#Rich mans world trilogy

[hiddenwritingsintheworld]

Rich Mans World Flow Chart...

I've been working on a flow chart for the entire trilogy of Rich Mans World and I want to share it with you guys so bad but I cant because it contains spoilers :'( UGH!

It also makes me realize I definitely should always make a flow chart of characters whenever I write a series!

[pickingupmymercedes]

Longer than I care to admit 1/3 - Lewis Hamilton

A special trilogy part of 1K Jukebox Event

Longer than I care to admit (pt.1) | Even when I said I didn't (pt.2) | When hating you was all I wanted (pt.3).

song: You're in love - Taylor Swift

pairing: Lewis Hamilton x Reader!

genre: there's angst but it'll be worth it (promise)

wordcount: +1k

As always, I'm open for feedback, come say hi!

______________________________________________________________

This city never truly slept, and neither did its people.

That’s one of the things I’ve learned to accept about Los Angeles, the way it hums even in the dead of night. The cars, the voices, the low bass thumping from the hills—it all reminds me that everyone here is chasing something.

Fame, money, love, escape.

Me though? I’m just chasing quietness.

“Do you want to take the canyon road?” I ask, keeping my eyes on the road but sneaking a glance at Lewis. He looks good, but that’s nothing new.

The man could wear a potato sack and make it look like part of his Dior collection.

“Yeah,” he says, his voice low, like the weight of the city is still clinging to him. “Let’s get away from all this.”

I nod, not bothering to fill the silence. We’ve been driving for twenty minutes already, leaving the lights and noise behind.

It’s funny—most people would think Lewis would crave excitement all the time, but moments like this prove otherwise. He likes the quiet.

Craves it, even.

And honestly? I do too.

But I know what this drive really is. It’s his way of sitting with whatever’s been on his mind lately.

He’s been doing that a lot more these days, sitting with things.

It’s the way he glances at me when he thinks I’m not paying attention, the thoughtful silences that stretch just a bit longer than usual. I can feel him realizing it, slowly but surely.

It’s the casual comments he drops—“You’d love Europe this time of year” or “My house in Monaco’s been too quiet without you”—that hang in the air a beat too long.

Indirect invitations, nudges toward a conversation I keep dodging.

He doesn’t push. But he’s persistent in his own way. A suitcase for me always in the trunk, Roscoe’s bed permanently stationed in the corner of my living room.

He’s falling deeper.

We’re falling deeper.

And that scares the hell out of me.

“Do you ever stop thinking?” I finally ask, breaking the silence. I don’t look at him, but I know he’s smiling. I can feel it.

“Just enjoying the drive,” he says, his voice light but not convincing.

 “You? Enjoying a drive when you’re not behind the wheel? That’s a plot twist.” I say with a snort.

He chuckles, and it warms the space between us. “I don’t mind when it’s you.”

“Charmer” I tease.

He laughs, a deep, rich sound that makes me smile. “For you. Always”

“Right” I say, glancing at him with a playful smirk.

But as we keep driving, I feel his gaze linger on me longer.

And I know that look. It’s the same one that’s been sneaking up on me more often these days. It’s soft and thoughtful, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say it’s love.

Scratch that. I do know better. And that’s the problem.

“What’s that look for?” I ask, breaking the tension before it drowns me.

“Just thinking” he says softly.

I raise an eyebrow. “About?”

“How lucky I am that you’re a decent driver.”

I roll my eyes, but I can’t help but smile. “Ridiculous.”

But deep down, I know he’s deflecting, just like I am.

In a while we pull into a small lookout point, one of those hidden gems you only find if you know where to look. The city stretches out below us, a million lights twinkling under a blanket of stars.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I say, cutting the engine. My eyes on the view, although I can feel him watching me.

“Yeah” he murmurs.

There’s a weight to his voice, and I know he’s not talking about the view.

He does this sometimes, makes me feel like the only thing in the world worth looking at. It’s overwhelming.

Too much and not enough, all at once.

“Sometimes I forget how nice it is to just stop and take it all in,” I say, trying to ground myself.

He nods, but the tension between us doesn’t ease. If anything, it gets worse, wrapping around us in the silence.

I know he’s waiting. Waiting for the right moment to say something. To let the weight of whatever’s on his mind finally spill out.

The drive back is quieter, the kind of silence that isn’t uncomfortable but still carries weight. When we finally pull into my driveway, I sigh. “Home sweet home,” I say lightly, though there’s a flicker of reluctance in my chest.

We go through the motions—shoes off, keys on the counter, jackets draped over chairs. It’s familiar, easy.

And that’s one of the things that scares me the most. How easy it’s all become.

“Do you ever just go straight to bed?” Lewis asks, leaning against the bathroom doorway, arms crossed over his chest like he owns the place.

Spoiler: he kind of does.

I couldn’t even count anymore the times he’d left LA swearing he wouldn’t come back, wouldn’t let himself do it again.

And every time, he found himself at my door again. My home feeling more like his than anywhere else.

His clothes hanging in my closet. Roscoe’s leash by the kitchen counter. Even his scent clinged to the sheets long after he’d left.

I smirk as I peel off my clothes, not bothering to be modest. “You know the answer to that.”

“Yeah, I do,” he says, his eyes trailing over me, a teasing smirk playing on his lips. “Still find it funny, like the bed will disappear if you don’t shower first.”

I grab my towel and give him a pointed look. “I don’t like feeling gross when I sleep. Some of us have standards, Hamilton.”

He chuckles, stepping aside as I head into the shower. “Standards, huh? And yet you still let me in your bed.”

I laugh as I step under the water. “Barely.”

When I come out, wrapped in one of his old T-shirt, that still smells faintly of him, I find him already in bed, scrolling through his phone, naked chest and tattoo on full display.

His braids are loose and the soft glow of the screen highlights his features in a way that makes my heart squeeze.

“Feel better?” he asks without looking up.

“Much,” I reply, but instead of getting into bed, I head for the door. “Be right back. Tea?”

He smiles. “Always.”

A few minutes later, I return with two mugs, handing him one before settling in beside him.

My feet, as usual, find his legs, and he groans. “Jesus, Y/n, your feet are freezing.”

“Don’t be a baby,” I tease, taking a sip of my tea. “You’re warm enough for both of us.”

I need the joke to deflect how I knew exactly how he liked his tea, down to the perfect balance of milk and sugar.

It was such a small thing, but yet, I knew it hit him every time.

We sit in comfortable silence, his arm around me, my head resting on his chest. His heartbeat is steady, grounding me in a way nothing else really does.

“Early flight tomorrow?” I ask, my voice casual.

“Yeah.”

I nod, my gaze dropping to my tea.

The words sit heavy on my tongue, but I can’t bring myself to say them.

Not yet. Not until he does.

So instead, I just lean into him, letting the steady rise and fall of his chest lull me into a sense of safety as he presses a soft kiss to the top of my head.

Someday, I think. Someday, I’ll be brave enough.

Just not tonight.

_____________________________________________________________

TAGLIST - @saturnssunflower @xoscar03 @chocolatediplomatdreamerzonk @itsmrshamilton @vicurious28

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@priopp123 @strqirlhrts @hmmmmm-01 @bisexual-babygirl-mj @bebesobrielo

@hiireadstuff @f1-football-fiend @unlikelystay

If you’d like to be added to my taglist you can leave a comment or send me a dm/ask.

[zepskies]

August Fic Recs

Hey, friends!

I got inspired by the awesome monthly rec posts that @winchestergirl2 and @deanwinchesterswitch put together, and decided to try this out. I might not do this every month, but we'll see! lol I now realize how much time and effort this takes, so to you guys who do this on the regular, I salute you! 🫡 😂

Note: If the author provided a summary, I'll include it. If not, and if it's untitled, I'll include the first line of the story. If it's a series and the author provided a series masterlist link in the chapter post, I'll also include it. MINORS BEWARE: a lot of this is 18+ content!

Supernatural

Dean Winchester x Reader:

@mxltifxnd0m -

Cute Glasses

Boyfriend Headcanons

@dewwinchester -

Stitches Summary: Dean texts you for help, and you drop everything for him.

@dean-winchester-is-a-warrior -

Things Learned and Unlearned | Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15 Summary: Y/N has spent her life trying to outrun her mother's reputation. When she meets the rich and successful playboy, Dean Winchester, how quickly can he get her to stop running?

Every Fucking Time Summary: You want to help Dean, but he knows you can't.

@talltalesandbedtimestories -

Just a Little Spice Summary: Dean likes to spice things up, but it would be nice if he didn’t have to put his life in danger in the process.

@luci-in-trenchcoats -

Oh, Baby Summary: When Dean is cursed on a hunt and turned into a baby, the reader has to take care of him along with Sam. Dean however, is a bit more adult than they might realize…

A Shirtless Winchester

Imagine...Breaking Dean Out of Jail

@zeppelinlvr -

"Better?" "Much" Summary: waking up next to Dean and getting ready with him.

@ohsc -

Help You

@rizlowwritessortof -

Sweet Escape - Part 1, Part 2 Summary: What happens when a friend jokingly does a spell at your birthday party to bring your cardboard standup of Dean Winchester to life?

@deans-queen -

Stolen Moments Summary: Y/N finds herself unable to resist capturing a rare, peaceful moment of Dean Winchester sleeping in a motel room. But when Dean wakes up and catches her in the act, what starts as an innocent photo op quickly turns into an intimate encounter.

Sweet Distractions Summary: Reader (Y/N) is at the bunker, working on an essay for her Child Development class. When Dean comes to check on her, his bad-boy charm quickly becomes a distraction she can’t resist, no matter how hard she tries.

@tofics -

Let There Be Light Summary: You, Dean and Sam are fighting America's monsters together. Coming from a long line of hunters, you fit right in with the Winchester boys, despite having been raised entirely different from the two. Where you were brought up with love and care, John raised Sam and Dean with rules and obedience. Seeing what Dean does for the world, you decide it's time that he gets his own share of love...

@jackles010378 -

A Sweet Treat Summary: Dean gets a little excited when Y/N makes his favourite treat.

Dean Winchester x OC:

@rizlowwritessortof -

Remember Me - Part 4

@spnbabe67 -

Girls, Girls, Girls Summary: While on a witch hunt Dean gets hit with a spell. Later at the hotel, Dean feels the effects of the spell and Tori has to help him through it.

It Takes Two Summary: Dean and Tori get roped into doing a pregnancy yoga session and he reminisces on how he found out she was pregnant. (Dean's POV)

Comfortember Day 7: Sick As A Dog Summary: When Dean wakes up sick, it's up to Tori to make him feel better again.

Comfortember 2023 Master List

The Broken Heart Trilogy Master List

Sam Winchester x Reader:

@ohsc -

Delicate

Untitled Drabble - "She wouldn't stop giggling."

The Boys

Soldier Boy x Reader:

@kaleldobrev -

Yes Ma'am (Soldier Boy x Plus-size!Reader) Summary: Macho Man Ben never thought he’d ever take orders from a woman; but now he does so with a smile (aka Ben is whipped and he doesn’t care).

After Everything Summary: You and Ben have a heart-to-heart.

@artyandink -

The Art of Heresy - Prequel, Chapter 1, Chapter 2 Summary: Modern day, 2022, and you have no clue what’s going on. You knew what you went through. You knew it was real, but why were there people trying to convince you that everything that happened to you wasn’t real. Hell, you called bullshit. But you get your chance to fight back when you get a call at your door.

Billy Butcher x Reader:

@lady-z-writes -

Untitled Drabble - "Butcher stumbles in the office. Haggard, nothing new."

Tracker

Russell Shaw x Reader:

@impala-dreamer -

Don't Mention It

@luci-in-trenchcoats -

M.I.A. Summary: When Colter Shaw calls the reader for help on a job, she thinks nothing of helping out. Only he never shows up and Colter may have just become the latest disappearance in this small town. It’s up to her and Russell to work together to find him before his case goes cold like all the others before…

Jacklesverse

Various characters portrayed by Jensen Ackles and/or crossovers:

@deanbrainrotwritings -

Jacklesverse Bingo 2023 Masterlist

@justagirlinafandomworld -

Stranded - SPN/The Boys crossover: Soldier Boy & Reader, with a mention of Dean.

@lamentationsofalonelypotato -

It's Not a Big Deal - SPN/The Boys crossover: Soldier Boy x Reader, with a side helping of Dean. Summary: Dean's in for a rude awakening when he finds out exactly what you did when you got stranded in another universe.

@artyandink -

Nature's Beauty Summary: You have stretch marks. How would the boys react to that?

Chicago Med

Will Halstead x Reader:

@deanstead -

5 Times You Held Back + 1 Time You Didn't Have To Summary: Five times you held back, and the one time you didn’t have to.

Wow, I read a lot this month! 😂 I hope you enjoy these lovely writers and their stories as much as I did. 💜

[medievalandfantasymelee]

THE HOT MEDIEVAL & FANTASY MEN MELEE

FIRST ROUND: 13th Tilt

Balian de Ibelin, Kingdom of Heaven (2005) VS. Legolas Greenleaf, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-2003)

Propaganda

Balian de Ibelin, Kingdom of Heaven (2005) Portrayed by: Orlando Bloom Defeated Opponents: - Athelstan [George Blagden], Vikings (2013-2020)

The definition of a man of his word. I’d take a promise from him over a blood contract from most people. He’s so known for his good character and word, that he negotiates with his enemy (as the loser) with enough grace and respect to walk out of the city he’s defending with dignity. His enemies speak well of him, his people love him, the worst his enemies, few as they are, can do deride his sense of honor. His king offered him a throne basically, as long as he would do this one underhand thing. He refused. And more than that, he’s earned it himself. He wasn’t raised rich, or strong, or even well. He was a bastard child of a mild noble he didn’t meet u til he was well into adulthood. He worked as blacksmith before swearing to be a knight, and went back to being a blacksmith when he was done.

Legolas Greenleaf, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-2003) Portrayed by: Orlando Bloom Defeated Opponents: - Shah Ala Ad Daula [Olivier Martinez], The Physician (2013)

“Perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect cheekbones - he's just the perfect elf! And he's so good at pointing out obvious stuff and killing big oliphants. It takes skill to be a himbo in a world where all elves are inherently wise!”

Additional Propaganda Under the Cut

Additional Propaganda

For Balian de Ibelin:

For Legolas:

“Elves are already the prettiest, but I love that the movies decided that the Mirkwood elves are the prettiest of the prettiest. And on top of that Legolas is a little weirdo, which just makes it even better.”

(+ Bonus Aragorn and Gimli)

[10yrsyart]

(quotes from Book 1 of the trilogy "the Singer, the Song, and the Finale" by Calvin Miller)

i love this trilogy and the way it describes the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation. it's allegorical in a similar way to Narnia and Pilgrim's Progress. i'm generally not one for poetry because my dyslexia makes the flowery sentences very hard to comprehend 😂 but Miller's work is understandable enough to make the story rich in imagery and feeling.

i never get tired of reading another angle of the overwhelming sacrifice Jesus made for all humankind. a payment not forced on us but gifted to us undeservingly. all that needs to be done is to accept it in understanding. a love like His can't be measured; it's so deep i can only continue to be amazed by it 🕊💙

"Now, most people would not be willing to die for an upright person, though someone might perhaps be willing to die for a person who is especially good. But God showed His great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. And since we have been made right in God's sight by the blood of Christ, He will certainly save us from God's condemnation." (Romans 5:7-9)

transcript:

(Page 1)

The word “crying” does not appear in the Lexicon of Heaven. It is the only word in the Lexicon of Hell. -Calvin Miller (The Singer: Chpt. 10)

(Page 2)

“How did you manage to make them cherish all this nothingness?” the Singer asked the World Hater.

“I simply make them feel embarrassed to admit that they are incomplete. A man would rather close his eyes than see himself the way Your Father-Spirit does. I teach them to exalt their emptiness and thus preserve the dignity of man.”

Singer: “They need the dignity of God.”

World Hater: “You tell them that. I sell a cheaper product.” -Calvin Miller (The Singer: Chpt. 14)

(Page 3)

Decision is the key to destiny.

“God, can You be merciful and send me off to Hell and lock me in forever?”

“No, Pilgrim, I will not send you there, but if you chose to go there, I could never lock you out.” -Calvin Miller (The Singer: Chpt. 21)

(Page 4)

He sang. And then His lips fell silently apart and His head slumped forward on His chest. The Father-Spirit wept. Existence raved... -Calvin Miller (The Singer: Chpt. 20)

(Page 5)

He reached the threshold of Eternity and found the doorway of the worlds not only open but clearly ripped away. He strained to hear the everlasting wail, the eternal dying which he loved. All was silent. Then he heard the Song. “NO!-” the World Hater cried. Each man on Terra had a key. And never could they come into the Canyon of the Damned unless they chose to do it. To live there, men would have to reject the Song. -Calvin Miller (The Singer: Chpt. 21)

[cecilysass]

When I Think About You, I Touchstone Myself: Fic Recs for the Biogenesis/ Sixth Extinction/ Amor Fati trilogy

I thought it was time to do some fic fixes for these important episodes for a few reasons.

First, Amor Fati is an episode I can’t ever stay away from; I both love it and have big issues with it. I love the tribute to Last Temptation of Christ, a film I admire, but I also find the identification of Mulder as a Christ figure to be problematic, or at least to raise questions the show doesn’t really address. I love the touchstone speech and the boy on the beach sequence; I find a lot of the real-life dialogue (e.g. between CSM and Diana) to be clunky.

And honestly, I find it kind of irritating that Diana's death happened off screen, too. Deep Throat, Spender, X, CSM, Well-Manicured Man, Blevins — their deaths were all dramatized onscreen, so it seems weird that Diana’s was not, doesn’t it? Anticlimactic and odd. To me, it's the straw that broke the camel's back for the Diana arc, really raising the question of whether she was ever really written intending to be an important character to the mytharc plot at all ... or whether she just really was a cardboard cutout character there to generate jealousy.

But I digress. What I mean to to say is: I always want to talk more about Amor Fati.

Second, I particularly enjoy me some psychic Mulder fic, and there are some great examples below. How well does he read minds? Does he read Scully’s? Her every thought? How long does it last? Readers want to know.

Finally, if you believe season 7 was the season of secret sex, or even if you just hold to season 7 as the “sometime consummated” season, these 3 eps have to be a crucial turning point. Some people maintain that Mulder got the affirmation to move ahead with MSR when he heard Scully's thoughts. Possibly. Either way, though, by the end, through the events of Amor Fati, they both validate the other’s point of view in a way we don't really see before. Plus, you know, maybe you heard? They’re one another’s touchstones. So this is a crucial MSR trilogy, too.

So I have a (NO DOUBT INCOMPETE) selection of fic recs below. I’m mixing up the fic recs for all three episodes, but I try to note if a fic is really more about one ep than another.

Fic Recs:

Before the White Noise - Nimz12peekaboo Scully goes to see Mulder inside his padded cell in Biogenesis. This is sweet and canon-attentive, if not quite compliant.

A Less Certain World - Sarah Segretti This is really only post-Biogenesis and goes AU after that; it’s the author’s AU Sixth Extinction, I suppose. Mulder is much more affected by the trauma to his brain and body than in the show, and Scully is scared for him. Amazing fic.

Temporary Shelter - Gwendolyn Also a Biogenesis post-ep, this fic imagines that Scully springs psychic Mulder from the hospital and then takes him back with her to the Ivory Coast. They stay in a cabin (with only one bed!) that was once occupied by another couple affected by the artifact. This is rich in plot (and in MSR.)

Stunned - Vickie Moseley This is, by description, what happens in the commercial breaks in Biogenesis. And let's just say that it’s kind of a lot. This fic focuses on Scully coming to calm Mulder down at the hospital, on their trust between one another. There is a little Diana wrap up, too.

All the Places - Ambress A lovely, lovely take on Mulder’s ability to read minds. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

Out of Our Minds - Sarah Segretti and haphazard method This is specifically post-Biogenesis, written before season 7 began. It focuses on the rather realistic idea that Scully would be freaked the fuck out by Mulder being able to read her mind—like, existentially freaked out. Both characters’ POV here; both characters have your sympathy; angsty and extremely true to character.

Disonance - suilven This piece is kind of a classic in my own little personal world. It just such a satisfying concept. It delightfully doesn’t take the canon implications of Mulder’s telepathy seriously, like, at all, which is why we love fanfic. Mulder, Scully, and Diana get stuck on an elevator just as Mulder’s starting to realize he can read minds. Delicious set-up.

the things they say in the dark - MonikaFileFan Missing scenes for Amor Fati, this piece helps us see the two moving closer and closer together while still having the invisible line between them. There is hurt/comfort here with Scully caring for Mulder, and a little light mind reading. So sweet and well done.

how to tell your lover you’ve seen all their secret gardens - 0666666 While Scully is taking care of Mulder after the events of Amor Fati, he tries to think of how to tell her he heard her thoughts. Very good.

Woven Deep by Maureen B. Ocks This is a really smart little Amor Fati post-ep with sharp dialogue / banter throughout. Mulder is in recovery, and they have a chance to talk about his experiences. It’s Mulder POV, but Scully is written very well here.

up and down the east coast by skuls When he’s still supposed to be recovering from Amor Fati events, Mulder asks Scully to go on a road trip to look for Sasquatch. She agrees. This one isn’t about psychic Mulder so much as the little guarded steps the two take towards acknowledging their feelings. Extremely sweet.

Synesthesia by haphazard method On a case shortly after the events of Amor Fati, Scully is still coming to terms with the role she plays in their partnership. An excellent conversation.

Petrichor by Aloysia Virgata. A lovely gem, a fandom classic. A one-chapter case file set directly after Amor Fati. Mulder and Scully’s relationship is offkilter and unsettled; Mulder is troubled by dreams with messages from a familiar ghost; the plot riffs on Anglo-Irish folklore. The spot-on banter and exquisite writing one expects from this author.

Eli Eli by Marguerite Mulder is recovering physically post-Amor Fati while Scully tries to cope with the crisis of faith her experiences in the Ivory Coast provoked in her. Skinner sends them to a beach house in Galveston to rest and heal.

Silence Waiting by JET Scully is struggling to cope with the implications of what she saw in Africa as Mulder heals and worries about her. This is intercut with the story of another telepath, Gretta, who grows up only reading the thoughts of one boy in her town, Frederick. This fic is lovely in every way and makes me weep.

The Boy on the Beach - me me (cecilysass) Yeah, I include my own fic. I just know it best, you know, lol? I include this one specifically for this theme because it was really written in part to engage with Amor Fati, specifically with the implications of Mulder’s Last Temptation of Christ-inspired dream sequence. But I'm the author, so you know, grain of salt.

Let me know what I missed!

[gallusrostromegalus]

What’s some of the shinigami’s favorite movies? Are there any genres some are more partial to than others?

Spaghetti westerns are a huge fave in Soul Society. Exotic cultures! Many of the same narrative cues and tropes they're already familiar with! Fun costumes! Iconic lines! Ennio Morricone scores! What's not to love?

In fact, Soul Society has an entire genre of movies called "Soba Westerns". Like how many of the spaghetti westerns are the plots of Kurosawa movies retold, the plots of many westerns are being retold but set in Soul society. The passing of the tales between cultures as well as between the world of the Living and the world of Spirits makes for an incredibly rich mixture of aesthetics, philosophies and visual vernacular. The "Fistful Of Kan" Trilogy is extremely popular, as well as "The Treasure of Yamanohaha"

With the recent outbreak of peace between Soul Society and Hueco Mundo, Director Sero Reione has approached the court guard for permission to travel to the land of hollows, to shoot his next movie (tentatively titled "Seven Shinigami") in an actual desert. He's also fascinated with the aesthetic sensibilities of Hollow culture, and there is a Rumor he's been stalking the Court Guards for a new Leading Man or six.

[idontknowreallywhy]

Fathers Day 4 - The Other Father

(Parts 1-3)

This one has been brewing a fairly long time. The 3 short sections I posted a while ago form a perfectly good trilogy and we could happily leave it there…but I did sneak in a hint that a certain somebody overheard at least part of the conversation between Scott and his siblings.

And I’m determined to force Jeff to confront his many failings as a parent and make a start on sorting things out with his sons, especially the eldest. Haven’t quite got there yet (of course it would be terribly out of character for me to actually finish the story 🙄) but they are moving in the right direction at least.

It feels a little rougher than I’d like but I haven’t managed to post a whole chapter of anything for over a month and perhaps am a little wobbly on that score but… here goes…

🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙

Jeff hovered uncertainly outside the door to his eldest son’s bedroom, pretending to be minutely interested in the glued crack running down the doorframe through the locking mechanism and out the other side. There was probably a story behind that, an attentive father should probably ask about it… he started to raise a hand to knock but lost his nerve and continued to hover.

Well, truth be told, he wasn’t so much hovering as leaning very heavily on his cane like the frail old man he always swore he’d never be. Certainly not at his age. But he was uncertain (whilst leaning in a solid and definite way) about whether to do the thing he had been so very certain was a good idea an hour ago but about which, NOW… now he was here… at the door… at Scott’s door… he was suddenly deeply unsure.

Jeff didn’t really do unsure and uncertain. That had never been his style. He’d always been blessed with a great deal of confidence in the plans that came to him and that confidence was justified by the fact he usually pulled them off.

Nor was he the kind of man who stood in corridors staring at inanimate objects while engaging in a rambling inner monologue.

And yet, here he was…

It was amazing what eight years of solitary confinement on a rock could change.

🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙

One hour earlier…

🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙

He eased himself down on to the lounger and closed his eyes, trying to fix in his mind the new version of that sound he’d dreamed of for so long - the laughter of his children. All of them. Together. Happy. Safe. The glowing memory of it had sustained him for years. The fear that he might have somehow extinguished it for good had kept him awake in the dark for far more hours than the mundane concerns about food, oxygen supplies…

Survival.

The voices were deeper now than the ones he’d remembered. Not quite so familiar. But still so beloved. They were still his babies. Lucy’s babies. They’d just grown. A lot. In innumerable ways.

Slowly, so as not to overbalance when gravity tugged at him, he leaned over and felt around underneath the seat to retrieve what he’d initially assumed was a piece of litter but now knew with a prescient certainty was going to be incredibly important.

“It was always you…”

He hadn’t meant to eavesdrop. Or sneak around like a teenager. He was supposed to be in bed but he’d found himself desperate to breathe oxygen rich but un-climate-controlled air for a few moments. As the lingering agoraphobia of the depths of infinite space warred with the claustrophobia born of the small liveable portion of the Zero-X that had been his entire world, Jeff had found his heart rate increasing and knew he wouldn’t sleep without proving to himself once more what the sea breeze felt like on his face.

And he’d snuck down the back stairs because they’d hear his balcony door open and come to check.

Then he’d have to explain.

If he explained, they’d just worry.

And today of all days, when the void between what he knew he was and what he desperately wanted to be to them all had loomed and sucked at him so hungrily… Well. How could he ever be their Daddy again if they had to be looking after him all the time? It was all backwards.

It had been so long since he’d been a Daddy. Far longer than the time he’d been stranded. He had been a good parent, once upon a time. Lucy had said so and he’d always trusted her judgment. To Scott and Virgil anyway. With John he’d done his best too, albeit the boy could rarely be persuaded to leave his mother’s side, but they’d had a decent relationship.

And there had been a time he was Daddy to five. Little Gordon chattering away at his knee while baby Alan’s bright blue eyes peered up at him from the impossibly tiny bundle in his arms. Lucy’s chin on his shoulder, her cheek brushing against his own… he’d known his place in the world, they were blessed with the privilege of raising these little ones together.

And then she was gone. And somehow everything good about Jeff went with her. Including Daddy.

He’d as good as orphaned them back then, eight whole years before it became official.

Eight more years to regret it after that.

Miraculously he now had his much longed-for chance to make it right. But for all the thinking and regretting and self analysis of those castaway years, he still wasn’t entirely sure where to start. He knew what he had to mend, he knew when and why it had all broken, but not how to fix it, if it was even fixable at all.

And now in light of what he’d heard, he realised that whatever “fixed” was, it might look rather different from what he’d spent all those years imagining.

And if he had been more honest with himself… he’d always known that. He let the card fall open in his lap.

“Still true.”

It was. It was absolutely true. Gordon and Alan were Scott’s kids, in all the ways that mattered. They knew it. Jeff knew it. And for all his desire to compensate for the time they had lost, he knew with absolute clarity he did not want to replace their eldest brother’s place in their lives. He had no right to.

He had no desire to. Not now.

He needed to make sure Scott knew that. His knees creaked as he shot decisively to his feet and he staggered slightly before snatching up the cane propped against the back of the lounger and making his purposeful… alright, shuffling way towards his old office.

He needed to find a pen.

🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙

And so here he was by the doorway, the card tucked into the pocket of his bathrobe, trying to think of an opening line. Some appropriate words to broach the subject.

Jeff Tracy was pretty good with words.

He used to be king of the press conference, inspirational teacher of young astronauts. A dreamer of big dreams that could recruit almost anyone to his cause given time. He was used to being in command. When he spoke, people listened.

Yes, Jeff Tracy could make words work for him. With strangers, anyway.

With family it was different.

Especially with one in particular.

Oh, he and Scott had talked a lot. When he was home from space tiny-Scott had been his shadow, trailing him around with his excited, bouncy hop-skip drinking in all his father’s adventure stories. In fairness some of those maybe became just a little exaggerated by the lure of the warm feeling the admiration in those sparkling blue eyes created.

As time had passed the skip-hop evolved into a leggy teenage stride, precisely matched to Jeff’s own. There was less bounce in it, but the sparkle was still there. The constant reminder to Jeff Tracy that he was admired far more than he really deserved to be.

But then it had all gone wrong.

Part of the problem with Scott was he looked like Lucy. He didn’t resemble her much at all, physically - Jeff’s firstborn was pretty much a clone of himself, everyone said as much. No. It was that he looked the way she had. When he was really looking. Something about the intensity of his gaze… the colour of Scott’s eyes may have been from Jeff but the power of them was all her. It was like facing down a strangely warming X-ray.

Yes, the issue Jeff had was that Lucy looked at him out of his eldest son’s eyes and it made him confused and lonely... and so very uncertain about everything that was important.

About whether he could do any of this alone.

About whether he had got a single thing right since she’d gone.

It had made him defensive and short with his son. And when he snapped at Scott, when the same uncertainty, the same confused loneliness was reflected back at him… that chased her away and replaced her image with only himself and he couldn’t bear it.

So he stopped looking.

And so as Scott took on her role, as his son parented far better than the father had the capacity to manage, Jeff backed away and allowed him to do it. He’d let his teenage son be father to his children while he hid away inside himself and focussed on the things that Jeff had been able to do long before he ever met her - he inspired strangers, he dreamed, he commanded.

And Scott had grown up way too fast. And Jeff couldn’t fix it.

There were some short conversations that came close to the one they really needed to have in the aftermath of the Bereznik situation, when Jeff had feared he’d lost his eldest boy for good. But the important words had got stuck in his throat and he’d had to settle for an affectionate pat on the shoulder. Scott had seemed to feel safer with Virgil present anyway and his second son was incredibly protective of his big brother… of course that hadn’t been conducive to bringing up more difficult topics. Although Jeff knew he could have engineered the circumstances if he’d had the nerve. By the time Scott had recovered and they’d both thrown themselves into the Big Project, the moment seemed to have passed.

So they talked Tracy household admin, school admin. Most of all, they talked about the Project, Scott almost as excited as he was about that. His son admired and encouraged and gently challenged him in exactly the way his mother would have. It worked.

It was comfortable. And Jeff had been too much of a coward to make it uncomfortable.

He’d been home nearly two months and he’d nearly missed his chance again.

Not this time.

He raised his hand once more and let his knuckles fall against the door.

🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙

“Scott?”

“Yes, EOS?” His reply was muffled somewhat by a mouthful of toothpaste.

“Your father has been stood outside your door for seven point five minutes.”

Some of the toothpaste migrated to his pyjama shirt. “What?! He should be in bed!”

“And yet he is currently located in the corridor. Just thought you’d like to know.”

“Is he ok?”

“His heart rate is a little elevated but his other vitals seem as healthy as they have proved in recent weeks.”

“I… ok, alright. Thanks for telling me.”

“Of course.”

Scott scrubbed pointlessly at the mark on his shirt and headed out of his en-suite towards the hallway door, where he paused and compulsively tidied his hair.

He reached for the door handle then jumped out of his skin as a loud knock sounded inches from his face.

🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙🤍💙

TBC when Jeff can work out how to start the conversation ;)

[bloodgulchblog]

fuck it i woke up and thought about halo and can't get back to sleep.

i really genuinely truly, from the bottom of my heart, think that sergeant johnson is a critical character for a halo adaptation and creates a lot of opportunities.yes, he's dead. yes, he's been dead for longer than we had that character in the first place. but if halo wants to return to the story of the original three games, johnson is so so valuable.

bear with me and pretend i know a damn thing about tv for a second.

everybody loves our boy master chief, but chief is an obnoxiously difficult character to portray directly as a leading man in a medium where you cannot easily get inside his head. chief's quiet and private and focused on his work. because of that, chief's personality is a negative space that you demonstrate the most through the characters around him. the people you put around chief and have talking to him, telling him stuff, and asking him to do things are the tools you have for illustrating him so they gotta be good. cortana is the best of them, obviously, but cortana is also an AI so her perspective on the world is also very weird.

of the human characters who interact the most with chief in that period of time, johnson is by far the best and the one who has the most layers. on the top layer, johnson is charming and funny and competent and tough. game fans love and remember him because he's likable. on the deeper layers, johnson is a long-experienced participant in this war and the war that came before the aliens showed up. he knows a lot of secrets, including the vital secrets about the chief, and has conflicted feelings he carries around. he keeps his head down and his ears up, and plays dumb jarhead to protect himself and others. he has just as much crazy shit in his backstory as chief and cortana, but chief's chief and cortana is like 3 years old tops and also an ai. johnson is our adultiest adult. johnson's pretty stable, he knows who he is and what's going on, and his perspective is much less strange.

chief needs handler characters with perspectives that are easier to grasp than his. johnson is an amazing handler character for chief because johnson knows him, johnson knows why he's fucked up, and johnson is a decent dude who cares about him even though he cannot save him. if you dilate the timeline to let these two characters talk, it is easy to have johnson check on chief and have chief report back that he's fine in a way that totally shows oh, this dude's priorities are insane. you establish that johnson knows the chief and is looking out for him, and then you do a flashback that shows he has known chief since he was a teenaged child soldier? jesus, suddenly so many things click together. you don't even have to get into the details of johnson's own status as a spartan-i grad for it to work.

it doesn't stop there! johnson's also a key character if you're working with the arbiter! johnson's the first human the arbiter ever has a chance to have respect for, and johnson's smart and able to figure out how to work with him! it also makes for great parallels because johnson was there when the war with the covenant started. you don't have to shoehorn him into a situation to create a bookend, it's just there.

johnson is a likable character with a rich backstory and a nuanced perspective on events and a complex relationship to them. (oh avery johnson, you have been victim of and complicit in so much shit, how's that going for you buddy?) he's a capable action character who also works well on the quieter end, is known and involved in secrets, and can draw out interesting and important details in the original trilogy's two main characters.

also, johnson is just a genuinely cool character who deserves more and on the one hand it's probably ultimately better for the character that he hasn't changed hands a dozen times like everyone else, but on the other his death still feels like a gutpunch and a loss. so like. idk. give him something cool to do in an adaptation from the time where he's alive.

....

anyway, the punchline of this whole thing is that i think johnson is a vital character. so of course he wasn't in that tv show.

[izunias-meme-hole]

My Top 10 Batman Villains (Revamped)

(Because I currently need to get this off my chest, also a lot of these are just in my opinion)

Honorable Mention: Bane (Various) - Despite being misrepresented as a dumb brute and the fact that one of the best adaptations of him somehow gets his voice and nationality wrong, Bane is a villain with QUITE the deserving reputation. A walking tank with a luchador mask that has the brains to match his brawn.

Number 10. Scarecrow (Nolan Trilogy) - Crane wasn't a big villain in the grand scheme of the trilogy, but my god Cillian Murphy does a great job with the character. Like I wish that his supervillain outfit wasn't just a bag over his face, but Scarecrow manages to be quite the dangerous and cowardly loon with a mask of sanity in Batman Begins, an active member of the underworld in The Dark Knight, and the guy actively sending folks to their deaths in The Dark Knight Rises. Could we have had more of him? Yes. Did he use up his screen time well? Absolutely. Though his fear toxin could've been infinitely wilder.

Number 9. Mr. Freeze (BTAS: Heart of Ice) - I feel like this is a "to the surprise of absolutely nobody" moment, but this show reinvented Mr Freeze as a tragic and vengeful figure, and his debut was a perfect example of that.

Number 8. The Phantasm (BTAS) - The Phantasm is one of the best darker counterparts to Batman a lot of levels.

Number 7. Harley Quinn (BTAS) - The minor side villainess turned breakout character of the show. If anyone has seen B:TAS and then seen the rest of the media she's in, then you know why this is the best version of her. A good amount of things about the character being based around her actress (R.I.P Arleen Sorkin), her interactions with half the cast, Peak HarIvy content, the best representation of how bad her situation with her abusive ex was, and the perfect mixture between being a not-so-great-person and a precious lil' thing who deserves better.

Number 6. Ra's Al Ghul (Various) - Ra's Al Ghul may be a more international threat in comparison to the other antagonists I've listed, but he's undeniably one of Bruce's greatest foes. A very rich and powerful older man whose mission and persistence is similar to that of the caped crusader. Though unlike Batman, Ra's is willing to do more than just kill, he's willing to commit genocide, and he's willing to use other harsh and controlling methods in order to create his ideal world. Ra's is pretty much the the worst elements of Batman shoved into a singular self-righteous figure, and when done well he's easily one of the greats.

Number 5. Two-Face (Various) - Harvey Dent is a man split down the middle, a two-faced dude in more ways than one, and an irredeemably tragic figure no matter the perspective, though funnily enough he's always a victim of chance. He's a victim of the one worst possible outcome that had just as much of an opportunity to be the best possible outcome. It's part of the reason why he makes choices based off a literal coin flip. Chance put Dent in the circumstances to become a villain, and as he surrenders his entire being to chance as Two Face.

Number 4. Oswald "Penguin" Cobblepot (Various) - He's just a pathetic and horrible little man. No I'm serious. Oswald has had various portrayals over the years, but they can all be summed up at "pathetic and horrible little man wanting respect" and its great to see in action because despite the fact that he can be legit menacing and sometimes tragic, Oz is just inherently ridiculous on some level. It's great.

Number 3. Catwoman (Various) - Selina, Selina, Selina... she's cool. Sure she is a classic example of a "femme fatale," but aside from that Selina has always been a thrill seeker in some way or another. Be it as a jewel thief who proudly shows this, or an anti-hero that covers this part of herself with actual justifications, there is always an aspect of Selina that enjoys what she does when she puts that mask on. Mrs Kyle is enjoyable, idk what else to say.

Number 2. The Riddler (Various) - Genuinely impressive intelligence and creativity mixed with an ego as big as 3 Russias and as fragile as a glass bottle. That's what you're always bound to find in Riddler. Be it in the 60's show, BTAS, Batman Forever, The Arkham Series, Gotham, or The Batman, Riddler is a Redditor with the theatrics of a gameshow host and the resources of John Kramer.

Number 1. The Joker (Various) - Come on. We all knew this was gonna happen. The Joker is a crook who fell into a vat of chemicals and got a clownish makeover, who ended up becoming the nemesis of Batman. While the other rouges have their particular danger levels, they all have some type of cause they're fighting for or they're purely out to benefit themselves. Joker just causes chaos, death, and suffering, for the sake of his twisted sense of humor. He is willing to kill and ruin lives in the most creative way possible, so long as he finds it funny. Yet despite how twisted he is, this evil ass clown actually can be funny. Not only that, but he's the most effective contrast to Batman, even more than the other rouges. Batman is a frightening figure with a semi-demonic visage who suffered one bad day in his youth, yet he is a hero dedicated to the cause of justice and protecting the innocent citizens of Gotham City. Joker is a colorful figure with a big 'ol grin on his face and a jovial demeanor, yet he is perfectly okay with causing as much unwarranted harm to others for the sake of artistic chaos. Ultimately, the Clown Prince of Crime is a villain that's managed to last for decades, despite the ever marching clock, for these exact reasons.

[panfroggy]

Zombie Apocalypse AU Character Stuff!

Im still on this so here we go.

The original post for this to make more sense is HERE

Here is general character stuff! Some appearance stuff but mostly character. Some appearance specifics at the end though!

Charles Xavier. Age 30. 

Charles is the main POV 1. He is your typical Xavier in FC. Witty and charming but a deeply caring person. He’s out of his depth with travelling, he grew up rich as hell, remember, and I imagine that his appearance will slowly become more and more like DOFP Charles esc

His character arc is very much acting as a shepherd to everyone he meets but also struggling with the violence of the world and his reluctance to use his powers offensively. He acts as a guide for most of the people he comes across and is just trying to do right. This relation is seen most obviously with Alex, Jean, and Logan. Obviously he has a whole thing with getting close with Erik because they have the shared trait of caretaking but opposite views of violence. 

Erik Lensherr. Age 33

Main POV 2. FC/Apocalypse typical Erik. Closed off and harsh but he has a deep care for those closest to him. In my head he’s just typical Erik appearance, nothing crazy from the apocalypse.

He is just fine with all the travelling  but has much more issues with wrangling children. His tendency for violence is constantly getting interrupted by all the people he has to deal with. His big arc is definitely just calming down and letting himself relax in this crazy world. 

Raven Darkholme. Age 27.

She’s lowkey more of a mix between OG trilogy Raven and NewTrilogy Raven. Serving cunt at all times even though it's the apocalypse. She is usually in her true blue form but shifts whenever there are others around they don’t know/trust. 

Raven starts off this au Very snobby and selfish. She doesn’t care about any of this, she doesn’t want to travel with anyone but Charles. Overtime she will get out of this. Mostly thanks to the kids. Ultimately culminating in her self sacrifice for them.

Alex Summers. Age 21

FC typical appearance but his hair is getting longer and longer. Alex is really a first half character but he’s still important. He’s overprotective of his brother and trying to do whats best. A lot of it is just finding himself and doing what’s right. Lot of his bonding is with Raven. His decision to stay with FC hurts but he’s doing what he wants. Keeping Scott safe and finding a place they can call home together.

Logan Howlett, Age ???

Typical scruffy scruffy Wolverine. So mad, like genuinely he is pissed at everyone except Kurt, Jubilee and Kitty. He’s basically having to be re-civilized since he’s been thriving as a crazy wilderness man again. However he’s having to relax and keep going for the girls. The people who set him on the right path are Cherik + Kurt. Kurt is basically Logan’s common sense buddy. 

Kurt Wagner. Age 24. 

Blue elf! Some other things that are for later. Kurt is weirdly normal for being here. He’s kind of an anchor that helps all these highly emotional people. He’s mainly just trying to keep the people he loves safe. He’s careful with the kids and gentle with the adults. Honestly helping people is his main thing. 

Wanda and Peter. Age 11.

Wanda has dark dark curly red hair and is a spitfire child. Peter has typical silvery white hair and is going too fast all the time. They are a handful, two halves a whole. Wanda is quieter and more polite but she is Mean in the way all preteens are mean. Peter is loud and unruly but he means well. They’re only big conflict/character moment is at the facility where they’re fighting and Peter lets them do the tests on him first so they could practice and maybe wouldn’t have to go so deep because he could “heal fast itll be fine”. Just trying to live their lives,

Scott Summers.  Age 14.

Ima be honest, he is primarily a plot device for Alex and Charles. He’s just wants his life back and to help him brother. He does have a tiny crush on Jean tho, its sweet and silly and reminds the elders that life is going on despite the horrors. 

Jean Grey. Age 15.

Oh poor girly. She's been through it!!! Her arc is learning not to blame herself for everything. Mainly through the help of Cherik and Wanda she accepts that it’s not her fault. She’s terrified of her powers and of accidentally hurting someone again. Unlike most telepaths, she has minor control over infected people due to being the originator of it all. Unfortunately it’s not very strong and she freaks every time she tries.

Not gonna go into depth but! At some point they do run into Rouge and Remy. In this interaction we learn Remy is bit but they’re hiding it and uh… A Lot Happens that day. Lemme know if you wanna know more! 

Appearance Tidbits

Long hair Raven, I mean everyone’s hair has grown out a bit but like LONG hair raven because I said so. 

Kurt has some major scarring he obtained when he and Logan got caught in a massive brawl of survivors in the city they were passing. His teleportation worked but it was impossible to see where he was going. He got them out but with Logan's claws in him and very cut up. He’s pretty banged up, looks very much like he’s been through hell but stays relentlessly kind.

Jean has scars on her temples from breaking the machine she was hooked into. Starburst type ones.

Wanda’s bite is on her arm. It now just looks like a regular bite scar instead of the festering wound it is for most people. 

Jubilee is actually missing her left arm. Why? She got bit and Logan/Kurt decided that the best course of action was unfortunately to cut it off. She is still in bandages from it because neither of them really know how to handle an amputation. 

Alex has scarring/burns around his torso from excessive power use when getting out of a hoard. He rarely uses them now. 

Some less important people things: Angel’s wings are badly cut up and she currently can't fly. Hank is perma-blue and doesn’t have the serum that lets him obtain a normal appearance. Emma’s diamond form is fractured and she can’t hold it very long anymore.

Yeah! Hope this makes a lick of sense. Lemme know whatcha think :3

I want to yap about this so bad plz ask me anything i mean anything lololols.

[hiddenwritingsintheworld]

K! Which song would you give to Each series? Like if you had to have a theme song for them!!

ehhhh.....lets do couples instead of series LOL I can't justify my answers as well!

1.) Midnight Rain/Chris Evans x Reader- (you'd think this was obvious but) LOML by Taylor Swift

2.) My Alpha/ Declan Harp x Reader-Burning Desire by Lana Del Rey

3.) Cruel Summer/Chris Evans x Reader x Chris Hemsworth - Bejeweled by Taylor Swift

These are for where we are at currently in the series. Which....aren't exactly good places LOL Good luck! New Chapters might be coming......TONIGHT!

[melanielocke]

Book recommendations: queer adult SFF

It's been a while since I did one of these posts but I'm thinking of doing more regularly. I have read a lot more new books that I hope some of you will pick up and I've made another selection. I'm reading more and more adult SFF lately because lots of YA is getting a little too young for me. But I also find that transitioning to reading more adult can be difficult, and it's not always easy to find what you're looking for. I found YA a far easier market to navigate, so I figured I'd make a post featuring some of my favorite adult SFF books.

The Unbroken & the Faithless I read recently.

This is a trilogy, with book 3 coming out most likely in 2025? Not sure actually. The series focuses on Touraine and Luca. Touraine is a conscript in the Balladaire army, stolen from her homeland and trained to fight from a young age. She is originally from Qazal, a country colonized by Balladaire, but doesn't speak their language or understand their customs. In the first book, she returns home for the first time since she was taken, to stop a Qazali rebellion.

Luca is the princess of Balladaire. Her parents both died when she was young, and her uncle is ruling as regent, refusing to allow her to be crowned Queen until she proves herself. She too is sent to deal with the Qazali rebellion. What makes Luca interesting is that she often means well and is definitely more benevolent towards the Qazali, but she's also very power hungry and wants her throne, and no matter how much she does to help the Qazali she is still the princess of the empire that colonized them, and the author continues to hold her accountable for her role in the empire and some of the choices she makes.

Luca is also disabled, she injured her leg when she was young and uses a cane.

There is a sapphic romance between Luca and Touraine. It is not really the focus on the series but at the same time it is what shapes much of the negotiating between them since Luca has a very obvious soft spot for Touraine and Touraine has to use that to improve things for Qazal.

The world is inspired by North Africa and French colonialism (in Balladaire they speak French so I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be France), and the author themself is Black and North African. The series as a whole is very political.

Next is Notorious Sorcerer by Davinia Evans

This is the first in a duology (I think?) with book 2 coming out this November.

This is set in a world where there are four different planes, and Siyon is a poor man who can delve into the different planes to get ingredients for wealthier alchemists. He wants to be an alchemist himself but can't afford the education. There's also the problem of magic being technically illegal, which means rich people can do alchemy but poor people can't.

Then one day Siyon accidently unleashes wild magic and is thrust into the world of alchemists where he wants to belong but doesn't. And there's also the matter of the four planes being instable and at risk of collapsing, and Siyon might be the only one capable of stopping it.

Siyon is bi/pan and his main love interest is a man, though this is not the main focus of the series.

Then Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

I think I had this one last time too, but not enough people are reading it so I'm going to discuss it again.

Check out the summary, but honestly not sure if that does it justice. Some Desperate Glory is the story of a girl who grew up in a fascist cult and was raised to believe in everything this cult stands for.

The earth was destroyed before she was born, and the Majo, aliens, were responsible. Kyr has been training her entire life for revenge. She wants nothing more than to be the perfect soldier for earth. As a result, she is a terrible person and everyone hates her.

Kyr first starts questioning Gaea station when she is assigned nursery to have babies even though she is the best fighter in her mess. When her brother disappears, she teams up with his friend Avi, a queer genius who works with the station's systems and was always aware of how fucked up Gaea station is. They discover Magnus has been sent on a suicide mission and go after him, and Kyr is confronted with the outside world, including a Majo she grows close to, and has to unlearn everything Gaea station taught her.

This book has a difficult to stomach mc at first, though it is very obvious what she believes is not what you as the reader are supposed to think. But there is some wonderful character development going on in here. It's hard for her to change, and she's thrown into lots of difficult situations before she gets there, but in the end you can see she's nothing like the person she was before.

There's an amazing cast of side characters, though not a very big cast. There's her twin brother Magnus who never wanted to be a soldier and is actually very depressed, which Kyr never noticed. Yiso, the cute non binary alien Kyr develops a weak spot for even before she comes to realize Majo are people. And my personal favorite, Avi, who is an unhinged little guy who is way too smart for his own good. He's a great example of how a cult can affect different people in different ways. He doesn't believe in Gaea station like Kyr does and is aware of how fucked up he is, he experienced that first hand as the only visible queer person on the station. But he did internalize their messages of revenge and violence which plays out in interesting ways.

This edition is the Illumicrate edition of the book from April's box, which has the UK cover.

Witch King by Martha Wells is next

This is a confusing book for people who do not have a lot of experience reading adult fantasy. It has a lot of world building that is explained gradually, the book doesn't really hold your hand, so be prepared for that.

Kai is a body hopping demon. He has been betrayed, killed and entombed under water. When he is freed by a lesser mage hoping to hone his power, he kills them and frees himself and his friend, the witch Ziede.

Together, they have to uncover what happened to them, who betrayed them and what is going on with the Rising World coalition. He's not going to like the answers.

Alternating is a past timeline in which Kai and his band of allies rebel against the tyrannical rule of the Hierophants, which happened decades before the present timeline.

The strenght of this book is really in the characters and how they grow and the bonds they have with each other. I loved the relationship between Kai and Bashasa, who is the rebel leader in the past timeline in particular. It's not quite clear what the nature of their relationship was, though it is implied to be romantic and I do think Kai is supposed to be queer. He is a body hopping demon after all, and spends his early life in the body of a girl. There's also a sapphic side pairing between Zieden and her wife Tahren, who they spent much of the present timeline looking for.

The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach

This is a science fantasy set in a world inspired by New Zealand and Maori (I think? The author is Maori and a trans woman herself)

The main character is a police officer from a poor background who believes she's making the world better for people like her. She's already been demoted for being queer but believes she can make the police force better from the inside.

Then she's murdered by fellow officers and thrown into the harbor. Unfortunately for them, she comes back from the dead with new magic powers.

She teams up with a pirate crew with similar powers and has to stop a plague from being unleashed on her city.

This book focuses on how police functions in many modern societies to protect the wealthy and harm and restrict poorer, non white communities. The main character doesn't believe this at first but it's obvious to the reader that they're not helping anyone doing their job. Next book is coming out next year.

Last is the Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri

Two books are out and book 3 is coming sometime in 2024.

This series is set in a world inspired by India. Priya is a maidservant with a secret. She is one of the few surviving temple children and still has some powers from being once born.

Malini is the princess of Parijatdvipa, the empire that conquered Priya's land. Her religious zealot brother has taken the throne and imprisons Malini because she refuses to be burned alive.

Priya is one of the maidservants sent to take care of Malini in her prison, which is the old temple where Priya grew up. Together, they can change the fate of an empire, but they can never quite trust each other.

This is a sapphic fantasy with magic but also lots of politics and I think if you like this series you'd also like the Unbroken and vice versa. I've talked about this one before but it should definitely be included on a list for adult fantasy.

I hope you can find something you like on here. All these books are not super well known and deserve a bigger audience

@alastaircarstairsdefenselawyer @life-through-the-eyes-of @astriefer @justanormaldemon @ipromiseiwillwrite @a-dream-dirty-and-bruised @amchara @all-for-the-fanfiction @imsoftforthomastair @ddepressedbookworm @queenlilith43 @wagner-fell @cant-think-of-anything @laylax13s @tessherongraystairs @boredfangirl16 @artist-in-soul @aliandtommy @ikissedsmithparker

[justforbooks]

How Deborah Levy can change your life

From her shimmering novels to her ‘living autobiographies’, Deborah Levy’s work inspires a devotion few literary authors ever achieve

Last August, the author Deborah Levy began to sit for her portrait. The starting point was a selfie – eyes penetrating, lips sensuous, head topped by a tower of chestnut hair. The artist, her friend Paul Heber-Percy, used Photoshop, then a pencil and tracing paper, to reverse and multiply the image of her face, until he had a drawing, neatly laid out on a grid, that satisfied him.

Then it was time to paint. He liked to work in the mornings, in hour-long bursts, in his tiny attic studio. When Levy came for sittings, he’d bring the painting down to the dining room, and the two of them would drink tea or wine, and talk. Not that these were sittings in the traditional sense, but “times I could observe her without feeling self-conscious”, he said.

Sometimes they’d discuss Levy’s new novel, August Blue, which she was finishing; but mostly it was “everyday things – friends, the news, exchanging recipes, how to unblock a sink”, said Levy. But, Heber-Percy said, nothing about these conversations was really everyday. She is the sort of person who makes the mundane remarkable. Even “going down to the bakery with her to get a baguette becomes a slightly magical thing”, says her friend the novelist Tash Aw. When her friends talk about her, they say things like this: “she is an event”, “she is a personage”, “she is a whole world”. People often remember the first time they met her. For Kate Bland, an audio producer, it was at a party at a Shoreditch warehouse. Levy was sitting on a high windowsill; Bland was leaning on it. The author’s rich, slightly breathy voice was coming over Bland’s shoulder. Talk unwound in a sequence of dazzling vignettes. “It seemed that there was a necessary theatricality: we had to hoist ourselves out of the ordinariness of chat and have a conversation that was going to be memorable,” she recalled. “I was quite thrilled by it.”

At the time of that party, in 2008, Levy was 49. Her life had contained one immense dislocation: when she was nine, her family emigrated from South Africa to the UK, after her father had spent three years as a political prisoner. After school at a London comprehensive, Levy took a theatre degree at the pioneering, avant-garde Dartington College of the Arts in Devon, and first forged a path as a playwright. Her first novel, Beautiful Mutants, was published in 1989, the year she turned 30. Twenty years on, at the time of the Shoreditch party, she wasn’t famous, and hadn’t sold more than a modest number of books, though she carried herself as if she had. She was teaching, adapting Colette and Carol Shields for the radio, raising two daughters, and living with her husband, playwright David Gale, in a semi-detached house off Holloway Road in north London. She was working on a novel, her first since 1996. Her previous books were out of print.

Four years later, Levy’s life was transformed. Her novel, Swimming Home – a sun-drenched story about a family holiday on the French Riviera, beneath whose glinting surface runs a Freudian riptide of wartime trauma – was shortlisted for the 2012 Booker prize. That sent sales flying. At the same time, her marriage fell apart. “By the time I went to the Booker dinner in December I knew I would be moving house and I was packing up,” she recalled. “It was very turbulent and very painful.”

The following year, she published Things I Don’t Want to Know, the first in a trilogy of what she calls “living autobiographies”, to convey their selective, fictive nature. Over the next few years, she alternated two more novels, Hot Milk and The Man Who Saw Everything, with two more volumes of living autobiography, which spoke of how, after her marriage ended, she recomposed a life for herself and her daughters in her 50s, outside the old patriarchal structures. All of these books, flew out of her “like a cork coming out of a bottle”.

Levy’s novels are popular and critically acclaimed. But it is with the living autobiographies that her reputation has transcended the literary. At events, readers tell Levy that her books make them feel less lonely, or ask her what to do about a life crisis. (One can’t quite imagine readers doing this with, say, Rachel Cusk, who also anatomises female experience, but in a somewhat chillier style.) At one of Levy’s online readings during the Covid pandemic, an audience member posted in the chat: “I’m 41 with two kids and sometimes I don’t feel I’m at home at all … Did it work for you, coming out of an unhappy marriage?” Levy answered: “It did work for me. You have to make another sort of life and gather your friends and supporters to your table” – which is pretty much the story of the second and third of her living autobiographies, The Cost of Living and Real Estate.

Levy’s writing has a very particular quality: it seems to infiltrate the mind. You absorb her way of seeing and start to perceive the world in Levy-ish ways. In her stories, seemingly trivial moments take on political force: an encounter with a hairdresser in The Cost of Living becomes a story about the camaraderie of women and what they reveal to each other; a scene about sharing a table on the Eurostar becomes about how men, literally and figuratively, fail to make space for younger women. In the new novel, August Blue, the narrator, having been insulted by a young man in a cafe, tells us, “I think he was expecting me to respond, to reply in some way, but I didn’t care about him or his problems.” I’ve used that in my own life more than once, since first reading it. The books become “almost a guide to life”, said Gaby Wood, director of the Booker Foundation. “She trains you to become your best self.”

Part of the appeal of Levy’s writing is that it is shot through with unpatronising sympathy towards younger women – both the hesitant, tough young female characters who populate her novels, and those who appear in her living autobiographies, often negotiating sticky situations with older, entitled men. In Real Estate, there is a passage in which she describes her joy in cooking for her daughters’ friends: “I liked their appetite – yes, for the dish prepared, but for life itself. I wanted them to find strength for all they had to do in the world and for all the world would throw at them.” She is not just talking about her daughters’ friends. Levy is also in the business of feeding and strengthening her readers. And they feel it.

The plays and the novels Levy wrote in her 20s and 30s are collage-like, gravelly, spiky, and dense, marinated in the eastern European avant-garde influences she absorbed at college. She had a talent for epigrammatic, slightly surreal sentences. “I once heard a man howl just like a wolf except he was standing in a phone box in Streatham,” says a character in her first novel. But the work had not yet acquired the razored-away, spare quality that has given the later work such airiness, such ripple and flow, nor was there the emotional force with which readers identify so strongly.

It was in the late 2000s that she forged the style that transformed her reputation. She was working at the Royal College of Art at the time. Two days a week, she’d take the tube from the fumes of Holloway Road to green South Kensington. She was a tutor in the animation department, helping students learn to write and construct narrative. “It was a potent time,” she said. Her colleagues at the Royal College of Art were inspiring; so were her students. At nights, while her young daughters slept, she was writing Swimming Home. “I was somehow living closer to my own emotions and understood that I might be able to put them to work in my book.” She had always felt that emotion was frowned upon by her avant-garde art “family”, but “from Swimming Home onwards, I decided to totally up-end that”. Charging the story with feeling changed her writing – and her relationship with readers. “I knew I was on to something, and it rocked me,” she recalled. “There were times when I’d stop writing and I’d come down to cook my daughters spaghetti in the evening. There was a sort of cool place under the steps, and I was so on fire, I would just stand there and cool down.”

What Levy found in her writing was a way of giving her story a shimmering, attractive surface, while allowing her preoccupations with literary theory, myth and psychoanalysis to occupy its murkier depths. The novel can be taken as “a kind of holiday novel gone wrong”, she said – and it has been slipped into many a suitcase as a beach or poolside read. “I’m happy if the surface is read. Because everything else is there to be found. And I’m working hard for my readers to find it. But I don’t look down on readers who don’t. I think, ‘Something will come through.’” The “something” might include the Freudian desire and death-wish that suffuses the novel; its peculiar linked imagery of sugar mice and rats; above all the immense treacherous undertow of history – of the Holocaust, of 20th-century suffering and wars – that Levy sketches into the story with almost imperceptible strokes.

But Swimming Home was rejected by every major publisher it was sent to. Levy, in all her certainty that it was good, was devastated. The years following the financial crisis of 2008 were inhospitable to a midlist novelist who hadn’t been in print for a while. The publishing industry was in trouble; the powerful new wave of feminism of the 2010s was a whisper rather than a roar; and the kind of spare, experimental books by women that would come to define recent literary trends, such as Cusk’s auto-fictional Outline trilogy, or Annie Ernaux’s intimate unfurling of memory, or Elena Ferrante’s revelatory novels on female friendship, had yet to appear in Britain. At the time, she said, “your book was either going to sell or it wasn’t going to sell, and when they said it was ‘too literary’, they meant it wasn’t going to sell”.

Then, in summer 2009, something changed. A friend of Levy’s, the late Jules Wright, who ran an arts centre in east London, read the manuscript. She was organising a show on photographer Dean Rogers, who documented the sites of car crashes that had killed cultural heroes – the spot, for example, where Marc Bolan died. Swimming Home begins with a scene in which Kitty Finch, a young woman with a death wish, perilously drives an older poet, with whom she believes she has a telepathic connection, along a winding mountain road. Wright decided to have the first two pages of the book printed large and installed at the beginning of the exhibition. Not long after the opening, though, she called Levy and bluntly announced she was removing them. It was a disaster, she said – people were clogging the entrance as they stopped to read the text. “It was,” Levy said, “the first spark: that those two pages of this much-declined book were gathering a crowd around them.”

Eventually the novel did find its publisher, a tiny new press called And Other Stories. The literary translator Sophie Lewis was editor there. Levy’s pitch, remarkably given all the rejections, was supremely confident. “Deborah said: ‘This is the tightest book I’ve ever written, and it’s going to be a bestseller,’” Lewis remembered.

In autumn 2011, Levy’s friend Charlotte Schepke, who runs Large Glass gallery in London, hosted the launch party. They decided to project The Swimmer, the 1968 Burt Lancaster film, on to the wall. On the night, to Schepke’s immense surprise, “you couldn’t stand – the place was absolutely packed. It was rammed.” Her interesting new friend, who had written witty labels for the opening show at her small gallery earlier that year, was suddenly making waves. It was almost, said Schepke, “as if she’d done this grand thing of claiming to be an author – and then, suddenly, she really was an author”.

In her living autobiographies, Levy frequently refers to her rented shed, a writing space in a friend’s garden, on whose roof the apples used to fall in autumn with a dull thunk. These days, as she moves deeper into her 60s, the shed has been replaced by an attic in Paris, a few blocks behind the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, near the Seine. On a limpid blue February day, she had pinned a branch of yellow mimosa to her front door. Its flowering marked, she said, the “end of gloomy, rat-grey January”.

The studio was as near to the platonic ideal of a Paris garret as you could imagine: reached by a winding stair through a courtyard, and with low ceilings and wooden beams. Kilim rugs were scattered on the floor, and her bed was covered in a fluffy sheepskin throw. There was a stash of red wine in the fireplace. Everything about the studio radiated her delight in objects and food and pleasure. If you met the author and saw the studio before you read the work, you might expect something more excessive and elaborate than the stripped-down, translucent prose she produces.

She poured coffee from a moka pot and passed me a dish heaped with croissants from her local boulangerie, La Maison D’Isabelle; pastries from the same shop turn up in the new novel. Objects from her real world often slip into her fiction. There was a biography of Isadora Duncan face-out on a shelf, perhaps the same book about the dancer she has her character Elsa read in August Blue. On a table stood a bowl of pearl necklaces, and at her throat were pearls – like the pearl necklace she has her beautiful, careless character Saul wear in her novel, The Man Who Saw Everything.

Things in her stories often hold the kind of powerful significance that Freud attaches to artefacts in dreams – such as the pool in Swimming Home, which, at its most basic, Levy pointed out, is a rectangular hole in the ground, and thus also metaphorically a grave. She loves the surrealists. The turning point of Hot Milk is the moment when her narrator, Sofia, discovers boldness through making bloody handprints on the kitchen wall of a man who has been tormenting his dog – a scene borrowed from a story told about the artist Leonora Carrington who, letting herself into the apartment of her prospective lover Luis Buñuel, smeared menstrual blood over his pristine white walls.

Motifs slip between books, too; in this she has something in common with a visual artist building a subtly interconnected body of work. The title August Blue, for example, is taken from the colour of the thread that, in Hot Milk, one character Ingrid uses to embroider Sofia’s name into a shirt. Horses, in particular, gallop through Levy’s work – from the tiny horse-shaped buttons that, in Real Estate, she kept from her late stepmother’s button box, to the moment Ingrid appears in the desert landscape on horseback, like a bellicose goddess, in the myth-infused Hot Milk. The whole of August Blue hangs on striking images of horses: it begins with her character, the pianist Elsa, watching jealously as a woman she thinks might be her doppelganger buys a pair of mechanical dancing horses in an Athens flea market.

Levy laughed when I asked her about her equine enthusiasms. “That’s a case for Dr Freud!” she said. She ponders, in Real Estate, what it is to be a woman “on your high horse”. Sometimes, she writes, you might find yourself incapable of controlling your high horse; at other times, people are all too eager to to pull you off it. She imagines a friend riding her high horse “down the North Circular to repair her smashed screen at Mr Cellfone”. When I think of Levy’s horses, I also think of her adoration of her small fleet of e-bikes, now famous from her living autobiographies, which she stables by her London flat and lends to friends when they visit; she bought her first when she moved out of her marriage and into her new life. When they start up with a little equine surge of power, she told me, “it’s hard not to whoop every time”.

When Levy was a small child in South Africa, and her father, Norman Levy, was imprisoned for his anti-apartheid activism, she started to speak so quietly that her voice became barely audible. What saved her from this state of virtual silence was her imagination: the dawning understanding that she could write other realities. “It was a question,” Levy told me, “of finding avatars.” The avatar she created for her nine-year-old self was a cat with wondrous powers of flight – perhaps unconsciously imagining freedom for her father, as well as liberation for herself. (In Real Estate, The Flying Cat is the name she gives to the ferry that brings her daughters to her for a holiday on a Greek island.) The characters in her fiction are still her avatars. “I’m in every one of them,” she said, “including the cats and including the horses.”

For a long time, in adulthood, she resisted writing or even talking about South Africa. The difficulties of her family felt irrelevant, when set against the struggles of black South Africans. But since she had decided to base the structure of Things I Don’t Want to Know on George Orwell’s headings in his essay Why I Write – one of which is “historical impulse” – she found herself obliged to tackle those repressed memories. Using a child’s eye view, she said, “I tried to convey, without using the old language of ‘the bloodstained regime of apartheid’, what it’s like to be told that you’re supposed to respect adults, while there are white adults who are clearly doing very cruel things to children of colour my age.”

Her mother, Philippa, through her husband’s imprisonment, coped alone, earning a living through a succession of secretarial jobs. Levy remembers her as capable and glamorous. “I loved the way she cooked, with her cigarette holder, and the way that she’d dance a bit to the record she’d put on when she came back from work.”

When Levy’s father was released in 1968, he was banned from working, and the family – Levy has an elder half-brother from her mother’s first marriage, as well as a younger brother and sister – had little option but to emigrate. Her father found work lecturing at Middlesex University, among other places. Money was tight. Her parents’ marriage ended in 1974.

After the “blue sky, and the bone-white grass of the garden” in Johannesburg, arriving in London felt “as if someone had pulled the plug out”. But despite England’s greyness, she loved it. She made, for the first time, proper friends. “I don’t have that narrative of exile, of wanting to return to the place that you left”. She adored the way people spoke, and she still delights in English turns of phrase: “Hello pet, hello lamb, hello duck.” As for her accent, “I had to lose it very quickly in the playground not to be beaten up.”

She often plucks her characters out of their familiar environments, partly in order to see their psychological foibles magnified on foreign shores. (She herself likes very much to be in a hot country, in southern Spain or a Greek island, swimming in the sea.) Sometimes these characters, like her, have been swept on the tides of 20th-century history – like the English poet Joe in Swimming Home, who is really Jozef, smuggled out of Łódź in 1943; or Lapinski in Beautiful Mutants, whose mother was “the ice-skating champion of Moscow”. Levy recalled of an interview in the news that moved her recently: it was with a Ukrainian woman from Kherson who had been lying in bed, thinking, when she was blown into her kitchen by a Russian shell. “Those were her words: ‘I was lying in bed, thinking,’” said Levy. “I do not take a place of calm, a place that is agreeable to think in, for granted.” Levy’s senses are finely tuned to the fragility of things.

After her A-levels, in the summer of 1978, she would walk past the Gate cinema in Notting Hill, timidly noting the thrilling, eccentrically dressed people who hung out there. One day, she saw an ad in the Evening Standard for front-of-house staff. For the interview, she put on a pair of big, gold platform wedges; as she left the house, her mother yelled, “‘You’ll never get a job dressed like that.’” Those gold wedges are the ancestors of the shoes that have carried her female characters on to victory, or else to triumphant defeat: the silver gladiator sandals that Ingrid, like the goddess Athena, straps high up her calves in Hot Milk; the sage-green Parisian tap shoes that get her into a scrape in Real Estate; the brothel creepers that, to her younger self, “marked me out for a meaningful life”; and the “scuffed brown leather shoes with high snakeskin heels” that we meet on page three of August Blue.

She got the job at the Gate. Her new colleagues were “either at drama school or off to university, and all way cooler than me. I was a nerdy writer” – of poetry, at the time – “with a great love of Bowie.” The cinema was screening Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee, “and he would come in, and he was curious and charismatic and friendly and cultured and he didn’t feel above talking to this 18-year-old making the popcorn, tearing the tickets and scooping the ice cream”. It was Jarman who told her she should apply not to university but to Dartington, where she’d learn about improvisation and dance and avant-garde theatre and art.

It was at this time, not having the kind of parents who dragged her round galleries at weekends, that she encountered contemporary art for the first time. It was an exhibition of the work of Joseph Beuys. She remembers, a grand piano muffled and covered with cloth marked with a cross; other objects made of gold leaf; dried plants tacked to the wall; things scribbled in pencil. “I remember almost not being able to breathe. And there was this voice inside my head, saying, ‘This is it. This is it.’ And I had no idea what it was.”

The Cost of Living opens with the narrator witnessing an encounter between a young woman and an older man in a bar in Colombia. The man, whom Levy calls “the Big Silver”, invites the young woman to his table. After she tells him a strange story about a perilous diving expedition, he remarks that she talks a lot, and carelessly knocks her book off the table. Levy writes: “It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character.” It is a very Levy-ish story, in its wry observation of dynamics between men and women, and with its implicit call to arms to women who have, as the critic Dwight Garner has put it, “come to sense they’re not locked into their lives and stories”.

Levy herself is without doubt a major character – and is intent on expanding the role. She has an immense appetite “for experiencing the strange dimensions of living and the absolutely practical dimensions”, she said. We were sitting, at the time, outside a cafe near the Panthéon in Paris after a good lunch, and Levy was smoking a roll-up. “I’m not endlessly open to experience. I am easily bored and impatient. I want to keep things moving, keep thought moving. I want to make something new of the old story. How do you make the novel as complicated as life, as interesting as life? That’s what I want to do.”

She has many plans. She wants to adapt her two most recent novels for the screen. (Swimming Home and Hot Milk are in other scriptwriters’ hands.) She knows exactly, how the opening scene of August Blue will go, and she has the perfect idea of how to tackle the temporal complexities of The Man Who Saw Everything, which slips, through its main character’s fractured consciousness, between the Berlin of 1988 and the London of 2016. In The Cost of Living, Levy fantasises about living in California and writing scripts by her pool. When I teased her lightly about the unlikelihood of this, she said, “You never know. I just might be there in my swimming costume at 80, writing films. I’d have a river now – with a little rowing boat tied to the jetty, and I’d smoke, drink coffee and write my scripts, I think probably in France.”

In the meantime, now that her daughters are in their 20s, she comes from her London flat to work in her Paris studio for weeks at a time. She is taking French lessons, though presently her literary enthusiasms outstrip her linguistic ability. “I say, ‘Shall we translate this poem of Apollinaire together?’ and my teacher says, ‘I think today, Deborah, we will try to master être and avoir.’” Her most natural creative affinities are in fact French – Godard, Duras – rather than British. To her evident delight, Levy has won one of France’s most important literary awards, the Prix Femina Étranger. She has not yet won a major prize in Britain, despite multiple short listings, perhaps because British prizes tend to favour large, self-sufficient, discrete slabs of fiction.

She begins her days early, with a walk by the Seine. After work there might be an exhibition, or dinner – which she might depart, more than one friend told me, with sudden decision, announcing that she is back off to work. She looked abashed when I mentioned this habit, worried she might appear rude to her friends. “I’m immensely sociable and then I really need to be on my own. I do like to write after a dinner party,” she said. (She herself loves to cook – “delicious mountains of cream and garlic, and the kitchen is like a bomb site,” Charlotte Schepke said, “but it’s like being in the finest restaurant. Her presence makes it an occasion”.)

At the moment, in a sharp change of gear, she is researching a biography of the young Gertrude Stein, to be titled Mama of Dada. She is concentrating on the writer’s early training under psychologist William James, brother of the novelist Henry. Levy wants to think about how this academically brilliant American – who’d be late for her medical lectures because her bustled skirts were weighted down by horsehair-stuffed hems – moved to Paris, ditched the corset and became the pioneering modernist who dressed in monk-like robes and filled her house with Picassos.

It’s a characteristic way for Levy to build character. But while the books are rooted in the physical, they also make room for the uncanny and the unexplained, for the sudden intrusion into a person’s consciousness of unwelcome memories or dark imaginings. “It would be very sad to have all the possibilities of the novel, this hot-air balloon, but to say, ‘I only write social realism and the hot-air balloon must never leave the ground,’” she said. “That’s not how people’s minds work: people have very strange dreams, and thoughts, and daydreams, and associations.” She is, she said, very careful not to let her hot-air balloon float away into the clouds of fantasmagoria. It is all in the balance and control.

What also earths Levy’s work is her wit. “She is so amused, diverted and delighted by life,” said the actor Tilda Swinton, who is a fan. Her jokes, often wryly commenting on her own failings, make for a kind of intimacy, even complicity – “the kind of complicity that many of us can only relate to the dry land of childhood companionship”, said Swinton. Levy’s women, especially the “I” of the living autobiographies, fail as well as succeed; they have good days and bad. They are neither “feisty” and “gutsy” – those tiresome cliches – nor are they self-saboteurs, who put themselves down to ingratiate themselves with the reader. They are both real and offer an example of how to live well. When Levy was finding a way to write her living autobiographies, she searched for a voice that “was immensely powerful, immensely vulnerable; immensely eloquent and totally inarticulate. Because that’s all of us.”

In March, I went back to Paul Heber-Percy’s house to see her portrait finished. It renders Levy’s face in triplicate, as if seen through a kaleidoscope, and her hair, piled on her head, soars upwards like Medusa’s snaky locks, dissolving into abstract, Rorschach-like patterns and repetitions. It gave the impression of a presence with many selves, in constant movement of thought. In the portrait, Levy has five large, wide-open, scrutinising eyes; but one of her tripled faces disappears into the world outside the frame, and the sixth eye is unseen.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[sciderman]

This makes me wonder... What do you think of MCU Peter? Like the fact he basically gets all his stuff from Stark. Tbh I'm not a big comic reader but isn't the point that he's like,, poor and invents his own stuff...? I could be so wrong here but oh well, I'll ask

i think that yeah - it absolutely misses the point of peter parker being a working-class hero who's struggle is. the whole point.

i think a huge part of the problem with superhero media in general lately is that it's not really about heroism or hope anymore (something that previous spider-man movies deal with in spades) - superhero media nowadays is often kind of just wish fulfilment. you know. imagine if YOU were this powerful and rich! imagine if you, a dumb kid, got a BILLIONAIRE SUGAR DADDY who makes you a COOL SUIT and COOL TOYS!! it's the same case in the comics too, it's not about the cost of power or the questions it brings about your responsibility to the world - or even it being allegorical for anything (everything to me is allegory. but i can't even do that with the mcu because actually, everything in the mcu is kind of literal? there's nothing there to sink my teeth into. nothing i can interpret in any sort of different way other than, like, military propaganda and wish-fulfilment. i don't think they're even concerned with telling any sort of human story with most of these characters.)

the thing is with peter parker is that the whole point is that it's not wish-fulfilment. sure, it's freaking awesome to have super-strength and swing around the city and everyone wants that. but it always, always, always comes at a cost to him. and it doesn't solve any of his problems. everything is still difficult. money. romance. he's knocked off his feet by the common cold. he's just a guy. bad things happen to him and there's never an easy out. he doesn't just have fortified penthouses at his disposal, and high-tech suits, and wizards he can call to break the multiverse for him.

i think the frustrating thing with peter parker in the mcu is that they'll pay lip-service to it but not have it be part of peter's character at all. peter says jokingly "haha i'm broke" like we ever even SEE the impact of that on him like at all. the vulture says to peter "you're like me, we're just working class guys", as if peter showed any frustration or struggle at any point in that movie to justify that comparison. he doesn't have to work a job to pay his tuition at this elite science school. there's never a question of whether he can afford this trip to europe. his identity is blown and immediately he gets set up at a fancy maximum-security apartment with all the technology he needs at his disposal. there is never a second of struggle for him. there is not one moment where he doesn't have everything he needs, any time he needs it. his court cases are settled immediately over like, a three minute conversation with matt murdock. nothing touches him. he literally skates by with sheer dumb luck and having powerful contacts. what kind of stupid, boring-ass spider-man story is that.

raimi trilogy and tasm movies you were real. you get it. being spider-man does not make life easier. you just get to punch guys to feel better about it.

[themosleyreview]

The Mosley Review: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

What continues to be fascinating about this franchise is the amount of humanity that is found in the world of the apes. The amazing Caesar trilogy brought us a fresh take on the franchise that focused on the apes rising as we watched humanity fall and how much of our worldly views influenced how they would live among us. That made his trilogy special and set up a future that was ripe for exploring. This film carries that same torch and takes a very natural turn that is familiar and special in its execution. The idea of what Caesar fought for and believed in was on display of apes living together in peace, but the idea of one ape twisting his word to something more sinister was fun to watch and added that layer of drama that kept me invested. I honestly could've just watched the apes live in their village and be satisfied. The adventure doesn't take long to begin and where we are taken was essentially a rescue mission and along the way we learn what has happened many generations after Caesar. Where the film benefits is in the apes of course and when the humans are introduced it becomes a balancing act between the retrieving of the main characters' family and the humans slowly trying to reconnect with each other. It works for the most part, but there are moments where I wished it followed just the apes.

Owen Teague takes the lead as Noa in this new story and I loved his performance. He delivers so much warmth and innocence through his eyes and the compassion he has for his friends and family. I liked that he was constantly learning about the world beyond and above his village. As the film progress, he matures quickly from the young boy type to a man fighting for his clan. Its a classic coming of age story for a young warrior that works everytime. Lydia Peckham and Travis Jeffery were great as his friends Anaya and Soona. You feel the tender care and building of a relationship between Noa and Anaya that was sweet. The bond between Noa and Soona was fun and their banter in the beginning was great. I wouldn't mind another adventure with just the three of them together. Peter Macon was excellent as Raka and I loved his jovial nature. He was a wealth of knowledge that Noa needed to see and hear about and I loved the time we spent with him. He highlighted the real ideals of Caesar and he even felt like a preacher more than a historian. On the human side, Freya Allan joins the franchise as Mae and I thought she was great. The survivalist nature of humanity always bounces between the background and foreground in these films and she was no different. She didn’t take up space and I liked that for the majority of the film she was silent and showed off her physicality in conveying emotion and thought. William H. Macy was fun as a more dare I say, domesticated human to Proximus Caesar, Trevathan. He was so defeated, fearful and yet at ease with giving up the thought of the before apes ruled. He gave a different yet familiar view of stockholm syndrome. Speaking of Proximus Caesar, the very underrated and outstanding Kevin Durand delivers an incredible and dominating performance as the antagonistic king. He exudes power and ambition as the one thing he desires is yet a few feet from him. He had a vision even if it was a cruel and sometimes violent one. Through him and thanks to Trevathan's teachings, you see a complete mirror of how the Roman Empire created civilization, but in ape form.

Composer John Paesano brought to life this new look at the world in a very emotional and epic way. His score elevated the pain of loss during the bridge scene and highlighted the tension when Noah meets Proximus. Visually the film is as stunning and rich as the previous films and the CGI used to bring the motion capture performances to life is some of the best this franchise has ever seen. As I've always said since the beginning of the current wave of Apes films, I care more for the apes than the humans. If this film was solely following the journey of Noah and no humans were in it, I would be even more happy. This was still a great entry to the franchise and Director Wes Ball has done an incredible job bringing us back to the Planet of the Apes franchise. Let me know what you thought of the film or my review in comments below. Thanks for reading!