#Not terribly dissimilar but the details that are different are too interesting to let go of so just make it all canon in its own way! Hehe

[sysig]

My kingdom for a "So you say” (Patreon)

[chocolate-parfait]

Hi there! Congrats on 300 followers! May I please have a matchup? One for IkeSen, and one for IkeVamp if that’s okay! 💖 A little about me: my pronouns are she/her, I’m a Leo, and my MBTI is ENFJ! I like to think I’m confident in myself, so I hate asking for help. I love to learn, but I also love to help others learn too. I enjoy getting to try new things, especially with others! I’m pretty extroverted, but still appreciate days where I can lounge and take time for myself to recharge 😌 1/2

Thank you✨ Here ya go, sweetie~

I match you up with... Comte!

Comte has a terribly weak spot for strong and indipendent women who can hold their own, so upon meeting you he can already feel his heart going at full speed when he feels your aura. It takes the self control he has learned in who knows how many years throughout his immortal life not to directly ask you to step on him each time you show him your leadership skills and self confidence.

He's basically whipped from the beginning, but he won't be making a move nor show his true feelings (aside from very light teasing remarks here and there) unless he sees some type of interest on your part, too. The moment you correspond his feelings he's on cloud nine, as he tries not to think too much about the future and all the obstacles you'll have to overcome

He respects your natural autonomy, and knowing how difficult you find it to rely on others, he'll try to give you as much space as possible; as soon as he sees you slightly more tired or stressed than usual though, he immediately steps in and helps you out while softly scolding you for not relying on him

If you love reading AND learning then rejoice! Comte's library has books so rare and old that you ask yourself whether he directly got them from the library of Alexandria before its burning. You can sit on the super soft sofa in his room and read one or snuggle his neck as you stay on his lap while he tells you stories and legends. It's a great way of combining the things you like the most while also not doing anything too energy consuming! Honestly it's actually a top tier date, and knowing that he trusts you enough to let you that close to him does things to your heart.

Good thing you like shopping! A little less good that you don't like it when he spoils you too much. That will always be a recurring "problem" in your relationship, being part of his love language, but maybe you can convince him to spoil you with cuddles instead and leave the gifts for important occasions only! The moment you convince him (he won't always stick to this, mind you), your relationship will go smoothly. With Comte there are no fights and little to no misunderstandings since you're both people who prefer to talk things over before jumping to conclusions and he tends to be quite compliant with your every request.

The only other problem that may emerge between the two of you is your eventual vampirification. Unlike Leonardo, our mama pureblood has no issue with biting you, and he actually plans on doing it at one point or another when and if you ever feel ready to take such an important step. He loves you so much that it is only natural for him to live a part of eternity with you, but in the eventuality you refuse to do so, he will respect your choice and won't mention it again

Your extroversion is something he's pretty grateful for. You don't have any problems attending balls or other types of public events; it's an easy task for you to entertain guests and dodge tricky or too specific questions in a way that doesn't let others in on your past and real identity.

It's a win-win situation for both on multiple levels. You get to witness real 19th century clothes, people and behaviors while experiencing things you could have only dreamed of back in the present, and Comte gets to enjoy your bright smile whilst maintaining his reputation

On the overall, you're truly the perfect example of what people call a power couple, and everyone in the mansion knows not to mess around with you unless they want to get a more-violent-than-usual spank session with the pureblood

Second choice: Masamune

What a peculiar lass he has stumbled upon! He chases anything that sparks some kind of interest in him until all the surprise and excitement is completely squeezed out till the last drop. What makes you so special though, is that you never cease to fuel his amazement; no matter the situation, you always react unpredictably, and he adores that. You're strong-willed, and not even Nobunaga can order you around when you set your mind on something.

Bold and indipendent, you're quite the rare sight among other women in the Sengoku period, you'd surely make a great warlord! Masamune takes it upon himself to show you around and explain you how things work; keep in mind that he's no Hideyoshi nor Mitsunari, so his explanations can involve more a practical approach which isn't always the safest way. Wanna learn how to ride a horse? Masamune raises you up to sit between his arms and almost flings you both off a cliff. Want to learn more details about formations and how soldiers live? He takes you on the battlefield. Once he gets an earful from his fellow warlords, he tones it down a bit, though he's pleased to notice that none of those experiences broke your enthusiasm.

Slowly he realizes he's fallen head over heels for you, and he knows all too well that this is not like his other short lived crushes. His flirting turns more purposeful and daring, but the moment he sees sprouts of mutual interest he takes your relationship to the next level. No one's really shocked about the news (aside from Mitsunari, who was oblivious the whole time), and even you two seem to be pretty chill with it.

When it comes to you, PDA is frequent, but it's so smooth and natural that barely anyone notices, but Masamune always seems to make a big fuss about it, either to tease you or annoy Ieyasu. All in all it's pretty funny to see him getting worked up over nothing, and this routine of yours brings you the certainty that your lover will always welcome with open arms whatever form of affection you have for him!

In private, goodnight and goodmorning kisses are a tradition, along other pecks and tight hugs in-between breaks or whenever you happen to see each other. At least once a day he'll come to your room with some snacks to chat over tea and cuddle together.

As a couple you do not only reign over the Tohoku region, the kitchen was the kingdom you loved ruling over together the most. Dates, dates and even more dates, you spend endless hours messing around with recipes trying to recreate a modern day cake or traditional sweets. When duty takes Masamune away from you for a couple days, you make sure to have a freshly baked plate of his favorite sweets waiting on his desk the moment he comes back. He absolutely adores knowing that you always think of him whenever he's gone, so he makes sure to make it up to you for his absence with love, affection and a nice dinner.

Since you come from two completely different worlds, your knowledge, point of views and opinions are bound to be like day and night. Where other couples might stumble and fight, you and the Sengoku hottie use your contrasting characteristics to strengthen your bond even more. You're more than eager to ramble about the modern day and tell him about mind blowing discoveries made in the western continents, whereas he finds himself complying with a loving smile whenever you ask him to teach you something. He thinks you're kind of like a black hole for knowledge, similar to Mitsunari (though you're far more cuter). You want to learn about his smooth calligraphy? No problem, he already has white sheets and ink ready! Now you'd like him to teach you how to cook zunda mochi? He has already bought all the ingredients!

You two make a great couple with many points in common but also quite the number of dissimilarities. For example, during the first steps and months of your relationship, he didn't seem to know the meaning of "I'm tired". Being the ball of endless energy he is, he dragged you off by the wrist with him whenever he had the chance to, and when you snapped and told him that you needed time to recharge, he was left dumbfounded and he decided not to approach you for a couple days. Everyone in the castle is on your side because obviously there's no one able to keep up with the hyperactive samurai. After this experience he learns to read you better, he observes with a keen eye your expressions, your movements and the light in your eyes.

[ariainstars]

The Last Skywalker or Homecoming of the Children or It’s About Family

This is my very own interpretation of the outcome of the Star Wars saga and its wrap-up, after having rewatched the movies twice last year as well as made researches in the web and thought about it for some time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The final battle on Crait in TLJ mirrors, with many visual parallels, Anakin’s assault on the Jedi Temple in ROTS, which had its terrible climax in the annihilation of the Jedi children padawans. In Kylo’s case, the attack is a total failure: the Resistance escapes, and Rey has brought with her the sacred Jedi texts from Ahch-To ensuring that their philosophy will not die.

In the final scene on Crait we see a frame of Kylo’s / Ben’s face which shows the opposite of Anakin / Vader after the battle at the Temple - on his knees instead of standing, bathed in white instead of yellow-reddish light, bare-headed instead of shadowed, his features vulnerable instead of hardened, his eyes directed up at his left instead of down at his right. That this story is going in the opposite direction of the prequels, closing up the saga making a circle and leading Ben Solo to his redemption, is undeniable.

Ben’s anger against his family led to nothing, and he wanted to eliminate Snoke to be free of him, not because he had an ambition for power; he strained for freedom and purpose and belonging with Rey, whom he feels as his equal. But we have already seen that General Hux would not hesitate to kill the new Supreme Leader at the first occasion; so it would not surprise me if the next and last chapter of the saga would begin with an act of state which would disempower Kylo / Ben and force him to flee across the galaxy, kicking over the traces. He killed Snoke to become the master of his own fate at last, thus mirroring and growing beyond Anakin, who had told Padmé he could overthrow the Emperor and rule the galaxy with her but remained Palpatine’s slave until shortly before his death. Both Anakin and Ben are no leaders or governors by nature; as Force users, their task is the galaxy’s spiritual welfare, not its political union. However, this union will not be possible unless the populations know and feel that there is an all-encompassing ideal behind it, that of a Force being and remaining in balance.

Although many fans lamented its seeming lack of purpose, in my opinion Finn’s and Rose’s journey to Canto Bight was pivotal for TLJ. It was important that they meet D.J. and hear his point of view as an outsider, i.e. that war is a dirty business which only makes people rich who have no qualms selling weapons (often to both sides), and that every kind of war is useless in the long run because “you blow them up today, they blow you up tomorrow.”

Even more important, in my opinion, is their encounter with the enslaved children who take care of the fathiers. These children seem insignificant sidekicks, emphasized by the fact that they only communicate with Finn and Rose through gestures and by the end we hear one of them speaking in an alien language; thus, they seem estranged to the story. Nevertheless, in all three scenes when they appear their features are very clearly discernible, including the few seconds when Finn observes them through the binoculars.

The children enjoy the fathier’s liberation because they would love to have the opportunity to run away, too. And the ending scene of TLJ shows that one of these children is a Force user and that he dreams about being a Jedi - a parallel with Anakin, who was a slave himself and dreamt, when he was a child, of being a Jedi and coming to free Tatooine’s slave population. (Another small detail: Cantonica, too, is a planet almost entirely covered in desert.)

The role of children in Star Wars always is very important. Anakin’s friends on Tatooine were slaves like himself, but the Jedi padawans we see at the temple don’t seem to be in an enviable position either: they are separated from their families at a very young age and taught to learn emotional detachment, since Jedi are not supposed to have close connections. In AotC and RotS we see how the affectionate and protective Anakin cannot endure his isolation, and how his intelligence criticizes the Jedi’s chief interest in politics and their lack of compassion. (As in the classic trilogy, it always comes up to him to speak the disagreeable truths nobody wants to hear.) His attitude results in setbacks and humiliations by the Jedi, who are convinced of being unquestionably in the right. All of this, in a chain reaction beginning with his mother’s cruel and senseless death, leads to his damnation; even though they had no really evil intentions, the Jedi were for a large part responsible for the disaster initiated by the future Emperor and then continued by him and his apprentice, turned into the ruthless Darth Vader.

Anakin’s ultimate moment of damnation is the carnage of the Jedi children, who were completely innocent and who additionally, before he raised his light sabre against them, had approached him with respect and trust, even calling him “master”, obviously not knowing that the Jedi had humiliated him additionally by denying him the title.

If we now assume that Kylo Ren’s / Ben Solo’s journey is basically an inversion of Anakin’s fate, it seems most logical to me to assume that he will have to meet the Canto Bight children (maybe also other children, but I would assume these, since they were already introduced in detail) and to find his future by bonding with them.

Let us consider his character as we have known him until now. Ben does not seem aggressive and violent in his nature, he has to hide behind Kylo Ren’s mask to do his evil deeds. On Crait he makes a fool of himself; the only successfully cruel act he commits bare-headed is Han’s killing, which he only manages because Han lets him do it, and which traumatizes him to the point that he can’t kill any more except in self-defence. During his interactions with Rey we meet a timid, awkward youngster, who is however also patient (he never gets angry despite Rey’s repeated aggression) and empathic (he is the one who listens to her and supports her after her experience in the Dark Side cave).

Kylo’s / Ben’s personality, like Anakin’s / Vader’s, is torn in two, but the fracture is much less deep, which can also be seen from the names: while Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader sound perfectly dissimilar, there is not much difference between Kylo Ren and Solo Ben. He is not physically maimed and handicapped like his grandfather, amply shown when he easily takes off his mask, when we see him shirtless, or when he offers Rey his hand - the right one, which distinctively is not a robotic hand. Luke could sense Vader’s inner conflict, proof that this conflict was always there but so deeply buried that only a Force-sensitive close blood relative could feel it; while Kylo’s / Ben’s outbursts of anger show that his own conflict is much more below the surface.

We can only conjecture what led Kylo to kill his own father; Snoke called it a “test” for him, probably threatening to kill Kylo himself if he didn’t commit the deed, but we do sense that there is also some personal reason. When he says to his father that Ben was “a weakling and a fool who deserved to die”, this leads us to understand that he has never learned to accept his introverted, thoughtful and vulnerable nature, even less to value it: Ben is practically his roguish, charming, good-looking father’s opposite. Knowing Snoke, he probably threw salt into Ben’s low self-esteem making him believe that by giving up the name and life of Ben Solo and becoming “the mighty Kylo Ren”, a persona modelled on Vader’s example, he would become someone “strong” as opposite to his attitude towards the Ben Solo persona. For the purpose, Snoke suggested that Ben had to kill his father, of whom he allegedly “has the heart”. But the exact contrary happens: Ben is traumatized by the act and finally understands that Snoke only used him (proving that Han’s words to him were right), destroys Kylo’s mask and never speaks to Snoke or even looks at him again. Allowing Ben to kill him, Han committed his last and most significant act of heroism - forcing his son to look at him while he committed the deed, the horror of which never leaves him again. This closes the cycle to Anakin, who had first become a killer, annihilating the tusken village, after his mother’s senseless death.

As we know Anakin when he is a child, he is intelligent, fort-right, self-assured and supportive of others. When we see him again in AotC, he is a padawan - frustrated, isolated, suffocated by the Jedi’s expectations and the lack of chances they offer him, and burdened by his master’s lack of faith in him. The child he was seems gone for good. (Another parallel: his son Luke, who had grown up with his aunt and uncle in a normal family until he was about twenty, is a pure, authentic soul full of dreams and ideals, and we even see him play with a toy aircraft in one scene on Tatooine.) We have never seen, until now, a “normal” family with mother, father and children in the saga; our heroes grew up in surrogated families or without one altogether, like in Han’s or Rey’s case. We can only speculate how far Ben Solo’s family was “normal”; their parent’s marriage was difficult, his mother busy with politics, and he was sent to training to his uncle at a young age - we do not exactly know when, but he assuredly wasn’t an adult yet. This is a big hint, for me, that peace throughout the galaxy will be possible if children could grow up in a safe place, well-educated but also loved and respected. The purpose of peace, in my opinion, is always to make the concept of a home possible. Superficially seen, Star Wars is a story of Good and Evil, but it’s not; it’s about Love and War.

At the end of TLJ, Ben is in love with Rey, but his feelings are not requited and now he has no one to whom he can offer them. I believe it would be a godsend for Ben to meet the children and learn to love them and be responsible for them. Among other things this would make him grow and find again the child he once was, the son of Han and Leia who, despite the mistakes they made with him, most certainly loved him. When they meet again in TFA, Leia immediately takes responsibility speaking with her husband, saying that she never should have sent their son away from home. She was convinced that her brother, the Jedi, would protect him, but by now she has understood that in his family sphere he would have been safer from Snoke’s evil influence. At the end of RotJ Luke was already showing the emotional detachment he retained until TLJ; this was, on the long run, neither good for him nor for his pupils. He could teach them the ways of the Force, but his wisdom was not enough to protect them. Tragically, and unknowingly, as a master he had gone a similar path as Obi-Wan and Yoda, who were wise but not truly compassionate because the Jedi ways had taught them to be detached, i.e. not to really care. Luke could not offer his nephew the comfort of a home, and this probably applied to his other students as well. Spiriting a dozen of powerful young men off to a distant planet, away from the happenings in the galaxy and without distinct purpose, and trying to teach them to suppress their emotions, Luke was unwittingly sitting on a powder keg, repeating on a smaller scale the disaster that had been caused by the Jedi Order during the times of the Old Republic. The young man who once was compassion incarnate became, ironically, uncaring precisely due to his commitment to the Jedi rules. Only after being shaken by Rey’s anger and later by Yoda’s advice he finds back to himself one last time and projects his image to Crait in order to rescue his sister and apologize to his nephew, giving up his life in the process.

If there is anything we can learn about the Jedi is that they were no heroes; Luke truly was a hero, but he was not infallible, and his story also teaches that being a hero is not a happy and fulfilling task. As beautiful as the classic trilogy is, it’s a story about longing for the past, about the desire to bring back the “past order”. None of the rebels seems to consider that the old Republic can’t have been all that good if it enabled the rise of the Empire or at least couldn’t foresee it. What the galaxy needs is not the old, but a new order, and children are demonstrative of a fresh and better start.

Ben Solo is the last from the Skywalker blood, and the Skywalkers are notoriously family men: Anakin wanted nothing more than a home. He got mad with grief when his mother died, he married although he was not supposed to, and the day Padmé told him that she was pregnant he declared that it was the happiest day of his life. Luke himself, even before knowing so, always did anything he could and ignoring the risks, to save and keep his family together (his sister, his father) and adding to it (befriending Han, who by marrying Leia became his brother-in-law). It’s when the Sykwalkers are united as a family that the galaxy is at peace. Ben has turned his back on his family feeling rejected and betrayed; all we see him do with the First Order’s means has only one aim, finding Luke and confronting him with all of his pent-up anger. So we can assume that he is not cold towards his family but on the contrary feels a lot for it, else he would not be so frustrated and disappointed. But by the end of TLJ Luke as well as Han’s dice, his last keepsake, have dissolved; a sign that his anger has literally gone up in smoke.

We have heard repeatedly the opinion other people had of Ben: his parents and his uncle feared that he might be or become like Vader, Snoke accused him of having his father’s heart… but in my opinion, Ben shows his Skywalker blood most by having, like all of them, his mother’s heart. In TESB Han pointed out that Leia would not be so angry with him if she didn’t care; and it was always she who comforted the others when they were hurt or traumatized. Ben killed Snoke in cold blood, but his extremely aggressive demeanour against Luke shows that he still cares a lot about his uncle; and in the scenes with Rey we have repeatedly seen his underlying compassionate nature. Although he is raw and immature, we feel his mother’s passionate heart in him. He has his father’s shrewdness at times, but the way he feels comes all from Leia.

Once again, the saga’s love for figurative speech helps us, emphasizing the theory of Ben Solo’s redemption: at the beginning we met a child who had no father, and the young man who is his reincarnation is the only one whose sword has the form of a cross. I do not doubt that Ben Solo will indeed “finish what his grandfather started”, as he had promised. He is the Chosen One now, Anakin being dead. That is also the main reason why I’m sure Ben will not die in the end: in Darth Vader we already had a figure who died for his sins and it would be unoriginal, mildly speaking, to simply go there again. But most importantly, Vader had left something good in the galaxy in form of his two children. If Kylo / Ben dies, the power he has inherited from his grandfather, his loving upbringing by his parents and the teachings from his uncle will all be gone with him, too: which would mean that the Skywalker family was begotten only to bring death and terror to the galaxy. This family was always meant to bring peace and stability, but it was often prevented from doing so by influences stronger than them.

The last Skywalker is now free from all outward influence - Snoke, his father, his uncle; and he has no past sins to repair for but his own, differently from Luke who spent the rest of his life trying to atone for Vader’s crimes. Ben finally has the freedom to make his own choices and to go his own way; he is the last Skywalker, but he is also the first who must learn to live without a father figure. In theory, he could now go anywhere: Snoke (albeit not voluntarily) left him his power, Luke his knowledge, Han his love.

Many viewers are of the opinion that Kylo Ren can’t hold a candle to Darth Vader in his villainous role. But this is deliberate: the tormented galaxy does not need another Vader. When the saga began, the central figure was Darth Vader, the Dark, the Evil Father; yet as we meet him when he is a child, he is the Good Son. When we first see Kylo he is the Evil Son; so narratively, I assume that his goal is that of becoming the Good Father. With a family of his own, the last Skywalker would finally find his balance and thus, bring peace to the galaxy.

On a side note, Ben may have an encounter with his grandfather aided by the Force, in order to get to know him how he truly was: an affectionate, protective person whose alleged “power” as Darth Vader hid the tragedy of a torn soul and dismembered body.

I am not quite certain about the galaxy’s political goal, but I would suggest that the only viable solution would be through matriarchy; the few working political systems we briefly know of are Naboo under Padmés rule and Alderaan under Breha’s, both of whom queens. In any case, none of them was a Force user; they did not reign using the Force the way Anakin / Vader / Kylo wanted. But not being Force users, they had never been padawans: thus they had not learned their caring and responsible attitude from the Jedi.

Ben Solo is by now the only known person in the galaxy who was actually trained in the ways of the Jedi and also knows the Dark Side. (In theory there are also the Knights of Ren, but their destiny is unknown as of yet.)

I believe it will be Ben’s task, together with Rey who is his equal in the Force, to find and keep a new and better balance in the Force without suppressing the Dark Side, and growing Force-sensitive children in a more natural way; not separating them from their families (respectively giving them one in case they don’t have it), not teaching them emotional detachment but compassion, and leaving them the choice as to whether they want to become Jedi or not. (Keep in mind: the Skywalker men from all three generations had the ambition of becoming pilots, and were pushed into becoming Jedi because it seemed to be the right thing for them. None of them actually wanted or ever was happy with being a Jedi.)

Most viewers were irritated on first seeing Kylo’s face without the mask: the reason for that being that his looks are diametrically opposite to Vader’s, he inspires trust and sympathy instead of fear. My assumption is that Ben would win the children’s confidence easily, and that his connection with them would lead to his salvation. Also, the girl he loves and whom he saw as “his” right from the beginning is someone who desires nothing more than a family, which would give both of them what they truly need - a home, and a sense and purpose in life. This would at last put an end to one of the central rules of the Jedi Code, which is that they are not supposed to marry and have families of their own. Ben Solo is the father figure the Skywalker family, and with him the whole galaxy, has been waiting for.

Carrie Fisher, whenever she was asked why she thought the saga was so loved, allegedly always answered “It’s about family.” This is perfectly true: the importance of an intact family where children can grow protected and loved is perhaps the most crucial theme of the entire story. And what makes Ben’s and Rey’s relationship so touching and inspires so many people to think and dream about them is that we instinctively feel why they fit so well: officially they impersonate Dark and Light side of the Force, but deep down they both are lost children, who desperately wish for nothing more than a home.

The technical preliminaries fit to this theory, too - George Lucas is father or three adopted children himself, and he sold the rights to the third trilogy of the saga to Disney, a production firm that knows like no other how to tell family stories and happy endings.

Narratively, it would close the circle with the other third chapters of the saga, which also deal with a return, a reckoning: after the revenge of the Sith and the return of the Jedi, now it would be time for the ones who are neither one nor the other to have a chance.

I am quite certain Ben and Rey two are meant to be together, but not on their own. Their task is to start another Skywalker story, one that is about love and not power. Ben and Rey are the beginning of the new Skywalker family, one to which everyone is invited, boy or girl, from a good family or poor and abandoned, Force-sensitive or not; the Canto Bight children are only the beginning. The “Reylo” love story so many fans are imagining these days is, in my opinion, a red herring just as Rey’s family background was in TFA, when after all of the speculating and fantasizing whose child she was, she turned out to be an absolute nobody. Her name was a dead giveaway, by the way - “Rei” in Japanese means “zero”. I know more than one Japanese manga or anime where the protagonist is named Rei which hints at her not having a belonging or family, and having to find her place in life through her own abilities and the friends she makes.

Ben’s name makes things clear, too: he bears the name Obi-Wan assumed while he was in exile; Obi-Wan / Ben was a Jedi, a mentor and a father figure, so now it’s up to Ben Solo to pick up this task.

The relationship between Ben and Rey will not lead to a grand romance but to their “place in all this”: as mother and father. The authors are drawing wool over our eyes to keep up the suspense and make us imagine all sorts of romantic outcomes, or terrible retaliations in store for Kylo / Ben, instead of the obvious truth staring in our faces.

Anakin never found another home after he had to leave his mother on Tatooine. His marriage to Padmé was secret, so they could never share a home together and present themselves in public as husband and wife. His children never knew him the way he was; and later they didn’t talk to anyone about him, Ben learned only at age 23 that the infamous Darth Vader was actually his grandfather. Luke had forgiven him and called him “father”, but even he didn’t accept the truth of his heritage, he tried to amend for the evil his father had done, but never learned about the good man he had once been. As for Leia, who had been imprisoned and tortured by him, she probably never wanted to waste a thought on him.

But Ben, who is Anakin’s reincarnation, reinstalled his place in the family the moment he called him “grandfather” in TFA. And if he manages to have a family in the end, Anakin, too will at last have come home again.

This is what I think the scene at the ending of TLJ is anticipating: we see the Force-sensitive boy sweeping the platform in front of the stables and then dreaming about being a Jedi, lifting the handle of the broom which in the starlight begins to gleam like it was a light sabre. The platform recalls a stage, and the little boy is not dreaming but, effectively, playacting.

Message received: free the stage, it’s time for us - the galaxy’s children.

[waraupiero]

the future belongs to the flames

happy valentines day @usagi-no-renkon! i’m your secret valentine for @dgm-valentine ☆☆ i hope you enjoy this story!!

ship: lavi / kanda yu word count: ~3k

Freedom does not exist; every man’s life is paved by his own choices, bricking him into a set narrative, a sentence of his own judgment. And like this we live, imprisoned by the consequences of our past decisions, under the assumption that we can still yet change what our history is destined to be. But the ink has already dried, and sometimes we regret; though for the most part we are indifferent to this apparent confinement, trusting the choice we made at the very beginning of the story.

Yet what of the man who was no longer who he was when he started? What of the man who has chosen to forsake himself, and wear the skins of other identities for the rest of his life?

What of a Bookman?

For the Bookmen, the choice they make terminates their journey at its inception. There is no personal freedom; only the duty to record the happenings of the world, and the privilege of having no single road to follow. It was a neat little paradox -- you’re free to be whomever you want, but at the same time you’re not allowed to be anything. It’s a rather fair tradeoff.

Prior to ‘becoming’ Lavi, the Bookman Junior was content with the consequences of his choice. He was not opposed to any of the requirements to becoming a Bookman --

his past was unremarkable and ordinary;

he was not particularly interested in anything other than his duty, for truly that was something momentous and wonderful to him; to have unfettered access to anything before his eyes, and to be tasked with telling the story of the world;

he was confident in his determination, and whilst he was in all other aspects not dissimilar to any other boy of his age, he was self-assured in his ability to control himself and devote himself wholeheartedly to the task in front of him;

and lastly he was pessimistic about the future that lay ahead of them all -- if this is the world that we live in and the people we live with, then there is no future he could possibly want outside of the one he had already decided on.

And to him all of that was certain; until he had become ‘Lavi’.

A heaviness was draped over his head like a shroud, and as he thumbed through the pages of the book on his lap Lavi found himself losing focus, nodding off ever so slightly; he looked up at the clock on the wall, and its fingers were, chastising, pointed at five and forty-seven. Lavi had been up since the ten the previous morning, updating the records that he and Gramps had diligently tended after, until his mind had gotten too weary from fatigue, and he switched to strengthening his background knowledge on several miscellaneous subjects.

Six in the morning was, also, usually the time Yu had gotten up to begin his morning exercises. Occasionally they would bump into one another as Lavi stumbled out of his room to brush his teeth before he went to bed and Yu sauntered out to the gym to drill, or something like that.

It displeased Lavi somewhat to find himself looking forward to these coincidental meetings. He had always enjoyed being around Yu, perhaps a little too much. Although he was loath to admit it, it went beyond simple curiosity in Yu’s person and his status as a second exorcist. It lay more in a genuine fondness for Yu, despite Yu’s generally terrible personality and foul attitude.

It wasn’t like Lavi wasn’t fond of any of his other peers at the Black Order; Gramps made it well known that he thought Lavi was far too attached to their subjects, and that Lavi’s now-biased perspective would impede the work that they were doing. Gramps wasn’t wrong; Allen, Lenalee, Miranda, Krorykins … they were all his friends. The fact of that statement weighed heavily within him; it made his existence as Bookman Junior burdensome and uncomfortable, but he could not bring himself to let them go.

Least of all Yu. Although Lavi had gotten along better with nearly any other person in the Order, Yu was the first person that he had considered his friend. Lavi was never sure if Yu understood who Lavi is, as the Bookman Junior, but Lavi understood Yu enough to know that they were both people with no pasts, and no real futures. Just as Lavi had been cut off from his past to devote his existence to history, Yu had been born with no past, and brought up only as a weapon against the Millennium Earl and his allies. In that way they were alike, and that made Lavi feel less alone.

Which only served to frustrate him more, as he was not supposed to mind being alone. Being alone was not supposed to less preferable to having someone understand you, or empathise with you. In fact, not being alone was an encumbrance, a disadvantage. Alone, gave you control. That was what he had always known.

Yet he found himself not wanting to be alone, more and more. He casually insinuated himself in Yu’s life, eating by his side during meals, and waving to him if they ran into one another somewhere.

Yu always seemed to find his antics annoying. Bookman Junior was in agreement; ‘Lavi’ is annoying. He is rather boisterous, cheerful, and invasive. ‘Deak’ would have probably hated ‘Lavi’. Yet Bookman Junior continued to accompany Yu as ‘Lavi’, usually with a fair amount of fanfare and hullabaloo; and gradually their relationship became less rigid and less like they were playing their ‘roles’, although Lavi was unsure who began to show more of their actual selves around one another first.

‘Lavi’ eventually began to resemble Bookman Junior more in terms of temperament -- he became more sarcastic with a darker worldview, rather than being happy all the time; he also became more serious and, at times, cynical. Bookman Junior had initially attributed these changes to ‘Lavi’ growing up, but really he was just getting tired of being ‘Lavi’ around Yu.

He knew that Yu didn’t like ‘Lavi’, but he wanted Yu to like him. More precisely, he wanted Yu to like him for who he was. Bookman Junior’s emotions -- which weren’t supposed to really exist in the first place, he noted with displeasure -- went through a little flip when Yu seemed to relax around him more, or at least when Yu didn’t actively try to avoid him anymore, or very obviously start walking in the opposite direction whenever they saw each other in the corridors at six in the morning. On a good day, sometimes he would nod, and Lavi would find himself more elated in that moment, than in those rare instances when Gramps praised him for his work.

Lavi was very much afraid of what this was becoming. In his limited experience of false friendships and, more recently, real ones with other members of the Black Order, he worried that this was progressing beyond what one would normally consider a ‘friendship’.

Well, not that it was in reality progressing much at all; but what Lavi had wanted it to become kept progressing. In his mind. Rather pathetically.

He kept looking at Gramps in paranoia, wondering if Gramps had picked up on whatever he was thinking of, because Gramps was surprisingly good at reading minds. Luckily, it seemed that Gramps’ heavily black-rimmed eyes did not look at Lavi with more disappointment than usual.

Lavi did not want Gramps to catch onto the preoccupation that he had with Yu, so he did not act differently around Yu than he did around anyone else. He simply maintained the narrative that ‘Lavi’ had grown up, and that was why his personality had taken a slight change. No one suspected anything other than that, since the acting skills of a Bookman in training were indeed impressive; however Lavi had been unable to escape the truth himself.

It annoyed him to notice how his heartbeat picked up whenever Yu called out his ‘name’. It annoyed him to notice the details on Yu’s hands -- blisters from training, dirt beneath his nails after a mission. It annoyed him to notice that his smile was genuine whenever he greeted Yu. It annoyed him to notice how much he liked saying his name, ‘Yu’.

It pained him to understand that Yu would never say his name back. It pained him to know that every pat on the back he gave Yu must never linger. It pained him to be so close to Yu -- to see him all the time, to sometimes be close enough to smell the boring soap that Yu used to wash his hair, to at moments be able to run his fingers through Yu’s smooth, straight dark hair, in jest, only to know that it wasn’t a jest at all, and he wished that he could do this all the time, but he couldn’t afford this kind of luxury -- in general. In pained him to know that he was falling for Yu.

For whatever reason he did not know. Out of all the things that Bookman Junior understood about mankind, Noahkind, and Akumakind, Lavi knew nothing about the matters of the heart. It was always a subject he avoided, and from an early age he would train and purge his emotions from his mind. They were all unnecessary. It was only dead weight.

And Lavi felt like he was drowning. He was sinking into a terrible quagmire, dark and opaque like a clouded night sky.

He did not know why he felt this kind of regard for Yu. As always he was never optimistic about the nature of man … and Yu was, in many aspects, the opposite of a good man. Yu was not particularly well-learned or polished, and although he was sometimes capable of providing some kind of insight, for the most part Yu was a childish and artless boy. Yu was not someone who usually showed kindness, compassion, or even niceness. Certainly Yu was physically attractive; he was almost as tall as Lavi himself, well-built, possessing a particular grace in his person, with an almost unworldly handsomeness, worthy of a born-for-the-Order clergyman but also comically at odds with Yu’s decidedly less beautiful personality. However that alone was not enough for Lavi’s attachment to be so strong.

Maybe it was the honesty. Yu never felt the need to lie or pretend around others, and to an extent maybe Lavi was jealous of that.

Perhaps jealousy was not correct the word, as Lavi had not minded playing different ‘roles’ as his duty had required; in fact he probably would not have liked to be his actual self at many times. But he was mindful and appreciative at the fearlessness of Yu Kanda’s honesty. It was sharp and uncomfortable, but it was Yu Kanda’s truth, and whomever disliked it could fuck off. Yu was straightforward and confident to an arrogant level, but to Lavi that was never a fault. It was only ever courage in facing the world, and faith in who he was as a person; and no one else Lavi knew possessed that sort of attitude. It was rather hot.

His thoughts of Yu had sent him reeling with guilt. It was like crossing a line, betraying an oath, turning his back to a knife; it went against everything else he had wanted for himself until that point, and a rejection of the path he had chosen to take himself. He couldn’t possibly have a future with Yu -- after all he would leave the Order after the war, and adopt a new alias to examine some other phenomenon. ‘Lavi’ would be dead and Yu would be left in the dust. Also, his partiality to Yu would possibly compromise the quality of the Bookmen’s work. There was no way for Bookman Junior to pursue Yu Kanda in any way; yet he desperately wanted to. The ink in his book had already dried but he still wanted to add Yu to the pages.

He wanted to rewrite his history to fill pages and chapters with his memories of Yu: the way he spoke like rocks falling into water, clipped and resounding; the way he moved like water, a soldier too graceful to take one’s eyes off of; the way he smiled to himself, when he thought no one was looking, like sunlight hiding behind the leaves. Lavi wanted to record all of that, and remember it for himself.

This was unlike anything he had wanted before. It was no longer about writing history for anyone else, or anyone at all. It was all for himself and only himself.

The idea appeared to him as something terrible and vaguely sickening, like the thought of burning down an entire library, watching the pages curl and blacken, the words crumbling into to ash in the painful ardency of flame. It burned his heart to think of throwing away everything he had devoted himself to for Yu. Yet the thought of leaving Yu, and the Order, which would inevitably come should they survive the war, left him feeling cold.

The morning light was beginning to slat through the crevices in between the curtains, and the clock’s fingers had moved to six o’clock. Lavi closed his book and wedged it back into the shelf, which was groaning with the weight of too many books and papers. Silently Lavi wished that it would one day just give in and topple over him, crushing him beneath the tomes so he could die instead of living with this god-awful crush Yu Kanda.

But now he had to go to bed, so he could focus on doing his actual work later, whilst he still had some downtime before the next mission for him and Gramps came along. Dragging his exhausted body to the door, Lavi grabbed his toothbrush and towel on the way, and pushed open the heavy oak door to the Bookmen’s room.

The Bookmen’s room was in a quieter quarter of the Order dormitories, closer to the libraries and the laboratories than the mess hall or the dojo. At this hour of the day there were a few people walking around like zombies, with pale faces and drooping limbs, but the hallways were mostly empty, and coldly lit by the light from the windows. It was going to be cloudy today again.

Lavi sauntered to the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth vigorously and scrubbed his face with his towel until he felt like he had half-woken up from his sleepless stupor. And in this sleep-deprived but slightly more alert state, Lavi mistakenly thought that he didn’t need to go to bed just yet.

Just a while longer. It was six o’clock in the morning.

He draped the towel around his neck and walked out of the bathroom to the other end of the hall, which was railed rather than walled, and looked down at the sprawling complex below his floor. Not everyone had woken up yet, so the Order was quiet, in an almost chilly way. There was no science division bustling around to do Komui’s work for him -- most of them might still be unconscious in a post-caffeine crash blackout -- and no finders and exorcists going out on and coming back from missions, or training themselves, or just hanging out with their friends. If Lavi had yelled ‘Hello!’ into the yawning depths below the floor, he could probably hear an echo greeting him back. It was lonely. At six in the morning, the Order was a lonely place.

For Bookman Junior, it couldn’t be anything more than that.

‘Oi, Lavi.’

Lavi spun around to catch Yu looking at him. Yu had tied all of his hair up, and was wearing the standard exercise uniform for all members of the Order. His hands were wrapped up in protective bandages, and he was holding a wooden katana. So Lavi hadn’t missed him going to his morning training session from hell.

‘What are you doing?’ Yu asked again, and Lavi had found that he did not actually say ‘Good morning’ to Yu, and was in reality just staring at him.

Lavi shook his head. ‘Nothing much, just observing.’

Yu walked over to him, and leaned against the railing next to Lavi. It embarrassed him to admit that he couldn’t resist letting his eye flicker over Yu’s lean body. How he wished he could look at Yu with both eyes. ‘What is there to observe? No one’s doing anything out there,’ Yu pointed out.

Lavi grinned like he knew a secret. ‘How would you know? We Bookmen see more than you’d think,’ he winked.

Yu scoffed. ‘Right, like your dense head ever picks up anything.’

‘Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?’

Blink and you could have missed it. Yu Kanda was smiling. Well, smirking, more like. But it was something. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’

Lavi could scarcely believe his eyes. Was Yu Kanda in actuality jesting with him? Was this reality, or some strange side effect of one of Komui’s experiments? Lavi found himself staring at Yu more, who regarded him with an aloof smugness as he said, ‘I’ll leave you to figure it out. I should get going and you look like you need some sleep.’

But Lavi didn’t want him to go. Not yet. On the other hand, a rabbit knows when it’s been caught in a trap. Lavi felt a coldness within his ribcage, an instinct telling him to run before he does something stupid.

An important thing to note for the future: Yu Kanda is capable of making Lavi forget his most basic survival instincts. Approach with extreme caution.

Present Lavi did the exact opposite.

‘Wait!’ he called out, and grabbed Yu’s elbow. His mind went blank as Yu turned back around.

‘What?’ he asked, his face placid and, as usual, perfect.

Lavi said nothing. The flames were roaring in his ears again. Yu’s eyes were the colour of charcoal ash in the morning light. Had the pages already burnt?

‘Lavi, get some sleep.’

He didn’t like to hear ‘Lavi’’s name in Yu’s voice; but he did not have another name to give him. Yet there are some names that are said without a voice. So Lavi leaned down and kissed him.

The clattering of Yu’s wooden sword against the marble tiles was loud as a thunderclap in the empty dorm. Lavi quickly let go of Yu as the ricocheting echoes taunted him for his admittedly impulsive action.

‘S-sorry about that,’ he began to apologise, unsure of what else to say. He didn’t dare look at Yu. ‘I should be going back, haven’t slept all night,’ he mumbled to himself before turning away. Lavi felt his entire body go cold; all the fire had left him, and the reality of what he had done was like the shock of ice water.

He felt Yu’s fingers wrap around his elbow. ‘Wait.’

Lavi turned back and looked at him. ‘I shouldn’t,’ Lavi admitted to himself. He had lost the grip on his plot. Bookman Junior’s history had already been written; he couldn’t write another one. That would be too selfish. He had already made his decision years ago, before he was ‘Lavi’, before he was ‘Deak’ … when he was still someone with an existence, a past, a name.

‘You shouldn’t what?’ Yu asked him. ‘I don’t care.’ He looked at Bookman Junior in total seriousness, unsmiling and stern as usual. It would have been rather funny if Bookman Junior were not still stunned by what he had done. Lavi was scared of what Yu was going to say next. He was scared that he would do something stupid again, that he would jeopardise everything that he’d worked for, that he’d burn under the price of this self-indulgence and the Bookman would be no more. But how would avoidance change what he had already felt? How would what he would do damn him further than what they’ve already done during this war? How would this matter when as ‘observers’ the Bookman have already changed and rewritten the possible history multiple times?

Yu’s voice was like a stone dropping in the water. A million thoughts rippled through Lavi’s mind, and then everything was still.

‘Kiss me again.’

Decisions be damned. Duties be damned. Rationality be damned. In a world where every tomorrow is not guaranteed, where children are soldiers and souls are weapons, where each day seems bleaker than the next, if Lavi were to die then he wanted to at least die without regrets. Let the pages burn; it will warm up our cold hearts even if it blackens our fingers with ash.

Lavi smiled at Yu.

‘Yes.’

[ohnooooonedirection]

Three days after the release of his self-titled debut album, and six days after he wore a now-iconic pink suit during a Today show performance, lesbian pop-rock twin bandmates Tegan and Sara tweeted a confession about Harry Styles from their account: “I have a very real crush on @Harry_Styles. Loving the new album and the high waisted wide leg pants.” Check the replies to this admission from mid-May to find a smattering of solidarity from Tegan and Sara fans: “Same.” “Same.” “Same.” “You’re not alone.” “Lesbians for Harry Styles Unite (LHSU).”

The entire internet had a crush, really. And while Tegan and Sara may be the most famous queer women to make their love for Harry (and his style) public, they’re just the tip of the iceberg that is the gay-lady Styles hive. The Great British Bake Off’s Ruby Tandoh wrote a recipe for “Harry Styles’ Dutch Baby with Cinnamon Rhubarb.” Former BuzzFeed writer Katie Heaney (along with current BuzzFeed Books editor Arianna Rebolini) wrote a whole damn book inspired by their love of Harry. My girlfriend has a One Direction wall calendar, and wholeheartedly plans to re-up for 2018. As a queer woman with lukewarm feelings toward the singer, I kept finding myself thinking, What the fuck is up with queer girls and Harry Styles?

Queer women have always rallied around their likeness in pop culture: Ellen DeGeneres, Joan Jett, and pretty much the entire US women’s national soccer team all sit squarely in the elite category of lesbian celebrity icons. It’s not terribly common for queer women to rally around a cis man in the same way. Sure, people love to joke that Justin Bieber and Cole Sprouse look like lesbians, and queer women have harvested fashion inspiration from James Dean and Marlon Brando for decades. But it’s much less common for a cis man to be the subject of a full-blown lesbian pop-culture obsession.

Once he went solo, folks who hadn’t paid attention to 1D started eating up what his fans had obsessed over for years: Harry's sexual ambiguity, androgynous style, boy band appeal, and relatively progressive social awareness. It’s what many women I spoke with characterized as Harry’s “magic.”

I found that Harry Styles means something slightly different to each of his fans. He possesses an ability to be whoever you want him to be. When the lines are blurred between stage persona and social media persona and real persona, when it’s unclear what’s fact and what’s fiction, when his sexuality is an open question, a character is born. Fans can project their own desires onto Harry, in the quiet of their imagination or in their own fanfiction or in group iMessage threads with fellow fans. That’s the magic of Harry.

And that’s the Harry that queer women get so obsessed with. That’s the Harry who has even inspired some women, in becoming infatuated with him, to recognize their own queerness.

Men herald Cher and Whitney and Gaga as their gay pop idols. Have queer women chosen Harry Styles?

One Direction came to fame in 2011 and 2012 by offering a near-24/7 window into their lives, thanks to social media. Twitter and Tumblr livestreams gave fans access to whatever the five cute teens were up to at almost any given time. Fans had an insurmountable pile of content to consume: photos and videos of the boys just pallin’ around backstage on tour, or performing for packed arenas, or pondering their endearingly silly teenage thoughts aloud. No boy band before One Direction roared to fame in such an all-consuming and intimate way, as the technology wasn’t there yet. That near-constant barrage of content gave their OG fans (mainly teenage girls and young women) a feeling of truly knowing the boys. And with that, a sense of ownership over their rise to fame — a sense of ownership of the boys themselves.

Fans immediately fell for the youngest of the group, Harry Styles. Raised in a tiny village equidistant from Liverpool and Manchester, he wields a relentlessly British charisma. Even from the get-go, Harry publicly radiated charm. His boyishness, his ease on camera, his frog prince face — it’s almost unfair how easy it was to love this kid. He exuded, as many celebrities and so few 16-year-olds do, a complete ease in his own skin. According to fans, he seemed to genuinely not give a fuck what people thought about him.

Harry’s either a very reserved person or is incredibly well media-trained — likely some combination of the two. He rarely shares personal details in interviews, which, as several women I spoke with concluded, makes him very easy to project an imagined personality onto. Compound that mystique with his enigmatic androgyny and surreal level of fame, and Harry is a perfect blank slate.

And thus, a fandom was born. And with every good fandom comes fanfic. And lots of that fanfic is gay. Very, very gay.

Slash fanfic is far from unique to One Direction, but 1D fans took up slash fic in a major way. The main coupling shipped in fic was Harry Styles and bandmate Louis Tomlinson, coined “Larry Stylinson.” Fans went so far as to speculate a real-life romance between the two lads. Though, it didn’t stop with Larry. From stories of Harry and bandmate Niall Horan hooking up on tour to a sentimental imagined romance between Harry and British radio personality Nick Grimshaw, there is a near-infinite trove of gay fanfic involving Harry Styles. In One Direction’s heyday, especially from 2013 through 2015, Tumblr was ablaze with stories of trysts between the boys. This, of course, says more about the fans themselves than of Harry’s own real-life sexuality.

The One Direction fandom really latched onto the Larry slash fic. Julia, a 32-year-old Harry devotee, told me she would read Harry fic “half turned-on, half, like, academically.” This phenomenon, too — of women being into gay male porn — is a well-established one. (Remember that scene in The Kids Are All Right where two wives watch porn, and how people lost their damn minds they were so confused?) Taking heterosexuality out of the equation in porn complicates gender power dynamics in a way that really works for lots of women. So, it makes sense that that phenomenon would translate to 1D fic. Those cute British boys were like queer-girl sex bait.

Let’s make one thing clear: Harry Styles looks like a hot lesbian. With a wiry frame, effeminate features, a shaggy mop, and an enviable wardrobe of floral prints and eye-popping suiting, he’s an absolute Shane. If you’ve never noticed this, perhaps you should hang out with more lesbians.

His fashion sense — that is, fashion not designed to flatter only men — is central to most queer women’s admiration for the pop star. I mean, come on: Those suits! Harry’s bottomless cache of dazzling two-piece suits and patterned blouses has made him a bit of a lesbian fashion icon. “I don’t wear suits often, or hardly ever — but I always want his suits,” says Katie, noting his penchant for sporting outfits that would look great on men and women alike. My girlfriend, Fran, asserts her “personal fandom is rooted in all of his outfits.” (Good answer.) I’m not sure if queer women are suddenly running out and buying Styles-esque suits, but they’re certainly fun to drool over.

Harry came to adopt his now-notorious personal style throughout 2015. It was at this time, too, that he grew his hair down past his shoulders, which amplified his androgynous looks. This androgyny piqued his queer fans’ affection. Even Sara Quin admitted to GQ that she grew her own hair out to look like Harry’s. For many women, long-haired, end-of-One-Direction Harry was a glory age of sorts. “There was a specific moment from late 2014 through early 2016 where he had this long hair and was wearing all YSL, where he was for me, in some magical witch way,” says Julia. He wasn’t a little boy holding hands with Taylor Swift anymore — his presentation had matured into something much more interesting. Something a little queerer.

Styles wears printed two-piece suits while performing in September 2017.

Of course, Justin Bieber was the original “looks like a lesbian” pop star of the social media era. If you’ve never noticed (again, see my above note about hanging out with more lesbians), mid-puberty Justin Bieber looked a lot like an androgynous-leaning woman. Internet lesbians embraced this comparison, and in 2010 the blog of viral fame Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber was born. Women would submit photos (mostly selfies) where their looks were particularly reminiscent of the then-teenage Biebs. (The Tumblr’s most recent post is from April 2017, so it’s not officially dead, just past its heyday.) The account posted masses of photosbetween 2009 and 2012; it was a truly excellent meme.

But IRL, Justin Bieber appears to be — what’s the phrase? — oh, aggressively heterosexual. He very publicly dated Selena Gomez, joined a church that “does not affirm a gay lifestyle,” and has a habit of sliding into random women’s DMs like a true 23-year-old dumbass. Honestly, Bieber’s severe straightness is the perfect punchline after years of Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber. While he may sport effeminate features (even post-puberty), the star doesn’t represent any sort of queerness in the pop sphere.

Harry Styles, on the other hand, prefers to publicly retain a level of sexual mystique not dissimilar to Bowie and Prince. In the six years that Styles has been in the public eye, his own sexuality has remained an enigma. Even though fans have long speculated about a romance between Harry and Louis Tomlinson, Louis has outright denied any romance between the two — but Harry never has. On the whole, he prefers to keep his own sexuality undefined.

On a 2014 press junket, the British singer said being female was “not that important” a quality in someone he would date. In an interview with the Sun this past May, Harry declines to label his sexuality, seeming to confirm a fluidity fans had long sensed. Since their 2015 On the Road Again tour, it’s become a bit of a tradition at shows for Harry to parade around stage with pride flags brought by fans.

But, hey, coyness doesn’t equal...well, anything. For all we know, Styles has no interest in men whatsoever. He might reach Justin Bieber level on the Het Dude scale behind closed doors. My cynical side suspects he knows that coming out as straight, now, could very well alienate a large portion of the singer’s fanbase. Instead, he gets the best of both worlds by keeping things vague. Having his rainbow cake and eating it too, as it were.

But it ultimately doesn’t matter whether Harry Styles is gay or straight or one of the many other iterations of human sexuality. What’s important is that he appears to publicly champion non-definition.

FULL ARTICLE

[ruminativerabbi]

COVID-Diary, Week Eleven

I had the most remarkable experience this last Tuesday, one I resolved on the spot to write about this week. And I also want to bring you all up to date on my COVID-era project of re-reading Mark Twain and learning what I can about the human condition from one of its greatest and most keenly trenchant observers. So, a two-part letter this week!

First, the Tuesday experience. As some readers know, I served the Canadian Jewish Congress (Pacific Region) as its chairperson for Interfaith Relations for more than a decade when we were still living in British Columbia. (This was long before the organization closed down operations in 2011.) I enjoyed that experience a lot. For one thing, I met all sorts of interesting people into contact with whom I would almost definitely not otherwise have come—particularly Sikhs and Muslims, but also Hindus, Christians of all flavors, and a sprinkling of other types. For another, serving in that capacity meant I was invited to all sorts of events and celebrations that I’d otherwise never have even heard of, let alone be invited to attend. So that was the good part. But there was also something almost irritatingly anodyne about the whole operation, almost as though it went without saying that the only sure way to maintain friendly relations between the various faith groups involved was almost obsessively to avoid controversy at all costs, a goal attained by refusing to discuss any topic that could possibly lead to friction, debate, or disagreement. The last thing any of these people wanted was to disagree, at least in public, about anything at all! And that part I didn’t like much at all.

The notion that the members of different faith groups can get along solely by ignoring the issues that divide them rather than by listening carefully and respectfully to each other and agreeing to disagree—that notion felt (and feels) to reflect a basic insecurity about the ability of people courteously and civilly to speak honestly to each other. Some other time I’ll write about some of my actual experiences serving as Interfaith Chair for the CJC during our Vancouver years, but I only bring it up today to provide a sense of the background I brought with me on Tuesday when, in the middle of the afternoon here, I signed onto a world-wide zoom platform to participate in a truly remarkable interfaith encounter, one spearheaded by my friend and colleague, Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum in Jerusalem. 

I’ve known Rabba Tamar (as she’s known—the Hebrew title rabba is what non-Orthodox Israelis call female rabbis) for years and had the privilege of editing her very interesting commentary on Pirkei Avot as part of the Pirkei Avot Lev Shalem volume published in 2018 by the Rabbinical Assembly. But Joan and I are also her occasional congregants: when we’re in Israel, we often attend the Friday night service at Tziyon, the congregation she serves in the Baka neighborhood of southern Jerusalem. And it was for that reason, I think, that I received an invitation last week to participate in something the flyer referenced as “a one-of-a-kind online global gathering” to be hosted by a group called Maaminim (“believers” in Hebrew) that was also to be “a spiritual joining of religious faiths and art from the sacred city of Jerusalem” and also “a digital prayer for healing by religious leaders and communities from across the globe.” I get lots of invitations to events like this, particularly in these last months. But because I know Rabba Tamar—and also because I met one of the participants, a Hebrew-speaking Franciscan monk from Italy named Alberto Pari whom I once met at Rabba Tamar’s Friday night table—I decided to bookmark the event and to tune in at the appointed hour.

The experience was exceptional. For one thing, there were hundreds and hundreds of people gathered on the Maaminim zoom platform. Some people added their locations to their signatures, so I could see people signed from all over North America and Israel, but also from many European countries (including Vatican City), from Australia, and from many Asian countries as well. It was a varied group, too: not only multinational, but also multi-generational, multi-ethnic, and very multi-spiritual. The event was led by Rabba Tamar and a Christian priest, who began by speaking to each other—openly and deeply—about the specific way that the vulnerability that the COVID-era has naturally engendered in us all has also made us all more aware of the degree to which we need to rely on each other, to turn to each other, to encounter each other in ways we might otherwise not have even realized possible. There was music too—and lots of it, mostly performed in Jerusalem by members of the various faith groups represented and all of it soulful and heartfelt. And then we were all asked to participate by writing a word or two on a piece of paper and holding it up to the camera, a word we wished to share with this remarkable gathering of people of faith from all across the globe.

Some of what  people wrote was what you’d expect: shalom, strength, courage, unity, health, etc. But there was a secondary theme present too, one suggestive of the core idea that the way to negotiate the COVID-crisis is precisely by engaging with each other, by using the sense of brittle fragility we’re all experiencing not solely as a negative thing to be avoided for as long as we can and then abandoned as quickly as possible, but as a positive thing to be embraced, as something to be accepted as native to the human condition (albeit one we generally try to repress or ignore) and then used as a basis for reaching out to others, for building a community of people who are—paradoxically, but really nonetheless—made stronger by acknowledging their weakness…and more sturdy in their faith by facing the instability that crises like the one upon us naturally engender.

I am usually more than slightly cynical about this kind of undertaking. And yet here were hundreds and hundreds of people from all across the globe, people who looked different from each other and who would normally have no way to join together—and yet who had been prompted by the pandemic to see themselves in the eyes of others and thus to find the common humanity we all share in the contemplation not of how similar we all are, but how different…and how the right dose of humility—and particularly one rooted in an acceptance of the precariousness of the human condition—can allow us to look past the cosmetic and see ourselves as each other’s partner in the great goal of coming out of the COVID-age whole, sane, and well.

In other news, I finished my re-read of Tom Sawyer. I first read the book back in high school, at which time I remember finding it irritating that we, sophisticated tenth-graders that we were, were being asked to read a children’s book. And that really is how it struck me back then—as a book about children and meant for children. Twain himself promoted the book that way back in the day, but he knew perfectly well that it was going to be marketed to adults and read by them—he was, after all, one of America’s bestselling authors when the book came out—and he obviously also knew that a lot of what he was saying in the book would only be intelligible to adult readers anyway. 

In the 1870s, the nation was still reeling from the terrible carnage of the Civil War, America’s bloodiest conflict. So by setting his 1876 book in the 1840s, Twain was inviting his readers to look back to an earlier, happier age. Indeed, by making Tom and Huck into eight- or nine-year-olds (their actual ages are not made clear) in the 1840s, he was also making them precisely the right age to have become soldiers during the Civil War and thus inviting his readers to remember a time when the young men of that generation were not soldiers trying to kill each other, but little children wholly unaware of the conflagration to come and its terrors. In his own way, then, Twain was doing something not entirely dissimilar from what Rabba Tamar was trying to do the other day: to invite people reeling from catastrophe to find comfort and resolve not in contemplating the catastrophe itself but in accepting the vulnerability the contemplation of catastrophe can engender. The book is set in Missouri, a border state that never quite joined the Confederacy—by war’s end 110,000 Missourians had served in the Union Army and only 30,000 in the Confederate Army. So would Tom and Huck have fought for the North or the South? It’s hard to say…and that, of course, is the point: by setting the book where and when he did, he makes of his children-heroes into future soldiers who could have ended up on either side of the conflict and who only might have survived. (Twain himself spent exactly two weeks serving as a volunteer in a Confederate militia called the Marion Rangers before quitting, a detail that seems to have been more or less totally forgotten by most. For more, click here.)

The story, unlike how I remembered it, was far-fetched and unlikely…but just possible enough to lend the book a breezy, almost dream-like quality. The children are innocent beings throughout: even when contemplating lives of crime and piracy, Tom and Huck are depicted as naïve and unambiguously pre-pubescent. (When, for example, Tom and Becky Thatcher end up spending several days together secluded in a labyrinthine cave, there is no hint at all of untoward behavior.) And that too was the point of Twain’s goal, I think: to remind readers that all people start out innocent and guileless, that forgiveness can come from reaching over the present into the past, that the sense of extreme vulnerability engendered by the horrors of day-to-day reality in wartime (be the enemy a virus or an actual enemy army) can be exploited to bring people together and make them feel connected and eager to support each other, just as do the people in the Tom’s town—who are depicted as being kind without being insensitive to wrongdoing, moral without being blind to the nature of childhood, and mutually supportive without transcending the mores of their own day.

So that’s what I learned from my COVID-era re-read of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Next I’ll report to you on my re-read of Huckleberry Finn, possibly the greatest American novel of them all and one that was for several different reasons specifically not assigned to us in high school.

[thebluesideofthemoon]

The Wall #49: SHEEP AND WOLVES

Welcome everybody to another entry of The Wall. On this week... your mom! Heh. Oh, I wish- I'm sure she's a wonderful lady. I said I was going to review Batman v. Superman but... eh, I then kind of lost interest and heat after a while- besides, the movie still sucks balls, so it's not like anything's changed. No, this week's review takes us on another stop of our international animated tour- Russia! The big mother of all cold herself, Mother Russia blessed us with this animated outing that was so good that it didn't get imported to the States. "Why might that be?" you're probably asking yourself, well I'll answer that right now: ... I HAVE NO IDEA! Maybe it was some sort of communication error (which wouldn't make sense as this movie has a fully dubbed English version, so... I 'unno), maybe they changed their minds at the last minute, or maybe because it's so mind-meltingly awful that they pulled the plug on its release before the studio would embarrass itself. Considering my last review it may be easy to assume that anything I would review afterwards would automatically be less positive. That may be true, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't have good things to say about it- hell, last week I saw one of my favorite movies this year (which I'll review later), and I've been itching to gush about it here. But no, I'm going to talk about Sheep and Wolves instead because, what better way to transition into my Worst Movies of 2016 by going from one of the best animated movies of the year to one of the absolute worst? Let's dive in, why don't we~?

(Music: Undertale- CORE)

I don't mean to be disrespectful, I like to think I'm a nice person and I will give anyone a chance, unless you’re Zack Snyder, or David S. Goyer, or Warner Bros., in which case you can piss off any day now. So when I write the things I’m going to write, I don’t mean this as just me trying to be mean, but as a way to try and help a small studio like the one that made this movie understand why your product doesn’t work, so I will try to be as cold and clinical as I can to explain just what is wrong with this movie. But first the plot, and you might want to sit down for this one.

In this movie we have a wolf named Grey (voiced by Tom Felton. Yes, THAT Tom Felton) who is a goofy but kind wolf who wants to live life as a carefree spirit, that is until he crosses the path of a big bad wolf named Ragear (voiced by Rich Orlow, whom I’ve never heard of) who is adamant to become the new leader of their wolf pack since their current leader Magra (voiced by Jim Cummings. Yes, THAT one, too.). However, Ragear gets shut down by Magra by telling him that he will not be ascended to be leader of the pack unless he faces off in a duel with another wolf, who just so happens to be Grey. Grey steps up to the challenge and they’re due to fight in three days to see who is more fit to run the wolf pack. Meanwhile, Grey faces a bit of problem when a surprise he had planned turns out to dash the dreams of his girlfriend, Bianca (voiced by Ruby Rose. Yes, THAT- I’m not going to keep this gag going or we’ll be here all day), who thought Grey was going to ask for her hand (paw?) in marriage. She accuses him of being very immature and in desperate need of change. Trying to find a way to change, Grey stumbles into this caravan full of gypsies and he talks to their leader(?) named Mami (I don’t know who she’s voiced by) who gives Grey this potion to help him change, but things go south when Grey gets turned into a sheep and is not only unwelcome, but hunted down by the wolves due to sheep being their prey. So he runs away and ends up getting knocked out, only to wake up in the sheep village. He’s being taken care of by an ewe named Lyra (China Anne McClain), while being suspected of by this skeptic sheep named Zico (Ross Maraquand) who questions his whereabouts and goes on to find clues about this new mysterious sheep that just showed up in their home. Grey believes that he’s in a bad dream but then decides to blend in once he starts meeting the sheep folk. Meanwhile, Ragear becomes impatient by Magra and his ban to keep them from hunting prey like wolves (which for this universe doesn’t really make much sense), so instead of waiting for his duel like Magra ordered, he just kills Magra and ends up taking the position as the wolves’ leader and wants to lead the wolves to hunt for the sheep so they can eat… well, like wolves. Grey discovers this and now wants to protect the sheep from this possible massacre, while it becomes hard for him to keep his true identity intact with his new kin. How will all of this be resolved?

I don’t take this long trying to give a simple plot synopsis, but I wanted to break down this entire setup to give you a hint as to what’s wrong with this movie. If you want me to sum this movie up really quickly it’s just yet another “fish out of water” story, and with a twist that isn’t even that unique to this kind of movie. The movie is a bizarre combination of both Shrek 2 and Brother Bear in terms of plot, but it’s nowhere near as funny as the former, nor (while flawed) as engaging as the latter, and while I have serious problems with Brother Bear I can tell you it pulled this story off a LOT better than Sheep and Wolves.

Since I’m going to dip into my issues with this movie (which is a LOT of them) I may as well get my positives with the movie out of the way, because they’re very minimal- it’s actually just one: the movie is really pretty. While it’s pretty obvious that this is a low-budget movie thanks to the very small amount of environments featured in the movie, not to mention that just like Sing it shamelessly copy-and-pastes characters and shots everywhere, the scenery of the movie actually manages to be pretty stunning. I like how the environments look, they’re vividly-detailed, very colorful, and the lighting also manages to look really good, especially when they stand out against things like grass or the fur on the wolves. The animation itself is also not bad. It’s far more lively than something like, say, Ratchet and Clank, and it has an art style that suits the animation better than a movie like The Wild Life. Even though I have HUGE issues with the character design, they managed to make a really appealing-looking movie and I do think that’s something that deserves some serious credit. It’s obvious to me that the people working on this movie have some good talent in their hands, and I’m saying this because I stop being nice right here. Because the problems with this movie are far too many for me to recommend this as something anyone reading this should watch.

Let’s start with the character designs. While the general look of the movie is really appealing and colorful, the actual designs of the characters leave a lot to be desired. There’s no real better way for me to say this, but the characters all look like how a middle-school furry artist would draw his furry wolf OCs (original characters, for those of you that don’t know) when first starting on DeviantART. They’re far more humanoid than anthropomorphic, which really stands out with characters that have more stylized and cartoony designs. It’s almost as if the characters were all designed by completely different artists, however this is an approach that worked in its favor in a movie like Secret Life of Pets, but here they stick out like a sore thumb. All the wolves are top-heavy and just look ridiculous when they run on all fours. I also had this same problem with Alpha and Omega six years ago (funny how they’re both movies about wolves), but the hair is really off-putting. Most of the wolves have pretty much anime hairstyles which just look distracting and out of place. This is really noticeable on a character like Bianca who basically looks like a human chick that just so happens to be cosplaying as a wolf. With the sheep this gets even more bizarre, as there are sheep who clearly look like anthropomorphized sheep, standing right next to sheep that have more human-like features that are kind of distracting, NEXT to other sheep who just look like they’re a human and sheep that probably fused together like in The Fly. Again, it’s highly distracting because they’re not anthropomorphic like the characters from Sing or Zootopia, and yet they’re also not animal enough to be like the animals from The Secret Life of Pets or even The Wild Life. It’s like they’re stuck in this strange uncanny valley of anthropomorphism and it’s kind of off-putting to watch. Mami is the only one who manages to make this work, though it probably helps that she’s hardly in the movie. Grey looks alright by all standards, except for his dumb Emo Peter Parker haircut.

From what I’m sure you can gather I’ve said about the story, it’s pretty much also copied and pasted from… anywhere else. It combines traits of Shrek 2, Brother Bear, The Lion King, too many romantic comedies to count, Kung Fu Panda 3, Shark Tale (another disaster full of clichés and off-putting character design)- it borrows so liberally from other movies that it even borrows their flaws as well. Shark Tale needs no explanation, it has the dopey character who is in love but cannot spit it out because God help him “he’s just awkward” (oh please), it also borrows a problem unique to a movie I reviewed not too long ago, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Movie, in which it is full of really annoying cartoony sound effects that get really, really fast. By the way, I said this movie ripped off The Lion King (why on Earth do we have TWO animated movies that came out in 2016 that thought this was a good idea?) and it does so in the Magra’s death scene. Ragear shoves him off the cliff in a way that’s not too dissimilar to Scar throwing Mufasa into the wildebeests. It doesn’t help that both just so happen to have a character voiced by Jim Cummings, which makes the resemblance even more obvious.

Though speaking of terrible sounds, the voice acting isn’t that great. I mean sure, you have people like Jim Cummings who would sound awesome if they even just read the phonebook, but much like Morgan Freeman in Ben-Hur, he’s not doing anything new. Tom Felton… I have NO idea what the hell he’s doing, it’s like he’s trying to sound American and fail horribly at it, but he’s at least trying. Ruby Rose just straight up did not care about this movie at all, she could not sound any more disinterested if she tried, which isn’t only a serious problem because it just sounds bad it also makes her character come across as really uncaring and self-centered, which becomes a MAJOR problem thanks to one particular scene from the movie that I’ll get to. Believe me, I will. Still, this is pretty bad- it’s almost as if the voice actors weren’t allowed to be given a second take or something like that.

But what’s even worse than the voice acting is the score. I’ve complimented good scores before and lambasted bad ones like Accidental Love, for example. It had a score that was highly annoying, bouncy, and would never shut up. It was trying to be a “whacky, silly” score that instead of trying to get you to laugh it only made you cringe. So yes, an overly-goofy score is one issue but thanks to this movie the opposite is also true. This movie has a score that is far more surprisingly dramatic and intense than you would think which gives me the impression that this movie is really trying to get me to take it seriously… and this is the same movie that has a Rocky-style montage of a character trying to give themselves a concussion. AND FAILING AT IT. Sure, that’s meant to be the joke, but this is much less justifiable in countless scenes of something dramatic happening only for it to get cut-off by some awkwardly-inserted comic relief. Oh God, it’s like Epic all over again.

The absolute worst part about this movie is the characters. I’m not going to spend much time on them because I could write an entire essay on just what’s wrong with this cast, and this review is getting really long as it is. So I’ll say this, they vary from being really stupid, to being really annoying, to all-around unpleasant. Grey is kind of a goofball, but other than that he’s just your generic main character and he’s one of the better characters. His best friend sheep who is lovestruck cannot say a word to her about his feelings to save his life, which is not just an awful cliché in and of itself, but his voice is really annoying and her never shuts up. The big bad Ragear is clumsy and gets beaten up a lot, so it’s pretty much impossible to take him seriously as a credible threat and the only time he succeeds at anything it’s simply because the plot just felt like it needed to keep going. Lyra is your generic “nice girl” type who pretty much has no personality aside from, well, being nice, except for one particular scene where she chews out Grey for giving her little brother, Shia, the influence to have him run off from the sheep village to fight off wolves himself, and this happened AFTER Grey saves his life as well as a scene in the movie where she scolds her little brother for being an irresponsible little shit who doesn’t listen to anybody. And Shia, oh I despise him. Not only does he have a really annoying voice and attitude, he’s one of those characters that should have died far sooner than he does (which is never- spoiler alert) because he does anything BUT listen to someone who’s trying to do nothing but HELP HIM. He’s by far one of the most irritating characters I’ve seen in any movie this year- he’s up there with Steel from Max Steel, The Enchantress from Suicide Squad, the Colleens from Yoga Hosers, and pretty much EVERYONE in Collateral Beauty- and it doesn’t help that he gives a really awful message at the end of the movie which pretty much amounts to him saying that you shouldn’t kill someone because it will make you just as bad as they are, which is normally a message that has a lot of weight to it, but when the person who is trying to kill you is DOING EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER TO TRY AND EAT YOU, and you fight back in self-defense!

I also mentioned Bianca, and out of all of the bad animated movies with forced-in love interests she’s by far the worst. Now, she’s at least thankfully not forced into a relationship with Grey (they already have one at the start of the movie) and the way his little problem is resolved isn’t by true love (but it’s not less dumb). The reason why I hate Bianca the most is because of one particular scene where she pretty much ACCUSES GREY OF CAUSING RAGEAR FROM KILLING MAGRA AND MAKING HIM THE NEW LEADER, and all because he was trying to change himself to prove to her that he’s not an immature clown. It’s somehow all HIS fault, and at no point does she ever get called out on being a colossal bitch. Though Grey DOES call out the sheep for being whiny, pathetic, and annoying, it doesn’t really leave a very satisfying impact when it’s ruined by the scenes that precede and follow it. I HATE EVERYONE IN THIS MOVIE. This movie was just like Collateral Beauty all over again- I really thought I was going to be in for something bland, but not THIS annoying and unpleasant. I really hate this movie, thanks to its combination of terrible tonal shifts, bland story, irredeemable cast of characters, and ho-hum voice acting. It’s easy to see why this movie never made it to the States. (2,541 words. Can't believe this one took me almost a week to write, but I needed to get my thoughts collected so I could express just what the hell was wrong with this movie.)

This is a really foul movie. I don't really get this kind of enjoyment out of something that fills me with dread and hatred- I would much rather be talking about things I really love, like Zootopia, but this is the kind of movie that is not only so bad that it's wasted your time, but it'll ruin your day!

Yes, I give this movie a 2. And how appropriate because now I can make more room for my best big project. That's right guys, The Wall #50 is going to be... THE TOP 10 WORST MOVIES OF 2016 I'll see you all there.

[noahfence1d]

Three days after the release of his self-titled debut album, and six days after he wore a now-iconic pink suit during a Today show performance, lesbian pop-rock twin bandmates Tegan and Sara tweeted a confession about Harry Styles from their account: “I have a very real crush on @Harry_Styles. Loving the new album and the high waisted wide leg pants.” Check the replies to this admission from mid-May to find a smattering of solidarity from Tegan and Sara fans: “Same.” “Same.” “Same.” “You’re not alone.” “Lesbians for Harry Styles Unite (LHSU).”

The entire internet had a crush, really. And while Tegan and Sara may be the most famous queer women to make their love for Harry (and his style) public, they’re just the tip of the iceberg that is the gay-lady Styles hive. The Great British Bake Off’s Ruby Tandoh wrote a recipe for “Harry Styles’ Dutch Baby with Cinnamon Rhubarb.” Former BuzzFeed writer Katie Heaney (along with current BuzzFeed Books editor Arianna Rebolini) wrote a whole damn book inspired by their love of Harry. My girlfriend has a One Direction wall calendar, and wholeheartedly plans to re-up for 2018. As a queer woman with lukewarm feelings toward the singer, I kept finding myself thinking, What the fuck is up with queer girls and Harry Styles?

Queer women have always rallied around their likeness in pop culture: Ellen DeGeneres, Joan Jett, and pretty much the entire US women’s national soccer team all sit squarely in the elite category of lesbian celebrity icons. It’s not terribly common for queer women to rally around a cis man in the same way. Sure, people love to joke that Justin Bieber and Cole Sprouse look like lesbians, and queer women have harvested fashion inspiration from James Dean and Marlon Brando for decades. But it’s much less common for a cis man to be the subject of a full-blown lesbian pop-culture obsession.

Once he went solo, folks who hadn’t paid attention to 1D started eating up what his fans had obsessed over for years: Harry's sexual ambiguity, androgynous style, boy band appeal, and relatively progressive social awareness. It’s what many women I spoke with characterized as Harry’s “magic.”

I found that Harry Styles means something slightly different to each of his fans. He possesses an ability to be whoever you want him to be. When the lines are blurred between stage persona and social media persona and real persona, when it’s unclear what’s fact and what’s fiction, when his sexuality is an open question, a character is born. Fans can project their own desires onto Harry, in the quiet of their imagination or in their own fanfiction or in group iMessage threads with fellow fans. That’s the magic of Harry.

And that’s the Harry that queer women get so obsessed with. That’s the Harry who has even inspired some women, in becoming infatuated with him, to recognize their own queerness.

Men herald Cher and Whitney and Gaga as their gay pop idols. Have queer women chosen Harry Styles?

One Direction came to fame in 2011 and 2012 by offering a near-24/7 window into their lives, thanks to social media. Twitter and Tumblr livestreams gave fans access to whatever the five cute teens were up to at almost any given time. Fans had an insurmountable pile of content to consume: photos and videos of the boys just pallin’ around backstage on tour, or performing for packed arenas, or pondering their endearingly silly teenage thoughts aloud. No boy band before One Direction roared to fame in such an all-consuming and intimate way, as the technology wasn’t there yet. That near-constant barrage of content gave their OG fans (mainly teenage girls and young women) a feeling of truly knowing the boys. And with that, a sense of ownership over their rise to fame — a sense of ownership of the boys themselves.

Fans immediately fell for the youngest of the group, Harry Styles. Raised in a tiny village equidistant from Liverpool and Manchester, he wields a relentlessly British charisma. Even from the get-go, Harry publicly radiated charm. His boyishness, his ease on camera, his frog prince face — it’s almost unfair how easy it was to love this kid. He exuded, as many celebrities and so few 16-year-olds do, a complete ease in his own skin. According to fans, he seemed to genuinely not give a fuck what people thought about him.

Harry’s either a very reserved person or is incredibly well media-trained — likely some combination of the two. He rarely shares personal details in interviews, which, as several women I spoke with concluded, makes him very easy to project an imagined personality onto. Compound that mystique with his enigmatic androgyny and surreal level of fame, and Harry is a perfect blank slate.

And thus, a fandom was born. And with every good fandom comes fanfic. And lots of that fanfic is gay. Very, very gay.

Slash fanfic is far from unique to One Direction, but 1D fans took up slash fic in a major way. The main coupling shipped in fic was Harry Styles and bandmate Louis Tomlinson, coined “Larry Stylinson.” Fans went so far as to speculate a real-life romance between the two lads. Though, it didn’t stop with Larry. From stories of Harry and bandmate Niall Horan hooking up on tour to a sentimental imagined romance between Harry and British radio personality Nick Grimshaw, there is a near-infinite trove of gay fanfic involving Harry Styles. In One Direction’s heyday, especially from 2013 through 2015, Tumblr was ablaze with stories of trysts between the boys. This, of course, says more about the fans themselves than of Harry’s own real-life sexuality.

The One Direction fandom really latched onto the Larry slash fic. Julia, a 32-year-old Harry devotee, told me she would read Harry fic “half turned-on, half, like, academically.” This phenomenon, too — of women being into gay male porn — is a well-established one. (Remember that scene in The Kids Are All Right where two wives watch porn, and how people lost their damn minds they were so confused?) Taking heterosexuality out of the equation in porn complicates gender power dynamics in a way that really works for lots of women. So, it makes sense that that phenomenon would translate to 1D fic. Those cute British boys were like queer-girl sex bait.

Let’s make one thing clear: Harry Styles looks like a hot lesbian. With a wiry frame, effeminate features, a shaggy mop, and an enviable wardrobe of floral prints and eye-popping suiting, he’s an absolute Shane. If you’ve never noticed this, perhaps you should hang out with more lesbians.

His fashion sense — that is, fashion not designed to flatter only men — is central to most queer women’s admiration for the pop star. I mean, come on: Those suits! Harry’s bottomless cache of dazzling two-piece suits and patterned blouses has made him a bit of a lesbian fashion icon. “I don’t wear suits often, or hardly ever — but I always want his suits,” says Katie, noting his penchant for sporting outfits that would look great on men and women alike. My girlfriend, Fran, asserts her “personal fandom is rooted in all of his outfits.” (Good answer.) I’m not sure if queer women are suddenly running out and buying Styles-esque suits, but they’re certainly fun to drool over.

Harry came to adopt his now-notorious personal style throughout 2015. It was at this time, too, that he grew his hair down past his shoulders, which amplified his androgynous looks. This androgyny piqued his queer fans’ affection. Even Sara Quin admitted to GQ that she grew her own hair out to look like Harry’s. For many women, long-haired, end-of-One-Direction Harry was a glory age of sorts. “There was a specific moment from late 2014 through early 2016 where he had this long hair and was wearing all YSL, where he was for me, in some magical witch way,” says Julia. He wasn’t a little boy holding hands with Taylor Swift anymore — his presentation had matured into something much more interesting. Something a little queerer.

Of course, Justin Bieber was the original “looks like a lesbian” pop star of the social media era. If you’ve never noticed (again, see my above note about hanging out with more lesbians), mid-puberty Justin Bieber looked a lot like an androgynous-leaning woman. Internet lesbians embraced this comparison, and in 2010 the blog of viral fame Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber was born. Women would submit photos (mostly selfies) where their looks were particularly reminiscent of the then-teenage Biebs. (The Tumblr’s most recent post is from April 2017, so it’s not officially dead, just past its heyday.) The account posted masses of photos between 2009 and 2012; it was a truly excellent meme.

But IRL, Justin Bieber appears to be — what’s the phrase? — oh, aggressively heterosexual. He very publicly dated Selena Gomez, joined a church that “does not affirm a gay lifestyle,” and has a habit of sliding into random women’s DMs like a true 23-year-old dumbass. Honestly, Bieber’s severe straightness is the perfect punchline after years of Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber. While he may sport effeminate features (even post-puberty), the star doesn’t represent any sort of queerness in the pop sphere.

Harry Styles, on the other hand, prefers to publicly retain a level of sexual mystique not dissimilar to Bowie and Prince. In the six years that Styles has been in the public eye, his own sexuality has remained an enigma. Even though fans have long speculated about a romance between Harry and Louis Tomlinson, Louis has outright denied any romance between the two — but Harry never has. On the whole, he prefers to keep his own sexuality undefined.

On a 2014 press junket, the British singer said being female was “not that important” a quality in someone he would date. In an interview with the Sun this past May, Harry declines to label his sexuality, seeming to confirm a fluidity fans had long sensed. Since their 2015 On the Road Again tour, it’s become a bit of a tradition at shows for Harry to parade around stage with pride flags brought by fans.

But, hey, coyness doesn’t equal...well, anything. For all we know, Styles has no interest in men whatsoever. He might reach Justin Bieber level on the Het Dude scale behind closed doors. My cynical side suspects he knows that coming out as straight, now, could very well alienate a large portion of the singer’s fanbase. Instead, he gets the best of both worlds by keeping things vague. Having his rainbow cake and eating it too, as it were.

But it ultimately doesn’t matter whether Harry Styles is gay or straight or one of the many other iterations of human sexuality. What’s important is that he appears to publicly champion non-definition.

Generally speaking, women tend to exist in a state of sexual fluidity more often than men do. A 2015 study from the University of Notre Dame found that women were three times more likely than men to report a shift in their sexual orientation, and more likely than men to identify as bisexual. What’s more, younger generations of LGBT people have been embracing fluidity and rejecting traditional labels of sexuality. A 2016 study found only 48% of Generation Z identified as exclusively heterosexual, compared with 65% of millennials.

So then, perhaps it’s Harry’s refusal to conform to mainstream sexual terminology that makes him so appealing to queer women. For many, seeing a pop star of extreme fame not only embrace a refusal to label, but appear to thrive in that gray area of sexuality, might be a relief. Sure, his private life could very well be less fluid. But publicly rejecting the notion of being “gay” or “straight” or “bisexual” — all of which have clear meanings — could be, for many non-straight women, something to celebrate.

But that, too, is an oversimplification of why queer women go fucking bananas for Harry Styles. After all, plenty of other celebrities keep their sexuality shrouded in mystery, or just choose to remain in the glass closet. So, still, why Harry?

On the topic of sexual fluidity, let’s get another thing out of the way: It’s not that queer women necessarily want to fuck Harry Styles. Sure, women tend not to adhere to gendered boundaries of attraction as rigidly as men do. But the Harry Styles obsession, for most gay women, is not “He’s so hot that I’d go straight for him,” nor is it “He looks like a lesbian, so that turns me on even though he’s a dude.” This love is not anchored in wanting to bone Harry. (Though, yeah, some would love to bone Harry.)

Hug? Yes. Flirting? Definitely. Engage in a drawn-out, rom-com-esque love affair that ends in kissing? Surprisingly, yes. But it’s not about sex in a straightforward sense.

“Addie” (who asked not to be named), a 29-year-old queer writer, would put wanting to sleep with Harry at, “like, number 17 of the reasons why I’m intrigued by him.” For Addie, “it's more of a kindred spirit situation, and I'd rather be him, or be like him, than sleep with him.” This feeling’s pretty common for queer people; think about gay men with Madonna or Beyoncé or Carly Rae Jepsen. Queer kids, before really tussling with their sexualities, often conflate these feelings of admiration with sexual attraction.

Julia has sexual fantasies starring Harry Styles, yes. But she clarifies that if the real-life Harry Styles made a move on her, she’d probably reject the advances. She then goes on to detail, “basically I want to watch him get fucked, then also zip his skin around me in a suit.” So, suffice it to say, these feelings are sexual, sure; but none of the women I spoke to were lusting after the real Harry Styles. Just the fanfic-born idea of Harry.

For some women, like Katie, their crush on Harry Styles is like a middle school crush: pure, nonsexual, anchored in cuteness and kindness. The kind of crush you had before you really understood your own sexuality whatsoever. “I can give myself flies thinking about Harry Styles flirting with me,” says Katie. “But my imagination ends there.” Similarly, Fran describes her ideal, real-life relationship with Harry to be “someone I see at four to six parties per year who I always flirt with, and who reciprocates, but literally nothing [sexual] ever happens.” (Again...good answer.)

And it’s not strictly about the music, either. Some women connect to the music itself, while others love it merely as an extension of Harry’s existence, like the “magical” era of long-haired Harry, mid-to-late 1D — once he was no longer the squeaky teen he was on The X Factor — holds a special place in the hearts of fans. Several fans cited the band’s 2013 album, Midnight Memories, in particular. Solo Harry falls more into the category of mom-like pride in their grown-up boy: “I love it because it’s Harry.” As Julia says, “Does a mother like her child’s macaroni art? Objectively, no. But yes, it’s the best thing she’s ever seen. I listen to [One Direction’s music] because I like to have them in my ears, but not because I like it.”

Fandoms are a funny thing. They can elicit such intense and unexpected joy, and the resulting friendships, more often than not, come to overshadow the thing itself. It’s like sports: It’s nice to have a thing, completely out of your control, that’s fun to talk about and obsess over without any actual, real-life stakes. A bizarre interview prompts an inside joke, a trek to a concert in New Jersey prompts another, and over time real-life, intimate friendships have been stitched. Addie tells me her life as a Harry stan brought her a whole new slate of queer women friends, including Julia. The One Direction community is far from the first one queer women have bonded over online: Everything from Buffy to The Social Network to American Idol has had rabid, fanfic-penning queer fans online. But still, it’s had quite a robust impact on the lives of many queer women.

For some queer women, the particular joy unveiled in the Harry Styles fandom is and was a newfound sense of connection to one’s own body and sexuality. Perhaps the strangest and most notable part of all this is the women who attribute their realization that they’re gay, in some part, to their love for Harry Styles.

Julia remembers the exact moment she realized she was gay, at age 29. It was early 2014, and she’d been consuming as much Harry content as possible over the previous two months — photos, videos, fanfic, the works. One evening, she and a friend were exchanging emails about Harry (you know, normal things), when she was sent an email of about a dozen GIFs of Harry Styles (naturally). Something struck her.

“I remember so clearly looking at those GIFs of Harry and being like, ‘I’m gay,’” she recounts. “I can’t really explain why… Something about this has unleashed a reality within me that’s like, I know myself now.” Julia attributes her sudden connection to herself and her sexuality to her love for this androgynous-leaning, charismatic pop star. It was wrapped up in her realizing she had a crush on a woman, who she now realizes she was conflating with Harry.

A similar thing happened to Katie Heaney. Her love for Harry, which peaked in 2014–15, “was much timed to my sexual awakening in my late twenties. I was completely obsessed with a boy band — for the first time in my life — at the exact moment that I’m turning away from men in general.” Julia and Katie’s stories are not identical (as no two coming-out experiences are), but are both inextricably linked to their fixation on Harry. Both women also describe feeling a sort of “second adolescence” during their coming-out periods. (Imagine feeling all that crazy, intense horniness and obsession, but with a parent-free apartment, a 401K, and a decade’s worth of weird pseudo-exes. That’s what coming out later in life is like.)

Perhaps Katie and Julia’s unapologetic love for a teen boy band sparked that second adolescence, or vice versa. In any case, the near-crazed feelings of boy band fandom and teen-esque sexual discovery can go hand-in-hand.

There’s no crystallized explanation for why so many queer women love Harry Styles so achingly. I’ve learned that the avenues by which fans arrive at Harry appear to be as multifarious as those to arrive at one’s own sexuality. I guess all I’m saying is, perhaps more lesbian bars could stay in business by adopting Harry Styles cosplay nights. If given the opportunity to exist as Harry, as this idealized prism of confidence and androgyny and fluidity and glitter and youthful joy — well, who wouldn’t come out for that?

[waynekelton]

The Best War Games for Android & iOS

If you have ever looked for wargames on your iPad/android device you will know what I mean when I say it’s akin to walking into a swamp to find your wallet. Hundreds upon hundreds of tower defense, sniper and risk clones drown out the truly decent experiences.

Weary of warfare? How about some Sports management games instead?

So with the latest in swamp draining technology allows us to bring you some of the android and iOS war games that are actually worth looking at...

Recent Releases

Battle Fleet: Ground Assault

Wars Across the Worlds (Review)

Publisher: Plug-In Digital Platform: iOS Universal Price: $1.99 (With IAPs)

WatW's premise is to present a universal war game system so that it can applied to a range of scenarios and settings from across history. You could be fighting in the forests of Tannenberg one minute, storming the beaches the Normandy the next, before finally taking on the Syrians in the Six Days War.

We were very impressed with how well the mechanics translates from era to era, giving a consistently fun and challenging experience. Bespoke flavour is introduced via the card system, which can offer meaningful tactical and strategic choices. The base game only comes with the tutorial and one additional scenario (hence the cheap price), but so far none of the $1-a-pop scenario offerings have disappointed. The Berlin 1945 scenario (priced $2.99) is currently our favourite.

Vietnam '65 (Review)

Publisher: Slitherine Platform: iPad Price: $9.99

The core mechanics simulate the nature of counter insurgency operational warfare in a plausible and realistic manner. The constant pressure to keep a presence out in the field makes it difficult to scrape together the forces you need for the big sweeps to destroy the core enemy bases without comprising somewhere. The result is a demanding just one more turn experience. The developer made a follow-up game, Afghanistan '11, which is also really good and covers the events following the 2001 War in Afghanistan. You're put in charge of American forces as you try and build up the 'hearts & minds' of the local populace, whilst also tackling Taliban-sponsored insurgents. Sadly, Apple arbitrarily removed the game from the App store last year and it has yet to return. You can pick it up on PC though, if you want.

Panzer Corps (Review)

Publisher: Slitherine Platform: iPad Price: $19.99

Panzer Corps has been hailed as the 'the spiritual successor' to the Panzer General series. If you don’t know Panzer General it was a wildly successful 1990’s war game. Panzer Corps is light-weight operational level WW2 game play that allows you to play a series of linked scenarios in which your forces will upgrade over time though around 800-unit types. The challenge is taking a specific objective within a time limit whilst retaining your force. Probably not for anyone who is interested in an actual simulation or specific order of battles.

Also Consider:  OpenPanzer, a completely free alternative to Panzer Corps which you can read more about on our ‘free games’ lists for iOS and Android.

Carrier Battles 4 Guadalcanal (Review)

Publisher: Avalon Digital Platform:  iOS Universal Price: $6.99

This is an outstanding pacific carrier battles game played out at the operational level. The excellent AI, easy interface and accessibility combined with realism and plausibility makes this game a must if you have a vague interest in naval operations. But most of all I love how this game gets you so quickly to the interesting decision points and the thick of the fighting.

At the time of writing, a successful Kickstarter means that this game will be coming to Android (and Desktop PC) in the near future. Huzzah!

Drive on Moscow (Review)

Publisher: Slitherine Platform:  iPad Price: $9.99

This is an operational level, area activation game allowing you to defend or drive or Moscow with realistic units. Battling against time you face a series of agonising decisions in this game, constantly trying to figure out when is a good time to push ahead or fall back to a new line. The outcome is determined by your skill in judging those correct moments. Realistic, tense and accessible, this a most excellent game indeed.

Also Consider: There is another game in Shenendoah's original 'lite' war game series, Battle of the Bulge, which is iOS Universal and well worth checking out.

John Tiller Software

Publisher: John Tiller Software Platforms:  Android, iPad Price: Free - $2.99

Modern Campaigns Series

This is a series of four operational level games covering the Arab-Israeli wars, a hypothetical cold war gone hot in Germany in the 80s and Quang Tri offensive in 1972. These games provide detailed order of battle, some good fog of war and a realistic tactical combat element. However, the core system is somewhat dated, the AI isn’t great and the experience doesn’t provide a particularly plausible command simulation if that matters to you. If you don’t like endless drop-down menus then these games aren’t for you, accessibility is not a key strength here.

Modern Campaigns: Quang Tri '72 

Modern Campaigns: Mideast '67 

Modern Campaigns: North German Plain '85 

Modern Campaigns: Fulda Gap '85 

John Tiller's Civil War Battles

There are a ton of civil war battle games on the various stores and most of them are a complete waste of time from a wargame perspective. However, the JTS Civil War Battles series does provide a tactically solid game with a strong order of battle backed up with good combat mechanics.

However, like Modern Campaigns the core system is dated and the overall simulation of the command experience doesn’t feel right. You will be hard pushed to find a better hard core tactical wargame of the ACW out there and with 11 games in the series you will be kept busy. Note, unlike the Modern Campaign games, not every game in this series has been released onto Android:

Civil War Battles

The Battle of Antietam

The Battle of Shiloh

The Battle of Chancellorsville

The Battles of the Peninsula

The Battle of Chickamauga

Battles in the Ozark

The Battle of Corinth

The Petersburg Campaign

The Battle of Atlanta

The Battle of Franklin

Also Consider: There are more JTS games on iOS than Android, but in addition to the above JTS has put out some of their Panzer Campaigns and an air warfare and naval warfare game. All are worth checking out, and some are even free!

Alternatively if you want something lighter then look to Hexwar and their series of Civil War: 186X games or their slightly more complex game American Civil War Battles based on the wildly popular Terrible Swift Sword board game Great Battles of the American Civil War.

Conflict Series

Developer: Joni Nuutinen Platform:  Android Price: Free to $5.99

The conflict series covers an absolutely huge number of WW2 operational level games that have been put out by this Finnish designer. The main thing about this series is that they are very accessible, time to combat is very quick and its probably the main reason for their success. This is combined with reasonable pricing and a design that makes you want to take just one more turn. On the downside the games don’t look great, they are all pretty similar and the AI can be very poor which without 2 players makes the game long term viability pretty limited.

Nuutinen's gamelist is a bit too numerous to list here (and it doesn't appear that he's on iOS?), so check out this link for the full list of games he's created. 

Command & Colours: The Great War (Review)

Publisher: HexWar Platform:  iPad, Android Price: $9.99

While we weren't that impressed during our review, the team at HexWar have been putting a lot of work into their digital adaptation since its release. It has some new well themed mechanics that well represent the tactical challenges of the era and to be fair, there's not a lot of digital WW1 games on mobile around. Since we've just come out of the 100th anniversary at the end of the war, this one might be worth reconsidering if it comes up on sale again.

Ancient Battle: Hannibal

Publisher: Hex War Platform:  iOS Universal Price: $4.99

It’s hard not to like the Punic Wars with its diverse number of units, colourful characters and wide ranging geography. This game offers different battle scenarios in a traditional hex, you go, I go format linked together by a wider campaign. Whilst their games are pretty standard one thing that HexWar really surpasses in is in its ability to make their games look great and accessible.

This is not only immersive but it allows the player to quickly get to the hard decisions and the crucial turning points that one can agonise over and reflect upon later. The base engine used by HexWar has been used across a number of their games including the early and late medieval and Napoleonic wars. So there are plenty of different era’s here to pick and choose from if you are looking for some serious plate metal on your horse.

Napoleonics: Waterloo

Publisher: DK Simulations (David Kershaw) Platform:  Android Price: $1.99

David Kershaw has a traditional mix of mobile wargames that are none too dissimilar to the conflict series but Napoleonics: Waterloo stands out as it takes the mechanics of the Napoleon’s Triumph and Bonaparte at Marango board games and ports them to Android (I couldn't locate them on the app store -ED). If you are bored of traditional hex war games and want something that better reflects the challenges of a real command and battle using a different kind of mechanic then look no further.

What are your favourite android or iOS war games? Let us know in the comments!

The Best War Games for Android & iOS published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[jamesmcphee30]

Facebook’s Mattress Problem with Privacy

If you haven’t had a chance to watch the latest episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown that I do with my co-workers every Wednesday, make sure you check this one out. Because it’s the end of the year it’s customary to do all kinds of fun wrap up stories. This episode focused on what we all thought was the biggest story of the year. For me, it was the way that Facebook completely trashed our privacy. And worse yet, I don’t see a way for this to get resolved any time soon. Because of the difference between assets and liabilities.

Contact The Asset

It’s no secret that Facebook knows a ton about us. We tell it all kinds of things every day we’re logged into the platform. We fill out our user profiles with all kinds of interesting details. We click Like buttons everywhere, including the one for the Gestalt IT Rundown. Facebook then keeps all the data somewhere.

But Facebook is collecting more data than that. They track where our mouse cursors are in the desktop when we’re logged in. They track the amount of time we spend with the mobile app open. They track information in the background. And they collect all of this secret data and they store it somewhere as well.

This data allows them to build an amazingly accurate picture of who we are. And that kind of picture is extremely valuable to the right people. At first, I thought it might be the advertisers that crave this kind of data. Advertisers are the people that want to know exactly who is watching their programs. The more data they have about demographics the better they can tailor the message. We’ve already seen that with specific kinds of targeted posts on Facebook.

But the people that really salivate over this kind of data live in the shadows. They look at the data as a way to offer new kinds of services. Don’t just sell people things. Make them think differently. Change their opinions about products or ideas without them even realizing it. The really dark and twisted stuff. Like propaganda on a whole new scale. Enabled by the fact that we have all the data we could ever want on someone without even needing to steal it from them.

The problem with Facebook collecting all this data about us is that it’s an asset. It’s not too dissimilar from an older person keeping all their money under a mattress. We scoff at that person because a mattress is a terrible place to keep money. It’s not safe. And a bank will pay you keep your money there, right?

On the flip side, depending on the age of that person, they may not believe that banks are safe. Before FDIC, there was no guarantee your money would be repaid in a pinch. And if the bank goes out of business you can’t get your investment back. For a person that lived through the Great Depression that had to endure bank holidays and the like, keeping your asset under a mattress is way safer than giving it to someone else.

As an aside here, remember that banks don’t like leaving your money laying around either. If you deposit money in a bank, they take that money and invest it in other places. They put the money to work for them making money. The interest that you get paid for savings accounts and the like is just a small bonus to encourage you to keep your money in the bank and not to pull it out. That’s why they even have big disclaimers saying that your money may not be available to withdraw at a moment’s notice. Because if you do decide to get all of your money out of the bank at once, they need to go find the money to give you.

Now, let’s examine our data. Or, at least the data that Facebook has been storing on us. How do you think Facebook looks at that data? Do you believe they want to keep it under the mattress where it’s safe from the outside world? Do you think that Facebook wants to keep all these information locked in a vault somewhere where no one can get to it?

Or perhaps Facebook looks at your data as an asset like a bank does. Instead of keeping it around and letting it sit fallow they’d rather put it to work. That’s the nature of a valuable asset. To the average person, their privacy is one of the most important parts of their lives. To Facebook, your privacy is simply an asset. It can either sit by itself and make them nothing. Or it can be put to use by Facebook or third-party companies to make more money from the things that they can do with good data sources. To believe that a company like Facebook has your best interests at heart when it comes to privacy is not a good bet to make.

Would I Lie-ability To You?

In fact, the only thing that can make Facebook really sit up and pay attention is if that asset they have farmed out and working for them were to suddenly become a liability for some reason. Liabilities are a problem for companies because they are the exact opposite of making money. They cost money. Just as the grandmother in the above example sees an insolvent bank as a liability, so too would someone see a bad asset as a possible exposure.

Liabilities are a problem. Anything that can be an exposure is an issue for company, especially one with investors that like to get dividends. Any reduction in profit equals a loss. Liabilities on a balance sheet are giant red flags for anyone taking a close look at the operations of a business.

Turning Facebook’s data assets into a liability is the only way to make them sit up and realize that what they’re doing is wrong. Selling access to our data to anyone that wants it is a horrible idea. But it won’t stop until there is some way to make them pay through he nose for screwing up. Up until this year, that was a long shot at best. Most fines were in the thousands of dollars range, whereas most companies would pay millions for access to data. A carefully crafted statement admitting no fault after the exposure was uncovered means that Facebook and the offending company get away without a black mark and get to pocket all their gains.

The European GDPR law is a great step in the right direction. It clearly spells out what has to happen to keep a person’s data safe. That eliminates wiggle room in the laws. It also puts a stiff fine in place to ensure that any violations can be compounded quickly to drain a company and turn data into a liability instead of an asset. There are moves in the US to introduce legislation similar to GDPR, either at the federal level or in individual states like California, the location of Facebook’s headquarters.

That’s not to say that these laws are going to get it right every time. There are people out there that live to find ways to turn liabilities into assets. They want to find ways around the laws and make it so that they can continue to take their assets and make money from them even if the possibility of exposure is high. It’s one thing when that exposure is the money of people that invested in them. It’s another thing entirely when it’s personally identifiable information (PII) or protected information about people. We’re not imaginary money. We live and breath and exist long past losses. And trying to get our life back on track after an exposure is not easy for sure.

Tom’s Take

If I sound grumpy, it’s because I am tired of this mess. When I was researching my discussion for the Gestalt IT Rundown I simply Googled “Facebook data breach 2018” looking for examples that weren’t Cambridge Analytica. The number was more than it should have been. We cry about Target and Equifax and many other exposures that have happened in the last five years, but we also punish those companies by not doing business with them or moving our information elsewhere. Facebook has everyone hooked. We share photos on Facebook. We RSVP to events on Facebook. And we talk to people on Facebook as much or more than we do on the phone. That kind of reach requires a company to be more careful with who has access to our data. And if the solution is building the world’s biggest mattress to keep it all safe put me down for a set of box springs.

  from martinos https://networkingnerd.net/2018/12/21/facebooks-mattress-problem-with-privacy/

[wingskribes-blog]

WHY ARE SPINOFFS SO FORGETTABLE? Part 1: The Nostalgia Dilemma

Before you (definitely) read this, let me say a few things.

1)  I’ll be using Ocean’s 8 and Solo as examples in this discussion about spinoffs. I will be go into some low-key details about their plots. Safe to say: SPOILERS.

2)  At a glance, my analysis is not terribly dissimilar to THIS IndieWire article about how studios’ tendencies to make safe choices is dulling the edges of the modern cinematic canon. It’s a good article; you should read it (after you finish mine). But I’m more interested in the films themselves. Why is it so hard for spinoffs to find their footing? Seriously, I googled “best movie spinoffs”, before writing this and there were god damn close to ZERO on any list I saw that I’d call particularly good films. Why? That’s the focus of this discussion.

3)  Now to be clear, I found Ocean’s 8 and Solo to be perfectly entertaining films (13/20 for both). Since this is an article about why spinoffs tend to be forgettable, I’m pretty much only going to talk about the bad stuff. Please remember that there’s good stuff too.

But first, why make a spinoff at all? Since so few of them stand out in the end, are they really such a safe choice? (And to be clear, we’re talking specifically about SPINOFFS here, not reboots, sequels, prequels or anything else of the sort.) The answer, still, is yes. It’s the built-in fanbase. They don’t have to work as hard marketing the film. They don’t have to convince anyone that they’re going to like it, or tell them what it’s about. The audience already (basically) knows what it’s going to be. And unlike sequels and prequels, there’s less risk of audience story fatigue. And of course, hardcore fans will be much less afraid a spinoff will ‘ruin the franchise’ than they ever are with full-on reboots.

We see it time and again, spinoff films whose success can be can be attributed (almost exclusively) to incidental connections they have to other already-popular works. Yet no matter how much box office success they find, the spinoff rarely manages to live up to the original. (To me, only Fantastic Beasts and Creed stand out as being better, or at least as good as their inceptors.)

Yet this should not be. If anything, at least half of all spinoffs should be better than the films that came before. Because they are safe, because they will be profitable, filmmakers should take risks and try new approaches to the universe. Because it isn’t a part of the original series, there’s everything to gain and almost nothing to lose. Sadly this rarely seems to happen.

Why?

For all their potential, spinoffs possess a hidden feature, an invisible obstacle rarely overcome. Let’s call it ‘the nostalgia dilemma’.

It goes like this:

An audiences watches the spinoff because of how much they (we) liked original. We want to explore deeper into the story’s universe. Therefor the connection to that universe has to be made clear. If the new story strays too far, if it’s not recognizably a product of the original, we will take note of the disconnect. We’ll think, ‘what’s the point of putting it in the same universe?’ But at the same time, the new story can’t rely on any of the original’s content or character motivation. It has to be its own independent thing.

Studios seem to see this as a paradox. (It’s not, but they seem to think it is.) How do we effectively remind people of the old story while telling a completely new one? And so they compromise. They DO tell a new story. And they DO connect it to the original. But to avoid ‘distracting’ us from the fact that we’re watching an in-universe subplot, the stories they create are by necessity, featureless. i.e. generic.

Now to be clear, I’m not trying to tell you, the filmmakers’ goal is to deliberately make something worse than the original. Just that the best way (as major studios appear to see it) to contain the spinoff within the spirit of its original, is by ensuring it won’t stand out as something new or different. It is, in the truest sense of the word, conventional.

And if we’re talking conventional, I guess that brings us to Solo.

 Part 2: Solo

Part 3: Ocean’s 8

[waynekelton]

The Best War Games for Android & iOS

If you have ever looked for wargames on your iPad/android device you will know what I mean when I say it’s akin to walking into a swamp to find your wallet. Hundreds upon hundreds of tower defense, sniper and risk clones drown out the truly decent experiences.

Weary of warfare? How about some Sports management games instead?

So with the latest in swamp draining technology allows us to bring you some of the android and iOS war games that are actually worth looking at:

Wars Across the Worlds (Review)

Publisher: Plug-In Digital Platform: iOS Universal Price: $1.99 (With IAPs)

WatW's premise is to present a universal war game system so that it can applied to a range of scenarios and settings from across history. You could be fighting in the forests of Tannenberg one minute, storming the beaches the Normandy the next, before finally taking on the Syrians in the Six Days War.

We were very impressed with how well the mechanics translates from era to era, giving a consistently fun and challenging experience. Bespoke flavour is introduced via the card system, which can offer meaningful tactical and strategic choices. The base game only comes with the tutorial and one additional scenario (hence the cheap price), but so far none of the $1-a-pop scenario offerings have disappointed. The Berlin 1945 scenario (priced $2.99) is currently our favourite.

Vietnam '65 (Review)

Publisher: Slitherine Platform: iPad Price: $9.99

The core mechanics simulate the nature of counter insurgency operational warfare in a plausible and realistic manner. The constant pressure to keep a presence out in the field makes it difficult to scrape together the forces you need for the big sweeps to destroy the core enemy bases without comprising somewhere. The result is a demanding just one more turn experience. Also consider: Afghanistan ’11, Slitherine’s follow up that looks at the aftermath of the 2001 war.

Panzer Corps (Review)

Publisher: Slitherine Platform: iPad Price: $19.99

Panzer Corps has been hailed as the 'the spiritual successor' to the Panzer General series. If you don’t know Panzer General it was a wildly successful 1990’s war game. Panzer Corps is light-weight operational level WW2 game play that allows you to play a series of linked scenarios in which your forces will upgrade over time though around 800-unit types. The challenge is taking a specific objective within a time limit whilst retaining your force. Probably not for anyone who is interested in an actual simulation or specific order of battles.

Also Consider:  OpenPanzer, a completely free alternative to Panzer Corps which you can read more about on our ‘free games’ lists for iOS and Android.

Carrier Battles 4 Guadalcanal (Review)

Publisher: Avalon Digital Platform:  iOS Universal Price: $6.99

This is an outstanding pacific carrier battles game played out at the operational level. The excellent AI, easy interface and accessibility combined with realism and plausibility makes this game a must if you have a vague interest in naval operations. But most of all I love how this game gets you so quickly to the interesting decision points and the thick of the fighting.

Drive on Moscow (Review)

Publisher: Slitherine Platform:  iPad Price: $9.99

This is an operational level, area activation game allowing you to defend or drive or Moscow with realistic units. Battling against time you face a series of agonising decisions in this game, constantly trying to figure out when is a good time to push ahead or fall back to a new line. The outcome is determined by your skill in judging those correct moments. Realistic, tense and accessible, this a most excellent game indeed.

Also Consider: There is another game in Shenendoah's original 'lite' war game series, Battle of the Bulge, which is iOS Universal and well worth checking out.

John Tiller Software

Publisher: John Tiller Software Platforms:  Android, iPad Price: Free - $2.99

Modern Campaigns Series

This is a series of four operational level games covering the Arab-Israeli wars, a hypothetical cold war gone hot in Germany in the 80s and Quang Tri offensive in 1972. These games provide detailed order of battle, some good fog of war and a realistic tactical combat element. However, the core system is somewhat dated, the AI isn’t great and the experience doesn’t provide a particularly plausible command simulation if that matters to you. If you don’t like endless drop-down menus then these games aren’t for you, accessibility is not a key strength here.

Modern Campaigns: Quang Tri '72 

Modern Campaigns: Mideast '67 

Modern Campaigns: North German Plain '85 

Modern Campaigns: Fulda Gap '85 

John Tiller's Civil War Battles

There are a ton of civil war battle games on the various stores and most of them are a complete waste of time from a wargame perspective. However, the JTS Civil War Battles series does provide a tactically solid game with a strong order of battle backed up with good combat mechanics.

However, like Modern Campaigns the core system is dated and the overall simulation of the command experience doesn’t feel right. You will be hard pushed to find a better hard core tactical wargame of the ACW out there and with 11 games in the series you will be kept busy. Note, unlike the Modern Campaign games, not every game in this series has been released onto Android:

Civil War Battles

The Battle of Antietam

The Battle of Shiloh

The Battle of Chancellorsville

The Battles of the Peninsula

The Battle of Chickamauga

Battles in the Ozark

The Battle of Corinth

The Petersburg Campaign

The Battle of Atlanta

The Battle of Franklin

Also Consider: There are more JTS games on iOS than Android, but in addition to the above JTS has put out some of their Panzer Campaigns and an air warfare and naval warfare game. All are worth checking out, and some are even free!

Alternatively if you want something lighter then look to Hexwar and their series of Civil War: 186X games or their slightly more complex game American Civil War Battles based on the wildly popular Terrible Swift Sword board game Great Battles of the American Civil War.

Conflict Series

Developer: Joni Nuutinen Platform:  Android Price: Free to $5.99

The conflict series covers an absolutely huge number of WW2 operational level games that have been put out by this Finnish designer. The main thing about this series is that they are very accessible, time to combat is very quick and its probably the main reason for their success. This is combined with reasonable pricing and a design that makes you want to take just one more turn. On the downside the games don’t look great, they are all pretty similar and the AI can be very poor which without 2 players makes the game long term viability pretty limited.

Nuutinen's gamelist is a bit too numerous to list here (and it doesn't appear that he's on iOS?), so check out this link for the full list of games he's created. 

Command & Colours: The Great War (Review)

Publisher: HexWar Platform:  iPad, Android Price: $9.99

While we weren't that impressed during our review, the team at HexWar have been putting a lot of work into their digital adaptation since its release. It has some new well themed mechanics that well represent the tactical challenges of the era and to be fair, there's not a lot of digital WW1 games on mobile around. Since we've just come out of the 100th anniversary at the end of the war, this one might be worth reconsidering if it comes up on sale again.

Ancient Battle: Hannibal

Publisher: Hex War Platform:  iOS Universal Price: $4.99

It’s hard not to like the Punic Wars with its diverse number of units, colourful characters and wide ranging geography. This game offers different battle scenarios in a traditional hex, you go, I go format linked together by a wider campaign. Whilst their games are pretty standard one thing that HexWar really surpasses in is in its ability to make their games look great and accessible.

This is not only immersive but it allows the player to quickly get to the hard decisions and the crucial turning points that one can agonise over and reflect upon later. The base engine used by HexWar has been used across a number of their games including the early and late medieval and Napoleonic wars. So there are plenty of different era’s here to pick and choose from if you are looking for some serious plate metal on your horse.

Napoleonics: Waterloo

Publisher: DK Simulations (David Kershaw) Platform:  Android Price: $1.99

David Kershaw has a traditional mix of mobile wargames that are none too dissimilar to the conflict series but Napoleonics: Waterloo stands out as it takes the mechanics of the Napoleon’s Triumph and Bonaparte at Marango board games and ports them to Android (I couldn't locate them on the app store -ED). If you are bored of traditional hex war games and want something that better reflects the challenges of a real command and battle using a different kind of mechanic then look no further.

What are your favourite android or iOS war games? Let us know in the comments!

The Best War Games for Android & iOS published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[waynekelton]

The Best War Games for Android & iOS

If you have ever looked for wargames on your iPad/android device you will know what I mean when I say it’s akin to walking into a swamp to find your wallet. Hundreds upon hundreds of tower defense, sniper and risk clones drown out the truly decent experiences.

Weary of warfare? How about some Sports management games instead?

So with the latest in swamp draining technology allows us to bring you some of the android and iOS war games that are actually worth looking at:

Vietnam '65 (Review)

Publisher: Slitherine Platform: iPad Price: $9.99

The core mechanics simulate the nature of counter insurgency operational warfare in a plausible and realistic manner. The constant pressure to keep a presence out in the field makes it difficult to scrape together the forces you need for the big sweeps to destroy the core enemy bases without comprising somewhere. The result is a demanding just one more turn experience. Also consider: Afghanistan ’11, Slitherine’s follow up that looks at the aftermath of the 2001 war.

Panzer Corps (Review)

Publisher: Slitherine Platform: iPad Price: $19.99

Panzer Corps has been hailed as the 'the spiritual successor' to the Panzer General series. If you don’t know Panzer General it was a wildly successful 1990’s war game. Panzer Corps is light-weight operational level WW2 game play that allows you to play a series of linked scenarios in which your forces will upgrade over time though around 800-unit types. The challenge is taking a specific objective within a time limit whilst retaining your force. Probably not for anyone who is interested in an actual simulation or specific order of battles.

Also Consider:  OpenPanzer, a completely free alternative to Panzer Corps which you can read more about on our ‘free games’ lists for iOS and Android.

Carrier Battles 4 Guadalcanal (Review)

Publisher: Avalon Digital Platform:  iOS Universal Price: $6.99

This is an outstanding pacific carrier battles game played out at the operational level. The excellent AI, easy interface and accessibility combined with realism and plausibility makes this game a must if you have a vague interest in naval operations. But most of all I love how this game gets you so quickly to the interesting decision points and the thick of the fighting.

Drive on Moscow (Review)

Publisher: Slitherine Platform:  iPad Price: $9.99

This is an operational level, area activation game allowing you to defend or drive or Moscow with realistic units. Battling against time you face a series of agonising decisions in this game, constantly trying to figure out when is a good time to push ahead or fall back to a new line. The outcome is determined by your skill in judging those correct moments. Realistic, tense and accessible, this a most excellent game indeed.

Also Consider: There is another game in Shenendoah's original 'lite' war game series, Battle of the Bulge, which is iOS Universal and well worth checking out.

John Tiller Software

Publisher: John Tiller Software Platforms:  Android, iPad Price: Free - $2.99

Modern Campaigns Series

This is a series of four operational level games covering the Arab-Israeli wars, a hypothetical cold war gone hot in Germany in the 80s and Quang Tri offensive in 1972. These games provide detailed order of battle, some good fog of war and a realistic tactical combat element. However, the core system is somewhat dated, the AI isn’t great and the experience doesn’t provide a particularly plausible command simulation if that matters to you. If you don’t like endless drop-down menus then these games aren’t for you, accessibility is not a key strength here.

Modern Campaigns: Quang Tri '72 

Modern Campaigns: Mideast '67 

Modern Campaigns: North German Plain '85 

Modern Campaigns: Fulda Gap '85 

John Tiller's Civil War Battles

There are a ton of civil war battle games on the various stores and most of them are a complete waste of time from a wargame perspective. However, the JTS Civil War Battles series does provide a tactically solid game with a strong order of battle backed up with good combat mechanics.

However, like Modern Campaigns the core system is dated and the overall simulation of the command experience doesn’t feel right. You will be hard pushed to find a better hard core tactical wargame of the ACW out there and with 11 games in the series you will be kept busy. Note, unlike the Modern Campaign games, not every game in this series has been released onto Android:

Civil War Battles

The Battle of Antietam

The Battle of Shiloh

The Battle of Chancellorsville

The Battles of the Peninsula

The Battle of Chickamauga

Battles in the Ozark

The Battle of Corinth

The Petersburg Campaign

The Battle of Atlanta

The Battle of Franklin

Also Consider: There are more JTS games on iOS than Android, but in addition to the above JTS has put out some of their Panzer Campaigns and an air warfare and naval warfare game. All are worth checking out, and some are even free!

Alternatively if you want something lighter then look to Hexwar and their series of Civil War: 186X games or their slightly more complex game American Civil War Battles based on the wildly popular Terrible Swift Sword board game Great Battles of the American Civil War.

Conflict Series

Developer: Joni Nuutinen Platform:  Android Price: Free to $5.99

The conflict series covers an absolutely huge number of WW2 operational level games that have been put out by this Finnish designer. The main thing about this series is that they are very accessible, time to combat is very quick and its probably the main reason for their success. This is combined with reasonable pricing and a design that makes you want to take just one more turn. On the downside the games don’t look great, they are all pretty similar and the AI can be very poor which without 2 players makes the game long term viability pretty limited.

Nuutinen's gamelist is a bit too numerous to list here (and it doesn't appear that he's on iOS?), so check out this link for the full list of games he's created. 

Command & Colours: The Great War (Review)

Publisher: HexWar Platform:  iPad, Android Price: $9.99

While we weren't that impressed during our review, the team at HexWar have been putting a lot of work into their digital adaptation since its release. It has some new well themed mechanics that well represent the tactical challenges of the era and to be fair, there's not a lot of digital WW1 games on mobile around. Since we've just come out of the 100th anniversary at the end of the war, this one might be worth reconsidering if it comes up on sale again.

Ancient Battle: Hannibal

Publisher: Hex War Platform:  iOS Universal Price: $4.99

It’s hard not to like the Punic Wars with its diverse number of units, colourful characters and wide ranging geography. This game offers different battle scenarios in a traditional hex, you go, I go format linked together by a wider campaign. Whilst their games are pretty standard one thing that HexWar really surpasses in is in its ability to make their games look great and accessible.

This is not only immersive but it allows the player to quickly get to the hard decisions and the crucial turning points that one can agonise over and reflect upon later. The base engine used by HexWar has been used across a number of their games including the early and late medieval and Napoleonic wars. So there are plenty of different era’s here to pick and choose from if you are looking for some serious plate metal on your horse.

Napoleonics: Waterloo

Publisher: DK Simulations (David Kershaw) Platform:  Android Price: $1.99

David Kershaw has a traditional mix of mobile wargames that are none too dissimilar to the conflict series but Napoleonics: Waterloo stands out as it takes the mechanics of the Napoleon’s Triumph and Bonaparte at Marango board games and ports them to Android (I couldn't locate them on the app store -ED). If you are bored of traditional hex war games and want something that better reflects the challenges of a real command and battle using a different kind of mechanic then look no further.

What are your favourite android or iOS war games? Let us know in the comments!

The Best War Games for Android & iOS published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/