#Suburban Thrall

[eachuisge-cc]

Any other animal hybrids in your lore?

not really. I just really enjoy designing cat people in any universe (I've got khajiit ocs in skyrim, cathar in swtor, a couple tabaxi in various d&d campaigns, etc) so I needed some for my ts4 world lol. the cat people aren't even actual hybrids in my lore, they're literally just a sapient species of cat that evolved into an evolutionary niche normally occupied by hominids in the same way hyenas evolved into one normally occupied by canids.

there are satyrs though, if that counts. I may very well make other animal-related addons, especially in relation to the digitigrade legs, but that's going to lean more into the fae side of things than what the cat people have going on. they're just kinda their own thing.

I kind of lean into the chaos inherent to playing the sims with all packs + some really excellent mods so my world is an ungodly casserole of scifi and fantasy and cyberpunk and whatever the hell's going on in strangerville (which isn't really what the ts4 devs intended to be going on in strangerville because the grocery-store-brand-stranger-things angle was the least interesting direction they could have gone with it). star wars aliens just kind of exist and nobody questions it. magical creatures are walking around. sometimes people are cyborgs. it's a fun time.

[darsynia]

Repeat After Me | Oneshot

(Tony Stark/Reader, Soulmate AU Canon Divergence 'Mob AU')

Summary: You're thriving in Loki's Empire as the most respected smuggler out there. You earned that reputation by remaining neutral, traveling between the city-states run by powerful Magnates like Loki's thrall Tony Stark in NYC or the relocated Wilson Fisk in Miami. It's lucrative business, but the real reason you have to stay moving is written on your arm.

Length | Rating: 3,635 | T (for language)

Notes: Set ten years after Loki successfully mind controlled Tony Stark and took over the world in 2012. My tongue-in-cheek take on a mobster-style AU, series potential if folks are interested.

Written for @caplanbuckybarnes's Three Words Challenge, using 'Don't look back.'

Tags: @ronearoundblindly @chickensarentcheap @themaradaniels @starksbf @tiny-anne @starryeyes2000 @my-soulmate-is-mycroft

Repeat After Me

You might be the only person who has both soulmate Words written on your body.

Repeat after me: don’t look back.

At first, you’d found them comforting. After all, they’re predictable in a way almost no one else’s Words are: if you’re right about them, it means you can choose whether to speak those fateful Words aloud. Then Loki came with his Chitauri army, and everything changed.

It’s been ten years since Lord Loki became the ruler of the world; ten years of societal restructure and bleak acquiescence. It turns out that humans are well adapted to be ruled, just as he’d said-- but perhaps not quite in the way he’d intended. Everyone has figured out their own way to survive, whether it’s in one of the densely populated city-states, the agricultural backwaters, or the uneasy suburban sprawl that straddles both extremes.

You’re one of the few who can travel easily through all three, and you pride yourself on that. Pre-Empire, you’d been a top exec at a shipping company, and your talent for managing large egos, ability to memorize maps, and knowledge of machinery was easily translated to a life as a smuggler. Your top rule? You do not take sides. Ever. It’s what made you successful, what kept you alive.

And no one knows the real reason.

“Zephyr, how long before you head out?”

You’re half-in, half-out of your truck, the open door heavy on your ass thanks to all the armor plating. “Weather looks like it’s gonna hold for another hour and a half, I was thinking forty-five minutes?” you guess, squinting up through the tint on the upper part of the windshield.

“Got time to meet with a potential?” Karl laughs at your obvious groan, adding, “Fancy suit says D.C., maybe New York. Probably shouldn’t risk skipping.” You trust your second in command, even if you don’t want to take his advice. Karl Mordo is pragmatic, honest, and a baronic pain in your ass sometimes.

“Fuck. Okay. But I’m going right now, before I de-grease for the trip.” You hop down and hold up your dirty hands, wiggling your fingers.

“What if they’re from Stark?”

You clench your jaw. “His people should know better, even after two years. We just did Fisk a favor, maybe he’ll remind Loki’s strongman that there’s a reason he relocated to Miami.” 

Karl nods and heads back to the house, and as soon as he’s gone, you hold still and count to ten to calm your breathing. Tony Stark rules the northeast with a literal iron fist, and no one’s sure whether the mind control has turned him cruel or he’d been released years ago and just likes it. Only people Stark trusts have been close enough to know for sure. 

Despite your reputation for neutrality, a few years back he’d sent his clever and ruthless ex-turned-CFO Pepper Potts to ask you to spy on some of the biggest players on the Eastern Seaboard.

It had been the first time you’d gotten close enough to see the electric blue of Loki’s mind control first-hand. Her threats had been articulate and terrifying, but your response ended up having a lasting effect on the way Lord Loki does his business. Word is that the emperor includes additional spells and enchantments to prevent a simple blow to the head from releasing a thrall and undoing years of work. 

You still get messages from Potts, filtered heavily by word of mouth, through the Resistance.

When you get up onto the porch, you note with approval that someone’s already gotten the burly, suited visitor some sweet tea. He turns around, and your heart sinks as you recognize him from news articles. Tony Stark’s sweet-faced associate, Happy Hogan. 

“Zephyr, is it?” he says warmly, reaching out a hand to shake. You offer him your left hand, and he immediately grins. You wear a binding on your right forearm, and it’s basically an open secret that your Words are there. Words you’ve made very clear you intend to remain a secret, on pain of death. “We have a job for you.”

“That’s truly unfortunate,” you say with a smile. “Your boss burned that bridge years ago. All I have is my integrity, I’m sure you understand.” Leaning up against one of the porch pillars, you send all of your anxiety to your legs, to hold you up and maintain the illusion that you’re not distressed. “Since you’ve come all this way, I can offer to connect you to one of the reputable smaller orgs.”

“Interesting you mention integrity. Did you know your right hand man is a known member of the Resistance?” Hogan’s tone is light, almost teasing.

You do your very best not to react, but on its face, you doubt the accusation. Karl had come to you deeply disillusioned by the Resistance, after working with them openly for a year, spending double that in prison, and being released with an interdict that prevented any employment but fieldwork. By the time you brought him in, he was full of quiet fury and determination to survive. The money you spent to clear his interdict was some of the easiest you’ve ever spent.

“I assume you have newer information than 2013?”

Hogan pulls an envelope from his lapel pocket and hands it over. Inside is a set of pictures showing Mordo speaking with and shaking the hand of Steve Rogers, the most wanted man on the continent. Karl’s hair has only been in that particular style for a few months.

You hand them back, keeping your hand steady. “If you can point and shoot pictures, why not point and shoot that particular problem?” The question is important to your public front, but you also want to know what kind of answer you get, whether it’ll be something you want to pass along.

“One step at a time,” Hogan says, walking over to you. He stops only inches away, a physical power play that masks the psychological threat.

“Which step are you on?”

“The one where you come with me to speak to Stark in person, or we reveal how thin your claims of neutrality really are.”

You nod as though you’re considering it, then say, “What if I dismantled everything and moved to Arizona? Started over.” It’ll sound like a joke, but you’ve considered it. You want nothing to do with Stark.

“You’re welcome to make that decision after the meeting.” The guy’s so confident he slides his hands into his pockets, fully relaxed except for the way his pulse is jumping in his neck. There’s zero chance that Hogan’s anxious because of you, so that means it’s important to his future that you leave with him today. If you have to, you’ll use that.

“You act like meeting with Stark won’t destroy my reputation just as much as your false accusations would,” you point out. 

Happy Hogan shrugs. “Stark is prepared to offer you one alternative. Meet with him or give us a credible way to contact Pepper Potts.”

You want to swear under your breath, but instead, you channel all your frustration into a single act of defiance. Lifting your grease-stained right hand, you press it right in the center of his chest, fingers spread so you get his white button-down and both lapels.

Then you shove, letting your hand slip against the resistance he immediately puts up to avoid moving backwards and show weakness. You would have expected anger, maybe even to be thrown to the ground, but Hogan just chuckles. It’s dismissive, diminishing, and does nothing to lower your level of fury. Especially not since he’s got you over a barrel.

You push past him toward the house. “I’m sending Mordo with my load. Your guys fuck with him and I’ll tear down every fucking thing you’ve built or die trying.” Given the clout you’ve accumulated in the last decade, which one depends on whether the emperor is in town to shield his pet Avenger or not.

You hadn’t told Hogan you’re coming with. You both know you have to.

The flight to New York City is stressful, but most of that is because you know how much effort and care it takes to maintain a fleet of airplanes. Now that flights are nearly all restricted to just the Magnates, you doubt the due diligence of their maintenance teams. This is reinforced when you land and walk down a presidential-style rolling staircase instead of into the abandoned airport. It’s hard not to think of what air travel could do for your business. One flight would take so much food from one place to another-- but the safety margins are horrifying.

“What’s with the face?” Happy Hogan asks, after the two of you get into the waiting limo.

“Just imagining how much work it would be to get an orange to Maine nowadays.”

“You don’t have to live in Georgia, you know. The offer’s always open.”

“Fuck your offer, and fuck you,” you say coolly, crossing your arms and looking out the window. There’s a non-zero chance he’ll kill you, but you’ve got a trick up your sleeve that might just carry the kind of irony that would make even a man as powerful as Tony Stark cry. It’s the reason why Hogan wants Potts back, the reason she won’t go, not while he’s in Loki’s thrall.

Midgard hadn’t been interesting enough for the trickster god. No, he’d grown bored by the way most of his new subjects had responded to his rule. Too many of you had accepted that you weren’t strong enough to resist him, and so, with the power granted to him by the staff he always carried, Lord Loki had bestowed each soulmate pair on the planet a random power set.

Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan’s version had been the ability to detect lies.

Tony Stark’s inability to find his soulmate had been newsworthy before the attack on New York, but now that he’s the de facto ruler of the place, his search has become an obsession.

It’s the reason you live in Georgia, the reason you wear the distinctive binding around your right forearm, the reason you’d balanced yourself on the knife-edge of neutrality instead of choosing a side that’s not Stark’s and then leaving yourself vulnerable to being discovered.

Stark’s Words are well known: ‘Don’t look back.’

Ironically, you don’t think he has connected your well-known quirk about protecting your forearm with his soulmate search. He wants you because Lord Loki wants Pepper Potts’ lie detecting powers, and Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff’s soulmate bond is keeping her hidden. Karl Mordo has forsworn his connection to the Mystic Arts, but a man will do many things to prevent his own death, including oathbreaking, so instead of putting pressure on him, they’ll put pressure on you.

And somehow, you’re going to have to resist without speaking a word.

The car is underground when it stops. You nod at Hogan in thanks for his hand as you exit the vehicle, and he cocks his head to the side and looks at you.

“Passive resistance, eh? Good luck.” He leads you through a warren of hallways, stairwells, and locked doors. This display of strength is clearly designed to intimidate and/or give you time to think and fear what comes next, but you wonder whether it’s annoying to Hogan. Undoubtedly he’d be taking the short way if it weren’t for this task, and that kind of time-wasting adds up.

Sure enough, the last leg of the trip is an elevator ride. The doors open out into the wide expanse of the penthouse, a rich space with wall-to-wall windows looking out over the city. A man in a well-fitting white suit walks out from behind a bar area, and you recognize him to be Tony Stark himself. Instead of a tie, the signature blue of his arc reactor glows against the buttons of his shirt, and as he approaches you, you see that it’s matched by the blue tint of mind control in his eyes.

That knowledge is dangerous; already, this man’s leverage over you has doubled. You wonder what you’ll have to promise to get out of here alive. 

Tony Stark stops a foot away and looks you over. His brown-blue eyes linger on your right arm, and as you’d planned during your pseudo perp-walk, you shift into a challenging pose, popping your hip out and lifting your chin. Stark’s lips curve into an appreciative smile. It’s attractive, he’s attractive, and you’re annoyed that you’ve even noticed. Everything about him exudes the confidence of a man who is never challenged, and that’s always been your catnip, your kryptonite. You love to bust egos, it could even be said that you live for popping that bubble. This man might be the first one you’ve ever met whose arrogance is well-deserved, though, and that could be a problem.

He gestures, and behind you, Hogan answers.“No weapons that we found, multiple scans.”

Ah, so the many doorways and long hallways had more than one purpose, you think to yourself. Well played. You stay still and expressionless as Stark looks you up and down, eyes lingering on your chest and your arm. He lifts his glass in an appreciative salute before finishing off his drink. Something about the way his throat works makes you feel the burn of the alcohol in your own chest.

“What’s under the armguard?” he asks Hogan.

“According to sources, a nasty burn. Sunlight makes it worse.” It’s the truth-- you’d tried to burn off the words as soon as you’d heard about Tony Stark’s search for his soulmate. The magic of the mark protects it, so all you’d managed to do was destroy the skin around it, causing a wound that never fully healed. The vambrace you wear is for concealment, yes, but it’s also there to keep the damaged skin protected and dry.

You turn your head and direct a grumpy look at Hogan. “This whole meeting could have been an email. What is it that you two want?”

Before you can stop him, Stark steps forward and slides his hand into the hair at the nape of your neck, forcing you to meet his eyes.  With a fierce, determined expression, he says, “Repeat after me: don’t look back.”

You can feel the strength in every single aspect of the man, voice, personality, grip, but that just fuels your need to fight back. With all your might, you manage to shake your head just enough to convey your refusal.

Tony Stark’s expression lights up. You realize your mistake immediately: if it didn’t mean something, if the words weren't important, you would have had no trouble repeating them. A million impossible escape routes spill out like marbles in your mind, scattering every other thought.

“Go on, Hap. Keep this to yourself for now,” Stark says. The triumph in his voice is as frightening as it is sexy. 

“You got it, boss.”

You fight back a strong feeling of desperate inevitability. Really, your only hope now is to wrench free and follow your contingency plan: to say the words and play them off, avoiding the physical contact that reinforces the bond. If you can convince this man that you planned to trick him into thinking you’re his soulmate, you might still get out of here with your free will intact.

That’ll be easier to do without Hogan there, so you force yourself to remain still. Stark sweeps a broad, warm caress along your neck with his thumb, and god, it’s been so, so long since anyone’s touched you like that. There’s something insidious about it, like some part of you is already lost to him if you enjoy it even a little bit. All you can do is close your eyes, clench your fists, and wait.

The elevator doors close, and Stark starts pulling his hand away, stroking your neck possessively on the way. You do your very best not to like it. In truth, Tony Stark the billionaire, Tony Stark the Avenger was absolutely your type. You imagine that after ten years of mind control and cruelty, there’s probably little of that man left. 

“You might as well say it,” he tells you with a smug little quirk in his voice. You open your eyes to see that Stark’s headed back to the bar. “Got a favorite drink?” You shake your head. “You strike me as a Tequila Sunrise type. Fun to look at, goes down easy.”

You cross your arms and glare at him, but it was a cute line for such a tense situation. Wrong, but cute.

Stark gestures to you with the Tequila bottle. “So, what, did you think you’d just stay quiet and run back home to Georgia? Happy says it didn’t take much persuading.”

You smile at him, but not warmly. One thing you hadn’t considered was that Stark might be pleased, might be looking forward to the other… perks of having a soulmate. That might make him more inclined to be kind to you, at least until you try to bluff him. You can use that.

“Don’t think I can’t see how furious you are, little one,” Stark purrs. “I’m still figuring you out, but I’ve had a file on you for years. You want to know what people say about you?” 

He rests a large hand on a folder you hadn’t noticed before, pushes it across the bar in invitation. You shrug and turn your head to look out the window, the picture of indifference. You hope it pisses him the fuck off.

“Yeah, you’re right. It’s all trash now anyway, now that you’ve met with me.” Stark holds it up. “They’ll never trust you again.” He tosses it behind him. When it strikes the wall, the many single pages that made up the bulk of the file fly out around him like some kind of monstrous confetti, to the accompaniment of breaking glass. You wonder how many bottles he just wasted, whether they’re even replaceable in this brave new world you’re all trapped in.

You nod, feeling the weight of the coming moment. Mentally you gird yourself, but physically you try to adopt an attitude of casual discourtesy. You want Stark to hate his soulmark, to hate you, enough to send you away or destroy you.

Anything, anything but touch you again.

Letting out a sigh, you spread your hands in a ‘what can you do?’ gesture and say, “Don’t look back.”

The words strike him, so much so that he chuckles ruefully on an indrawn breath. A bitter disappointment sweeps across his face before it hardens into anger. You're grateful; you'd expected something-- a thunderclap, a rush of adrenaline, a gust of magical wind, but there’s nothing to indicate that you’ve both said the Words. Maybe, maybe, you can get out of this, if you’re careful. If you’re just the right level of heinous bitch.

“Did you practice that?” Stark finally says. He walks out from around the bar, and you take the opportunity to make your way over to the window, the picture of unconcerned, unattached, unbothered.

“What do you want, Mr. Stark?” Shit, your voice is shaking.

“I want a challenge,” he snaps, his voice closer than you expected. He’s just a foot away, and you can’t hide your shock fast enough. “You think that file was just for show? I read the whole thing.”

“Then you know I don’t want to be here. I have a business to run, a business you’ve fucked over with--” you back away in the guise of making a dismissive, furious gesture; “--whatever this is. What do you want, so I can get the fuck out of here?”

“What’s wrong, pet? Foot caught in a trap?” he asks, tone suddenly gentle, soothing. You scoff, turning on your heel to stalk away from him--but Stark reaches out swiftly and catches your hand in his.

A jolt of pleasure-fueled electricity floods you with an almost overwhelming need for closeness, companionship-- to be known. It's as if until this exact moment, you’d been empty, and you gasp, screaming against the sudden, insidious desires that have cropped up in your mind.

Oh god, no, this is too much, this is--

What you don’t expect is for Stark to answer.

Oh FUCK yes, telepathy. My second favorite superpower, right after flight.

You snatch your hand away and fall back onto the window, eyes wide. Stark shakes his head almost imperceptibly, then throws both hands in the air as if in disgust.

“You really had me, but there’s just… nothing. I should toss you off of the roof, you know that, right? Faking soulmark words? Ballsy.” He twitches his lips as though he can’t decide whether to be angry or not, and steps closer. “Hold out your hand?”

There’s vulnerability in his expression, something you hadn’t at all expected to see, but you are still reeling from what had passed between the two of you. Tony Stark is one of the smartest men on the planet, and certainly one of the most ruthless. He’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants-- and it’s well known that every inch of his penthouse is under surveillance, not to mention whatever Lord Loki has monitoring his most powerful thrall.

Just like the words written on both of you, neither of you can look back.

Sullenly, you lift your hand, and immediately, Stark engulfs it in an angry grip.

Okay here’s how this is going to go: Do as I say, and we can keep this our little secret. Resist me and I’ll tell Loki I’ve finally found my soulmate. Believe me, you do not want anything to do with what he has in store for us.

Possibly TBC if there's interest...

[mercerislandbooks]

A Pleasing Terror

Brad is taking over the blog today, sharing his passion for horror and his lovingly crafted Haunted Bookshelf (all his own original artwork!) — Lori

Brad: Each October, as the air turns crisp and the nights grow longer, I share my love of ghost stories with our customers by adorning one of our display tables with spooky artwork and spookier tomes. I call it The Haunted Bookshelf. Cue howling wind and clanking chains!

I can trace my love of horror and Halloween to my years growing up in suburban New Jersey. In the early 1970s New York’s WPIX broadcast a program called Chiller Theatre, a repackaging of 30s, 40s, and 50s horror movies hosted by Zacherley. To this day I can remember the thrill of terror I felt watching a floating skeleton back actress Carol Ohmart into a pool of acid in The House on Haunted Hill. I was so freaked out that I had nightmares for weeks. I couldn’t wait to see more. And, while I loved the Frankenstein monster, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy, it was haunted houses that I looked forward to visiting most.

Unfortunately, the majority of haunted house movies are cheats, with the “ghosts” exposed as conniving relatives, greedy prospectors, or bumbling bank robbers by film’s end. Even my beloved floating skeleton is revealed to be a surprisingly complicated puppet, manipulated and voiced by Vincent Price. Eventually I discovered that the authentic haunted houses I craved were found in books. I’m sure my horror library started with Stephen King, but soon I was adding H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and many more.

Let us begin with arguably the 20th century’s finest ghost story writer, Montague Rhodes James. Between 1904 and 1925, James penned 4 slim books of ghost stories which have been collected in two annotated volumes, Count Magnus and other Ghost Stories and A Haunted Doll’s House and Other Ghost Stories. The first time I read “Oh, Whistle, and I Will Come to You, My Lad”, I got actual goose bumps when the specter made its startling appearance. Unlike the subtle haunts in tales by Henry James and Edith Wharton, M.R. James’ ghostly manifestations manifest! Often horribly. As the author himself remarked, in the essay “Ghosts—Treat Them Gently!”:

...our ghost should make himself felt by gradual stirrings diffusing an atmosphere of uneasiness before the final flash or stab of horror. Must there be horror? You ask. I think so.

Agreed!

Carmilla is the classic lesbian vampire story, written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu in 1871 and responsible for as many imitations as there are stars in the night sky above the heroine’s gothic Austrian schloss. However, the 2019 Lanternfish Press edition is a different beast, with an introduction by novelist Carmen Maria Machado, restoring a disturbing backstory to this often-told tale. Or does it? I am hesitant to ruin the fun here, so I will just say that if the term Borgesian means anything to you then this edition belongs on your bookshelf next to the original text.

Finally, as we move back through literary time, we arrive at The Oceans of Cruelty: Twenty-Five Tales of a Corpse Spirit. In this ancient Hindi story, retold here by Douglas J. Penick, a hapless young king, in thrall to an evil sorcerer, must bear a corpse spirit on his back as the grotesque husk whispers stories into his ear. Not unlike Princess Scheherazade’s stories from The Thousand and One Nights, the corpse spirit’s tales are full of moral lessons, family dramas, and occasional horrors. Not only is this book charmingly weird, but Penick’s introduction, about the stories his mother read to him as a child, is wonderful.

So, thank you for visiting the Haunted Bookshelf, and as Zacherley would say: Goodnight Whatever You Are!

— Brad

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Christian Pax at Vox:

Is Donald Trump on track to win a historic share of voters of color in November’s presidential election? On the surface, it’s one of the most confounding questions of the Trump years in American politics. Trump — and the Republican Party in his thrall — has embraced anti-immigrant policies and proposals, peddled racist stereotypes, and demonized immigrants. So why does it look like he might win over and hold the support of greater numbers of nonwhite voters than the Republican Party of years past? In poll after poll, he’s hitting or exceeding the levels of support he received in 2020 from Latino and Hispanic voters. He’s primed to make inroads among Asian American voters, whose Democratic loyalty has gradually been declining over the last few election cycles. And the numbers he’s posting with Black voters suggest the largest racial realignment in an election since the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

There are a plethora of explanations for this shift, but first, some points of clarification. The pro-Trump shift is concentrated among Hispanic and Latino voters, though it has appeared to be spreading to parts of the Black and Asian American electorate. Second, things have changed since Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket in late July. Polling confirms that Harris has posted significant improvements among nonwhite voters, young voters, Democrats, and suburban voters. In other words, Harris has managed to revive the party’s standing with its base, suggesting that a part of Trump’s gains were due to unique problems that Biden had with these groups of voters. Thus, it’s not entirely clear to what extent this great racial realignment, as some have described the Trump-era phenomenon, will manifest itself in November.

[...]

Why? Putting aside environmental factors and shifts in the American electorate that are happening independent of the candidates, there are a few theories to explain how Trump has uniquely weakened political polarization along the lines of race and ethnicity. 1) Trump has successfully associated himself with a message of economic nostalgia, heightening nonwhite Americans’ memories of the pre-Covid economy in contrast to the period of inflation we’re now exiting. 2) Trump and his campaign have also zeroed in specifically on outreach and messaging to nonwhite men as part of their larger focus on appealing to male voters. 3) Trump and his party have taken advantage of a confluence of social factors, including messaging on immigration and cultural issues, to shore up support from conservative voters of color who have traditionally voted for Democrats or not voted at all.

[...]

Theory 1: Effective campaigning on the economy

Trump’s loudest message — the one that gets the most headlines — is his bombastic attacks on immigrants and his pledge to conduct mass deportations. His most successful appeal to voters, though, which he has held on to despite an improving economy under Biden, is economic. Trump claims to have presided over a time of broad and magnificent prosperity, arguing that there was a Trump economic renaissance before Biden bungled it. That pitch doesn’t comport with reality, but it may be resonating with voters who disproportionately prioritize economic concerns in casting their votes, particularly Latino and Asian American voters. Polling suggests that voters at large remember the Trump-era economy fondly and view Trump’s policies more favorably than Biden’s. Black and Latino voters in particular may have more negative memories about Biden and Democrats’ economic stewardship because they experienced worse rates of inflation than white Americans and Asian Americans did during 2021 and 2022.

[...]

Theory 2: Direct appeals to nonwhite men

The political realignment of women voters has been one of the major stories of 2024; the gender gap in American politics exploded in 2016, took a break in 2020, and seems like it’s about to be historic in 2024, with a huge pro-Democrat shift among women. At the same time, though, the rightward drift of men, including men of color, is a quiet undercurrent that may end up explaining what happened if Trump wins in November. Plenty of theories have been raised in the past about what kind of appeal Trump might have specifically to men and to men of color: Does his businessman persona resonate with upwardly mobile, financially aspirational men? Is there a “macho” appeal there for Hispanic men? Could his gritty, outsider, everyman posturing and brash rhetoric resonate with Black and Latino men, particularly those living in traditionally Democratic cities?

[...]

Theory 3: Championing conservative social issues

Trump and the GOP may also have found the right social issues to emphasize and campaign on in order to exploit some of the cultural divides between conservative and moderate nonwhite voters, and liberal white voters who also make up part of the Democratic base (in addition to liberal nonwhite voters). In 2021 and 2022, that looked like fearmongering on gender identity and crime, playing up concerns over affirmative action, and campaigning on the overturning of Roe v Wade. In 2023 and 2024, the Trump focus has shifted strongly toward immigration, an issue that has divided the Democratic coalition as hostility toward immigration has grown. That’s true even for Latino and Hispanic voters — long seen as being the voting group most amenable to a pro-immigrant, Democratic message — and it’s being used as a wedge issue by Republicans among Black voters as well.

Though it was seen as a gaffe, Trump’s “black jobs” comment during the first presidential debate got to this tension — the idea of migrants taking jobs, resources, and opportunities from non-white citizens. Florida Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, one of Trump’s go-to Black surrogates, explained the argument to me like this: “If you’re a Black man, Hispanic man, white man, you’re working hard every day, and the money you earn doesn’t go as far. That hurts your family, that hurts your kids. So they look at this situation, this immigration problem. People are saying, ‘Wait a minute. Why are illegal aliens getting food, getting shelter, getting an education, while my family and my child is struggling. It’s not right, and it’s not fair.’” And for Asian American voters, now the fastest growing ethnic segment of the electorate, immigration is also becoming a wedge issue, Zarsadiaz told me. “This feeling, ‘I’ve waited my turn, I waited my time’ — there’s long been Latino and Asian American immigrants who have felt this way. The assumption has long been that if you’re an immigrant, you must be very liberal on immigration, and that’s definitely not the case,” Zarsadiaz said. “Some of the staunchest critics of immigration, especially on amnesty or Dreamers, are immigrants themselves, and with Asian Americans that’s an issue that has been drawing more voters to Trump and Trumpism — those immigrant voters who feel like they’re being wronged.” Democrats are now moderating on immigration, but only after years of moving left. And that shift left has been true on a range of issues, contributing to another part of this theory of Trump’s gains: that Democrats have pushed conservative or moderate nonwhite Americans away as they embraced beliefs more popular with white, college-educated, and suburban voters. The political scientist Ruy Teixeira and Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini have been theorizing for a while now that a disjuncture over social issues in general — and Trump’s seizure of these issues — has complicated the idea that Democrats would benefit from greater numbers and rates of participation from nonwhite America. It may explain why conservative and moderate voters of color, who may have voted for Democrats in the past, are now realigning with the Republican Party.

[...]

There are signs that some of this shift may be happening independently of Trump. It could be a product of the growing diversification of America, upward mobility and changing understandings of class, and growing educational divides. For example, as rates of immigration change and the share of US-born Latino and Asian Americans grows, their partisan loyalties may continue to change. Those born closer to the immigrant experience may have had more of a willingness to back the party seen as more welcoming of immigrants, but as generations get further away from that experience, racial and ethnic identity may become less of a factor in the development of political thinking.

Concepts of racial identity and memory are also changing — younger Black Americans, for example, have less of a tie to the Civil Rights era — potentially contributing to less strong political polarization among Black and Latino people in the US independently of any given candidate — and creating more persuadable voters in future elections. At the same time, younger generations are increasingly identifying as independents or outside of the two-party paradigm — a change in loyalty that stands to hurt Democrats first, since Democrats tend to do better with younger voters.

Vox explores how Donald Trump made inroads with a portion of the POC vote this election: young men of color.

[danas-old-art]

OC-tober #14-20! A whole big batch of Suburban Thrall characters!

Featuring:

#14 Bradley ‘BC’ Cooper: stoner demon summoner with a real mysterious old book on his hands

#15 Toby Kozlov: overdramatic art history major who thinks all this demon stuff is, frankly, BULLSHIT

#16 Holly Vonnegut: weird horse girl turned Weird Horse Woman. Can and WILL wrestle a demon.

#17 Lynette Miller: mildly pretentious teenager with a bit of a “not like other girls” complex and a real knack for AP physics

#18 Carol. .. ?? /?????: A mysterious Emissary from another dimension. Claims to be doing “damage control”

#19 Legatus Rahthvowr: The big mean top ranking general of the Liatorian Army

#20 Or’brlis: A big, remarkably cordial dog demon that escaped through a crack in space-time and is currently holed up in the suburban Wisconsin woods. 

[cyberdragoninfinity]

Some OC doodles for Pride! ft. Emmy from @piezeth of course

[the-anxious-dimosiographe-1989]

Such vampiric patriarchies not only reveal their un-desirability through their direct association with the monstrous but further align their structures with evil through the direct threat they pose to the safety of the Sunnydale teenagers. Both the Master and the evil Angelus pose particularly potent threats to Buffy and her friends, each not only succeeding in destroying part of the teens’ inner circle—Jessie is turned into a vampire at the Master’s bidding to bait Buffy (‘Welcome to the Hellmouth’, 1001/ ‘The Harvest’, 1002), while Jenny Calender is murdered by the sadistic Angelus (‘Passion’, 2017)—but also have a powerful hold over the slayer herself. While ultimately the slayer and her pals vanquish these vampiric patriarchs, Buffy is, at first encounter, powerless to land the killing blow. While it is Buffy’s love for Angel that stays her hand against Angelus (‘Innocence’, 2014), the Master imposes a much more alarming control on the teenaged warrior. It is the power of the Master himself, his authority as patriarchyincarnate, which commands the obedience of the young slayer. Through his hypnotic control over Buffy, the Master is able to remover her ability to fight back, to defend herself against being penetrated by his bite. This control and thrall which the vampiric patriarchy exercises over the slayer suggests the attraction that traditional structures still hold for the teens of Sunnydale. However, the appeal of the patriarchy is again undermined by the inherent corruption of the Master. Rather than offering security and safety for the teens of Sunnydale, the Master’s family is intent on their destruction. The artificiality of the traditional family is revealed through the Master’s bite which violates and drains the life, albeit temporarily, from a disempowered Buffy. Far from providing security and structured guidance for the teenaged Buffy and her friends, patriarchies within the Buffyverse threaten to destroy them, brining chaos and corruption to their ordered suburban world. [15] Just as the conception of the traditional patriarchal family unit as cohesive and stable is revealed within Buffy as a construction and ultimately artificial, so too is the world of the cohesive suburban family revealed to be a fabrication. While certainly the human families of the show’s protagonists are located as ‘good’ compared to the monstrous patriarchy, even these family units are loaded with negative connotations. The families of Buffy, Willow and Xander represent the dysfunction and disintegration of the American nuclear family, highlighting, as Owen explains, the fear of “the fragmented heterosexual, middle-class family unit, and the failures of the rational world paradigm” (Owen 1999, 27). Each of the show’s protagonists’ families are represented as fragmented. Buffy is part of a divorced, single parent household where her absent father is constructed as disinterested in the family he has lost, choosing to enjoy a European vacation with a new fling rather than support his family through Buffy’s Mother’s illness (‘Family’, 5006). 

https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/76372636/stevens_slayage_8.1-with-cover-page-v2.pdf?Expires=1667324409&Signature=V-rDW11SR4PknEFxMGcPozPsd0W-Ln5CFaiwbIPofEu-7NvuMySUo6jZnKCGuCmOCHbDPdSvzGf7UV1lMBhn7tbMWO6w2c~iMn7tpHaMLhssugn8Ukl4kOpfX9ptNNiAiAiDmargTqI1EJWi3iVw6EgJKrBUvLcI4M3j00vA~Y6U1B9nXFl-3BZpHK2PIQr7uoTP9tXEXAtXRkf7wEtjQAIUuE4p13ZfHurG6uzzqeNTQya9J5dUHgwVnO4wHcFejfevdFlyYJI9TUXHmHizZMkuSb7KVkcQJ54zdx5nFBqy5oDefbnM3MYu-i8mFNo9mOZU5V0SYiZ7m5c-QtdTOg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA

[mysme-fictober]

Mysme Fictober 2021

It's that time of year again!

I'm putting the list under the "read more" along with a synopsis of each movie for those who may not be familiar with it. I hope others will join me this year in celebrating the spooktacular Mystic Messenger characters!

Reblogs Appreciated!

RULES

Oct. 1st: Hocus Pocus

After moving to Salem, Mass., teenager Max Dennison (Omri Katz) explores an abandoned house with his sister Dani (Thora Birch) and their new friend, Allison (Vinessa Shaw). After dismissing a story Allison tells as superstitious, Max accidentally frees a coven of evil witches (Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy) who used to live in the house. Now, with the help of a magical cat, the kids must steal the witches' book of spells to stop them from becoming immortal.

Oct. 2nd: The Addams Family

When a man (Christopher Lloyd) claiming to be Fester, the missing brother of Gomez Addams (Raul Julia), arrives at the Addams' home, the family is thrilled. However, Morticia (Anjelica Huston) begins to suspect the man is a fraud, since he cannot recall details of Fester's life. With the help of lawyer Tully Alford (Dan Hedaya), Fester manages to get the Addams clan evicted from their home. Gomez realizes the two men are conspiring to swindle the Addams fortune and that he must challenge Fester.

Oct 3rd: Halloween

On a cold Halloween night in 1963, six year old Michael Myers brutally murdered his 17-year-old sister, Judith. He was sentenced and locked away for 15 years. But on October 30, 1978, while being transferred for a court date, a 21-year-old Michael Myers steals a car and escapes Smith's Grove. He returns to his quiet hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, where he looks for his next victims.

Oct. 4th: The Nightmare Before Christmas

The film follows the misadventures of Jack Skellington, Halloweentown's beloved pumpkin king, who has become bored with the same annual routine of frightening people in the "real world." When Jack accidentally stumbles on Christmastown, all bright colors and warm spirits, he gets a new lease on life -- he plots to bring Christmas under his control by kidnapping Santa Claus and taking over the role. But Jack soon discovers even the best-laid plans of mice and skeleton men can go seriously awry.

Oct. 5th: Edward Scissorhands

A scientist (Vincent Price) builds an animated human being -- the gentle Edward (Johnny Depp). The scientist dies before he can finish assembling Edward, though, leaving the young man with a freakish appearance accentuated by the scissor blades he has instead of hands. Loving suburban saleswoman Peg (Dianne Wiest) discovers Edward and takes him home, where he falls for Peg's teen daughter (Winona Ryder). However, despite his kindness and artistic talent, Edward's hands make him an outcast.

Oct. 6th: Beetlejuice

After Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin) die in a car accident, they find themselves stuck haunting their country residence, unable to leave the house. When the unbearable Deetzes (Catherine O'Hara, Jeffrey Jones) and teen daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder) buy the home, the Maitlands attempt to scare them away without success. Their efforts attract Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), a rambunctious spirit whose "help" quickly becomes dangerous for the Maitlands and innocent Lydia.

Oct. 7th: The Lost Boys

Teenage brothers Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) move with their mother (Dianne Wiest) to a small town in northern California. While the younger Sam meets a pair of kindred spirits in geeky comic-book nerds Edward (Corey Feldman) and Alan (Jamison Newlander), the angst-ridden Michael soon falls for Star (Jami Gertz) -- who turns out to be in thrall to David (Kiefer Sutherland), leader of a local gang of vampires. Sam and his new friends must save Michael and Star from the undead.

Oct. 8th: Sweeny Todd

Evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) lusts for the beautiful wife of a London barber (Johnny Depp) and transports him to Australia for a crime he did not commit. Returning after 15 years and calling himself Sweeney Todd, the now-mad man vows revenge, applying his razor to unlucky customers and shuttling the bodies down to Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who uses them in her meat-pie shop. Though many fall to his blade, he will not be satisfied until he slits Turpin's throat.

Oct. 9th: Sleepy Hollow

Set in 1799, "Sleepy Hollow" is based on Washington Irving's classic tale "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Faithful to the dreamy custom-bound world that Irving paints in his story, the film mixes horror, fantasy and romance and features an extraordinary cast of characters that dabble in the supernatural.

Oct. 10th: Psycho

Phoenix secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), on the lam after stealing $40,000 from her employer in order to run away with her boyfriend, Sam Loomis (John Gavin), is overcome by exhaustion during a heavy rainstorm. Traveling on the back roads to avoid the police, she stops for the night at the ramshackle Bates Motel and meets the polite but highly strung proprietor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), a young man with an interest in taxidermy and a difficult relationship with his mother.

Oct. 11th: The Haunted Mansion

Workaholic real estate agent Jim Evers (Eddie Murphy) is accused by his wife, Sara (Marsha Thomason), of neglecting his son (Marc John Jefferies) and daughter (Aree Davis), so he takes the family on a vacation. Along the way, the family stops off at a sinister mansion that Jim has been asked to sell, only to discover it's haunted by Master Gracey (Nathaniel Parker) ; his stern butler, Ramsley (Terence Stamp) ; and two other servants who need some help breaking a curse.

Oct. 12th: Practical Magic

Sally (Sandra Bullock) and Gillian Owens (Nicole Kidman), born into a magical family, have mostly avoided witchcraft themselves. But when Gillian's vicious boyfriend, Jimmy Angelov (Goran Visnjic), dies unexpectedly, the Owens sisters give themselves a crash course in hard magic. With policeman Gary Hallet (Aidan Quinn) growing suspicious, the girls struggle to resurrect Angelov -- and unwittingly inject his corpse with an evil spirit that threatens to end their family line.

Oct 13th: The Exorcist

One of the most profitable horror movies ever made, this tale of an exorcism is based loosely on actual events. When young Regan (Linda Blair) starts acting odd -- levitating, speaking in tongues -- her worried mother (Ellen Burstyn) seeks medical help, only to hit a dead end. A local priest (Jason Miller), however, thinks the girl may be seized by the devil. The priest makes a request to perform an exorcism, and the church sends in an expert (Max von Sydow) to help with the difficult job.

Oct. 14th: The Shining

Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) becomes winter caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel in Colorado, hoping to cure his writer's block. He settles in along with his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and his son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), who is plagued by psychic premonitions. As Jack's writing goes nowhere and Danny's visions become more disturbing, Jack discovers the hotel's dark secrets and begins to unravel into a homicidal maniac hell-bent on terrorizing his family.

Oct 15th: Casper

Casper (voiced by Malachi Pearson) is a kind young ghost who peacefully haunts a mansion in Maine. When specialist James Harvey (Bill Pullman) arrives to communicate with Casper and his fellow spirits, he brings along his teenage daughter, Kat (Christina Ricci). Casper quickly falls in love with Kat, but their budding relationship is complicated not only by his transparent state, but also by his troublemaking apparition uncles and their mischievous antics.

Oct. 16th: A Nightmare on Elm Street

In Wes Craven's classic slasher film, several Midwestern teenagers fall prey to Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), a disfigured midnight mangler who preys on the teenagers in their dreams -- which, in turn, kills them in reality. After investigating the phenomenon, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) begins to suspect that a dark secret kept by her and her friends' parents may be the key to unraveling the mystery, but can Nancy and her boyfriend Glen (Johnny Depp) solve the puzzle before it's too late?

Oct. 17th: Ghostbusters

After the members of a team of scientists (Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray) lose their cushy positions at a university in New York City, they decide to become "ghostbusters" to wage a high-tech battle with the supernatural for money. They stumble upon a gateway to another dimension, a doorway that will release evil upon the city. The Ghostbusters must now save New York from complete destruction.

Oct. 18th: The Mummy

The Mummy is a rousing, suspenseful and horrifying epic about an expedition of treasure-seeking explorers in the Sahara Desert in 1925. Stumbling upon an ancient tomb, the hunters unwittingly set loose a 3,000-year-old legacy of terror, which is embodied in the vengeful reincarnation of an Egyptian priest who had been sentenced to an eternity as one of the living dead.

Oct. 19th: Carrie

In this chilling adaptation of Stephen King's horror novel, withdrawn and sensitive teen Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) faces taunting from classmates at school and abuse from her fanatically pious mother (Piper Laurie) at home. When strange occurrences start happening around Carrie, she begins to suspect that she has supernatural powers. Invited to the prom by the empathetic Tommy Ross (William Katt), Carrie tries to let her guard down, but things eventually take a dark and violent turn.

Oct. 20th: Scream

Wes Craven re-invented and revitalised the slasher-horror genre with this modern horror classic, which manages to be funny, clever and scary, as a fright-masked knife maniac stalks high-school students in middle-class suburbia. Craven is happy to provide both tension and self-parody as the body count mounts - but the victims aren't always the ones you'd expect.

Oct. 21st: Rosemary’s Baby

A young wife comes to believe that her offspring is not of this world. Waifish Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her struggling actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes) move to a New York City apartment building with an ominous reputation and odd neighbors Roman and Minnie Castavet (Sidney Blackmer, Ruth Gordon). When Rosemary becomes pregnant she becomes increasingly isolated, and the diabolical truth is revealed only after Rosemary gives birth.

Oct. 22nd: Friday the 13th

Crystal Lake's history of murder doesn't deter counselors from setting up a summer camp in the woodsy area. Superstitious locals warn against it, but the fresh-faced young people -- Jack (Kevin Bacon), Alice (Adrienne King), Bill (Harry Crosby), Marcie (Jeannine Taylor) and Ned (Mark Nelson) -- pay little heed to the old-timers. Then they find themselves stalked by a brutal killer. As they're slashed, shot and stabbed, the counselors struggle to stay alive against a merciless opponent.

Oct. 23rd: Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Count Dracula, a 15th-century prince, is condemned to live off the blood of the living for eternity. Young lawyer Jonathan Harker is sent to Dracula's castle to finalise a land deal, but when the Count sees a photo of Harker's fiancée, Mina, the spitting image of his dead wife, he imprisons him and sets off for London to track her down.

Oct. 24th: The Sixth Sense

Young Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) is haunted by a dark secret: he is visited by ghosts. Cole is frightened by visitations from those with unresolved problems who appear from the shadows. He is too afraid to tell anyone about his anguish, except child psychologist Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis). As Dr. Crowe tries to uncover the truth about Cole's supernatural abilities, the consequences for client and therapist are a jolt that awakens them both to something unexplainable.

Oct. 25th: The Conjuring

In 1970, paranormal investigators and demonologists Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) and Ed (Patrick Wilson) Warren are summoned to the home of Carolyn (Lili Taylor) and Roger (Ron Livingston) Perron. The Perrons and their five daughters have recently moved into a secluded farmhouse, where a supernatural presence has made itself known. Though the manifestations are relatively benign at first, events soon escalate in horrifying fashion, especially after the Warrens discover the house's macabre history.

Oct. 26th: Pet Sematery

Doctor Louis Creed (Dale Midkiff) moves his family to Maine, where he meets a friendly local named Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne). After the Creeds' cat is accidentally killed, Crandall advises Louis to bury it in the ground near the old pet cemetery. The cat returns to life, its personality changed for the worse. When Louis' son, Gage (Miko Hughes), dies tragically, Louis decides to bury the boy's body in the same ground despite the warnings of Crandall and Louis' visions of a deceased patient.

Oct. 27th: Children of the Corn

As physician Burt Stanton (Peter Horton) and his girlfriend, Vicky (Linda Hamilton), drive across the Midwest to his new job, their trip comes to a sudden halt when they encounter the body of a murdered boy in the road. In trying to contact the authorities, Burt and Vicky wander into a small town populated only by children, followers of sinister young preacher Isaac Chroner (John Franklin). Soon the couple is fleeing the youthful fanatics, who want to sacrifice them to their demonic deity.

Oct. 28th: Monster House

No adults believe three youths' (Mitchel Musso, Spencer Locke, Sam Lerner) assertion that a neighboring residence is a living creature that means them harm. With Halloween approaching, the trio must find a way to destroy the structure before innocent trick-or-treaters meet ghastly ends.

Oct. 29th: Misery

After a serious car crash, novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is rescued by former nurse Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), who claims to be his biggest fan. Annie brings him to her remote cabin to recover, where her obsession takes a dark turn when she discovers Sheldon is killing off her favorite character from his novels. As Sheldon devises plans for escape, Annie grows increasingly controlling, even violent, as she forces the author to shape his writing to suit her twisted fantasies.

Oct. 30th: Poltergeist

Strange and creepy happenings beset an average California family, the Freelings -- Steve (Craig T. Nelson), Diane (JoBeth Williams), teenaged Dana (Dominique Dunne), eight-year-old Robbie (Oliver Robins), and five-year-old Carol Ann (Heather O'Rourke) -- when ghosts commune with them through the television set. Initially friendly and playful, the spirits turn unexpectedly menacing, and, when Carol Ann goes missing, Steve and Diane turn to a parapsychologist and eventually an exorcist for help.

Oct. 31st: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

For Buffy Summers (Kristy Swanson), nothing is the same after she meets Merrick Jamison-Smythe (Donald Sutherland). Merrick tells the teen that he's been sent to train her to fight vampires, and he proves himself by displaying his supernatural powers. Buffy is a quick study, and soon takes fellow student Oliver Pike (Luke Perry) under her wing, repeatedly saving him from fierce bloodsuckers. But, when a very dangerous vampire (Rutger Hauer) gets rambunctious, she must go to war again.

[maddie-grove]

Little Book Review: Took

Author: Mary Downing Hahn.

Publication Date: 2015.

Genre: YA horror

Premise: In the wake of the 2008 recession, thirteen-year-old Daniel’s father loses his well-paying job and is unable to get another. Daniel’s parents make the dubious decision to move him and his little sister Erica to a rundown house in rural West Virginia, where the cost of living is low but there are even fewer jobs than in suburban Connecticut. The whole family is unhappy and an object of resentment for the desperately poor locals, but no one is more miserable than Erica, who becomes increasingly withdrawn and obsessed with her doll, whom she names Little Erica. Is this the natural result of their bleak circumstances, or is it the influence of an immortal witch who has a creature called Raw Head and Bloody Bones in her thrall? 

Thoughts: If your eight-to-thirteen-year-old has expressed a strong interest in reading Gone Girl, but you aren’t sure that children of their tender years should be exposed to its labyrinthine gender politics (or foul language, or scenes of wine-bottle self-mischief), you can do worse than Took, another chilling missing-person story of the post-2008 recession. It doesn’t bear much resemblance to Gone Girl beyond the reason for the family’s move, the main characters’ cold resentment of a cash-strapped existence in a rural area, the fact that a girl gets gone, and the slightly awkward title, but it’s enough that I suspect Mary Downing Hahn saw all the hype for Gone Girl circa 2012 and jotted down “Gone Girl but for kids???” on a napkin. 

Whether this happened or not, I approve of the results. The most effective part of the story is how alienated the family members become from each other; the parents retreat separately to solitary hobbies (and solitary drinking) when they’re not at their demoralizing jobs, Erica silently parents Little Erica, and the relatively well-adjusted Daniel is left to sulk and bristle with no audience.  The disappearance of Erica, rather than galvanizing the parents to action, causes them to sink further into solitude. Daniel, wracked with guilt for angrily leaving Erica in the woods when she refused to come home with him, is the only one capable of acting.

As in many horror stories, Took loses some of its momentum once you see the monsters, who, to be fair, are appropriately macabre. After Daniel finds local allies who take his concerns seriously and figures out who his enemy is, the rest is pretty simple. 

Hot Goodreads Take: So, Mary Downing Hahn’s supernatural middle-grade books have been subtitled “A Ghost Story” for as long as I can remember, so I can see why people might object when the “ghost” is maybe technically something else (i.e., an immortal witch and her immortal pet monster). However, some people seem remarkably unimpressed by the book’s villains. “To me, it was not a ghost story by any means,” says one reviewer. “It was a creepy old woman in the woods story.” This reviewer does note that the old woman had lived for at 200 years without aging, which isn’t nothing in the supernatural department, surely. 

[ava-candide]

T'aint right, t’aint fairas Prudie, the Poldarks’ housekeeper, would say. Poldark is nearing its end; let the Sunday-night-swoon audience rend its garments. It returns next month for a fifth series then that’s your lot: game over. No more shots broodily staring out to sea, no more dramatic galloping at full pelt across Cornish clifftops making me worry for that horse. But, at least, a rest for the poor overworked six-pack of Aidan Turner, whose performance as Ross Poldark has held thousands of middle-aged ladies in thrall.

And here I am sitting 2ft away from him in a tiny room at the British Film Institute in London, a man whose abdominal muscles are the most “celebrated”, by which I mean “leered over”, in Britain. “You’re a ‘hot property’, ” I tell him as if he somehow hasn’t noticed his own naked torso appearing incessantly in every newspaper and magazine since 2015. “Do you feel like a hot property?” He looks horrified. “No, I don’t,” he says, smiling through a bushy black beard. “I don’t think I’d want to know anyone who [called themselves] a hot property. That gives me the heebie-jeebies.” Good answer. Anyone who refers to themselves as a hot property is obviously a massive tool.

I assume the beard (the Daily Mail said it made him “unrecognisable”, but he is totally recognisable) is for a part in an “exciting” new project, which, he says, involves working with a director he admires but, alas, he can’t tell me what it is. “I’m so sorry, it’s boring; it sucks,” he apologises (he means having to be secretive, not the production, just to be clear).

So how does he feel to have pulled off Ross’s tricorn hat and ravished Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson) in that small Nampara bed for the last time? Turner, 36, has spent about a third of his working life on Poldark. Does it feel the right time to drop the curtain? “It feels storywise that this is the right time. It just seemed the right time in every possible way. It has been an incredible journey for all of us . . . but it’s a long shoot. I think we’re all ready to do other things.” I say I hope he had a suitably tearful farewell with Seamus, Ross’s trusted black horse who has built up such a fan-base that he is known as “famous Seamus”. Turner became very close to him, sometimes having a nap on his back between scenes. He thinks they have a similar personality: “We’re both Irish.” So how was the big goodbye?

“It’s kinda sad,” Turner says. “I was gutted.” For a terrible moment I’m imagining a glue factory, but it turns out he never said farewell to the horse. “With everything else when the job was wrapping up I remember the last time I wore the boots and the last time I wore the tricorn hat and the jacket, and the last time I did a scene with Eleanor in the kitchen. And I really marked it because I wanted to remember it. With Seamus I thought I was going to see him again; but then a scene got pulled we were going to use him for . . . so I never got to say a proper goodbye. I was really gutted.” Seamus lives in York. Might he go and see him? “Maybe I will. I should drop Mark, the trainer, an email and pop down and say hello and take him for a run-out.” A reunion? There lies a payday for the paparazzi.

This is the first of the BBC series not adapted directly from the Winston Graham novels (first dramatised by the BBC in 1975 starring Robin Ellis). There was a gap of ten years in the books and Debbie Horsfield, who has written every episode of the five series, has bridged the gap between novels seven and eight using information gleaned from the later works, to keep the characters at their present ages. The Graham estate thinks she has a great affinity with the novels. It is a strong first episode, with new characters and suggests, shall we say, that Elizabeth’s death is affecting the mental health of George Warleggan (played splendidly by Jack Farthing) more than we realised. After our conversation there is a Q&A and a screening of the episode at the BFI, but Turner says he thinks he’ll duck that bit because he feels uncomfortable watching it with an audience. “I’m not very good at that. I find it a bit strange.” He is quite shy and endearingly modest for a man so lusted after. At one point some traffic noise erupts outside and he jumps up to close the window for the sake of my Dictaphone which, trust me, not every actor would do.

How boring has he found the enormous fuss and objectification over his six-pack, prompted by a famous scything scene? “I get asked a lot. It’s par for the course,” he says. “It certainly doesn’t irritate me; it’s not something I regret doing, so it’s not something I ever care to avoid talking about. I just don’t find it that interesting.”

Turner, who was born in a suburban town near Dublin and attended drama college there, probably first became well known to British TV audiences in Being Human, after which Peter Jackson cast him as a dwarf in The Hobbit. But it was Ross Poldark who has made him famous. He says he’ll most likely miss Ross —“I love him; he’s a flawed character; he’s real” — though it’s early days. Is there anything he won’t miss? He seems flummoxed for a moment. “It’s good that I have to struggle a bit for that actually,” he says. “There’s nothing I hated and despised on the show. I’m used to early mornings. I’d love to be able to give you a bit of gossip but there’s nothing . . . Maybe living in rented accommodation.”

There have been reports of rows between him and Eleanor Tomlinson on set, usually over protecting their own characters in the show. She has joked that they squabble like an old married couple. “I don’t think we fall out often and certainly nothing serious. If there was ever any tension between us it was purely to do with work because we care a lot,” he says. “These conversations came later, the last two or three years. As we became more invested we felt we had more to lose because the show was successful, but it was always very professional. Eleanor’s an intelligent girl, conscientious, polite and articulate, so it never got into any screaming matches or anything. I was always really interested in what she had to say.” He starts laughing. “And most of the time she was right.”

I wonder if he minds the level of fame that has come with Poldark. Recently the actor Richard Madden (Bodyguard) revealed that he deliberately wore the same clothes and carried the same cup of green juice every day in the same way so the paparazzi couldn’t get a different picture and would lose interest. Turner says he tried that, but the photographer waiting outside the theatre (he was performing in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, for which he got rave reviews and a Stage debut award ) told him he could change the colour of his T-shirt in a heartbeat. “And the next day he showed me! He changed my T-shirt to pink and the colour of my jeans.” But he doesn’t mind the attention from the public. “People are usually very nice and polite. I like to see the best in people.”

He rarely reads reviews or his own interviews, never uses social media and is guarded about his private life, namely his American girlfriend, Caitlin Fitzgerald, with whom he was pictured recently on a red carpet (they met on the set of a film they both starred in: The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then Bigfoot). He has also been photographed walking her dog, Charlie. When I mention Fitzgerald he raises both palms: “I can’t say anything about that,” he says, again apologetically. I imagine all those swooning fans would rather not hear about it anyway. For the record, he says he splits his time between London, Dublin and New York. Does he fancy big Hollywood films? “Wherever the work is,” he says.

He believes this fifth series is the most exciting yet and promises the issue of Valentine’s parentage will be a big story (the little boy who plays him and may be Ross’s secret son looks spookily like him, right down to the hairdo). “It’s a great story for George Warleggan; Jack is brilliant. He’s amazing, a real talent.” By the end will the audience be sad or happy, Aidan? “I don’t know,” he says cryptically. “Some people might be happy; some people might be delighted.”

But it might not be game over, actually. He does not completely rule out returning to it in ten years’ time when he is old enough to play the more mature, wrinklier Ross (Horsfield has said “never say never”). However, he says a lot of things would need to be in place. All the actors would need to be available, the Graham estate would have to agree, and most of all the audience would still need to want it, which is the most important point. Television moves on so fast these days. “It would be silly, though, to say that it’s completely off the table,” he says.

So was he emotional at the end as it all wound down? “That last day I think it was just myself and Eleanor in the bedroom at Nampara, which was lovely,” he says. “It felt like the right way to finish and probably the right place as well. Yeah, it was quite emotional.” They still had the work to finish, the call sheet to complete, but “it was lovely just to be with her”. Afterwards, when it was done, he says it was — and he searches for the right phrase — “a bit shocking. It just feels surreal because it’s over.” For him, yes, but not for us. Not quite yet.

[darsynia]

Sneak Peek: Repeat After Me

Tony Stark/Reader 'Mob AU' (set in Loki's 'Empire' after the Avengers lost in 2012)

Written for Round 1 of Trope Madness to vote for Soulmate AU, I was searching for a way to put a fresh spin on Soulmate Words, and came up with this. I decided to combine this with @caplanbuckybarnes's Three Words Challenge and use the words 'Don't look back.'

Tags: @ronearoundblindly @chickensarentcheap @themaradaniels @starksbf @tiny-anne @starryeyes2000

Let me know if you'd like to be tagged! It's... probably going turn into a series. I'm really enjoying the worldbuilding.

Repeat After Me

You might be the only person who has both soulmate words written on your body.

Repeat after me: don’t look back.

At first, you’d found them comforting. After all, they’re predictable in a way almost no one else’s words are: if you’re right about them, it means you can choose whether to speak those fateful words aloud. Then Loki came with his Chitauri army, and everything changed.

It’s been ten years since Lord Loki became the ruler of the world; ten years of societal restructure and bleak acquiescence. It turns out that humans are well adapted to be ruled, just as he’d said-- but perhaps not quite in the way he’d intended. Everyone has figured out their own way to survive, whether it’s in one of the densely populated city-states, the agricultural backwaters, or the uneasy suburban sprawl that straddles both extremes.

You’re one of the few who can travel easily through all three, and you pride yourself on that. Pre-Empire, you’d been a top exec at a shipping company, and your talent for managing large egos, ability to memorize maps, and knowledge of machinery was easily translated to a life as a smuggler. Your top rule? You do not take sides. Ever. It’s what made you successful, what kept you alive.

And no one knows the real reason.

“Zephyr, how long before you head out?”

You’re half-in, half-out of your truck, the open door heavy on your ass thanks to all the armor plating. “Weather looks like it’s gonna hold for another hour and a half, I was thinking forty-five minutes?” you guess, squinting up through the tint on the upper part of the windshield.

“Got time to meet with a potential?” Karl laughs at your obvious groan, adding, “Fancy suit says D.C., maybe New York. Probably shouldn’t risk skipping.” You trust your second in command, even if you don’t want to take his advice. Karl Mordo is pragmatic, honest, and a baronic pain in your ass sometimes.

“Fuck. Okay. But I’m going right now, before I de-grease for the trip.” You hop down and hold up your dirty hands, wiggling your fingers.

“What if they’re from Stark?”

You clench your jaw. “His people should know better, even after two years. We just did Fisk a favor, maybe he’ll remind Loki’s plaything that there’s a reason he relocated to Miami.” 

Karl nods and heads back to the house, and as soon as he’s gone, you hold still and count to ten to calm your breathing. Tony Stark rules the northeast with a literal iron fist, and no one’s sure whether the mind control has turned him cruel or he’d been released years ago and just likes it. Almost no one Stark doesn’t trust has been close enough to know for sure.

Despite your reputation for neutrality, a few years back he’d sent his clever and ruthless ex-turned-CFO Pepper Potts to ask you to spy on some of the biggest players on the Eastern Seaboard.

It had been the first time you’d gotten close enough to see the electric blue of Loki’s mind control first-hand. Her threats had been articulate and terrifying, but yours ended up having a lasting effect on the way Lord Loki does his business. Word is that the emperor includes additional spells and enchantments to prevent a simple blow to the head from releasing a thrall and undoing years of work. 

You still get messages from Potts, filtered heavily by word of mouth, through the Resistance.

[bbclesmis]

New Statesman: Les Misérables: this epic of the have-nots is pretty dire

As the BBC’s adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (Sundays, 9pm) reaches its midway point, let us briefly put aside the man-sized Kleenex and the wild disbelief and consider precisely why this series is so bewildering. I mean, is it (quite) good? Or is it (very) bad? Or, perhaps, both? All I can tell you is that whenever the reformed criminal Jean Valjean (Dominic West), is on screen, I am in its thrall. How I blubbed when he told little Cosette (Lia Giovanelli), the enslaved daughter of the seamstress-turned-prostitute Fantine (Lily Collins), that tonight he would carry her buckets of water. The rest of the time, I’m all eye-rolls. Dear God. The sentimentality. The melodrama. The simplistic division between good and evil. And people have the temerity to slag off Dickens, the velvet lapels of whose frock coat M Hugo is not, in my view, fit even to dust.

What I’m saying, I suppose, is that this epic of the have-nots, boiled down like old bones to six hours of television, is pretty dire, but that West is such a good actor he makes you forget this. I love the hint of South Yorkshire he has added to his voice, and I love the moments when the camera lingers on his expressive, rather simian features, the better that we might register his more fleeting and suppressed emotions. But how little help he gets from elsewhere. I adore Olivia Colman, but both Andrew Davies’s script and the series director, Tom Shankland, have required her here – as the landlady Mme Thénardier, she is Cosette’s torturer-in-chief – to lay on both the spite and the comedy with such dotty alacrity, it’s as if she’s in a pantomime (that, or this is her audition for Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd). Beside this, and the cartoony performance of her Waterloo “hero” husband, Thénardier (Adeel Akhtar), Valjean’s sincerity seems misplaced, somehow, as if he’s wandered in from another production entirely.

The script tells and tells and tells. There are few asides, and no subtext; the plot just unspools, like rope. Every twist is preposterous, the latest being Valjean’s escape from prison, to which he returned having confessed his true identity to his arch enemy Javert (David Oyelowo), the inspector of police, and which took him all of 30 seconds. (What was the thing he spat out of his mouth in his cell? A skeleton key? A saw? A hand grenade?) The poverty and degradation is Monty Python-relentless – replace the cardboard boxes on motorways with old Burgundy bottles in badger sets and you’re there – and while every priest and nun is entirely good, pretty much any member of the establishment is creepiness personified.

We have to take so much on trust. Why, for instance, is Javert so obsessed with banging up Valjean again? This has never been adequately explained, just as Valjean’s conversion to the straight life has never quite been explained (yes, yes, I know it has something to do with the candlesticks he nicked from Derek Jacobi a while back – but was that kindly priest’s refusal to snitch on him really enough to set him on the narrow path?). Abandoned Fantine, having sold her hair, her teeth and her body, is dead now. But did we weep? No, for she was never more than a cipher. As she lay in the convent, gasping for air, I kept thinking how weird it was that, even days later, her mouth was still filled with blood following the extraction of her incisors. If Colman is Widow Twanky with added garlic, Collins seemed to be rehearsing – aargh! – for a role in a forthcoming zombie apocalypse movie.

Now that’s off my chest, let us move on to – yes, more poverty – Revolution in Ruins: The Hugo Chavez Story (16 January, 9pm). Ruth Mayer’s dash through Venezuela’s recent history wasn’t a radical piece of film-making, but it worked brilliantly. How quickly a state can fail. How easily a people can be taken in. How weirdly similar were Chavez’s media tactics to those of Trump. Jeremy Corbyn, incidentally, appeared more than once, swooning at the feet of Chavez like some suburban teenager, two minutes of beard in an hour-long festival of corruption, murder and starvation. He won’t watch it, of course, but everyone else should – even if only through the gaps in their fingers.

Les Misérables (BBC One) (x)

[writer59january13]

One month into summer 2022 elapsed here...

Within Perkiomen Valley, Pennsylvania, thus far marginal rainfall for season nevertheless...the hazy, hot and humid dog days meanwhile (gad) Zeus

tiredly huffs and puffs...with a growl regarding thunderstorm unable to make headway against invisible firewall shielding this area of the keystone state haul in tandem with the spirit of Saints Peter, Paul and Mary (Southeastern - tri county (also) encompassing the suburban hall, sans Spring Mount Mountain King - an egg gree us fellow - quite tall simultaneously straddling Bucks, Delaware, and Montgomery), and much as I revel, when blizzard conditions raged, a Saul ting self importance of humanity,

where meteorological conditions hurled a wicked frozen curveball forcing fatuous, egocentric brazen arrogance into unassuming (ruff) atoll shape shifting paradigm,

viz dogmatic couture of modesty call out depravity, immodesty, pomposity, et cetera, vis a vis, when "she" declares marshall, law yes only when might

of Mother Nature tempers trumpeting one donning guise of cloudy (with chance of) meatballs

unfortunately indiscriminately striking havoc overall mindful, honest, decent... folks swept up in maelstrom, which pitfall could cause loss of life or limb, this teetotaler inebriated, fascinated, and captivated, and linkedin to thrall

dom wielded by volcanic, tectonic, climatic...

of phenomena take (measure for measure) an indifference to scuttling hominids beef four all lose well that ends well, asper scrimmage maul ling the accouterments of civilization then...deathly still quiet doth befall after unleashed forces exhaust and expend blistering might temporarily silencing madding crowd to standstill, and eventual faint crawl courtesy of a wicked atmospheric drawl!

[danas-old-art]

A Liatorian Codex arrives! Got a nice hardbound book printed up with all of my visual thesis work I’ve been doing for senior year and i just got it yesterday. It looks fantastic!

[cyberdragoninfinity]

A whole bunch of quick OC intros I’ve been doing on Twitter for the last couple weeks!! love my kids

[a-skirmish-of-wit-and-lit]

Book Review: The Favor by Nora Murphy

What an emotionally compelling domestic thriller! Definitely the kind of story you're tempted to devour in one sitting. Leah and McKenna are strangers with parallel lives. They're educated, wealthy, attractive, live in beautiful neighborhoods, and are married to handsome and successful men who know how to charm. On the outside, everything looks perfect. Cookie cutter. Like a suburban fairy tale. On the inside, however, something far more sinister roams. Though the women have never met, they're both trapped in the same physical and psychological prison of abuse, with both of them suffering at the hands of their domineering husbands who have slowly smashed their peace and happiness to smithereens, having crumbled away their sense of dignity and independence until it's black and blue. When Leah sees McKenna one day at a liquor store, she is gripped with an unsettling sense of familiarity. A bone-deep knowing. A siren call that seems to shout "all is not what it seems." So she follows her home. Watching from the street, she decides to keep an eye out for her, until, one night, things take a turn for the worse...and she intervenes. What happens next will bind these two women, these two strangers, together forever. This was such an addictive read! Not only is it fast-paced and engrossing but it reveals the insidiousness of abusive relationships: the slow, sweet slide of coercion, the gaslighting that can muddle clarity of mind, the loss of sense of self, the isolation, the anger, the "walking on eggshells" fear and terror, the helplessness that can make a cry for help seem crazy, hopeless, dangerous, or impossible. The plot is predictable, I grant you that, but the characters' mutual trauma and psychology is what holds readers in its thrall. You can't help but empathize with all Leah and McKenna go through with their monstrous husbands. You can't help but hold your breath at all the ways in which their lives parallel, and then later, intersect because of a favor that was bestowed without request. So, so good! A lot of great insights here about domestic abuse and manipulation that'll give book clubs much to discuss. Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press, and Minotaur Books for the ARC in exchange for my review.

4/5 stars

**Follow me on Goodreads