#Reader is Sendak’s Daughter

[galraluver]

This is the first version of this request that I wrote

_________________________________________

Sendak would do anything for his daughter and everyone knew it, if anyone so much as made her cry they would wish that they'd never been born. (Y/n) was Sendak's little girl and he would do anything for her, although he raised her with a mixture of softness, support, responsibility, boundaries and how to respect others. He never treated her harshly because he didn't want her to grow up hating him, it would kill him if she resented him. Sendak had to raise (Y/n) on his own ever since his wife died during childbirth, before (M/n) took her last breath he promised her that he would raise their daughter to be a wonderful person. Since (Y/n) was half human she had a few physical human traits and aged at a rate that was normal for human children, although she looked mostly galra except for her human shaped ears, her (E/c) eyes and (H/c) hair.

The years flew by in what felt like an instant for Sendak and it wasn't long before (Y/n) turned thirteen years old, he could never regret being a father and he always had the inkling that his late wife had been looking over them the entire time. (Y/n) loved her father even though he could be a little strict sometimes, he was always there for her no matter what she was going through. She knew her father had been a commander in the galra empire and she grew up knowing that her mother was an angel, when she was twelve her father told her the truth because he thought she was old enough to handle it; they both avoided each other for a couple of days and (Y/n) blamed herself for her mother's death, but Sendak comforted her, assuring her that she shouldn't blame herself for something that she couldn't control. Sendak wasn't exactly sure how much of (Y/n) was human and there was one thing he hoped wouldn't happen to her, unfortunately his luck ran out one day in particular. (Y/n) hadn't felt very good since she woke up but when her father asked her about it she assured him that she would be fine, although as the hours passed her lower abdomen began to hurt worse.

She remembered when she received a couple of anatomy lessons from her governess the previous year, one about galra anatomy and the other about human anatomy, alas she couldn't remember everything from the human portion of the lesson. Ever since she was little she knew that she was half human, one of her favorite things was when her father told her about back when he and (M/n) were getting to know each other. When the pain became too much for her to handle (Y/n) went to the bathroom and that was when she saw it, blood stains on the crotch of her underwear. She understood the concept of menstruation, but she never thought that she would actually get her period; she started to cry while she sat on the toilet because she felt really emotional all of a sudden, then it dawned on her why she'd felt strange for the past week. It took her a few minutes to calm down, then (Y/n) reached for her phone so she could call her father, and thankfully it wasn't long before he arrived at the bathroom to help her in any way he could, even though he wouldn't actually be in there to help her.

“Are you alright in there, (Y/n)?” Sendak questioned while he stood on the opposite side of the bathroom door, speaking loud enough for his daughter to hear him; when he received the text about her period starting he nearly had a heart attack, although she needed him then more than ever.

“No, I'm bleeding! I- I don't remember what to do to get it to stop, I wasn't paying too much attention to that part of the lesson because I didn't think this would happen. I'm sorry, daddy!” (Y/n) replied loudly enough for her father to hear before she broke down crying again, feeling guilty for not paying attention to the menstruation part of her human anatomy lesson.

“It's- it's alright, it's understandable. I'll be back in a moment, try to clean yourself up.” Sendak responded with uncertainty before he went to his bedroom where he had a stash of pads packed away, just in case such a situation were to happen; he also had some pads stashed away from when (M/n) was alive.

(Y/n) heard what her father said but she wasn't sure what he was going to do; she cleaned herself up to the best of her ability even though she was still crying, she didn't care that her face was wet. She could feel her cramps getting worse with every minute that passed, she felt as though she would get sick if she stayed there much longer. While she patiently waited on the toilet Sendak grabbed the box of different sizes of pads out of his closet so he could give them to (Y/n); he honestly didn't think they would ever be used, although deep down he knew that his daughter might eventually need them. On the way back to the bathroom he went into her room to get clean underwear for (Y/n) and was on the verge of having a heart attack again, he knew the basics of how to take care of a woman when she was on her period but as far as taking care of his daughter during her very first period he was clueless about how to handle it. The only person he'd been around who had a period had been his late wife, helping his daughter with hers would be a whole new experience for him.

“I have a box of pads and some new underwear for you, the pads soak up the blood.” Sendak said through the door once he returned to the bathroom; he didn't just want to go in there while (Y/n) was in there with her pants down, she was thirteen years old and he didn't want to seem creepy even though he simply wanted to help her.

“What are ‘pads’ and how do they soak up the blood? They're not like diapers, are they?” (Y/n) asked with a nervous tone since she didn't recognize the name of the items that had been brought to her.

“Not exactly, but in a way they resemble diapers.” Sendak answered without thinking about the way he worded it, he barely remembered what pads felt like even though (M/n) once showed one to him.

“I don't want them then, I'm too old to wear diapers!” (Y/n) shrieked in disgust; even though there was a solid wooden door separating them Sendak could practically see the look of pure disgust and discomfort on his daughter's face.

“You need to wear one, I don't want to see blood everywhere you sit! They're not diapers and they have instructions on how to use them properly. I don't know how else to help you and I'm not going in there while you're half… dressed.” Sendak responded firmly, pinning his ears against his skull while the fur around his neck stood on end.

“A-alright, I'll try them. Just slide the box across the floor, the door's unlocked.” (Y/n) said after taking a moment to think about it, deciding to wear a pad so that she wouldn't leave blood everywhere.

Sendak looked up at the ceiling when he cracked the bathroom door open, knelt down and slid the box of pads in the direction of the toilet before he closed the door and stood up again. He was thankful that he kept a stash of pads for his daughter in case she were to ever start her period, otherwise he would have been completely caught off guard and unprepared since menstrual products weren't sold on Daibazaal. (Y/n) had a look at all of the pads and selected the one she thought would work best for her, she noticed how there was clean underwear for her to wear as well, she was grateful that her father got them for her. She read the instructions on the package and put the pad in the new underwear after she exchanged it for the one she bled in, luckily she already knew how much liquid painkiller to take. Sendak stood right outside of the bathroom, wondering exactly how he would help his daughter; he hated being nearly completely clueless about how to help her, he would have to just wing it.

“I- I figured it out.” (Y/n) spoke quietly after she opened the bathroom door while staring down at the floor; she cleaned everything up, put her bloodied underwear in the hamper, flushed the toilet and washed her hands before she opened the door, but she felt really embarrassed and emotional at the same time.

“That's good… Did you take something for the pain?” Sendak replied awkwardly, questioning as to if she knew how to relieve the cramps or not.

“Y-yeah, I did. Daddy?” (Y/n) said, replying to his question while she fidgeted with her fingers, feeling even more embarrassed about her request.

“Yes?” Sendak asked, fighting the urge to scrunch his nose up from the scent of her anxiousness and her period.

“Can we cuddle in bed together? I just really need to be close to someone right now- I understand that I'm not little anymore, but- but I really need you to comfort me right now.” (Y/n) queried before more tears spilled down her cheeks, feeling scared and alone all of a sudden; she was scared that she was being too demanding since she hadn't cuddled with her father since she was a little girl.

“Of course we can, kit. I'm always going to be here for you whenever you need me, I'm proud to have you as my daughter and you having your period doesn't change that, it simply means that you're growing up.” Sendak responded with a smile before he knelt down and carefully scooped her up with his right arm; she definitely got her height from her mother, he honestly didn't mind because she would always be his little girl no matter how old she got.

(Y/n) didn't mind being carried by her father, it reminded her of when she was younger and he would carry her around everywhere. It was common for galra parents and children to cuddle together as a way to stay close as a family and for comfort, so to Sendak and (Y/n) it was perfectly normal just as it was for every galra family; (Y/n) was growing up and Sendak wanted to spend as much time with her as she could before she grew up and started a life of her own. (Y/n) was still in pain, but laying curled up on her father's midsection while he laid on his bed made her feel a little better since she trusted him more than anyone in the entire universe. She was too emotional to purr, although the way her father's deep purr rumbled deep within his chest made her feel sleepy. Sendak felt a little sad because his wife and the mother of their child wasn't there to help him take care of (Y/n) during her first period, he refused to cry though because he didn't want to make (Y/n) feel more emotional than she already did; he would be sure to take time off from work for the first few days of every period she had, he didn't want her to feel alone during such a vulnerable time that she would have to experience every month or so until she got used to it.

[humanveil]

from a parallel universe wip draft thing:

4. When Joy Comes, Will I Be Ready, I Wonder.

Her life is never quiet, now, except on the rare occasion. Except for when she’s allowed moments like this: early morning, Sunday, the apartment warm and cosy and smelling of pine, cinnamon, eggnog, evergreen. Elliot carried the tree—a real one, barely big enough to make it past her thigh, its spotty foliage equal parts pathetic and endearing—up all nine flights of stairs two days ago, then stood, doubled over, out of breath and unamused while she sat there and tried her hardest not to laugh at him.

It’s covered in glitter now; tinsel, too. Loose sparkles and fallen needles litter the floor beneath it, homemade ornaments hanging on by a thread. Olivia sits cross legged beside it, idly poking at a bauble and smiling when it swings, the gentle back and forth strangely soothing.

It’s been a long few weeks. Moving is never easy, but moving in December with a two-year-old in tow and a killer on the loose had proved downright disastrous. They still have so much to do—still have boxes left open, untouched, half-hidden in the corners. She’s started picking at them when she can’t sleep, but it never achieves much of anything. Mostly, she fixates on the three boxes labelled BOOKS, drawn to the ritual of sorting, re-sorting, the quiet routine a remedy for her late-night nerves. Those nagging thoughts: How is this my life now?

How do I make it last?

They’re mostly hers, the books. Annotated, inherited. Elliot isn’t much of a reader, except for when their daughter asks, her book of choice shoved toward his chest as she demands, Do the voices, Daddy! He always does; a new set for each one. Olivia listens whenever she can, the insides of her cheeks bitten raw and bloody with her attempts to hide her grin. More than once, she’s caught him at the kitchen sink reciting Maurice Sendak, his voice low, deep, a rhythmic whisper.

Oh, please don’t go—we’ll eat you up—we love you so!

She’d finally started organising the shelves last night. Had settled on aiming for a semblance of order: fiction and poetry first, then nonfiction, work related, self-help. Alcott sits next to Atwood, Austen, Blake. A shelf down: Dickens, Dickinson, Dostoevsky. She got all the way to Shakespeare before it got the best of her, her throat tight with a tell-tale burn as she thumbed through the Complete Works, its spine cracked and edges frayed, the cover page coffee stained. A dead woman’s penmanship: With sighs of fire, Olivia. She’d had to stop, after that. Moved on to something easier.

Now, she sits amidst the flow on from Bea’s room, books her daughter had outgrown or didn’t like or lost interest in stacked haphazardly at her side. She’d made steady progress til a picture book of JFK had caught her eye (John’s idea of a recovery room gift. You can never start too early, he’d said, which was Munch for, Congratulations. It’s a girl!). The apartment had started to stir around the same time a car arrived at Dealey Plaza, so Olivia had cleared her mess and sat back, poking baubles while she waited for the chaos to trickle in.

It hadn’t taken long.

It never does.

She hears the commotion come to life. Tip toes, first. Running water. Then: Voices. Mattress springs. A soft thud, a peel of laughter. Little feet running across the laminate as larger, heavier footfalls follow.

A flash of colour. Two people barrelling into the room, one right after the other.

“Mommy! Mommy!” Beatrice cries. “Save me!”

She’s a blur of white, pink, pastel blue, purple. Unicorns are the latest craze; her onesie has a glittery, golden horn hanging from its hood, and it bounces as she dashes past Olivia to weave through the furniture, her father a half-step behind.

“Don’t run in the house,” Olivia tries, but it’s half-hearted at best. She knows full well that it falls on deaf ears.

Bea pulls the rookie move and stops to glance behind her, a mess of dark brown bed hair covering her eyes. Elliot seizes the opening and swoops down, scoops her up, his triumphant little hurrah almost drowned out as Bea’s laugh morphs into a squeal, her little legs kicking as she tries to wiggle free from her father’s hands.

“Mommy!” she cries again, the word broken up by giggles. “Make him sto–OP.”

Elliot’s got her bridal style, his head bent to blow raspberries against her chubby, round cheeks. “Nuh-uh,” he says, sing-song. “Mommy can’t save you now!”

There’s more giggling; another squeal for help as Olivia gets to her feet. “Alright,” she says, no-nonsense. It’s easy to slip into an imitation of Detective Benson, assertive and formidable if not for the fact that she’s standing in a pair of old sweats, her arms outstretched, hands clasped to form a finger gun. She aims it at Elliot’s chest. “Hands where I can see ‘em.”

Sunlight falls across the living room, striped and golden and flickering gently, the bright light forcing Elliot to squint. “You’ll never take me alive,” he says, an emulation of the movies. His cheeks are red, blotchy, the creases of their sheets embedded in his skin. He looks sleep-warm, inviting; Olivia sees Bea curl toward him even as she thumps a little fist against his chest.

“Daddy,” she scolds, the way only a two-year-old can. “You have to do what she says!”

Olivia laughs, then sticks her tongue out when Elliot rolls his eyes. She can tell that he’s biting back a grin, too, a laugh of his own stuck at the back of his throat.

“Don’t I know it,” he says, a kiss placed to the top of Bea’s head. He deposits her on the couch, careful, and holds his hands up for them to see. “Alright, alright,” he tells Liv. “Don’t shoot.”

Olivia steps forward, hand catching Elliot’s wrist so she can make her mock arrest. She moves closer than she needs to, her chin propped atop his shoulder, her body stealing what’s left of his warmth. “Anything you say can and will be held against you,” she says, her voice low, the innuendo clear.

Elliot tilts his head to get a glance of her. “Yeah?”

“Mmhm.” Her free arm winds around his middle, her hand flat against his chest. “Naptime ‘round here gets very eventful.”

His laugh is tangible. She feels it ripple along his sternum, up his spine, and hides her smile against his shoulder blade, her grip on his wrist shifting so they’re just holding hands.

“Looking forward to it, Detective.”

not 100% happy w this yet but from the draft fic notes to explain my choice of name for an eo kid: bea, as in beatrice, as in inspired by both the shakespeare character from much ado about nothing and the beatrice of dante alighieri’s the divine comedy, because a sharp-witted little terror that is also a heavenly guide representative of grace and faith sounds a lot like an eo kid, dunnit? i also just like the idea that olivia’s name is inspired by the olivia of twelfth night, and so (TO ME!) it is a small way to carry on serena’s tradition. also also: on the list of names i looked at, it sounded the best with benson-stabler. lmao.

thinking about her (girlmom liv)

[sergeantnex]

Hi there! You can call me Nex, Thank you for your continuous support!! This is my AO3 account. Feel free to heave over here as well if you want!

https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBrokenOmega/works

Masterlist:

Dragon Ball Z

Bardock x Reader: A Little Piece of Heaven (Fluff)

Bardock x Saiyan!Reader: Mating Season (Smut)

Broly x Reader: The Key to Broly (Fluff)

Raditz x Reader: A Dream Come True (Fluff)

Trunks x Reader: A Prince's Love (Smut)

Tora x Reader: A Secret Desire (Smut)

Voltron Legendary Defenders

Antok x Male!Reader x Kolivan: Galran Instincts (Smut)

Keith x Reader: Only Exception (Smut)

Kolivan x Reader: Leader's Stress Relief (Smut)

Kolivan x Antok's Daughter!Reader: Lost and Found (Fluff)

Kolivan x Half Galra!Reader: Our Hellcat (Fluff)

Kolivan x Jealous!Reader: Misunderstandings (Angst/Fluff)

Krolia x Child!Reader: Mama (Fluff)

Sendak x Reader: Druid's Mistake (Fluff)

Sendak x Reader: Commander's Rut (Smut)

Thace x Reader: Savior in the Shadows (Smut)

Thace x Chubby!Reader: Not About Looks Pt. 1 (Fluff)

Thace x Chubby!Reader: Not About Looks Pt.2 (Smut)

Ulaz x Reader: The Medic's Assistant (Smut)

Ulaz x Reader: Kits of Our Own (Smut)

Zarkon x Reader: Unexpected Rut (Smut)

Dream SMP

Dream x Reader: Lesson on Teasing (Smut)

Dogboy!Dream x Bunny!Reader: A Game Of Chase (Smut)

Dogboy!Dream x Bunny!Reader: A Game Of Chase (Smut/Part Two)

DreamXD x Reader: Nightmares (Smut)

DreamXD x Succubus!Reader: Dream Feeder (Smut)

Dream x Goddess!Reader: You look lonely, I can fix that.. (Fluff)

Dream x Trans!Male!Reader: I Will Always Be Here For You (Fluff)

Dream x Trans!Male!Reader: My Needy Kitty (Smut)

Dream x Trans!Male!Reader: Marks (Smut)

Dream x Trans!Male!Reader: Desperation (Smut)

Dream x Male!Reader: Piss Kink (Smut)

Blazeborn!Sapnap x Hybrid!Reader: Burning Love (Smut)

Sapnap x Wolf Hybrid!Reader x Dream: Companions (Fluff)

Karl x Reader: Thick Thighs Save Lives (Smut)

Karlnapity x Child!Reader: Adoption Incident (Fluff)

Philza x Elytrian!Reader: Attraction (Fluff)

Sam x Hybrid!Reader: Tupping Season (Smut)

Foolish x Reader: Swimming With Sharks (Fluff)

Schlatt x Reader: Sub Control (Smut)

Schlatt x Reader: Knocking Heads (Smut)

Sub!Schlatt x Dom!Reader: Edging (Smut)

Technoblade x Hybrid!Reader: Overwhelmed (Fluff)

Technoblade x Pregnant!Reader: Protective Blood God (Fluff)

Technoblade x Reader: Orgasm Denial (Smut)

Tubbo x Parental!Hybrid!Reader: A Family (Fluff)

Call of Duty

Graves x Reader: False Love (Angst)

König x Reader: Tension Relief (Smut)

König x Reader: The Uniform (Smut)

Nikto x Reader: Prying Eyes (Smut)

Soap x Reader: Facesitting (Smut)

Werewolf!Ghost x Trans!Soap: Sensitve Senses (Smut)

Zombie!Ghost x Reader: Relearning (Smut)

[dragonofyang]

The Heroine with a Thousand Faces

As the youngest member of #TeamPurpleLion, not only have I learned a lot in just the four months we’ve been working together, but I’ve explained a lot of what I’ve learned to others. Sometimes it’s about the history of Defender of the Universe and Beast King GoLion that @crystal-rebellion researched, sometimes it’s referencing @felixazrael‘s musical knowhow or @leakinghate‘s animation knowledge, and most recently, it’s leaning on @voltronisruiningmylife‘s expertise in how to break down and identify writing to provide corrections to those who see something in a show or article not working but can’t tell why. One big thing I learned since starting this crazy ride with my team is a massive hole in my college education on writing, which Felix filled in for me since we hit the ground running. Sure in my fantasy literature class we discussed Aesop and The Hobbit, and what the phrase “The Hero’s Journey” means and why it’s the monomyth, but there was one thing that my dear professor never taught us, although I’m sure she will in the future. Compared to Joseph Campbell’s heroic journey, this other monomyth is much younger.

What is it, you may ask?

Simply put, it’s a heroine’s journey.

[Image description: Princess Allura with her hair up and wearing her flightsuit from season 1 “The Rise of Voltron” backlit by white light.]

Let’s go on an adventure together.

To understand the heroine’s journey, I want to give you all a rundown on what exactly the hero’s journey is first. While it was never neatly labeled as “The Hero’s Journey” until Campbell, studies on common themes and plot points began back in the 1870’s. As time moved forward, Campbell published his 17 steps to the monomyth in 1949 (The Hero with a Thousand Faces) and as we move toward the present his monomyth is eventually dubbed as “the hero’s journey”. I won’t overload you with the dates and stuff I needed to study since that’s a) not the point of this piece and b) Campbell’s monomyth is actually secondary to the main one in Voltron: Legendary Defender. That said, it’s the backbone of a lot of literature both old and new, and while not every story follows these 17 steps outlined by Campbell or approaches them in the same order, you’ll find everything from the story of Christ to Lord of the Rings somewhere in these steps. It’s just that a lot of times the steps of the hero’s journey aren’t ever really explained, so you as a reader/viewer/consumer will see them and will have a gut instinct as to what’s supposed to happen, and when it happens you feel great! The story followed a formula that satisfies its audience! But it also makes a story that doesn’t follow a formula feel fundamentally wrong, from just a mild discomfort like putting on a shirt and buttoning it slightly off, all the way to triggering strong emotional responses including panic attacks or tears. Stories are designed to bring forth emotions from their audience, but what good is a tragedy without a lesson to learn? How can we enjoy an empty marriage when the couple has no chemistry?

So with this piece, I hope to illuminate just what the steps of the heroine’s journey are, contrast them against the hero’s journey, where VLD fits into all of this, and through that demonstrate why they are not interchangeable even though they share similar names.

Part I: Of Heroes and Heroines

In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell outlines seventeen steps, which are laid out in this diagram by Reg Harris:

[Image description: diagram of The Hero’s Journey using a circular diagram shape separating out the seventeen steps into eight categories, divided into the Known World and the Unknown World.]

In Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey, she writes the heroine’s journey as follows:

[Image description: The Heroine’s Journey depicting a cyclical diagram of the narrative, featuring 10 distinct steps that loop back to the beginning at the top.]

The Heroine’s Journey is fundamentally cyclical in nature, and while the diagram above shows the Hero’s Journey as a circle as well, it ultimately has finite start and end points. One of the key differences between these is that the Hero’s Journey explores internal character in an external adventure and the hero achieves a (theoretically) lasting peace once their journey is finished. Conversely, the heroine must constantly evaluate themselves in the bigoted environment that tries to disenfranchise them.

As a note, while I use gendered terms such as “hero” and “heroine”, I use them as gender-neutral placeholders to label which monomyth I’m speaking about at present. Women can undertake a hero’s journey, and men can undertake a heroine’s journey, particularly when you examine them in an intersectional lens.

A heroine’s journey, at its heart, is an examination and acceptance of the self in an unaccepting environment, and its cyclical nature stems from the fact that whenever a heroine moves into a new environment, they have to make that journey over and over. They can be a queer man of color, a white stay-at-home mom, a disabled nonbinary person, whatever the case, the constant need to re-evaluate their place in the world is what marks the heroine’s journey as separate from the hero’s journey.

But while it’s cyclical in nature, we should start at the beginning nonetheless.

[Image description: Alfor (right) holding Allura (left) in the Castle of Lions. She says, “We can’t give up hope!” and he replies, “I’m sorry, daughter.”]

In The Heroine’s Journey, the story begins when an event causes the heroine to separate from the feminine. A significant event spurs them to reject the prescribed role of the patriarchy, which in the case of a woman could be a mother, a damsel in distress, a wife, etc. The heroine is put into a box and chafes against its edges because it cuts them off from their ability to reach for the masculine, the power and privilege it affords. This marks a stark difference from how our archetypal hero lives and begins their own adventure. The hero lives a fairly mundane life for the brief time we see them before the first element comes into play: the Call to Adventure. This is generally an external force spurring the hero to action, as opposed to the internal force of the heroine.

The hero then will Refuse the Call and will be introduced to the Mentor they will come to rely upon, whereas the heroine typically immediately begins on a journey to become more powerful/masculine, generally through rejecting femininity. Princess Allura does not inherently reject her own femininity. She rejects the helplessness of being forced into cryostasis after her people have been destroyed and embarks on embracing her masculinity by finishing the war her father and Zarkon started 10,000 years ago. The heroine Identifies with the Masculine and Gathers Allies, which we see Allura do in the pilot of season 1 of VLD. She awakens to find a team of five men and her male adviser Coran, her allies in the coming intergalactic war, and she takes up the metaphorical lion herself as the pilot to the Castle of Lions, changing into her armor--pink, to honor the fallen--for the fight against Sendak as he tries to claim the Lions of Voltron for Emperor Zarkon. Her choice of pink, particularly pale pink, is reminiscent of the breast cancer awareness ribbon, baby pink, it is an intrinsically female color that she dons to assume the role of her father, King Alfor. The narrative is reminding the audience that Princess Allura--the first nonwhite Allura, no less--is just as much a princess as her previous white and blonde iterations are warriors.

After choosing their allies and undertaking this quest of gaining power (not to be confused with empowerment, our heroine is still operating within the confines of the patriarchy here), our heroine undergoes trials and faces enemies that try to persuade them back into the box, into what’s known and fundamentally safe and silencing. The words may be kind, be delivered kindly, but ultimately they can be boiled down to a single message: “go back to where you belong.” For the hero this is a point of no return as an external journey. The hero can choose to go home and leave saving the world to someone else, or they can choose to face the trials that bar them from their prize. But the heroine? They can’t. There is nobody who can save the heroine’s world because for them because their world is what they are trying to escape, and often they are the prize for a hero. It’s up to them to save themselves, and at this point in time, adopting the masculine and the power of the father figure is the way to go. And it works. Princess Allura, again while she does not get discouraged by the men around her to remain an idle princess, because this is the 21st goddamn century, her conflict arises from inexperience. King Alfor supports her drive to finish the war and take decisive action, to finish what he started. The Paladins challenge her authority as a sovereign in the beginning because even if she’s a princess by birth, she has no planet and they’re not of her planet or species anyway, and until they themselves undergo trials in the first few episodes do they appreciate that Allura is still critical as a person, despite her lack of sovereign weight.

Together, she and her team move through the obstacles and the war against Zarkon together, while simultaneously trying to build a coalition of allies to aid in the fight. In fact, much of the plot of VLD takes place during this stage of the heroine’s journey, and it’s here where we as the audience follow Allura as she meets her animus in the form of a Shadow figure: the cunning Prince Lotor. He takes on the role of the challenger to force Allura to better herself, and as Allura rises to the occasion each time, he is textually impressed by her battle skill, then by her intellect. The most iconic moment of Lotor as a Shadow (aka: the half of herself that Allura doesn’t want to accept yet), is when he baits Voltron into battle, then pilots his cruiser through the volatile environment of Thayserix. He expresses disappointment at Voltron’s ability in battle, but when Allura in Blue rises to meet the challenge he lays out, he praises her, even if he textually does not realize who is in Blue at the time.

[Image description: Prince Lotor in profile, a pleased expression on his face, and the subtitles read “Someone’s learning.”]

As a brief aside: the animus comes from Jung and is often paired with an anima, or masculine and feminine energies. The key takeaway is that these energies are complementary to each other and exist in a balance. While they typically are portrayed in a more heterosexual context, like everything else in this meta, the terms are used in a gender-neutral context when not applied directly to Allura’s storyline. While Lotor could be likened to either Meeting the Goddess or (Wo)Man as Temptress in the hero’s journey, a key difference between the heroine’s journey animus and either of these feminized roles is that the Goddess and Temptress are two separate figures--generally women to male heroes--and are generally not equal to the hero physically or mentally. The animus, however, is intrinsically the perfect match to the anima of the heroine, being their complement and their intellectual and physical equal. Lotor is not meant to be seen as the woman on Indiana Jones’ arm, he’s meant to be a force in his own right, challenging Allura to better herself and raise the standards for them both. It’s fitting that this occurs in an episode full of fog and a dangerous abyss, because the traditional hero descends into a metaphorical (or literal) one to encounter these flattened versions of feminine energy.

The trials continue for Allura through the seasons, and she makes many allies and continues to face their enemies head-on, and once Prince Lotor, now Emperor, cements his place as one of Allura’s allies he shifts from the Shadow figure challenging her to the animus in full, being encouraging and supportive as they work together as allies to find Oriande, a mythical place that should yield them the secrets of unlimited Quintessence. While Lotor challenges Allura in a traditionally masculine way (physical trials, battle, strategy), he also encourages her in a decidedly feminine way through Altean history and mythology, as Altea is very feminine-coded compared to the Galra Empire, which through Zarkon represents a familiar and violent strain of masculinity that seeks to crush Allura and force the universe to fit his will through abusive language and physical violence and genocide. Allura taking up the battle in Alfor’s place is simply her continuing the cycle and seeing power in masculine terms, rather than breaking the cycle.

Now here is where the diagrams diverge even further. Until this point, the journeys followed fairly similar trajectories. After the trials and battles of the heroine’s journey, they experience the boon of the journey, which the hero does not achieve until they face further trials and temptations. As such, we will continue to follow the heroine’s journey model and I’ll explain the significance of the flip.

Part II: Not the Place to Arrive

One of the significant things about the heroine’s journey is that when a woman undertakes it, it’s empowering and her becoming her most unified self. Campbell once reportedly said to Murdock, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.” In the hero’s journey, often a woman’s place is as the prize, rarely is she her own agent. As I stated previously, the hero and heroine journeys do not have to ascribe to gendered protagonists, however the reality is that the hero’s journey is very patriarchal in nature since it was formulated primarily through the study of male heroes and does not take into account the constant reassessment heroines must face. For heroes, they simply must survive going from point A to point B. Heroines are always subjected to reevaluation within their environment and the people around them, so their journey never really ends.

All this is to say that the hero receives their boon at the end of their story and that’s the end of it. They get a happily ever after and can return to normal life and spread their bounty to those in need or dearest to them.

The heroines?

They get their boon at the middle of the story.

And there’s still more to come for our heroine as they build toward the climax (pun intended).

Princess Allura receives the boon of Oriande’s secrets with Lotor by her side, which in pretty much every literature class would become a discussion on the ways this represents sex, or the the ways Allura is interacting with the world in terms of gender, particularly how they discover Oriande after having an emotional reaction in Haggar’s lab and activating the Altean compass stone. In the heroine’s journey, this boon is often of the same significance as the hero’s boon/reward at the end of their journey, but for the heroine it’s false. It’s fleeting. It’s not meant to last. This is the turning point for our heroine because while yes, our heroine achieved the goal of the adventure, they did so by consciously or unconsciously shunning the feminine. In Allura’s case, she’s still taking after her father, trying to follow in his--and to an extent Zarkon’s--footsteps by mastering the unlimited Quintessence.

And true to form, before season 6 is out, our heroine seems to be betrayed by her animus, returning him to the status of Shadow figure as he challenges her to unleash the power within one final time. Princess Allura thinks Lotor lied to her and has been harvesting Alteans for their Quintessence when Keith and his mother Krolia discover a living Altean in the Quantum Abyss, and with the budding on-screen romance between Allura and Lotor, this betrayal cuts our heroine deep. To her, he not only lied about there being no more Alteans left, but he actively continued the genocide his father began 10,000 years ago. That’s not an easy thing to get over. So Lotor assembles Sincline, which bears a visual resemblance to a wingless dragon--the last metaphorical dragon she faces before moving into the next step of the heroine’s journey--and with Allura in Voltron the two battle it out in a tragic action-packed scene that leads to Voltron overloading Lotor with Quintessence and leaving him in the Rift.

With the dragon defeated and the boon lost, the heroine has to sacrifice not only her animus, but the last vestiges of her home to try and undo what following the masculine has done: close not only the original Rift, but all the fractures in reality caused by their battle.

And what does a girl who has already lost her planet, people, and lover have left to lose?

[Image description: The five Lions of Voltron flying away from the massive Rift, the Castle of Lions flying straight toward the center of it.]

The heroine following the footsteps of the masculine always comes at a major cost to them. In Allura’s case, she has to sacrifice her castle in order to make right the harm done to the literal universe. In this case, she mirrors Zarkon in his destruction of the universe, but rather than directly harming billions of lives on uncounted planets, she creates a literal hole in the universe because of her blindness to the consequences of the actions of herself and those around her.

And much like her father sending away the Lions, she must send away her castle in the hopes of saving the universe from greater destruction.

Part III: Transcending the Rift

From the gain and loss of the boon, things look dire for the heroine at this stage in the journey. In Allura’s case, she is without people, without planet, without castle, and as she learns at the beginning of season 8, her found family has families of their own--other than Coran, that is. Our heroine continues to lose pieces of the things and people surrounding her at the beginning of the story: which Murdock refers to as awakening feelings of spiritual aridity or death. She is losing her place in the universe even faster than before, when she stood on the shoulders of her father, and she must move forward. Allura passed the point of no return all the way back in season 1 episode 1. As the heroine, she broke free of the safe mold she knew for the past 10,000 years, and every episode since her awakening she has had to try to forge forward on the path she knew: that of her father. Now, though, her father’s methods have failed her, just as they failed him, leaving her with no option but to keep moving forward and to approach her journey from another angle.

[Image description: from left to right, Veronica, Allura, Romelle, and Pidge (mostly off-screen) in a clothing swap shop as Allura speaks. Caption reads, “I could give you a royal decree of service from the Crown Princess of Alte…”]

Allura not only must deal with the loss of her place in the universe, but she must also deal with the fact that by leaving Lotor in the Rift, she abandons half of herself as well. Physically she is a whole person, but if we look at her role as an anima and what her fears and strengths are, destroying her animus throws her self-knowledge out of alignment. She’s careening away from the safe path of her father, but she must now rediscover the strengths within herself without succumbing to her weaknesses and do so by stepping out of her father’s shadow.

Season 8 is rife with emotional buildup and no payoff. We as the audience don’t know what happened to Lotor for the whole of season 7 and we see Allura struggling to deal with all her losses, we travel to Earth and meet the MFE pilots, a plucky bunch who probably were meant to lay groundwork for a new Vehicle Voltron, and we see that Haggar/Honerva is the final big bad of the whole show, ready to vindicate the son she lost to the Rift, but also 10,000 years ago when he was born and she became the Witch we love to hate. So when we join Allura and the gang on Earth with Luca in the infirmary, and Allura’s final trials begin…

Or they should have.

[Image description: Lance and Allura kissing in rainbow lighting where they are artificially-colored in red, then pink, then blue from top to bottom in front of a fading background of warm yellow at the top to gray at the bottom.]

Instead, we are treated to the final acts of a hero’s journey, but still following our heroine through the steps.

Our heroine wears down to the persistence of Lance, who in a heroic journey would receive a fair princess as his boon, and Allura is trying to find a place to belong. In seasons prior to this, Lance acts like a goofy everyday guy, very much a typical character in many present-day stories that allows the audience to see themselves in him. He fantasizes about wooing the princess, calls himself a ladies’ man, tries to be funny, he’s a pretty typical character that a male audience is more likely to sympathize with, and as such the fantasy is pairing up with the prettiest, smartest, etc. girl in the story. The woman as a boon, the Goddess, and the Temptress are never on equal footing with the male hero, and even in the case of female heroes, the meeting with a god(dess) means that the female hero is worthy of being a consort rather than the equal that a heroine is to the anima/animus. In fact, Campbell reportedly told Murdock, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.” In the hero’s journey, if the hero is male and heterosexual, the women will always be the prize, the virginal ideal, or the sexualized damnation, and in all of them, the woman is meant to be receptive to the man (and doesn’t THAT sound like some familiar rhetoric). Never is the woman an agent in the hero’s journey when it fulfills a male fantasy. And it is this very same box that spurs a heroine to begin their heroine’s journey: this breakdown of people to individual parts as determined by a patriarchal society.

While Lance is a hero in his own right, in Allura’s heroine journey, he acts as an ogre that comes dressed as a male ally all the way back in season 1. He’s a Subverted Nice Guy in that he’s constantly trying to woo Allura, but ultimately he’s still reinforcing the same patriarchy that not only plagues Allura in this iteration, but also in previous iterations of the Voltron franchise. The Nice Guy doesn’t challenge the heroine like the animus, but rather encourages them to stay in place or to fit a predetermined mold once more.

Look familiar?

[Image description: Lance’s fantasy, with him standing triumphant over Zarkon as the team cheers him on, Allura kneeling at his right side and looking up at him, while a flag with his face waves on his left.]

Many of the silly shots in the series have been foreshadowing, whether in the most direct sense or in the promise of subverting what’s portrayed. In the case of this screenshot, by the time Lance gets the girl, Zarkon is killed (by Lotor), Allura has already had an intimate relationship (with Lotor), and the team collectively became heroes and allies of Lotor before the end of season 6 happened. Lance, textually, is not Allura’s equal as an animus, and while he doesn’t quite view her as his equal--especially in earlier seasons--he can only textually become her equal when she is at her lowest point, and he’s still affixed to the idea that she’s a prize, going so far as to say that “winning prizes is my specialty” in “Clear Day”. Really, it’s a messy relationship dynamic that tries to show the audience why, as they stand in the canon material, they don’t work. Not only is Allura still not his equal, but his fantasy comes about at the hands of others, or with the help of others, and he comes second. He plays a role, but he is not the singular hero he once fantasized about being. Textually this subversion is teaching him a lesson about becoming his best self and acknowledging that he doesn’t have to be the hero, the payoff of which should have come in season 8 as Allura completes her heroine’s journey to become her most unified and realized self. It’s meant to be his apotheosis, the new perspective and enlightenment brought to the hero after facing all the trials of the journey as a part of the final reward.

Allura, fighting with this sudden loss of herself, must now also help spearhead the war against Honerva, the archetypal Bad Mother, in an alchemist-versus-alchemist battle for not only Lotor’s physical soul but for Allura’s metaphorical one as well. This is a new fight, the gauntlet thrown by someone other than her animus, and after all his tests, she must still rise to the challenge with the same energy, but she must do so with new knowledge now that she knows she cannot rely solely on her father.

But what’s the next step for a heroine trapped in the arid desert of the unknown self and with the weight of the world pressing onto them?

They must descend to the underworld and begin the transformation from the masculine methods to unleash the femininity that’s been locked away this whole time.

And who do we have to escort Allura to the metaphorical underworld as she falls asleep?

[Image description: A close-up of Lotor’s face in deep shadows as he stares head-on at the “camera”.]

Her Animus, acting as a Shadow once more.

His entrance is littered with sex. Not literally, but metaphorically. He greets Allura while she’s in bed, the camera does a gratuitous slow pan over his body in a way that many cameras exclusively afford to women, the presence of a blooming flower with an erect stamen, the lighting of the preview--altered in the final season itself--is purple even, a romantic and spiritual color. You know the joke in college English classes about how everything is sex except sex? That’s this scene in a nutshell. He’s always been drawn and behaved in a way designed to appeal to the female gaze (an essay in itself), but this scene really takes the cake.

[Image description: Lotor as viewed in profile from a low angle in a Garrison room, looking down at a juniberry flower in a pot.]

And it’s this scene where we see Lotor give Allura the first critical piece of information for how she can stop Honerva/Haggar, but also reminding her that some people do not change. While Allura must change to achieve her realization, he reminds her that Haggar is still the same witch, and that her pain of losing Lotor becoming public does not excuse the fact that she has not expressed remorse or tried to change herself, let alone her hand in not only his downfall but in the brainwashing of the Alteans. She is an antagonist so focused on the wrongs done to her that she justifies the wrongs she does to others with them. Allura, however, expressed remorse and wanted to save Lotor as soon as she realized what was going on, which further cements the ways in which their fates could have been the same or switched had they made slightly different choices. Honerva is 10,000 years too late. Like Lotor mirrors his father and in “Shadows” is shown to be more empathetic, Allura mirrors Honerva and both prove throughout the show to have stronger moral compasses than their predecessors. They are the Emperor and Alchemist, and while fate decrees they must take up the mantle left behind, their free will dictates that they should not blindly follow their footsteps if they truly wish to make a lasting change. Narratively, they must forge a new path if they are to bring the universe to peace again.

[Image description: A close-up shot of the juniberry flower with Allura visible in the background, but blurred. The subtitle reads Lotor’s line, “The witch may change her name, but she will always be a witch.”]

Lotor tempts Allura to take the entity into herself, and when she reaches out to connect with it, she is taken further into the dreamscape and finds herself back on Altea and greeted by her mother. This marks the beginning of the reconnection with the feminine, but while Allura has always so desperately missed her family and Altea, she finds herself in a precarious position. Suddenly, she is in the very same mech suit that Luca was found in, and to save Altea from the Galra fleet overhead, she makes the decision to use the planet’s Quintessence. However, in the process of destroying the Galra fleet, destroys Altea as well. As her world crumbles, her mother congratulates her for a job well done. This presumably mirrors the dropped plot about the Altean Colony and the decisions Lotor would have been faced with, and after “Shadows” would lend both Allura and the audience a greater appreciation for the position he was in before he died.

And when she finally wakes?

[Image description: Allura sitting up in the Garrison bunk, looking at the mice, the juniberry dry and wilted in the foreground, blurry. The subtitle reads, “It was only a dream.”]

Our oh so sexual symbol is wilted, and Allura wakes up alone.

With the visual deflowering and this new revelation about the kinds of decisions those before her have had to make, Allura can begin reconnecting with the feminine in earnest without falling into the old placements she may have been subjected to at the beginning of the story. This would have continued further with Allura reconnecting with her animus in the missing episode @leakinghate titles “The Descent”, especially fitting as she continues her descent to her feminine roots as a heroine and to reconnect with her lost animus. Reconnecting and reconciling with him--and with the side of herself he represents--is critical to her achieving unity within herself and being able to face Honerva head-on.

Once the heroine has descended to the underworld, begun the reconnection to the feminine, and returned with new knowledge on their relationship to their emotional side and the aspects overshadowed by the masculine, they are ready to begin healing the mother/daughter split. This in essence is the heroine returning to the old knowledge she has cast aside when following the path of the masculine/father, but approaching it with a new understanding and perspective. Think of it as understanding why your parents enforced rules like “don’t run into traffic”. As a kid, the danger may not be obvious, but as an adult you’re able to look at the same situation, see over obstacles younger you might not have, and realize “oh shit, that’s a car”. That said, the heroine does not allow themselves to get put back into the same or even a different pre-prescribed role because they now have a greater understanding of the situation at hand.

In Allura’s case, this means revisiting the plan on how to take down Honerva, and realizing that she must pursue the course laid out by her trip to the underworld to not only save the universe, but awaken Lotor from being a robeast. Part of the conflict against this plan comes from the team, who see the entity she took within herself as dangerous. While that’s true, stopping the plan also prevents Allura from growing in strength to be able to fight Honerva. The power flowing within her that Lotor referred to back in season 6 is at her fingertips, and like his visit in “Clear Day” reminded her, she need only take it. During both parts of the “Knights of Light” episodes, Allura is confronted with shades of Honerva’s memories as they dive deeper, and it’s here that we as the audience and the cast are meant to learn what truly became of Lotor after he was imprisoned in the Rift, and it’s meant to be utterly jarring to everyone. Instead, with how the scenes were edited together during the post-production alterations, Hate aptly points out in “Seek Truth in Darkness” that Honerva promising vengeance and seeing Lotor’s corpse has next to no impact. Or rather, it does to the audience--a melted corpse isn’t exactly Y-7 appropriate--but the characters don’t really react to this revelation at all.

That said, it’s more than likely that Allura genuinely believes Lotor to be dead (as opposed to a sleeping prince), which would explain her aggressive reaction to seeing pre-Rift Zarkon, and we don’t see his reaction to learning what he did to his son, either. This would be a prime location for Zarkon to experience and express remorse for what his actions have done to his son, subverting the toxic masculinity narrative his character had been representing prior.

At the end of “Knights of Light Part 2”, Hate mentions that Allura would need to make another trip to the underworld to commune with Lotor and realize that no, he’s not dead, but also that she not only must defeat Honerva, she must do so in order to save Lotor and free everyone of the cycle of violence that began 10,000 years ago. This is the final descent she makes before she can heal the wounded masculine, both in herself, and Lotor directly.

[Image description: Allura in profile inside the cockpit of Blue Lion, unconscious. Her window displays measurement increments and stars in red-tones, while Allura herself is lit in blue tones.]

After the end of this episode, however, Hate mentions that much of what was there is butchered in the post-production editing, so I will be extrapolating based on the content we have in the season as well as utilizing her analysis of the story as it should have been.

When Allura wakes up from falling unconscious, this is when we should see her proposing to save her animus, and it should come with a discussion with Lance about how they don’t click romantically. That said, in the version on Netflix, we see their relationship continue, however much of their shared body language doesn’t necessarily even match up with an awkward couple. Lance seems sullen and possessive, and while he might still be sullen in Allura’s original heroine’s journey, he would have had this moment of growth in which he learns to let go of Allura. She’s his fantasy, and not only is that unfair to Allura, it’s also unfair to him, and he doesn’t need to be the hero or the guy that gets the girl. He can be himself, silly, sharpshooting, video game-playing Lance. A genuinely nice dude, which completes the subversion of the Nice Guy trope his character embodied for so long.

“Uncharted Regions” is a hot mess of an episode in terms of narrative flow and consistency, but this would have marked the beginning of the alchemist vs. alchemist fight for not only Lotor’s soul, but the universe. Honerva uses the Sincline mech and her new mech to start tearing holes through realities, and once Allura jumps into the fray, that moves the audience into the next missing episode proposed by Hate: “Storming the Pyramid”. This would be where Honerva uses Allura to revive Lotor because she did not receive the life-givers’ blessing, and Allura would do it, literally healing the wounded masculine, but also falling right into Honerva’s trap in the process. This would almost certainly be a highly-controversial thing among Allura’s allies, but like Allura remaining on the path she knew, it’s easier to accept Lotor as pure evil who got what he deserved, when at no point is there a definite case against him. In fact, “Shadows” is designed to render him as a sympathetic character, and seeing his melted corpse is even more horrifying after seeing him as a baby and child. But that’s the way it is when a heroine breaks the mold. The heroine defines their own role, and as part of that, it gives them the ability to help others break theirs. The heroine experiences true empowerment by divorcing themselves from the power structures that defined them before, and doing so with the greater knowledge of their internal masculinity and femininity. Allura revisiting the war of her father with the lifegivers’ knowledge to compound her intrinsic alchemical abilities is the moment when she achieves union within herself, and it manifests physically as reviving Lotor, her animus.

It’s after this point that we see the Purple Lion and Purple Paladin manifest, our namesake.

In “Day 47”, Kolivan references the team sizes the Blades of Marmora use. He references four and five as the usual sizes, but six occasionally happening, but what he says next is particularly interesting.

[Image description: Kolivan being filmed for an interview, saying, “Seven seems rare, but… it could happen.”]

The Voltron team had four Paladins briefly after Shiro disappeared and before Allura took up the mantle, but the full team always has five. After Shiro returned for good, their team became six Paladins.

Now, with the healed animus Lotor on their side, they could have the rare seven-person configuration that Hate discusses at length in “Seek Truth in Darkness”.

With the anima and animus aligned together at last with no secrets, they can unify externally the same way Allura unified internally, and battle against Honerva properly. Now, Team V, Lotor, and the entire universe can face Honerva head-on and stand a chance at winning.

We also should get the emotional payoff for Lotor as an abuse victim in his own arc, closing up this nice little loose end that hurts way more than it did before season 8 dropped.

[Image description: An up-close shot of Lotor glaring into the “camera” in green lighting and saying to Haggar, “maybe I will take pity on you when the time comes.”]

And it’s worth mentioning that while the final battle is exciting and action-packed, the final surrender of Honerva comes quietly, in the rift of all realities. The characters of Team V are able to deliver their character-based arc lessons, it’s a somber moment of learning as Allura, using once more the blessing of the lifegivers, enlightens Honerva to her memories and what she’s done, but also restoring her sense of self the way Allura was. This is the final healing of the mother/daughter split, and it’s significant that Honerva’s abuse victim not be her healer. Not only does Lotor (as far as we know) lack the ability, but it’s never the victim’s job to heal their abuser, just as it’s not the obligation of the oppressed to appease their oppressor. Honerva can finally move on and begin atoning for what she did by setting the ghosts of the Paladins of old in her mind free, but that still begs the question of what our heroine and her animus must do to finish the job.

This is where Lotor would get his second chance, in the most literal sense of the term, where he faces a similar trial to the one in Oriande back in season 6 and the burning question for a man so concerned with survival and cunning.

Is there something he would give up the life he has known and fought so hard to keep for?

And this time, the answer is yes.

Allura.

It was always Allura.

While Honerva is able to stop the rift from expanding by, well, not expanding it herself, she lacks the ability to properly close it the way that it was closed the first time. It takes one final adventure, one final unification by the anima and animus, by the heroine and her Shadow, and one final goodbye. Allura and Lotor, born of an age long past, become the lifegivers eternal through staying behind to close the rift.

The lionhearted goddess of life and her stalwart champion of survival.

[Image description: The final scene after the credits, where an Allura-shaped nebula is nestled up against a smudged, darker nebula with a sea of stars among them, and the five Lions of Voltron flying toward the nebulae.]

Sources

Dos Santos, Joaquim and Montgomery, Lauren. Voltron: Legendary Defender. Netflix. 2016-2018.

LeakingHate. “Seek Truth in Darkness”. VLD Visuals Detective and Imperial ApologistTM. 2 Mar. 2019. https://leakinghate.tumblr.com/post/183160042843/seek-truth-in-darkness

“Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey Arc”. The Heroine Journeys Project. https://heroinejourneys.com/heroines-journey/

Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine’s Journey. 1990.

University of Kansas. “Science Fiction Writers Workshop: Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey”. KU Guinn Center for the Study of Science Fiction. http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Workshop-stuff/Joseph-Campbell-Hero-Journey.htm

[pjsblog-voltron]

Together Once Again

Sendak + Daughter!Reader

Warning: Kidnapping

Summary: Sendak finds you (his daughter) after years of being apart

Author's Note:

I sorry this took so long but I hope you like it Anon!

~~~

Sendak sigh as he finally sat down got the frist time today and rubbed his face.

It was a very rough day for the Commander.

Today was your birthday and he wished that he was with you.

Or knew where you where.

He blamed himself for the last one.

He when away on a three day mission when you where a few weeks old and cane back to find his wife dead and his little Y/N gone.

There was a knock on the door and Sendak answered with a "come in". A young looking cadet came out in he looked scared to be in the Commander's Room.

"Can I help you, Cadet?"

"There was a small rebel ship caught in the quadrant of Syd Stella."

"So. . ."

"Well. . .ummmm. . .one of them said he know where your daughter is."

Sendak looked at cadet, who was looking at the ground.

"Tell the pilot we are going to the Syd Stella Quadrant."

~~~

You stood in the middle of a metal work shop covered in grease and oil. Your  master rolled his eyes at you and his wife giggle. You where always told that they had for you abandoned on the streets, and that you parents didn’t want you back you where a half Human Galra thing. You hair was a bright purple and you ears where tipped and you had gold-ish eye. What they didn’t tell you was that they where high ranking rebel agents working in the Underground and stole you from a Galra officers because of you oddness.

Someone ran in the shop.

“Sir!” he said “There is a Galra cruiser coming here!”

“What?” 

“Sendak is looking for her.”

“He will never find her!” Your Master growled.

“Guess again,” Sendak said pushing pass the man “there is no honor with liers and thief.”

“Like you have more honor!” Your master said “Kill people in the name of your empire, not thinking about their family and the aftermath of it.”

“You stole my child!” he said.

“Only after you killed mine.” he said grabbing you and putting a knife to your throat “Now I can return the favor!”

Your eyes got big. You where at first scared because there was Galra soldiers, now to learn the the one with the robotic arm is your father, and the man that have been raising you was going to kill you.

“You will not hurt Y/N!”

“Why not?” he said “You didn’t care when you killed my daughter. I wonder if you will care if I kill yours.”

“Please, don’t do things” you cried.

“Do you really think we kept you out of the kindness in our hearts?” he growled in your ear “we kept you because we knew he would come one day and then I can give him the some pain that he give me.”

“Please, save me!”  you said as he pushed the blade to your throat

Sendak’s eyes got big before he acted. He shot above you and something hit your old master and you ran to Sendak. The Commander picked you and and wrapped his arms around you in a big hug.

“Little Y/N.” he said.

“Papa” you said baring your face in his chest.”can we go away from here?”

“Of course.” he said and he lifted you up and cared you out of the room and away from your kidnapers.

[voltronhsm]

Little fic for Sendak being reunited with his 4-6 year old human galra hybrid daughter who was taken from him when she was a baby but she's scared of him and tries to runaway? I know you did a HC on it but I would really love it if you would do a little fic please and I luv your blog keep up the great work

(Of course whe can. We do prefer x readers or ship fanfic but we will write it for you. We are sorry if this fic isn't long we found it a hard concept to do.)"Commender Sendak!" I turn around and look at a galra soldier walking up to me. "Yes?" "We just got back the DNA scan about the half galra half human child." He looks at me nervously. "Yes? What about it?" He looks up at me but tries to avoid looking me in the eyes. "W-Well sir she turn out to be your child." Flashback of my time on earth come back. In my time back on earth i did the worst thing a galra soldier could have done ever. I fell in love. I fell in love with a woman and i really loved her dearly but galra soldiers can't be with someone so i had to leave her. I never new she was pregnant though. I feel tears well up in my eyes but i blink them away. Can't have someone see me crying. I stand straight and clear my troat. "Well bring me to it." "Of cours sir." He bows and walks forward to the room where the little half galra half human is. Here we are sir. I look at the kid. It has purple skin and hair like me but its skin is smooth and a lot less hairy then me. "You can go now." He bows at me. "Vrepit Saw Sir." And he walks away. I look at the little kid and walk towards it. The kid hears me walking towards it and turns it's head towards me. After it sees me it immediatly starts crying and screaming at me. "I don't know you!" It yells. "Stay away from me!" I reach out to grab the crying child but it hopes of the table and runs away from me. It hurts seeing it running away from me. It probably has never seen a galra so it shouldn't hurt as much as it does but it still hurts. Since the door is locked It can't go anywhere and curls up in the corner crying. I aproach it gently. "You don't have to be afraid of me i won't hurt you." It looks at me scared. "I don't belive you it yells." "No i would never hurt you you are my child" i tell it gently and i kneel beside it. It turns away from me. "You can't be my dad." I put my hand on its shoulder and at first it flinches but when it realises i am not hurting it, it relaxes. I smile at it "come with me i can prove it to you." I stand up and stick out my hand. It stares at it and hestantly grabs it. It might not be much but it is a start. I smile. Maybe having a kid is not that had.

[biglittletale]

Cinematic Openings

There is one thing I look for in visual storytelling in any medium, for any audience, and that is cinematic sequences that bring you into the story. Though how you approach that will differ according to the age of your readership. You can tell when a natural director is behind the camera so to speak.

The importance of a cinematic visual opening that brings the reader into the story cannot be undervalued. The opening that either grabs you by the throat or the heart brings you in for the duration. The prompt for this post came from a paper covering visual and written openings in storytelling I wrote while completing another degree, this one a BA Hons degree in sequential illustration, more than several years ago. In that paper I covered the visual opening for Maurice Sendak’s picture book, Outside Over There, and the written opening from Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. For this post, I’m covering three graphic novels by two author illustrators I admire very much, Jillian Tamaki and Ryan Andrews.

Graphic novels for me are films in still images, with even more opportunities for storytelling through panel and image scaling, story beats hit on through pause and movement from panel to panel and page to page, use of inserts, types of sequences and choice of moment and shot. Although I’ve been working intermittently for several years on Wolf Girl, and I’m not saying I won’t finish it someday, I’m answering a personal challenge in the kind of truth telling that can only be told in story. I’ve started this process by writing down the beginning of a new graphic novel with a working title of, Eel Stories. Graphic novels sit right smack in the middle for me of two great storytelling mediums, the illustrated book and film, both live video and animation.

Skim, written by Mariko Tamaki, pictures by Jillian Tamaki The first visual opening comes from the first graphic novel written and illustrated by two Canadian cousins called, Skim. It actually opens with the end papers which can be utilized to bring us into the story either graphically, or introducing setting or exposition. We, the viewers, are lead across a camera negative style image in blue-green following two girls through the woods and leading us out of the spread on the far right (not shown).

After a few pages of front matter and insert imagery, we’re still being lead to the very first page. Already we know that Skim keeps a diary and has a constant inner monologue that we’ll follow throughout the book. The flying leaves give us a sense of time of year, validated on the first spread.

And here we are again, still following the same girls introduced to us earlier in the end papers. Though now they are not silhouettes emerging out of shades of blue, but actual characters. We learn about Kim in her own words. We learn even more about her by how she looks, dresses and by her determined stride ever deeper into her story.

The panels take us through a series of point of view shots, wide shots and close ups and one very nice high angle shot looking down at both girls smoking cigarettes in the woods. There is an unexpected visual and implied aural transition between the close up of Skim’s cast and the bang of the spaghetti jar on the counter to the breaking spaghetti noodles over boiling water, referencing directly to the separation of her parents and her father’s heart attacks.

This spread opens first with a large bleed panel showcasing a framed photo of her parents smiling happily out of the frame surrounded by relics of Skim’s progression from small child to teenager. Below this are three panels giving us a view of the loneliness expressed by her mother’s downcast face at dinner and back at the sink washing dishes. In counterpoint to what seems like her mother’s aloofness, or maybe Skim’s desire, is the large upside down cup with the words, World’s Greatest Mom.

The right hand side of the spread opens up into a full page bleed showing a distraught young girl just dumped by her boyfriend being consoled by her best friend. The size of this image makes it hard for us to look away and experience her distress close up. Images of broken hearts drawn on the back of her hand in black marker pen continues the references to broken things and the heart. Skim’s outside viewpoint of this girl and her losses is reflected back to Skim’s own love lost experiences again and again throughout the story. In a couple more pages we will learn through Skim’s diary that the boy has killed himself. Are you drawn in yet?

This One Summer, words by Mariko Tamaki, pictures by Jillian Tamaki

While Skim’s visual opening bring us into the story by first learning something about her and her life before introducing the theme of loss and love, This One Summer opens with sound expressed through intentional placement on the page. The quality of the sound and rhythm is hinted at by the weight of the text and the vertical spacing between each word, crunch, crunch, crunch.

Jillian is not afraid of white space as you can see in this spread. The small panels feel like the quiet crunch of father’s footsteps carrying his sleeping child home in the dark. With one large image, their world is opened up to us. We don’t know yet how this relates to the story we are about to enter into, but we do know about the love and care of a parent carrying a sleeping child home to her bed in a house down a quiet wooded track.

The next spread takes us to a later time, hurtling through space on a road filled with cars rushing to unknown destinations. We know in one line, not completed on this spread, that where they are going is a place they have been going, ‘like… forever’. Jillian is a master of interpreting filmic moments such as the suggestion of time passing with frames showing the flickering light caused by passing cars and landscape. The transition from the opening spread to this one is quiet, clearly expressing the shift from the past to current time and the intimacy of a family traveling together to a known place full of memories.

Jumping from the closeness of the inside of the car to the whooshing landscape outside, we learn about Mom’s quiet alertness to her daughter and Dad’s jovial comments to break the tension between mother and daughter.

Now we’re brought full circle, in this present time, to that quiet wooded track leading to the house the family stays in every summer. Hinting that this summer won’t be like the other summers that have come before.

Our Blood-stained Roof, words and pictures by Ryan Andrews.

This story is part of an anthology of stories called, Nothing is Forgotten, written and drawn by Ryan Andrews. Jillian Tamaki’s visual opening approach focuses the viewer into cinematic subtle moments that introduce us to the characters and the world they inhabit and the situation emerging through more like a reveal. Ryan brings us in on the first page with a series of panels opening up like a camera tilting downward from the sky to the roof of the house. We know the situation right away. A flock of geese fell out of the sky, smacking heavily down on their roof.

In the first spread, the image setting the stage bleeds across both pages, we quickly realise the narrator’s voice belongs to a young boy. He is the first to see the ‘awful’ sight of the dead geese on the roof. We see his continued narration through his annotation introducing his family. The dialogue tells us his father has no room for wimpy boys and sees the horrible job of cleaning up the remains of the fallen geese as matter of fact. The two insert panels brings the viewer close into the boy’s face to read the horror of that day.

Struggling with how the dead geese were treated in death, collected in a large trash bag and put into garbage bin to be disposed of by the trash collectors, he persuades his brothers to help him bury them properly. All this against his father’s express orders. Sneaking out of the house after their parents have fallen asleep begins what is both quest and ghost story. The other stories in the anthology are just as good.

As illustrators for books, we are used to choosing what we hope are the right moments and viewpoints to best tell the story. In this regard, what we do is no different than the film maker. Our choices for scale; wide shot, full figure shot, medium shot, close-up, extreme close-up and or inserts, are the same. Other considerations are viewpoint, birds eye or worms eye, composition lines and direction, horizontal, vertical or diagonal movement. Questions we ask ourselves as we go include, when do we slow down, take in the subtle build up of tension or changes in temperature of the story. When does the pace move along at fast clip? When do we set up barriers to move the eye back into the spread and when do we lead it out to the next page?

My suggestions for those who want to develop their visual storytelling skills, consider what films and animations you watch. Watch them with an analytical eye. There is much to be learned from them. Take a scene and break it down into little thumbnails to explore how the story unfolds. You can take this into learning from books by other author illustrators. Analyse picture books, graphic novels or older fiction by drawing them out as small thumbnails. Map out the flow of how you move in and out of each spread or page, and the scale and viewpoints shown in each image and how they relate to each other in telling the story. Take a storyboard class. I recommend www.storyboardart.org. There is much you can access for free on the website to help develop your visual storytelling skills. Words and pictures is a specific kind of craft as is crafting visual stories for film and animation. And lastly, try out different scenarios for the same scene. Try taking one scene and change the mood or emotion of that scene by changing your visual approach.

[wordbookstores]

Read with Barack

The 44th President of America was our first black president, a pioneer in his “pivot to Asia” and already missed by many. But to us at WORD he will primarily be our book bea, reader in chief, and the coolest lit lover to ever helm the nation.

As he looks to having leisure for the first time in years, our booksellers look at his reading recs from the past eight and revel in our overlap and new additions to our TBR piles.

Christopher, Bookseller/ Cafe

I would love to recommend my personal hero Junot Diaz, it came out recently that Obama read Junot during some difficult times in his presidency. I'd recommend the books Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to start with!

Lydia, Book Fair Coordinator

I would definitely recommend the book he wrote for his daughters: Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters. It's a beautiful picture book that is a tribute to 13 Americans that shaped our nation but is also about how he sees the traits those Americans had within his own children and all American children.

Steven, Inventory Coordinator

I love Denis Johnson. He's in my top 3 favorite writers. That's one of the authors that I was pretty surprised by and happy to see the president reading. The Laughing Monsters is on top of my to read list.

Brian, Events Coordinator

I'll be reading all of Phil Klay's Redeployment because the title story is one of my favorites and our military engagement is so hidden from the population in general... plus Klay is a literary hunk. [Note the bookseller’s of WORD do not take responsibility for Brian’s man crush, though they do encourage it]

Hannah, Operations Director

One of my top five books ever is Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, a book I am currently gingerly rereading in the face of personal loss and the loss of our solid moral leader in our President. The fear between the hawk and Macdonald, and the peace they come to is incredibly detailed. Her dovetailed investigation into one of the unsung literary genius' of the World War II era is a wonderful tale of the dangers of secluding yourself and the saviors of nature. The fact that Obama enjoyed a beautifully crafted book so centered on empathy is one of the many things I love about him!

I'm also going to read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind because understanding our history as a grouped species seems deeply important at the moment.

Aubrey, Children’s Manager and Katelyn, Operations Supervisor:

We’re happy to see that Obama enjoyed Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, a super-addicting modern fairy tale, which features one of the most fascinating female characters I have ever encountered. This book is a beautiful meditation on love and marriage but also the personal struggle of womanhood in the public realm. I wonder if he saw all of the twists coming, or if the second half of the book left his jaw agape too.

Dan, Shift Supervisor

Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff-writer for the New Yorker, is one of my go-to experts of the science and politics of global climate change. The Sixth Extinction is a book looks at the broad impact that humans have had on the world, specifically on the sharp decline in species diversity. This book is a must-read for readers who follow the work of E. O. Wilson, Bill McKibben, and George Monbiot.

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon features a debate between characters Guitar in Freddie in Tommy's Barbershop over the real-life murder of Emmett Till. This scene stopped me in my tracks when I first read it in mid-2012, as protests around the country were mounting over the murder of Trayvon Martin. This book is a must-read to understand the times we're living in.

Kristina, Cafe Manager

Where the Wild Things Are - This was a favorite for me as a child and re-reading it as an adult I've realized how many important things Sendak was portraying. This story teaches that things shouldn't be judged by their appearance and that it is okay and encouraged to have a great and wild imagination. I would recommend this for any age because sometimes as we get older we need those reminders.

Chazz, Shift Supervisor

Looking at Obama’s list I am gonna read One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez because I enjoy magical realism and literature that's representative of different cultures from different authors and this novel is supposed to be the mac daddy of those two features.

I’d also recommend a favorite classic of mine, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I feel we live in a time period where we're ONLY taught how to win and how to be winners so much so that when inevitable failure occurs, especially with our dreams, it's hard for us to both accept and process.

Ashanti, Inventory Director

As booksellers we get the lucky privilege of reading soon-to-be-published works sometimes months in advance of the publication date. The frustrating flip side of this is you can talk about it as much as you want, but you can't put in people's hands until it actually, y'know, publishes. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was one of those titles that as soon as I picked it up, I knew I had something special in my hands. So rarely does a book absolutely floor me with it's "twist" AND speak to existing in a female body in contemporary society. Flynn's notion of "the cool girl" has radically shaped how I interact with other people.

The best kind of armchair travel, Finnegan's biography Barbarian Days is so compelling that even if you've never thought of dropping everything else in life to go surf, you'll at least understand the allure. Not only do we get beautiful locales, we get a narrator sensitive to exoticism and othering, questioning what his interactions mean to the people with whom he visits. Besides that, the prose is lush and carries you through the counter-cultural spike of the 60's, 70's, 80's with aplomb.

Camille, Events Director

A few Obama-recommended books dear to my heart belong to the still-developing African American literary tradition, and because they grapple so fearlessly with our American experiment they feel especially important now. Whenever someone in our community wants to read the electric, absurdist Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952) — a piece of the larger American cannon — I want to point them to Souls of Black Folk (W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903) to better understand Ellison's references, and after they've digested it I want them to follow up with the meditative coming-to-terms arrived at in The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin, 1963). Some of the most noteworthy contemporary authors in the tradition are still responding to these compasses.

Alison Gore, Operations Supervisor

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is a beautiful novel about three generations of a religious midwestern family and the various joys, griefs, and hurdles they face.

[onestarpicturebooks]

I hate this book. My daughter only "likes" it because I despise it in a funny way. If this book had been written by some unknown author, people would never have heard of it because it would have been trashed. This book makes absolutely no sense. I get that it's a dream, but dreams don't make good stories. It's easy to write a nonsensical book, anyone can do it. And if anyone can do it, then there is nothing special about it. I'm convinced that this is a joke from Sendak. "Hey Marty, I'm going to hand in this completely garbage manuscript and see if they publish it! Holy moly, they did! I'm so hot right now!" The art is good, but incredibly creepy. The story, as I mentioned is completely absurd and does not flow in any perceivable way. I feel dirty and negligent reading this to my children because it's just a bad example of literature. The book ends with a proclamation indicating that the story has logically led the reader to a specific conclusion, when no such logical progression exists at all. It's a literary slap in the face that we should not stand for. Nobody would stand for it in any other format. Imagine watching Star Wars and then being told at the very end, "And that's why we harvest lumber in a sustainable way!" You would turn to your neighbor and say "WTF?" That is this book. Please don't buy it.

Steven reviews In the Night Kitchen

[bostonfly]

When asked what books he recommended to his 18-year-old daughter Malia:

1. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer 2. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez 3. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing 4. The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston

In November 2014, Obama took a trip to D.C. independent bookstore Politics and Prose:

1. Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson 2. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad 3. Nora Webster, Colm Toibin 4. The Laughing Monsters, Denis Johnson 5. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, Evan Osnos 6. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Dr. Atul Gawande 7. Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms, Katherine Rundell 8. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan 9. Redwall series, Brian Jacques 10. Junie B. Jones series, Barbara Park 11. Nuts To You, Lynn Rae Perkins

In 2016, he released his list of summer vacation books:

1. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan 2. H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald 3. The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins 4. Seveneves, Neal Stephenson 5. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

He also released a list of his summer favorites back in 2015:

1. All That Is, James Salter 2. The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert 3. The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri 4. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates 5. Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow 6. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

In 2015, Obama shared some of his childhood favorites with a group of young students:

1. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson 2. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck 3. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald 4. Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak

According to the president’s Facebook page and a 2008 interview with the New York Times, these titles are among his most influential forever favorites:

1. Moby Dick, Herman Melville 2. Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson 3. Song Of Solomon, Toni Morrison 4. Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch 5. Gilead, Marylinne Robinson 6. Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam 7. The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton 8. Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois 9. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene 10. The Quiet American, Graham Greene 11. Cancer Ward, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 12. Gandhi’s autobiography 13. Working, Studs Terkel 14. Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith 15. Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith 16. All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren

As a devoted reader, the president has been linked to a lengthy list of novels and poetry collections over the years:

1. Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese 2. To the End of the Land, David Grossman 3. Purity, Jonathan Franzen 4. A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipau 5. Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff 6. Lush Life, Richard Price 7. Netherland, Joseph O’Neill 8. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie 9. Redeployment, Phil Klay 10. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison 11. Plainsong, Kent Haruf 12. The Way Home, George Pelecanos 13. What Is the What, Dave Eggers 14. Philosophy & Literature, Peter S Thompson 15. Collected Poems, Derek Walcott 16. In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck 17. Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn 18. The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin 19. Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling

Books About Other Presidents:

1. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris 2. John Adams, David McCullough 3. Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, Fred Kaplan 4. Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, Jonathan Alte 5. FDR, Jean Edward Smith 6. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin 7. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln

Informative Reads:

1. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America, Thomas L Friedman 2. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, Steve Coll 3. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels 4. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert A. Caro

Non-Fiction Titles:

1. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Evan Osnos 2. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman 3. Moral Man And Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr 4. A Kind And Just Parent, William Ayers 5. The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria 6. Lessons in Disaster, Gordon Goldstein 7. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari 8. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin 9. Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American, Richard S Tedlow 10. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo

[allbestnet]

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[galraluver]

Single father Sendak doesn't know what to do when his half human daughter gets her cycle for the first time. I thought it would be funny and maybe even cute.

Sure thing! I don't think he would necessarily be completely clueless bc he had a human mate, but I definitely have a pretty good idea of what would happen. I tried to make it as hilarious towards the beginning but it ends up as being heartwarming since I wasn't able to come up with a hilarious ending, I hope that's okay with you 😅

_________________________________________

Sendak would do anything for his daughter and everyone knew it, if anyone so much as made her cry they would wish that they had never been born. (Y/n) was Sendak's little girl and he would do anything for her; he raised her with a mixture of gentleness, support, responsibility, stability, boundaries and how to respect others. He never treated her harshly because he didn't want her to grow up hating him; it would kill him if she resented him, although he wasn't the perfect parent and he definitely made a few mistakes along the way. Sendak had to raise (Y/n) on his own ever since his wife died during childbirth, before (M/n) took her last breath he promised her that he would raise their daughter to be a wonderful person. Since (Y/n) was half human she had a few physical human traits and aged at a rate that was normal for human children, and she looked mostly galra except for her human shaped ears, her (E/c) eyes and (H/c) hair.

The years flew by in what felt like an instant to Sendak and it wasn't long before (Y/n) turned thirteen years old, he could never regret being a father and he always had the inkling that his late wife had been looking over them the entire time. (Y/n) loved her father even though he could be a little strict sometimes, he was always there for her no matter what she was going through. She knew her father used to be a commander in the galra empire and she grew up knowing that her mother was an angel, when she was twelve her father told her the truth because he thought she was old enough to handle it; they both avoided each other for a couple of days and (Y/n) blamed herself for her mother's death, but Sendak comforted her, assuring her that she shouldn't regret something that she couldn't control. Sendak wasn't exactly sure how much of (Y/n) was human and there was one thing he hoped wouldn't happen to her, unfortunately his luck ran out one day in particular. (Y/n) hadn't felt very good since she woke up but when her father asked her about it she assured him that she would be fine, alas as the hours passed her lower abdomen began to hurt worse.

She remembered when she received a couple of anatomy lessons from her governess the previous year, one about galra anatomy and the other about human anatomy. Ever since she was little she knew that she was half human, one of her favorite things was when her father told her about back when he and (M/n) were getting to know each other. When the pain became too much for her to handle (Y/n) went to the bathroom and that was when she saw it, blood stains on the crotch of her underwear. During her human anatomy lesson she'd been taught about menstruation, unfortunately she wasn't paying much attention to that part of the lesson; she started to cry while she sat on the toilet because she felt really emotional all of a sudden, then it dawned on her why she'd felt strange for the past week. It took her a few minutes to calm down, then (Y/n) reached for her phone so she could text her father and thankfully it wasn't long before he arrived at the bathroom to help her in any way he could, even though he wouldn't actually be in there to help her.

“Are you alright in there, (Y/n)?” Sendak questioned while he stood on the opposite side of the bathroom door, speaking loud enough for his daughter to hear him; when he received the text about her bleeding all of a sudden he nearly had a heart attack, although she needed him then more than ever.

“No, I'm bleeding! I- I think that I'm dying! I'm sorry, daddy!” (Y/n) replied loudly enough for her father to hear before she broke down crying again; she was scared because she knew that spontaneous bleeding always meant death if it wasn't stopped, and she wasn't entirely sure where she was bleeding from.

Sendak didn't know how to respond or what to do; he remembered that his late wife had periods every month, but all he remembered was providing pads for her and that she bled for one week every month. He just stood there in front of the bathroom door, attempting to remember what (M/n) had to do whenever she got her period. Cramps were involved and they always cuddled after she came out of the bathroom, but as to what (M/n) did in the bathroom he didn't know. (Y/n) knew that her father was still standing in front of the bathroom door, most likely trying to figure out how to help her. She should have seen it coming, in fact she should have known that she would get a period, but Sendak never saw fit to explain it to her because he didn't think that she would actually start her period.

“I'm not going to die, am I?” (Y/n) asked loudly enough for her father to hear again, her voice wavering as she spoke; she really did feel like she was going to die and it scared her.

“No, you're not going to die. What you're going through is perfectly normal, sort of.” Sendak assured her, feeling guilty for not warning his daughter that she might get her period.

“Perfectly normal?! How the quiznack is bleeding normal?” (Y/n) questioned firmly; she was pissed that he didn't tell her that she would just randomly start bleeding one day without getting injured, although to be fair he never thought she would actually get her period seeing as she was only half human.

“What you're experiencing is called menstruation, your mother went through it every month until she got pregnant. Stay there, I'm going to go see if I still have any of her pads.” Sendak said before he left, hoping to find the rest of (M/n's) pads that he'd packed away.

(Y/n) was even more confused than before; first she started bleeding when she went to the bathroom and then her father told her it was normal, then he went to go get something called pads. While she sat on the toilet Sendak went into his daughter's room so he could get some new underwear for her, he figured that she might have bled in the ones she'd been wearing and she couldn't get them herself. The next thing he did was go into his own room so he could open his closet; Sendak found one of the boxes that held some of (M/n's) things and he found an open package of pads, he took the package out before he put the box back on the top shelf. He stuffed the clean underwear in the package alongside the pads so that it would be easier for him to give everything to (Y/n) without actually going into the bathroom. (Y/n) cleaned the blood off of herself with some toilet paper, unfortunately she was still bleeding.

“I found some of your mother's pads and I got some new underwear for you. Can I open the door a little and slide them to you?” Sendak said when he returned to the bathroom, speaking calmly so that he wouldn't further upset her.

“Go ahead.” (Y/n) replied as she gave him permission to slide the pads to her; she was embarrassed about the whole situation, but she was grateful that he wasn't the type to sneak a peek; no self respecting galra would do such a thing and (Y/n) knew it, it was why she trusted him so much.

Sendak turned his head away from the bathroom door when he cracked it open, then he knelt down and slid the package of pads across the floor. He closed the door before he stood up again in favor of pacing back and forth, the whole situation about (Y/n) getting her period was nerve-wracking for him because it meant his little girl was growing up. (Y/n) picked up the package of pads and took the new underwear out, she decided to change her underwear before she tried using a pad; she tossed her old underwear in the hamper so it could get washed later. Her heart sank when she pulled a pad out of the package and opened it up, the scent and the texture were almost like a diaper. (Y/n's) face flushed in embarrassment; she was thirteen years old, she didn't understand how human women could stand wearing pads.

“Why are they like diapers?” (Y/n) complained while she held the pad; it definitely wasn't an actual diaper, but the thought of having to wear pads still made her feel embarrassed.

“From what your mother told me it's to soak up the blood, I don't remember much more than that. Just wear the pad, I don't want you leaving blood everywhere you sit.” Sendak responded with a frustrated sigh.

(Y/n) grimaced before she read the instructions on the package and removed the pad from its individual packaging so she could stick it in her clean underwear. She wiped herself again, then she stood up and pulled her underwear and pants up; she absolutely hated the feeling of the pad between her legs, unfortunately she would have to wear them until she stopped bleeding. She took something for the pain before she quickly flushed the toilet, put the individual pad package in the trash can, placed the rest of the pads in one of the bathroom drawers and washed her hands before she opened the door and turned the lights off. (Y/n) felt humiliated to have to wear a pad, although she knew that if she didn't then her blood would be on everything she sat on and ruin her pants. She winced in pain when she felt a particularly bad cramp wrack through her lower abdomen, it was apparent that her cramps would last longer than she thought.

“Tell me the truth, what am I going through?” (Y/n) hesitantly asked her father nervously, fearing that she would somehow make him angry.

“You're going through what humans refer to as a ‘period’. You will bleed for about an earth week every earth month. I apologize for not telling you sooner, kit; I didn't think that you would get it.” Sendak apologized as he stepped towards (Y/n) and gently hugged her, wishing that he remembered all of what (M/n) did during her period.

“Am I going to live?” (Y/n) questoned; she was on the verge of tears again as she processed what she'd been told, it was a lot to take in.

“Yes, you're going to live.” Sendak reassured her with a sigh; she stunk of fear and blood, but his little girl needed him and his instincts to comfort her were strong.

“Can- can we cuddle like back when I was little? I feel vulnerable and I'm scared. I know that I'm not little anymore, but I really want to cuddle with you like when I was younger.” (Y/n) inquired, sniffling a little as she spoke whilst trying her best not to start crying again.

“Of course we can, my little one.” Sendak purred affectionately before he knelt down and carefully picked her up so he could cradle her against his chest; (Y/n) was still small compared to him, it made it easy for him to cradle her in his arms.

Feeling her father's warmth made (Y/n) feel sleepy, she'd forgotten how much she missed being carried around by him. She subconsciously began purring after Sendak carried her to his room and laid them both in his blanket nest; from her understanding about humans, human parents didn't cuddle with their children once they reached a certain age, she was glad that she had been raised on New Daibazaal where it was common for families to rest together in the same nest for comfort. Sendak ignored the bloody smell coming from his daughter as much as possible, she needed him to comfort her and he was going to do just that. He felt a wave of sadness sweep through him because he missed his wife, she would have known how to help their daughter more than he could, and he also felt sad because within the upcoming few years his little girl would be all grown up, move away and start a life of her own; he wanted her to have a successful life once she grew up, although it didn't mean that he couldn't miss her being young. (Y/n) felt safe and warm curled up next to her father the same way she did when she was a little girl; it was mostly the hormones that made her want to cuddle with her only parent because she felt vulnerable, but during that moment she didn't care, eventually her period would end and she could return to her normal life for a while.

[ao3feed-voltronlegendarydefender]

Space Rebels Without A Clue

read it on the AO3 at Space Rebels Without A Clue

by Lenni51074

You are the daughter of two of the Galaxy Garrison’s most decorated leaders, fighting to be recognised and respected for your skills rather than your lineage. Your adversary is a hot-headed rebel loner with a penchant for ignoring orders and doing things his own way. The two of you also happen to bring out both the best and the worst in one another.

What happens when the two of you discover that you are life-bonded? Pure, unadulterated chaos, that's what.

Throw in an unexpected trip to the far reaches of the galaxy with some fellow cadets, mind-blowing intergalactic technology, a world-weary Space Dad, and a temperamental robotic space lion that ‘accidentally’ traps the two of you together, and life as you know it just got a whole lot weirder.

But eventually, you and Keith realise that you would follow each other to the moon and back. Well, you’re life-bonded, so you don’t really have a choice, do you?

Words: 7098, Chapters: 2/?, Language: English

Series: Part 1 of To The Moon And Back

Fandoms: Voltron: Legendary Defender

Rating: General Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: F/M

Characters: Keith (Voltron), Lance (Voltron), Shiro (Voltron), Pidge (Voltron), Hunk (Voltron), Allura (Voltron), Coran (Voltron), Space Mice (Voltron), Zarkon (Voltron), Sendak (Voltron), Iverson (Voltron)

Relationships: Keith (Voltron)/Reader, Lance (Voltron)/Reader, Shiro (Voltron)/Reader

Additional Tags: Enemies to Friends, Not another soulmate AU, We got life-bonds instead, Slow Burn, But not too slow because who has time for that?, Fluff, Flirting, But Keith is bad at flirting, It's Lance who's the flirt, Mostly Canon Compliant, Some angst because Voltron that's why, I say Vol, You say Tron, Emo space baby, It's meeeeee Keeeeeeeeith, Keith is clueless, Reader isn't much better tbh, Sarcasm is how you both hug, Keith makes me soft, Hunk is a hopeless romantic, Shiro is number one space dad, The Red Lion ships it, hunk ships it, Lance most definitely does not ship it, BFF Lance McLain

read it on the AO3 at Space Rebels Without A Clue

[chestnutpost]

Michelle Obama Shares The Children’s Books She Used To Read To Her Daughters

This post was originally published on this site

Former first lady Michelle Obama has often discussed her love for reading and is now a worldwide best-selling author with her memoir Becoming. And when it comes to her picks for little readers, she keeps it classic.

In an appearance on Today’s video series “Open Book with Jenna Bush Hager,” in which notable people chat about their reading habits and recommendations, Obama said the first character she remembers loving as a child was Pippi Longstocking, the red-headed adventurous main character created by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren.

“I was really fascinated with this strong little girl that was the center of everything, and she was almost magical in a way,” she said. “She was stronger and tougher than anyone. She had super-human strength, and I got a kick out of her.”

Rick Kern via Getty Images

Former first lady Michelle Obama remembers loving a certain “magical” children’s book character as a kid. 

Michelle has mentioned her love for the character before. In December, she told the New York Times, “Pippi Longstocking was my girl.” She said it might be surprising that the character became a role model “for a black girl on the South Side of Chicago,” but at the time, main characters who looked like her were rare. That’s why when she had kids, she made it a priority to find characters that resembled her girls. A family favorite in their home, she said at the time, was The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats.

Michelle listed some classics when host Jenna Bush Hager asked her what titles she used to read to her daughters, the now 20-year-old Malia and 17-year-old Sasha, when they were little. She said their reading time consisted of titles like Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown or “any Dr. Seuss book” (Theodor Seuss Geisel, the author behind the Dr. Seuss titles, remains an icon in the children’s book world despite a problematic past).

What about former President Barack Obama? Michelle said he especially loves Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, an unsurprising choice considering the couple used to read it at the Easter Egg Roll event at the White House.

Pool via Getty Images

Michelle said former president Barack Obama loves the kids’ book Where the Wild Things Are, a title the couple used to read at the Easter Egg Roll event at the White House. 

During her time as the first lady, Michelle read the picture books Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? at various events. Late last year, she told the New York Times she reread The Grapes of Wrath and Life of Pi with her daughters.

Many other celebrities and leaders have shared their little ones’ preferences for children’s books. In September, People reported that Prince William told the author and illustrator of The Gruffalo that their book was “a big hit” at home with his three kids.

Actress Jennifer Garner has a “Books with Birdie” series (Birdie is her family’s dog) made up of videos that show Garner reading children’s books like Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson and The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak.

The post Michelle Obama Shares The Children’s Books She Used To Read To Her Daughters appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://thechestnutpost.com/news/michelle-obama-shares-the-childrens-books-she-used-to-read-to-her-daughters/

[vxltrxn-imagines]

It's me again lol for the Sendak reunited with his preteen human galra hybrid (like Keith) daughter. I was thinking that they would meet like in the middle of a battle or something like that and when Sendak sees her sees that she looks like his secret human wife(?) and realizes that she's his daughter, she's tries to run away but he knocks her out and takes her back to his ship and when she wakes up he tells her that he's her father and she has a complete denial breakdown and tries to get away?

Ooooh okay. Thank you for explaining a bit more of this to me. I appreciate it!

Okay. I think I have a slight idea on how to write this. It might take me a little while to write(since I still need to do a bit more research on Sendak) and I’m guessing this is a reader insert?

-Mod Shiro

[teachanarchy]

More than 40 years ago, my seventh grade English teacher began the year by telling us that we were definitely not allowed to read “The Catcher in the Rye” because we weren’t “ready” for it. So naturally we all went out and read it immediately.

I told this story to my son when he was a seventh grader. I meant it as a funny story, and I pointed out that it had taken me years to appreciate that teacher’s pedagogic strategy. But then my son read the book himself right away. The mere long-ago echo of a possible ban was enough to make it interesting.

Adults have been known to worry a great deal about the possible corrupting influence of the printed word on children. If you look at the list of “frequently challenged children’s books” maintained by the American Library Association Office of Intellectual Freedom, you will see a wide range of touchy topics. (A book is “challenged” when someone tries to get it removed from a library or a school curriculum.)

Books can get challenged because they involve magic (Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling), or because they offend religious sensibilities. “A Wrinkle in Time,” by Madeleine L’Engle, has been challenged as both overly and insufficiently religious. Some books are challenged because they depict children behaving, well, childishly (Junie B. Jones, the heroine of a series of books by Barbara Park, gets in trouble for using words like “stupid.”) So adults worry that books may be bad for children’s morals and for their manners.

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“I think it happens in the U.S. more than in some other countries,” said Leonard Marcus, a children’s book historian and critic. “There’s a squeamishness in the U.S. about body parts I think that goes back to the Puritan tradition, and has never completely died out.” He pointed to the controversy around Maurice Sendak’s 1970 children’s book “In the Night Kitchen,” which centered on the illustrations showing the naked — and anatomically correct — little boy whose nocturnal adventures make up the story.

“Anything with any sexual content is likely to attract attention and hostility,” said Joan Bertin, the executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship. “Regardless of the nature of its message — whether it is deemed to be helpful or instructive or insightful in some way or just merely titillating — people don’t make that distinction.”

In fact, banned book lists can be a great resource for parents looking for books that teach kids about the world and themselves.

When your children read books that have been challenged or banned, you have a double opportunity as a parent; you can discuss the books themselves, and the information they provide, and you can also talk about why people might find them troubling. Here are a few books that are often challenged, yet present great opportunities for children to learn.

“IT’S PERFECTLY NORMAL: CHANGING BODIES, GROWING UP, SEX AND SEXUAL HEALTH” BY ROBIE HARRIS. Your children should have age-appropriate books to help them learn about bodies, and you can find plenty of those on any list of banned or challenged books. This book, with illustrations by Michael Emberley has become a classic of information about bodies, development, and sexuality. First published in 1994, it has now gone through several editions and updates. Ms. Harris, who also wrote “It’s So Amazing,” for younger children, and “It’s Not the Stork,” for those even younger, says most of the challenges to her books have revolved around issues of gay sexuality, though masturbation and contraception can also be flash points. (She is also a good friend, and I have helped at times with pediatric questions on some of these and other books.)

“CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS” BY DAV PILKEY. This series, which has long been legendary for its compelling power over small boys, has sometimes been at the top of the most-challenged list, perhaps in part because (surprise) there are many jokes about undergarments. These books will definitely help children appreciate that bodies and their functions can be profoundly funny and silly (actually, most children seem to know this anyway).

In addition to being attacked for their potty-mouthed humor, the “Captain Underpants” books have come under scrutiny because they are full of children playing tricks and disobeying and generally creating havoc; again, as with Junie B. Jones and her big mouth, there is this strange sense that children need stories about obedient model children.

“ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET” BY JUDY BLUME. In this widely beloved novel by Judy Blume, originally published in 1970, but still on the most-challenged list, the narrator is deeply preoccupied with the when and how of menstruation. An other Judy Blume perennial, “Deenie,” which came out in 1973, is about a young girl struggling with scoliosis and the brace she has to wear, but it was the most attacked of her books, Ms. Blume says, because it included references to masturbation.

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   Much of the controversy about Judy Blume’s books centered around information about puberty. “I think the feeling was, if my child doesn’t read this, my child won’t know about it or it’s not going to happen to my child,” said Ms. Blume. “I used to get up there on stage and say, I have news for you, your kids are going to go through puberty whether you like it or not, so why not help them — it’s going to happen whether they read my books or no books or somebody else’s book.”

Ms. Blume said that often when adult tourists come into Books & Books Key West, the independent bookstore that she helped found and where she often works, they want to tell her how much they learned from her novels. “It’s like, thank you, thank you, my mother never told me anything and I wouldn’t have known anything without your books.”

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Ms. Blume said she recently sold a copy of “And Tango Makes Three,” the 2005 book by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell about two male penguins who hatch an egg and raise the baby together (you’ll find it on the list of challenged picture books) to a man who had just adopted a little girl with his male partner. “That’s my new thrill as a bookseller,” she said, “to put that right book into the hands of someone who appreciates what it’s saying.”

“I AM JAZZ” BY JESSICA HERTHEL AND JAZZ JENNINGS.  This 2014 picture book about being transgender has been at the center of controversy recently with some schools coming under attack for using it in the curriculum, and others arguing that it can be helpful in teaching tolerance.

Some banned and challenged books upset adults because they teach children that the world is a complicated and sometimes disturbing place, in which good people sometimes behave badly and evil sometimes goes unpunished. This category stretches from modern young adult “problem novels” to great classics of literature. What makes a book “disturbing” often is tied to what makes it interesting or important or worth reading.

If you look over lists of frequently challenged young adult books, you’ll find everything from “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier (challenged for violence and for scenes of masturbation) to Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl” (challenged for sexual explicitness and for depressing tragic outcome). Also on the list — Alice Walker’s “Color Purple” (challenged for sexual explicitness and bad language), and of course, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” which last month was removed from classrooms and libraries in schools in Accomack County, Va., along with “To Kill a Mockingbird,” when a parent complained that the books contained racial slurs.

Those are all books I came across and read on my own, growing up, and yes, they were disturbing, in places, and yes, there were things I didn’t completely understand, and basically skipped over to return to on later readings. (This is a very valuable skill possessed by most precociously bookish children.) I was never forbidden any book by my book-loving parents (we all know what the result would have been), and I don’t think I ever tried to stop my children from reading any book (we all know what the result would have been), though I occasionally said something like, “I think that one may creep you out, so maybe you want to wait.”

One of the jobs — and joys — of parenthood is recommending books at what you think are the right ages. On of the corollaries is that sometimes you get it wrong and your child is not ready — or is much farther along than you thought. Mostly, as a parent, you should be glad and proud if your child is a reader.

In fact, many of the books which are on the most-challenged lists are also frequently assigned as classics (and being assigned may be what gets you challenged). Common Sense Media has a nice list of books on this border between classic and controversial, suggesting parents and kids read them together and discuss why people find them disturbing.

As a parent, I was dazzled when my daughter’s high school summer reading assignment was to choose a book “out of your comfort zone,” however the student chose to define it. Because that is, of course, what literature does, and part of the glorious freedom (and human right) of literacy is the opportunity to journey with words well beyond your comfort zone.