#Novels of the Gulf War

[williamrablan]

Understanding Protagonists: The Troubling Journey of Max Laurie

I’m two weeks away from releasing Event Horizon. I’ve been working up to it for some time now, and this promises to be a good, solid Crime-Thriller. As always, we’ll focus on strong police procedural storytelling and detective techniques. In the course of the last several months, I’ve presented a host of subject ranging from spousal abuse to the detectives involved. One thing we haven’t looked…

[ineffable-endearments]

The Crow Road by Iain Banks

I finished The Crow Road and had a little time to think about it. I'll put my thoughts under a Keep Reading in case anyone is trying to avoid spoilers.

As I speculated before, I think it's likely that The Crow Road is more related to Good Omens in philosophy than in plot. I mean, it's not that the plots necessarily have nothing in common, and we could be very surprised in the end of course, but now that I've read the whole book, its philosophical commonalities with GO are both apparent and kind of inspiring. Also, if I were a writer, I'd be more interested in dropping hints about what themes are important than telegraphing my whole plot ahead of time.

So here, I will describe the book and point out themes that I believe may reappear in Good Omens 3.

This is a long post. If you read it, make a cup of [beverage of choice].

Update on 4/20/2024: I made a second post: The Crow Road and Good Omens: Further-Out Thoughts

Below are mentions of suicide, death/murder, and sexual acts.

The Crow Road centers around a character named Prentice McHoan, a university student in Scotland who starts to sort out his complicated relationship with his complicated family as he explores the mystery of his uncle Rory's disappearance. Although the book is mostly from Prentice's perspective, the narration jumps around in time with the McHoan family. There are quite a lot of important characters to keep track of; the bare-bones summary I put below doesn't even include some of the important ones. I wanted to make the summary even shorter and simpler than this, but the truth is that this book is not short or simple, and if I made the summary any simpler, it might be downright misleading.

There are at least three major cultural aspects of The Crow Road that I am inexperienced with: the overall culture in the 1950s-1980s (I was born in 1988, so of course wasn't here for the relevant decades), the international experience of the Gulf War (again, born in 1988), and the history and culture of Scotland itself (I'm USAmerican with only reading as a source). As a result, I'm sure there are important dimensions to the book that I've missed. If someone has a different perspective taking some of these things into account, I'd love to know about it.

Also, keep in mind, there is a great deal of descriptive writing in this book. There are a lot of pages about the geography of Scotland, and about Prentice as a kid, and about Prentice's father and uncles hanging out together in their youth, and about various family incidents, and about Prentice spending time with his brothers and friends. At first, these passages seem to just make things more confusing, and in my head, I accused them of being "filler." But they definitely serve a purpose. They're a way of showing and not telling the characters' attitudes and relationships to each other. More importantly, because we get to actually live these experiences with the characters, they are what give all the plot points below their deeper emotional impacts. In other words, the everyday experiences give the plot its deeper meaning. They resonate with one of the core themes in the novel: that our experiences in life, rather than any supposed existence after death, are what matters.

The Crow Road's story is like this:

Prentice is rather directionless in life, and he seems to have trouble investing any energy in his own future as he moons over his unrequited feelings for an idealized young woman named Verity. Soon, Verity ends up in a romance with Prentice's brother, Lewis, and Prentice feels that Lewis "stole" her from him. Prentice has also become estranged from his father, Kenneth, over spirituality. Prentice believes there has to be something more after death because he feels it would be incredibly unfair if people didn't get anything other than this one life; Kenneth is not only a passionate atheist, but is offended by the notion of an afterlife.

Prentice's uncle Hamish, Kenneth's brother, has always been religious, although his religion involves a number of bizarre and offbeat ideas of his own, with inspiration from more traditional Christian notions. Prentice is not really sure about this ideology, but he's willing to talk to Hamish about it and even participates during Hamish's prayers, whereas Kenneth is openly scornful of Hamish's beliefs. Hamish interprets this as Prentice being on "his side."

Prentice has a few opportunities to go back and talk to his father, and is begged to do so by his mom, Mary, with whom his relationship is still good. Mary doesn't want either of the men to give up their inner ideas about the universe; she just wants them to agree to disagree and move on as a family. Prentice says he will visit, but he just keeps putting it off and off and off.

Prentice acquires a folder containing some of his missing uncle Rory's notes in the process of hooking up with Rory's former girlfriend, Janice Rae, who seems to have taken a shine to Prentice because he reminds her of Rory. Using the contents of the folder, Prentice wants to piece together the great literary work that Rory left unfinished, which Rory titled Crow Road; however, it becomes apparent that Rory didn't turn his concepts into anything substantial and only had a bunch of disconnected notes and ideas. He hadn't even decided whether Crow Road would be a novel, a play, or something else. The few bits of Rory's poetry for Crow Road read are bleak and depressing.

Prentice also spends a lot of time with a young woman named Ash. They've been good friends since childhood and seem to have a somewhat flirtatious dynamic now, but they aren't in a romantic relationship; mostly, they drink and hang out together. Ash tells Prentice bluntly to get his life back on track when she finds out he's failing at school, avoiding his family, and engaging in shoplifting. She is a voice of reason, and when Prentice insists to her that he's just a failure, she reminds him that actually, he's just a kid.

Prentice's efforts to figure out Rory's story or location stagnate, and he continues to fail at school and avoid his father. He then receives word that Kenneth was killed while debating faith with Hamish. In fact, Kenneth dies after a fall from a church lightning rod, which he was climbing in an act of defiance against Hamish's philosophy when it was struck by lightning; Hamish is convinced that Kenneth had incurred God's wrath. Ash is there for support when Prentice finds out about the death.

With Ash's help, Prentice returns to his hometown again to help manage Kenneth's affairs. Prentice speaks with a very shaken Hamish, who is handling Kenneth's death with extreme drama and making it all about his own feelings. Hamish tells Prentice that Kenneth was jealous that Prentice shared more in common with Hamish's faith than with Kenneth's lack of faith. However, this isn't really true, and as he contemplates his father's death, Prentice begins to internalize one of the last things Hamish reported that Kenneth had argued: "All the gods are false. Faith itself is idolatry."

As the chapters go on, Prentice is compelled by some of the meaningful items related to Rory that he discovers in his father's belongings. He gains a renewed sense of purpose trying to solve the mystery of where Rory went and what happened to him. Among the interesting items are an ancient computer disk of Rory's that Prentice can't access with any equipment he can find; Ash uses her connections in the US and Canada to find a computer expert who can finally open the files on it. This takes quite a while, since the disk has to be mailed and Ash's connection is investigating the disk only in his free time.

Prentice also discovers that his feelings for Verity have changed. He no longer feels angry with Lewis for "stealing her." At first, Prentice's narration describes this as his feelings "cooling" as a result of the trauma of losing his father, but interestingly, this soon means Prentice gets to know Verity as a sister-in-law without getting caught up in jealous romantic feelings. Verity gets along well with the family, and Prentice is actually happy to discover that she and Lewis have a baby on the way. Prentice's relationship with Lewis improves greatly as well, partly because he is no longer jealous and partly because he realizes he does not want to lose Lewis, too.

Ash's connection who was looking at Rory's computer disk comes through and sends the printed contents of the files to Prentice. The files reveal to him that Rory likely knew Prentice's uncle, Fergus, murdered his wife by unbuckling her seat belt and crashing their car. Rory had written out a fictional version of events and considered using it in Crow Road. I'm not clear on exactly how certain Rory was about Fergus's crime, or whether Rory would have intentionally reported Ferg, or whether Rory even had enough proof to publicly accuse Ferg of murder, but people would likely have connected the dots in Rory's work and become suspicious of Ferg. For this reason, Prentice believes Ferg murdered Rory as well.

Prentice confronts Ferg. He doesn't get a confession and leaves Ferg's home with no concrete proof of anything; Ferg denies it all. But Prentice is soon physically assaulted in the night, and it seems Ferg was almost certainly the culprit, because he hadn't been home that same night, and he had injuries (probably from being fought off) the next day. A day or two later, Ferg's body is found unconscious in the cockpit of a plane, which crashes into the ocean. It's uncertain whether this was a suicide, but Prentice suspects it was. Rory's body is then soon recovered from the bottom of a waterway near Prentice's home, where Ferg had sunk it years ago.

As the mysteries are solved, Prentice realizes his feelings for Ash are romantic love. However, it's too late, he thinks, because Ash is about to take a job in Canada, where she may or may not stay. Prentice also hesitates to approach her because he's embarrassed about his previous behavior, venting all his angst about Verity and his father. He isn't sure she would even want to be in a relationship with him after that. But the very night before Ash leaves, she kisses Prentice on the cheek, which leads to a deeper kiss. They finally connect, have sex, and confess their mutual feelings. Ash still goes to her job in Canada, but says she'll come back when Prentice is done with his studies that summer.

The relationship's future is somewhat uncertain because something could come up while Ash is in Canada, but Prentice is hopeful. The book ends with Prentice getting ready to graduate with his grades on track as a history scholar, fully renouncing his belief in an afterlife while he acknowledges the inherent importance of our experiences in our lives now, and enjoying his time with Lewis and Verity and his other family members.

What's the point of all these hundreds of pages?

Well, look at all of the above; there's definitely more than one point. But the main point I took away is that we get this one life, with our loved ones in this world here and now, and this is where we make our meanings. There is no other meaning, but that doesn't mean there's no meaning at all. It means the meaning is here.

It's not death that gives life its meaning. It's the things we do while alive that give life its deeper meaning.

The Crow Road is described (on Wikipedia) as a Bildungsroman, a story focusing on the moral and philosophical growth and change of its main character as they transition from childhood to adulthood ("coming-of-age novel" is a similar term that is interchangeable, but more vague and not necessarily focused on morality/philosophy). And, indeed, all of the plots ultimately tie into Prentice's changed philosophy.

After his argument with Kenneth, Prentice feels childish and humiliated, and as a result, he refuses to go back home, which leads to a spiral of shame and depression. Kenneth dies and Prentice realizes it's too late to repair the relationship, which also leads him to realize it's what we do in life that matters, and that therefore, his father's argument was correct after all.

At the end of the novel, Prentice outright describes his new philosophy. However, I can't recall one specific passage where Prentice describes the process of how he changed his mind (if anyone else can remember something I missed, do let me know). There is, however, a moment when his narration indicates that Hamish seems less disturbed by his own part in the incident that led to Kenneth's death and more disturbed by the notion that his beliefs might actually be true: there might actually be an angry, vengeful God. In other words, Hamish's philosophy is selfish at its core.

My interpretation is that when his father died, Prentice realized three things: how utterly self-serving Hamish's devout faith is, how Kenneth's untimely death proves the importance of working things out now rather than in an imaginary afterlife, and how much profound meaning Kenneth had left behind despite having no faith at all. After these realizations, a determined belief in an afterlife no longer makes our lives here more profound like Prentice once thought it did.

Also, it's worth noting that this incident changes Prentice's idea of partnership, too. He loses interest in this distant, idealized woman he's been after. In love as in the rest of life, Prentice lets go of his ideals, and in doing so, he makes room for true meaning, both in a sincere familial, platonic connection with Verity and a sincere intimate, romantic connection with Ash.

But what about the sex scene?!

Yes, indeed, at the tail end of the story, Prentice and Ash have sex and admit they want to be in a relationship together. Prentice's narration describes them sleeping together and having intercourse not just once, but many times, including some slow and relaxed couplings during which they flex the muscles in their private parts to spell out "I.L.Y." and "I.L.Y.T." to each other in Morse code. This is relevant because earlier, they had been surprised and delighted to discover that they both knew Morse code; it isn't a detail that came from nowhere.

I didn't get the impression that this scene was trying to be especially titillating to the reader. It was mostly just a list of stuff the characters did together. I felt the point was that they were still anxious about being emotionally honest, a little desperate to convey their feelings without having to speak them out loud, and awkward in a way that made it obvious that their primary concern was the feelings, not the sexual performance. They cared about each other, but they weren't trying to be impressive or put on a show; contrast this with previous scenes where Prentice would act like a clown in front of Ash to diffuse his own anxiety. I've always thought that being able to have awkward sex and still enjoy it is a good sign.

Okay, so what does this all have to do with Good Omens?

Here's where I have to get especially interpretive. I'm doing my best, but of course, not everyone reading this will have the same perspective on Good Omens, the Final Fifteen especially. I believe similar themes are going to resonate between The Crow Road and Good Omens regardless of our particular interpretations of the characters' behavior and motivations, but I suppose it could hit differently for some people.

The TL;DR: I see similar themes between The Crow Road and Good Omens in:

The importance of mortal life on Earth

Meaning (or purpose) as something that we create as we live, not something that is handed to us by a supreme being

Sincere connection and love/passion (for people, causes, arts, life's work, etc) as a type of meaning/purpose

Relationships as reflections of philosophy

The dual nature of humanity

Life on Earth as the important part of existence is a core theme in Good Omens, and has been since the very beginning. We all already know Adam chose to preserve the world as it already is because he figured this out, and we all already know Aziraphale and Crowley have been shaped for the better by their experiences on Earth. But Good Omens isn't done with this theme by a long shot. I think this is the most important thematic commonality Good Omens will have with The Crow Road. Closely related is the notion that we create our meanings as we live, rather than having them handed to us. Isn't this, in a way, what Aziraphale struggles with in A Companion to Owls? He's been given this meaning, this identity, that doesn't fit him. But does he have anything else to be? Not yet.

Partnerships as a parallel to the characters' philosophical development also resonates as a commonality that The Crow Road may have with Good Omens. Prentice's obsession with Verity goes away when he starts to embrace the importance of life on Earth and makes room for his sincere relationship with Ash. Note their names: "Verity" is truth, an ideal Prentice's father instills in him; "Ashley" means "dweller in the ash tree meadow" in Anglo-Saxon, according to Wikipedia, and "ash" is one of the things people return to after death. Prentice literally trades his high ideals for life on Earth. We see in Aziraphale a similar tug-o'-war between Heaven's distant ideals and Crowley's Earthly pleasures, so I can see a similar process potentially playing out for him.

I don't particularly recall a ton of thematic exploration of free will in The Crow Road. However, there is a glimmer of something there: Prentice feels excessively controlled by Kenneth's desire to pass down his beliefs, and part of the reason Prentice is so resistant to change is simply his frustration with feeling censored and not being taken seriously. As the reader, I do get the feeling that while Prentice is immature, Kenneth made major mistakes in handling their conflict, too. And Kenneth's mistakes come from trying to dictate Prentice's thoughts. There is likely some crossover with Good Omens in the sense that I'm pretty sure both stories are going to take the position that people need to be allowed to make mistakes, and to do things that one perceives as mistakes, without getting written off as "stupid" or "bad" or otherwise "unworthy."

Suffice it to say that the human characters in Good Omens will also certainly play into these themes, but it's hard to write about them when we don't know much about them except that one of them is almost certainly the reincarnation of Jesus. This also makes me suspect perhaps the human cast will be 100% entirely all-new, or mostly new, symbolic of how Aziraphale and Crowley have immersed themselves in the ever-evolving, ever-changing world of life on Earth. Alternatively, if we encounter human characters again from Season 1 or 2, perhaps the ways they've grown and changed will be highlighted. For example, even in real-world time, Adam and Warlock have already, as of the time I'm writing this, gone through at least one entire life stage (from 11 in 2019 to 16 in 2024). They'll be legal adults in a couple of years, and if there's a significant time skip, they could be much older. If characters from Season 1 do reappear and themes from The Crow Road are prominent, I would expect either some key scenes highlighting contrasts and changes from their younger selves or for stagnation and growth to be a central part of their plot.

The more I write, the more I just interpret everything in circles. Hopefully this post has at least given you a decent idea of what The Crow Road is like and how it may relate to Good Omens.

I'll end this post with a quotation that feels relevant:

Telling us straight or through his stories, my father taught us that there was, generally, a fire at the core of things, and that change was the only constant, and that we – like everybody else – were both the most important people in the universe, and utterly without significance, depending, and that individuals mattered before their institutions, and that people were people, much the same everywhere, and when they appeared to do things that were stupid or evil, often you hadn’t been told the whole story, but that sometimes people did behave badly, usually because some idea had taken hold of them and given them an excuse to regard other people as expendable (or bad), and that was part of who we were too, as a species, and it wasn’t always possible to know that you were right and they were wrong, but the important thing was to keep trying to find out, and always to face the truth. Because truth mattered. Iain Banks, The Crow Road

[tanadrin]

pretty sure that Dune was inspired by the gulf wars. it's right there in the names: Iraq-is, Emperor Saddam, unprovoked terrorist attack on the Atreides ala 9/11, etc.

you know what, sure. frank herbert was the real kwisatz haderach and he his power to write science fiction novels.

we're all gonna be real fuckin' upset when we get to the events of The Jesus Incident and Hellstrom's Hive.

[jadelotusflower]

And Kansas, she says, is the name of the star

So, Wicked. I actually saw it two weeks ago but have been letting my thoughts marinate a bit. As with anything currently dominating the cultural zeitgeist, the film has received both overwhelming praise and unmitigated hate - although the latter seems to be directed more towards its stars than the film itself, where the line between playful meme-ification and genuine unkindness has been crossed.

Like many, I've been a fan of the world of Oz since I was a child, not only the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, but the quasi-sequels Return to Oz (check out my rewatch/analysis here) and the animated Journey Back to Oz (yes, the one with Liza Minelli). I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz at some point in my childhood (and have been making my way through the rest this year) but it was the films that really captured my imagination. Also a long time fan of musicals, I was first exposed to Wicked through the documentary Broadway: The American Musical, and was able to see the show in London in 2007 with Kerry Ellis and Helen Dallimore (+ Miriam Margolyes), and subsequently in Australia with Lucy Durack and Jemma Rix (interestingly, Glinda and Elphaba billing swapped for this production). I also read Gregory Maguire's novel shortly after first seeing the show, although have yet to read the sequels.

I very much enjoyed the film, even if for me it isn't really the definitive version, but simply another interpretation of a classic story, a different telling of the same fairy tale. Oz is particularly malleable in this way, the story very much of its time and yet also timeless. As Gregory points out in his preamble of the Wicked musical program: "Tolkein's Middle-Earth reinvigorated readers' interest in older narrative conceits of the hero in battle just as Europe was tumbling towards its mid-century paroxysms of genocide and war. Lewis Carroll, three quarters of a century earlier, had gently mocked Victorian certainties and niceties by portraying Wonderland as an anarchic dreamscape...While Oz was being invented and charted by Baum at the turn of the twentieth century, the American experiment in democracy was coming to resemble, in ways both bad and good, a great and powerful empire."

Maguire wrote his own revisionist tale in 1990, at the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Gulf War, the musical adaptation premiered on Broadway just after the invasion of Iraq, and now the film is released in times that are no less turbulent, and in which the threat of fascism and the power of propaganda are more acute than ever. It's a story that was resonant in 1900, and is resonant now - albeit in different ways and through different perspectives.

It's all a parable - whether it be Baum's fairyland of childhood adventure, MGM's loving devotional to "the young at heart", Disney's dark fantasy of a splintered mind (and later, their own take on the villain/anti-hero origin story), Maguire's exploration on the nature of evil, the musical's bittersweet ode to the power of friendship, and the film's empowering of the other - a folk tale, a dream, a prophecy, a cautionary tale, a tick of the Time Dragon Clock.

But my thoughts! Here they are. Needless to say, spoilers for the film, stage musical, and all other Oz-related media.

Oz has always been a story that centered its heroines - in the books the arrival of the Wizard disrupts the natural order of the world by usurping Ozma, his power an illusion compared that of the women who surround him - good in Glinda the witch of the South and the unnamed witch of the North, and the wicked in the witches of the East and West. The Wizard and his successor the Scarecrow must both be deposed - the former by Dorothy (albeit unintentionally), and the latter by Jinjur and her girl army, until finally harmony is restored when Ozma returns to her throne.

Wicked of course plays with this notion, where good and evil are not so linear, where Elphaba (in the musical) is the only witch with actual magic - other than Madame Morrible, the true power behind the Wizard’s throne. It's not so simple as restoring a queen to the throne to benevolently reside over a utopia - Elphaba's activism either ends with her death (in the novel) or her escape from Oz (in the musical), Glinda replaces the Wizard as figurehead with the Grimmerie she doesn't know how to read, and the intention to deploy her other skills and popularity this time "for good" - whether she succeeds is unknowable. But I'm getting ahead of myself, because the film is only Part I, aka Act I of the stage musical.

On that point, it was absolutely the right decision to split into two films, even if Part I is almost double the runtime of Act I and seems to add very little (although I enjoyed what it did add). It’s Part II that will benefit from breathing room to pack in a lot of plot (and hopefully flesh out some of the holes). Although from the audible groans in my theatre when the “to be continued” title came up the marketing did its job hiding the split.

But back to my point, it's so gratifying to see not only a big-budget musical that's unashamed and unapologetic to actually be a musical, but one that so unequivocally is a story about women, not only their own struggles, but embracing their own power and exercising their own agency. Elphaba's faith in the Wizard as the cure for all her problems, both internal and external, is viciously shattered and she must take responsibility for her own destiny, Glinda as the epitome of privilege must learn to look beyond the superficial of both herself and others.

It's almost reflective of the classic golden age musicals that were often driven by women and their stories - Maria in The Sound of Music, Eliza in My Fair Lady, Anna in The King and I, Dolly Levi in Hello Dolly!, Fanny in Funny Girl, Mama Rose in Gypsy, and of course the (literal) mother of them all, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. And I think Wicked in some ways does hearken back to that classic style of movie musical in the setpieces and choreography, though not as much as I would like (more on that later). I don't think its a coincidence that Wicked's audience is skewed 70% female and it's been enormously successful, and much like last year's Barbie, has shown that women will show up an support a film about women when the story and characters are captivating rather than just lazy girlboss faux-empowerment sludge.

The casting is across the board good - I admit I had my reservations about Ariana Grande and while I don’t think she quite hits the rich vocal heights of Chenoweth, she certainly sells the comedy moments, even if there is more calculation and less ditz to her Galinda - there’s very little Billie Burke in her. Which is not a criticism, it's a valid take and her reverence for the musical is clear so of course that's her guiding light, while also making the role her own.

But the emotional core of Part I is Cynthia Ervio’s Elphaba, her isolation and otherness powerful astride her vulnerability and immense inner strength. I’ve always felt in the musical Glinda is the meatier role just because she has a more dramatic character arc, but splitting the film into two has really allowed the first part to centre Elphaba, and Ervio brings the emotional moments - her faith in the Wizard and subsequent loss of it in particular, as well as her humiliation at the Ozdust Ballroom which is just heart-shattering and so relatable. Ervio brings a fragility to the role where on stage there was hostility, and I actually think she is my favourite interpretation.

Michelle Yeoh brings steely manipulation to Madame Morrible, it was a good change to siphon off the comedic elements to new character Miss Coddle (heh) and lean into Yeoh’s natural gravitas. Yes, she talks on pitch rather than sings but who cares. There’s a menace to this Morrible, and yet we see her manipulation of Elphaba so very deftly (setting up Elphaba to need to prove her powers to the Wizard by reading the Grimmerie for example). I'll watch Yeoh in anything, although I do wish we'd seen her actually deliver "this wicked witch" line rather than Elphaba both times.

Jonathan Bailey is appropriately handsome and charming as Fiyero, with enough fluidity of movement to foreshadow his transformation into the Scarecrow (although not to the extent of my favourite Fiyero Adam Garcia, whose limbs were practically liquid).

Jeff Goldblum is doing Jeff Goldblum things, although leans into the sinister - the Wizard is genuinely wicked and fascistic in this version even moreso than the musical. It is kind of amusing that there is absolutely no hiding his distinctive voice in No One Mourns the Wicked so it's blatantly obvious he's Elphaba's father even for those who haven't seen the musical. I do wonder if they are going to make him well aware rather than being told by Glinda at the end - the way he plays A Sentimental Man it's certainly possible.

On that point, the screenplay is actually very faithful to the musical's book, which makes sense since Winnie Holtzman wrote the former and contributed to the latter. There’s some great changes that tweak and tighten the narrative - the relationship between Nessarose and Boq is given greater foundation, as is Elphaba’s connection with Dr Dillamond and her meet-cute with Fiyero. Making Glinda's minions Bowen Yang (Pfannee) and Brownwyn James (Shenshen) comic relief was also a great addition - "Elphaba, love you and your shoulderpads" made me cackle and I kind of wish there was more of them.

However I do feel there were some opportunities missed - I had thought with Act I being it’s own film we may get a bit more meat to Elphie and Glinda after they become friends - we do see that they form a group with Fiyero, Boq, and Nessa but more would have been nice (there were evidently scenes filmed we may see in flashback in Part II). I did appreciate the setup of the Wizard and his diorama (a nice way to visualise Oz) but could have done without Glinda naming the Yellow Brick Road. Not everything needs a reference!

I wish there were some references to Ozma, but it makes sense that the Wizard’s propaganda would erase her from history in favour of the “wise ones” (perfect cameos for Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth). It's interesting that, like in Oz the Great and Powerful, they invoke a prophesy the Wizard co-opts - this really is a mashup of all the Oz lore than came before it.

It also seems they cut "I got what I wanted" from the Ozdust scene (unless I missed it?) which is one of my favourite Glinda moments, so that was a shame.

I did find John M. Chu’s direction oft-times too frenetic. While this is effective and dynamic in numbers such as What is this Feeling? cross-cutting between Elphaba and Galinda and their early rivalry across various school activities, in many others I was desperate for the camera to slow down (or stop!) already and let me see what was on screen. There were so many beautiful things to see! But I missed half of them because the dolly was seemingly fixed to a rollercoaster. The set piece in the library and rotating bookshelves for Dancing Through Life was fantastic, but most of the choreography is muddled by frenzied camera motion, as is the cacophony of the Emerald City. Coming back to classic musicals, I wish he'd taken more a lead from them in locking a wide shot and letting us see the dancing.

Perhaps this is just my sensibility, but although a movie musical must justify its existence and rise above simply becoming a filmed version of the stage performance, there’s power in keeping the camera still and letting the performance speak for itself. In The Wizard and I Elphaba speeds through Shiz passing lakes and hallways and people - now there’s coloured glass! now there’s a cave! now she’s running through a field! now she’s looking over the Deadly Impassable Desert! (a change I'm assuming was made to allow Elphaba and Fiyero to leave Oz through it at the end of Part II). Even I’m not that Girl has luminescent flowers blooming in the background as Elphaba wanders yet again, this time in the dark. It’s almost as if Chu doesn’t trust the audience not to be bored unless there are Things to look at every moment.

I also think it was a mistake to set so many scenes at night rather than leaving that for the narrative turn with the Wizard. The Ozdust Ballroom re-imagined as undeneath the lake at Shiz is inspired, but ultimately is gloomy and dull because of the way it's lit (or rather, not lit). The sets however, particularly Shiz, are genuinely beautiful so I give Chu a great deal of credit for not going full cgi.

There’s also been a lot of criticism of the colour grading and I don’t disagree with it, “muddy” effects and muted palette seems par for the course these days and the camera movement was much more distracting for me. I can appreciate that Chu wanted this to be a less colourful Oz to contrast to '39 visually as well as thematically, but I still would have preferred a bit more vibrancy, especially in Shiz and the Emerald City.

I also didn’t care for Defying Gravity to be so broken up - it’s like that on stage, but still feels like it’s all building to towards that incredible climax. But the film inexplicably breaks up the final verse which absolutely halts the momentum, rather than the build of So if you care the find me/Look to the western sky to And nobody in all of Oz/No wizard that there is or was, we get an interlude of the Unlimited motif which prevents the final lines from soaring as they should. I get what they were going for, but it seems that Elphaba delivers the lines about the West, then flies out and sees it, and comes back to deliver her denouncement when it should have been the other way around. For all the papering over of possible holes in the musical’s book, it’s odd that there wasn’t some foundation to Elphaba’s reason for choosing to go West. For example, if that’s where the Animals said they were going, or if she and Fiyero had discussed his homeland.

However these are minor quibbles! I enjoyed the film enormously, and is a worthy contributor to the Oz canon.

On that point, I've been interested to see fandom discussions around the film, and have noticed that quite a few viewers now see Wicked as "the true story" to the Wizard of Oz's "propaganda". While it's certainly a valid interpretation, if the goal is to interrogate narratives, who is telling the story, and why, to replace one version wholesale with another and declare it "the truth” seems simplistic. This is storytelling, it is both truth in its purest form and propaganda, as all art is on some level. There is not, and cannot be, a "true" version of the story - just different perspectives, and different retellings.

It’s easy to forget that while 1939 has defined so many iconic aspects of the story (ruby slippers, green skin), it was made after forty years of books and staged productions exploring the world of Oz - which the '39 film acknowledges in its opening text. This has always been a story that has grown and changed, been added to and subtracted from, each version taking what they want and discarding the rest, building upon what came before.

And perhaps this is an unpopular opinion - but Wicked (be it book, musical, or film) does not work as a strict prequel to either Baum's novels or the 1939 film - Elphaba is clearly not the Wicked Witch we see in ‘39 (there’s no way this Elphaba would ever try to straight up murder a child to get her hands on shoes), similarly Fiyero and Boq becoming the Scarecrow and Tin Man respectively is fine as a throwaway on stage but just doesn’t line up with the film characters. It's a different version of the same fairy tale - much like Barrie's Peter Pan is different to Disney's, which is different to Hook, which is different to Once Upon a Time etc etc.

If Dorothy’s Oz in is a dream where she needed to find the strength within herself, Maguire’s Oz is gritty nightmare where fate is inescapable. Wicked the musical finds balance between the two, although I am interested to see how they incorporate Dorothy in Part II, as she is very much a bridge between all adaptations as her character changes very little between them (I've yet to see Dorothy as the villain, and honestly hope I never do).

Baum’s vision was an American folk tale, the ‘39 film framing of “it was all a dream”, the stage musical takes place inside the Time Dragon Clock, a mechanical propaganda machine inside which book!Elphaba is literally born. Even this film opens with the haunting voiceover of Glinda’s announcement of witch’s death, purporting to tell the "true story" but even that can only be from her own perspective, coloured by her own guilt. Maguire’s novel bills itself as the “Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” - it’s the telling of a story, the employing of a literary device.

I love thematic mirror, and the Oz of Wicked is in many ways a mirror-verse of the Oz of Baum/MGM - flipping the narrative to re-examine good and evil, to see familiar characters from the other side of the glass. Mrs Gultch takes Toto away on her bicycle to be destroyed, Elphaba take the Lion away on her bicycle to save him from captivity. Ruby slippers return to being silver shoes, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion are not just happenstance companions of Dorothy but the result of Elphaba's magic - even Elphaba's "i want" song in The Wizard and I can be mirrored to Dorothy's Somewhere Over the Rainbow, their respective unmasking of the Wizard as a fraud can be contrasted, and in the end the Wizard abandons Dorothy, but pursues Elphaba.

Glinda is perhaps one of the most fascinating mirrors from previous works - where she is the ultimate deus ex machina, stepping in at just the right time to save the day. But she is removed from the action, the hand of god, arguably the most powerful being in all of Oz. Wicked seems to both tear down this goddess figure and feed into it - in Part I Glinda wants to be seen as benevolent and perfect and kind when she starts as anything but, and ultimately Glinda the Good is a persona she adopts, like the Wizard she has no real power herself, only the power of myth-making.

Each of the character arcs in Wicked revolves around the stories they tell themselves/others juxtaposed against who they really are. This is a further mirror to the archetypes in Oz - the good witch, the bad witch, the powerful wizard. Elphaba's wickedness is confected, her otherness amplified to make an enemy of the people, but even before this she was using her exclusion as a shield, as Glinda observes, she cares deeply what others think of her, she just pretends she doesn't - and by the end of the film she throws off those shackles, willing to be cast as a wicked witch rather than betray her cause. Fiyero pretends to be "deeply shallow" while Elphaba sees through to his unhappiness, Morrible presents herself as wise mentor but is revealed as cruel puppetmaster, etc etc.

However, even Baum plays with this notion of artifice - the Emerald City is not in fact made out of emeralds, instead visitors don green-tinted glasses on entry, even his Wizard proclaims himself “a good man, just a very bad wizard” but the narrative condemns him as the man behind the curtain - although the subsequent books can never really quite decide if he a lovable rogue with pockets of enchanted piglets, or is he a sly trickster who deposed Ozma. Ultimately, he is both. He is a man from our world transplanted into a fantasy world, and cannot help but corrupt it.

I really have so much more to say! I love Oz in all its various incarnations but have probably rambled long enough.

[balrogballs]

hello, i'm balrogballs, who has regretted this username since the second i chose it. i post mostly LotR/Silm content ✨

I write, illustrate, and shitpost — under the cut is a list of some of my work, and a little bit more about me.

about me: i'm 27, mostly based in the UK atm but grew up and schooled overseas. i'm also a novelist irl (literary-ecological fiction), currently working on book 2.

as my day job, i work as a humanitarian advocate and travel quite frequently - so i have extended times on here and extended times off here. if I haven't responded to a message/tag for a few days, it's probably because i have no internet access and the blog is running off a queue.

pronouns: she/her

fandoms: LotR, The Silmarillion. I haven't seen RoP yet but I do enjoy seeing stuff from it on my dashboard! I enjoy a ton of other stuff too, such as obscure German detective novels, and weird conservation projects.

what you can expect to find here: the blog is called balrogballs, not balrogbrains, so just a note that i really don’t take myself very seriously and you’re probably not going to find much Serious Fandom Discourse. i do have my moments however!

generally though, the gulf between my writing and my personality has been described as “like meeting mr bean and finding out he wrote the iliad”, so take that as you will! re: 18+ content, i repeat, the blog is called balrogballs not balrogbaby, and i essentially use the word DILF like a punctuation mark, so again do with that as you will.

interactions: feel free to open a chat or send me an ask, check out my asks tag as well!

writing: here's my AO3 account. i write almost exclusively for lotr/silm ✨

here's some fics I'm proud of:

the sword tree: Maedhros and Celebrìan 'teaming up' to open a rewilding sanctuary in Valinor to help traumatised ring war returnees. environmentalism, pacifism, and hope in the face of helplessness.

cast in stone: a fic about memory gaps, found family, and holes in the archive. imagine that "who tells your story" line from hamilton except it's 35k words long and starring Maglor, Maedhros, Elrond, Estel and Legolas.

i enjoy exploring decolonial/ecological themes in my writing but i try not to be insufferable and most of my works have some degree of absurdism/humour. i also have a oneshots series called Elrond Peredhel and his Feral Children, a fun romp tackling parenthood in LotR, in which every child of Rivendell is fucking unhinged because their dad is a card-carrying weird little freak ✨🌞

art:

you can find my art tag here! I mostly do graphic novel style "illustrations", because I don't know how to draw anything else 🌞

I saw your work posted on ____, was that you?

Absolutely not — I use no social media aside from this and AO3 (technically I have an "official" account, but that's managed by a publicist and has no elves). I've had a couple of stories reposted onto Wattpad/FFN before — that is not me, so please ping me a link if you come across anything I've written that's not either on here or on AO3 as TimelessUtterances.

(If you came from the “i had to explain to my publishers why i wrote fanfiction about elrond giving lindir the battering ram treatment before they greenlit my first novel” post, no the goddamn fic isn’t still up). However, I do often get questions re writing/publishing from people who read said post, and I’m always very happy to answer these or hook you up with lists of resources, so feel free to ask anything on that front!

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

World War Z is one of my favorite novels, but every time I reread it I am reminded of how painfully American it is. Very "third-way centrist," very "Democratic Liberal during the Bush years," very "I believe in America, we're the best country on Earth, let us show you the light." it is vehemently anticommunist, and plays the "both sides" card by having a character whose family suffered under Pinochet claim that imperialism and white hegemony are ghosts from a bygone era that developing nations need to get over; "far-left is just as bad as far-right, why can't we all just get along?"

A lot of the stories are interesting, and I want to do an in depth analysis of the timeline of the Great Panic someday, but this is a book that suggests Colin Fucking Powell would have been a great bastion of democracy and freedom, so I can't take any of the politics seriously anymore.

Iran becoming a nuclear nation and going to war with Pakistan

A Chinese civil war splits the PLA and dissolves the PRC, but not a single word is spoken about the multiple separatist movements in the United States after they were abandoned by the federal government for YEARS in zombieland (only that they were "given the option to be readmitted peacefully" when the feds came marching back)

Floridians turning Cuba into a "capitalist utopia" and Fidel Castro taking credit for the subsequent Cuban Evolution

Nelson Mandela personally signing off on an Apartheid-era plan to abandon half the country as human bait

The whole situation between Israel and Palestine (that is a can of worms I am neither qualified nor willing to dissect here)

Hollywood military propaganda gives people the will to live

The British royal family "shielding the soul" of the UK under the burden of their godlike mandate?!? (gag me with a fucking spoon...)

This book would be VERY different if it were written today. Published in 2006, it was obsessed with the Cold War but barely glossed over the War on Terror with one reference to "Gulf War 2" (Iraq) and a handful of references to a low-intensity "brushfire war" (Afghanistan) that ended in American victory by 2008, although a Pyrrhic one. I do not remember nor can I even imagine a time when ANYTHING within this book could be considered plausible outside the deepest fears and/or wettest dreams of the most diehard 'Mericans.

The more I get into it, the worst is sounds. I think I like the idea of the book more than the book itself now.

The prologue ends with a hint at an eventual sequel. The narrator says that a lot of people consider it too early to write a history book about a war that only just ended (and in fact is still being fought in some northern countries), and that it will take a few generations for people to fully process what happened. "Perhaps decades from now, someone will take up the task of recording the recollections of the much older, much wiser survivors." That is a book I would like to read; a retelling of WWZ with far less hero worship and characters who don't all sound like a 30-something American SNL writer.

[thgfanfictionlibrary]

Teen and Up Rated Fics Masterlist (33)

Part 1-Part 24 / Part 25 / Part 26 / Part 27 / Part 28 / Part 29 / Part 30 / Part 31 / Part 32 /

Created: March 14th, 2024

Last Checked:—-

Abernathy, TX-Gamemakers (ao3) Summary: Effie's betting on the charm of rustic Abernathy, Texas to make her new bed and breakfast a success. She can't deny that proving Haymitch wrong is really part of the appeal. Or, how Mike's Hard Lemonade, posies, and a claw foot tub might just have saved her life.

we’ll prove ‘em wrong again-Abagail_Snow (ao3) Summary: Peeta’s on his last leg as captain of the Panem Football Club. Based on Ted Lasso. When There are Clouds in the Sky-Abagail_Snow (ao3) Summary: Peeta returns from the Gulf War a changed man, and only Katniss can reach him. When You Go Through The Valley-dracoisalooker76 (ao3) Summary: Peeta Mellark is seventeen and dying from terminal cancer. With the help of his best friends, Finnick and Johanna, he has made a list of everything he wants to do before he dies. Topping the list of desires is falling in love. Modern Day AU. *Based off the novel 'Before I Die' by Jenny Downham Wide Awake-Ally147 (ao3) Summary: "The sight of her now, bopping around in their kitchen, darting between steaming pots and pans in just his shirt and a simple pair of cotton panties is better than any other remedy for a long day. In the space between blinks, he’s more alive, more awake than ever." Wilderness Log-Alliswell (ao3) Summary: What if they had run off into the wilderness before the Quarter Quell? Where would the go? Would they get on each other’s nerves, or travel in harmony? Willow Grace-Broken_everlark (ao3) Summary: This is based off of the song Zoe Jane by straind. (It belongs to them not me) Witch Maidens-Alliswell (ao3) Summary: Halloween-y One Shot, Based on a visual prompt on tumblr by @everlarkprompts’ #octoberlark Prompts: Witches Dancing around a bonefire in their nightgowns. Yes, Primrose, There is a Santa Claus-Dracoisalooker76 (ao3) Summary: On Christmas, Haymitch reminisces about his first holiday season with the girls. Do Not Go Gentle Universe. Scenes from pre-DNGG and post-Two. You're Just You-DustWriter (ff.net) Summary: She's too infatuated to speak to him and he'd never notice her anyway...right? A light n' fluffy present day AU about the most important night in high school.

[sweetestcersei]

A Journal of Ice and Fire #1: Origin Stories and Treading Old Ground with New Eyes

Hello! I'm jack aka sweetestcersei on tumblr dot com. This is my first journal entry reflecting on my A Song of Ice and Fire re-read project I started in June of this year. I didn't expect this first blog to be so emotional or personal, but I've already cooked the goose, haven't I? I've put the read more after the first paragraph out of respect for your scrolling experience, but I'd greatly appreciate anyone willing to engage in parasocial intimacy by reading my thoughts and feelings about our favorite dragon books as they apply to me and my life.

It was the summer after 8th grade on a beach trip I was forced to take (I was an “indoor boy” by my own admission at age 4). I was 14, and deeply, insecurely committed to my interests and the search of self the way only a 14 year old can be. The near audible roar of teenage testosterone, the icy condominium HVAC gales, the smell of the sea, the grossly greasy fried Gulf oysters -- the sensoriality that accompanied the introduction to a great love that has waxed and waned over the years, but never quite left me. This was a week with a biblically-sized tome that I finished before I could even realize it. This love, of course, was and is my obsession, hyperfixation, and study of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.

I was certainly a bit young to read something so “adult”, even despite my gifted student reading habits, but I had 7 days to kill and 800 ½ inch-margined pages as my murder weapons. My mother offhandedly introduced me to A Game of Thrones after getting me a Kindle for graduating middle school, mentioning a fellow nerd she worked with (who in many ways served as a sort of otaku mentor when I was younger and slightly more impressionable) said he thought I’d enjoy the yet-to-be cultural phenomenon Game of Thrones on HBO. There was no HBO at my grandparents' condo, and my attention span hadn’t completely left me yet, so I settled for reading before watching the titillating tit show.

After an hour or so with Amazon support, we got the novel downloaded to my beloved OG Kindle. I went in expecting something like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. If I’m being honest, it’s because the HBO marketing tie-in cover with Sean Bean on the Iron Throne looked like the kind of crunchy late-aughts RPGs of my childhood, with unsettlingly wooden dialogue and eldritch uncanny face animations. I was thankfully proven wrong. At the time, those first 200 pages felt like the first real literature I ever read, and were more animated than any video game I could have played at the time. I still think the series is deliciously pulpy pop art; not quite McDonald’s but not quite foie gras either. But at 14, freshly pubescent, in the closet, and directionless? It was a revelation.

I finished my re-read of AGoT back in September of this year. It was an emotional experience I wasn’t expecting to hit me the way it did. And not in the nostalgic 2012 Tumblr “oh the feels” kind of way. It struck me because I realized how much this series helped me process my identity and my youth, and how that fateful week I spent poring over the first novel changed my sense of self for years to come. Reading George’s work has been a balm for the hurts of a year that has been by turns joyous, tumultuous, invigorating, demoralizing and exhausting. It’s not lost on me that my first time reading this series as an adult coincided with the start of my Saturn return. The next three years of my life are about as do-or-die as things will get (before the inevitable resource and class wars thanks to…everything in this world). More on that later!

Much like the subject matter of this journal, I’m long overdue to start putting my thoughts down about this re-read. Nearly 14 years since my first and only full read of ASOIAF, and I’ve fallen back into Westeros harder than I did as a teen. A world and intellectual property that felt forever tainted after #that show’s ending -- or so I thought. Fiction can find its way back to you, I guess, and five years is a long time to process the ill-fated culmination of, arguably, your second fondest obsession.

Over and over, just re-reading the first entry of the series, I was forced to reckon with the way so many characters carried me through my very real, very silly teenage troubles. Daenerys’ dragon dreams and doubt-tinged inner monologue were a solace for my endless anxieties around who I was and wanted to be. Cersei’s theatrics, mania and glamour felt like something to armor myself in, a crude mirror for what I viewed myself as when I wasn’t quite sure if I was even a man. As a kid whose hair helped him express his muddy gender identity “...and hair grows back” went hard as fuck. Honestly, a lot of the” loss of hair as an arbiter of change” themes throughout the series still hangs over my head. 

I could list a majority of the POV characters’ names and draw a comparison to my own problems in some shape or form because of the way I drew power from them. My point in bringing any of this up in regard to myself is that it has brought a quote to the front of my mind ever since I cracked this long winded anti-war romp back open: “we need fantasy to survive because reality is too difficult.” While this Lady Gaga quote does feel especially prescient now more than ever, it was the essence of my love for this series, long before I could recognize it. I was the blood of the dragon, I was a lion (or lioness, depending on the day), I could be underhanded like Tyrion or fierce in my despair like Catelyn. But my world shaking events were trying to pass algebra, or coping with first loves and crushes that would never be reciprocated – not ending slavery or picking up the pieces of a broken kingdom. My flare for drama has not waned, thankfully, and it feels good to be a self-assured drag queen that knows my miniscule problems do and should feel the same as a magic dragon woman learning to rule a city.

Now, as an adult, I find myself understanding why these stories affected me so much as a teenager. I’m even finding greater inspiration as an adult, who has now known illness, grief, strife, love, lust, and myriad other “”””adult”””” experiences. There have been moments where bits and pieces would come back to me, especially during traumatic or trying life experiences.

In 2022, I was diagnosed with stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I had a textbook prognosis, and was back to “myself” within a year of starting treatment. That being said, I don’t think I’ll ever fully get over the trauma of watching myself wither and change. But, I took some choices into my own hands, like forcing myself to shave my head before I could watch it all fall out (and hair grows back) or donning wigs and makeup to look “healthy”. The entire time I was getting my head shaved, I felt like Daenerys stepping into the fire, Cersei swallowing her pride, Arya being sent on her great trek north, Jaime escaping the dungeons of Riverrun born anew. It was impossible not to feel like I was doing my own walk of shame or vision quest in the Dothraki Sea, a husk of a person with hair falling out in clumps and darkness behind my eyes. This was probably the first time I remember finding strength in the stories of ASOIAF since adolescence. It’s hard to put myself back there, emotionally, but it’s a good kind of hard, because it helps to remember how and why I was able to survive it.

At this point, I’m rambling through a rolodex of bruises that never quite healed, but have been soothed through my obsessions, ASOIAF or otherwise. Who would have thought a grimdark fantasy series would evoke this kind of navel-gazing histrionics? Heartbreak feels good in a place like this, or whatever Nicole Kidman said. My intention in putting all this to ink is that I feel so strongly about this series and the power fantasy and fiction can hold over us. What I’m really trying to say, mostly to myself, is that I am so grateful to have healed whatever part of me that allowed me to escape myself and my problems. My next journals will likely take another form, more focused on my observations and shower thoughts around themes, parallels, and character work. Until then, I’m off to battle on the Blackwater Rush.

[thetrashthatsmilesback]

Me: the Jedi order did fail many of those who fell to the dark side, especially Bariss and Anakin, but acknowledging that is not justifying their eradication. The movies exist as a commentary on wider social failings which cause people to buy into fascist ideology. While individuals are responsible for their own actions, it is true that broader social issues lead to the rise and prominence of fascist ideology, and the Jedi order was acting as one example of such a situation - with George Lucas himself holding firm to the idea that Anakin (and by extension the others who fell during the Clone Wars) were victims. The Jedi being flawed makes them more interesting. The historical context of the time when the prequels adds even more context to the message they were intended to display - the Gulf War had ended in 1991 and the Iraq War began in 2003. These movies were a commentary on American military culture of the nineties and early 00s much like how the original trilogy was a commentary on imperialism during WW2 and the Vietnam war. The failures of the Jedi to provide proper mental health training (the lacking of which is especially prominent in the books and comics published in tandem with the prequel movies, particularly those books which were line-edited by George Lucas himself such as ROTS's novelization, and while some concepts of DBT are present in Jedi teachings they are not extensive or well communicated as they would be in proper therapy), their subconscious bias towards the core worlds, and their detachment from those they set out to help were all commentaries on how those who set our to help can lose focus as well as acting as a broader commentary on social attitudes during wars which lead to the broader social context from which fascist ideas spread. No single Jedi failed on a personal level, but rather the social systems within which the Jedi operated led to radicalization of some but not all Jedi youth. George Lucas's anti-imperial and anti-fascist beliefs are integral to understanding the message of these movies regarding radicalization.

Also me: none of this applies to Aayla though <3 she did nothing wrong <3

[romanceyourdemons]

the big lebowski (1998) is not only a beautifully filmed and scripted movie, but also a brilliant experiment in narrative scale. the intense complication of the story, paying homage both to the narrative and visual style of film noir and especially chandler-style gumshoe detective novels, gives the illusion of an epic story getting at the heart of the american experience. that is certainly the impression the dramatic cowboy framing device conveys. the film seems to subvert the promised epic narrative through the person of its “hero,” jeff “the dude” lebowski, a former hippie and self-identified loser whom the narrator postulates is “possibly the laziest man in all of los angeles.” the epic scope of the narrative seems to be subverted through the loser person of the protagonist, but, as the story goes on, it proves not to be an epic story at all; the story itself is very small, confined to the petty obsession of each character. the dude’s obsession with his rug is particularly clockable as petty, but the millionaire lebowski’s obsession with the appearance of success, maude lebowski’s obsession with her principles, and of course walter’s obsession with his vietnam war service all reduce their actions—and their actions’ scope—to something almost comedically small when compared to the grand story the film’s narrative framing promised. the repeated juxtaposition of the characters’ petty problems and obsessions with war—the gulf war, the vietnam war, the korean war, wwii—seems to echo the similar juxtaposition in cléo from 5 to 7 (1962); however, whereas that film uses the juxtaposition to legitimize the personal magnitude of the character’s problems, this film uses it to delegitimize and draw attention to the pettiness of the obsessions that drive the film. the big lebowski (1998), like many coen brothers films, uses a fast-paced and complex plot to give the illusion of an epic story; it instead draws attention to the true smallness of the scope, parodying its noir genre and resulting in a very entertaining film

[kingocringeracc]

Howdy. I'm racc, I'm posting this one for new people coming in from @fuzybby so yall don't just come in to trent reznor with a Dino, and game of thrones fanart. Anyway, this is all heavily inspired by max brooks and his world war z novel.

Thanks for reading, see ya.

Jacob Sterling.

Synopsis, uhhhh, an interview.

November 25, 2023

Yonkers, New York

After a pleasant dinner with the Sterling family, I’m met by the father of the home, Jacob Sterling, and Sean Gray, the men I would be interviewing, even though Jacob would be speaking for most of the interview.

“So, Jacob, you were put in prison when the US government fled past the Rockies correct?”

“I was, this was back before they had found out a way to keep criminals from being criminals, public shaming, you know, the signs they'd put around people's necks saying what they did?”

“But I was caught trying to steal from my neighbor, and I was put in a jail cell with a man we all called Bubba.”

“Now, I'm a pretty tall dude, I'm 6’0, but Bubba? Jesus Christ, he was tall, I think one of the guards measured him to be about 6’8? 6’7?”

“But anyway, Bubba was tall, but he was cornfed too, straight off a ranch in Amarillo. I'm sure if he wanted to, and with a good right hook, a Zeds head would explode, he might not have been Iron Mike, but he hit hard.”

“I dont know why Bubba got put in there, but I dont think he did anything, he was a kind, Bubbae person, that always gave people more chances than he should've, and was more than happy to help if you needed it.”

“now on to the actual substance of my experience in the war. One day, me and bubba were in the cell, doing whatever the hell we did to pass the time. When a few officers came in and asked us to put a bag over our heads, or they'd do it themselves, me and bubba where smart enough to go along with what the hell was going on, even though we had zero clue if we were about the be put to death or not. And we were put in some type of vehicle, and driven out to some air force base I can't remember the name of.”

Jacob pinches the bridge of his nose, seemingly trying to remember some of the details.

“We met this agent of some sort, I dont remember if he told us his name or not, but he told us we were to be trained on how to jump from a plane and survive. Me and Bubba dont know why, but we figure it's better than being in a cell.”

“So for the next three weeks, we take a basic airborne course, learning how to be a paratrooper, all the while we haven't been filled in on why we’re being given this course, all we know is that we’re doing it, when finally, were put into a big ol plane going across the continent, only landing once in the gulf of Mexico, where there was the USS teddy roosevelt, where we refueled, and on our flight, we where finally told our destination, and why we where trained.”

Jacob then decides to do an impression of the officer, which gets a laugh out of both me and sean.

“you have been chosen to be put in the city of yonkers to find and kill, any, and every, single zombie that you can get you hands-on, this will help the united states, eventually, retake the east coast. If you can even kill 5 of those things, it will help us.”

After his joke, he continues his story.

“We’re given a pack, we open it up, find a week of food, water, a cyanide pill, a knife, and a journal. And told to get ready to drop”

“The freefall was something I'd like to experience again, it was like floating at a point. But as were falling we spotted a few stores that would be essential for our survival, and a house, but I saw a construction site, so I decided to land there. I land at the site, I dont see any zeds, so I see Bubba’s parachute landing just a few across from me, and he comes over to me, and asks what to do next.”

“We decide to go to the house that we spotted in the sky, Bubba literally says, “This knife is too small”, manages to find a sledgehammer, and decides, yeah! That'll be my weapon!”

“Yonkers was surprisingly not full of zeds when we dropped, but there were still a few wanderers, and I got to witness the strength of a 300-pound titan of a man, with the extension of a metal hammerhead. More than enough zeds were on the floor, and this is with Bubba using the sledgehammer as a one-handed weapon, not as a two-handed weapon, which is how normal people would use it.”

“We find the house, figure out it's a two-story, and decide to scout it out, Bubba finds one of those “in a fire, rescue the animals! Sign” with the only name “ruby” on it, and we enter through the door after I manage to pick the lock. We find signs of a very clear animal lover, there are animal signs all over the place, and pictures of a man with a dog, who must've been ruby. The dude in the picture had one of the best-grown beards in the world, pure black hair, and the most charming smile I've ever seen. Ruby seemed to have the same coat of hair as him, except curly, he must've been some kind of poodle mix from what we saw. And had an even better smile.”

“I’m pretty sure that was the first time I saw Bubba cry, looking at that picture. But we continue to investigate the house, making sure the locks work, checking windows, and looking for any type of non-perishable food. We find a few cans, but we find an entire stockpile of dog food in the backyard shed. We decide that enough searching around for the night, and we’ll look at gas stations, look for more supplies, come the next day.”

“We actually got a good night's sleep, after blocking off the stairwell, and getting our separate rooms with good beds. It's actually a little strange how many rooms there were being that the only evidence of the house owner was the dude with the great beard and his dog. But come next morning, we stop by a gas station, get all the canned foods, bring them back to the house, drop them off, then go to a grocery store, all the while clearing out the zeds we see, we get more canned food, and for whatever reason bubba decided to get some canned dog food.”

“we go back to the house, drop off the food, then I see one of the best cars I've ever seen, which I'm sure you saw in the garage.”

Jacob winks at me, and its true, its a very impressive car, a 1969 Camaro, kept in almost perfect condition.

“and wanna know what's even better? It wasn't locked, and the keys were in the glove box, whoever decided to leave that girl behind clearly didn't want to take care of it, so, that made me the owner, and the caretaker of it. Bubba didn't really get it, his thing was music and collecting CDs, and records. We decided to go to the fire station, maybe they'd have some clothes we could wear, that'd be thicker, be better than what we had if we got into close quarters with the Zeds, Bubba thought it was a good idea, so we get in the Camaro, which had gas, luckily, and drive on down to the fire station.”

“bubba asked to me to go to a music store soon because there weren't any CDs in the glove box, nor was there a CD book. I agree, music is good, but I think Bubba would have badgered me and gone on a rant about how music was the greatest thing to ever happen, and how music was the very essence of humanity. I came to find out that he was right”

“We arrive at the fire station and sneak in, I tell Bubba that it is probably not a good idea to bring the sledgehammer, but he ignored me, didnt wanna use a knife, “too fragile, too small”, he would say. So we get into the station, and go to the locker rooms, maybe they'd have uniforms there. Turns out they did, and apparently there was one of Bubba’s cousins in Yonkers before the war because they had one that fit him, I also found a crowbar, a useful tool, for literally everything. We decide that we've done enough for today, and go home”

“The next months went without a hitch, doing more cleanouts, and getting Bubba his music, going further and further away from our base each time. But one day we come home to something rummaging around in our backyard, we see this black dog, with curls, it must have been ruby, I grab a rifle we had found a month back, but Bubba screams at me to “Put that damn thing down!” it was the first time I heard bubba shout like I said, gentle giant. But he goes into the house, all the while Ruby is growling and barking at me, when Bubba comes out from behind me with the canned dog food, and opens it.”

“To my absolute bewilderment, Bubba puts the food down in front of ruby, and it begins to eat, bubba circles it, trying to examine it, and he comes back to me and says “it's starving to death, and its almost winter, let it come inside, we have power, and firewood to keep the house warm. Ill be damned if I let it die out here when we have the power to help.” so, I couldn't really say no, especially when I thought the same, so I leave the door open, and that's how ruby started hanging out with us, and became our best friend.”

“Fast forward a few years, we've got a routine nailed down, the town is all secure, when we decide to go into a more densely populated area, and we find this fellow over here, who managed to survive out all on his own, because his parents where survivalist, and decided not to go with the government because they thought the government where all nazi’s.”

Jacob points to Sean, where Sean gives a small smile and a wave, before adding to Jacob's story.

“I had been living by myself for the past 4 years, my parents died after the first week of us coming out and investigating, but I remained for the next 4 years, and had essentially lost the will to live, so, out of sheer recklessness, I went out on a limb and decided, id much rather die by someone else's hand, than my own, or succumb to the dead. And I ended up meeting Bubba, Ruby, and Jacob.”

Sean gestures to Jacob to continue his story, Jacob does, but busts out a bottle of alcohol, he hands it to Sean, and Sean seemingly understands and leaves the room and returns with glasses, he pours one for all of us, and I sip at mine, while they both slam theirs back.

“Another 3 years pass, and we'd been out here for about 7 years at this point when one day I see Bubba looking at Ruby with a sad look in his eye. He looks at me and tells me to get Sean, he sits us all down and tells us that Ruby isn't getting any older, and she's gonna start to hurt a lot, and we gotta think ahead. Sean isn't having it, to be fair, neither am I, but Bubba had every single reason to be right, every single living thing died someday, despite what was going on in the world at that time. So Bubba goes to the veterinarian's office, turns out he was a veterinarian in Amarillo besides his farm work, he knew how to take care of animals, and he knew how to do it properly, that must have been why he was such an animal whisperer, he befriended a murder of crows during those years as well, every few weeks or so they come back, none of them are the original crow's bubba fed and befriended, but crows are smart critters, and they can pass down which humans are friendly or not. But where was I? Ah, right, Bubba going to the veterinarian's office. He makes sure he has the stuff to make a chemical called pentobarbital, it's the stuff they use to put down your dog, he explained it all to use both, it was a seizure medicine, that caused the animal to go unconscious, and it would stop brain function, and it would stop the heart, within 2 minutes.”

Sean is starting to cry silently on my right, his hands formed into a fist pressed against his mouth. Jacob pours another drink, and slams it back, pouring another for sean.

“when the day finally came, bubba was ready, he had ruby in the car within seconds, and we where at the veterinarian's office within 2 minutes, speed limit didn't matter, i found the whole speedometer, and this was time to use the whole speedometer. Bubba made a batch of the chemical we needed a few days before, some kind of sixth sense he had. But he inserted the IV into Ruby’s leg, and we all hugged parts of her, bubba looked her in the eyes as she closed them. He said it was what he did with all the farm animals he had to put down. It was his code of honor or something like that, I never saw him kill a human, and he never really looked the Zeds in the eye.”

Jacob sips at his glass and takes a shaky breath.

“We buried her in the backyard”

“That wasn't the worst to happen though.”

“A few months later, some freak storm came in, and Bubba went outside to make sure the generator was working when we heard his scream, a zed had snuck up behind him in the storm and must brought about 400 of his buddies with him, I see him stomping the skull of the zed in, I see the bite on his leg, I see the group of zeds behind the fence, bubba runs inside, he gets a first aid kit. Calmly wrapped the wound around his leg, got dressed in his firefighter uniform, and gave me his journal, and I will never forget the words he told me, he said to me and sean after Sean came out of his trance that he was in because of the bite. “If I pass out, have the strength to end me, you have been the greatest blessing to me, the both of you, but ill fend all of them off, it will be the last thing I do, and I will then go rest with ruby.” so, as the storm raged on, it must've been right on top of us, the thunder and lightning were going a mile a minute, but as I watched bubba smash the skull of every single zed out there, with the exact same sledgehammer that he picked up the first day we got to yonkers. I think every single strike from his hammer was somehow perfectly synchronized with the thunderstrikes. And when the rain cleared, Bubba was the only living being that remained. And we were just now coming down with a fever. He used to joke about how he drank from a lake where there were tons of brain-eating amoebas, and he starved the thing to death. I'm half convinced he was right now, because was still standing when normal people would have already slipped into a coma, he had been fighting for at least 7 or so hours. He looks at me and hands me his hammer, tells me it's time, and so I go and get a towel lay it underneath his head, and wind up the hammer, and in a single stroke, I smash his brain in one blow, merciful and quick. I wrap the towel around his head and cradle his head in my arms, Sean joins me. Me and Sean had a silent ride to the casket store, if that's what you'd call it, and hauled it back to the house.”

“It takes me about 5 hours to dig his grave, Sean puts his body in the casket, and makes a wooden grave.”

we manage to not drop his grave, and we bury him.”

“Another year passes, and the army finally arrives, a year too late. But they arrive nonetheless, I meet the missus from the army, we settle down, and start this little family. 2 years later, the final zed in China gets crushed under my heel.”

Jacob and Sean get up and ask if I want to pay my respects, I follow them, and put a guitar pick on a grave.

It reads.

Here lies Bubba

Dearest friend

The man who made me realize music was the soul of humanity.

The second grave reads

Ruby

[williamrablan]

Free Kindle Read: The Cross and the Badge

Right about now, someone is saying those immortal words, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” There isn’t you know. But for five days, starting Christmas Day and going through the 30th if December, and if you have a kindle account, you can read “The Cross and the Badge” for free. After that, it goes back to its regular price. It’s, of course, a bit of marketing with hopes that if you…

[winterpinetrees]

Long Character Bio for Ryn.

Name: Councillor Ryn Stormson Mercuralis

Pronouns: He/Him

Species: Elf (Spark)

Age: 242 (about 40)

Special skills: genius tactician, sailor, just google Air Force Pararescue and see what they can do.

Appearance notes: 5’7 with a strong athletic build. He is ethnically ambiguous as most commonborn elves are, with wavy dark brown hair and dark gray eyes. Ryn has calloused hands and a tattoo of northern hemisphere constellations over his shoulders. He wears a noble vambrace with exactly two red dots. He has somewhat rectangular pointed ears.

I think this is going to be the longest bio. I rotate this guy around in my brain constantly. He’s just… in the wrong setting. He’s doing great, but he fundamentally should not be here.

Ryn Stormborn Mercuralis is the second most politically powerful person in the Elf World. He’s in the bottom 5% in terms of magical power though. Ryn has one biological son (Fen) but is also a father to Ishtar’s other kids. The coup would not have been successful without him. Thanks to his upbringing, Ryn views humans as well, human. He knows what a war crime is and wants to commit as few as possible. That being said, he wholeheartedly believes that global conquest is the best path forward. This will require war crimes.

Ryn was born about as far from the high nobility as possible. He is a spark from a harbor town parallel to the Gulf Coast. His people are Voyagers. What they lack in magical ability, (you will rarely find a Voyager that isn’t a spark or less) they make up for with grit. Ryn’s last name “Stormson” is actually a title given to the boldest and most skilled Voyagers. It means that Ryn can fly planes like a fighter pilot, sail solo across an ocean, and has basically every skill admired by the Voyagers. He earned this title by the equivalent of his late teens.

Around this time, the human world was going through the Industrial Revolution. Most elves believed that humans would discover radiation soon, and make it to space. Some, especially the nobility, felt threatened by this. Elves, for comparison, hadn’t sent anything to orbit in seven thousand years. Voyagers had been the best astronauts back then, but that was dozens of generations ago. All Voyagers want to go back to space, but it’s viewed as an impossible dream. But Ryn was a Stormson in his 60s. He’d already done the impossible, so why not do it again?

Ryn left home to try and join the nobility when he was 20 in human years. He not only survived the YA novel-esque noble school known as the Conservatory but excelled. He allied with Ishtar Mercuralis to win the final wargame and they earned global fame. Ryn became a rising star of the nobility, but was all but disowned by his people. Voyagers do not kill other kids. Guess what you do at the Conservatory. In the following decades, Ryn has used his power to slowly drag elf society back into a space age. They haven’t built any rockets yet, but they’re getting damn close, and public opinion is finally on his side.

Ryn is a peerless tactical genius and near-perfect shot, but without much magic, he is helpless in noble combat. His relationship with his birth culture is also complicated. He kept his title “stormson” even after joining Genus Mercuralis, and has been trying to raise all three of his children with Voyager values in mind. It’s really difficult though. The voyagers believe in curiosity, equity, and teamwork. The nobles run their entire society on eugenics. It’s Not Great.

If Ishtar is strength, then Ryn is resilience. He might not be able to crack a continental plate like she can, but the ocean and wind eventually wear everything down. Or at least Ryn likes to think of himself as the storm. He’s not. Ryn is a sailor at sea. He’s been dealing with powers he can’t match for centuries now. He can’t get out, he can’t take any of his choices back… and he doesn’t want to. Ryn has always done the impossible and he sees no reason why his luck should run out now. Ryn has forgotten how close he is to drowning.

Ryn watches a lot of softer sci-fi, both human stuff and elven media from the elf space age nearly ten thousand years ago. He is very emotionally invested in NASA. The song I associate with him is Notos by the Oh Hellos.

[rhianna]

FOREWORD

The death of Jeremiah Curtin robbed America of one of her two or three foremost scholars. Mr. Curtin, who was by birth a native of Wisconsin, at one time was in the diplomatic service of the Government; but his chief work was in literature. The extraordinary facility with which he learned any language, his gift of style in his own language, his industry, his restless activity and desire to see strange nations and out of the way peoples, and his great gift of imagination which enabled him to appreciate the epic sweep of vital historical events, all combined to render his work of peculiar value. His extraordinary translations of the Polish novels of Sienkiewicz, especially of those dealing with medieval Poland and her struggles with the Tartar, the Swede and the German, would in themselves have been enough to establish a first class reputation for any man. In addition he did remarkable work in connection with Indian, Celtic and other folk tales. But nothing that he did was more important than his studies of the rise of the mighty Mongol Empire and its decadence. In this particular field no other American or English scholar has ever approached him.

Indeed, it is extraordinary to see how ignorant even [x]the best scholars of America and England are of the tremendous importance in world history of the nation-shattering Mongol invasions. A noted Englishman of letters not many years ago wrote a charming essay on the Thirteenth Century—an essay showing his wide learning, his grasp of historical events, and the length of time that he had devoted to the study of the century. Yet the essayist not only never mentioned but was evidently ignorant of the most stupendous fact of the century—the rise of Genghis Khan and the spread of the Mongol power from the Yellow Sea to the Adriatic and the Persian Gulf. Ignorance like this is partly due to the natural tendency among men whose culture is that of Western Europe to think of history as only European history and of European history as only the history of Latin and Teutonic Europe. But this does not entirely excuse ignorance of such an event as the Mongol-Tartar invasion, which affected half of Europe far more profoundly than the Crusades. It is this ignorance, of course accentuated among those who are not scholars, which accounts for the possibility of such comically absurd remarks as the one not infrequently made at the time of the Japanese-Russian war, that for the first time since Salamis Asia had conquered Europe. As a matter of fact the recent military supremacy of the white or European races is a matter of only some three centuries. For the four preceding centuries, that is, from the beginning of the thirteenth to the seventeenth, the Mongol and Turkish armies generally had the upper hand in any contest with European foes, appearing in Europe always as invaders and often as conquerors; while no ruler of Europe of their days had to his credit such [xi]mighty feats of arms, such wide conquests, as Genghis Khan, as Timour the Limper, as Bajazet, Selim and Amurath, as Baber and Akbar.

The rise of the Mongol power under Genghis Khan was unheralded and unforeseen, and it took the world as completely by surprise as the rise of the Arab power six centuries before. When the thirteenth century opened Genghis Khan was merely one among a number of other obscure Mongol chiefs and neither he nor his tribe had any reputation whatever outside of the barren plains of Central Asia, where they and their fellow-barbarians lived on horseback among their flocks and herds. Neither in civilized nor semi-civilized Europe, nor in civilized nor semi-civilized Asia, was he known or feared, any more, for instance, than the civilized world of to-day knows or fears the Senoussi, or any obscure black mahdi in the region south of the Sahara. At the moment, Europe had lost fear of aggression from either Asia or Africa. In Spain the power of the Moors had just been reduced to insignificance. The crusading spirit, it is true, had been thoroughly discredited by the wicked Fourth Crusade, when the Franks and Venetians took Constantinople and destroyed the old bulwark of Europe against the Infidel. But in the crusade in which he himself lost his life the Emperor Barbarossa had completely broken the power of the Seljouk Turks in Asia Minor, and tho Jerusalem had been lost it was about to be regained by that strange and brilliant man, the Emperor Frederick II, “the wonder of the world.” The Slavs of Russia were organized into a kind of loose confederacy, and were slowly extending themselves eastward, making settlements like Moscow in the midst of various Finnish [xii]peoples. Hungary and Poland were great warrior kingdoms, tho a couple of centuries were to pass before Poland would come to her full power. The Caliphs still ruled at Bagdad. In India Mohammedan warred with Rajput; and the Chinese Empire was probably superior in civilization and in military strength to any nation of Europe.

[jackhkeynes]

An Authorial Assortment

brief references for some writers previously mentioned in my worldbuilding notes.

Olexi Harchenko (fl. c19) was a Zahid Russian [1] author from the city of Boxa [~Novi Sad, Serbia]. He wrote the widely-translated mystery work Разгадто (Dénouement), whose title was borrowed into Italian as rasgatto "resolution, unravelling of a mystery", and from there into many European languages.

Thoffina ver Girmont (fl. 2005) is a British author who wrote Arthurian romance Y Ðreic o Redrwth (The Dragon of Redrouth). The book is loosely based on the old tales codified in eleventh-century England (and reworked in post-Imperia Wales), but owes much more to the ahistorical reimaginings of the Long Peace [~1800] period.

Heudar Fiðaut (fl. c14) was a Borlish writer who is an important source of vernacular Middle Borlish texts. His most famous work is Catreðejnt Lagrem (Twenty-four Laments); his works together contain many first attestations of Borlish words (for example, graçant "merciful").

Tanasio Capretti (fl. 1970) was a theologian and humanist at the University of Florence. He wrote sociological work L'Inclusion Deviante di Conti Polari (The Deviance Incorporation of Folk Tales) to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the 1850 Laic Declarations of Belgrade, a landmark accord for secular governance in many polities.

Yollamaniza Elcabir (fl. 1943) was a Mashick [~Mexican] author and one-time spy. He wrote the spycraft novel La te Hozuho Sineton (No Slumber Will Seize Him) in 1943 partly based on his own experiences, in the aftermath of the Lovaquarian Wars and the bombing of his home city of Moshtar [~San Francisco]. His writings were revealing enough that governments across Gulf Mendeva [Mexico Gulf states] issued warrants for his arrest.

---

[1] A Slavic ethnic group present in the northern Balkans and descended from westward-migrating immigrant communities.

[ficbrish]

ME4: Aftermath Chapter 1

"Rubble" [AO3]

Rating: Explicit, 18+ only

Tags: Post-Reaper War, Destroy Ending (Mass Effect), Shepard Survives (Mass Effect), Biotic Shepard (Mass Effect), Colonist (Mass Effect), War Hero (Mass Effect), Sentinel (Mass Effect), Paragade (Mass Effect), Novel, Slow To Update, POV Alternating, Plot, Established Relationship, Queerplatonic Relationships, Eventual Relationships, Adventure & Romance, Fluff and Humor, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Found Family, Rebuilding, Reunions, Canon-Typical Violence, Dorks in Love, I Will Go Down With This Ship

[[TW/CW: Grief, alcohol]]

[All Chapters]

Major Kaidan Alenko was familiar, too familiar, with the feeling of cold steel in his hands, but nothing ever froze between his fingers like the plaque he gripped tightly now. It was engraved with the name of his favorite person.

The crew of the Normandy were all used to sad, difficult things. Some of them had even gone through Commander Shepard’s death before.

It would all be okay.

And yet…

They found themselves wishing they were back in recent time, still in the heat of the Reaper War; even with billions being harvested, because that's when seeing her was as simple as turning a corner. When Shepard was around.

It was a stupid, selfish thought.

The Major's team stood behind him, well, most of them... The holes that EDI and Shepard had left behind cratered into vast gulfs and filled with a mess of stinging, burning grief. It was a glue between them that broke them apart. They were anxious about Kaidan losing it again, and a part of himself was too. 

The time had come to add her name to the wall. They’d all agreed it would be good for him; to be the one who... It’s what she would’ve wanted.

To hold her one more time.

Sort of.

Kaidan breathed deeply and shakily as he stepped towards the memorial. All he needed to do was put her to rest above her Cap- her father’s name. Admiral David Anderson—that call had come once they got their comms restored. Anderson and Shepard confirmed dead.

“What does ‘confirmed’ mean? Do they have a body?” he’d asked, bearing down over Liara’s shoulder while gathering himself together after a particularly rough fit. She was plastered to the computer screen by her wall of monitors.

Liara had been more patient with him lately considering the circumstances, but she still shrugged his added weight off her back.

“She’s gone, Kaidan. I’m so sorry.”

“Did they find a body?”

“Kaidan…”

“Did they?!”

“It’s not going to be like the last time,“ Liara stated mechanically, still not meeting his face.

“You don’t know that,” he said, and repeated, “Did they find a body?”

“It wasn’t clear.”

It was enough to give him hope. Shepard was capable of anything.

He felt a bit silly standing there in front of that wall, another funeral with no body to mourn. It was Tali’s idea, people needed to say goodbye to EDI, Anderson, and… and Shepard. Now that the extranet was partially up and the Normandy was space-worthy, it was time to head out again. It was the perfect moment for closure.

But Kaidan wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

He hesitated a moment before encrusting her name on the tomb. His expression twisted up with the loss of her, and then—

Oh Goddess! Liara thought.

Kaidan turned around and announced to the crew, “She’s not dead! We’re going to find Shepard,” with a gleeful mania about him.

They all groaned.

Liara let out a half-choke, half-inhale. Then burst into tears and fell into Tali’s arms.

“I’m just so stressed out,” she said to reassure everyone, as if that were better.

Vega wasn't trying to be a dick when he asked, “And you all still think putting him in charge was a good idea?”

“Hey now,” Garrus warned, one hand resting on Tali’s shoulder as she comforted Liara.

“Why is everyone upset?” Kaidan asked, “This is great news!”

Garrus gave Liara a look that said, Go get Chakwas.

Liara understood. She nodded, wiped her eyes, and began to sidle out of their small crowd.

“Hey! No! You’re not going to get Dr. Chakwas. I’m fine,” Kaidan insisted.

The way the old crew could effectively communicate without words still impressed and intimidated everyone else. Traynor looked at the floor, shuffling her feet, and suggested, “I could try to strengthen the comms, you know, once we resupply and do some more minor repairs.”

“Now you’re encouraging him,” Vega reprimanded, crossing his arms.

“I think the Major is right,” Javik stated, glaring at Vega.

“Liara, you’re the one who found her last time, and now you have more resources than ever.”

“Exactly, Kaidan. I have more resources than ever and no news,” she snapped.

His face began to fall. 

A moment of silence followed that had nothing to do with respect for the dead.

After a while, Joker blankly said, “I’ll get the ship ready to go,” and hobbled over to the elevator. 

Traynor left for the bar. Vega and Javik followed her, arguing.

Tali put a hand on Kaidan’s arm, a gentle and pitying gesture.

“You have to be prepared for the worst,” she told him in a kind, but hard, voice.

Kaidan covered her hand with one of his, “I know.”

Garrus nodded at him, Kaidan nodded back. He watched Garrus lead Tali away. 

Liara remained.

“She was my best friend,” she stated.

“I know. You were hers.”

“And you just ruined her memorial service.”

He didn’t respond. 

“And now you’re sending the rest of us on a fruitless search—”

“How can you say that?”

“Joker saw the whole thing explode! This isn’t like the last time. Last time she was ejected into space, not incinerated.”

Kaidan was quiet for a while, then said, “I’m sorry I’ve made this so hard on everyone.”

He stepped heavily into the elevator, cradling that plaque in his hands like it was precious.

Humans were terrible at letting go.

*                       *                       *                       *                       *                       *

Gasp!

Dying hurt a lot more this time.

Cough—Cough! Gasp! Cough!

Everything was so dark. At least death in space had given her the stars. 

There were no stars here.

And a lot of pain.

Last time had been painful too, but only for a little while. This time it was constant, a steady wave of excruciating sensations that dulled together into a new feeling of normal. It was so bad it even woke her up.

Woke her up?

Shepard tried to open her eyes but couldn’t see. She tried to move.

But couldn’t do that either.

She was alone.

Then that blissful nothingness enveloped her once again. 

*                       *                       *                       *                       *                       *

The baby was screaming.

“I want everyone able on this search! Scrounge through the rubble until your hands bleed. We need her found, dead or alive.”

The furious voice boomed and filled the room, even over the wailing child. Wrex had not slept in days, and the baby was screaming in his ear. The war had nothing on its aftermath.

Wrex growled, “A body! You hear me? I want a body!”

The other Krogan feared and respected him too much to argue, but they all thought it was pointless. Days had already passed, and they'd found the body of the former Human councilor on the first. Fear and respect aside, there were females to fertilize and extractions to be made. Earth was less populated now, but the Humans would want it back. They needed terms, not a pile of ashes. They needed their leader to lead.

The baby was screaming.

Wrex threw the little monster in the air and caught it. A peaceful smile replaced the noise. He repeated the gesture again and again, grateful for the momentary quiet, and sunk into his thoughts.

“Have communications been able to reach beyond the Sol system yet?”

“No, sir. At least not from us. But people have been able to get news outside of the system via travelers,” answered one of the Human Alliance soldiers assigned to assist him.

Wrex grunted, which made the human nervous. The baby continued to giggle and squeal as she flew between gravity and her father’s arms. 

It had been almost a week, but Shepard could still be alive. That window was closing more every day, and it was dangerously close to being shut for good. Wrex couldn’t let that happen. If they brought back a body, it wouldn’t be one that had expired after the explosion.

“You saw it Wrex,” Bakara kept insisting when he'd come back at night, “With your own eyes. We all did.”

The sky had lit up.

They’d been losing, and they all knew it. 

Then the sky lit up, and the Citadel began to rain down into the atmosphere. Hell had come to take them all home.

Then—

A pulse of red energy swallowed the world, and the monsters went away.

The Reapers were all gone. 

Just like that, while the ruins of the Citadel still fell in brilliant streaks across the red-blue sky.

The Reapers were gone! The Genophage was cured!—He held his own child in his hands! And everyone was telling him to give up on the person who'd made it all happen. 

His own sister.

Wrex caught the baby one more time, then pounded his free fist on the desk.

“I’m going. Somebody get Bakara, or watch this baby.”

He handed the now-delighted child off to the nearest guard.

“Here, you’re her uncle now. Uncle…?”

“Quash Brax”

“Ugh,” Wrex sighed. “Okay, well, uh, have fun with Uncle Brax, kid.”

Then Wrex stormed out of the room.

Why did he always have to do every damn thing himself?

Except when Shepard was around. She never let him work alone.

“And somebody feed those fucking cats while I’m out!” Wrex roared as he barreled through the city’s ruins.

*                       *                       *                       *                       *                       *

Kaidan could still smell her on the bed, but he knew it was only a matter of time before that was gone too. He was lying on it now, looking up at the stars like they did in those last weeks together.

“I get the same feeling when I look at you, you know?” Kaidan had said then.

Shepard smiled and squeezed his hand, “I always wanted to show you this.”

It had been one of the first times they’d spent just lying there on their backs and watching the stars from her bed.

“If I wasn’t such an ass, you could’ve shown me sooner,” he responded.

She laughed at him the way she did when she thought he was being ridiculous.

“You weren’t being an ass, Kaidan. You were being realistic, and I needed that.”

“Heh, was still a bit of an ass, though.”

They could have had one more year together.

There was a knock, and the doors slid open.

“Sorry, automatic,” Liara shrugged apologetically.

Kaidan patted the spot on the bed next to him. Liara took his invitation and joined him. He held out an arm, and she sidled up to his side.

“You need to sleep,” she said, yawning and resting her heavy head on his chest.

“Yeah, well…”

“Yeah,” Liara agreed.

Kaidan sighed, “I’ve been getting on everyone’s nerves, haven’t I?”

“Especially mine,” she joked, and it made him smirk.

“Thank you for, for everything,” Kaidan said, feeling his face turn hot. Twice she had seen him completely surrender to loss. She’d witnessed his wailing. She'd held together while he fell apart; only once joining in his lament, that night as they flew away. 

“You were there for me after Benezia. And after Thessia… It’s what friends do.” Liara said.

He squeezed her shoulder, pressing her against him. Somehow, slowly, they’d become each other’s family.

“But with Benezia, I wasn’t hurting too,” he added, “And Thessia was devastating, but it wasn’t my planet.”

Liara shrugged, “I’ll be fine, Kaidan, “Do not worry about me.”

“Do you remember that last fight?”

Liara tensed up. Kaidan kept talking about everything she just wanted to forget.

“What about it?” she asked.

“I just really thought that was gonna be it. Shepard had that fear in her voice I’d never heard. We all did, and we all kept going—Well, they kept coming. And I kept losing sight of you and Shepard, but you were both right there. I know I won’t shut up about it, I’m sorry, but I never had any siblings and… I’ve just never felt as close to anyone as I have with you and her. I got through all that because we were a team. Now I’m getting through this, I think, I don’t know... But I’m only able to stay together because—”

“We’re a team,” Liara finished for him, and patted his hand. He nodded.

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Kaidan. Everyone’s been getting on everyone’s nerves,” she said kindly after a bit.

“I feel like we should do something about that, don’t you?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Get everyone together in one room? Air it out? Do something fun together?”

“I have no energy for that," Liara sighed, "but it sounds necessary.”

“I just don’t want it all to fall apart like the last time she—,” he stopped.

“I know, me neither,” she agreed tiredly and yawned, “So Alenko, what do you have in mind?”

The two friends began planning how to null the Normandy’s growing chasm, their eyes lazily tracing the stars as they passed by above them.

*                       *                       *                       *                       *                       *

It was an awkwardly wide chasm. What had erupted into a stir-crazy, spiraling rash once they’d gotten back into space began with a restless itch inside them all from being trapped in the unknown on some random planet.

They’d landed on fucking Pragia. That haunted, overflowing jungle planet.

“I’ve been here before,” Tali said on their second stuck day, “It’s fucking Pragia.”

What Cerberus had done there to biotic children made Brain Camp look like a nurturing environment. Thankfully, they seemed to be nowhere near that facility, or what was left of it.

Ghosts weren’t a problem. The vegetation was.

“This is bullshit,” Vega complained, unloading a round of ammo into a patch of vines woven thickly around the Normandy. Kaidan had commanded them to work in groups; food, water, repairs, plants. Vega and Cortez were on vine duty again. They grew back with madness every few hours.

“I know,” Cortez agreed, panting. The humidity turned the suppression of their rifles' recoil into a real fight, “These vines are as aggressive as Turian Twinks during Pride.”

“Huh?”

Cortez sighed, “Nothing.”

The day they'd crash-landed was indescribable. It took only a few moments to turn everything hopeless. Months of scrounging to save the entire galaxy parred down to overwhelming seconds of FUBAR. It was agony, and then it was over.

Just like that.

Most of them were alive; some didn’t make it.

But most of them were alive. The galaxy was going to continue.

There wasn’t room for much else other than deep relief, but loss was so damn loud.

The second day was just as surreal but structured too. Kaidan had limped out of the Med-bay to address everyone. He looked rough, but spoke kindly and with consideration. They'd all agreed without words to put him in charge.

“I know you’re all eager to get back in the sky, but we have to do this right instead of fast,” Major Alenko told them.

Kaidan knew what it meant to be led by a monster—Vyrnnus, and a legend—Shepard. He was sure he could at least accomplish middle ground. It was the same thing he'd told himself when commanding his biotic squad.

He’d expected to hear opposition, but no one made a sound. They were all looking to him the way they’d looked to her.

“We have fuel, but not much,” Kaidan went on explaining, “Communications are still silent, so we don’t know what’s waiting for us up there. If we rush, and there’s no active fuel stations—Well… So, we have to wait until we know for sure.”

Everyone just looked at him, waiting for more. Kaidan didn’t know what else to give them other than blind hope.

“We’ve got this. We’re Shepard’s—We’re the crew of the Normandy.”

And, oh god, there it was: Pity.

“First things first,” Kaidan continued in a lighter tone, “We’ve gotta do something about those fucking vines before they trap us here forever.”

The windows had grown thick with them overnight.

“What about the engine?” Tali asked.

“That too,” Kaidan said, “It needs some repairs. Luckily, they’re minor. By the time we get in touch with anyone, we’ll probably be good to go.”

“What if there’s no one out there?” asked a faceless voice in the crowd.

People parted and revealed a member of the crew, Hiverson. They’d picked him up sometime towards the end. He'd only been there for the assault on the Cerberus base and battle for Earth. The Normandy wasn’t his sanctuary; home was far away. His face was pale brown, and afraid.

“They’re out there,” Kaidan said stubbornly.

Hiverson didn’t nod his head. The crowd, still strangers to him, swallowed up the staring crewman. His concern hung in the air.

They had to be out there.

“Any more questions?” the Major asked with a clap of his hands.

“No?” Kaidan repeated after more expectant staring, “Okay! Then let’s get into groups. Tali and Garrus, I want you on the engine with Joker. Help out Adams, Gabby, and Ken. Liara, you work with Traynor and try to get a signal. Vega, Javik, and Cortez, I want you to find a water source. Chakwas, come with me. Maybe we can find something edible to lessen the pressure on our stores. The rest of you, grab a gun and clear these vines before they cover every inch.”

Everyone took part, and everyone rotated roles—except for Tali and Garrus. It became apparent by the fourth day that they were only ever on repairs. Truth was, Kaidan was afraid to risk his dextro-amino friends on a world made for levo-amino life. They were cut off from the galaxy. If anything happened to them here… but he wouldn’t let it. The food and medicine remaining for them was another story though, and out of his control. The Normandy's dextro-supplies hadn't been restocked before the last battle.

They had to get out of here.

“Hey, L2!” Vega called out when he saw Kaidan coming back from the jungle, “How about you go get your pals to give us a break?”

It was Anderson who taught him that poking fun at command was a good thing. It built trust, and relieved tension. Annoying each other could be a beneficial type of play. Let them have fun and they’ll listen. Even after that whole incident when… with her visit. Just let it happen, Anderson had advised him. Be in charge, but be a person.

Vega could call him “L2” all he wanted. At least for now.

“Because my pals are already working on another very important task,” the Major answered.

“Yeah, but Adams has already been out here with Gabby and Ken.”

“Watch it, Meathead,” Cortez warned, “the Major might start to think you’re questioning his orders.”

“Question away,” Kaidan said, “There’s no reason to keep anyone in the dark concerning my decisions. Especially now. That being said, you want a break? I can take over.”

“That would be great!” Vega said, joyfully shoving his gun over to Kaidan and walking briskly towards the ship’s entrance. Traynor ran into him on her way out.

“So sorry!” she apologized as she continued her mad dash over to Kaidan and Cortez.

Traynor was out of breath when she reached them, but spoke anyway. “Major! Liara—go!" she panted, hands on her knees, "A message!”

Kaidan took off at a run, bumping into Vega on his way in.

Oh god, was the elevator always this slow?!

He bolted from its doors as they opened to the crew’s quarters, and flew over to Liara’s cabin.

“Do we have a connection?” he asked desperately, bursting inside.

Liara nodded.

“There’s a message,” she said. But something was wrong. There was no enthusiasm.

He joined her side to stare at the screen.

Reaper forces defeated. Citadel moved to Earth and destroyed. Council safe. Captain Anderson and Commander Shepard confirmed dead.

The message was signed by Admiral Hackett, broadcast out into the vastness of known space to anyone who could receive it.

“Comms are back online,” Liara stated dryly.

That’s when Kaidan lost it. He stopped breathing when he read those words, and it returned in violent shudders.

Liara shut the door, and a sound like a wounded animal crept along the Normandy’s walls. She spared him from being seen, but they’d all heard their commander break.

So, Tali thought it would be a good idea to have a memorial service.

*                       *                       *                       *                       *                       *

Could somebody turn the lights down, please? They’re too bright.

She saw white and red before she was aware of anything else. Snow and blood.

“Shepard?”

A voice like roasted gravel.

Her throat was dry-locked, so she couldn’t get the question out.

Is this death?

A rough, hot hand pressed her arm.

“Take it easy, now.”

She closed her eyes and opened them again.

The sight before her was so beautiful it brought tears to her eyes.

*                       *                       *                       *                       *                       *

Kaidan’s hope was infectious, a pathogen born out of refusal, not fact. Joker was doing his best to not let it grate on his nerves. 

Their fragile friendship had started to mend over the war but frayed again after the funeral. It was almost like the last time Shepard died, but with no one to blame. Over the past few days, they’d gone from brothers-in-loss to colleagues who tolerated each other.

Joker’s own hopes refused to shut up when Kaidan’s were so loud. It was cruel. They were never going to get them back, and they both needed to accept that.

Kaidan got in the way.

“What are you doing in here?” Her voice startled Joker from his thoughts.

She caught him over by the fried blue box again, with the body laid out respectfully underneath. She found him standing around here a lot lately.

“Jesus, Traynor. You scared me.”

“Sorry," she quipped, smirking shyly and looking at her feet, "I didn’t know I was scary.” 

“Yeah, well…”

Traynor nodded. Joker looked away.

Déjà vu, they’d done this before. A few times now. One would run into the other whenever they came by here.

Liara's smooth voice suddenly came over the loudspeaker, “Normandy crew to the bar. Port Observatory, toodle sweetie to the lounge!” Something in her tone was playful.

Then it was distant, small, and matter of fact. “The what? I don’t understand… I said tooth sweet. No, I’m not still—” rang her voice through every room.

“Oh, great. What are they doing on my intercom?” Joker asked frustratedly, masking his relief at the interruption. He let Traynor exit first.

He took one last look after she left, then tried to sneak his way back to the helm but was intercepted by Vega at the elevator.

“You’re coming with me, sad boy,” he said, grabbing him by the shoulders and spinning him around.

“Easy! It’s like you’re a yeti and you’re trying to maul me,” he chastised as Vega guided him, captive, towards the Port Observatory.

“Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Joker rolled his eyes.

Everyone else seemed to spill into the room behind them.

Liara and Kaidan were already behind the bar, mixing drinks. The way they were smiling and joking was, frankly, a little scary. 

“Thank you all for coming,” Kaidan started, “My lovely blue friend and I realized something. In all the commotion and stress, we, ah, never really celebrated our victory.”

“We thought it would be good for us all to get together and share a drink,” Liara said.

“Or a few drinks, and clear the air,” Kaidan continued.

“Like a party?” Tali excitedly asked.

“Yes!” Kaidan said a little too loudly, pointing at her with the bottle in his hand, “Exactly like a party!”

“It’s like survivor’s guilt, but fun!” Liara added.

Kaidan entered something on his omni-tool and music started playing. A deep, electronic beat thrummed through the room.

Joker didn’t like the unhinged, unblinking look in both their eyes.

“I’m in!” Garrus exclaimed, and Tali stood on her toes to give him a high-five.

Cortez walked up to the bar and picked up two drinks, “¿Qué dices, Vega?”

“Wait!" Liara shouted, holding up two others, "Those are for Garrus and Tali, take these.”

They all crowded around the bar until each had a glass. Then they looked to Kaidan.

He nodded at the group and said, “To us, and to… to our girls. EDI and Essie.”

As one, they raised their glasses and drank deeply. It was going to be a long night, but at least there was alcohol.

Suddenly, Traynor threw her top off and stood there in her bra. Everyone turned to her, astounded.

“What?" she asked the room. "It was going to happen anyway. Might as well while I can still remember it.”

“No fair!” Tali whined, desperate to join in.

“If she’s doing it, I’m doing it,” Cortez announced, halfway free of his shirt already.

“That’s why I don’t mess with buttons," Vega undressed a lot faster than Cortez, "Takes too long.” His sleeveless undershirt flew to the other side of the room.

“Double no fair!”

Garrus draped his arms around Tali to comfort her.

Joker actually chuckled as he walked back over to the bar.

“I saw that,” Kaidan said, taking Joker’s glass to refill it.

“Yeah, well, fuck you,” he said with a weak smirk.

“Love you too, Joker.”

“You can’t use the L-word unless you’re really serious about us,” Joker quipped, grinning.

Dammit.

Joker was planning to sulk, but there was Kaidan getting in the way again.

*                       *                       *                       *                       *                       *

Shepard blinked. The pain was different now.

She was lying down on something soft.

It was still way too bright.

Before Shepard was aware of anything, her vision began to clear. Something large and alive was there with her, wherever she was. 

She closed her eyes and opened them again.

“Wrex?!”

“Shepard!”

“Wrex!”

“Shepard!” he shouted again, jumping up and clapping his hands against his head, “Grunt! Get in here!”

The younger Krogan slammed through the door, making it burst off its hinges. The surprised screams from the hospital staff could be heard through the walls.

“Shepard!

“Grunt!”

“Shepard!” Wrex called again.

“Wrex!” she cried out.

“Shepaaard!” Grunt grumbled.

“Grunt!”

It went on for a while like that, even after they started embracing and crying.

She'd made it! They'd made i—

“Oh, fuck! She passed out!” Wrex called out, “Nurse!”

“Nuuurse!” Grunt shouted, barreling out of the room. The door hit the floor with a loud smack.

*                       *                       *                       *                       *                       *

“Luckily she’s the fastest ship in the galaxy, but we’ve never been without relays before. All our ships were built with them in mind,” Joker explained, slurring very slightly.

Javik chuckled, “So were ours.”

“Presumably, so was everyone’s,” Liara added.

The three of them were sitting off to the side while everyone else was gathered around the poker table. These days, having been stuck and then coming back from nowhere, it was rarely without a crowd. Chakwas and Adams had even come over to join the game.

“I’ve got you now, Vakarian!” Vega exclaimed.

Liara could see Garrus glaring without even turning her head. Maybe it was the effect of her fourth drink, but she smirked.

“Is it harder without the robot?” Javik asked.

Joker sighed. His eyes moistened.

“Yeah, it’s been really hard. Thanks for asking.”

“I meant the navigation,” Javik corrected blankly.

Joker stared back.

Liara couldn’t help but laugh a little, and Joker joined in.

“What?” Javik asked.

Liara and Joker laughed a bit harder.

“You smug prick fuck!” Traynor shouted, startling them.

Kaidan had just won another round. “Your hatred only feeds me,” he chuckled proudly, gathering the pile of chips on the table into his arms.

Joker answered Javik’s original question, “Thanks to that firecracker over there, it hasn’t been as rough to navigate as it should be. She’s crazy, but she’s a genius.”

Liara took another sip and said, “That’s because all women are crazy to you, Joker. Non-Humans too!"

“What can I say?” he shrugged, “I’m a man, a Human man at that!”

Vega called over to them from the table, “What’s he saying over there about Human men? Joker giving us all a bad name?”

“Being fair,” Adams said, “Human men give us all a bad name every day.”

“Ouch! I happen to like Human men,” Cortez replied.

“Yeah, you do!” Vega said, holding up his hand for a high-five that Traynor met with a loud slap.

“Joker was just being a bigot, nothing new,” Liara informed the group.

They all groaned.

“I might have to meet you outside after school,” Tali warned, an obvious smirk in her masked expression.

“That’s right, everyone pick on the guy who can’t hit back without breaking something,” he said.

“Come on, Joker. What did you say this time?” Kaidan prodded.

Liara saw a certain expression darken Joker’s face. She turned to Kaidan and gave him a look from across the room that told him to back off. She saw him nod in acknowledgment.

“Joker thinks all non-Humans and women are crazy,” Javik stated.

“Might someone remind Mr. Moreau that his doctor is a woman?” Chakwas asked.

“I wasn’t serious,” Joker said defensively, “It’s in the name. Never listen to me.”

Liara smiled and leaned back in her seat. There hadn’t been banter on the Normandy like this since… 

And it was nice. 

It made her think of the party Shepard had on the Citadel, and suddenly she really missed Wrex. She hadn’t thought about him since they'd left Earth. Where was he now? She hoped he was okay.

The game finished with Tali sneaking up from behind and wiping everyone out. Unlike the party Shepard just had a few weeks ago, everyone decided to go to bed before they got through about a bottle each. They all cleared out after, leaving Liara and Kaidan behind to clean. The gathering had been their idea, plus biotics made the job easier and quicker.

“I’d say that was a success,” Kaidan stated, satisfied.

“I just hope it lasts for a while,” Liara added, floating the dirty glasses left lying around and placing them on the bar. Kaidan then cycled them through the automatic washer.

“Yeah," he agreed darkly, "I, uh, wouldn't want things to go back the way they just were." 

They continued in silence for a while, then he said, “I just wish she were here.”

Liara stopped what she was doing.

“I know,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” his voice was breaking, “I don’t want to drag us down.”

She sighed and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Kaidan, you’re okay. Just be sad if you’re sad.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“And stop apologizing,” she added. He looked up at her and smiled weakly. His eyes were red.

She wanted to comfort her friend. “We’re going to find her,” Liara said, taking his hand, “I promise.”

She didn’t know if she was lying, or if she actually believed it.

Fuck you, Kaidan. Liara thought, You were right.

It felt better to hope.

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