana places her son up for adoption; Mary Eunice's daughter is stolen from her, dumped on hospital steps with no note by Monsignor Howard who will not be held accountable for his actions. When Mary Eunice is well enough, she leaves Briarcliff with Lana, desperate to reconnect with her daughter, but it's years before they catch up to young Billie Dean Howard, and they find that demons still continue to touch them at every turn.

Autumn Hands: Audrey saved Shelby's life, but she couldn't save her mutilated vocal cords, permanently damaged by her attempt on her own life. All sorts of trials await them—criminal, medical, social—as they try to look past their fraught history and come together as the sole survivors of Roanoke.

On the Pyre, Before the Hearth: Lana Winters gets lost in the Louisiana swamp after she tries to find herself in the wilderness. There, she encounters a lonely hermit woman who has spent the past decade living in solitude and subsisting off the land. A flood forces her and Misty into one another's company for several days, but when it's time for Lana to leave, she finds she doesn't want to life with Misty ever again. Misty has her own secrets and reasons for hiding, unbeknownst to Lana, who writes and publishes about her experience in the hope of drawing Misty out of the woods. She has no idea the ramifications of her actions.

That... Should be everything 😳😬😐 I'm tagging @reidology @ablogofthecriminalmindsvariety @its-a-goode-day @honeyvenable and whoever else feels motivated to do it!

[dukeofriven]

Good In The World

I meant what I said with that extended LOTR quote being what the Epilogues are about - about there being good in the world, and it being worth fighting for. Given that I’ve been up to my neck reading Hussie commentary lately I feel like I’ve gotten a pretty strong grasp on what makes him tick - and who boy does this guy love stories about friendship, teamwork, and love, loves them so much he sometimes sounds like Téa Gardner about to lay down a friendship speech on Yu-Gi-Oh. So - while noting that the extent to which the epilogues are and are not Hussie’s work are even more muddled that usual in regards Homestuck - the take-away is this: everything went wrong, in both Meat and Candy, because everyone forgot that - that friendship, teamwork, and love is the only reason any of them survived. The Sburb survivors came to Earth-C as literal gods, beings of inordinate celebrity and power, and then didn’t work as hard as they should have to still be friends and family. We point to John as some kind of recluse but it quickly becomes clear that everyone stopped working at staying together. Karkat and Dave are as much shut-ins as John, stewing together in their own incapacity. Katkat’s self-loathing, so often a hilarious joke in Homestuck is - free of the immediate pressures of Sburb - shown to be intensely debilitating. It undermines him repeatedly in Meat, and requires incipit genocide in Candy to be set aside, costing him everything that mattered on a personal level. Dave made the mistake of many in his position before him, leaning too much on the first epiphany about trauma and not taking the care to continue down the path to further healing and reconciliation with the past. It leaves him desperately reaching for intimacies he too scared of to actually experience. Coupled with an abused kid’s terror of perpetuating harm he lies to Karkat and Jade both time and time again to try and save their feelings. Jade, so utterly fucked up by years of isolation and loneliness, and so endearingly, crushingly full of love makes all the wrong decisions in trying to build a triad (that is - the triad could have worked, but she went about it all wrong) and makes two separate instantiations of Dave and Karkat miserable. Rose and Kanaya have no malice in their actions, but they do what married people always do: pull away from everyone else, and focus on themselves and their new lives. Harmless, normally - or, at least, not seriously harmful - but those lives took them underground and away from everyone else, The two most insightful and level-headed members of the party simply weren’t around when everyone needed them most. Unaware how bad things were getting they missed so many of the warning sides that would have clued them in earlier that everyone was going off the rails - and being as isolated as she was in Meat this left Rose vulnerable to the manipulation most likely to succeed: just like with Doc Scratch she was preyed upon by someone who could flatter her sense of grievance, knowledge, and uniqueness. Terezi wouldn’t have stood by and let things go to shit - but she was doomed the moment she tied her heart to ego personified, and so was absent too.  As for the Alphas, well - their problems were never resolved in the first place, their 'conflict arcs’ interrupted by the arrival of the betas. Only Roxy, element of void, utterly self-contained, a refugee from a dead reality, walked onto Earth-C able to withstand the horror that awaited them: celebrity. Skaia is benevolent, but it is not wise: Sburb seems to have a cherub’s worldview, full of bright colours and heightened stories, but not much maturity. When the victors of Sburb escaped to Earth-C the last thing they needed was celebrity, praise, and positions of note. The issues are all laid out in the prologue: John retired before he ever started working, every one of them richer than any mortal could conceive of. These kids didn’t need parades, they needed to go school. Jane didn’t need honorary degrees from every business school on the planet, Jake didn’t need a TV show centred entirely around his ass: what everyone needed was to be aggressively ordinary. Mundane and unregarded. They needed to put everyone in a group home with four on-staff counselors and take a chunk of years doing nothing but heal. Because everyone was damaged. Other than Calliope - a special case - everybody walked out of Sburb having witnessed at least one apocalypse. Put aside any of the individual traumas and deaths and abuses and sins and just focus on that alone: the death of entire worlds and the burden of saving seven sentient species. Rather than the ultimate Reward being a sit-down with kindly professionals who could help a bunch of kids cope with that, these literal children entered a new world and built new lives on a foundation of dust. The beta kids never finished seventh grade. Jane Crocker never finished high school. Jade Harley, Jake English, Roxy Lalonde, and Dirk Strider never went to school at all. Not one of those four had ever been around more than four humans in their lives until the day they won the game. They couldn’t have. Jade and Jake grew up alone on islands. Roxy and Dirk grew up in the apocalypse. Dirk grew up in a literal box. As Cascade hit Dave and John were the only living humans Jade had ever met who wasn’t her grandpa: and she spent three years alone on a ship with only the Nannasprites and consorts for company. (And Jaspers to chase.) For those four especially, think about they went through within 24-hours: BAM here’s a group of people including your alt-relatives and literal aliens BAM here’s a crazy fucking battle against technicolour chess people, killer dogs, and fish queens BAM here’s a pristine new-ish world better BAM produce thousands of species to populate a new world /TABLE SCRATCH/ Welcome to Earth-C in the year 5000 Celebrity Gods. Here’s your debit cards full of riches. Seriously - this all happens in about a day. And yet people are shocked that things didn’t work out? They were sixteen years old. Four of them had no formal education of any kind, nor had ever been around enough to people to form a softball team. And that’s not even starting on the trolls, who had multiple culture-shocks and traumas of their own the sort through. And yet people are shocked that things didn’t work out? There is, absolutely, a way all of this could have been addressed and become a happy ending. If you don’t like the Epilogues because you’re just sick and fucking tired of tragedy stories - boy do I feel you. Man, don’t get me started on shit like Westword we will be here all week. If you just wanted there to be a fucking happy ending because god-damnit people deserve to be happy - I feel that too. Had that been what we got I can’t say that I’d have been displeased. But if you’re angry because what happened in the Epilogues seems “unreasonable”  all I can do is wave my arms at all the shit everybody went through and ask you why going from that to retired celebrity godhood was good for anyone. What happened on Earth-C was nobody’s fault - not even Dirk’s. Of course he lost it. Of course he took his godhood to its logical conclusions - what possible grounding in real human beings had he ever seriously had, and what in his life was there to make him see people as people? Dude grew up alone in a box with SBAHJ and rapping robots for company - the only voice in his head his own, magnified in the echo chamber of ego and his own blindness to his inadequacies.  Why wouldn’t Jane cling to status quo of her dead world? Really, what did Sburb ever bring her but heartbreak, an excessively baroque Bad Relationship Simulator that took away her home and her position as a corporate heiress for a six month romp through a bunch of dead planets and inter-friend squabbling (We don’t talk about how fucking boring the alpha session was: nothing but undead and emptiness.) She reaches a new world, gets told how smart she is, gets a bunch of degrees - but as Dave himself notes, when you’re rich as can be and have everyone on the planet lining up to do business with you, it’s pretty easy to think you’re actually skilled at running things, especially if YOU STOPPED YOUR EDUCATION AT SIXTEEN AND GOT TOLD THAT YOUR SIXTEEN YEAR OLD SELF WAS THE APEX OF YOUR BEING. Take a moment to remember yourself at sixteen. Try to put sixteen year old you in charge of something meaningfully important - like, mmh, let’s say a regional bank. Uh - oh. Oh dear. Oh it’s on fire, is it? And the fire is spreading? Yeah, that’ll happen. [One glaring issue I’ll note in these epilogues is that nobody knows what the fuck to do about Dad Crocker, so they do... nothing, until Candy reminds you he exists in order to kill him to motivate Jane to do something she probably could have been easily prompted to do anyways by another means. I guess Dad Crocker just... happily let Jane not finish school or exert any kind of parental control at all after that point? On her or anybody else? You want to talk about OOC: what the fuck happened with Dad Crocker, of whom I expected better? And where did Tavrosprite and the Nannasprites go?] My point in all this is that Homestuck is a story about how important love, teamwork, and friendship is, and after the Earth-C victory everybody got lost. Everybody reacted to being Celebrity Gods in their own way, and it created little cracks that widened over time, and when everyone should have been coming closer together - group therapy sessions, even - they got further and farther apart. These emotionally-stunted mentally-teenaged kids with buckets of trauma, the power of gods, and the celebrity to match broke. One by one. All in their own unique ways. The Epilogues are in some sense a musing on the absurdity of adulthood - how its mantel is placed upon you regardless of whether you are ready or not, for reasons as arbitrary as ‘turning a certain age’ or ‘winning a video game.’ In some cases it takes our heroes DECADES of life before adulthood - before real maturity - begins to make something of an appearance, and even then it’s a crapshoot. Love, friendship, and teamwork are what matter in Homestuck: in the epilogues it takes years of monumentally boneheaded decisions for our heroes to remember this, and some of them never do.

Is there still a happy ending at the end of Homestuck? One that lies ahead? I think so. Hussies loves his characters dearly - and yes, he does. Of course he does. He didn’t spend ten years of his life telling the story of one dimensional Brechtian Archetypes to make some otiose point about the nature of narrative: if he had none of you would be feeling as you are now.  The difference between you and Andrew Hussie is that you see his characters like family: you leap to their defence whenever they are hurt, and when they are cut you bleed: “How?” you ask, “Could anyone be so cruel to do this thing?” But Hussie sees his characters as characters, in a story of which he is author, and in which pain and hurt and tragedy can be the vehicles through which good stories can be told: that the light is made all the brighter because of the quantity and quality of darkness that was banished. Candy and Meat are the story of a boy who can only destroy love because he thinks he understands it, and lashes-out when things don’t go as planned. Dirk is just as much the villain in Candy as in Meat, as Calliope makes very clear: the Candyverse is in some sense defined, or at least made more distinct, by his absence. He is a tragic figure on the macro scale - if only he and all the walking wounded of Sburb had been given help when they needed it - but his death in Candy is not a tragedy of ‘what ifs,’ it’s an act of petulance and cruelty by a kid who’ll take his ball and go home if he’s not allowed to play the winning game. His death destabilizes the Candyverse far more than John’s choice to stay, its just that its corrosive effects take longer to be obvious - and the gears he’d already set in motion didn’t cease to turn, though they may have slowed. Dirk destroys love, his effect on both timelines is to push people apart because division suits him, and to push his own view of what ‘love’ is on people who experience it far more expansively than he could ever imagine. He’s a sad little boy who grew up in alone in a box and entered a world that told him he was a literal god with the powers to match - by the end of Meat it’s clear that love, friendship, and teamwork mean nothing to him, only the perfect order of his own fevered imagination. What will bring him down in the end is the reclamation of that feeling at the end of Act 7 - the joy of victory, of having worked together, of the love of family both found and familial, and of the realization that they were none of them better apart. And then some therapists. Some actual therapists. For a good long time. (Also I hope that they find Doc Scratch and beat his sorry ass from here to eternity because that smug fuck has his puppety fingertips all over this thing, and if Dirk really is merging with his ultimate self that includes (as @geekycalligrapher noted) aspects that wound up in Lord English, including a not insignificant portion of one Doctor Vanilla Milkshake, Esq.) (Edit: I did, in fact, do a few edits when I noticed the opening sentences were missing things like ‘the subject.’)

[kanyniablue]

fic writer tag meme

i was almost finished when i lost this post TWICE!!! TWICE

tagged by america-oreosandkitkats, which tumblr is not letting me @ !  i love new updated tumblr!  it’s my favorite!

AO3 name: kat_blue, however i haven’t actually uploaded anything.  it was #newyearsresolution2020 to start uploading some writing, just to say “i’m D O N E im not going to touch it again” but...2020 got in the way

Fandoms: overwhelmingly hetalia where i set up camp back in 2010-2011 and never moved on, harry potter but only in headcanons/crossovers, Discworld but don’t test me, uh, The Outsiders, yes that book we read in middle school, Coco (2017) because im a corporate sellout

Tropes: 30 AU Pileup, Historical AU, 20 Minutes into the Past/Future, Gen, Enemies-to-Lovers, Friends-to-Lovers, Hookup-to-Something-More, Enemies-to-Lovers-But-They’re-Still Enemies, Unhealthy/Codependent Relationship (romantic, platonic, familial...), Breakup Fic, For Want of a Nail, Everyone’s Dead Dave/Tragic End, Postcredits Scene/whatever you’d call it when you write what would happen after canon says “the end,” Character Study (not sure if that’s a trope but it’s mostly what I write)

Number of fics: ...a bunch.  i write in several documents, some of which are inaccessable to me because of a computer crash.  i honestly have no idea

Fic I spent the most time on: considering it’s not even finished, Sun Down (WWI Prussia that was supposed to be PruHun but turned into an extended character study/war novel/just torturing the guy but he kind of deserves it) has been limping along for 2+ years...although mostly nowadays I just poke at it occasionally

Fic I spent the least time on: i have no idea, i’ve got a bad habit of coming back to a “finished” fic months or even years later and messing with it.  Maybe The Witch Dreaming, a weird little Nyo!EnglandxGreece fic that needed more notes explaining what it was about than it had actual words.  it was one of those *sudden inspiration* *scribble scribble scribble* “wait, what the fuck is this?” fics

Longest fic: Brother, Can You Spare a Dime (RusAme domestic fluff & death threats in the Great Depression/Stalinist USSR, burns so slow they barely manage to kiss right before WWII breaks out, ends badly) clocks in at roughly 21K and it’s not even half finished.  technically my main WIP but i don’t focus

Shortest fic: The World in the Palm of Your Hand, a tiny little Revolution!America character study, 147 words including its entire title?  i know i used to write drabbles & flashfics but that document is...problematic right now

Most hits/Most kudos/Most comment threads/Most bookmarks: yeaaaah, about that...see “haven’t uploaded anything.”  i think i uploaded a couple of fics to tumblr, possibly an old account, but if i did nobody ever read ‘em

Total word count: eeesh, probably at least 150K if we’re counting everything

Favorite fic I wrote: it changes but im still fond of Skin, a bunch of little spamano...vignettes? that i started back around 2014 and still enjoy, which isn’t something i say about a lot of my old writing

Fic you want to rewrite/expand on: ...all of them.  if i have to choose probably Take the Long Way Home, a partially-finished NorwayxSouth Italy Human!ExchangeStudent!AU that i used to love back in its day of ~2012-2014 but now is very...dusty.  writing style changed a lot from what it was back then, lots of “new to the fandom” tropes, lots of “real humans don’t act like this it’s just more dramatic” plot holes...i could do a lot with rewriting it, i just generally work on more recent things and i leave it fossilized and occasionally say “but what if”

Share a bit of a WIP or a story idea you’re planning on:  

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime:  What was supposed to happen was that they’d be met by the secret police at the train station, and U.S. Personification Alfred Jones would be arrested as a foreign spy.

What actually happened was that after giving up at the train station, one of Ivan’s bosses’ secretaries met them at the front of Ivan’s office building, where he waited and kicked his heel against the wall because he couldn’t light a cigarette without dropping America’s wrist and no amount of exasperated sighs from America was going to convince him it was safe to do so, and when the human secretary did get out there all he said was, “The police aren’t coming.”

Ivan closed his eyes.  “Why are the police not coming?”

“They say you seem like you’ve got it handled, Comrade Braginsky,” said the secretary.

“How am I supposed to handle him?” Ivan said through his teeth, waving America’s arm, “Keep a grip on him like he’s a child until they feel fit to interrogate him?”

<<Hi,>> said America sardonically.

The secretary pressed his lips thin.  “I don’t know, comrade.”

“He’s an American spy!”

“I am not being spy!” America said.  “Not!”

The human looked between them, then said to Russia, “I don’t know what else to tell you, Comrade Braginsky.  I don’t have the authority to override the chief of police.”

Slowly, Russia rubbed his eyes.  “...I know, comrade.  Very well.  Take down a message for me, will you?”

Russia’s bosses received a note, in lieu of Russia returning to work as he’d planned:  Have in custody suspected American spy, name of ALFRED JONES (note English spelling).  Contact American consulate as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, Russia would take America to the only place he knew he could keep an eye on the foreign nation.

--

[and then they were roommates.  I don’t know nearly enough about Soviet Russia to depict it with any amount of accuracy but I’m writing gay country anime boys, this isn’t the place to look for a documentary.]

i know a lot of people who follow me write fanfiction so if you do and you see this, you’re tagged!  let’s try to tag people who i know write:  @gothicmagpie @knowledgequeenabc @convenientalias uhh I don’t know how many of my other followers are both active & writers

[force-dyad]

“Try for Some Remorse” A Look At Palpatine’s Role In Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

It has been said by many, including the creator: George Lucas that Star Wars is a children’s story. Star Wars largely encompasses themes of forgiveness, redemption, compassion, and hope. Dave Filoni himself has stated that “There’s a redemption for most characters– if not all characters– in Star Wars films and there’s an arc and a path to when they let go and stop being selfish.” This is an important read to have on the Star Wars franchise when going into The Rise of Skywalker because we can assume that Kylo Ren, the wayward son of Han and Leia, is on a path towards redemption. He and Rey are set to right the wrongs of the generations that came before them. My personal read of the story makes me think that we will get a happy ending where Ben Solo comes back to the light and his family. I believe he will be forgiven and given a chance at his new life, a life that Anakin was never able to live. So where does Palpatine’s ending fall in all of this?

Palpatine. Sheev Palpatine (as was revealed in the 2014 novel, Tarkin by James Luceno) is not a sympathetic character. He is probably one of the only characters that the majority of the fandom agrees will need to go in order for the Skywalker family (and the galaxy alike) to live in peace. His selfishness and need for power is Voldemort like in that actual human life is expendable to him. He only cares about one thing: gaining the most power. In the Rebels episode, “A World Between Worlds” it is revealed that whoever controls the world between worlds will control the very universe. In that same episode, our heroes, Ezra and Ahsoka, just nearly escape Palpatine in his quest to access the portal. This episode just reinforces how knowledgeable Palpatine is in terms of the machinations of the force, and highlights what his final game plan will be. Now that we know that he is back, corporeal or not, we can assume that he will attempt to use Rey and Kylo, to access this portal, given the magnitude of importance that the portal holds.

So we can assume that Palpatine will assuredly be back to his schemes of trying to control the Skywalker (Kylo) in order to control the Universe, given his track record of controlling the Skywalker (Vader) to control the Universe (badumtss). But I think he will have a different end than the one in Return of the Jedi. Darth Vader finally “murders” his master at the end of ROTJ, but The Rise of Skywalker trailer including his laugh at the end emphasizes that whatever happened in Episode VI was not enough to truly get rid of the phantom menace. According to George Lucas, the Sith cannot come back as force ghosts, so I don’t think that is how Palpatine will return. I can’t pretend to know how he’ll return, but I’m just crossing the force ghost option out due to the rules imposed by Lucas (though I realize that they can change at any time, but since a lot of the current Lucasfilm team worked under Lucas, I believe they’ll want to respect his vision). Whatever form of Palpatine that Kylo, Rey, and the resistance go up against will have to be defeated in a way that has not been attempted before. The traditional “final battle” will have to be subverted in order for Palpatine’s destruction to feel believable. If a murder is the simple solution to destroying Palpatine, the ultimate villain, then why was the sequel trilogy even made? According to Kathleen Kennedy, Palpatine was always a part of the plan, and I believe her, but like I’ve said, they’ll have to do something different. Before The Force Awakens came out, Kathleen Kennedy gave a quote “I think we can’t explore in quite as much detail issues of compassion, the way [Lucas] did in terms of the values of the Jedi. But we’re going to get there, let’s put it that way. In the arc of all three movies, that will increase.”

In Return of the Jedi, we see Darth Sidious egging Luke on as he fights his father, Darth Vader. Darth Sidious encourages Luke to embrace the anger inside of his heart, “Your hate has made you powerful, let the hate flow through you, and your transformation to the dark side will be complete” he goads Luke on to embrace his feelings of hatred, and anger to embrace the power of the dark side so that Luke could defeat Vader, but the true lesson that one must learn is that fighting is not the way to defeat your enemy. Rose Tico sums up all of Star Wars in The Last Jedi when she tells Finn: “That’s how we’re going to win. Not fighting what we hate. Saving what we love.” Luke proves to be the walking embodiment of that quote once again when he faces off against his nephew, Kylo Ren. Luke has blame to share with regards to Ben’s fall, and though he knows that he can not save him, he still goes to confront him to help save his family and the resistance. Since he is a force projection, he cannot use any offensive tactics against Kylo, nor can Kylo hurt him in any way. He bides time for the resistance to escape, while ensuring that his nephew does not kill off the resistance. Ultimately, Luke chose not to fight two times: against his father, and against his nephew. I think letting go of negative emotions and doing anything possible to protect people is the true way towards balance. Kylo Ren is not at that part of his journey (yet), but I think he is on his journey towards letting go. While Luke and Kylo’s confrontation on Crait was about saving the resistance on the surface level, I believe that the color of the salt going from white to red back to white during the course of their confrontation is symbolic of healing wounds, both Ben and Luke’s. While it’s not a light sided emotion to have anger, it is healthy to confront it. Maybe not in the way Kylo has done so far, but I believe that he’s on the journey towards letting go of his anger, resentment, and hatred.

This is where I believe the final confrontation comes in. Like I said, I think it would be too much of a retread if Kylo and Rey confronted Palpatine and it ended in Palpatine getting the chop via Lightsaber. The Last Jedi already showed us this through Snoke. Snoke tried to have Kylo kill Rey, but Kylo, in a grab for power and to save Rey alike, killed him with the Skywalker saber. Now will The Rise of Skywalker give us the same ending for the biggest bad of them all? I don’t think so because murder is inherently evil. In an interview with Bill Moyers, George Lucas said “…everybody has the choice of being a hero or not being a hero every day of their lives. And you can either help somebody, you can be compassionate toward people, or you can treat some people with dignity or not. And one way you become a hero, and the other way, you’re part of the problem.”

And the other way, you’re part of the problem. I believe that redemption for Ben Solo is inevitable, and I believe he will live and strive towards being a balanced individual for the rest of his life. That being said, I think that when he and Rey finally confront Palpatine, it’ll take a different route than Vader pushing Sidious down the reactor shaft. I do believe that Ben Solo will definitely resent Palpatine for all that has happened to his family because of his influence, but I think that it will end differently. Vader had to deal with years of Palpatine belittling him. From what we know, Kylo already had that type of relationship with a “master” aka Snoke and he already murdered him.

One of the reasons why murdering Palpatine will not work is because we have seen skilled force users such as Yoda, Mace Windu, and Anakin fight him (or throw him down a shaft), but he has gotten away each time. (I mean, maybe he won’t be in his old body in TROS, but I believe he, or maybe his soul, must have escaped somehow.) An ending where Palpatine is destroyed in the same way as ROTJ will lead to many questions for Disney like “So this is not the end of the timeline for the Skywalkers since Palpatine will probably be able to come back, right?” They have to figure out a way where the death of Palpatine will be believable and true to the message of hope and choosing the light, so that people don’t question it. (Remember: If you don’t see what happens to the body, anything is possible.)

This leads me into talking about how I think he will be defeated… Through compassion. Now you may be asking yourself: what? And trust me, I understand the hesitation…Sheev “Darth Sidious” Palpatine is probably the closest thing we get to the devil in the story.  J.J. Abrams referred to him as the ultimate evil. But there are many examples in children’s media that help inform how the end of the Skywalker Saga could go. Children’s media tries to teach us that murder is not the way to finish the evil. Specifically I want to talk about Voldermort and Lord Ozai from Harry Potter and Avatar: The Last Airbender, respectively.

In Harry Potter, Voldemort is the ultimate evil. He is He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. He’s someone that does not care about the humanity around him. He kills Harry Potter’s parents and attempts to murder Harry Potter, which is his ultimate downfall. In Harry Potter, there is a prophecy that says that someone will kill Voldemort but that “neither could live while the other survives,” but like all great stories, prophecies are not truly activated until someone seeks to prevent their fate. This ultimately leads to his defeat; but his defeat wasn’t as simple as Harry shooting the killing curse at him. During the final confrontation, Harry uses a disarming spell (basically a defensive mechanism). Harry tries to appeal to Voldemort’s humanity.“It’s your one last chance,” said Harry, “and it’s all you’ve got left… I’ve seen what you’ll be otherwise… Be a man… try… Try for some remorse…” Even through all the pain and horror and destruction that Voldemort has caused Harry Potter’s life, he still tries to appeal to Voldemort / Tom Riddle’s humanity, much like Dumbledore, who always called Voldemort by his given name. Appealing to his humanity is appealing to what Voldemort hates the most, as his number one fear is mortality and losing his power. Sound familiar? A Sith lives without love because they reject any emotion that will bring them closer to the light. A famous Dumbledore quote is: “Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all, those who live without love.” Pity: “the feeling of sorrow and compassion caused by the suffering and misfortunes of others.” Voldemort’s end is ultimately due to his own hubris and misunderstanding of wand lore. His own hubris brought him down, not Harry.

Another similar scenario is Avatar Aang in the series Avatar: The Last Airbender In this story, Aang must defeat the evil Fire Lord who has seeks to conquer through destruction. The previous Avatars all tell him that he must kill Ozai to bring an end to the war, but still Aang cannot. Avatar Aang is an air nomad who has been taught to respect all life, so the act of murder is something that he cannot come to terms with. When Aang finally confronts Ozai, he reiterates that they do not have to fight and goes on to use defensive moves against Ozai, avoiding the fire bender. It isn’t until he reaches his Avatar State (aka all the avatars join forces and he becomes all powerful) that he starts using brute force, but before he strikes the killing blow, Aang returns to his own body and stops it. In order to stop Ozai, Aang takes away his bending power, leaving him powerless.

Both of these methods have brought in complaints from fans. Why wasn’t this ultimate evil power attacked by the main protagonist? People found the final battle in Harry Potter to be anti-climactic since Harry uses his signature spell of expelliarmus, something that everyone from his peers to the Death Eaters (Voldemort’s followers) criticize and call him weak for using. With Avatar, it’s the same argument: where’s the death? But I put forth that these people should not be looking for destructive mechanisms in a children’s story. Those methods are always painted in bad light. We might think that that will be the true way to get rid of evil in the world, but as adults, we see things differently than children. One of the reasons why evil prevails is because of lack of empathy and compassion. It is foolish to say that evil will be defeated completely through showing those things towards evil people, but that’s the only way to defend the light.

I think Ben Solo showing compassion towards Palpatine is not at all about Palpatine getting a redemption arc. I think the only way for Kylo to truly heal is to let go of any and all anger. I would even go as far as saying that he will forgive Palpatine. Not because he deserves forgiveness or because of any true feelings of fondness towards him, but because letting go of the resentment and anger and grief that Palpatine has caused is the only way to truly move on. Kylo holding a grudge or attacking Palpatine in anger will not fix the force. I believe that through showing Palpatine some kind of compassion, Palpatine will go on a self-destructive path. This way, we’ll have a different way of defeating evil that ultimately shows us the reason why the sequel trilogy had to exist to fix the Skywalker story. It also shows us that we must choose the light in as many situations as possible and let go. The key to a happy life is being able to let go: of fear, of anger, and the negative emotions that led to two Skywalkers falling to the dark side.

Thanks for reading! And of course, thanks to BlindManBaldwin for posting the original post about Sheev’s role in IX + Compassion and for talking through this with me! Check out my podcast on it on Soundcloud, or wherever you find podcasts!

[theseerasures]

Conspicuous Media Consumption, 2019

i mean, everyone's doing these write-ups, right? might as well hop onto the bandwagon

towards the end of last year i had one of my typical existential crises about my media consumption: am i slowly disappearing up my own ass because i no longer care about most of the pop culture people like to discuss ad nauseam? but on the other hand, isn’t it more responsible to find the niche items made by non-mainstream and marginalized creators? on the third hand, wouldn’t i be much happier if i just watched FMA Brotherhood over and over again, preferably while starting a new Mass Effect playthrough at the same time?

the answer to all these questions is probably “yes,” but i decided to try something different going into 2019. for every week of the year, i would try to get through a year’s worth of content for some kind of media, be it comics, video games, TV, etc--they didn’t all have to be recent, or even new to me, but once i was done with that week i’d be done, even if i didn’t finish the content, and i’d make a judgement based what i’d seen on whether i want to continue. mostly, i was trying to avoid what happened to me with video games in 2018, when i was hating every second of playing Uncharted but still felt obligated to finish because everyone and their houseplant liked Uncharted or listlessly doing the Master Hunter achievement in RDR2 because the main quest made me miserable.

the actual outcomes of this Project(tm) are a little more complicated than anticipated--some media i could finish in a day, while trying to play through ALL THE CONTENT OF AN MMO understandably took much longer than a week--but it all kind of evened out. in the end i did 48 weeks of this, and used December as my catch-ups month to follow up on some things i didn’t get to finish. i thought i’d give my thoughts on each of the things i consumed this year as part of this project below in a concise manner--and yes, i know the people who’ve read even one (1) thing i’ve written are probably laughing right now, particularly given how long i took in this introduction just to get to me point, but i really am going to try!! it’s all an exercise in shameless self-indulgence, basically, but hey: if any of you want to chat at length about any of this stuff below, hit me up.

(quick note: you’ll only find media that i chose for this particular project below, so things i watched socially with friends--like certain film properties slorping me back into Disney’s gelatinous monolith--are not included)

Devilman Crybaby (anime, finished 1/5/2019): honestly i should have twigged onto what the year was going to be like when the first thing i drew from the metaphorical barrel was demon tiddies and apocalyptic existentialism. i was determined to dislike it for most of the year due to fundamentally disagreeing with its main thematic thrust, but i kept THINKING about it even months after. at this point i’ve kinda mellowed out. it’s definitely not a must love, but there’s enough queer metaphor and philosophical richness in it to make it worth checking out.

Attack on Titan (manga, 3 volumes finished 1/12/2019): this is the second time i’ve tried to get into this franchise and...yeah, no. i still don’t see the appeal. the fascistic overtones juxtaposed with absolutely no one having a sense of humor wigs me out to no end.

Young Justice (TV, 2.5 seasons finished 1/31/2019): honestly, what even is there to say? they’re my kids. they’re back and grown up and making even more terrible decisions. i screamed when i saw Babs in her wheelchair.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf (book, finished 2/10/2019): i tried VERY HARD to like this book, given how much i liked Brief History of Seven Killings, but it just...didn’t click for me. which honestly is fine, since i don’t think it was made for me either.

Dragon Age (3 games, finished 2/28/2019): i feel like there’s always a part of me that’s going to think of this series as “the other one,” but y’know. it’s good. it’s my second playthrough (as a mage for all three) and it’s good! i even went around killing all the dragons in Inquisition because Knight Enchanter was a blast. appreciate the higher queer content vis-a-vis Mass Effect, even though i couldn’t care less about any of the plot. Dragon Age II is the best one, do not @ me

Bitter Root (comic, 4 issues finished 3/1/2019): i love intergenerational dramas and i love stories about vampire slayers, so this was aces. my only complaint is the pacing was a little slow for a story that was going on hiatus after five issues.

Pearl (comic, 6 issues finished 3/3/2019): i know that he’s done great things and grudgingly admit that he’s probably a net positive in the industry but Brian Michael Bendis can suck my entire dick

Lazarus (comic, 5 trades finished 3/ 4/2019): i really thought this was going to clench the position for comic of the year. it’s Rucka doing Highly Relevant Dystopia! it’s a corporate Lannisters AU! it’s a highly personal story about a woman with high privilege and little agency! what more could you want

Immortal Hulk (comic, 2 trades finished 3/ 4/2019): i vibed with the horror feel, but i don’t honestly think it’s THAT exceptional. being set in 616-verse means there was still ton of baggage i didn’t know or care about, since i’ve now swung more to the DC side of things

thank u, next (album, finished 3/5/2019): didn’t Ariana Grande get canceled this year for some reason? oh well, i liked her album

When I Get Home (album, finished 3/13/2019): i vividly remember listening to this for the first time and feeling vaguely disappointed that it wasn’t more like Seat at the Table until i realized that i was covered in goosebumps. still don’t understand the magic but it is Good

The Bird King (book, finished 3/23/2019): pretty much everything you’d expect from a G. Willow Wilson book--spirituality, the female lead finding Themselves and the Answer and learning they’re the same thing, etc etc. i’m slightly resentful that her Wonder Woman was so lackluster while this was so good, but whatevs

Psychodrama (album, finished 3/29/2019): possibly my favorite album of the year? dense and emotionally raw in a way i really appreciate. Dave has a Mercury and he’s younger than me

Mass Effect (4 games, finished 4/7/2019): wow guys did you know that Mass Effect is good! it is. all of it is actually, even the Mass Effect 3 ending, another controversial finale to a big franchise that i will obstinately defend. even Andromeda, which isn’t AS good as the trilogy but still has a lot of heart. all its bugs have been exhaustively patched since launch anyway

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV, 4 seasons finished 5/13/2019): i’m...still kind of mad about this finale, but can’t exactly deny that this show is one of the best things to ever happen to me, or television probably. i didn’t even mind new!Greg that much! tho he was probably the nail on the coffin of me jumping onto the Nathaniel train.

Knights of the Old Republic/The Old Republic (3 games, finished 7/4/2019): did you guys know that KOTOR II was my first ever video game? i feel like that...explains a lot about me. anyway, the first game is a classic and the second is a deconstructive classic and playing either of them is basically a fun way for me to turn off my brain these days. even the MMO wasn’t as much of slog as i worried it would be. the Imperial Agent storyline had some nice surprises and i dig the general atmosphere of ruthless pragmatism and crushing loneliness.

Wanderers (book, finished 7/13/2019): Chuck Wendig is a very well-intentioned man in dire need of a strict editor. still good tho! some VERY punchy emotional bits and an ending that still leaves me with vague existential terror.

Code Geass (anime, 2 seasons finished 7/20/2019): i feel like this is on the polar opposite of the spectrum as Devilman Crybaby, because i don’t think Geass is GOOD on like, any basis, and i actually find its central moral message kind of abhorrent? but some part of my lizard brain LOVED the High Imperial Family Drama (it’s been a good year for me and Lannister types, hasn’t it? well, with the obvious exception of--never mind), so...yeah. have i discovered the true meaning of guilty pleasure

The Farewell (movie, finished 7/23/2019): how could i not a) watch this and b) love this and c) feel emotionally cold towards this at the same time because the situations depicted were so similar to mine that i ended up feeling kind of alienated

The Nickel Boys (book, finished 8/8/2019): i STILL haven’t read Underground Railroad, but here i am a book late and a dollar short to appreciate Whitehead’s new book. the man’s stylistic versatility is jaw-dropping and i appreciate the plotting in contrast to like, 90% of the litfic out there that’s just “protagonist sad in different milieu”

Durarara (anime, 2 seasons finished 8/31/2019): it’s fucking bonkers and i loved pretty much every second of it? even the second season, where i finally got the BruceNat AU i deserved??? the first anime i’ve seen where everyone was relatively soberly dressed. the answer was love and having feelings and asking your middle school best friend to hurl you like a projectile so you can chop your girlfriend’s head off with a demon katana

Lover (album, finished 9/1/2019): i feel like with all the Discourse surrounding Taylor Swift re: she’s the devil incarnate or re: she’s good, actually the fact that she makes fucking bops gets kind of lost in the conversation. i have no vested interest in her as a person but i liked Lover, even though London Boy was “what if Style but stupid”

Are You Listening (comic, finished 10/2/2019): my actual choice for best comic of the year if i were giving out awards like that. it’s coming of age! it’s grief! it’s queers! it’s trauma! it’s magical realism! it’s cats! it’s expressive gorgeous art! Tillie Walden has an Eisner and she’s younger than me

High School DxD (manga, 2 volumes finished 10/10/2019): i don’t even know how to talk about this series?? i actually kind of came around to the whole “main character is a perv but goes hard for consent” by the end of the second volume, but it’s still...bad. i only can have lingering conflicted feelings about one Japanese adaptation of Christian mythology per year

Ghosteen (album, finished 10/18/2019): much like Immortal Hulk i thought it was fine but over-hyped. it’s Nick Cave doing his Nick Cave ethereal music thing. i still can’t tell what any of the lyrics mean, except Jesus is there sometimes

Watchmen (TV, 2 episodes finished 10/29/2019): i am nOT FUCKING CAUGHT UP so please watch out for spoilers. it is on my high priority list of things to be caught up on tho--i appreciate that the plot is blatantly unsubtle but still manages to give me aneurysms and i appreciate the political overtones just kinda...balances on a razor thin wire and also gives me aneurysms. i wanna say i have no expectations and would be fine if it does a full dive into the horrible bland depths of the both-sides porridge, but i’m sadly a fool who wants to believe in Damon Lindelof

Syllabus/Making Comics (2 comics, finished 12/24/2019): it’s funny--even before Making Comics came out i was like “man i miss Lynda Barry” and then BAM. it’s incredible how her work just makes me feel taken care of, even when we’re wrestling with tough topics or she’s demanding that i draw a Batman in 30 seconds. kudos for immediately shooting to the top of my gift list for my sister also

Allegiance/Choices of One (2 books, finished 12/24/2019): fun and largely inoffensive, but i was honestly hoping for more. the level of Empire apologia going on was too much for me, someone who thinks Mara Jade is the best Star Wars character of all time (still?????? still). it reeked a little of Zahn believing his own hype as the only valid guy in Star Wars Legends of whatever

Aldnoah.Zero (anime, 1 season finished 12/24/2019): turns out i also can only have “trash but my trash” feelings about one Japanese mecha show with higher art pretensions and patriotism verging into jingoism per year, and this one ain’t it. it’s not as good as Code Geass and Code Geass ISN’T GOOD. at least Geass attempted character complexity and moved at enough of a breakneck pace to distract me from its questionable bits. Aldnoah is just...bland, and nothing gets accomplished or revealed in 12 episodes, except the baffling and contradictory motivations of the main bad guy.

Baldur’s Gate (game, unfinished): yet again something i really wanted to like, given *gestures at all the BioWare above*. i think it’s mainly the Seinfeld issue, where it actually predates my own experience with video games and was so formative for the Western RPG genre that what was innovative just comes across as kind of staid now. i didn’t DISLIKE it, and will probably play the sequel since it’s supposed to be more character-driven, but by the time i finished the vanilla campaign i just didn’t have it in me to squint at more tiny avatars on the screen, so the expansions ended up a no-go.

most prominent thing i noticed about this list is that only one 2019 movie made it on the list and ZERO 2019 video games did so. the former i’m okay with because i currently live with two film people with whom i’m happy to tag along to the cinema. the latter bums me out a little more, because there WERE a few things i wanted to play this year, but all of them came out just as my semester was reaching its catastrophic boil, so i had no time. maybe i’ll use my free time after the New Year festivities to catch up on those.

to conclude: this worked out pretty well! i ended up finishing all but one of the things, and only a few were bad enough that i have no interest in seeking out more content. i’ll probably do this again in 2020--we’ll see if the scheduling can withstand a full year of grad school hell

[gffa]

Scattered Star Wars thoughts: - I finished the audiobook of A Crash of Fate and it’s pretty much exactly what I expected out of it--it’s a YA novel with Star Wars window dressing, where the bigger events of the galaxy are so distant they might as well not even be there, the two characters fall in love over the span of a day, communication issues are the biggest challenge (other than the last quarter of the book has the main character’s old acquaintances popping back up, as you know they would when you started the book), and it’s exactly what it’s supposed to be.  None of these comments are a value judgement, because one person is going to find them to be a minus and then the next will find them to be a plus, and that too is exactly what it’s supposed to be. I think a lot depends on how much you’re charmed by the tropes of YA stories, of stories being centered almost entirely on the love story between two characters, and that will determine a lot of what you get out of the book.  Since I’m not a big fan of “fell in love over the period of 24 hours” (not even when they knew each other when they were much younger), the book could never really get me onboard with the Jules/Izzy relationship feelings, I never got swept up in their relationships, especially when so much was told to us about who these characters are (well, who Izzy is, Jules is just kind of there), and the uphill battle of trying to make me care about Batuu The Product Placement Planet, when it’s so obviously about the corporate tie-ins. That’s not to say it’s a bad book, nor do I regret having picked it up!  There was a point towards the end, when I had less than an hour left of the book to go, I almost paused it to go listen to something else, just because I didn’t want to be finished with it, that it’d become something of my comfortable listening.  It was easy to have it on in the background and let it go for a couple of hours while I cleaned or played a game.  I found it to have a genuine charisma that made me want to keep going!  Whether this is the light material of the book itself or that I really enjoyed the narrator’s voices or even a mix of the two, I can’t say.  Yet I definitely found that I was fond of this book by the end. But I’m still not the target audience for this, so my review comes with some giant grains of salt, and maybe I wouldn’t have read it if I didn’t want to have the dubious honor of having read all the SW canon books, but it was a fun way to have some background ambiance for the hours it took to get through the book and I’d love to hear from others if they really got sucked into it and liked it, what made it work for them!  But if the above stuff isn’t really your jam, if you’re not looking to be a completionist, then this one might not be the one for you, either.  It depends on what you want to get out of a Star Wars book. - Now that I’ve finished that one, time to pick a new one!  I want to read Treason and Black Spire and Alphabet Squadron, so those are out.  I probably should start Empire’s End again, I keep putting it off because I don’t want there to be No More Aftermath.  But instead I’m gonna try Star Wars and Philosophy.  I’ve tried reading this one in novel form, but it slides off my brain every time--and 10 minutes in, I’m remembering why. This is a book that brings up really interesting philosophical questions, stuff like, “Can you choose against your destiny?” or “Could Luke have lived his life on Tatooine and been just fine?” or assumes that Obi-Wan and Yoda were trying to get Luke to kill Vader.  These are things that the narrative and the creators have already specifically answered and so I’m left with this dissonance between the idea of THESE THINGS HAVE SPECIFIC TO THIS UNIVERSE ANSWERS ALREADY (WHICH YOU ARE GETTING WRONG ACCORDING TO THE NARRATIVE INTENTION) versus OH MY GOD SHUT UP AND LET PEOPLE HAVE THEIR FUN OF SPECULATING. (Me, trying to be cool while listening to this book, then inevitably there’s a voice in my head yelling-- ONE, Yes, George Lucas says Anakin “went against his Fate” in ROTS so you’re not locked into pre-destined choices, TWO, sort of, the TLJ novelization has Luke having a Force dream about what that would have been like, THREE,  George Lucas specifically says, no, they weren’t trying to get Luke to kill Vader, but they needed him to be prepared that it MIGHT happen.) Because speculation is an important part of being a fan, one that the creators of Star Wars have talked about how they don’t want to take that way.  It’s why we don’t have any word of god answers on what the hell Mortis is, because Dave Filoni specifically said that they do have answers, but they’re not going to give them because that would ruin speculation.  I mean, they don’t do it on everything and George Lucas famously goes around going, “Oh, yeah, here’s what that means.” (WHICH I LOVE HIM FOR, I LOVE WORD OF GOD STUFF) and even he doesn’t tell you how to think about every single thing, that some things are up to interpretation.  It’s a balance between talking about the narrative intentions up to a certain point but still allowing people to have their own reactions and speculation, which isn’t easy, but I like the balance they’ve achieved.  (Especially because no one is obligated to take word of god narrative intention into account.  Hell, no one’s obligated to take canon into account if they don’t want to, much less what the creators say about the intentions behind it!) All of which isn’t really the point of a philosophy book (this is more a navel-gazing post about me than it is about this book XD), but it does distract me away when the premises brought up to bring about these interesting questions are ones that have already been answered and that’d be fine, except the point of the book (and they say this early on) is that there aren’t any answers to these things.  Which, if you want to discount those answers, that’s totally cool!  But they are still answers.  And I have a hellish time getting that out of the way so I can just settle in with the book. Which may be a frustratingly silly reason to bounce off a book, but, eh, at least I’m not to Tolkien Scholar Levels of Being A Nerd.  (I say with genuine admiration, there are some hardcore Tolkien Nerds and I LOVE THEM.) Scattered Star Wars Thoughts/2019 Resolutions Update: - A Crash of Fate (audiobook) Current total:  278/520

[backtozeon]

Dear Fans of Watchmen, Hello there. My name is Damon Lindelof and I am a writer. I am also the unscrupulous bastard currently defiling something that you love. But that’s not all that I am. I am a twelve-year old boy being handed the first two issues by my father. “You’re not ready for this,” he growls with a glint of mischief in his eye. My parents have recently divorced and he has gone rogue, so there I am in my bed, flashlight beam illuminating pages, watching the Comedian fall again and again and again. The old man was wrong. I am ready for this. Because this was written just for me. I am thirty-eight. A man offers me the opportunity to adapt Watchmen for television. The filmed adaptation came out less than a year ago, but that doesn’t matter. I tell him I am not interested and that perhaps he should let sleeping dogs lie with hopes they will eventually be run over by a car tire, bursting their stomachs. He does not get the reference. I am watching my father haggle with a man in a wheelchair. I am fifteen years old and we are at a comic book convention in New York City, long before attending a comic book convention was something anyone wanting to ever have sex with another person would admit to. I definitely want to have sex with another person. My father finally harangues the merchant down to thirty dollars for a guaranteed authentic screenplay of Watchmen, soon to be a major motion picture! Now, he reads aloud from the script as “The Watchmen” battle terrorists at The Statue of Liberty. Something is wrong. The old man’s brow furrows, scanning the text in a mixture of disappointment and rage, a child who has just been told that Santa didn’t bring him presents this year, then robbed the house and beat up his parents. “What the fuck is this?” my father mutters. It is the first time he swears in front of me. Another man offers me the opportunity to adapt Watchmen for television. I am forty now. I tell him someone else asked me to do this a year ago and I declined. He inquires as to why I said no. I tell him that Alan Moore has been consistently explicit in stating that Watchmen was written for a very specific medium and that medium is comics, comics that would be ruined should they be translated into moving images. The Another Man pauses for a moment, then responds – “Who’s Alan Moore?” I am twenty-three and living in Los Angeles. My father flies out from New Jersey for my birthday and gives me a present, a new edition of the “graphic novel” that is Watchmen. He explains to me that this is the publisher’s way of retaining the rights to the characters. He tells me that Dan and Adrian and Jon and Walter and Laurie are all serfs, working the land for a Feudal Lord that will never grant them freedom. My father is more than a little drunk.. More so, he is a hypocrite for buying me the new edition. “I know, I know…” he says, that same mischievous glint from years ago obscured by now thicker lenses, “But it’s so goddamned good.” Yet Another Man offers me the opportunity to adapt Watchmen for television. “Just a pilot,” he says, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” I am forty-three now and I am thinking about something I read about Orthodox Judaism. While most religions are cultivated by evangelizing and conversion, Orthodox Judaism doesn’t solicit. If someone from another faith wishes to become an Orthodox Jew, they are rejected. If they are stubborn enough to ask again, they are denied even more harshly. But should they have the audacity to ask a third time? The door cracks open. And if they’re willing to invest an immense amount of time and effort and sacrifice and faith, they are embraced into the fold. Why am I thinking about this? I have said no to Watchmen twice now. This makes me Orthodox Judaism. I crack the door. And now I’m a hypocrite too. I am standing over my father’s hospital bed. I am twenty-nine, the last age at which I will consider myself “young.” The breathing tube was removed two hours ago and they said he wouldn’t last longer than fifteen minutes. It’s a cliché. I’m living a trope. He is unconscious and unable to impart final wisdom nor tell me he was proud all along, even though he never said it out loud. There is no beeping machine showing his weakening heartrate. My father is beyond machines. I hold his cool hand and try not to pray to God because he detested the very idea of God so instead I pray to his gods. I pray to Cthulhu. I pray to 42, the Eternal Cosmic Number. I pray to Dr. Manhattan, far away in a galaxy less complicated than this one. The television is on and the Lakers win the championship. My father never cared about basketball. He didn’t even know the rules. When he dies, I finally understand that I don’t know the rules either. No one does. I am forty-five and I am writing a letter to the fans. The fans of Watchmen. It’s unnecessarily wordy and an exercise in oversharing, but nothing gets people on your side more than telling them about the moment your father died. Sharing such intimate details with strangers feels needy and pathetic and exploitative and yucky and necessary and freeing. I am also looking for an elegant way to escape from this device of quantum observance, a device appropriated from Mr. Moore so that I can speak to those fans from the bottom of my cold, thieving heart. Perhaps I could switch from referring to them in the third person and shift into the second, thus bringing them closer to the first? Would that be amenable to you? First and foremost, if you are angry that I’m working on Watchmen, I am sorry. You may be thinking I can’t be that sorry or I wouldn’t be doing it. I concede the point, but I hope it doesn’t invalidate the apology, which I offer with sincerity and respect. Respect. That’s second and twicemost. I have an immense amount of respect for Alan Moore. He is an extraordinary talent of mythic proportion. I wrote him a letter, parts of which are not dissimilar to this one, because I owed him an explanation as to why I’m defying his wishes and to humbly ask him not to place a curse on me because he knows magic and apparently, he can do that. His response, or whether he responded at all, is between he and I. Suffice to say, even before I sent it, Mr. Moore had made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t want anyone to “adapt” his work. To do so is hubris. Worse yet, it’s unethical. There are a million ways to rationalize unethical behavior – I could argue that Mr. Moore’s partner, the brilliant artist, Dave Gibbons, is equally entitled to authorize access to his masterwork and that he has been kind enough to offer us his blessing to do so. Or I could offer that Mr. Moore cut his veined teeth on the creations of others; Batman, Superman, Captain Britain, Marvelman (he’ll never be “Miracleman” to me), Swamp Thing and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, not to mention The Charlton characters upon whom his Watchmen characters are based… So am I not allowed to do the same? No. I am not. I am not allowed. And yet… I am compelled. I am compelled despite the inevitable pushback and hatred I will understandably receive for taking on this particular project. This ire will be maximally painful because of its source. That source being you. The true fans. I once said that if one were a true fan of something, they weren’t allowed to hate it. A prominent writer took me to task for such heresy, arguing that just because one was the creator of a show, this did not permit them to pick and choose who was and wasn’t a fan of it. The writer went on to win a Pulitzer for television criticism. I went on to get snubbed by the Razzies for Prometheus. As such, I concede this point, too. After all, even the most fervent lifelong fan of, oh, let’s say the New York Jets, is allowed to shout at the top of his lungs, “YOU SUCK OH MY GOD YOU SUUUUUUUUUCKIII II” and do so while wearing a replica Namath Jersey he purchased for an ungodly sum of money that may or may not have constituted his entire first paycheck on Nash Bridges. But the point. The point is, you love Watchmen. That gives you the right to hate it, too. Because no matter what… You’re still true fans. But to quote the immortal P.W. Herman… “I know you are… But what am IT’ What am I? I’m a true fan, too. And I’m not the only one. What I love most about television is that the finished product is a result not of singular vision, but the collective experience of many brilliant minds. I have the pleasure of sitting in a Writers Room each and every day that is as diverse and combative as any I’ve ever been a part of. In that room, Hetero White Men like myself are in the minority and as Watchmen is (incorrectly) assumed to be solely our domain, understanding its potential through the perspectives of women, people of color and the LGBTQ community has been as eye-opening as it has been exhilarating. We’ve committed to doing the same in front of and behind the camera. And every single person involved with this show absolutely adores Watchmen. But in the spirit of complete honesty, we also sorta want to… uh… Disrupt it? Except I hate that word because now it’s not disruptive anymore. And how can I present as punk rock when I’m now cozy in bed, spooning with Warner Brothers, HBO and DC? Truth be told, everyone there, particularly Geoff Johns (who is as true fan as it gets) has been extraordinarily supportive. Sure, it’s fun to kick around the comic corporate overlords for exploiting writers and artists, but we all know what happened to Jack Kirby and we’re still first in line for every Marvel film. So… how do we answer the challenge of when it is appropriate to appropriate? Which brings us to the most important part. Maybe the only part that really matters. Our creative intentions. We have no desire to “adapt” the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago. Those issues are sacred ground and they will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted. They will, however be remixed. Because the bass lines in those familiar tracks are just too good and we’d be fools not to sample them. Those original twelve issues are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along, it did not erase what came before it. Creation. The Garden of Eden. Abraham and Isaac. The Flood. It all happened. And so it will be with Watchmen. The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica. To be clear. Watchmen is canon. Just the way Mr. Moore wrote it, the way Mr. Gibbons drew it and the way the brilliant John Higgins colored it. But we are not making a “sequel” either. This story will be set in the world its creators painstakingly built… but in the tradition of the work that inspired it, this new story must be original. It has to vibrate with the seismic unpredictability of its own tectonic plates. It must ask new questions and explore the world through a fresh lens. Most importantly, it must be contemporary. The Old Testament was specific to the Eighties of Reagan and Thatcher and Gorbachev… ours needs to resonate with the frequency of Trump and May and Putin and the horse that he rides around on, shirtless. And speaking of Horsemen, The End of The World is off the table (THE LEFTOVERS! NOW STREAMING ON HBO GO!) which means the heroes and villains — as if the two are distinguishable — are playing for different stakes entirely. The tone will be fresh and nasty and electric and absurd. Many describe Watchmen as “dark,” but I’ve always loved its humor -worshipping at the altar of the genre whilst simultaneously trolling it. As such… Some of the characters will be unknown. New faces. New masks to cover them. We also intend to revisit the past century of Costumed Adventuring through a surprising, yet familiar set of eyes… and it is here where we’ll be taking our greatest risks. Risk is imperative. I need the feeling in my stomach before I leap from a great height without knowing the depth of the water below. If my body should shatter upon impact, at least it was in pursuit of glory. And let’s be honest… Isn’t there a small part of you that wants to see me explode like a fleshy watermelon? But hopefully, there’s also a part that wants to experience something sort of amazing. As for what I want? I want your validation. I also want not to want it. I’ve given up the opioid highs of Twitter, but continue to score my methadone in the threads of Reddit and the hot takes of morning-after recappers. I’ll be reading and watching and listening to what you have to say because even though I wish I didn’t… I deeply care about what you think. Which brings us, Thank God, to the end of the missive. Endings. I’m GREAT at them. A wise, blue man once said that nothing ever ends. But maybe he wasn’t wise. Maybe he was just scared and alone and sad that he would outlive everything and everyone he ever loved. So I hope this isn’t the last time we correspond, fellow fans… after all, it’s just a pilot and we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. But maybe… if everything works out the way I hope it does… and if you’re willing to give me a chance, it’s not the end at all… It’s the beginning? With Respectful Hubris, -Damon

[greenlightmusicreviews2]

The Revenge of GLMR!!! | Reasons, Review & Analysis

Because opinions are like voices, we all have a different kind, so just clean out all of your ears, these are my views • atcq "award tour"

There’s a lot different ideas that run through my head when I’m listening to music, and - although it’s been a while - especially when I try to review music. Obviously, there’s going to be bias because I have certain sounds and textures and concepts that I like more than others, but there are three that I expand on down below: effort, competence, and experimentation.

Of course that’s not to discount other aspects like... production value, mixing style, lyricism, songwriting, composition, style and a lot of other aspects to what makes a song work or an album flow - egads! - album sequencing!!!

I really like music, and at the bottom of that, I really want to like music. I’ve spent a lot of time writing my own music and sitting next to friends as they mix and produce the music I write, and so it’s exciting, new and different to sit on the other side and seriously think about the music that I get to listen to. I want to take more time with this endeavor and put in the work to maintain this thing. Maybe that means starting with familiar stuff and getting a feel with how I think about music with artists or albums I know. At the end of the day, I’m a guy on the net with a blog, but I hope you sweet, beautiful people find something worthwhile, interesting, funny and hopefully insightful from this thing. Maybe you can get something cringeworthy out of it. We may never know, but hopefully, we may.

In the words of Josh Homme:

If you've got the time and you've got the space you've got to make something of it. We might balls the whole thing up but you've got to try!

Effort

One of the things I put a premium on is effort: did’ja at least try to make a good song or record? Because if you didn’t, then fuck you.

In my teenage years I listened to a lot of alt-metal, post-grunge, hard rock and generally loud guitar music, so understand that I speak with some authority when it comes to that genre of music. Seether, Hinder, Nickelback, Godsmack, Papa Roach, Saving Abel, Three Days Grace - even bands that were influenced from the original crop: Daughtry, Theory of a Deadman, Popevil - and even bands that were just a little outside of generic rockers, bands like Foo Fighters, Audioslave, the sort of acts that were pretty well-respected but still made similar music but of a little better quality than their imitators. So I’m a bit of an expert when it comes to the post-grunge sound, that sound a generation or so removed from the Seattle heavyweights they hold in such high regard. My favorites of the bunch were: Foo Fighters, Nickelback, Seether, Puddle of Mudd, throw in some Everclear and that’s a good sampling of bands that I really liked at that time. These are bands that sounded like they put in a good amount of effort in the records that they made.

I hear distant scoffs, but only because it’s fallen out of fashion to dislike Nickelback, but hear me out: if you think Nickelback was generic and derivative, then you weren’t given the chance to hear Nickelback-lite.

Nickelback is a band whose blueprint was always more CCR, ZZ Top and Metallica than anything else, and their albums, save for maybe Curb typically reflected this.

They combined these three somewhat disparate influences with the sonic template that the Big Four of Grunge popularized and made some incredibly catchy and well executed music.

Hoobastank, on the other hand, you could tell sort of wanted to imitate Incubus, but recognized the immediacy of a band like NIckelback. Their music was similar, though never venturing further than Drop-D tunings, but their songwriting was sub-par. There was never, I sensed, the effort that truly made certain bands stand out. The lyrics especially, where they offered fairly banal observations and pleas for help:

Show me what it's for Make me understand it I've been crawling in the dark Looking for the answer Is there something more Than what I've been handed? I've been crawling in the dark Looking for the answer

- “Crawling in The Dark” by Hoobastank (2001)

The sound is part and parcel of what rock bands in the mid-2000s were aiming for in order to receive radio play: dull production value, samey chord progressions, vaguely introspective lyrics and leads that sound like U2 outtakes. Was there any effort, any character, any color, any life to your production, music or lyrics? Unfortunately, once executives and the ilk come in, well, that’s where a lot of “corporate rock” gets its reputation from.

Competence

Competence is one of those things where all it’s asking is, did’ja do it well? Does it sound awkward or cringey, or is it well-executed and hits the mark?

An example that comes to mind is Foo Fighters’ 2014 album Sonic Highways. After 2011′s Wasting Light, which was a watershed moment for the band, they began to really lean into their own legacy. Grohl and Co. became a standard-bearer for rock music at this time, and to an extent still do. What came after was a pretty bloated concept record about the musical history of the United States in 8 different cities tied together with an HBO documentary. While the documentary was actually decently made though not perfect, the record suffered from the band overextending themselves. They recorded the album in 8 different cities while interviewing famous musicians with deep roots in those cities, and then Grohl would go and write lyrics based on what he had learned in those interviews, weaving in little things they said here and there in order to form a coherent narrative for the song.

It didn’t quite work. The music is decent for the most part, but Grohl was just not able to make it compelling enough. Dave’s insistence on the record not straying too far from the band’s original sound didnt’ make sense when the entire concept was based on a city-by-city celebration of American-made music. The finished product was colored by Vig’s by-the-numbers production and Grohl’s own hesitation about making it too different.

There are musical projects that are well-performed and well-produced (i.e. competent in a couple different dimensions), but the overarching concept can be marred by the artist’s own musical limitations.

Danny Worsnop has had a successful stint with Asking Alexandria. His foray into country music with The Long Road Home is pretty good. Kid Cudi, the rapper whose Man On The Moon records were well-done pop-cum-rap albums, didn’t quite hit the mark with 2012′s WZRD and much less with 2015′s Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, both attempts to make rock(?) records.

An artist’s own musical limitations can hinder musical projects, even if other aspects of the music are otherwise done decently well.

There’s a dimension where a record can be “competent” in what it does and score a 5/10 or higher. There’s also a dimension where a record can be “competent” in what it does and score a 4/10 or lower. It’s tied to the effort made, and of course, goes by an artist-by-artist basis. Same thing with...

Experimentation

Not every song or album has to be a genre-bending, mind-expanding, sound-expanding trip through another universe, but artists that make an attempt to go beyond their comfort zone or beyond an established boundary get credit for doing so.

This is, again, kind of by an artist-by-artist basis. You can’t have multiple Beatles, for example, who rewrite the music playbook or whatever. But when an artist tries to go even a little out of their comfort zone, it’s appreciated. Take an artist like Ian Thornley. An extraordinarily talented guitarist and songwriter, his band Big Wreck recorded In Loving Memory Of... in 1997 and, although it took its blueprint directly from Led Zeppelin III, did some pretty interesting things sonically and early on demonstrated some great potential in developing their sound. Their follow-up was a bloated piece of work that unfortunately fell into the trope of “let’s go thicker on the guitars and have overblown ballads” that most rock bands in the 2000s fell into. After their break-up, Ian continued this trend with the plodding generic music of Thornley.

A band that actually threads this needle pretty well is Queens of the Stone Age. Josh Homme creates each record with its own unique identity, doing so competently, with effort, and not sounding (at least not all the time) like a phoned in attempt to sit on his haunchy laurels. Era Vulgaris, a personal favorite of mine, was this dirty, sleazy, almost evil sounding record while its follow-up ...Like Clockwork plumbed the depths of Homme’s struggle with depression and created gorgeous sonic landscapes on songs like “The Vampyre of Time and Memory” and “I Appear Missing.”

I like a little experimentation whether with production, music or lyrics. It’s not going to kill a record if they don’t really experiment, but the artist gets points for at least trying.

Final Thoughts, Concerns & Whatever Else

These three things are what immediately came to mind when I thought about what goes through my head when thinking about music. It’s not super technical, and probably comes from my own background as a musician without a background in theory and who pieces music together mostly through feeling and intuition. But there’s a bunch of other things that I know should look out, and want to look out for. Things like production value, lyricism, composition and style. The way I listen to music hopefully will change for the better, and looking back to previous reviews, I can do a hell of a lot better, and plan to. I actually hope to find better and more unique and interesting ways to describe how I hear certain sounds and even improve on listening out for certain, subtle aspects of production jobs.

Welcome back to Green Light Music Reviews! Sub-par music reviews for a healthy colon! Enjoy!!

[thefangirlingdead]

If you’re still taking Klave prompts then...what about a propsal a fic cause I be soft for that kind in content??! (Also you’re setting is BEAUTIFULLLLL and such a gift 💕)

FUCK, ANON. This destroyed me. I meant for this to be super sweet and short and it ended up being super fucking long and tooth-rotting cute. I hope you enjoy. 

(I also posted it on my AO3 because why not)

Downtime in the midst of a war, even if just for a few minutes is a gift. It doesn’t happen frequently, but when it does, it finds soldiers slipping into comfortable habits even though they know it’ll be short lived. During downtime, most of them can be found outside smoking or huddled in a tent playing poker, chatting and reminiscing, telling funny stories or weaving tales from back home. Tonight in particular is no different, and that’s how the question comes up, uttered by one of the fresh-faced privates who arrived just a couple of months after Klaus:

“What are you going to do when you get home?”

At first, nobody answers, and the question hangs heavy in the air because honestly, all of them have seen too much in the past few weeks and months to even think about such a question. They all know that their chances of returning home without any life altering scars (physically ormentally), let alone returning home at all are slim to fucking none. So for a split second, it’s silent among the men in the tent, all of them too afraid to say anything, afraid to hold on to the hope that they’ll make it out of here alive and afraid to tell the new guy that he probably won’t, either.

That is, until Klaus Hargreeves speaks up.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I’m planning on getting so fucked up that I can’t walk straight.”

And just like that, the tension breaks. A few soldiers chuckle while another one - Anderson, who is always quick to give Klaus shit - teases, “How is that any different than now, Hargreeves?”

“Touché,” Klaus calls, pointing at Anderson from across the circle with his cards, uncaring if anyone sees his hand, “But I’ll have you know, that I can walk just fine right now, thankyouverymuch.”

“You know what I mean,” Anderson taunts back, which earns a chuckle from Klaus.

“Oh Mike, you think you’ve seen me fucked up, but you’ve got no idea, darling,” Klaus teases in response. Although the pet names didn’t sit well with the other soldiers for the first month or so - they were in the 60’s, after all - Klaus uses them so much and with everyone, that they really don’t phase anyone anymore.

“Come on,” Klaus pushes then, “What about the rest of you? Don’t lie and tell me that you’re not daydreaming of going home, eating a nice home-cooked meal from your momma and settling down with your high school sweetheart to have three-point-five kids and a golden retriever.”

“I just really want to finish college,” Romero, another one of the younger privates pipes up at last, offering a shrug when all eyes dart to him instead of Klaus. “I wanted to be a teacher.”

“The home-cooked meal sounds nice,” Carmichael adds with a smile. His comment in particular earns a few teasing remarks from the men sitting around the circle - even Dave gets a couple of jabs in - but eventually, they all end up agreeing that yeah, even shitty diner food sounds pretty damn good right now.

Across the room, even Corporal Barnett chimes in at one point, muttering out, “The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is marry my girl,” which earns a few nods of agreement from his fellow soldiers. And that’s how, within just a few minutes, the poker game quickly goes forgotten in favor of soldiers sitting around in the tent, telling stories of back home and sharing their hopes and dreams for when they finally make it out of this hellhole.

And Klaus knows deep down, than most of them probably won’t make it back, but it doesn’t hurt to hold on to a little bit of hope, right? He almost nudges Dave with his elbow at that thought to ask him what his plans are, but as he turns to his right, Klaus notices, with a pang in his chest, that Dave is no longer sitting next to him. In fact, he isn’t even in the tent anymore.

It takes a little bit of searching, once Klaus manages to find a way to slip out unnoticed as well, but eventually, he finds Dave sitting alone on the edge of camp, barely illuminated by dim lights and accented by the cherry of his cigarette and a thin swirl of smoke that curls up over his head and disappears into the night. In a weird way, this has kind of become a routine for them, sneaking away from the others like this to have just a few moments alone. So when Klaus plops down next to Dave in the dirt, an unlit joint in one hand and a flask in the other, he knows that the other man is expecting him.

“So what’s your plan?” Klaus asks in lieu of a greeting, fishing a lighter out from the breast pocket of his jacket.

Dave turns to glance at Klaus in the dim light, offering him a small, albeit confused smile. He was definitely expecting Klaus, but judging by his reaction, he wasn’t anticipating his question. “What do you mean?”

Klaus uses his lighter to motion back to camp. “In there, everyone was talking about their plan once they get out of here,” he mutters around the joint, waving the lighter in the air as he talks, “You didn’t say what yours  is. So, indulge me, mi amor.”

Dave can’t help but chuckle at Klaus’ mannerisms and his fond pet name. “You noticed that…”

“I did.” Klaus pauses to light the joint, taking a long hit and holding the smoke in his lungs just long enough for it to begin to burn slightly before exhaling. Then, he leans in a little, enough to bump his shoulder against Dave’s. “So…”

“So…” Dave echoes, and Klaus can tell that he’s stalling, that he’s trying to figure out what to say, so he gives him a little leeway. He offers Dave the joint, which Dave accepts without question, taking a hit himself before finally speaking.

“I’m not sure, actually,” Dave admits at last. “I mean… as you know, I had just moved back in with my parents before I was drafted, so I - well, I would like to do some traveling, but -”

“No buts,” Klaus interrupts. He reaches for the joint, which Dave hands over, before continuing, “In a perfect world, would would you want to do, when you get home?”

Klaus is careful to say when. Not if. No, Dave will be going home. There is no if.

“In a perfect world?” Dave repeats, and Klaus simply nods in response. And Dave actually seems to think about it for a few quiet moments before answering, giving Klaus a chance to take another drag, exhaling upwards into the night sky, relishing in the feeling of his body relaxing with each hit.

“I want to move somewhere new,” Dave says at last, his voice soft and wistful. Far away. He gazes off into the night as he speaks, “Somewhere I’ve never been… far away from my hometown. Maybe, somewhere secluded with some land where we could just be.”

We.

The implication of the word isn’t lost on Klaus. In fact, he latches onto the word almost as soon as it leaves Dave’s lips, but before he can interject, Dave is continuing, as if he didn’t just drop a fucking bomb into the conversation.

“I mean, I suppose in a perfect world, it wouldn’t matter where we are, but I think somewhere quiet would be nice,” he muses, “Somewhere away from the city, but close enough if you wanted to have a night on the town, you know?”

Dave turns to look at Klaus then, and Klaus’ voice catches in his throat at the sight. He can’t find the words to say, and even if he could, he’s pretty sure he couldn’t speak right now if he wanted to. Instead, he just holds his joint tightly between his index finger and his thumb, staring at Dave with wide eyes.

When Dave just looks at him expectantly, though, as if anticipating a response, Klaus croaks out, “We?”

Dave smiles in response, and fuck, his smile is enough to bring Klaus to his knees, to light up a room, to melt his heart. It’s such a simple little thing, but it brings Klaus’ world crashing down around him and also makes him feel fucking invincible.

“Yeah, we,” Dave murmurs. “I mean… you said in a perfect world and well, in a perfect world, I’d want to build a home and start a life with the person I love.”

And god, Klaus is usually so good at masking his emotions, at appearing flippant and blasé about everything and hiding behind humor and crassness, but Dave’s words are so unexpected and disarming that they catch him off guard. Klaus has no control of his mouth when he simply just repeats, numb, “The person you love.”

Unfortunately, Klaus’ shock seems to give Dave the wrong idea and almost immediately, he begins to backpedal, his face falling. “Well, I mean, shit,Klaus. We haven’t really talked about it - what this is but, I mean… I thought it was obvious.”

I thought it was obvious. The words hit Klaus like a truck.

“That you love me,” Klaus mutters, his own voice sounding very far away in his own ears.

Klaus is no stranger to those words, but, well… he isn’t really used to people meaning them. Not like Dave appears to mean them right now. Sure, others have uttered those words to Klaus before, but never in the way that Dave says them.  They were gasped in moments of passion, or exclaimed when Klaus decided to be generous and share whatever he managed to score with an acquaintance at a party, or even muttered when he did a favor for one of his siblings when they were kids… but never like this.

Now, sitting here next to Dave, Klaus knows that this is different.

Dave clears his throat. “I do,” he says very matter-of-factly, but is quick to add, “But if you don’t feel the same way, it’s okay. I know it was forward of me to assume, and we haven’t even properly discussed what this is and -”

“I would like that,” Klaus says at last, his voice quiet when he interrupts Dave, before he can finish his thought. He really doesn’t know what else to say, and it’s shitty and awkward, but it’s a start.

Klaus takes a long drag of his joint to mask his nerves and give himself a moment to think while Dave struggles to catch up.

“You… you would?” Dave asks after a beat of silence, as if he can’t believe it.

“Yeah,” Klaus mutters, shrugging. “You know… a little house in the woods, maybe a couple of pets. A quiet life. It would be a nice change of pace.”

Dave swallows then, shifting to face Klaus a little better. Somehow, the conversation has turned into something much more than just daydreams, and it requires much more attention than they were previously giving it. “Well, if we make it out of here, I’ll make good on that, then,” he says at last, “If that’s what you want.”

And Klaus, never one to avoid humor in serious situations, mock gasps at Dave, a hand on his chest. “Davey, are you trying to make an honest man out of me?”

Apparently, it’s just what the doctor ordered. Dave laughs at that, the tension bleeding out of him. “Yeah, I think I am,” he mutters, and then, he’s reaching forward, his hand finding its place at the back of Klaus’ neck before they’re kissing. It’s nothing over-indulgent, just a brief press of lips in the dark, hyper aware of their peers not far from them, but it’s much needed.

When they part, Klaus grins up at Dave, his eyes glinting, even in the dim light. “I hope you know that when we get married, it’s going to be the wedding of the century.”

51 years, 7 months and 13 days later

Eventually, Dave makes good on his promise to Klaus. Although it happens about fifty years after he initially planned it - after he is catapulted into the future and forced to save the world alongside Klaus and his superpowered siblings - he makes good on his plan to move somewhere far away and secluded and start a life with the person he loves. He makes good on that promise to make an honest man out of Klaus Hargreeves, even though just the idea of it sounds like taming a wild animal.

It isn’t necessarily a small little house in the woods like they had initially discussed, but it is a secluded, modest place just a few hours outside of the city, their closest neighbor about a mile down the road. They find the place and move in almost a year after they save the world - a year after Klaus brings him to the future - and it’s everything that Dave wanted and then some. Granted, he never knew that he wanted to travel into to future to be with the man he loves, but he’s not surprised. There was always something special about Klaus, something that Dave knew that he’d follow him to the ends of the earth for.

Although, there was another part to that promise that Dave hasn’t addressed. It was unspoken, really, but he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since Klaus mentioned it only six months into knowing one another, six months into their time in Vietnam together.

When we get married, it’s going to be the wedding of the century.

Dave was certain that it was just a pipe dream back then, just wishful thinking, in a perfect world , but then suddenly, it’s 2020 and he’s buying a little house upstate with Klaus, and that little dream, that comment that Klaus made just a couple of years ago - or over 50 years ago, depending on how you look at it - seems a lot more realistic. It’s 2020, and Dave still has a hard time believing that gay marriage is legal. In fact, it takes Klaus dragging him to pride that first summer to truly convince him and show him just how much has changed.

Honestly, Dave has been planning on asking Klaus to marry him for a while, but it’s a lot easier said than done. Sure, he could just get down on one knee after a romantic night out, or maybe on their anniversary (Klaus loves the strange looks that he gets when he brags that they’ve been together for over fifty years) but that doesn’t seem good enough. No, Dave knows that Klaus is a man of grand gestures and has a flair for the dramatic, so he wants to do something big, something really nice for him, but he just doesn’t know what. And that’s why he’s in his current predicament.

He’d ask Ben, but Klaus can only manifest him when he’s nearby, and he can’t really have a conversation with Ben about how to ask Klaus to marry him  when Klaus is present. So he buys the rings fifty-one years, five months and two days after he makes that promise to Klaus in Vietnam, but he sits on them for over two months, unsure of how to bring it up, what to do or how to say it.

And then, one morning, it just hits him.

Klaus is a hard man to predict. Some mornings, he’s up at the crack of dawn, banging pots and pans around in the kitchen, making breakfast without being prompted and bringing it to Dave where he lays in bed, crawling over him and kissing him sweetly until he finally wakes. And others, he’s impossible to wake and honestly rather grouchy when he finally drags himself out from under the covers. Dave thinks that those days, he wouldn’t even get up if the house was on fire.

And then some mornings, Klaus opts to lounge in bed, pulling Dave close so he can’t get up, insisting sweetly, “just five more minutes,” which turns into another hour of drifting in and out of sleep, cuddling and eventually, sleepy kisses that devolve into sighs of pleasure, tangled limbs and Klaus proclaiming that morning sex just might be his favorite kind of sex.

This morning in particular is shaping up to be one of those mornings.

It’s a lazy Sunday and Dave wakes at around ten in the morning, but Klaus is quick to pull him close before he can even think about climbing out of bed, sleepily whining something about wanting to spend all day in bed along with, “just stay for a few more minutes.” But of course, a few minutes quickly turns into half an hour, which turns into Klaus peppering sleepy kisses on Dave’s lips, fingers running gently through his hair, and honestly, who would Dave be to stop him?

However eventually, soft kisses eventually turn into more solid presses of lips, which turn into teeth and tongue and Klaus sighing softly into Dave’s mouth, body rocking gently against his in bed. And that eventually turns into Klaus shifting to straddle Dave’s hips, Dave’s hands sturdy on his thighs, palms sliding up and down exposed skin, fingers hooking  under the waistband of his ridiculously bright underwear. And god, Klaus is going to be the death of him, but Dave is never one to deny him, especially when he’s got Klaus’ lithe body pressed up against his own, the sweet little noises working their way out of his throat and -

And suddenly, Dave’s thoughts are cut short when Klaus sits up abruptly, a small smirk playing on his lips. “Fuck, I wanna ride you,” Klaus mutters in a form of explanation as he shifts, moving to pull his underwear off, but surprisingly, Dave’s thoughts aren’t focused on the dirty words leaving Klaus’ lips, nor the way his body moves beneath his hands or even the arousal pooling in his own stomach.

No, instead, he can’t focus on anything but the way that the sheets drape around Klaus’ strong shoulders and the way late morning light paints stripes across his fair skin through the blinds. He can’t focus on anything but the way that Klaus’ green eyes shine when he looks down at him, and the sleepy, easy smile that finds its way onto his face when he catches Dave staring. And suddenly, it just hits Dave.

Holy shit, he wants to marry this man.

Klaus moves to shimmy out of his underwear, but Dave stops him with a hand on his waist. “Klaus wait -”

Klaus pouts slightly at Dave’s gentle request, but to his defense, he doesn’t move. “Aww come on, this was just about to get good,” he begins to protest, but when he spies the serious, concentrated look on Dave’s face, he steels himself, asking, “What is it?”

And fuck . All words are lost on Dave. He doesn’t know how to ask or what to say, but he knows in his heart that he needs to do this right now. It isn’t a grand gesture, but it’s perfect.

So, after a deep breath and a quick internal pep-talk, Dave closes his eyes and says softly, “I want to marry you.”

When he opens his eyes again, it’s to find Klaus smiling down at him, his emerald eyes filled with love and - a little bit of surprise. He sits up a little straighter, the sheets slipping off of his shoulders and pooling around his waist, and Dave follows suit, propping himself up on his hands so that he’s almost eye-level with the man in his lap.

Klaus reaches forward then, placing his hand gently on Dave’s cheek. “Dave,” he murmurs sweetly, then, “Davey…”

But before Klaus can say anything else sweet or teasing or derail the conversation, Dave continues, “I’m serious, Klaus. I - you know that conversation we had, a few years ago about… you know, perfect worlds and what I’d want to do when I got home and -”

“Yeah,” Klaus cuts him off, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Well, that included spending the rest of my life with the person that I love. And that’s you,” Dave explains. “So, will you marry me?”

And, for the first time in his life, even if it’s just for a few seconds, Klaus is rendered speechless. He gapes for a moment, staring at Dave as if he can’t believe the words that just came out of his mouth before he seems to come back to himself, a small smile spreading across his face. “Aren’t you supposed to get down on one knee?” he asks softly.

“You’ve never been a conventional person,” Dave teases gently, “Why start now?”

“And rings,” Klaus continues, “Aren’t you supposed to have a ring?”

“Bedside table,” Dave offers with a smile, “There’s a little box in there, hiding under some papers. I’ve been waiting until the time was right and -”

“You decided that the time was right when we were just about to fuck?” Klaus asks incredulously, but his grin only widens as he speaks. He’s certainly not bothered by it, and only seconds later, he’s leaning over, knees still bracketing Dave’s hips as he pulls the drawer open and rummages around until his fingers find the small, velvet box. Dave can tell when he finds it by the way he pauses, eyes going unfocused for just a split second, and just like that, the mask drops.

Sure, he loves Klaus’ sense of humor and his ability to make light of any situation, but he also loves him like this: emotional and vulnerable and open.

Drawing the box out of the drawer, Klaus hesitates for only a moment, his eyes darting to Dave’s face as if for permission before he opens it, his jaw dropping slightly at the sight, as if he doesn’t quite believe it.

Dave smiles, and it’s this gentle, hesitant thing. Klaus certainly looks happy, but he also hasn’t said anything since he laid eyes on the rings, and Dave can’t stop himself before he’s saying, “I know it’s not some grand gesture, and I’m sure you wouldn’t mind a big musical number or a few wardrobe changes or -”

“It’s perfect,” Klaus mutters, his voice barely loud enough to hear. And when he looks up at Dave again, his eyes look wet, as if they’re brimming with tears. “You’re perfect. Shit, I love you Dave.”

“So, is that a yes?” Dave asks, a teasing hint to his voice, and just like that, the moment breaks. When Klaus laughs, a few tears escape his eyes, trickling down his cheeks and landing on Dave’s chest, but they’re happy tears. They’re yes tears.

“Yeah,” Klaus murmurs, nodding his head frantically, “Yes, yes. Jesus, Dave, of course.”

Before Dave can say anything else Klaus is leaning down, the velvet box set aside in the sheets, and taking Dave’s face in his hands, pressing a wet, passionate kiss to his lips. The kiss doesn’t last long, though, quickly evolving into gentle pecks, relieved laughter and words of adoration. Before long, Klaus is wrapping his arms around Dave’s shoulders, burying his face in his neck, and Dave can practically feel his smile, burned into his skin for all of eternity, like a tattoo on his heart.

Then, Klaus is laughing against him, and before Dave has the chance to ask what’s so funny, he’s muttering against his skin, “I don’t know whatpossessed you to propose in the middle of morning sex, but this is the best cockblock ever.”

And god, he loves the ridiculous man in his lap. He’s loved him since the moment he laid eyes on him. He has loved him for what feels like a lifetime and then some, and now, he’s going to marry him.

“I love you, Klaus,” he murmurs at last, pressing a gentle kiss to his temple, and Klaus only squeezes him tighter.

“I love you too,” he replies quickly, god, Dave thinks, they’ve come a long way since that night in Vietnam.

[texastheband]

CONSUMING PASSIONS

Interview by Gavin Martin Taken from Uncut - September 1999

In the heart of Texas are Diana Ross dolls, alien movies, fanzines, photo books, American soul and something in leather - just a few of the favourite things; that loom large in Sharleen Spiteri's world...

Gene Clark Memorial Fanzine

“I could be wrong, but I don't hear many people talking about Gene Clark least of all any of The Byrds. I think he's the most underrated talent to have come out of the Sixties. Such a beautiful voice. When Dennis Wilson did his solo album, it sounded like the sea and Gene sounds like the wind - that sounds stupid but it's something organic that he has and it's the essence of being a good singer. I feel really sad when I see footage of Gene Clark with The Byrds banging the tambourine. He's like, really like music, but I don't really like it here. 'Sometimes I think I know how he feels."

Chic's "I Want Your Love" 12′ 

"For me, it's a great record, obviously, but it also brings back memories of making our first record. We'd just done a few demos, been signed by a major label and we were told Bernard Edwards wanted to produce our record. I was like - YESSSS! This is the best business in the world. We went to LA and what I remember about Bernard is long games of table tennis, four changes a day and many, many trips to the bathroom. At the time I was 18, and I didn't know what it was all about until one day when he disappeared completely. We were told Bernard was upset because a Chic movie was being made - Eddie Murphy had been cast as Nile, but he was being played by some no mark. As if that gave him the right to get off his face and fuck us off! That was a very early lesson - my bubble burst right there."

"Divided Soul: The life of Marvin Gaye" by David Ritz

"David Ritz is the ultimate Marvin Gaye writer. He's done other books, but you can tell from this one that Marvin is his true passion. I love Marvin so much but what I love about this book is that it's not a Hog that just goes on about how wonderful the subject is. This is balanced, and it makes the case that Marvin is interesting outside his music. Considering the records he made, that's an amazing achievement. The interesting thing is the way it starts - the beginning is the end of his life because it's about his relationship with his father - that's what makes it a wonderful story. Tragic but wonderful."

“Aliens” DVD Box Set

"Sigourney Weaver is not a role model, but she can kick ass. I wouldn't put any actresses down as role models. Or anyone, for that matter. I like the suspense of these films, but I don't find them scary. I like the whole idea of the story and the way the stories run into each other. The first one is definitely my favourite, but it’s an amazingly consistent series."

Diana Ross doll

"I got it at a toy fair in LA for $I50 - it was patented in I977 and registered to The Motown Corporation Of America. Totally cool. I was with Johnny (McElhone, Texas guitarist and songwriting partner), who is always collecting Star Wars stuff, but I really love Diana Ross and I had to have this doll. I collect quite a few toys. I haven't had this out of the box but I do keep fixing her hair because it keeps falling over her face, which really bugs me. She's got great eyelashes and blue eye shadow, just as I remember Diana had when I was a kid. There's a big thing on the Internet now where people are trying to make clothes for these dolls. Fuck that! I've got some of the original clothes with Diana's face on them. She wont get to wear them, but she can look at them in her wardrobe."

“Something Leather” by Alisdair Gray

"It's a book about a really straight woman who works in an office, never does anything very exciting, then one day she sees this leather dress in a shop window She buys it, and it changes her whole life. It's three short stories that go off in tangents but come together in the end. To me, that's really clever writing. He doesn't write from a female perspective - I think that stuff about men being in touch with their feminine side is a load of shit, actually. The writer's a man, and he writes about sex and everything else from a male point of view, which is fine by me. I hate it when men try to be something they're not."

Jeff Wall Photo Book

  "It's a really nice, really simple book of beautiful modern photographs. His theme is just life generally - people, space and time. I've got many photographic books in the house - every time we do an album cover it's an excuse to buy some to get ideas. I always think the best way to find what interests you is to go to the photographic section of a bookshop and find what you like for yourself. People get far too much handed to them on a plate. I've got a videocam and a DVD but I'm old-fashioned - nothing really replaces photography. It's one of my big interests. If I weren't in a band, I'd either want to be a photographer or a carpenter."

"Atlantic Rhythm and Blues" Box Set (Vinyl edition)

"Everything you need to know is in this box, the best education you could have. it filled in a lot of spaces for me. Sam and Dave I always loved, but people like Barbara Lewis I never knew before this and I really got into her. I got it when I moved into my first flat. I spent so many nights there with nothing in the flat just listening to this. Even on the Marvin Gaye box set I'll skip tracks, but this is brilliant from start to finish."

"Doctor Alimantado Born For A Purpose"

"Number One - what a great title. The record itself is just filthy, it makes you want to do the whole thing. it's not dreamy beautiful like Gene Clark, where you can just lie back and go 'Aaah' with this, you have to get involved. When we did The Hush, Studio One was a major inspiration, I know it sounds different but the whole sensual sexiness thing came from our interpretation of it."

[canchewread]

Editor’s note: earlier this afternoon I managed to smash my foot into a coffee table and I’m increasingly starting to suspect that I broke at least one toe. As a result I haven’t had time to write a full edition of “The Skinny” today; in the meantime here’s a short essay on history, propaganda and the CIA.

In a recent essay about changing mainstream attitudes towards Edward Snowden and the national security state, I talked a little bit how the business of recording and analyzing history is riddled with class-based structural barriers that largely serve to protect and support establishment power and as such, elite capital. Obviously where I deal with this most in my writing is in the real-time record of history reported and analyzed by the media - after all, this type of orthodox, pro-establishment propagandizing happens every day on the evening news.

Today I'm going to switch gears and talk about books, specifically actual history books about war, foreign policy and espionage. After finishing Edward Snowden's new biography “Permanent Record” I went back to my shelf and pulled down Tim Weiner's 2007 book "Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA" - a volume I've reference many times in my writing but have never sat down to read from cover to cover until a couple of days ago.

While this isn't exactly a normal book review, I like to note up front that I’m not here to explicitly trash Legacy of Ashes - it's not like Weiner's tome is an objectively bad or horrifyingly inaccurate history book; it did after all win a Pulitzer Prize.

Based on hundreds of direct interviews and massive hordes of (then) recently declassified documents, Legacy of Ashes is mostly what it purports to be - a complete history of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency from its formation up until roughly 2006. Obviously different scholars have different primary sources but if you're in mainstream liberal media or military scholarship and you write about national security, this is a book you'll be expected by most informed observers to be familiar with; as I said, I've referenced it quite often in my work as well.

Of course, in light of the fact that the book was released right around the same time as the full exposure of CIA's staggering failure in the lead up to and aftermath of 9/11 and its complicity in Bush's secret prisons hiding America's torture program, the author understandably takes an overall "dim" view of the CIA. From cowboy covert operations in the fifties and sixties, up on through to the horrifying failures that lead to the invasion of Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction our government knew they couldn’t find (because they didn’t exist), Legacy of Ashes tells the tale of a wayward, out of control intelligence agency that has never been capable of its supposed primary function – keeping the President informed of what is happening beyond America’s borders.

In the general sense then, it’s fair to say that for the average reader the book almost certainly comes off as a shocking indictment of the Central Intelligence Agency and many of the men who have had leadership roles inside the agency - so what's the problem? It almost sounds like I'm recommending it - doesn’t it?

Unfortunately however Tim Weiner is an affluent former New York Times journalist with a Journalism degree from Colombia and a career's worth of contact with minions of the national security state; in other words Weiner is about as "establishment" as they come and the effect that has on both his overall worldview and his study of the CIA's history, screams off virtually every single page in Legacy of Ashes.

Like all too many national security "muckrakers" Weiner starts with the basic hypothesis that the CIA and U.S. intelligence agencies in general are good, justified and necessary for the defense of the country - the whole mom and apple pie American feel good story. The repeated abuses and failures of the agency, from the author’s perspective, are simply an obvious byproduct of the arrogance, incompetence and personal failings of individual leaders - failings that are often magnified by the byzantine bureaucratic structures inherent to a "free" and "open liberal democracy” like the United States.

In Weiner's account the CIA itself is not the problem, but rather the faulty individuals entrusted with its sacred task. Catastrophic failures in intelligence that have all too tragic consequences are a result of individual hubris, mission drift and plain old American cultural arrogance; the question of whether or not there should have even been a Cold War for example, simply doesn’t come up - even as the author openly admits that everything the CIA and the US government thought it knew about the Soviet Union turned out to be wrong and was based on lies produced to order by, yes the CIA. Leader after leader and planner after planner are revealed to be flawed human beings consumed by petty emotions or false assumptions and thus wholly unsuited for the job. Every U.S. president is a poor helpless dupe, grasping to extend his power to protect America from harm without realizing what he's now empowered the wayward CIA, lead by "the wrong men", to do next – even as those same men continually empower the CIA to do more and more damage in the “service” of protecting American interests abroad. In this worldview American “cloak and dagger” imperialism comes off as a sort of tragic accident; rather than a purposeful activity designed to bolster American power not just in a military sense, but in a global economic sense on behalf of American corporations as well.

In particular, Weiner's curious assessment of Allen Dulles as a bumbling incompetent obsessed with reckless covert military actions and derisive of the CIA's real work, gathering intelligence, paints a very different and somehow less harmful picture of the former CIA director than previously released accounts that delve deeper into the control Dulles exhibited over American media and the ruthlessness with which he marched men to their deaths in the dubious service of the Cold War on communism. While anyone who has read Dave Talbot’s “The Devil’s Chessboard” will have no real problem accepting that Allen Dulles was an unhinged psychopath whose vision was clouded by myopic hatred of the Soviet Union (and anti-capitalism as a whole), Weiner’s portrait of a gout-ridden dilettante withdrawing into a world of public relations and spy-novel trickery doesn’t line up very well with Dulles’s staggering level of (malignant and xenophobic) influence over multiple U.S. presidents and American foreign policy. We are after all talking about a man who might have had a hand in assassinating an American head of state to not only save the CIA but also prolong the Cold War in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Another good example of how the author’s proximity to his subject influences the way he presents the history of the CIA can be found in the way Weiner's suggestive prose repeatedly implies, but does not directly state, that Fidel Castro killed John F Kennedy; an extremely unlikely if not almost impossible scenario in light of the secret peace talks the Kennedy administration has since been revealed to have been trying to conduct with both Castro and Nikita Khrushchev.

It would be one thing if Weiner were just repeating information from CIA interviewees who believed Castro had Kennedy assassinated, but the problem is that Weiner himself is clearly purposely leaving a trail of clues towards his own belief that Fidel Castro had John F. Kennedy killed in retaliation for the CIA's botched plots to assassinate Castro; clues that are scattered throughout the entire book - it comes up at least a dozen times in the first 250 pages for example.

Naturally this theory has the benefit of not only indirectly absolving the CIA itself (and shifting the blame to Robert Kennedy) but also supporting the author’s primary thesis – namely that the CIA is horribly run and has at times been completely out of control but ultimately the agency is worth salvaging; a position that undoubtedly makes Weiner’s ex-CIA friends and sources happy no matter how much they protest otherwise.

In the author’s worldview, even the existence of the CIA is an unfortunate compromise for the pure as snow “democratic” Pig Empire, a result of America’s desperate need to fight the more talented, sophisticated and ruthless Soviet intelligence machine - an admission of inferiority that may seem scandalous on its face, but likely serves the CIA and its efforts to obscure the real, decidedly imperialist purpose of the agency just fine on the whole. Weiner could have and quite probably should have named the book “Legacy of Ashes: Confessions of the real CIA” or something similar because this feels like a confessional, or perhaps national therapy more than it feels like excoriation and condemnation.

Legacy of Ashes uses the agency’s own records and officers to gleefully point out all of the CIA’s already admitted mistakes, but the larger questions of how and why the world’s only superpower keeps letting dangerous cowboy intelligence officials “lead it” by the nose into “accidental” atrocity after “accidental” atrocity is left wholly unasked and unanswered. In the end you’re left with a book that largely consists of a full and detailed chronicle of the CIA’s known public history from the perspective of an exasperated but ultimately sympathetic parent who just wishes the agency would stick with the important work of gathering intelligence. 

So that simply leaves one question; did Tim Weiner sit down to write a limited hangout for the CIA at the time of its greatest need? I can’t definitively answer that question but truthfully, I doubt it. The lens through which Legacy of Ashes views the CIA seems to me wholly a product of who the author is, or rather who he’d simply have to be to end up a world renowned national security reporter for the New York Times; an influential media figure with the resources, time and gravitas to speak to hundreds of former CIA employees.

Weiner comes from a lived experience and professional environment where American imperialism is a dirty foreign smear, the CIA’s purpose is purely defensive and questioning whether or not the problem is American global hegemony itself, as opposed to rogue cowboys running an unsupervised spy shop, is strictly verboten. If the author were the kind of guy who thought the CIA deserved to be shattered into a thousand pieces and American imperialism is a source of global suffering, not global stability - well I highly doubt you’d have ever heard of his book.

All of which isn’t to say that Legacy of Ashes is a worthless book; if like myself you’ve read dozens and dozens of other books on not only the CIA but also U.S. imperialism, it’s fairly easy to tease out the facts from Weiner’s strictly liberal orthodox opinions and desire to ultimately preserve the agency. Unfortunately however if you are not an accomplished history student or largely unfamiliar with the minutiae of CIA’s history as a whole, it’s safe to say that Legacy of Ashes is only going to tell you part of the story - the what, and not the why.

This is because if you ever did figure out the real reasons why, you’d see no justifiable reason for America to even have a CIA.

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog. Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord! 

[journeysintowebcomics]

Homestuck Liveblog #183

UPDATE 183: Narrative Takeover

Last time everything went wrong for so many characters. John’s fight with Caliborn went awry, Jane’s plan to seduce Jake didn’t work because he kept thinking of Dirk, and Dave and Karkaroni’s political strategy meeting got derailed by Jade deciding it was a good time for romantic overtures. So now let’s continue.

So, now that they have been dumped in middle of the chaos that’s destroying all the known existence and reality, John checks the situation. Lord English is up there, in front of the black hole, seemingly impervious to its strong absorbing effect.

Unlike his younger form, his eyes aren’t flickering wildly. They’re locked in place, an eight ball in each socket.

If I remember correctly from the booklet about pool I read like six years ago when I started playing pool for fun, the eighth ball is the last one you must sink, so I’d say it indicates it’s endgame. I think it also had happened in Arc 7. Symbolism!

Tavros is over there, leading an army, Vriska is nowhere to be seen and presumably is very dead, and Meenah was supposed to be going away, I think? Anyway, it’s fight time! Everyone already has their weapons at the ready – all the weapons that are supposed to hit Lord English pretty hard – and Rose tries to remind them what exactly their plan is. She barely gets a single word out before she’s dead.

But Rose doesn’t get to finish what she was trying to say. Lord English’s mouth roars open and a wave of energy blasts through your group. Rose is the only one caught in it. She dissolves in slow motion. You can see the outline of her body in shadow. One arm thrown up over her eyes, shoulders pulled up defensively, cape billowing out behind her. She leaves an afterimage of shimmering light in her wake and then dissipates, drifting apart like a handful of salt tossed out to sea. You can almost hear the cosmic clock counting down, tick tock, and a chime to accompany her fate: Heroic.

This fight lasted like three seconds before it all looked grim as heck for John and friends. This is going to wreck everyone’s morale and ruin whatever effective plan they had, as I really doubt Rose was supposed to stand aside and let everybody else act. They’re so doomed.

As if to underscore how screwed they are, Jade tries to use her powers and finds out the black hole up there is where the green sun used to be. It made Lord English vulnerable, but she’s powerless now too. Whooops. Kind of a big oversight. How didn’t John or Future Rose foresee that detail? It’s kind of important!

With that, two of the four are now dead and they haven’t gotten started for real. Dave is trying to cut Lord English with the cueball sword, John is...standing around, I suppose, until he snaps out of it and surrounds Lord English with wind, capturing him until he tries to smash his skull with the hammer. Lord English eats the hammer. I’m...okay, I didn’t see that coming. I appreciate the move a lot. John can’t do much else because his glasses are broken, so he can’t see well at all. Good thing Meenah is around now! What a lifesaver!

Time to assess the situation and check how badly things have turned in...like a minute or so. As I always say: a minute is quite a long time in a fight!

Ghostly Tavros and another one of John’s hammers join the list of casualties, Meenah deciding to go in for the kill. Not unless you turn into Dave, gal! Not that Dave is faring much better, he’s trying to harm Lord English but he’s way too fast, even for Dave, who is no slouch in the agility department. That’s incredibly quick, and he’s not fueled by the green sun right now. Everything is awful for the heroes here!

Meenah is launched away and I can only guess she’s dead, because in this scenario being thrown away is kind of fatal due to the huge black hole up there. Dave is under Lord English’s foot, John barely saves him by throwing more hammer at Lord English for him to eat, and tries to set up a hammer barrier to prepare that silly thing he made with the legendary Zillyhoo and Vriska’s dice. If they need a lucky hit they sure need it now!

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < waaaaaaaaaaaait

...oooooooh no. I had completely forgotten this existed. Hey, what’s new? Will you be able to defeat Lord English? At least Dave is reacting with horror, which is the right reaction when you see a copy of yourself that was merged with a cat. Davepetasprite is being inspirational, trying to psyche up Dave, and it works!

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < i know it looks pawful right now but we can do it

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < in fact were literally the only ones who can do it

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < after all

DAVEPETASPRITE^2: B33 < it is our destiny B33

You also are the last three people left here, so I don’t think it’s much about destiny at this point.

Somehow, between the three of them they manage to do real damage on this monster. John’s hitting him with hammers even if Lord English keeps eating them, Dave slashes and actually gets blood, and Davepeta scratches with the claws. The cycle continues, Lord English almost eats John’s favorite hammer, just that this time he almost gets John himself. Well then. This story is truly something.

Apparently John got injured with Lord English’s teeth or something, because he’s bleeding heavily. I swear, if John dies because he got bitten by Lord English I’m going to be astonished, because that was never a cause of death I imagine would ever happen.

You lift your chin and see it: Lord English’s gold tooth cracked off at the base and embedded in your chest. It must be stuck between two of your ribs, you think, because it hurts like a bitch when you try to breathe.

Oof, you’re in big trouble! When you have something embedded into you you really shouldn’t take it out unless you’re in a professional’s hands, so it’s pretty likely John will have that tooth embedded into him for quite a while. Dave isn’t doing too badly, managing to stab Lord English with the cueball sword up the hilt, unfortunately leaving him vulnerable to Lord English’s maw. Oh god, he has tasted human blood, everyone run! Too late for Dave, though, he gets his head bitten off.

Won’t lie, that’s pretty brutal as far as deaths go. Damn!

Obviously this enrages Davepeta, who grabs Lord English and flies up to the black hole, dragging him along. That was an option? Maybe it’d have been great to have done that much earlier, before Dave died. Really would have been nice.

The black hole—the gaping, implacable, cosmic embodiment of the dead cherub, his long-departed sister—finally welcomes Lord English home.

English and Davepeta are sucked in with a subatomic whimper. The reunion sends shock waves across the pitiful remains of Paradox Space. And then everything is wholly, utterly, and categorically silent. It’s over. Lord English is dead.

Ding dong, the witch is dead. Somehow it’s done! Excellent! Now, here comes opinions about this whole sequence.

To be perfectly honest, this left a lot to be desired. The least of my complaints is the length – for a climactic fight it’s a little bit short. Which isn’t really a problem here, given this isn’t Homestuck anymore, it’s the epilogue. The fight not getting focus is fine and dandy, honestly. I’m actually surprised we got a fight at all.

What I will complain about, though, is that for something that pretty much only Davepeta got to do something worthwhile. It feels like pretty much everyone else who intervened, both alive and dead, were there just to die. It’s pretty disappointing, really. I think I’d have been okay with that if they at least had managed to do something before dying.

Curiously enough, if this had been incorporated into the story, characters dying so fast would have been less bad. I’d say this being part of epilogues is what makes this be treated differently to how it’d be otherwise. But yeah, Lord English is dead, and there’s plenty of epilogue left. I suppose that means the political stuff is what’ll fill the rest of the epilogue in this route, no?

You collapse against whatever is passing for the floor at this moment of utterly null corporeal conditions surrounding you. It doesn’t feel possible. You’re not sure you can even trust your perception well enough to believe it. But it seems to be over. You’ve convinced yourself of this truth well enough to allow yourself to exhale. Enough to allow yourself to suddenly acknowledge the agony coursing through your body, emanating from the gold tooth lodged in your chest. Enough to allow yourself to succumb to the overwhelming urge to sleep.

He’s so dead. And so, all the Wonderkids are dead, total party kill. They tried and they succeeded, mostly thanks to a timely intervention by what turned out to be the best sprite just for killing Lord English, and now they’re all dead. I’m pretty sure by now this makes Homestuck qualify as a Greek tragedy.

Ah, there’s the conversation Rose and Dirk are going to have. She starts by talking about that novel she wrote in her diaries, the ones about wizards. She feels the story as written by the adult Rose Dirk knew from his original world didn’t have as much passion as she did when she wrote the original draft in her journals. Maybe! When you write something for a widespread public, you have to kill a liiiiittle of your own passion to tailor it for a wider audience. It’s a cynical thought, I admit, but I believe I’m right.

ROSE: Anyway, my point is that I’ve long suspected my story was a pre-manifestation of my Seer of Light powers. I was seeing beyond my universe into another.

Doesn’t sound farfetched to me, I must say. It’s possible that, from her early ages, she was unconsciously starting to tap onto the many powers and abilities that come with her title and role. I mean, Mom Lalonde was there, and I believe in her own way she’d help pave the way for the kids to achieve what was needed to triumph. She may have done something, inadvertently or not, that led to Rose writing her novel in a fit of inspiration. Who knows. Certainly not me, and it’s such a minuscule point in the vast net of Homestuck I doubt it’ll be ever touched.

I hadn’t noticed until now that in the end a total of twelve players had crossed the door into the new universe. Fun number for that. Also, Terezi’s name is among them, so she did get to the new universe after all. What happened to her?

All these numbers may or may not have significance. Hah! Well it depends on what kind of author writes the story. Given it’s Hussie, well, I’m inclined towards thinking there’s some significance. Whether the reader will find out about it is an entirely different manner, of course.

Of course Dirk has given his current situation a lot of thought, he even has theories about what’s it. I’m listening, pal, enlighten me about this new plotline.  

DIRK: I mean, some of us have stopped using our powers completely. Not a whole lot of need for emergency resurrections or complex timeline manipulation on a planet that’s never had a conflict more serious than a sportsball riot or a rumpled hat shortage.

DIRK: But even aside from how often they’re used...

DIRK: Some powers don’t lend themselves to the infinite expansion of one’s mind, the way ours do.

ROSE: I see.

ROSE: So what you’re saying is, it’s more a matter of one’s aspect than it is whether one’s powers are practiced further, or allowed to atrophy.

DIRK: Yep.

So it all depends on the power. It’s not like everyone’s going to start suffering this too, it seems to be limited to what aspect it is. Perhaps Jade and Dave would go through this too? Other than them, I’m not sure anyone else would.

ROSE: In that case, perhaps Terezi had the right idea.

ROSE: Getting away from this place, I mean.

ROSE: Maybe I was a fool for imagining I could settle down here.

Ah, so that’s what happened to Terezi. She left. Maybe she had a feeling things wouldn’t go well, it does make sense she’d be feeling the awfulness Dirk and Rose feel right now. With her Mind aspect, it does make sense she would. Where’d she go, though? Is she a nomad around the world or something?

Dirk’s taking this easier than most would because he’s used to multitasking. Ah, right, he did have his dreamself and his realself, dealing with both must have given him some practice. Still, two is nowhere close to the infinity of everything, so I’m skeptic it’s as good of a training as he says it was.

ROSE: I’m caught in the liminal space between reality and reverie, where people once believed demons dwelled. But the only reason the demon is still sitting on my chest is because I refuse to banish it. All it would take is looking directly at it.

ROSE: I’m forcing myself to stumble through my life as a sleepwalker. All this pain and sorrow could go away if I would just allow myself to wake up.

DIRK: Then why don’t you?

ROSE: Because I’m not sure that the person opening her eyes will be me.

Brings to mind that about us being someone’s dream and, when that someone wakes up, it’s all over. It’s the kind of thing that brings existential crisis when you think about it too hard, isn’t it? So, if Rose here’s experiencing something similar, she’s not going to have a good time because she’s the kind of person who thinks a lot. Nobody should be jealous of these two, that’s awful.

Dirk, in what’s unusually close to sympathy, crouches and takes off his sunglasses, looking straight at Rose’s eyes. He admits he’s a very flawed person and shouldn’t be always right, and that he knows all about his own flaws.

Rose’s eyes have grown distant, almost mirrorlike. Dirk can see himself reflected in her vacant stare.

ROSE: All the pieces in their place.

ROSE: The mechanisms all running smoothly.

She says this in a hollow tone. It’s the disarming voice a puppeteer ventriloquizes for a marionette.

...okaaaay, something happened. If I’m understanding this and the next few sentences correctly, Dirk pretty much took over Rose. I don’t know why, he just did. Althoooough...hm. It’s still early. Maybe the reasons will be revealed later. But hey, you can’t say this was predicted! Also, if I had to guess, the moment Rose was taken over was when he took off his sunglasses. It just makes sense, really.

Whyyyy is the text turning orange. Dirk, are you taking over the narration?

Yup, he did, and he’s addressing the reader. He sounds pretty bitter there are readers, and brags about he can make the reader’s perspective change and turn into a character’s perspective. No complaints from me for you doing that, really, be my guest.

But I haven’t revealed myself to you just to boast about the abilities arising from the gradual obliteration of the constraints on my consciousness. I’ve only taken a moment to answer a few questions. Not ones I heard you ask—because again, you are nonspecific and therefore do not matter—but ones I imagined you asking. And by imagining these questions, they became less fake, and as such, demanded similarly non-fake answers. No, in truth, the time has come to make my presence known in order to start bringing my plans to fruition. It’s time to get down to fucking business.

Eh. Sounds to me like Dirk wants to ramble and wants an excuse to do so, even if he has to make that excuse himself. Golly, pal, you have free control of the narrative. Ramble all you want, go ahead.

To continue the narrative, John has to wake up and does so. I suppose he being sleepy and exhausted after the fight was just he being sleepy and exhausted instead of being borderline dead because of blood loss. Dirk forces the narrative to make John apologize to no one for everything that happened in the battle, and it’s all so heavy-handed even John notices something’s going on with his head. Dirk, you’re not doing a very good job at being subtle.

Suddenly you remember: Lord English’s tooth is still embedded in your chest. You panic, wrap your hands around the base, and give it a little tug. It’s excruciating. The tooth makes an awful grating sound as it grinds along one of your ribs. You gasp and lose your grip, biting the inside of your mouth so hard that you taste blood.

Can’t blame you for trying, but I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Without someone to administer proper medical care, you’ll bleed to death pretty much instantly.

Yeah, exactly! Not that there’s anyone to administer proper medical care in the middle of literal nowhere, so he’ll have to transport himself somewhere else before he touches that tooth any further. Where’s John, anyway? Is he still lying around underneath the black hole? Did he zap himself somewhere else?

On the other hand, the tooth is poisoned. So you’re pretty much fucked either way, and that’s really all there is to say on the matter.

Oh. That’s a thing now? Well then, guess you’re screwed, John. Thanks for everything, have a nice death. I suppose it would count as a heroic death because he received that fatal wound fighting someone who was obliterating reality, so being revived isn’t an option, I suppose.

John wanders around for a very long time, depressed and feeling pretty awful, until he sees Dad Egbert’s wallet. It’s a coincidence to find it anywhere in the infinite expanse of reality! John opens the wallet, aaaaand...end page! Quick, make a distraction and go check some other place. It’s the usual Homestuck style, so that’s what happens.

Jade’s explaining Dave and Karkaroni’s political ambitions to Roxy and Calliope, once again using the terms ‘neoliberal austerity measures’. I’m still unsure what that’s supposed to mean, but whatever it is makes Roxy groan, no doubt because she has heard about said measures too much already. They’re bad, and Karkaroni’s underdog populism is the counter to those, she argues. Give him a chance! Unfortunately for Elect-a-Troll 20xx, it doesn’t seem like Calliope and Roxy are very interested in getting involved in this at all.

ROXY: i just dont rly

ROXY: care about politics that much i guess

I suppose this means she’s not going to support Jane either. Hey, better for her to not be interested than for her to be on the opposite side. This is a victory of some sort.

She’s reticent to supporting anyone not only because she’s not interested in politics, but also because it’s a fight between her friends and she sure isn’t eager to going against a friend. She also knows this is something Jane has been planning for a long time, so she’s not into ruining Jane’s plans – even though she won’t really go out and say she supports Jane. I really disagree Jane is fragile, though. She’s anything but fragile.

In the spirit of full disclosure, Roxy’s the only one left I haven’t been able to crack. Her mind remains a total enigma to me, just like it always has. If I had to guess, it’s her Void powers that make her invisible, even to increasingly omniscient parties such as myself. For all intents and purposes, it’s like her thoughts don’t exist. She’s the same person, as far as I can tell. She still wears her heart on her sleeve. But the bottom line remains: Roxy Lalonde is still utterly fucking inscrutable.

Which is a very good thing for her. I wonder if this means Dirk would be unable to do anything with the narration involving Roxy, if she’s invisible for even the increasingly omniscient parties. In that case, she’s the luckiest person in this entire canon. Good thing, too, given how Dirk is a fervent supporter of Jane, so he can’t manipulate her into doing anything.

Roxy’s staying out, but what about Calliope? She doesn’t want any of this either, because it’d be stressful as all hell and that’s a very valid reason to not want to get involved in politics, especially if it’s between competing friends. At least Jade understands well enough and doesn’t insist.

Apparently Roxy asking Jade to call both Calliope and her by ‘them’ throws Dirk off to the point he has to hastily say aloud he doesn’t care and that he’s very okay with this, you guys, it’s totally okay. I don’t know, when this kind of thing is written or said like he did I can only think that person is indeed not okay with it. Dirk really should stop his rambling for once before he shoves his feet deeper into his mouth.

For a person that’s starting to be omniscient and spent an entire page mocking the reader and being vainglorious he sure is pretty concerned with keeping up the appearances.

ROXY: i mean what am i gonna do

ROXY: get married and pop out 100 bbs?

I mean, with ectobiology that’s far easier and simpler than you make it sound. You don’t even have to get married for that.

I choose to believe Dirk has gotten so flustered by the conversation about Roxy and Calliope being non-binary he chose to make Jade be unconscious. He had to stop the conversation somehow, so he made her do astral plane stuff. Smooth, Dirk, smooth as a brick.

I may as well stop here for the time being.

Next update: next time

[thaumaturtles]

Epilogue Thoughts

So, I finished the epilogues at around 11 AM on 4/21 and spent the better part of today mulling over it internally. Overall, I think I liked ‘em. Don’t get me wrong, they were brutal and tragic and ripped my heart out, but this is my garbage and I’m allowed to enjoy it. I was planning on liveblogging the epilogues but constantly pausing to jot down my feelings detracted from the overall experience. This is probably gonna be pretty scattershot, since I have neither the ability nor the desire to order my thoughts properly. Now, without any further preamble, let’s get into it.

Jane

 A lot of people said they didn’t like the treatment of Jane in the epilogues, and, fair enough, she was pretty awful and Crocker stans have every right to be pissed. But to anyone saying it came out of left field or didn’t make sense, I’d have to disagree (for the most part). Jane was brainwashed by the Condesce for the first 16 years of her life, and we see the effects of this when she goes Crockertier. She’d almost certainly have baked-in presumptions about how trolls were “meant to be” (ie super violent) even before she was consciously aware that trolls as a race existed. Jane was also always really in denial about having been brainwashed by the Condesce and I can definitely see adult Jane flat-out refusing to do any self-analysis and just assume there are no remaining effects of the brainwashing and she’s “totally cured” now or whatever. Jane’s also not super progressive? Like the conversation where she discovers Dirk has a crush on Jake and that Jake might even reciprocate was pretty uncomfortable to experience, and she starts a business on Earth C even though there’s no real need for corporations in a world with infinite resources. This shows that she’s still stuck in the belief that capitalism is inherently good/necessary for no reason other than “it’s what i grew up with.” All in all I could totally see Jane as someone who’d grow up to become xenophobic and have this colonizer mentality of “I have to regulate the Other because they’re not capable of functioning without me”

As for the non-consensual/rapey stuff... I’m actually not gonna touch that shit with a six-foot pole. The narrative is very explicit in the fact that Jane is an abusive partner and what she’s doing Is Bad, but like if she’s your favourite character you probably aren’t going to be all gung ho about seeing her do all the things that she did, which were admittedly very upsetting to read. I completely understand if you couldn’t read past those parts because they were pretty rough.

The Epilogues do get pretty unpleasant to read though :/

The Epilogues are highly antagonistic towards Homestuck’s readers. This is a fact. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to interpretation, but it is at the very least not a new thing. Listen to Kate Mitchell of the Perfectly Generic Podcast and YouTuber OptimisticDuelist for more in-depth analysis than I could possibly provide on this, but one of Lord English’s greatest weapons is his ability to get people not to care about Homestuck, or even better, to revile it. That’s what the aspect of Rage represents: Plot Contrivance. As Karkat says,

THERE ARE OUTCOMES THAT ARE EVEN WORSE THAN THE COMPLETE ANNIHILATION OF EXISTENCE ITSELF. FORCES MORE DAMAGING TO THE INTEGRITY OF REALITY THAN THOSE CAPABLE OF TURNING IMAGINATION INTO PURE VOID. THEY ARE FORCES WHICH IF HANDLED RECKLESSLY WILL NULLIFY THE BASIC ABILITY OF INTELLIGENT BEINGS IN ALL REAL AND HYPOTHETICAL PLANES OF EXISTENCE TO GIVE A SHIT.

This is repeated, by Hussie himself no less, later on during his smug self-insert, found here. After Hussie dies and loses control of the narrative, LE is free to try his hardest to get you, the reader, not to give a shit. Rose, in the Epilogue’s Prologue, says that if people stop caring about Homestuck, reality as they know it will break apart, which is exactly in line with LE’s plans. So the fact that the Epilogues are very hostile towards the reader is basically par for the course. That said, I can see how it kinda sounds like I’m being all “oh it’s SUPPOSED to be shitty you wouldn’t underSTAND,” but that’s. literally what’s happening. and there’s evidence for it in the text.

Of course, in the past, when the narrative would pull things like this it would be under the guise of, say, Homosuck, which is very obviously meant to be bad and is presented in a fun, satirical way. The Epilogues, on the other hand, are downright upsetting. They’re presented in a much grittier light, which can obfuscate to what degree it’s Actually A Joke, if it even is a joke in any capacity. The fact that they’re tragic, though, should not be seen as evidence that they’re bad.

Some stuff I Liked

Both routes had some really top-notch interactions in them. A lot of folks seem to be overlooking how genuinely good the writing was. I said the phrase, “they’ve still got it” ALOUD to myself once or twice because the dialogue really did have that good ole Homestuck Charm. The Dave/Karkat/Jade interactions early on in Candy (before everything went to shit) were pretty great, as was basically everything that came out of English’s mouth. I dunno who the Antiquities Consultant was, but they did an excellent job at mirroring Jake’s usual speech pattern. I find that a lot of people, when writing Jake, just kinda throw in as many random old-timey words as possible and as a result it feels kinda disjointed, but the writing team for the epilogues managed to make him feel very... would light be a good way to put it? Sort of airheaded I guess. Just very goofy idk

We got to see Rosemary and they were married and raised a kid and it was the best! Rose was really well-written, as was Kanaya; I really loved seeing those personalities balance each other out again. It was nice to see them be good parents in the Candy-verse. The Vriska they raised was such a fucking scamp too! It was nice to see a Vriska who had a positive home environment but still had that same spunk

Also, Dave. Just, all of Dave. He was really solidly written throughout the whole thing. I fucking love his interest in the economy holy shit. I got to hear Dave Strider say the phrase  “neoliberal austerity measures.” That’s the best. “Economically Aware Anti-capitalist Dave” is rivaled only by “Karkat (True Leftism)”. I’ve seen a few complaints that Dave’s interest in the economy was also OOC, but for one thing he’s an adult and can cultivate new interests if he likes, and for another Dave is a pretty clever kid, and very numerically-minded. (Is that a term? I mean he’s good at maths and such). Don’t forget, not only did he manage to accumulate all the wealth on LOCAH in the span of three days by taking over their stock markets, but he also used the hash map modus in his day to day life, showing that he was able to do calculations in his head as quick as breathing. As shown here, the hash map modus is pretty complex and requires you to come up with a word that has the same value as the thing you wanna use in order to use it. That’s not easy to do on a dime and yet he uses it in his rooftop battles with Bro. All of this is to say, he’d certainly learn to be very good at economics if he wasn’t already. It just suits him.

Oh and I also love that Dave still makes SBaHJ and Karkat has a bunch of sockpuppet accounts he uses to defend Dave’s honour. it’s very cute.

Karkat also had some lines in the epilogues damn. I hadn’t realized how starved I was of VantasRage until I read a few of his rants. Also we finally got to see Badass Rebel Leader Karkat and he’s just as great as we all knew he’d be

The davekat kiss in Meat was great too. It was very gratifying to see after all the narrative cockblocking that went down in Candy.

John realizing in the Candy universe that he isn’t responsible for everything and that they’re all still just people with their own autonomy was good. Much as I have problems with the Candy universe on a whole I liked this specifically.

Also, roxygen! I love roxy/callie as much as the next guy but John and Roxy were very cute near the end of the comic and I liked seeing them grow up and have a kid. John names his son after the guy from Night Court because he’s a massive dweeb. Love it.

We got some great Terezi writing as well. The johnrezi at the end of Meat was nicely written and made me feel a whole host of emotions despite me not even having shipped them that hard beforehand.

OH MY GOD THE OBAMA SHIT. I almost forgot to put this in because I was focused on other stuff but my word the whole Obama Situation was beautiful I loved every second of it. It was so over-the-top in the best way and it simultaneously carried airs of being So Serious And Important To The Narrative and being just the dumbest load of crap. I loved it so much

Also, I was very happy with Roxy and Callie coming out. Roxy talking about how he’d already come out as dating an alien with a green skull for a head and how it felt like maybe he was being “selfish” by also wanting to come out as trans was a great illustration of something that already-out LGB people often feel when realizing they don’t identify with their assigned gender. Additionally, Calliope coming to terms with the fact that they don’t have to identify as female just to further differentiate themselves from Caliborn was great. It really helped to show how far they’d come from just being Caliborn’s foil into being their own person. However, this leads into:

Some stuff I didn’t like

Speaking of Roxy and Callie’s transition, Dirk also came out. As a transphobe. Which was disappointing, to say the least. He made a point of misgendering Roxy as often as possible and was pretty dismissive towards NB people when he learned about Calliope’s identity. (You could make an argument that Dirk is being thoughtless by misgendering Roxy and not intentionally malicious, but I don’t see Dirk as the kind of guy who slips up very often. He’s very careful with language.) I always headcanoned Dirk as trans, as I’m sure most people did, so having him just up and become transphobic was kind of the worst. I intend to talk about Epilogue!Dirk a lot more in a later post but yeah. Not a fan.

EDIT: I’ve thought about the Dirk thing a little more and he does eventually start calling Roxy by the correct pronouns, albeit in kind of a “see see look at how openminded im being youre such a manly dudely stud bro” way. Dirk’s initial discomfort with Roxy and Callie’s identity more comes from his own egotistical belief that he should have already known about it than it does from genuine animosity. That aside, he does still say “She probably would have loved being a “they” when she was a teen,” which sorta rubs me the wrong way. I might just be being oversensitive though.

Also, in the Meat universe, Rose and Kanaya split up! I’m very upset about that. Ultimate Power be damned, I want happy, married lesbians! It sucks that we either have Rosemary OR Davekat but not both

On the topic of davekat, Jade really got done dirty by both Epilogues, huh? She was used as a narrative device in one and was an intrusive presence in the lives of Dave and Karkat in the other. TBH I was never a fan of davekatjade for a lot of reasons but I would have preferred they be in a happy poly relationship than what actually happened in Candy.

Actually, the only two polyamorous relationships in the Epilogues both turned out awfully. I doubt any of the writing staff had anything against poly people; I’m sure it was just a coincidence but either way it’s pretty unfortunate. I have a bit to say about this but this is running too long as is.

Gamzee

Fucking Gamzee.

Unanswered Questions

Will there be any further updates? I sure hope there will, because the ending was not very satisfying and creates more questions than it answers. I can sort of see where it might be going but they left way too much up in the air and it feels very much like it’s unfinished. V has referred to it as “the whole thing” on twitter, so it might be finished for good, but i really hope it isn’t

Why did Rose say the session they’re creating will be the most important session of SBURB ever played? Why couldn’t they play it on Earth C? Surely Earth C’s inhabitants would be more used to seeing alien life forms and would know the basics of SBURB, thus making it more likely for them to survive it. Why go to the trouble of seeding a whole new planet? I’m curious.

Can a character be said to be “Out Of Character” if the character’s own creator wrote those actions? What if they passed on the actual writing to someone else but still had to verify it themselves? What does OOC even mean? Does it mean “this doesn’t fit my headcanon” or “there is no evidence for this” or “the author wouldn’t write them like this”? If it’s the last one, can an author merely saying “this interpretation is correct” absolve ANY action from being deemed OOC? I like that I’m being made to think about this kind of thing now

To what degree is each universe truly “Canon”? I’m aware that Candy lost its canon-ness when John decided not to fight LE, but the two universes are intrinsically linked: we see characters from one universe travel to another and it’s implied that Terezi has spoken to both Johns. How canon is Meat, even? Are either of them even still bound by the need to be part of the Alpha Timeline anymore, since Lord English has been created? What does anything mean?

Final Musings

I understand completely if you don’t like the epilogues. Maybe you think they’re too dark. Maybe you just don’t agree with portrayals of the characters. Maybe you hate that they gave jade a fucking tail when she never had one in the main comic. There certainly were bits of it that I wasn’t a fan of, but there are also parts I really wanna go draw fanart of right now. I like the Epilogues, but if I write fanfic or make dumb joke posts about Earth C, I’m probably gonna ignore large swaths of it (such as, I’ll probably keep both John and Dirk alive, and make them kiss a lot)

There has been a great deal of vitriol directed specifically at Hussie about the epilogues despite the fact that other people worked on them. It’s difficult to take these criticisms in good faith when so many people are blaming solely Hussie. I’m aware that he had total control over actual plot elements and wrote a bit of dialogue, but the bulk of the actual text was written by V. Another thing I’ve noticed is that people’s attitudes towards the epilogues are very much like the general attitude towards Act 7 when it first came out. I’ll admit, I left the Homestuck fandom in like 2014 and didn’t return until mid-2017, but people’s Jimmies were definitely still Rustled even then. There was a general atmosphere of “I hate Hussie, and you should too! The ending was bad and no one asked for it!” but as time went on, and people started analyzing the ending and making meta posts about it, everyone sort of grew acclimated to the ending. Suddenly, the general consensus was that Homestuck was Good Again Finally and the ending was Amazing and The Fandom Loved It. I feel like maybe that sort of thing’s gonna happen again with the Epilogues. I really hope that, as it continues to update (if it does), everyone will sort of chill out about it

[momestuck]

Epilogues: Candy, Ch 22-26 [Epilogue 5]

/So a lot of heavy shit has happened, though worse is yet to come (I’ve been warned of an onscreen sexual assault in chapter 32).

Everyone’s been having babies and funerals! It’s a busy time.

(note: csa mention in chapter 23, though it does not occur in the narrative)

Chapter 22

This is another John-Terezi text convo chapter. There’s been a three-year timeskip. And... it’s raining ghosts now.

So I guess that’s what became of the whole ghosts in the Furthest Ring thing?

We also learn that, on top of the breeding restrictions, trolls are banned from rising beyond certain levels in government. Jane is, we learn, pretty much running the government behind the scenes, because what makes fascist movements tick is one evil person, obviously.

Karkat’s the one with a backbone at least...

JOHN: and karkat...

JOHN: he’s gone completely off the grid!

JOHN: at first we all assumed that the reason he ran away was because he got fed up with his shitty poly relationship.

JOHN: which was probably part of it, honestly. but now i keep seeing his face on all the resistance posters!

JOHN: i think they may have actually put him in charge?

TEREZI: H3H

TEREZI: 1 4LW4YS KN3W H3 H4D 1T 1N H1M

This situation is only exacerbated by the ghosts. So that means characters who were very definitely dead in the main storyline can show up.

Gamzee has been apparently spreading this religion of ‘redemption arcs’ by ‘making out with people’, and doing some kind of milk-based ‘baptism’. John, meanwhile, asks about the ethics of kidnapping baby Tavros from his horrific parents...

We get to bare witness to Gamzee ‘redeeming’ the ghosts of Feferi and Eridan. Which involves Eridan going on about Feferi’s feet and Gamzee mashing their faces together to make them ‘kiss and make up’.

Jane, it seems, is going full Condesce in more ways than one:

Just then, a dark shadow passes over the park. The crowd falls silent as they raise their heads to watch a drone ship pass by overhead. Its design is insect-like, splitting into many jagged branches, each decked out with weapons and cameras. It’s completely silent, and encased in armor with a bright red finish, smooth and seamless. It’s often cited by Jane as the crown jewel of Crockercorp’s various military contracts with the government.

...including literally building her spaceships, and sending them out over the Troll kingdom.

So we’re basically going to have the Holocaust allegory in here I guess? Fucking hell.

chapter 23

We get more words towards Roxy’s steady character dissolution...

It’s not like Roxy had ever been argumentative, exactly. He just seems to remember someone from his youth who was somewhat more contrarian in spirit than this person he’s married to now.

Back when they were dating, John thought she was acting a little off. Not quite in a bad way, but perhaps a little too “in love,” too fast. At least she still seemed like herself most of the time. But since the wedding, every year that goes by, she seems to become just a little more conciliatory. Not just toward him but toward life in general. She indulges Harry Anderson liberally and almost thoughtlessly. She doesn’t care that her best friend is slowly turning into an executive overseeing the corporate arm up the puppet ass of a ruthless dictatorship. She still thinks Gamzee is being sincere about all this “redemption” bullshit, even though he’s been casting an increasingly dark and hungry shadow behind Jane: a malicious royal vizier to her burgeoning imperial persona.

So John’s going to do something, and hopes that it will make things feel ‘real’ again... which is to say obviously what he talked about with Terezi, kidnapping/rescuing Tavros Crocker. Well-intentioned, but... I do not anticipate this going well.

We learn a little such as... Jane’s planning to outlaw human and troll marriage, which would retroactively hit Rose and Kanaya. Which I guess is the final straw for them. (Frankly it should be well past the final straw for all of them. They should all be with Karkat by this point!)

Also Jane and Jake are in ‘auspistice counselling’. We witness a loud row, in front of Tavros...

TAVROS: It’s fine,,, my parents are kismeses after all,,,

like, fuck.......

It’s a birthday party for Harry Anderson (John and Roxy’s kid), and Jane’s gift is, well, a fucking imperial drone!

sometimes I picture V’s gleeful face as we see the next thing she’s got for us... and now you lick the clown’s armpit... jane’s making the Holocaust but for fictional space aliens...

John awkwardly finds an excuse to be alone with Tavros, to convince him to run away. The kid dialogue is convincingly naive.

The possibility of child sexual abuse (by Gamzee) is raised, but it’s made clear this isn’t the case: what ever else Gamzee is in this version, he doesn’t rape children. However, that the situation is overall abusive in just about every other way is more than clear. Tavros, on his part, seems to be very keen to leave once he’s convinced John can escape Jane’s security.

I have a feeling the imperial drone may become relevant again shortly.

Jade, however, witnesses what John’s trying to do. She insists it will just make everything worse... (also Jake has an ‘execution dance off show’ because yeah...)

Whatever weird character corrosion has hit them is finally raised...

JOHN: if there was another way we would have found it by now!!!

JOHN: but there isn’t one, because everyone’s been all... brainwashed by marriage, or whatever the hell happened over the last few years that made things be this way!

JOHN: it’s like everyone just talks past each other all the time!

JADE: john...

JOHN: i’m the only one who ever seems to realize that something...

JOHN: that something’s WRONG!

Tavros sadly can’t get a word in edgewise as they start having a go at each other - John calling out everything that’s wrong, the way Jade forced a relationship on Dave and Karkat, and... and the noise is loud enough that Jane arrives on the scene.

John finally has a go at her with all the latent awfulness that’s been building up to this point. The fascism, the way she’s treated Jake, the Gamzee thing... the narration has put us very much on his side, centred his perspective, but his friends won’t hear it. And his windy powers destroy the room. So that’s something.

John runs away.

Comment: the mostly strict John viewpoint makes me wonder if there’s any degree of unreliable narration. All the same, most of the stuff is pretty undeniable.

chapter 24

This one begins with an interesting exchange:

JADE [alt-Calliope]: the timelines are interacting again.

ARADIA: ooh do you hear anything interesting

SOLLUX: don’t be s0 n0sy aradia.

To me the implication is that a lot of the ‘arrivals’ in this timeline - alt-Calliope in Jade’s body, the ghosts - are as a result of things that might be happening in the Meat story.

Through alt-Calliope’s eyes, we see Terezi and John’s conversation. Terezi is lost, in more ways than one, in the dreaming void searching for Vriska. She’s also experiencing derealisation... John, apparently in a mood for dropping harsh challenges, tells her point blank that Vriska is either dead, or, not worth her time for leaving her in doubt for so long.

alt-Calliope explains that what is at stake is not the destruction of this universe - but those of them here are ‘the lucky ones’, who live ‘beyond the reach of the prince’. She doesn’t bother to explain what is at stake.

Meanwhile, John and Terezi talk depression. There’s some really vital Terezi dialogue here...

JOHN: please. please come home.

TEREZI: TH3N WH4T

JOHN: umm, i dunno.

JOHN: we hang out and stuff?

TEREZI: JOHN YOU ST1LL DONT G3T 1T

TEREZI: 34RTH C 1S *NOT* MY HOM3

JOHN: do you really miss alternia that bad?

TEREZI: 1 D1D FOR 4 LONG T1M3

TEREZI: MOR3 TH4N K4RK4T 4ND K4N4Y4 D1D 4T L34ST

TEREZI: BUT 1 H4V3 NO 1D34 4NYMOR3

TEREZI: 4LT3RN14, VR1SK4, SGRUB

TEREZI: 1M SO CONFUS3D 4BOUT WH4T 1 W4NT

TEREZI: UGH, 1 THOUGHT TH4T NOT K1LL1NG H3R WOULD M4K3 M3 F33L B3TT3R

TEREZI: BUT 1NST34D 1TS L1K3 1 R3TCONN3D 4 HUG3 CHUNK OUT OF MY SOUL

TEREZI: 1 3R4S3D 4N 4CT1ON OF R3GR3T 4ND GR13F...  

TEREZI: 4ND JUST TURN3D 1T 1NTO SOM3TH1NG 1 C4NT STOP CH4S1NG 4FT3R

TEREZI: M4YB3 WH4T 1 D1D W4S N3CESS4RY TO S4V3 3V3RYON3 3LS3

TEREZI: BUT 1T SUR3 D1DNT S4VE M3

oh terezi....

terezi is giving up. she tells john she texted, echoing his words, to ‘give him the courtesy of closure’. and that she’s going to let herself die, alone in the Furthest Ring.

this is the ‘sweet fluffy’ branch huh

chapter 25

finally an update on what’s going on with Karkat!

he’s been somehow appointed ‘Commander’ of the rebellion, with good old Swifer Eggmop as one of his comrades! I’m so glad Swifer is having a role. Karkat is not all that pleased about the successes of his rebellion:

KARKAT: SO FAR ALL THIS “TROLL REBELLION” HAS AMOUNTED TO IS A WHOLE LOT OF DICK ALL, WITH AN ADDITIONAL SIDE SERVING OF JACK SQUAT, FOLLOWED UP BY A FINAL COURSE OF GETTING TO WATCH OUR TOP ANALYST, CLIPER BORDEN, BEING FORCED TO DANCE TO AVOID LIFE IMPRISONMENT IN A LABOR CAMP ON LIVE TELEVISION AND MAKING A COMPLETE ASS OF HIMSELF.

It’s all a weird mix of surreal and grimdark, much like the Alpha kids’ backstory in Homestuck proper. There’s hard labour camps... making cake; a ‘pastry-based shadow dictatorship’.

Rose and Kanaya are at least involved somewhat in the troll rebellion, and transport of the Mother Grub has been arranged.

Anyway, Karkat’s typically grumpy internal monologue is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Meenah from another dimension. A living Meenah - equipped with a Ring of Life. John asks if she got it from Calliope, but Meenah insists she did not. (Possibly she got it from Andrew Hussie himself? I’d have to watch Cascade again probably...)

Meenah, it seems, is fresh from battling Lord English - apparently without success. But her massive army of ghosts arrives with her... and she’s willing for Karkat to take charge and order her around, as long as he does it with a suitably commanderly demeanour. Does this mean the rebellion now stands more of a chance? Meenah is ruthless (she was the Condesce in another life), though capricious... Karkat is honest and direct and angry about the right things, but rather prone to getting lost in it.

Also he still won’t text Dave, and won’t let Rose talk to him about it.

chapter 26

Back to John, who’s thinking about messaging Terezi again - presumably in the hope that she is not, in fact, dead?

He’s getting a good old mope on about the seeming fakeness, non-’canonicity’ of life on Earth C. But after some ‘melodramatic contemplating’ in this vein, he’s interrupted by his dad’s car.

I’m going to be very curious if the Meat route explains how all this stuff got into the Earth C universe.

Unfortunately, what John finds in the car is... not his dad, but a bit of Terezi’s blood. From which he concludes... he’s never going to see her again, there was never even a possibility of it.

Feeling derealisation more than ever, John just screams a lot.

Damn lol, this story is making me care about John Egbert of all people!

epilogue 5

This is the episode where the whole idyll comes crashing down. Things aren’t ok, things weren’t going to be ok, trying to pretend things were ok just made everyone miserable.

I am sufficiently depressed that that rather appeals as a narrative - much more than a ‘happily ever after’ ending. But it’s not over yet.

Hopefully there’s yet hope for the characters I like to find some manner of escape from this latest hell, develop out of the worst selves they’ve built... Roxy, at least, I hope can change, stop being this non-person...