#THEY DID HER SO DIRTY AND ILL NEVER FORGIVE THE WRITERS FOR IT. actually I don't think there's a single character in seasons 4-5 they didn' | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

itsclydebitches · 4 years ago

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RWBY Recaps: Volume 8 “Creation”

Happy Saturday, everyone! Oh man, oh man, oh man. I think I'll need to steer clear of the general RWBY tags this week, simply because I know the sort of responses I'll see to this episode. From smug celebration at Ironwood's downfall, to bad takes about what makes us human, this episode is a petri dish of sensitive material handled insensitively.

Let’s unpack it, shall we?

We open on an action that feels like a summery of the last three volumes: a grimm attacks an airship from the front, no doubt killing its pilot, while the other grimm conveniently ignore our heroes, no masking in sight. The group looks a little sad at the destruction around them, but ultimately ignore it because they have bigger, heroic things to do. I could write a whole, additional essay on how the huntsmen code — to protect the people — has been warped and abandoned by our protagonists in their effort to do what they think is right. It's a tale that might have been compelling if only RT knew they were writing it.

We get a shot of Atlas drones unloading the bomb before one is taken out, presumably by Qrow and Robyn. Segueing to Ironwood and the Ace Ops, they're waiting for Penny to arrive, the former carrying a massive gun presumably capable of capturing her. Despite the horror we saw on their faces last episode at the realization that Ironwood would kill Marrow for speaking up, it seems that now the Ace Ops are entirely in agreement with these measures. A week ago the implication was that they fell back in line out of fear, but now Harriet talks passionately about "putting down" the group if they were stupid enough to accompany Penny. "The General gave his terms." Vine sighs at this, but doesn't actively disagree. He's just "retracing the steps that led us here."

So, congratulations on introducing four new characters, not bothering to develop any of them, killing one off while ignoring Qrow's hand in that, and having the other three become all, "Yeah! Mass murder is a perfect solution!" off screen. Marrow is the only one with something resembling development and, as covered in these recaps, that's been pretty badly executed too.

Ironwood sends them to deal with Robyn and Qrow after Winter reappears to "assist" him. That gets quotation marks because most viewers at this point have realized that she's who our two birbs spotted in the elevator. Winter isn't on Ironwood's side anymore, she's just skillfully clearing the field for the final attack. Indeed, we get a moment where she hesitantly brings up the bomb and Ironwood responds that he hopes she's not going to try and talk him out of it. No. Winter doesn't think that's possible. This was her final attempt at peace.

One of the reasons why I think I'll stick to my own blog for a while is because the fandom has a tendency to paint broad personality traits as evil when applied to some characters, yet simultaneously heroic when applied to others, when really it's about how that those traits are used. What I mean is, I've seen a lot of Ironwood critical posts that emphasize how stubborn he is. He thinks he's right and he won't back down. He wont listen to others. He's going through with this plan and if anyone tries to stop him? That's their mistake. Totally evil, right? Except, this is the exact same behavior Ruby displays, particularly in Volumes 6 and 7. She was stubborn about stealing from Argus and continuing the fight to the point where it endangered her and her teammates, to say nothing of the rest of the city. She refused to listen to Qrow, or Ironwood, or the Ace Ops, loudly announcing that she was right about, well, everything. If they didn't agree with her, the options were to leave the group entirely, or fight her. The actual difference here is that the writers have taken Ironwood to an extreme, one that's incredibly easy to understand as bad because it is bad: bombing Mantle has no defense. Ruby pulls the exact same nonsense, it's just not to that same extreme and her actions are followed by scenes that are meant to make us forgive her: a sad look because she didn't mean to get a city attacked by a leviathan grimm, a cry on the staircase because she didn't mean to risk the lives of an entire kingdom... even though she did. Ironwood is the bad guy because he's been written to take specific, OOC actions like shooting unarmed kids. He's not the bad guy because when other characters go, "Don't do this" his response is, "I have to." Because that's been Ruby's motto ever since she "had" to use the Lamp to rip Ozpin’s life story away. RWBY introduced those extreme actions of shooting the youngest in the group (for no reason) and threatening to bomb a city (for no reason) or shooting a councilman (for no reason) because when you remove those you've got a man who looks exactly like our hero. Ironwood's arc has been peppered with these confusing, unpersuasive actions because if you just keep the story as him stubbornly keeping to a plan he thinks will save the world, you're left with the reminder that all Ruby has done lately is stubbornly keep to plans she thinks will save the world. This moment with Winter just highlights how ill thought out Ironwood's descent has been because he does everything Ruby does... with a few, tacked on, “and randomly shoots people!” moments to ensure we understand that he’s definitely evil. No comparison to our heroes here, folks!

Ironwood is a bad guy now. That’s certain, but he was made that way so the story never had to grapple with the question of what that means for Ruby if we really start condemning things like lying, secrets, stubbornness, or endangering others for the greater good. Well then damn, if we strip away the hypocrisy then she might not be a good person after all. Or the people she’s simplistically labeled as bad might not be the devils Ruby claims they are.

But that’s a level of nuance RWBY would rather pretend doesn’t exist.

All of which is highlighted by Ironwood’s reaction to "Penny." He sighs and sags over the gun, immediately putting it aside. With his hand on her shoulder, Ironwood tells her she's "done the right thing." Precisely the same way Ruby would lower Crescent Rose and give someone a smile when they decided to fall in line with her.

Which, of course, is the moment when Emerald reveals herself, dispelling the Penny illusion and revealing Team JNPR The Second behind her. She gives a quip about it feeling "weird" to do the right thing before disappearing.

From there the action picks up fast. I really enjoyed this battle simply from a choreography and energy standpoint. It gets the blood pumping, Ironwood's hand-to-hand is spectacular — especially that moment against Ren — and the group actually displays teamwork for the first time in what feels like forever, all of them needed to land a hit on Ironwood. As always, out of the context of the rest of the show it feels and looks great. My primary issue is that we get this fantastic fight against Ironwood. Not Salem, not Cinder, not Watts (like last volume when Ironwood was still a hero), not even Emerald as a means of transitioning from murderous villain to the group's best bud. No, what's arguably the best action sequence in the volume thus far goes to beating up the guy they betrayed from the start. There's no catharsis for me here, only frustration as we watch Ironwood stand in shock as Winter powers up Nora — who's fine now, I guess — and she slams her hammer into his face.

It never should have come to this and when a good character is done so dirty, their downfall doesn't evoke the emotions the writers are looking for. Watching Ironwood fall doesn't generate feelings of victory, or even tragedy at a course of events others were powerless to stop. It's just frustration at watching years worth of bad writing, sprinkled with fantastic ideas that never go anywhere.

Oscar gets a few hits in, Ironwood snatches his cane, and just as he's about to throw a punch, Winter arrives with the most dramatic sword slash I've ever seen.

Ironwood's aura breaks and he falls, unconscious. We cut to an image of a droid's head separated from its body, one of Robyn's arrows through its skull. That doesn't have meaning or anything.

I suppose I should be grateful they didn't rip Ironwood's arm away during the fight, or outright kill him, though I'm still expecting him to die before the end of the volume.

Hmm. Wouldn't that be something? If after Salem's arrival, freezing cold, a Hound attack, grimm soup, a giant whale, a massive army, and a hack ending in self-destruction, the one character who actually dies is Ironwood.

It's looking more and more likely.

Honestly, beyond all the obvious, what's so frustrating about this fight is that characters are only now using their impressive abilities to their fullest. Emerald creates an entire fantasy of what's happening and then straight up disappears, but she only does a half-assed version of that when fighting against Penny. (And really, she put more effort into helping the heroes she just joined over Cinder, the woman she's been obsessed with since the start?) Marrow refuses to use "Stay" against a group they wanted to peacefully arrest because that's just too horrible an act, I guess, but he'll do it on his own teammates the second Qrow and Robyn don’t want to fight.

This is what I mean when I say the rules of the world bend to assist the protagonists in absurd ways. It's not nearly as egregious as Amity suddenly being up and running, but the fact that characters become substantially more powerful while fighting for the protagonists than they do against them is still a significant problem.

So Ironwood is down and out. As much as I hated watching that and didn't necessarily want more, am I the only one who felt like it was... a bit lackluster? I mean, the action was great, yes, but relatively short. There was no dialogue, such as another delve into the moral questions that led to this fight in the first place. There certainly wasn’t any hesitance against fighting a former ally. (Again, we’re meant to believe that the Ace Ops won because they just couldn’t bear to fight the group seriously, but every former ally here is capable of wailing on Ironwood without a single pause or pained look?) Ironwood just skillfully blocks for a while, is blindsided by Winter's betrayal, and then falls unconscious. Given that we learn he and Jacques will be evacuated after the rest of the kingdom, it's possible he'll escape somehow and we'll get a fight 2.0, but if not that feels like a rather tame end to the guy forced into the antagonist seat. Plus, what was the point of having Qrow frothing at the mouth to kill him this whole volume? I never wanted that to happen, I'm glad it hasn't, but I'm nevertheless left to ask why we bothered with that eleven episode side plot if we were going to erase it with one sentence from Robyn about Qrow being better than this. If that's all it took, let them work through Qrow's irrational anger while sitting around in a cell.

Winter tells the group to move onto "phase two" which is when we're treated to a flashback. We return to the ending of the last episode, with Ruby realizing that opening the vault is an option. Jaune, all smiles, goes, "We never considered using what's inside!"

This is what I mean about no consequences! This is what I mean about it all being a meaningless circle that ends with undeserved praise for the group! We started this horror show with Ironwood going, "We don't have a plan to protect the people, so I'm going to take what people we do have to safety" and the group going, "We don't have a plan either, but we're going to stop you implementing your plan because it's not perfect, risking a kingdom's worth of lives in the process." Now, the group has used two plans, one of which two characters knew about at the start and another they could have devised with the information they had. Oscar and Ozpin's, "We have an all powerful magical blast in our cane" and the group's "What if we used the Staff for something other than raising Atlas?" are both things that could have come up in the office debate. These were both always on the table! Instead, Ruby grew furious over the mere thought of cutting their losses, betrayed Ironwood again, attacked his people, denounced him to the world, and then two days later goes, "Oh wait! We could do something now that we could have easily done before if we hadn't made a needless enemy!"

Everyone realizes how much worse they made things, right? Turning against Ironwood, bringing everyone left in Mantle directly under Atlas, sitting around while an army was devoured, drawing it out until Penny was hacked... all of it would have been avoided if the group had thought and discussed things for a few minutes, not jumping straight to violently resisting what Ironwood came up with first. "We never considered..." Ruby says. Yeah, you didn't, except that's not something to smile about. The group made the situation a thousand times worse with their reaction when they could have just magically evacuated the kingdom from the start. “Maybe we could use it to save Penny and get everyone in Atlas and Mantle back to safety." Nothing has changed! They had this ability the whole time! Nothing about the last twelve episodes led them here, they just randomly thought of it after RT had padded the volume with needless drama. Considering that they're heading to Vacuo now, we could have just made this the finale of Volume 7 instead: big fight with Ironwood, revelation, get everyone evacuated while Salem attacks, leave her behind, then Volume 8 begins in Vacuo with the group knowing Salem is out there looking for them. This entire volume has been pointless. What did they accomplish?

Oscar got kidnapped and beat up, Nora was scarred, Ruby and Yang realized horrible things about Summer, and the whole world is panicking about a witch. Good things are... Ren and Ruby unlocked some semblance stuff? Weiss loves her brother again after he proved himself useful to her? Great work, team.

So this one moment makes everything they've done up to this point useless and, of course, once thought up the plan goes off without a hitch. Note that the summary of this episode says, "It's risky, dangerous, and nearly impossible — but it's the only plan they've got." Nearly impossible? That's a whole lot of talk for a plan that was implemented perfectly.

There is, admittedly, one snag, but one that is likewise made meaningless just seconds later. We'll get to that.

We see Winter call Weiss who also smiles at hearing from her sister. Obviously interactions like the group's with Emerald are the bigger concern, but it's still an issue that no one reacts as they should to people reappearing in their lives. Rather, RWBY continually confuses audience knowledge with character knowledge. We know Winter is on their side now, but Weiss hasn't a clue. Last she saw, she and Winter were agreeing to head down different paths. She has no reason to think her sister isn't loyal to Ironwood, so why isn't the group treating this call with suspicion? What if it's Ironwood trying to mess with them through a presumably safe party? I swear to god, with any consistency in the story this group would be dead ten times over because their decisions are so stupid. Oscar decides to believe in the guy currently beating him to a pulp, the group decides to trust a villain over a flawed ally, and now they see Ironwood’s second calling and are like, “Great, big sister Winter is checking in!” There’s a difference between a hopeful story filled with second chances and characters whose reliance on the narrative bending to assist them makes them come across as insanely naive.

None of which even touches on characters forgetting that other characters are presumably dead. Ironwood shot Oscar off the edge of Atlas, but doesn't react to learning he was kidnapped, or when he shows up to the fight. Thanks to Marrow's comment, Winter thinks YJOR have perished in the whale, but also has no reaction to them appearing to help with this plan. Absolutely nothing is followed up on.

We then get a flashback within the flashback (fun) of Winter — shock — not arresting Marrow. It's precisely as I assumed, with Marrow angrily asking why she hit him and Winter responding with, “Because you were about to get killed if I didn’t do something!” As I said last recap, I feel like I should let the marginalized groups lead this discussion, but I do want to add that no matter how well intentioned — or strategic, as I mentioned last time — the imagery itself is still harmful. No matter the context, we were still left with white woman Winter putting her knee on black man Marrow's back to arrest him, and it’s an image that everyone in the U.S. should be familiar with the horror of. Far more of a problem than the (presumed) ignorance of this scene is, I think, the choice to make Winter entirely unrepentant. I think some of this discomfort could have been alleviated if RT had written Winter as apologetic, contrite that it came to that and asking Marrow to understand that she only did it as a means of assisting him. Asking his forgiveness. Instead, we get this

So what, the only emotion we have room for is gratitude that Winter beat him up? Yikes.

As a lighter side note, I find the animation here unintentionally hilarious. Winter's assistive device makes her shoulders look too high, making this gesture more, "Woman exaggeratedly pouts about not getting ice cream for dinner" and less, "Woman sternly closes off during a disagreement about saving lives and betraying their general." Gotta find our humor where we can, right?

What's intentional, but far less funny, is the needless animation to show us that, yes, Marrow is peering at Winter calling Weiss. Oh, the shenanigans.

The elevator opens where Qrow and Robyn spot them. "Speaking of help," Winter says, as if she has any reason to believe Qrow didn't kill Clover. He and Robyn lower their weapons a bit, as if they have any reason to believe Winter and Marrow aren't still loyal to Ironwood. Would it really be so hard to have Winter immediately throw up her hands in the face of their almost-attack, blurting that she's not their enemy and needs their help, please listen? Again, RWBY can't remember which characters know what, let alone what their motivations and reactions should be.

We then enter the third part of the flashback where everyone piles into the Schnee dining room and discusses doing the things they could have done from the start. I'm metaphorically banging my head against that table. In RWBY's favor though, we also get a long shot of Jaune continuing to boost Penny’s aura.

Though it's only one of many issues, just the other day I asked, "Hey, why has Jaune always needed to hold onto the person he's assisting, but now suddenly he can touch Penny once and the boost remains?" It still doesn't explain why he was letting go before/why him needing to boost her continuously didn't put a hard time limit on their plan — not that Mantle's hour limit meant a thing — but at least they're showing more of that here.

Oscar notes that Atlas has enough gravity dust that it won't fall immediately when they use the Relic, but they will have to move fast to ensure no one is underneath. Yeah, like all the civilians you put there. He also cautions that the Staff isn't a "magic wand" that they can just wave to make all their problems go away... even though that's precisely what they're going to do. Ozpin gets some lines that aren't apologies or followed by attacks — hallelujah! — about how the Staff's spirit is a "character" and requires that you be able to precisely explain anything you want him to make. Blueprints, examples, a firm knowledge of how this will be accomplished — all of it is required to actually get what you're after. That's a cool limitation. It's just too bad we didn't know about it episodes ago, forcing our heroes to find ways to meet those requirements. Instead, they already have everything ready to go the moment they learn about it: Penny has her own schematics and Whitley apparently has knowledge of the entire kingdom after sending some ships out. Normally I'd go, "Really?" but I'm still just struck by how much good he's done compared to everyone else in this room. Your show is seriously broken when the side character the writers didn't even want the audience to like until a few episodes ago is more active, mature, and sensible than the heroes.

From there we see the group implementing the plan. They fly up through the hole Oscar left, straight to the vault. Penny opens it without any trouble and Ruby uses her speed to grab the Relic and stop time, halting her self-termination. I do like that combination of skill and their knowledge of how this magic works. That felt like a smart move. What's interesting though is that the Relic appears to stop time in the entire kingdom. We see people in Mantle and Atlas slowing to a halt too. I assume no one remembers that happening after time restarts, otherwise people would be freaked out by suddenly being frozen in place.

Wouldn't that have been cool though? The group often takes a while to use the Relics, either deciding what they need, or watching Jinn's information, so what if you had a population that blinks and suddenly, from their perspective, half an hour has passed? How long might Ozpin have sat on his knees after Jinn told him he wasn't able to defeat Salem? How long was that space frozen? We could have had a world built around rumors and fairy tales. Not the random stories Ozpin brings up to make a point and that we never hear about again, but tiny details that foreshadow these revelations. A Beacon where the kids tell each other spooky stories of people suddenly losing time, once a whole day. The wives, sisters, daughters, and nieces who disappear, or wake up one day with horrifying, unnatural powers. We see magic influence the world around it, but we've seen very little of the world reacting to that influence. The one time I can think of is Blake reading a book about "a man with two souls," the fiction clearly inspired by knowledge of Ozpin. And indeed, it felt great to recognize that as a significant detail and then be proven right years later as the lore was revealed. We could have gotten so much more of that if RWBY was better planned out.

I'm getting off track though. As time stops we see a series of images: Ironwood being led to a cell with Jacques, Penny succumbing to her hack, Team JNPR The Second preparing to contact the kingdom about what's going on. Then everyone is distracted by the giant, blue, buff Ambrosius who comes out of the Staff.

...there's a lot of innuendo in that last statement lol. At least RWBY is committed to the crazy design they chose? I was never particularly comfortable with the image of characters gaping up at a giant, naked woman in chains, so it's nice to balance that a bit with an equally giant, naked dude in chains.

From here things get confusing. In all honesty, I'm not sure if this is another moment where RWBY is trying to pass off a retcon as the group being brilliant, or if I, as an individual, simply didn't follow the logic. I won't bother to rehash the slow, meandering way that Ruby reveals their plan — that certainly didn't help with the clarity. Not in an episode where we didn’t even know these rules ahead of time — but it boils down to this:

The moment they have Ambrosius create something new Atlas will start to fall. Two of his creations can't exist at the same time.

He needs clear instructions about what he's making in order to create it.

The group has brought him Penny's schematics so that he understands how she's built.

They want, specifically, "a new version of her... using her exact robot parts."

They can't just create an exact duplicate of Penny because that would carry the virus with it.

They can't create an exact duplicate without the virus because that Penny would cease to exist as soon as they used Ambrosius to make an evacuation plan instead.

So they essentially want Ambrosius to create a new Penny by removing all the robot parts from the Penny that currently exists, carrying the virus with them, and leaving only the human parts of Penny behind: her aura/soul. Then, the purely robot version is destroyed when Ambrosius creates something new.

Except... this new Penny, this human Penny, still needed a human body. That's what Ambrosius created and that's the snag I don't understand. They want a version of Penny that's just her aura, just her soul, but that soul still needs something to be housed in. Ambrosius himself notes that. At first I thought the group would just have some wisp-like version of Penny they'd have to find a new body for — perhaps leading to a new one for Ozpin too — but she's just... given a human body when he takes the technology away, something she absolutely didn't have before. That is Ambrosius' creation. That is what should have disappeared along with the removed parts of Penny, leaving only her soul — what Ambrosius didn't touch — behind. Instead, the plot oh so conveniently has Penny get a new body for free and it's untouched as they move onto the next task.

Ruby drops a casual line about Ambrosius not being able to kill, or destroy, or something, which I think is meant to be the justification here. The rule (which, again, we JUST learned) about not killing anyone supersedes the rule of two creations not allowed to exist, allowing Penny to stick around. But even if that’s true, it’s a load of bull. What, does the magic think no one in an entire city might die if the floating mechanism is removed and it plummets to the ground? Ambrosius didn’t say, “Sorry, can’t stop floating Atlas because thousands of people are still here and they’ll die if I create something new,” but we’re supposed to believe the group skated by on, “Sorry, can’t destroy the last creation like everything else because there’s a single person still using that body and she’ll die if I create something new”?

Seriously, did I miss something? Or is this another, "Amity is ready because the group needs it" situation? The rule of creations ceasing to exist is bent because the group needs to have their friend around. Ambrosius is certainly enthusiastically complimentary, saying how "smart" the group is and that they've "done their homework," but I'm not so sure. It feels like a moment where the show is (once again) insistent that the group is far more talented and brilliant than their actions actually imply. It's only the rules of the world twisting and turning that allows for their success. To say nothing of how the episode dropped all these rules on the viewer in a ten minute info dump, ensuring we didn’t have any time to think about them before the deed was done.

It doesn't add up for me and honestly, even putting that aside? I hate this. I absolutely despise it. Look, if it turns out this really does make sense then props to the group for coming up with that plan. Our snag aside, the rest is a legitimately well thought out wish. I don't have a problem with the execution so much as the message. I've been saying since Volume 7 that RWBY has done Penny a disservice in terms of her "real girl" narrative. Whereas before we had a firm message that you don't need "squishy guts" to be human, to be real, Volume 8 continued to carry us further and further into the idea that it is necessary. That Penny's body is entirely inhuman, something to hate, but at least her soul is human and good. That's what the virus arc taught us: your terrible, technological body might be betraying you, but hold onto the parts of you that are really human. I hated that too, but I never thought RWBY would go this far. They made Penny fully human and went, “THIS is the version that always should have existed.”

And this isn't just me reading into the implications. It's right there in the text. Blake says that they're looking for “Penny, the girl who’s always been there underneath." Meaning, underneath the metal. The girl exists trapped in the robot body. Yang holds up her arm and says that the metal is only "extra," it's not really who you are.

That gets into two perspectives on disability that RWBY just doesn't have the nuance for: what's an integral and celebratory part of one person's existence can be seen as something separate and discomforting to another. Though there are many people with disabilities who would happily cure themselves with a magic Staff if given the chance, there are just as many who say no, this is a part of my identity. I don't want to change, I just want the world to accommodate my existence. However, RWBY takes a hard stance here, saying that any metal in your body is intrinsically bad. We didn’t use to have this take, but now the show has embraced it. Blake says the real Penny is trapped in there. Yang's words implies that she'd get rid of this "extra" bit of her if possible. Mercury with his metal legs is the enemy. Ironwood with half his metal body is the enemy. Whereas once difference was truly accepted, now it's shunned and fixed whenever possible. Those who can't be fixed, like Yang, must simply deal with the lot they've been dealt, reassuring themselves that the metal isn't really them. But Penny? Penny they can fix.

So they do and the very first thing Penny does is hug Ruby, exclaiming, “Do hugs always make you feel this warm inside? Wow. More!” and proceeds to hug all the others.

What's the underlying message there? Penny didn't understand hugs before this moment. She never experienced the "warmth" of them while an android, despite the fact that here warmth is entirely metaphorical and has nothing to do with a literally cold body. RWBY really went and said that the "real girl” android was never actually real at all — not as real as she could be — because it's only when she's given "squishy guts" that she understands the true happiness of a hug.

Wow.

I mean seriously, wow.

Never-mind that, you know, we've seen that happiness and warmth since she was first introduced.

RWBY is really rewriting all the core themes introduced in Volumes 1-3 and it sucks. The show is absolutely the worse for it.

To say nothing of all the other disservices to Penny's character here. There's all this buildup about whether she'll still be the same Penny once the wish is complete, but of course she is. We wouldn't want to have Penny struggle when she becomes something other than what she's always been, would we? After all, it took Yang an entire volume to work through the shock of a metal arm, but taking away a metal body for a human one is in no way traumatic. Having a normal, human body is intrinsically a good thing! Of course Penny accepts it with nothing but smiles. Becoming human is celebratory, but becoming more machine is a horror.

She gets to watch her body self-destruct, glitching out and collapsing in front of her. But again, nothing to unpack there that can't be covered with a hand over her mouth.

There's no discussion of whether Penny still has the Maiden powers, or whether a wish like that would mess with the transfer in any way. How did the group know this action wouldn't register as a clear-cut death, forcing the power out of her and into someone new? Obviously they couldn’t know, but no one even thought to bring it up?

And the entire time they're formulating their evacuation plan, there's no talk of whether these portals will appear before everyone currently alive in the kingdom. I mean, if they do then Ironwood and Jacques can just waltz through and escape into Vacuo. If they don’t, then Maria and Pietro don't necessarily have a way out. We still don't know if they're stuck floating in Amity, or if Amity crashed, or if they made their way back to Mantle or Atlas. More importantly, the characters don't know. I have no problem with RWBY keeping that a surprise until the finale, but I absolutely take issue with Pietro's daughter walking through a portal, seemingly not to care whether her father is going to make it out too.

It's been the same with Qrow and his nieces' relationships. The show is good at insisting that these families love each other because they hug and smile while on screen together, but when shit is actually going down, none of them care about pesky things like disappearances, arrests, or “The last time I saw you, you were with an old woman on a damaged station after a villain attack, potentially stranded in deadly cold if life support failed.”

So yeah, this entire arc with Penny has been a disaster. From throwing away her framing subplot, to giving her a virus that did absolutely nothing, to giving her the Maiden powers which she's also done nothing with, to erasing her android status for a “She's really human now” message, Penny has been done dirty by the show these last two volumes. Not nearly to the extent Ironwood has, but still. At this point I wish they'd just kept her dead dead. Why do I want her back when that resurrection produces no reaction, her conflicts lead nowhere, and one of the core things that made Penny Penny has now been magically erased?

I've been saying for weeks that killing Penny off and keeping Penny around each had serious downsides attached, yet I never expected RWBY to do BOTH.

Also, I'm warding off any, "But Pinocchio was made into a real boy too" defenses. RWBY is not Pinocchio. Penny is not Pinocchio. I thought the allusion was going to be the Pinocchio inspired girl heading into the whale, not the show forcing the exact plotline — down to a blue, magical creature — onto a character whose entire journey has been about accepting herself as an android. Congratulations, RT. You just obliterated years of work.

Again, if you'd like an example of how to do this far better:

As Penny's character falls apart, Atlas shakes, alerting Jaune and the other that a new wish has been granted. Jaune pecks at the screen and realizes "That did, uh, something…?” but doesn’t realize that there's a giant, red "LIVE" up in the corner.

Jaune tries to warn the entire kingdom about their plan, but what he actually says is

“Atlas is falling, but — !”

And then the communications cut out.

Watts, perhaps?

Our heroes are really good at saying things that make large populaces panic, huh? This is the one (1) snag in their "impossible" plan, but as said above, it doesn't amount to anything. We get a shot of Nora, horrified at the thought of kingdom-wide communications being down, but literally seconds later Team RWBY has made portals appear that everyone can walk through. So... why do we care about communications? More importantly, why does the show try to make us care? So much time is spent getting the viewer invested in problems that never come to mean anything.

Including the problem of Salem herself.

Because the group successfully creates that evacuation plan. This is it. Everyone is leaving while Salem still reforms.

Yang asks if they can use the vaults themselves as a single point for everyone to go to and Ambrosius agrees. So everyone is going to pile into the Vacuo vault that can only be opened by an unknown Maiden? They're going to put an entire kingdom's worth of people, including their enemies, into the vault where the Relic of Destruction is? Yeah, that's great. Prior to this — like if this had been the plan at the end of Volume 7 — I would have 100% agreed that these risks are better than death by Salem/grimm/cold. Now though, Oscar as axed Salem for an unknown length of time, the cold is having no impact on the civilians outside, and the grimm only attack background military personnel that supposedly no one cares about. They couldn't have spent another few minutes (especially with time stopped!) to figure out a means of getting to Vacuo that doesn't involve revealing and providing access to the location of a super secret vault? To say nothing of what they're going to do if Salem wakes up and snags one of those portals for herself. Two kingdoms for the price of one!

But that's what they're going with. Weiss gives Ambrosius a schematic of the kingdom, I guess, and he makes branching pathways appear with numerous portals for everyone to step through. They'll enter through one and, when they exit another, will be in Vacuo. Easy peasy, right? Especially since Ambrosius doesn't seem to have any limitations about how often his power is used. Is it three creations every 100 years like Jinn? We're not told, at least not to my recollection. However, I was expecting there to be a waiting period, that they'd fix Penny, go to evacuate the kingdom, and learn that sorry, I can't make another creation just yet. It feels like the sort of shit move these beings would pull — "Don't cry to me when it's not what you wanted" — it would have been another commentary on the group's insistence on putting friends over the people's safety (like demanding the Ace Ops not bomb the whale because of Oscar), and crucially, would have kept the action in Atlas. Isn't that what this volume is? The battle for and potential destruction of the Kingdom of Atlas? We have two episodes left and, unless something unexpected happens, we're moving that action to Vacuo. Why?

Meanwhile, Penny's corpse is just chilling in the background 😬

While all this is going on, Winter reassures Jacques that he and Ironwood will be evacuated too, though she makes it clear saving him was Weiss' idea. It checks out, considering Weiss is the one who turned her father's arrest into a joke last volume. Winter still takes his abuse seriously.

The group prepares to leave with a celebratory, "We did it!" from Weiss. I'm still banging my head against that dining room table. Before they can pass through the portal though, Ambrosius leaves them with one, dire warning: "Do not fall."

In any other story a line like that is a neon sign announcing to the audience that someone will absolutely fall, and maybe they will, but RWBY has dodged consequences so often I wouldn't be surprised if this was merely another way to string us along. Remember all the hype surrounding Salem? The cold combined with her army and magic? How she was going to decimate Atlas and leave our group broken in a Fall 2.0?

I mean, we still have two episodes left. Forty minutes of content. Salem might still decimate them, especially since something has to happen in the finale. But god, it's a problem that we've come this far without a payoff. Salem randomly decided not to attack anyone, was stopped by a weapon added in solely for this purpose, and now the whole kingdom is being evacuated with a plan the group could have used at the start. This volume really is meaningless.

“We go to vacuo and hope we’ve thought of everything” they say as the camera zooms in on Cinder's smiling face. For the second week in a row.

Bingo time!

Winter betrayed Ironwood, the group used the Staff of Creation, and I'm axing Maria on behalf of Pietro. You can't have the guy's daughter become human — after he was killing himself to give her his aura?? — and magically walk to Vacuo, not knowing if he's even survived since she last saw him, and expect me to think he hasn't been forgotten. Same with Maria. Has the group mentioned her since Amity cut out, notably for reasons they couldn’t explain? Of course not. Did they care to find out what happened? Of course not. I have no doubt they'll both re-appear in the next two episodes, Pietro crying over how perfect his girl is now and Maria congratulating the group on their actions, but we're still marking it.

This is the ugliest thing I’ve ever created, I hope you all are enjoying it :D

Another week, another couple feet added to the hole we’re digging. I know I keep saying I have no idea what's going to happen next... but I have no idea what's going to happen next. A Vacuo ending was not in the cards, not outside of them miraculously showing up in ships. Maybe they have been on their way to Atlas (somehow...) and will arrive precisely when everyone has left! Anything is possible at this point.

See you next Saturday, everyone. Hold on until then lol. 💜

#rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby volume 8 #mymetas #rwby recaps #rwby creation

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xxxdragonfucker69xxx · 4 years ago

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@lyhoradka tagged me in that post about five bits of text from written media that are burned into your brain and, kindly, gave me a theme of places. i am going to annotate this because i am a bitch

1. holy places are dark places. the wisdom that we get in them is not thin and clear like water but thick and dark like blood. - cs lewis, till we have faces

im almost certain ive misremembered this one but its better this way. clive what the devil fuck were you trying to say with till we have faces. burn it down and start over with this. i have a sidenote about hope faith and love but thats beyond the scope of this discussion

2. night falls. the workers put down their tools and point to the sky. “there is the blueprint,” they say. invisible cities, italo calvino

again idr if its sky or stars. this is the description of thecla from invisible cities, kindly appointed to me by my good friend venus. this is not the strongest one but it is a strong one and its for Me and i remember it. inna thought i was going to make this whole post about haunted houses and this one is completely the opposite; i’ll consider it aspirational

3. walk to the east till you can walk no more. swim east until you pass the sunrise; swim east until you pass the stars; swim east until you come to the edge of the sky. there you will find yourself on the shores of a different land. even in that place, they shall know your name, and mine. - adel, kc danine/unlikely flowerings, jenna moran

sorry i cheated on this one bc i looked up the attribution and found my memory was wrong. but i cut it up to match what i thought. this one is actually a combo with

3a. the sea will be the color night behind glass. then, slowly, it becomes green: first rain-wet slate, then darkest jade. green as fresh emeralds. green as remembered rivers - the sun beneath the sea, sunless seas

again ive hashed the first part of that but green as remembered rivers lives in my head rent free. these two live under the heading “an exile in the uttermost east”

4. THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR. NO HIGHLY VALUED DEED IS REMEMBERED HERE. NOTHING OF VALUE IS STORED HERE.

the warning continues of course but the basis is here. the idea that we cannot produce something so horrifying and terrifying that it does not also fascinate us, as you might guess, fascinates me. nightmare and obsession are such close brothers

5. a woman drew her hair out tight/and fiddled in the violet light/and upside down in air were towers/tolling reminiscent bells that kept the hours/and voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

in my head sean bean reads these lines in his civ vi voice. why did so much weird fiction pattern weird bits of worldbuilding after this bit. not that i am immune. voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhauuusted wells

BONUS CONTENT

so many things i wanted to add that werent written or that i didnt have memorized perfectly enough

1i. the, like, entire first half of to tundra by los camp, which i will reproduce below

meet me at st nicholas among the oaks behind the church that sway like pigtailed girls as summer wind whistles around your bare-shin knees and the forsythia leaves in the shade lay with me tickled by the feather reeds thats where the trees grow old under the ivys hold as you in my two arms equally safe from harm and in a hazy daydream our bodies married the stream and we broke down into pebbles and silt the water ran from the fields until the oceans we filled and found the seabed the comfiest quilt

there was more life in the weeds than in the few hundred seats that rose from transept to chancel to nave [...]

2i. prim leaves her father’s house. i won’t reproduce the whole story here but there’s a girl prim and her father is the god hansa and they live in a house of iron nails and one day her dad is killed and she has to go bury him and takes nothing but his corpse and a single iron nail. and she traipses all across creation and the void looking for somewhere to bury him but every time she tries his corpse shouts at her for being shit at it. and eventually she collapses, and drops the nail and it springs right up into the same exact house, and she imagines crawling in there with her fathers corpse to die next to him and freaks out and then

A pale face came before her and she was abruptly struck from her despair as though by a great hammer. A beautiful stranger had appeared, mild and tall, of milky flesh, spare in figure, but radiant in voice and visage. "I know you," said the stranger in a small voice, "you are Prim."

"I was Hansa's orphan, the slave, Prim," croaked Prim in response, "and now I am nobody, just a small dirty thing in great emptiness and here I will die."

"No," said the stranger, and the clarity and firmness of her voice and smile send a shock through Prim, "you are Prim, and Prim only, and Prim you shall be." And Prim there realized her tears had made a great pool and she was greeting her own reflection. And she fell into that murky pool and straight away it turned clear as crystal and Prim vomited forth a great black knot from very deep within her, and her body was scoured and lashed by the icy waters of that pool, and great draughts of poisonous filth and despondency were drawn in rushing gasps from her wounds, and her skin was sealed and her soiled trappings were purged and the caked illness and death was ripped away and she rose from that pool fresh and humming. Her back straightened and she scarcely thought on her father's corpse or the faintest echo of that iron house. That is how Prim left her father's house.

so basically abaddon scooped all of tsiy and every other haunted house writer in like five thousand words

3i. berenike

From my words you will have reached the conclusion that the real Berenice is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable.

4i. a ghost does not come to stand in the dark doorway of your room because it is an 18th century orphan girl named annie. a ghost comes to stand in the doorway of your room because the doorway is where things come to stand. - i am in eskew, david ward

the formats all fucked up now huh. this has influenced my thoughts on both psychogeo and necromancy. what a fucking guy. theres also the pope lick bridge one but

5i. i hope you will forgive me for including a bit from tsiy

I opened my eyes. I was kneeling at the base of a tree, at the top of a grassy hill, under starry night. Dad was standing a little ways back, head craned back to look at the tree. "What is this place to you?" he asked, looking around. The island came to an abrupt stop at the edges; it wasn't a floating island in space or anything, there just.....wasn't anything beyond the edge of it. Like looking past the edge of your own eyesight -- not the blackness of eyelids, but the colorless place beyond.

"I'll die here someday," I said, and meant it.

i really need to work on getting places and haunted places into the new draft. im slacking. but im also not allowed to go back and change anything rn or ill just never get anywhere

#visible cities #also sprach #christ this took a million years

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thewitchydorkofportals · 5 years ago

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Hawk like behavior Hawksxlistener(Yandere)

(This is a Yandere RP meaning there is nblood,guts,gore, trauma, etc etc. And this is a special equlivent exchange (yes i believe in the FMA rule) To a sweet bean @the-grimm-writer I hope they have their fill and if i do good maybe ill sick this hawks on them more often.Also forgive grammar.Yes i use the wiki as a ref DONT JUDGE ME SO DO THE REST OF YA!)

Hawks lived up to his name to the actuall bird of prey itself.Sadly he doesnt have talons for feet..so he has to settle for killing people that tried to hurt his swan psycially or emotionally in other ways without ruining his rep publicly.He has a rep to keep not just in the public as #2 hero..but as #1 lover in your eyes.

Ah yes you.. how could he forget those memories..even though they were bittersweet as store bought chocolates.Keigo was born on the island Kyushu, Fukuoka, which has a very long history with poverty. His childhood home was an eyesore of a nest. Dirty, neglected, with garbage, broken shards and alcohol bottles on the floor.He dispised the smell slightly to this day.At that time Keigo was portrayed as an expressionless, quiet child. Doctors digonosed him as a child that could not show feelings normally or that if he could it would just end in sarcastic comments that might be rude, however they noticed there was one person that could light a light in his heart shaped cage. A little girl that had it even worse than Keigo with her father always being out and always trying to convince his wife to ‘get rid’ of their quirk kid cause “SHES A BOTHER WITH THAT QUIRK OF HERS!”

That little girl was you and you had the same quirk as him but in a different genus. While his were fierce red and Hawk like..yours..oh yours..were swan like and beautiful.White as snow itself..He was there for you along with your mother comforting you and helping you clean up when they grew in, he taught you how to fly..or at least hover at their age and when brave enough you did somthing special. With him you ballet danced in the sky the special part of swan lake.to him that meant EVERYTHING!.and that incident..you were the reason he did it. That car accident was because your father snapped at the fact your mother chose you over him and was gonna try to destroy you both. He had to do it.to protect you.but at what cost.. leaving you on that DISGUSTING island so he can train to be a hero! He only went cause you encouraged him. You were his only friend that had acess to his heart.

Years went on and he was a prodigy with little to no emotions and yet, when he learned you were visiting his agentcy at 18 he was OVER THE GOD DAMN MOON! There you were as (H/N) in your costume that made you look like a ballet dancer and yet your stage was the sky. His shitty secratary was about to refuse you till he stormed in and hugged you.

“(Y-Y/N)? I-is that you?” He asked pinching himself to made sure he wasnt dreaming..that you were here. You chuckled at him.

“Yes Keigo..its me..Look at you your such a mess! Do they even feed you around here?”

He chuckled at your attitude. Of course you would be more concerned about his health then your own. He looked at his secratary a little coldly and she saw somthing was off. Sure he was still the same but she swore she saw hearts in his eyes. “Fill her in as MY only sidekick. Ill take in others later on but she is PRIORITY.” then he looked at you with a smile..”Wanna dance to swan lake for old times sake?” He smiled when you nodded and he guided you to the roof.He knew when hawks and swans danced with their lover..they mate for life. and he will make damn sure you never look at a guy the same way you look at him when dancing this special dance. If they dared come close..they might lose an arm. But for now.. you were ALL HIS and you were finally free of that island. And he promises on his breath..even when he dies..to never EVER let you go.

#IM A WOMAN OF MY WORD #the-grimm-writer #FEAST MY CHILD

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brittle-bone-gabe · 5 years ago

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Hypochondriac

Summary: Eddie had grown up with an overbearing mother, unfortunately for him the issues she’s caused him followed him into adulthood, Richie just wants to try to help. Pairings: Adult Reddie (Richie x Eddie) Read on Ao3: Here

Hypochondria is defined as: an abnormal anxiety about one's health, especially with an unwarranted fear that one has a serious disease. Unfortunately for Eddie Kaspbrak, he would be considered to be a hypochondriac. He didn’t see it, but everyone else could see it, and the Losers could definitely see it since they were kids. It wasn’t Eddie’s fault though, as his mother, Sonia Kaspbrak was the reason he was like this to begin with, pinning an issue on her son that wasn’t even his fault.

When Eddie was five-years-old his father had sadly passed away from cancer, not long after that, Eddie came down with bronchitis and had to stay home for awhile until he started to feel better. Sonia had been terrified since then, thinking it was some sort of bad luck on their family; cursed with illness. Eddie couldn’t really remember the details about it, he just remembered that he was forced to go to the doctors a lot, like, at least twice a week a lot. He could remember back at his childhood home they had a kitchen cabinet just filled with medications, so filled that if you opened it they would start to fall out. The moment Eddie found out the pills he had been taking were placebos he would refuse to take anything his mother gave him to treat his “illnesses”. If he got sick he would go to the pharmacy himself to get cold medicines that would help him.

While it was a strange case of a childhood trauma, it was still childhood trauma nonetheless. Sonia used this kind of treatment to control him, to make sure he couldn’t just leave the house when he wanted to, to make sure he would stay home with her so nothing on the outside could hurt him. And if that didn’t do it, she would guilt trip into staying; like when Richie and Stan wanted to go outside to play she would give Eddie the look. Pleading with him to stay, to take care of her since she suddenly wasn’t feeling well. Of course, Eddie couldn’t leave his mom behind to suffer, so he would say he couldn’t go out.

Having this trauma stick throughout his life made everything difficult for Eddie, as everything had to be cleaned, everything had to be perfect, anything dirty had to either be cleaned that moment or get thrown out. Germaphobe was another word that Richie would use to describe his husband. Laundry had to be done three times a week, if they were out they couldn’t sit on their bed with the same clothes they left the house in, and the moment they enter the house they have to wash their hands. It was a hard arrangement for Richie to get used to, but if it made Eddie feel better... then he had to do what he could.

Richie was minding his own business one Saturday afternoon, he had his feet kicked up on the coffee table, his laptop on his lap as he was typing away. Since he had started writing his own material he’s been on the computer a lot more, he had deadlines now. Deadlines. When did he ever had to deal with deadlines? Never. The whole concept was foreign to him. Everyone was always breathing down his neck about his material too: we need it soon, Richie; how’s the show coming, Richie?;do you just want us to rehire your writer? Hell no, he could do this himself.

“Fucking... finally!” Richie yelled out loud to nobody in particular, finally pressing save on his document file as he finished up his next round of material. The first time he tried writing for himself he forgot to hit save, so five hours to writing and planning when down the fucking drain.

Richie could hear Eddie’s footsteps coming up from behind him. He leaned his head back on the couch to watch him walk from down the hallway towards the living room. His husband had that look on his face like he wasn’t in the mood to joke around; he was very serious.

“Hey, Eds! Guess what!” Richie still asked, a huge smile on his face.

“Get up,” was all Eddie said as he moved past him to get to the closet by the front door.

Richie was confused at first, not sure what he was talking about or what was going on, but that didn’t stop him from making a shitty joke.

“Already there, baby,” he said, winking at his husband when he turned around to face him as he was scowling at him.

Eddie turned back to the closet, pulling out a spray bottle before walking up to Richie who closed his laptop, tossing it next to him on the couch. He opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted when Eddie sprayed the water that was in the bottle at his face.

“Oh, what the fuck?!” Richie said, standing up quickly, taking off his glasses. He tried cleaning them off from his shirt, but since his shirt was wet too it was just making it worse. “Eds, what the hell?”

“I’m deep cleaning the couch,” was all Eddie said before going back to the closet.

Clean...? The couch? Was that something people did?

“Why?” He asked, plopping back down, “it’s not like we fuck on it. I mean, I would love to, but you won’t let me,” Richie rambled, moving his laptop to the coffee table.

“Richie... please get off the couch,” Eddie said, walking back up to him while holding onto a box of baking soda.

“What’s got you all wound up?”

“I read this thing online,” Eddie started to say quickly that Richie zoned out for just a moment, trying to wrap around what he was saying, “that the couch is the most disgusting piece of furniture a person could own.”

“I keep telling you, you read this shit online and get all worked up for nothing,” Richie started.

“I mean, it has to be true, right? At least to a certain degree...” at this point Eddie was muttering to himself, looking from the floor back up to Richie who still hasn’t moved from his spot on the couch. “Please move.”

“No. Not until you-” Richie couldn’t even finish his ultimatum before Eddie pushed him off the couch. “Hey, that was rude,” he said, sitting up on his elbows, looking at Eddie who was sprinkling the baking soda all over the couch. “What the fuck did you read this time? I want to see it,” he said, pulling himself up from the floor.

Eddie just shook his head, going back down the hall to find the vacuum cleaner. Grumbling under his breath, Richie followed close behind his husband, trying to get him to spill whatever it was that was bothering him. Once Eddie was in one of these episodes it was hard to pull him out of it, would this be considered to be a type of anxiety attack? No... Well... maybe. Certainly had something to do with OCD, something that Richie swore Eddie had but he wouldn’t listen to him. Yeah, worrying about germs to a certain degree could be normal, but not like how Eddie felt about germs.

“Eds, just let me see what you read,” Richie tried again, “it’s really not that ser-” he stopped himself. Even though Eddie wasn’t officially diagnosed with OCD that didn’t stop Richie from researching it, learning what he should and shouldn’t say to people who have that mental illness. “C’mon, Eddie, think about how far you’ve come. Remember when we first moved in together and you made sure we had two different blankets and I wasn’t allowed to touch yours? Now you hog the fucking blanket.”

“I don’t hog the blanket, moron,” he said, attempting to yank the vacuum cleaner out from the closet in the hallway. “Can you get this out for me?”

“No. I want to see what got you so worked up.” He put his hands on Eddie’s shoulders as he was pulling his phone out from his front pocket. “Let me see.”

Eddie held his phone out of reach as he unlocked his phone to find the “article” that he read earlier. “They wrote about all the bacteria that live in the couch, Richie. It- Hey!” He whined when the taller man plucked the phone from out of his hands, skimming the article. “Stop!”

“Did you read the whole thing?” Richie asked him once he reached the bottom of the page.

“...yes... maybe... no. Why?”

“The person who wrote this isn’t, like... someone who’s qualified to write shit like this, I never even heard of this site before. Where did you find it?” Eddie shrugged, still struggling with the vacuum. “C’mon, we’re not doing this.” Grabbing his shoulders again, Richie moved Eddie away from the closet, the smaller man complaining the whole time as he was moved into the kitchen, his back to him.

Why didn’t Richie understand that what he was feeling was real? He was scared to death of the possible illness the infectious bacteria could case. He wanted to protect himself, no, he mainly wanted to protect Richie from getting sick. How upset he would be if Richie got sick and passed away like his father did? Fuck, Eddie would never be able to forgive himself if anything happened to Richie.

“Why won’t you just listen to me?!” Eddie exploded, stepping away from Richie’s grasp. Richie was stunned, yeah, Eddie would sometimes playfully yell at him, but this time he knew he was being serious. “I’m just- I’m...” He wrapped his arms around himself, breathing heavily going into what felt like a panic attack. “I can’t breathe...”

Eddie’s limbs felt numb, like he wasn’t even in reality even more. Wait, was this even real? He forced himself to look down at his hands that he now held out in front of his face, moving them side to side to make sure they were actually his hands. The sudden pain in his chest made his panic attack worse, he was feeling dizzy like he was about to pass out. Oh, fuck. I’m having a heart attack, Eddie thought as he tangled his fingers through his hair as he kept breathing heavily.

“Eds? Hey...” Richie said calmly, wrapping himself around Eddie, nuzzling into the crook of his neck. Eddie moved away from him, not wanting to be touched right now, as he was in the middle of panicking.

“Don’t touch me...” he mumbled, stepping away from Richie, holding onto himself again.

Richie nodded, understanding that, as when he was having an anxiety attack he didn’t liked to be touched either.

“What can I do?”

“I need my.. my...” Eddie couldn’t even finish his sentence, tears were burning in his eyes as he was trying to find the ability to breathe.

“Inhaler?” Eddie shook his head, trembling slightly, “want your anxiety meds?” He nodded. “How about you go sit on the couch-... the... chair. I’ll grab your pills.”

Spinning... everything’s spinning...

Eddie thought he was going to pass out again, he couldn’t find anything in the environment to use to ground himself back into reality.

“...Eddie? Eddie,” Richie tried again when he didn’t say or do anything.

The sound of Richie’s voice managed to snap Eddie out of whatever trance he was in. He spun around, looking up at Richie who had a small, sad smile on his face. That was Eddie’s grounding point; he studied every detail of Richie’s face, how his soft, slightly curly hair laid on his forehead, the crinkles around his eyes as he smiled, the glare from his glasses lenses... Goddamn he was so fuckin’ cute.

“You...” Eddie reached up, squishing Richie’s cheeks, catching him off guard, “are so. Stupid. I love it. I love you.”

“Uh... Thanks, Eds. I love you too.”

“You just comfort me, even though you just... talk so fucking much.”

Richie couldn’t help but laugh at that, wrapping his hands gently around Eddie’s wrists that were still on his face.

“Is this okay? Let me know if you don’t want-”

“No!” He said quickly, closing his eyes as he was trying to steady himself from the horrible dizziness surrounding him, “I’m dying...”

“No, no, you’re not dying.” Richie moved his hands up to cover Eddie’s smaller hands. “Wanna go lay down? I can get you your meds, okay?” He nodded in response before Richie laid his hands on his shoulders, turning him around as they walked back to their room.

The walls in the hallway felt like they were closing in on Eddie, causing him to panic even more. He wanted to scream, he wanted everything to just go away. The only thing that was keeping him sane right now was Richie rubbing his back and giving him words of reassurance. You’re doing great... We’re almost there... I’m proud of you, Eds...

How’d he get so lucky?

Richie was about to pull the cover and blankets back on Eddie’s side of the bed, but remembered that last time he did that Eddie didn’t like that, feeling like he was confined. Instead, he helped him into the bed, watching him as he settled in so he was comfortable.

Richie had no idea how he got so lucky to end up with Eddie. They haven’t- no, they had forgotten each other for years, just to end up back in Derry for... some reason, and all those feelings that Richie forgot flooded back. Thankfully he managed to overcome his fear of rejection to basically blurt out his true feelings for Eddie just before he was leaving for the airport back to New York. Apparently he had filed for divorce before leaving for Maine, pushing everything through so he was basically a free man even before he managed to get back home. He left everything back with Myra, starting a new with Richie. The best decision he had ever made in his entire life.

“How are you feeling, Eddie?” Richie asked after sitting next to him on the mattress for a few minutes, he had been watching Eddie’s face twitch with his eyes shut tight while trying to control his panic attack. He reached over, booping his nose to get his attention, and he finally opened his eyes.

“I don’t want you dying, Rich,” he said, looking up at him with sad eyes.

Richie’s face scrunched up in confusion, not sure what he was talking about. “Wh..what? Why would I die?”

“Ever heard of sepsis?”

Of course I’ve heard of sepsis, you never stop talking about it. Was what Richie wanted to say in response to that, but he decided, for once, to keep his mouth shut. Maybe he hasn’t been handling the whole OCD thing the correct way. Maybe he’s been invalidating him and that’s why he was sent into a panic attack. Oh fuck, was this fault?

“I... think I’ve heard you mention it before,” Richie finally settled on saying, reaching over to Eddie’s night stand to grab the orange RX bottle that contained his anxiety medication. He held the small, white, oval pill out to Eddie who had the talent of being able to take pills without a drink. Eddie looked at the pill then back up to Richie, looking worried. “What’s wrong, honey? Isn’t this what you needed?”

“Where’d you get that from?”

“Oh, uh...” Richie rattled the bottle that was still in his hand, “this.”

“I want to see it.”

This is the same pill you take everyday, Eddie. You know what it is.

“Sure, here,” Richie once again stopped himself from saying what he was thinking, choosing the best route to help Eddie as he handed the bottle over. He watched as Eddie was reading the area of the label that describes exactly what the pill looked like; size wise, color wise, even what was printed on the pill.

“What’s on it?”

Richie let out a quick sigh, holding the small pill up so he could see it. Hell, even with his glasses he could barely make out what was on it.

“One side says FL... I think the other side says 20.”

Satisfied that the pill Richie was trying to give him matched up with the bottle he took it from him, taking it instantly. Honestly? It made Richie cringe watching him take meds without a drink, it was unnatural, but growing up taking pills his whole life must’ve made it easier to do that.

Even though Eddie was with Richie and knew that he wouldn’t do anything to hurt or trick him horribly, he was still scared of being given placebos again. He was scared of being lied to, of being told he was sick but truly wasn’t, he just wanted to be normal.

“Sepsis can really fuck you up,” Eddie continued, leaning back in the bed, closing his eyes again, waiting for the pill to kick in, “if you get an infection, sometimes your body can overreact when trying to fight the infection.” Richie just nodded along, letting Eddie go on to talk about whatever he needed to get off his chest. “It can cause organ damage and eventually organ failure.”

“Huh... that sounds scary.”

“I don’t want you to die of sepsis, Richie.”

“I...” He paused, trying to pick his words carefully, “I really appreciate that, Eds. Bacteria can cause it?”

“Bacterial infections are the main cause, actually. That’s why I wanted to clean the couch, I don’t want you to get sick. I was... just trying to protect you.”

Well, that broke Richie’s heart. And now he felt like an asshole.

“You’re so sweet, Eds.” Richie leaned down, planting a kiss on his forehead. “Always lookin’ out for me; the best husband.” He couldn’t help but smile when he saw Eddie’s cheeks turn pink.

“S...shut up, dick.”

“Mmm... no,” he crawled over Eddie, plopping down on his side of the bed. “I love you, Eddie.”

“I love you too.”

“Can I hold you?” He asked, looking at Eddie who still had his eyes closed.

“Mhm,” he breathed, rolling over so his back was facing Richie, who wrapped himself around the smaller man, holding him tight against him. “Richie?”

“Hm?”

“Do think I’m annoying?”

“Yeah, but not because you’re worried about germs. You just have a loud mouth.”

“I have a loud mouth?!” Eddie turned around quickly, looking at Richie who had a huge smile on his face. “You can’t ever shut the fuck up!”

“So noisy.” Eddie groaned, scooting away from him. “No, wait, I’m sorry. You’re a... moderate loud mouth. Quiet until provoked.” He started running his fingers up and down Eddie’s back, feeling small chills running through his spine.

“You’re the only one who provokes me, you ass.”

“It’s how I show I love you. Just like how you say-”

“Beep beep, Richie.”

“Thank you. Exactly.”

They were silent for a while, taking in the peace of being in each others company. Feeling Richie’s arms draped around him felt nice, like everything was real, like he was real, that everything was going to be okay. Richie... Richie was Eddie’s comfort blanket, he knew that for a long time but couldn’t find the exact phrasing to describe it. It was as if Richie knew when he was about to go into a panic or anxiety attack and would take charge, making sure he was okay, making sure he had everything he needed, trying his best to help. Sure, sometimes Richie didn’t say the right things, but he was trying and that’s all that mattered.

“How’re you feelin’, Eddie?” Richie asked, burying his face in his back.

“Better, thanks to you.”

“Good.” The moment the words left Richie’s mouth, he sat up, swinging his legs off the edge of the bed before standing up, leaving Eddie very confused. “C’mon, Eds.”

“What? Where are we going?” He asked, sitting up, feeling a bit loopy from the anxiety meds kicking in.

“You wanted the vacuum cleaner out, right? To deep clean the couch?” He asked from the hallway, yanking it out from the closet. “Its been about twenty-minutes. I think it’s ready.” When he turned around he jumped, not expecting Eddie to be standing right behind him. “Jesus!”

“It’s super easy to deep clean, Richie,” Eddie started quickly, taking the vacuum cleaner from him, “after you put the baking soda on the couch and let it sit you just vacuum it off and it’s done.”

“Oh, well... that’s pretty easy,” he responded as he followed him through the living room.

He stood back by the TV, watching Eddie running the vacuum cleaners brush all over the couch, making sure all the baking soda was cleaned off. Okay, to be fair, this process was a lot easier than Richie had expected, thinking they had to buy some special cleaner or something. If that would’ve been the case, however, Richie would’ve gone out right away to get whatever Eddie needed to make him feel better. He would done anything for him.

While he was doing that, Richie went back to the closet in the hallway, he reached all the way back, grabbing the worn out blanket that they never used. If there was anything Richie could do to make Eddie feel better he would do it in a heartbeat. So he had the perfect idea.

“There! It’s done,” Eddie announced proudly.

“Good job, baby,” he said, reaching over to give Eddie a kiss. “I have an idea to keep the couch cleaner.” He dropped the blanket over the couch, covering the back, tucking it into the cushions. “So now you can just wash the blanket.”

Eddie wrapped his arms around Richie, hugging him tight. He wasn’t used to people trying to understand what he was feeling, in fact, he was used to people telling him it was all in his head, that he was overreacting, etc. Richie was always different with him though, he would always try to accommodate with him to make sure he was comfortable, helping him through his thoughts and panic attacks. Hell, Eddie would remember that Myra would purposely mess things up, make them dirty just to get on his nerves then practically laugh and wonder why he was so upset. Yeah, Richie made jokes, but he was starting to understand when his jokes were going too far and take it back, making sure everything was okay with him.

Richie couldn’t help but chuckle as he just thought of a joke. “Hey, now that we have the blanket on the couch can we fuck on it now?”

“Absolutely.”

“Really?!”

“...fuckin’ not.”

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flyswhumpcenter · 5 years ago

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Bad Things Happen Bingo! The event where you send me requests according to this marvelous card! (Red cross is the completed prompt, character headshots are prompts I’ve already filled. Green deltas are for requested prompts.)

There’s a reason why Chronos was such a cruel god.

I almost forgot to post this fic... I started it a while back, got art block, and only went back to it during a boring geography lesson during Whumptober. It was also not meant to be an Inazuma fic, but sometimes I have a weird creativity and muse. Don't ask me, the wonders of the human mind I guess. It'll come to literally nobody's surprise that I ship Anna and Nosaka because I'm the token F/M shipper of the main fanfic writers of this fandom (y'know, gotta contrast my colleagues and provide the stuff nobody but me and maybe an IRL friend wants). I'm surprised I've never managed to finish a fic with them before, tho: yes, the previous prompt fill, "Bedside Vigil" was supposed to be for them until I switched to Haizaki/Akane over... my Tomodachi Life game immediately pairing them up (true story). Anyway. This fic does imply to a road accident of some sort, so if you're sensitive to this kind of topic (for which you're entirely justified, tbh, that's coming from someone who's almost been in one), proceed with caution. It's nothing graphic or anything, just floating in the background of this story, though. I also almost forgot to mention this is supposed to be set in my Inazuma Café AU, but the only reason why you need to know that is because they're college students there, and why Anna and Hikaru are as friendly to each other as they are here. I mean, if you wanna know more, I'll gladly respond to questions.

It’s also the last story I can write for this card without getting a Five in a Row, which I may or may not have done on purpose lol

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For Time Cannot Be Accelerated

Summary: Anna didn't think ambulance rides could last this long on the mind. She was seriously proven wrong.

Fandom: Inazuma Eleven (Ares/Orion continuity; implied college AU) Relationships: Platonic Anna & Hikaru friendship, implied established Anna/Nosaka

Wordcount: 1.7K words

Content Warnings: Implied road accident, talks of death, some blood and talk of injury.

Event hosted by @badthingshappenbingo

AO3 version available here.

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They’re all tense in the ambulance. It doesn’t help that they share a small space amongst themselves, all cranked in one back of a truck that had clearly been made to have one stretcher and the paramedics watching over it. Nobody talks, except the latter amongst themselves in the front of the ambulance and through the vehicle. Instead, they don’t look at each other, too busy staring at the floor or their responsibility.

Anna has opted for the floor, for the time being.

It’s overwhelming to remain here, in a crowded place where she felt alone nonetheless, drowned in the noise of the beeping machinery and blaring sirens echoing on the inside, feet surrounded by wires, hands trembling and sorrow she desperately kept inside. Her thoughts are still shaken from what had happened merely moments before, isolating her even further, words having escaped from her mouth and her vocal cords remaining knotted with no throat clearing able to untie them back to usefulness. She’s speechless, voiceless, useless.

Her shoulder is pressed against Ichihoshi’s, whose hand happens to sometimes brush against her naked arms. From what little she can see of his face, drowned in the darkness of the vehicle and lit by the unstable, flickering coloured lights of the different monitors crippling her earing, he isn’t any more relaxed than she was, shoulders stiff and frowned eyebrows, biting his lip, trying not to fidget with his fingers. She feels like she should be telling him something to make him untense, but considering how tense she also is, she has no idea what she’s even supposed to utter. Her mental syllabus has given up on her for the time being.

In this moment of despair and desolation, Anna still admires the valiant efforts of the paramedics making sense of the numbers displayed on tiny screens and muttering a language she doesn’t understand most of, words whose meaning she has no idea of flying way over her head. They’ve kept their cool when she was on the verge of tears, an unknown yet powerful force preventing her from falling to her knees and weeping like she is, frankly, wanting to do above everything else. Still, she’s the Empress, and no Empress has ever cried when her capacity of judgement was needed.

The air of the ambulance was hot, too much so, smothering both Ichihoshi and her. If she could take a breather outside, even if it’d be for a mere moment or from a minuscule hole, her head would spin far less quickly, her world would stabilize, her mind would be much further from the verge of breaking down under its own weight. She craves tranquillity and serenity, two states of mind she’s meant to have and yet lacked in these desperate moments.

Anna has started finding ways to recover her calm. The floor of the ambulance which seemed highly uncomfortable and disgustingly dirty when she climbed in now looked more than comfortable enough to her, but they lacked the space to even attempt sitting down. Before long, she’s realized the hard reality of things: there’s no way for her to get even the slightest bit more comfortable, and despite the speeds this vehicle is going at, it’s still taking ages in her mind.

In a way, it reminds her of being on a sinking ship, swimming in the cold sea, except she doesn’t even have the merit of risking hypothermia because she’s boarding on a rescue boat while someone else is pushing it, giving their skin to the freezing waters and floating debris. Morbid imagery she tries to erase out of her mind as soon as possible, yet the beating of her heart making itself known in her head and neck prevent her from not thinking about death nor debris.

“I… I hope everything will be alright,” Ichihoshi eventually stutters, in an almost-whisper, voice hiding behind the ill-paced cacophony.

“So do I,” she replies as she notices something was dripping along her skin, eyeing the liquid going down her arm. Drifting her glance in its direction, she sees he’s holding his right arm with his left hand pressed against his jacket’s fabric, a faint difference in colours showing up in the mostly uniform light blue-and-red that his white sleeves had become.

As a result, her voice changes in tone, “are you okay, Ichihoshi?”

“It stings, but it’s nothing too bad. I’ll have it checked when we’ll arrive.”

The trembling, weakness in his own voice makes her more than doubtful of his statement. He’s unstable on his feet, almost swaying, crashing into her when the ambulance unfortunately shifted too quickly for him to catch himself on something, fingers slipping on the metal walls. She barely catches him with weak arms, legs feeling fainter until she’s stabilized him on his feet.

“I don’t believe that it can’t be ‘too bad’, if you’re tilting this much,” she tells him, even more concern melting into acid. “Let me see”.

A sense of responsibility gives her back some of her stability, legs straightening up, eyes sharper as she tried to see in the half-dark. Without a word, she took off her comrade’s sleeve, noticing the sharp contrast marked by what could only be a wound. It seems like a deep cut, with shards reflecting the dim lights visibly exiting from it. Her hair rises on her limbs as soon as she knows what this is about.

“How long do we have left until we arrive?” She demands, in an imploring voice, to the paramedics.

They’re not able to provide a clear time, “a couple minutes left, traffic’s really bad, our apologies”, so she has to deal with it and simply keep Ichihoshi close to her, making sure he doesn’t trip on himself, inspecting for other wounds he could have. Aside from his arm, she thinks she sees a stain on his stomach and another on his right leg, although they’re less noticeable and she kind of sighs in relief to herself about that fact. It must mean they’re less grievous than the one she saw first.

“I really hope he’s gonna be okay…” Ichihoshi whispers close to her ear, back lying against the metal.

The concern she’s tried to hold in until now by thinking of something else and failing to fully do so breaks through the gates and floods her mind again. She has too much to worry about and not enough available space, the scratches on her knees and elbows from the glass shards paling in comparison to the anguish that this ambulance ride is starting to become.

“Same here…” Her voice almost chokes on itself, but she breathes in and out, swallows her pride and her stress in one gulp, and continues speaking as not to betray her actual state of mind. “I’m sure he’ll be fine, he’s pulled through worse, I know it…”

Her hands still enlace themselves in a silent prayer she tries to hide from the world.

“He’ll… be fine. He will be fine.”

She wants to cry.

“You’re right. Surely he’ll make it…”

Anna isn’t lying to reassure herself, merely speaking her truth. Yuuma has always proven himself to being capable of the most daring stunts, even life-threatening ones. While she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to fully forgive him hiding his tumour away from her for reasons he’s never quite told her about, merely tune down the hurt he’s caused her by taking in account the reasons he did so; she has to use it as proof it should be fine. She only has hope to keep herself afloat now, her reason having fled the scene.

Yuuma is capable of great things, that much she’s sure of. She doesn’t know him entirely yet, and is certain she won’t ever be able to fully understand his character, yet she trusts him with her own life and, in these dire moments, he needs her. He needs her to remain strong and level-headed, to withstand the pressure and the desolation taking root inside her heart. They’ve promised to remain together and be there for each other: it’s time for her to fulfil her part of the trade.

Plus, from the three of them involved in this tragic accident, she’s the only one who has grazes instead of injuries. She also has to keep an eye on Ichihoshi on behalf of both Yuuma and her.

“He’ll make it. I’m certain of it,” she repeats, more to herself than to her friend.

“I’m sure of it too,” he adds, in a similar fashion, and they’re back to both silently pray in silence as time slowly flows before their eyes, like the calm waves of a serene beach coming and going. If she closes her eyes and tries ignoring reality enough, she can almost hear the sea instead of sirens and cryptic whispers.

“And you? Are you okay?” she asks, her hands leaving their praying position, about to inspect her friend.

“I’ll be fine…”

He sounds too unsure to her liking, but before she can even comment on that, the atmosphere changes as she hears in echoes the nearby sirens of other ambulances.

This is when Anna realizes that she couldn’t have been more relieved to see a hospital in her life, making sights she’d have wished never to see again some she was looking forward to: the paramedics shifting around the stretches and talking among themselves in a slightly different way, the monitors displaying new numbers, men shouting in an urgent tone. Almost unbeknownst to them, they were holding each other’s arm for support in dire times, the smell of iron sticking to his skin, her composure coming back despite the tears having taken away some of her makeup.

They’re most likely both ugly sights too, but they’re alive, they’ve arrived, and it’ll all be fine, eventually. For now, they step down from the ambulance, his arm wrapped around her shoulders. Despite the circumstances, neither of them succumb to their darker thoughts and bruises, not a complaint heard despite Ichihoshi grunting in pain from time to time and her lack of balance and remaining strength to carry the both of them without herself panting.

Still, Anna is the Empress, this much she knows; and an empress remains strong, no matter the circumstances. She’ll trust Yuuma and bring Ichihoshi to someone who can help tend to his wounds. That’s her mission and she’ll make sure to accomplish.

#inazuma eleven #mikado anna #ichihoshi hikaru #nosaka yuuma #yuuann #inazuma eleven orion no kokuin #inazuma eleven ares no tenbin #bad things happen bingo #bthb 2 #injury #cw blood #bleeding #ambulance ride #worry #hurt comfort #au: inacafé #plat: morning star #otp: emperor and empress

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katsumi-sensei-of-iga · 5 years ago

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Damn the living, forgive the dead

I’m suffering with writers and an art block with all my projects. So have an AU!MC/ Oniko where she writes to Yahiko after he goes to work as a poison taster for Ieyasu. ( For the sake of this fic let’s say Yahiko is 16 and Mc is 24)

You can check out a snippet of her character here

I was listening to this while writing, the translation actually kinda matches what I’m writing... I image the same mocking tone when Oniko sings about all the misfortune around her.

Dear Yahiko,

I think it’s the right time to answer the question you asked me when you were old enough to understand what happened to father. I would have preferred to tell you this in person, but alas I do not know when or if we will see each other again, so I will have to answer you in this letter.

Why did he deserve to die? We are taught by priests that as humans we are sinful and deserve a slow and painful death. There some people who do.

We don’t.

He didn’t.

Who deserves death, you ask?

I will give you a few examples.

The insane woman, living next to us, who beats and neglects her children because her husband left her for a younger, prettier, nicer woman. I payed for medicine lessons from the doctor who lives on the other side of the city to make sure they won’t die at our doorstep, like they almost did a few days ago. The boy had four broken ribs, six broken fingers and a dislocated hip bone. He had taken his sisters’ portion of the beating that day. He was 14. I was 24 when I lost sleep over them, afraid they will stop breathing in the middle of the night. This happened 5 days after you left.

Why does mother hate us...?

The low-life drinking himself to death in the alley behind our restaurant because he can’t bring himself to tell his wife he gambled away all their money and she will have to watch their chronically ill son writhe in pain and fever this month because no-one will give him a loan. I was 20 when I gave O-kei-san money to take care of her child and divorce him. You played with the boy in your room for hours while his mother was crying and clinging to me in the house across the street.

What did I do to the gods, for my child to deserve this...?

The loathsome bastards who have never heard of Honor among thieves. Who cut each other’s throats, and anyone else’s for that matter, for a few coins and a chance at getting away. If they can’t get away they sell away their sworn brothers to the guards to save their own skins knowing very well they will be tortured and then killed. I was 16 when I saw a man’s hanging body be torn apart from the feet up by stray dogs. I bought you a drum and some dango to diverge your attention the other way.

It’s not me at the gallows, so what does it matter what happens...?

The syphilis-ridden whores who sell their bodies to any passing soldiers and their horses for a bag of rice. Who can’t afford medicinal tea against pregnancies, so they carry the child to full term and then kill or sell it, or they choose to get pregnant as there are men who would pay to lay with a pregnant woman. I was 14 when I saw a woman bash an infant’s head with a rock under a bridge. You were just a child in my arms, but I still covered your eyes, afraid you will remember this when you were older.

My life matters the most, whose business is it what I do to survive...?

The noble ladies and their maids looking down upon everyone from their lavish castles. Wearing fabrics, a single layer of which can feed a village for months, to go riding and then throw away because they got dirty. They’ve got more and the season for it will soon end, what does it matter if they throw it away or not? I was 10 when I saw our neighbor, O-fue-san, and her child, Haruko, be beheaded in the street because the little girl, no older than 4, got mud on a noble lady��s kimono. I ran home , my heart too afraid to beat, as I knew mother went out with you to shop in that same market a few hours ago. I have never been happier to hear you blabbering the words sis and O-i-ko, as you had trouble saying “n”.

What do peasants’ lives matter to me...?

The samurai that the gods should rain plagues and famine upon. Who send men, good men, to their deaths in the name of Unification. A lunatic’s dream. All while they sit in their personal gardens, behind walls and guards, in their reinforced castles. The blood floods their land but they are too high for it to reach them, so they don’t care. I was 8 when they took our father. Mother was pregnant with you. You weren’t born yet.

They are dying for a good cause, that they chose themselves, so why should I feel bad?

Did I answer your question?

These people deserve death, but usually are the last to receive it.

Your life is not worth any less than theirs, Yahiko, and never forget that no matter what happens or what you do, I will always be on your side and will go to Hell and back for you.

Take care of yourself and remember: Show kindness only to those who deserve it.

I love you, my dear brother.

-Oniko

#slbp #my oc #Oniko #my writing #I was salty that day #Can you tell?

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ncfan-1 · 6 years ago

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Okay, it’s time for me to have a little rant about the whole clusterfuck surrounding Barbara’s pregnancy announcement, the context for why she announced it the way that she did, and what I’m afraid the future holds for her and her sprog. This is probably not going to be particularly well-organized, but I hope that it will at least be coherent.

Point 1: Why are you dumping all of this shit on Lee, Jim?

Never mind the fact that, as pointed out by @lalaurelia, at this point Jim has stronger emotional connections with virtually everyone in his life than he does with Lee. Never mind that Harvey and Barbara are both right there in the precinct. Never mind that though he and Harvey have had their ups and downs, they’ve been firmly on the same page and the same side the whole season, their relationship is probably at its strongest, and that Harvey would probably be willing to lend a sympathetic ear to Jim’s fears about what’s going on in Gotham because he’s been right there with him, experiencing the same things. Never mind that Jim and Barbara have been slowly, if unsteadily, reconciling, that just earlier this episode they had the not-nearly-as-heated-as-you-would-have-expected exchange “What’s it going to take for you to trust me?” “After everything you’ve done?”, and that Jim choosing to trust Barbara and confide in her would have been a nice nod to that earlier exchange. Why dump all of this shit on Lee?

For one thing, there’s all the times Jim has hurt her, up to and including shooting her husband dead on their wedding day—and given how convinced Lee was so for long that it was cold-blooded murder, I’ve never bought that she’d be willing to warm back up to him after that. There’s also the fact that Lee has told Jim repeatedly that it’s over between them, and that by the end of Season 4, he seemed to have finally accepted it. In light of all of that, it is at best really inappropriate for Jim to suddenly start unloading on her in a manner not dissimilar to the way he confided in her when she was still his fiancée.

For another thing, Lee has been gone for three months, Jim had no idea she was still in Gotham at all, and she’s just been through a traumatic experience. He didn’t even wait for her hands to stop shaking after she was nearly murdered to start using her as a living worry doll. And it’s not like this Jim seems to be at all interested in reciprocating, because it’s just a stream of words from him, with no room for Lee to confide any of her own fears or worries in him.

It honestly seems like Jim’s doing this because in his mind, Lee is the Good Woman to Barbara’s Bad Woman, the Madonna to Barbara’s Whore. And what are Good Women and Madonnas for, if not to provide support and a sympathetic ear to their men? But you can only achieve that kind of dichotomy by ignoring the inner life and the messy, complicated history of both of the women involved. You can only achieve that sort of dichotomy by forcing someone into a box and cutting away everything about them that doesn’t fit in the box, no matter how it might mangle them. That isn’t love. It’s not even caring.

Point 2: Having sex with Barbara only to start fawning over Lee the moment she shows up makes no sense based on Jim’s previous characterization.

Yes, even with the point I made regarding Good Women and Madonnas vs. Bad Women and Whores.

Jim does not do casual relationships or one-night stands. He just doesn’t. You remember how badly entangled he was with Sofia, how he could never seem to entirely extricate his fear and loathing of her from his initial caring for her? You remember his hookup with Valerie in Season 3, and the very different expectations he had the morning after than hers? How he just had different expectations than Valerie in general? I’ve said earlier that an ill-advised drunken hookup would actually be somewhat in character for Jim, and I still believe that, but I don’t believe that he’d treat it as a one-night stand. Not even with Barbara.

Because he knows that Barbara doesn’t do casual relationships or one-night stands, either. Seriously, neither of these people are known for just running around, having sex with people and then expecting no commitment from last night’s partner the morning after. Jim is probably going to expect some level of renewed commitment in their relationship after having sex with Barbara, and if he hasn’t developed convenient amnesia regarding Barbara’s character (which I know is a pretty big if, on a show like Gotham), he knows that having sex with Barbara is going to signal some level of renewed commitment to her, too.

(And yes, to those of you shouting “But what about Renee? What about that time Barbara cheated on Jim with Renee?”, I can hear you. Thank you. I was unlikely to forget, but thank you. That leads me into this digression:

Point 2A (only tangentially related): They really did Renee Montoya’s character dirty on this show.

Like, seriously: she only existed to sabotage Barbara’s relationship with her male fiancé. From day one, she’s constantly pestering Barbara with claims of Jim’s corruption that she can’t back up with hard evidence, at one point breaking into Barbara’s home to do it. Their hookup was after Barbara had been kidnapped earlier that season and was not faring well mentally (especially considering she wasn’t getting proper support from anyone in her life), when A) Renee knew Barbara was in a committed relationship, albeit one under strain, and B) Renee would have known full well that Barbara was mentally vulnerable, and that Barbara probably wouldn’t be willing to have sex with her if she was in a better place, mentally. Having taken advantage of her ex’s mental vulnerability to successfully torpedo said ex’s relationship with her fiancé, Renee drops her like a sack of shit not long afterwards and promptly disappears from the show, never to be seen or heard from, or even alluded to again. The fact that Barbara tries to go looking for Jim would indicate that she wants to get back together with him (with a possible mindset of “Okay, I made a horrible decision there, and I really hope the person I’m in a committed relationship with forgives me.”)… and she finds that he’s already moved on to Love Interest #2.

So Watsonianly, you could reasonably conclude that Renee was just so full of jealousy at seeing that her ex had apparently moved on with her life that she decided “Okay, if I can’t have you, you can’t have the relationship you forged after leaving me, either. Good luck picking up the pieces of your broken engagement, honey!” And Doylistically, it’s screamingly obvious that the only reason Renee even existed in Gotham was to sabotage Barbara’s relationship with Jim so that Jim could get together with Lee, instead—the fact that she disappeared right after and might as well not have existed anymore certainly indicates the writers had no purpose for her beyond that.

So: Renee Montoya in this show exists at the horrifying intersection of Predatory Lesbian, Homewrecking Lesbian, and Disposable Lesbian, and if she hadn’t been placed in that intersection, there’s a chance that Barbara and Jim would either have never broken up, or that they would have broken up at a much later date.)

Back to the main topic: Jim has sex with Barbara. He relies on her for protection. He has weird, flirty dialogue with her. And then, the very moment he lays eyes on Lee, he starts fawning over Lee again and drops Barbara like a sack of shit, treating her with dismissive contempt when she tries to pull him aside until she finally, angrily, announces to everyone in his office that she’s pregnant. When he’s the kind of man for whom sex usually equals commitment, and he knows that Barbara typically views sex in the exact same way. The way he dropped Barbara for Lee isn’t just douchebaggery; it’s blatant stupidity. Especially given the way she has historically behaved when spurned.

If this was a different show, if it was any other show, I would think it obvious that Jim had been using Barbara for sex and protection, and that what really threw him for a loop was the revelation that there might be consequences for that—not just potential pregnancy, but that Barbara might expect that their having had sex meant that she had some sort of right to his oh, I don’t know? Commitment? But since this is Gotham, I suspect that we were instead expected to root for Jim and Lee having “shippy” interactions, and that we were meant to view Barbara as a bitch for wrecking their “reunion.”

(That said, I wouldn’t be any happier about the way Jim treated Barbara if she wasn’t pregnant. It’s just a horrible way to treat people in general, and given their interactions earlier that episode, given the sheer number of times she’s stuck her neck out for him this season, it signals a rank lack of gratitude.)

Point 3: The likelihood of this ending well for Barbara is close to nil.

At this point, Tabitha has succumbed to Bury Your Gays disease, and Barbara has had large portions of her earlier characterization (including her entire relationship with Tabitha—“best friends,” my ass) stripped away to make her more palatable as a Love Interest to Jim, even one he feels content to treat like shit when it suits him, and to make her more palatable as the mother of his child.

Not that I think she’s been made palatable enough to save her own life.

When I first found out about leaked images of the hookup, this was the scenario I envisioned: Tabitha will be killed to get her out of the way (Because rumors of her death were floating around at the same time, though I, naively, had assumed that the writers would have the decency not to kill her off in the very first episode of the season). Barbara will have large chunks of her personality airbrushed away to make it even remotely plausible that she’d want to have sex with Jim. She’ll get pregnant. She’ll die in childbirth to get her out of the way for what’s coming next, as the cherry on this shit sundae. Jim will get back together with Lee, despite all the reasons that doesn’t make any sense, and they will raise Jim and Barbara’s child together.

This was what I thought for a long time, though the interactions early on in ’13 Stitches’ and the fact that there was something approaching warmth in Jim and Barbara’s conversation in the Sirens, along with the fact that Barbara helped him out through all of his plans this episode, actually made me hopeful that maybe she wouldn’t die in childbirth after all. Barbara whitewashed enough to get back together with Jim is decidedly unpalatable to me, but it’s better than her being dead.

But then Lee showed back up. Then Jim started immediately fawning over Lee and treating Barbara with dismissive contempt. Then, my hopes that Barbara would survive pregnancy shriveled and died.

Not that dying in childbirth wouldn’t leave her character any more intact than it would if the writers whitewashed her enough for her to be considered “worthy” of marrying their “hero.” Barbara would be instead the Tragically Dead Mother whitewashed of her worst sins, but still too sinful to be considered worthy of living and raising her child. Instead, you have Lee being railroaded into the spotless Madonna who never felt even the slightest attraction to darkness and violence, who gets back together with Jim because Reasons, and nobly and self-sacrificially raises the child of her hated rival.

Never mind the fact that Jim shot and killed Lee’s husband. Never mind that Lee told Jim over and over again that it was over, and that at one point, Jim seemed finally to accept that. Never mind that Lee is the last woman on earth Barbara would ever want raising her kid. Never mind that Lee would probably feel, at best, a bit weird about having to raise the child of A) the woman who tried to kill her for “stealing her man” and B) the man she supposedly “stole,” and who then later killed her first husband.

The whole scenario is just sick. It’s sick. And the fact that I don’t trust the writers to do precisely this makes me feel sick.

#Gotham (Fox)#Gotham spoilers #Meta #It's all horribleness all the time

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maxinajar · 6 years ago

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Right fuckers, here we go. Imma go through all the points on that list of plot points VLD forgot about and say my thoughts on/ explain what I know of each of them:

Why Haggar was interested in Shiro - ya, they never really did explain that did they? I think it was meant to be that he was a strong warrior and the galra like that? But it wasn’t really explained and that was kinda a letdown

Shiro’s Illness - yes, what was it. Vld explain!

Cloning - I- just why? Why was cloning a plot point if you were only gonna use it once? Please? Explain?

Kosmo - Honestly, I luv this dog a lot, but seriously you can’t just have him appear. Explain him at least a little. We don't want a whole backstory, just one or two lines explaining him.

Keith’s turning Galra once and only once - I think this one's importance was mostly due to the fandom being way too focused on what the show obviously felt was insignificant. Though I do wish it was brought up at least once more.

How different species are biologically compatible - Honestly, I don't think this one is important. Lots of shows don't bother to explain this and it doesn't detract from anything, its just y’all being petty.

How Keith could sense blue - Yeah, please explain. Cuz that's kinda important. You could have just had like Lance or something sense blue. But you chose Keith, why?

Haggar’s appearing and disappearing maternal instincts - this one was just kinda annoying. If you are going to give a character a certain trait, at least make it consistent or give us a concrete reason for why it's inconsistent.

Why aren’t planets round? - Were there any not round planets? Can someone send me pics? Cuz if there were, VLD that's just plain wrong.

The second colony - You don't just get to make something super important to the plot and then never explain it at all. That's just really fucking lazy writing. Especially since you only brought it up in season 6, so you can't say that you forgot about it.

What Matt saw in Sam Holts cell - So, this is another one that I think was just the fandom focusing too much on minor details. I personally think it was him reacting to the empty cell. But if there was something in there, Vld tell us what it was.

“Another [human]” mentioned in the opening minutes - Um, forgive me but I do not remember this. Then again it has been a while since I watched the beginning of Voltron, so please someone like send me screenshots or something.

Lance’s Sword - Yes, I wanted to see more of his sword. And the other bayards upgrades. Very few of them got upgrades and when they did they used them maybe only once or twice.

What are the blue lions preferred paladin traits - Yeah, I was kinda upset that they never told us. I was even trying to find any similar personality traits between all the blue paladins, but there really weren’t any I could find in regards to Allura. This is something they could have talked about again in the Lion Switch ep.

Voltron Coalitions distrust of working alongside the galra - is this one referring to the little bits of distrust we get that was never really explored and kinda felt like they pushed it to the side although it should have been a big issue. Cuz yeah, that was stupid.

How Alfor even knew about the Sincline Comet - It landed on Zarkon’s planet. Literally, right on his planet. Of course Alfor would know about it. He was best buds with Zarkon. All of the old paladins were friends before Voltron existed.

The implied sentience of the MFE ships - I never noticed that so I can't really comment.

Keith’s entire thing on quintessence sensing - Again, fandoms fault for focusing on small details that weren’t meant to add up to anything.

“Allura my only child” Alfor why you gotta specify only child like that - Because he only had one child.

Keith's dad's name - yeah, I kinda wanted to know that too. Probably they didn't say anything cuz the fandom had already gotten attached to other names. Or they just didn't think of him as important.

All of the clone subplot - Yep, never explained or returned to. Lazy writers not having a story actually planned out.

Shiro's Bayard form - Stupid Stupid Stupid Let Us See Him Use a Fucking Bayard you Cowards!

Altean Alchemy and its plot holes - Please explain everything to do with altean alchemy. How Honerva could topple the entire galra empire by herself but all of Altea couldn't defend themselves despite Honerva being an altean alchemist, something I would assume there are more of on Altea.

What is Voltron - Yeah, what happened to the Universes Strongest weapon? It literally got its ass beat in almost every battle.

Lotor - Please, you did this boy dirty the least you could do is give us more backstory.

Lance’s insecurities/ homesickness - while not a pronounced as they are in fanon, it was still clear that lance had insecurities surrounding him being a paladin and he wanted to go home. All that was starting to just disappear around the halfway point of Season 7 and completely got thrown out the window in season 8. What the fuck VLD, you need character consistency.

Found Family plot - missed opportunity you threw out for a half-assed love story that demeaned to characters and pretty much guaranteed you for failure, are you happy that you did what pretty much every other show in existence does?

Shiro - His character was pretty much not expanded on at all throughout the entire show. The most character development he got since the first two seasons was the first episode of season 7, nothing else. He is so boring but he could have been so much more.

The Holt family - please don't focus so much on this family when you push your main characters to the side and refuse to give them legitimate character development.

Sendak's obsession with Shiro - don’t change it, just give us some reason why.

What happened to Narti - Yeah, she was possessed by Haggar through her connection to the cat, and then Lotor killed her in order to guarantee the safety of the rest of his crew and his mission.

That's all I’m gonna do for now cuz I'm salty.

Link to the post I got this stuff from, there is more but I just couldn't continue it right now. I will continue this post later tho.

https://galtean-gf.tumblr.com/post/181565556929/grand-list-of-plot-points-dropped-or-not-explored

#voltron #vld #angry #they wrote this show so badly #anyone wanna rewrite with me in the form of fanfiction #only one romance #and that will be lotura #because it was the only well written one #and maybe hunk and shay #because they were cute #oh shit almost forgot shiro and adam #they will be there too

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deancanmarryme · 4 years ago

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Okay, so the shock of the ending is kind of setting in and as (from my username) you can tell that I’m a huge fan of Dean Winchester. He’s an amazing character who has went through amazing character development over the years and let me tell you that the writers RUINED that. Dean Winchester deserved so much better. He WANTED so much better. Dean was a suicidal character, he hated himself and always thought he was going to die on a hunt, but he also fought. He fought for our world, he fought his own head, and he won dude. You cannot convince me Dean Winchester did not adore life. The way he hugged Miracle. The way he loved his kitchen. The way he loved driving baby. He saw light at the end of that tunnel and they robbed him from that, they took away that development and killed him on a mediocre vampire hunt and I will never forgive them for that. Dean Winchester deserved better.

Castiel sacrificed himself for the Winchesters countless times. He rebelled against heaven for Dean. It makes sense hed die for Dean Winchester, but to be sent straight to turbohell and nobody questions it? To make it seem like Cas didn’t matter? Guys he was on set, it was confirmed that he was in Canada so why the hell wasn’t he on camera? Why didn’t he have a scene? It’s so cool Jack raised Castiel from the Empty, but it’s so disrespectful to not actually give Cas a scene in the finale, after everything he at the very least deserved that. Plus, you’re telling me Cas willingly let Dean die the way he did when he sacrificed his life for him days earlier? It just doesn’t make sense. Castiel deserved better.

I’m sorry but I need to focus on Destiel, the goodbye scenes, and Wincest. I will say I am a Destiel shipper, I believe that Dean loved Cas back and I’m never going to get over the fact they never let Dean express that. Yay goodbye scene between Dean and Sam felt more like a *subtle* nod towards Wincest shippers. I know Dean and Sam have such a reliant relationship, but this just was not it. I mean it made the Destiel goodbye scene even feel less significant almost to me because it’s like they just wanted to get the ships fans like over with so they can move on without actually making any of them explicitly canon as not to stop someone from watching the finale.

The funeral! You’re telling me that NOBODY showed up to Deans funeral? You’re telling me that over the past 15 years Dean only had Sam? It’s not true. Dean had family, he had people who loved him, and it was more than Sam. I can’t take COVID as an excuse for that because that crew was on that bridge and I get it and I take the pandemic seriously but Dean Winchester did not deserve that death and he did not deserve that lonely funeral.

Eileen! Sure we can assume she was Sams wife but why can’t it be confirmed? I mean she deserved to be in that finale, she deserved to be with Sam. She deserved recognition. Sam Winchester loved Eilleen and that is simply fact, the way he just forgot about her wasn’t in character and it wasn’t right. Eileen deserved better.

Sams life. I’m so happy that he got his happy ending, but the fact that he just sat there for like 7 minutes holding his Deans hand while he died and he did NOTHING? You’re telling me Sam Winchester would just sit and watch his brother die? Seriously? Since when is that the Winchester way? Since when do we just watch our family die and make no attempt to save them? Because people deserve to live. Dean deserved that same ending as Sam. Dean deserved Cas and endless pie and trips around the country to wrestling matches. Sam deserved his brother. Plus so much was unanswered about his life. I mean what did Sam do for a living? Did he ever tell his son? If his wife isn’t Eileen than how much does she know about who Sam really is? Did he still hunt? Why did he never make an attempt to contact Cas or Jack? Or did he? And if so what happened? I mean you’re telling me Sam just walked away from it all like it never happened, like nobody or nothing from his hunting days mattered, like he didn’t have a best friend for an angel and his adopted son was God? I don’t believe it. Sam Winchester deserved better.

All of our dear characters deserved better, but the actors did too. I mean Jensen has played and dedicated himself to Dean Winchester for 15 years and has stated he didn’t like the ending and over and over through the years he has been told he was “too close” to Dean and that they just go where the story takes them. Well, if that’s where the story took them than they’re wrong. Jensen Ackles deserved better than letting this character he has lived as, bled for, cried for, and developed to be killed off on a petty hunt by a no-name vampire.

Jared said that it was his favorite episode and tbh IDK if it was just for viewing boosts but I don’t see how. I mean I love Jared and if it’s his favorite that’s great, and I can’t think of a better person to play Sam Winchester. Although I think Jared deserved to give Sam an ending where he was with his brother.

Misha freaking Collins. They have ALWAYS disliked Misha. Misha is such an amazing person. He is so sweet and kind and I love him and they did him SO dirty. They treated him and Castiel like trash and I won’t ever forgive that. Cas deserved a happy ending, he deserved to be brought back for a proper goodbye at the very least. Misha deserved to have that closure for him and Cas.

AFK!!! This ending implies that happiness comes through death which is NOT TRUE!!! The actors have fought so hard to raise awareness about depression and anxiety and mental illness only to have the finale of this show basically say the only way one of their most suicidal characters would be happy was if he died. That does not put out a good message especially when so much of this fandom deals with that. So many of us deal with depression and suicidal thoughts and Supernatural helped save us, but they turned the narrative of happy in life to peace and happiness always comes in death and I hate that because it is so not true. Here is to Dean, Sam, Cas, Eileen, Jack, Charlie, Kevin, us (the spn family), the actors, and everyone else who deserved so much better. We stand with you. We love you. We will miss you. Thank you for 15 amazing years

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weekendwarriorblog · 6 years ago

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WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND May 10, 2019 - POKEMON: DETECTIVE PIKACHU, THE HUSTLE, TOLKIEN and More

It’s Mother’s Day weekend and while Avengers: Endgame seems to holding strong, we get four new movies in wide release, two of which I’ve seen, both of which are pretty decent. Unfortunately, due to illness, I’m running a bit late on this column, but I’ll try not to cut too many corners.

The big movie this weekend is POKÉMON: DETECTIVE PIKACHU (Warner Bros.), starring Ryan Reynolds as the voice of Pikachu and Justice Smith from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, plus the likes of Bill Nighy and Ken Watanabe, the latter who seems to be Legendary Pictures’ go-to Japanese actor. (He’ll be appearing in Godzilla: King of the Monsters later this month.) I’m hoping to still get around to reviewing the movie, but I will say that I generally enjoyed it, even if my connection to the material was the old TV cartoon rather than any of the games. (Look for that review before Friday, if I’m able to get my ass gear. In the meantime, here’s my interview with director Rob Letterman.)

I’ve been interested in the Anne Hathaway-Rebel Wilson comedy THE HUSTLE (U.A. Releasing) since it was called “Nasty Women” and was a straight-up remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but I just haven’t had time to catch the one press screening, so it looks like I’ll have to catch this sometime down the road.

And then there’s POMS (STXfilms), a new Diane Keaton comedy featuring an ensemble of actresses in their prime, including Pam Grier and Jacki Weaver. While this doesn’t look like my kind of movie, I totally would have gone to see it if I could, but I’m less apt to see it than The Hustle.

The other movie opening Friday which I’ve seen and enjoyed is TOLKIEN (Fox Searchlight), directed by Dome Karukoski (Tom of Finland) and starring Nicholas Hoult as J.R.R. Tolkien and Lily Collins as his wife Edith Bratt. I’m hoping this finds an audience, even though it’s obviously competing with much stronger and more high-profile films.

Mini-Review: I began to watch this movie with some trepidation, because at least at first, it seemed to be a typical biopic, much like director Dome Karukoski’s previous film. At least as the film began, it cut between Nicholas Hoult’s Tolkien while on the frontlines during WWII and his early schooldays at King Edwards and then Oxford, where he formed a bond with three other students.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure I necessary needed to see a Dead Poet’s Society type way of getting the viewer to know more about the fantasy author, but that’s just a very small part of the film. Where the film really picks up is when Hoult and Collins take over their respective roles, because this is when the romance between Tolkien and Edith becomes a larger part of the story. It’s a bittersweet tale where Tolkien is forced to pick going to Oxford over continuing this romance by Colm Meany’s pries, who has become Tolkien’s guardian after his mother dies suddenly. The majority of the film bounces between Tolkien in the trenches and dealing with school issues, being a poverty-stricken orphan, but he finds an ally in Derek Jacobi’s headmaster.

I’m constantly impressed by what Hoult has been doing as an actor as he gets older, but Collins really brings more to their scenes together than any of the classmates or acting veterans.

Tolkien is a flawed film for sure, but the last half hour is so abundantly full of feels it’s easy to forgive the earlier problems, as Tolkien seeks out one of his school chums on the battlefield, a part of the movie where Karukoski is allowed to shine as a director. (Honestly, I think Steven Spielberg would be quite proud if he made this movie, and that’s saying something.)

I’m not sure this movie will be for everyone, even those who love Tolkien’s work as much as I do, but as a testament to what an amazing life he had before he started writing The Hobbit, it’s quite an amazing story with a worthy film to tell it.

Rating: 8.5/10

You can find out my thoughts on the weekend box office over at The Beat.

LIMITED RELEASES

There’s actually some decent movies opening this weekend, but the one that I want to give special attention to is John Chester’s doc THE BIGGEST LITTLE FARM (NEON), which is all about how he and his wife Molly left their California apartment living behind to try to develop a 200-acre sustainable farm outside L.A. For months, my favorite doc of the year was NEON’s Apollo 11 about the 1969 moon launch, but this quickly took it over after I saw it, because it’s amazingly educational in terms of what it takes to make a farm work. It also looks absolutely fantastic, and seeing the trailer in IMAX in front of Apollo 11 made me really want to see it. If you want to see a great doc that hopefully will be in theaters over the summer, then definitely look for this one. I’m sure it will open in a few cities Friday but hopefully NEON will do another great job getting out there as they did with Apollo 11 and Three Identical Strangers last year. This movie is a MUST SEE.

Kenneth Branagh directs and plays William Shakespeare in his new historical movie ALL IS TRUE (Sony Pictures Classics) which also costars Dame Judi Dench and Ian McKellen. It follows Shakespeare on his return home to Stratford after the Globe Theater has burned down, as he tries to reconnect with his older wife (Dench) and his two estranged daughters. This is a fine film if you’re a fan of Shakespeare’s works and were interested in knowing more about his last days, because it features a great script by Ben Elton, and fine performances by Branagh and Kathryn Wilder as his younger daughter Judith, who gets caught up in controversy while trying to find a husband. It will open in New York and L.A. this weekend, and you should look out for my interview with Sir Kenneth over at The Beat in the next couple days.

Opening at the Metrograph this week is Abel Ferrara’s PASOLINI (Kino Lorber), an amazing look at the Italian filmmaker as played by Willem Dafoe. I’m not particularly familiar with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work, although the Metrograph did a pretty extensive retrospective last year. Like with All is True above, the movie covers the last days in the filmmaker’s life, and it proved to me that Dafoe is doing some of the best work of his career these days and like a few others (Woody Harrelson and Ethan Hawke, for instance), you can put Dafoe in your movie, and it will immediately make it better. I haven’t seen much of Ferrara’s recent work but I feel it’s been a while he’s been at the height of his greatness with Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, so it’s nice to see him creating a new movie in that general vein. Apparently, Ferrara’s movie premiered at Cannes many, many moons ago, but I think it was a smart move by Kino Lorber to save the movie and give it a release. By pure coincidence… or not… MOMA has been having a Ferrara retrospective (see below), so if you haven’t been able to get up there and see the movie, then you now have a chance with Ferrara and Dafoe doing QnAs after a few showings this weekend.

Matt Smith plays cult leader Charles Manson in CHARLIE SAYS (IFC Films), the new movie from American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page director Mary Harron along with her frequent collaborator, writer Guinevere Turner. As a huge fan of their previous moviesand with interest in the subject matter, I’m not sure why I never got around to watching the screener I’ve had for months, but much of it has to do with how generally busy I’ve been. Anyway, it will open in around 35 theaters and be on VOD this weekend if you have similar interest.

Opening at the Film Forum Wednesday is Almedea Carracedo and Robert Bahar ‘s doc THE SILENCE OF OTHERS (Argot PIctures). Executive Produced and presented by Pedro Almodovar, this is an amazing film about the horrendous crimes committed under the Franco regime in Spain by people who were able to get away scott-free when it was decided to create an Amnesty Pact of “Forgiving” after Franco’s death. The thing is that there are people who had been tortured or had loved ones killed who are hoping to get justice or just get their bodies back from mass graves, and this doc covers those amazing efforts. Frankly, I found this film to be far more interesting than Joshua Oppenheimer’s similar films about the crimes by the Indonesian government in The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.

The Quad Cinema will have two new exclusive releases starting Friday, beginning with Christian Carion’s French thriller MY SON (Cohen Media), starring Guillaume Canet as a man whose son has been kidnapped, so he travels across France to where his ex-wife (Melanie Laurent) lives to try to solve the crime.

Also, the Quad will be showing Nicolas Brown’s doc The Serengeti Rules (Abramorama), which looks at five ecologists who broke new ground with scientific concepts we take for granted, and it looks at how the Serengeti might be the place to look for civilizaton’s sustainable future.

Amy Poehler makes her feature directorial debut with the comedy Wine Country (Netflix), which is getting the usual nominal theatrical release in a handful of theaters but mostly will be on the streaming network. It co-stars long-tie Poehler pals Maya Rudoloph, Tina Fey, Ana Gasteyer and Paula Pell, but I’m excited to see it for Maya Erskine from the Hulu show Pen15 and the upcoming rom-com Plus One, which was one of my favorite movies at Tribeca. (Don’t worry.. I’ve started writing something about that festival, too, so stay tuned!)

Opening in New York at the Cinema Village and in L.A. at Arena Cinelounge is Akash Sherman’s Clara (Screen Media), starring Patrick J. Adams as Isaac Bruno, an astronomer looking for life beyond Earth. This becomes more of a reality when he meets Troian Bellisario’s artist Clara, who shares his interest in space.

After years of problems and lawsuits, Farhad Safinia’s The Professor and the Madman (Vertical) is finally seeing the light of day, no thanks to a lawsuit put on it by star and producer Mel Gibson, who plays Professor James Murray, who begins compiling the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, receiving 10,000 entries from Dr. William Minor (Sean Penn), who is a patient at a asylum for the criminally insane. I have no idea how bad this movie must be to be buried as long as it has, but it has a great cast including Eddie Marsan, Natalie Dormer, Stephen Dillane, Jennifer Ehle and Ioan Gruffudd, so how bad can it really be? Good luck finding it in theaters but it will prbobably be on VOD as well.

This week’s major Bollywood release is Student of the Year 2 (FIP), directed by Punit Malhotra. As you might guess, it’s a sequel to the 2012 romantic comedy, this one involving a love triangle between a guy and two girls, and it will be released in about 175 theaters on Friday.

STREAMING AND CABLE

Amy Poehler’s directorial debut WINE COUNTRY will begin streaming Friday, though I haven’t seen it yet, so instead, I’ll recommend Dava Whisenant’s fantastic doc Bathtubs over Broadway, which will premiere on Netflix Thursday. I missed this movie last year but I got to catch-up when it screened at the Oxford Film Festival in February, and it’s fantastic. It follows Letterman writer Steve Young as he follows his passion to find rare records featuring industrial musical numbers presented at corporate events throughout the ‘50s and later to energize employees.

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

I’ve already mentioned how Playtime: Family Matineeshas become this cinematic comfort food that’s helped me relive my childhood, but this weekend, the shit gets real as they screen the 1977 action-adventure Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, featuring the stop-motion animation of the late Ray Harryhausen. I still remember first seeing The Golden Voyage of Sinbad at a drive-through in Framingham, Mass. when it first came out and I loved it so much I picked up the novelization. I wonder if I still have that somewhere. (I’m pretty sure I saw this sequel as well.) Late Nites at Metrographwill screen Lukas Moodysson’s 2002 film Lilya 4-Ever, as well as the not old enough to be repertory film Climaxby Gaspar Noe. (Lots of cool movies coming up in this series, as well.) Another series starting Friday is the first-ever New York retrospective of Japanese filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, whose new movie Asako I & II will have its theatrical premiere at the Metrograph starting next week. I’m not too familiar with Hamaguchi’s work – though I’ve seen Asakoand generally liked it -- but I don’t think I’ll have the time to see his 5-hour long 2015 family drama Happy Hourany time soon. The series features seven of his movies, almost all of them shorter than Happy Hour. (2012’s Intimacies, showing a week from Thursday, is four hours long.)

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

After showing the Judy Garland version of A Star is Born (1954) today at 2pm, the New Bev has double features of Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978) and It’s My Turn (1980), the latter starring Jill Clayburgh and Michael Douglas, on Weds and Thurs. Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and Lizzie Borden’s 1983 Born in Flames will screen on Friday and Saturday and then the 1933 film Christopher Strong (starring Katharine Hepburn) and Anybody’s Woman (1930) will screen Sunday and Monday. The weekend’s KIDDEE MATINEE is the animated The Chipmunk Adventure (1987) while the 1995 anthology Four Rooms (featuring one room by Tarantino) is the Friday midnight and Anna Biller’s 2016 film The Love Witch will screen midnight on Saturday. On top of that, there’s a special Cartoon Club on Saturday morning at 10AM and Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Love & Basketball (2000) will screen Monday afternoon.

FILM FORUM (NYC):

It’s the last full weekend of Film Forum’s“Trilogies” series and on Thursday, they’re screening Whit Stillman’s (Is this a real title for the trilogy?) “Doomed. Bourgeois. In Love” trilogy Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998) with Stillman doing select intros and QnAs that day. Friday is Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “BRD” Trilogy, including The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), Lola (1981)and Veronika Voss, and this weekend is a Carol Reed Post-War Noir Trilogy, including The Third Man (1949). Saturday also sees a Michelangelo Antonioni trilogy including L’Avventura (1960) and two other films from the Italian master. Sunday and Monday sees a very rare screening of Wim Wenders’ “Road Trilogy” including Kings of the Roadfrom 1976 and Alice in the Cities. Also, on Wednesday and Saturday is a repeat of a John Ford trilogy, including Rio Grande and Fort Apache, plus don’t forget the weekend’s family-friendly Film Forum Jr, which this weekend shows a bunch of cartoons from Bugs, Daffy and Friends. Obviously, there’s a lot going on at this venerable NYC arthouse and I hope to get to some of these now that Tribeca is over.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

If you live in L.A., you can spend a good part of your weekend at Maltin Fest 2019, taking place at the Egyptian Theater, which includes a really incredible series of screenings and events with special guests. Friday is Nicole Holefcener’s Please Give with Holefcener and frequent collaborator Catherine Keener on hand, plus a screening of Sing Street! Alexander Payne and Laura Dern will be there Saturday afternoon to screen the filmmaker’s early work Citizen Ruth, plus lots more! I also want to pay special attention to them showing the late Jon Schnepp’s doc The Death of “Superman Lives” on Saturday night.

AERO (LA):

Thursday is a Christopher Munch double feature of The Hours and Times (1991) and The Sleepy Time Gal (2001) with Munch and the great Jacqueline Biset in person! Then it goes right into Starring Europe: New Films from the EU 2019 i.e. new films, not repertory but still interesting.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

Waverly Midnights: Parental Guidance shows James Cameron’s Aliens (okay, am I crazy or do they show this every other month?), Weekend Classics: Love Mom and Dad shows Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and Late Night Favorites: Spring is the Coen Brothers’ Fargo (1996).

BAM CINEMATEK (NYC):

In the midst of Black 90s: A Turning Point in American Cinema, which will include Ice Cube’s Friday (on Friday, of course), as well as Set It Off, New Jack City, Belly, Straight Out of Brooklyn and Menace II Society over the weekend. Also, the late John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood will screen twice on Sunday as well as on Monday as part of the series.

MOMA (NYC):

Abel Ferrara: Unrated continues this week with repeats of 1998’s New Rose Hotel, 1993’s Body Snatchers and more recent films like 2017’s Piazza Vittorio and 2007’sGo Go Tales, and this series will continue next week. The current Modern Matiness will conclude with Pixar’s Up on Wednesday and Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) on Weds and Thurs, respectively.

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

Panorama Europe continues through the weekend but that’s all new stuff, not repertory.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):

Friday’s midnight screening is Wes Craven’s Shocker (1989) with a QnA… but not with Craven.. unless they plan the creepiest movie tie-in possible!

That’s it for this week but next week, we get John Wick Chapter 3 and more!

#Pokemon DetectivePIkachu Tolkien TheHustle POMS Movies Reviews TheBiggestLittleFarm

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declassroomedteach-blog · 7 years ago

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Jailhouse Salvation 101

(word count approx 1570)

By Gina Fournier

The Merchant-Ivory movie adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View features a poignant scene following a street fight that ends in murder. Lucy (Helen Bonham Carter) comments that you witness something memorable and think you’ll never be the same, but then you forget and return to your old self. I hope to do a better job holding onto my jailhouse conversion, from skeptical to convinced about the existence of God.

Disclaimer: My conviction has wavered intensely even before I finished editing this essay.

Thanks to my former employer and its bad actors, an institution I’ll call Land of Motown Community College, where I served as an English teacher, I’ve seen the best and the worst of pure Michigan humanity. If God created humans, God sure must have a sense of humor.

Even a smattering of details from my story sound like a rollercoaster Lifetime movie no one wants to watch. Since 2012, I’ve been sexist witch-hunted through an ongoing living nightmare that has included hack shrinks, illegal and involuntary lock up in a Catholic mental health ward and now incarceration for thirty-four days in a mid-Michigan county jail for a crime I did not commit. College administrators, union teachers, dirty cops, dirty doctors, dirty nuns and dirty priests, plus the state’s top most government officials, have participated in the protection of white collar criminals and encouraged my simultaneous downfall. All this for me, so one man can prove his power over unions near union ground zero.

The U.S. Constitution’s first amendment makes clear that government is not to establish any official religion, not protect any particular religion from existing laws. Perhaps the founding fathers could foresee the distant future. Nearly two hundred fifty years later, a female citizen has found cause to invert the phrase “God bless you” with blasphemy, attempting to redress grievances.

I’ve never met the emergency room doctor who signed me into a Catholic looney bin for a week. To my horror, I was held in a Catholic Siberia, it turns out, on campus with my all girl Catholic high school. I was raised and violated by the same church, which now pretends it’s never met me. Thirty five years ago, for Halloween, classmates mimicked the Robert Redford movie Brubaker to stage a failed, backboneless prison break. These classmates, who have also turned away from my plight, dressed not in hospital gowns or orange as the new black, but plaid skirts and knee socks adorned temporarily with stripes. (Good girls, we stopped mock rioting when the nuns glared.)

Unfortunately, there is no law or principle governing the intersection of religion and families. In my time of need, even my immediate and extended family has turned away, exponentially multiplying my distress. My extended Catholic family has not advocated for me, though it would cost nothing except some skin. The anger caused by this and so many betrayals envelops like nuclear explosion.

However, I realized something on day thirty-three of my lock up in the big house. Because the ties between families and religion tend to act like strangleholds, my estranged Catholic mother is incapable of doing the one thing I want and need her most to do: to demand that Livonia Catholics honestly investigate me claims. Because of my new found belief, I forgive my aging mother. She’s only human and doing the best she can. (Unfortunately, the damage done feels irreparable. Forgiveness does not mean I can tolerate her presence.)

Through five solid years of loss, I have been cornered mentally and financially into a nearly impossible position. But the kindest of strangers have helped me to survive. Downstate, nice generous neighbors responded to my cries for help by giving. Up north, the same. People have given money, food, house wares, helpful supplies such as wood, shoes, warm clothes, plus their time and honest well wishes. I wish I would have kept better track of the names and faces of the many regular people who have been so kind, forming a lifeline, keeping me alive.

My fighting spirit has kept better track of my transgressors, including Fox News Detroit, which ran a sexist hack piece in 2015 cutting together footage I asked them not to shoot in order to make me look looser than loopy. In search of more positive and helpful press, my creative and liberal mind encouraged me to tag my own, downstate old-ring suburban home with a metaphoric phrase that offended and confused. “A religious figure criminally violated me!” Only my version was Twitter-short. Basic sentence: subject, verb, object.

Passersby assumed I was nutz. I’m not. Unfortunately, the human resources’ labor attorney and architect of my nightmare is smart enough to know that once a crone-aged female is labeled crazy dangerous, most people won’t bother to parse the facts. Just ask Hillary. Voters elected a man without ethics, unwilling to practice stability, a sexual harasser, eager to “lock her up!”

I recreated my civil rights protest up north at a lake named after the largest city in New Brunswick. Maybe I watched too many episodes of Little House on the Prairie, after numerous rereadings of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. In middle age, without an income, I’ve been forced to gather wood and water for two years, for two winters, with a third approaching, in order to survive in my dead husband’s summer cabin, which is facing tax forfeiture, and soon. In both iterations, I repainted my eye-catching sacrilegious phrase with “Act Peace.” I’m not a bad person, or dangerous, or interested in spreading evil. But Fox News Detroit has been not interested in my actual story.

While I was incarcerated, nasty locals ran down my mailbox to which my sign “Act Peace” was nailed, and then took the sign. Two paintings espousing the Statue of Liberty have been stolen. My sign about the connection between the dirty cop who put me in jail and Land of Motown Community College was stolen, I’d guess by the dirty cop. My cries for “help!” with needed justice have been ignored. Instead, community officials at this private lake community have bent the law with the help of dirty local county officials, who may try to re-arrest me over the care of my feces. Yes, you read correctly. My troubles continue. Danger surrounds. This is not a pretty story.

(FYI. Please believe me. I’m still be getting my proverbial shit together, but I’ve always I properly and responsibly discarded my poop.)

Something wicked this way came, and stayed, but I pray to harness goodness and finally slay the beast on my back. I’ve been falsely accused of being suicidal and a danger to society within a country that has grown accustomed to men mass murdering and sexual harassing. I know the pain of mental illness in the form of mental torture, so I feel very sympathetic to those, especially military veterans, who suffer from PTSD. Mental pain is real. And can be excruciating. I realize no matter my idiosyncratic tendencies, finally winning a measure of justice will require the help of other people, and, well, by any name, I guess God. I know that God may not intercede with my legal and financial problems but belief in a higher power does help with gratefulness and tranquility.

In jail, every day is a good day to die. However, the smallest graces save a tattered soul and help a person carry on to the next long minute. I want to thank the two women who ran Bible study every Tuesday. Yes, you read correctly. Unbeknownst to them, they gave me gold for a writer without means: a composition notebook, on my 54th birthday, which was an otherwise desolate milestone. Moreover, these women of God showed me a respectable and inspirational version of Christianity.

On cable tv, my cellmates preferred back-to-back episodes of Cops, shows about zombies, the shallow high jinks of Jerry Springer, endless sci-fi. (I prefer comedy and drama.) The day I was eventually sprung from the slammer, my legal troubles abated but not erased, Unsolved Mysteries ran a segment on St. Pio, an Italian priest who was said to develop stigmata and miraculously heal. Angered, under stress, I admit I acted out loudly like an ass (even by jail standards): “I hope they roast his nuts!”

Many jail birds claim to accept Jesus as their savior, though none gave up their bottom bunk for the pregnant woman in our ranks. Critically, I recognized around me the kind of souls who would have rejected Mary and Joseph. But I was forced to realize this was not a television segment that was going to uncover more Catholic dirt. Although St. Pio may have self-inflicted his wounds, trapped in a county cell block, I dropped my bad attitude and truly felt in my body an undeniable wave of love.

No surprise, in the short time since my release on PR bond, my nascent jailhouse conversion has been tested and wavered, fallen apart, and needing rebuilding. Im not a saint. My days are terrifying and unresolved. But. If I breathe calmly and deeply, and repeat my affirmations, what some call prayers, I recognize a connection between hope and light.

House of Hope in Hersey, Michigan, offered me a composition notebook. Any additional help readers may offer with legal defense, plumbing, back taxes, transportation, work or grace are appreciated. Thank you.

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casualdestinynut-blog · 8 years ago

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Lackluster entry -- I am sick today

It seems almost appropriate that I’ve been fighting off a cold since I took a few hits off a dirty bowl a couple days before Thanksgiving. I got better, but the past several days it’s gotten worse again. I’ve been coughing, my nose is running again and my throat is very dry and somewhat sore. My hunch is that the heating system has some kind of dust or mold in it that exacerbates the mucus membranes in my nose. I changed the filter yesterday. Hopefully that’ll help. I also stopped douching my nose with saltwater a while ago. I’d been snorting saltwater every morning for years to prevent the sort of perpetual cold I used to suffer from growing up, and I don’t know why I stopped but I’ve started it back up again. I got sent to an allergist once who taught me how to do that. It was some of the best medical advice I’ve ever gotten, actual preventative medicine.

So, reading about how Marfan Syndrome is treated I learned in 2015 that the drugs that they give us reduce our growth hormones, though that was only part of the story. At first I thought it was unfair considering the emphasis on growth when it comes to boys and the preference for large body size that’s encouraged via praise young guys get in their families and oftentimes in school as well (there’s also discouragement if you don’t grow muscle, which I found out when the women in my family would tell me things like, “Stop looking like you just walked out of Auschwitz,” and how my parents used to dress me in mismatched clothes with very large and ridiculous-looking glasses, while dressing my brother, their non-freak child, in clothes that were color-coordinated), but yesterday I read that doctors seek to reduce our growth because we grow too fast, faster than most kids, which is what causes a lot of our problems to begin with. That makes sense because some time between the fourth and fifth grades I became the tallest kid in the entire elementary school, except I was so thin and lacking in any sort of muscle whatsoever that I was frightening-looking -- I have pictures as well as memories of the phenomenon. I really did after a very short period of time start to look like I’d just walked out of Auschwitz, and when I read that the drugs they give us reduce the production of not only adrenaline but testosterone, I became very angry in retrospect because I’d been put on the beta blocker (which is the kind of medicine we’re put on to reduce the speed of our growth) that reduces testosterone *the most* out of all of them, and it was around that time that I grew to be the tallest kid in elementary school *completely* and frighteningly without muscle on me was when the doctors switched me to a different beta blocker that doesn’t reduce testosterone as significantly as the one they’d prescribed me, as though they knew what had happened to me.

It’s like I was a guinea pig for medical science -- *like*, though not really.

So, it’s not testosterone that’s the problem in why we grow so fast; it’s a side effect of the medicines they give us that reduces our testosterone. The problem hormone is called transforming growth factor beta, about which there’s been a recent study that suggests a different kind of blood pressure reducer should be used in treatment rather than a bate blocker, since the specified drug, Losartan, directly affects the receptors for TGF-B in the body, from what I can understand in reading about Marfan mouse studies that have been recently completed to detect the molecular manifestation of the disease more accurately. I’ve read both that people with Marfans produce too much TGF-B and too much, so the results -- and reporting on the results -- are conflicting, but since Losartan from what I’ve read doesn’t cause as much fatigue as a beta-blocker, I’m all for changing the recommendation and the possibilities for new clinical studies and treatments for people with Marfans, especially in kids like me who may have been more drugged than they should’ve been growing up (I was very tired all the time as a kid; that’s why it seems appropriate that I’m sitting here sick and tired, because this is how I grew up, tired like I’d been hit by a ton of bricks all the time, but without a cold or flu).

There’s actually an article online about how the class of drugs Losartan is in is being reevaluated as more effective than beta blockers in a wide variety of treatments when blood pressure-reduction is necessary, not just with Marfans. My rabble-rousing question: who’s funding these studies?

Taking less beta blocker medicine is a factor in how I hurt my back (I hurt my back, irreparably, by the way, about a year and two months ago; I’ve lived with near-daily pain since). The increase in adrenaline was so astounding that I went a few months in a hyper-competitive state that I’d never really known before, and knew suddenly why I had nothing in common with the other boys growing up: because I simply didn’t have the same amount of adrenaline coursing through me. I was enraged, to be sure, and as I grew bigger the pill took less of an affect on me, but when I stopped taking it for months that conspired to create the conditions where I hurt my back.

Anyway, I’ve been blocked in my writing. Today I’m going to read and write, as is my vocation, as is the life I love to live, the life I should’ve never left. I don’t ever want to leave the house again. I’ve been obsessed with a neighbor for quite a long time. We were caught up in a pattern together I couldn’t recognize because I’d never been in it before. I tried to live and let live because I truly liked him and I knew we wouldn’t fit in together, but he wouldn’t let me do that. He taught me it’s not possible to live and let live. He’s an ethnic German Lutheran, a skateboarder, a bike-rider, a canoer, a runner, etc -- things that I wasn’t allowed to do growing up; even my pastor didn’t invite me to come to youth group growing up, instead telling me about how much he liked to watch movies when all I wanted to do was to go outside and play, essentially being told I was ungrateful for not consuming the corporate art I was being told to consume. I know this because after a year and a half of him shouting things at me in passing, I stopped taking my pills and got very angry at him and hurt myself, and I looked up his facebook page. He can tell when I look up his facebook page, he knows because we’re in a synchronous sort of relationship, and he can tell. He posts things like, “Skateboarding is not illegal,” except for guys like me it was illegal, all those things he does were illegal for me. We’d meet each other outside while we were walking our dogs and he’d shout things to me as he passed by. He’s athletic and obviously privileged in the ways that I wasn’t growing up, being allowed to go outside and to have boyfriends in addition to girlfriends. He was the first guy who talked to me in three years after moving back home and who treated me like a human being instead of someone to talk down to because I wasn’t a homeowner. I thought I could just let him live his life. I knew we weren’t the same kind of people. I didn’t expect anything of him except to live his life. And I was happy, but he wouldn’t let me be happy. I didn’t judge him at all. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe I should’ve judged him like he judged me. Because that’s how guys who were allowed to be outgoing have always treated me: in passing, saying things to me, sometimes the same words and phrases coming from different people. That’s how it’s always been with me, the guy who was given adrenaline-reducing drugs, as though they felt the need to manage me from afar because they wouldn’t live and let live.

Anyway, he constructed me socially as his stalker, and that’s how it developed eventually in reality. So I’ve been writing a novel about a deformed guy who’s writing about the murder of an infant by a woman who he notices has the same deformity as him. The event got national news, but it happened one county over from him where he lives, and the novel’s about him researching the novel and finding both support and resistance from the family who’s grandchild/child was killed. He’s also trying to figure out why the woman who killed the infant killed her. It’s somewhat based on my interactions with him because I know about his family now since he treated me like I was his stalker a year and a half before I did anything stalker-like, and to take the narrative out of his hands, I’ve been calling it research foor the novel to check out his and his family’s facebook page. I haven’t been studying his facebook page since the past summer though because there always seems to be a social retaliation for looking at his facebook page. I tried to live and let live, but he taught me that that’s not possible. Last night when I looked at his page for the first time since the summer, it was like the writer’s block I’d been suffering from for a few months started resolving and I remembered my place again. It’s definitely helping me get past my block, because now I know how to edit and where the story’s heading after looking at the page. He and his family did try to talk with me, but did I deserve retaliation when I wanted to keep living my life, when I was actually too crazy to talk to them? I don’t think so. Is it always a choice between being beautiful and being ugly? When someone’s mentally ill and doesn’t know what’s happening to them, when the kind of people they’ve been told to admire from afar their whole lives and told to look up to yet told that they can’t possibly be like because of something wrong with them at essence, shouldn’t there be forgiveness when they can’t see that they would’ve been accepted because they didn’t know any other way?

Anyway, the book is about a deformed man researching why a deformed woman one county over killed an infant in the perfect sort of outgoing athlete family we’re all required to admire in school, to use his family as the inspiration for the family whose infant was killed. That’s what the book is about. I’m going to go walk the dog now and hope that there’s no synchronous event that occurs as has happened the other times I’ve looked at his facebook page.

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declassroomedteach-blog · 7 years ago

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Jailhouse Salvation 101

(word count approx 1570)

By Gina Fournier

Disclaimer: My conviction has wavered intensely even before I finished editing this essay.

(FYI. Please believe me. I’m still be getting my proverbial shit together, but I’ve always I properly and responsibly discarded my poop.)

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